“Please,” she insisted, “tell me now.”
She paused.
“Haven’t I earned the right to know?”
Since she most assuredly had done that, Lavon felt he had no choice but to explain.
“It’s the prisoner we heard Herod questioning this morning,” he said. “The Romans crucified him, and now he is buried here.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “How do you know this?”
Lavon and I both popped out our ear buds and displayed them to her.
She seemed to find this plausible, although I could tell that her doubts had not completely vanished. On the rare occasions when they were buried at all, the Romans tossed the corpses of such victims into a refuse pit. These tombs belonged to the nobility.
“It’s something scholars continue to debate today,” said Lavon as he explained her misgivings to the rest of us. “Some even argue that the Gospel accounts are fictional, given the standard Roman practice.”
“Obviously they’re not,” said Sharon.
“No.”
“Then why?” asked Bryson.
“My guess is that Pilate decided that he could afford to be magnanimous,” said Lavon.
“Despite his fears of a violent uprising, he had managed to eliminate a person the Romans considered a threat to their rule without triggering a riot. Allowing Joseph to take the body served as a goodwill gesture to Jesus’s sympathizers in the Sanhedrin — a small, practical token that cost him nothing.”
This squared with my impressions of the governor, though unfortunately, we’d never be able to find out for sure.
“You speak as if you knew this man.” Naomi said after Lavon had explained our discussion.
Lavon started to answer; then his voice trailed off in an odd manner. I started to feel a bit unsettled myself, which I found strange.
On the one occasion in which I had visited the Holy Sepulcher, I had felt no inkling of the transcendent.
Whether that was because of my own innate skepticism, a consideration of the many thousands who had died fighting over the purported resting place of the Prince of Peace, or just the sight of obese, elderly tourists being herded through like cattle, I couldn’t tell. Probably all of the above.
But now, seeing the actual site, and realizing whose body was inside -
“We need to leave,” said Sharon.
Lavon nodded without saying a word, and Naomi, ever perceptive, could sense our growing unease. Only Bryson and Markowitz remained unaffected.
Lavon took Naomi’s hand and signaled for the rest of us to follow.
Chapter 61
Though the moon had not yet risen, we managed to pick our way through the scrub via the light of a glittering celestial canopy — an inspiring sight, and one sadly invisible to modern city dwellers.
After a few iterations of trial and error, we reached the main road. Although Polaris, our familiar north star, had shifted considerably in the intervening two thousand years, it was still, in the words of one of my old commanders, “directionally correct.”
Thus guided, we continued on to the northwest until we arrived at a crest of low hills that I recalled from our trip in. Following some brief stumbling around, we managed to locate a rock overhang that would serve as sufficient shelter for the night.
Lavon and I decided to divide our party into three shifts. He and Naomi would take the second watch, followed by Markowitz and Bryson toward the dawn. Sharon and I agreed stand guard first.
We climbed up and situated ourselves just below the peak, so our silhouettes could not be spotted from a distance. Being proper sentries, we sat with our backs to each other in complete silence. For a couple of hours, we heard nothing but the soft murmur of insects.
I didn’t really expect trouble, and as the night wore on, I grew more confident that the combination of the Sabbath and the Passover would keep people from moving about.
So I finally whispered to Sharon the question I had pondered throughout the day.
“Last night, in Herod’s palace, how did you hold yourself together?”
She didn’t immediately respond, and for a moment I thought I might have trodden on overly sensitive ground.
“I’ll just say that I found your quick thinking extremely impressive — especially how you managed to let me know where they were holding you in a way that wouldn’t raise the king’s suspicions.”
“Thank you,” she finally replied. “But to tell you the truth, I didn’t have any grand design. It just came to me, there on the spot. I had to do something.”
That, I knew, was the way most heroes were made, despite what the storybooks said.
“Well, however you concocted your scheme, that bow was a piece of work. Where on earth did you learn to do that?”
She chuckled softly. “It’s called the Texas Dip. You were never a debutante, were you?”
I admitted that the honor had eluded me.
“But only because my gown wouldn’t fit properly on my big day.” I said.
She laughed again. “Of course.”
“Seriously, if you don’t mind me asking, how did you deal with the shame of being paraded through the palace naked like that? You had to have been scared.”
She considered this for a moment.
“I was terrified,” she finally said. “I thought I was done for; that I really was going to have to sleep with that pig.”
“If it’s any comfort, he wasn’t the one with the worms,” I said.
“I know; I finally remembered that was his nephew Agrippa. But I wasn’t thinking about worms. I was more concerned about the disappointment — that in my first real test, I would fail to stand up for my principles.”
“Defying the king would have been suicide. Anything you would have done would have been under extreme duress.”
“The other women didn’t see it that way. From what I could tell, they viewed their situation as a great opportunity.”
“The first century’s version of the ‘casting couch,’ I suppose.”
“Yes. I’ll never forget this one girl — she couldn’t have been older than seventeen — who spotted me as her primary rival from the first minute I arrived at the palace baths. In other circumstances, the situation would have been almost comical.”
“So what kept you going? How did you manage to hold your head up so high?”
“I wanted to live,” she replied. “I wanted to see my home again. I decided I’d do whatever I had to do to accomplish that.”
But she sounded ashamed of herself for doing so.
“Do you know how I justified it?” she asked.
“In the Book of Esther, a young woman had to take part in a contest: whoever could screw the king’s brains out better than the others won the prize. Hers was the safety of her people. Mine — well, like I said, my goal was to stay alive one more day.”
That wasn’t quite how I remembered the nuns telling the story, but that was the gist of it.
“There’s no fault in that,” I said.
“You didn’t see him this morning,” she replied. “The whole time they were mocking him, I cried. He wouldn’t have compromised.”
“You did nothing wrong,” I repeated.
“It wasn’t what I did, it’s what I had already made up my mind to do. I can thank you that in the end, I didn’t actually have to go through with it, but that doesn’t negate the choice I had already made inside.”
“Well, if you’re going to thank anyone for getting you out of there, thank Naomi. And if anybody has cause for shame regarding his conduct last night, it’s me. In spite of all that duty, honor, and country stuff we talk about so much, I didn’t exactly sacrifice my life to save a damsel in distress.”
“You wouldn’t have accomplished anything if you had.”
“No, nor would you, had you refused the king.”
She thought about this for a moment.
“If you want to dwell on what you did, focus on your escape,” I reminded her. “Even some of my old Ranger colleagues would have struggled to pull that off. You should have seen the way Publius described how you got away; the look of admiration in his eyes. If it makes you feel any better, even Herod was impressed.”