Soon, Aspasia’s Shadow could hear the sound of fighting. He remembered these streets. They were not much changed from when he had worked for Solomon, designing and overseeing the construction of the Temple. He turned a corner and saw his legionnaires in fierce combat with the Judeans. They were still three blocks short of the Temple itself.
Aspasia’s Shadow backtracked slightly and went down a side street until he came to a blacksmith’s shop. He entered the courtyard. Movement to his left caught his attention and he spun, drawing his sword. A woman holding a child stared at him from the corner of the courtyard. He had to assume the blacksmith was with the defenders, trying to save the Temple. An interesting choice, he thought as he walked up to the woman and child with a smile on his face — church over family.
“Do not worry,” Aspasia’s Shadow said.
The woman slowly stood, holding the child tight to her bosom. Aspasia’s Shadow still had the comforting smile on his face as he thrust, the blade easily going through the child and piercing the woman’s chest. He relished the surprised look on her face as she slid to the ground, still holding her lifeless child tightly in her arms.
Aspasia’s Shadow turned to the center of the courtyard where the blacksmith’s heavy anvil rested on a thick stone. The metal of the anvil was scored from centuries of use. Aspasia’s Shadow sheathed his sword. Then he wrapped his arms around the anvil and lifted. With superhuman strength, he moved it off the stone, and it tumbled heavily to the dirt. Then he placed the medallion around his neck into the center of the stone. It slid open, revealing a ladder that descended into darkness.
With a quick glance to make sure no one was watching, Aspasia’s Shadow climbed inside. Once his head was below the stone, he placed the medallion in the proper place and sealed himself inside.
He quickly clambered down the ladder, reaching a passageway twenty meters below the level of the city. He knew the tunnel — he had overseen its construction and also the slaying of every man who worked on it. He turned toward the Temple.
The tunnel he was in descended into the bedrock. Soon Aspasia’s Shadow knew he was under the outer wall of the Temple. As he came close to the door that hid Solomon’s treasure, Aspasia’s Shadow drew his blood stained sword. He used the medallion to open the secret door and carefully edged into the treasury. He knew of the Wedjat and, while he did not particularly fear them, an ambush now would be quite irritating.
The room was empty of life. On the stone pedestal restedan object draped with a white cloth. Aspasia’s Shadow didn’t hesitate. He walked to it and pulled off the cloth.
Aspasia’s Shadow stopped breathing for several seconds.
On the pedestal was a severed head. It was a face that Aspasia’s Shadow recognized. A leader of the zealots, who had had a blood bounty placed on his head by another leader of a different sect — Eleazer ben Yaír, a man wanted by the Romans.
How could Eleazer have known of this place and the Grail? Aspasia’s Shadow wondered as he exited the chamber and headed back the way he had come. The answer came as quickly as the question — the damn Wedjat must have given up the Grail to Eleazer for protection.
Aspasia’s Shadow knew there were several ways out of the city via the tunnel system he had had constructed during Solomon’s reign. There was little doubt that Eleazer and the Grail were long gone.
Aspasia’s Shadow climbed up the ladder and opened the doorway to the blacksmith’s courtyard. He sealed the stone behind him and stood still for several moments, listening. There were the screams of those being slaughtered and the continued sound of fierce fighting from the vicinity of the Temple. The fight for Jerusalem was far from over.
There would be time to track down Eleazer and the Grail, Aspasia’s Shadow decided, as he drew his sword. First there was blood to be let.
XIV
Donnchadh and Gwalcmai didn’t know it, but they were standing in the exact same spot where Aspasia’s Shadow’s chair had been placed during the siege of Jerusalem. Now there was little other than mounds of dirt where parapets had been placed to show this had been the camp for a Roman legion. Looking across the valley, there was little to indicate that a large city had once occupied that location either, except for massive stone blocks that constituted the base of what had once been Solomon’s Temple.
“The Romans are as good at tearing down as they are at building,” Gwalcmai noted.
“The last report from the Wedjat of Jerusalem said that the Grail was hidden underneath the Temple,” Donnchadh said.
“And that report was over fifty years old,” Gwalcmai. “It seems that the information might be a bit outdated.”
It had taken them three years to make the journey from Rome to Judea because of Donnchadh’s untimely death at the hands of pirates off the coast of Greece. Gwalcmai had recovered her ka, buried the body on a stony hillside overlooking the Aegean, then been forced to return all the way to England and their ship under Stonehenge to implant her memories in the waiting clone.
He’d had to brief her on all they had experienced in Romeas they once more took passage to the south and east. It was a strained voyage, as both were now experiencing the out-of synch sensation of the multiple and disjointed lives they’d been leading. They bypassed Rome and headed straight for Judea, but it was obvious that the delay had been far too long.
There was a Roman garrison on one of the hills that had been Jerusalem, but beyond that, there was little to indicate that a city of hundreds of thousands of people had once existed there. The valley below them was littered with the bones of many of those people, picked clean by scavengers and time.
“Do you think the Grail is still underneath the Temple?” Gwalcmai asked.
“No.”
“You seem certain of that.”
Donnchadh pointed at the destruction. “Do you think this was all by chance?”
Gwalcmai didn’t have to mull that over very long. “Aspasia’s Shadow. He goes by the Roman name Tacitus.”
“And he is now with the Tenth Legion at a place called Masada, laying siege to the last of the zealots.”
“One would assume he would only be there if the Grail was,” Gwalcmai said.
Donnchadh shouldered her pack. “Let’s go.”
Masada is an isolated rock on the edge of the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea Valley, a most inhospitable location, even for a part of the world that is not very favorable to life. It towered over the surrounding terrain and there were only four ways to the top, all narrow and difficult to climb. The defenders of the rock had blocked three of the paths up and placed their defenses around the one remainingroute, known as the “snake path” because of its winding and torturous ascent.
The fortress on top had first been built by King Herod as a refuge in case of revolt and because of fear of invasion by Cleopatra. The Romans occupied the hilltop in the early stages of the Jewish revolt, then Menahem, Eleazer’s uncle, seized the fortress from the Romans. It was the perfect place for Eleazer to bring his surviving followers.
Naturally the Romans eventually followed. With Jerusalem sacked and the countryside scoured of rebels, Masada was the last holdout. It was isolated and the zealots there not really a threat, but Tacitus had spent months urging the new Roman governor Flavius Silva, to destroy this last pocket of resistance.
It was easier said than done.
For two years the Tenth Legion sweltered in the desert around Masada, laying siege to the place, believing they could starve Eleazer and his zealots out. But as the seasons came and went, the Judeans on top of the mountain showed no sign of starving.