Phoebe watched her son drain the goblet dry and then stare at it bleakly. “What happened?” she asked again, softly.
He set the goblet down hard on the tray. “I forsook my pride and she threw it back in my face,” he said in self-contempt. “That’s what happened, Mother.” Marcus went out onto the terrace, and Phoebe followed him. He gripped the railing. Her hand slid gently over his.
“She loves you, Marcus.”
He jerked his hand from beneath hers. “I offered to marry her. Would you like to know her answer? She said she didn’t want to be yoked to an unbeliever. There’s no reasoning with a faith like hers. There’s no compromise. One god! One god above all else! So be it. Her god can have her.”
He turned away, his knuckles whitening on the rail again. “It’s over, Mother,” he said grimly, determined to put Hadassah behind him. An evening at the baths would help him forget her. If not, Rome had many more exciting pleasures to help a man obliterate his frustrations.
Chapter 36
The Ethiopian dancers moved with increasing violence to the beat of drums as Vitellius’ guests supped on ostrich and pheasant. Julia’s heart beat in time to the drums, faster and faster, until she thought she would faint. Then, boom, the dance ended, the drums stopped, and the half-naked dancers adorned with colorful plumes flew from the room like frightened exotic birds.
The moment had come. Her breathing still quickened, Julia raised her hand slightly, summoning Hadassah. No one noticed the small Jewess; she was just another maid among the dozens who served their masters and mistresses. Julia dipped her hands into the bowl of warm water that Hadassah held for her, and wondered how long it would be before Vitellius noticed the sash around her maid’s small waist.
Hadassah knew something was wrong. She had been glad of Julia’s command that she attend her at Vitellius’ feast. Primus had always insisted one of the other maids attend Julia. This evening, though, he hadn’t quibbled about Julia’s decision . . . and now Hadassah sensed that Julia had another, darker purpose for her insistence that she be present. As she stood, holding the bowl of water, people began staring at her and whispering. Hadassah felt a warning prickle on the back of her neck.
Julia slipped the towel from Hadassah’s arm and dabbed at her hands delicately.
Primus leaned close to her. “Do you know what you’re doing, Julia?” He forced a smile, pretending a nonchalance he was far from feeling. “Vitellius is glaring at us as though we carried the plague into his house. Send Hadassah away. Send her away now.”
“No,” Julia said and lifted her head slightly, staring straight into Hadassah’s eyes. A cold smile curved her lips. “No, she’s going to stay right here.”
“Prepare yourself, then. Vitellius is coming over and he looks greatly offended. If you will excuse me, my dear,” Primus said, rising, “I will share a story with Camunus and leave you to explain yourself to our host.”
The guests grew quieter as Vitellius made his way to Julia. “Put the bowl down, Hadassah, and pour me some wine,” she said.
Hadassah felt Vitellius’ presence without raising her head; his hatred was like a tangible presence surrounding her. Her throat went dry, her heart beat like a trapped bird. She looked at Julia in appeal, but her mistress was smiling up at her host in greeting. “Vitellius,” she said, “you lay a most impressive table.”
Vitellius ignored her flattery and stared with loathing at the striped sash around Hadassah’s waist. “Of what race is your slave?”
Julia’s eyes widened. “Judean, my lord,” she said and those nearby fell silent. Frowning, she glanced around her in apparent innocence. “Is something wrong?”
“Jews murdered my only son. They besieged Antonia Tower and broke in to slaughter him and his men.”
“Oh, my lord, I am so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“A pity you didn’t,” he said, his dark gaze still fastened on Hadassah. “Mad dogs, all of them. The spawn of scorpions. Titus should’ve exterminated them from the face of the earth.”
Julia rose and placed her hand on his arm. “Hadassah isn’t like those who took your son’s life. She is loyal to me and to Rome.”
“Do you think so? Perhaps you are too kind and naive to understand the treachery of her race. Have you tested her?”
“Tested her?”
“Does your maid worship at the temple of Artemis?”
“No,” Julia said slowly, as though the admission caused her to think.
“Has she burned incense to the emperor?”
“Not publicly,” Julia said, and Hadassah’s heart sank at her words. As though sensing her silent plea, Julia looked at her, and it was then Hadassah knew. Julia had brought her to this deliberately.
“Test her as you desire, Vitellius,” she said smoothly, a dark triumph glowing in her eyes.
“And if she refuses to proclaim Vespasian a god?”
“Then do to her as you see fit.”
Vitellius snapped his fingers and two guards came and stood on either side of Hadassah. “Stand her over there for all to see,” he commanded, and they took her arms. She went with them without resisting. They stood her in the center of the marble floor where the Ethiopian dancers had just performed and turned her to face Vitellius.
“Put the emblems before her.”
The guests gathered closer, curious and eager to see what she would do. They whispered among themselves. Some laughed softly. The emblems were brought in and placed before Hadassah. She knew she had only to proclaim Vespasian a god, light the slender reed, and put it to the incense as an offering to him, and her life would be spared.
“Do you see how she hesitates?” Vitellius said, and the frightening promise in his tone made Hadassah tremble.
Lord, you know what’s in my heart. You know I love you. Help me.
“Take up the flame, Hadassah,” Julia commanded.
Hadassah reached out slowly, her hand trembling violently. She took a slender reed and placed it to the flame.
Oh, God, help me.
And the Word came to her, filling her. “I am the Lord your God, and there is no other.” She took her hand from the reed and watched it curl and blacken in the flame. Guests began whispering.
The soft voice whispered through her mind. “Take up your cross and follow me.” Hadassah put her hand over her heart and closed her eyes. “God, forgive me,” she whispered, ashamed that she had almost given in to fear. “Don’t forsake me.”
“Lo, I am with you, even to the end of the age.”
“Take up the flame!”
Hadassah raised her head and looked at Julia. “The Lord, he is God, and there is no other,” she said simply and clearly. Astounded and angered, everyone spoke at once.
“Strike her,” Vitellius said, and one of the guards struck her hard across the face.
“Vespasian, he is god,” Julia said. “Say it!”
Hadassah stood silent.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Vitellius said coldly.
“She’ll say it. I’ll make her say it.” Julia went to her and slapped her. “Speak the words. Speak them or die!”
“I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
“A Christian!” someone whispered.
Julia struck her again. “The emperor is god.”
Hadassah looked at Julia through a blur of tears, her face laced with pain, her heart breaking. “Oh, Julia, Julia,” she said softly, wondering if this was how Jesus had felt when Judas kissed him.
The desire to avenge her brother’s broken pride had set Julia on this path, but it was her own jealousy that made her erupt into violence. Uttering a feral scream of rage, Julia attacked Hadassah. The guards stepped back as she beat the girl with her fists.
Hadassah took the blows with soft cries of pain, but made no effort to defend herself. Julia stopped when Hadassah was on the floor, unconscious. “You can have her, Vitellius,” she said and kicked her in the side.
“Haul her up and take he
r to Elymas,” Vitellius ordered, and the guards obeyed. “He pays five sesterces per victim for his lions.”
Atretes came awake with a deep, guttural cry and sat up. His body was drenched in sweat, his heart galloping. Panting, he raked shaking fingers through his hair and stood. He strode to the entrance of his cave and looked back toward Ephesus. The Artemision was there, glistening like a beacon in the moonlight. It wasn’t in flames.
He wiped the beads of sweat from his face and went back inside the cave again. He knelt down and covered his head.
The dream had been so real, he could still feel the power of it. He wanted to shake himself free of it, but it came, night after night, bits and pieces of it clearer until he knew he would never be free until he understood its meaning.
And he knew the only one who could tell him the meaning was the one who had come to him the night before the dreams had begun.
Hadassah.
The guard of the lower dungeon threw the bolt. “What are the odds on Capito surviving against Secundus, Atretes?” he asked, eager for tips on how to bet at the games. Atretes didn’t answer. And after a look at the German’s hard face, the guard asked no more questions.
The sound of the Roman’s hobnailed sandals sent Atretes back to Capua. As he followed the guard, the smell of cold stone and human fear made the sweat break out on his skin. Someone cried out from behind a locked door. Others moaned in despair. Then, as they kept walking, Atretes heard something coming from the far end of the dank environs—a sound so sweet that it drew him. Somewhere in the darkness a woman was singing.
The guard slowed, tilting his head slightly. “Have you ever heard a voice like that in all your life?” he said. The singing stopped, and he walked more briskly. “A pity she’s going to die with the rest of them tomorrow,” he said, pausing before a heavy door. He threw the bolt.
A sickening stench hit Atretes as the door opened. The cell was on the second level, and the only vents into the chamber were from another level above it, rather than from the outside. The air was so close, Atretes wondered how anyone could survive in it. The foul smell was so overpowering, his gorge rose and he stepped back.
“Bad, isn’t it?” the guard said. “After five or six days, they begin dying off like flies. It’s no wonder some prisoners run into the arena. They crave one last breath of fresh air before they die.” He handed Atretes the torch.
Breathing through his mouth, Atretes stood on the threshold and looked from face to face. A single torch flickered in the mount on the side wall, but those in back were cast in shadows. Most of the prisoners were women and children. There were less than half a dozen old bearded men. Atretes wasn’t surprised. The younger men would have been saved for the fighting, pitted against men like Capito and Secundus . . . men like himself.
Someone said his name and he saw a thin woman in rags rise from the mass of filthy captives.
Hadassah.
“Is that the one?” the guard said.
“Yes.”
“The singer,” he said. “You there! Come out!”
Atretes watched her as she picked her way across the room. People reached up to touch her. Some took her hand, and she smiled and whispered a word of encouragement before she passed by. When she reached the open doorway, she peered up at him with luminous eyes. “What are you doing here, Atretes?”
Unwilling to say anything before the Roman guard, he took her arm and drew her out into the corridor. The guard closed the door and set the bolt. He opened another door across the corridor and lit the torch.
“Leave us,” Atretes said when the guard remained just outside the door.
“I have my orders, Atretes. No prisoner leaves this level without written authorization from the proconsul himself.”
Atretes sneered. “Do you think you could stop me?”
Hadassah put her hand on his arm and turned to look at the guard. “You have my word that I will not leave.” The guard looked from Atretes’ murderous anger to her gentle eyes. A frown flickered across his face. He nodded once and left them alone.
Atretes listened to the sound of the hobnailed sandals on stone and clenched his fist. He had vowed never to enter a place like this again, and here he was, by his own choice.
Hadassah saw his distraction. “Did Julia send you?”
“Julia sent word you were dead.”
“Oh,” she said quietly. “I had hoped—”
“Hoped what? That I’d been sent to free you?”
“No, I hoped Julia would have a change of heart.” She smiled sadly and then looked up at him with a faint frown. “But why would she send you word about me?”
“Because I sent for you. After the first message, a boy came to me. He said his name was Prometheus and that you were his friend. He told me Julia had sold you to Elymas. I went to Sertes and he made inquiries and found out you were being held here.”
Hadassah came closer and placed her hand gently on his arm. “What troubles you so much that you would go to such lengths to find a mere slave?”
“Many things,” he said without hesitating or asking himself why it was easy to trust her. “Not the least is the fact that I can’t get you out of here.”
“That doesn’t matter, Atretes.”
He turned away, anger filling him. “Julia should be the one in this place,” he said harshly, looking around at the cold, stone walls of the dank chamber. “She’s the one who should suffer.” How many hundreds had waited within these walls to die? And for what? The pleasure of the Roman mob. When he had come to the gates of this place, he had almost turned back from the black memories. “She should be the one waiting to die. Not you.”
He hated Julia so much he could taste the bile of it in his mouth, feel the rush of it heating his blood. He would enjoy killing her with his own hands if it wouldn’t mean he’d end up back in this place, waiting to fight in the arena again. And he would take his own life before that ever happened.
Hadassah touched his arm, pulling him out of his murderous thoughts. “Don’t hate Julia for what she’s done, Atretes. She’s lost. She’s frantically searching for happiness, but she’s drowning. Instead of grabbing hold of the one thing that will save her, she grasps at flotsam. I pray God will yet be merciful to her.”
“Merciful?” Atretes said, looking at her in stunned amazement. “How can you pray for mercy on the one who sent you here to die?”
“Because what Julia did has given me the sweetest joy of all.”
Atretes searched her face. Had confinement driven her mad? She had always had a strange look of peace about her, but now there was something more. Something that surprised him. In this dark place, with a horrifying death facing her, she looked changed. Her eyes were clear and luminous—and filled with joy.
“I’m free,” she said. “Through Julia, the Lord has set me free.”
“Free?” he said bitterly and looked pointedly at the stone walls.
“Yes,” she said. “Fear was my constant companion, from as far back as I can remember. I’d been afraid all my life, Atretes, from the time I was a small child visiting Jerusalem, right up to a few days ago. I never wanted to leave the safety of the little house where I grew up in Galilee or the friends we knew. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of losing those I loved. I was afraid of persecution and suffering. I was afraid of dying.”
Her eyes glistened with tears. “Most of all, I was afraid that when the time came and I was tested, I wouldn’t have the courage to say the truth. And then the Lord would turn his face from me.”
She spread her hands. “And then it happened, the very thing I feared most . . . I was stood before people who hated me, people who refused to believe, and I was given a choice: recant or die. And the cry came from within my soul, a cry the Lord gave me through his grace. I chose God.”
Tears ran down her cheeks, but her eyes were shining. “And the most amazing, miraculous thing happened to me in that moment, Atretes. Even as I was speaking the words, proclaiming Jesu
s is the Christ, my fear fell away. The weight of it was gone as though it had never been.”
“Had you never said the words before?”
“Yes, among those who believed, before those who loved me. Where there was no risk, I spoke them willingly. But in that moment, before Julia, before those others, I surrendered completely. He is God and there is no other. To not tell them the truth would have been impossible.”
“And now you’ll die for it,” he said grimly.
“Unless we have something worth dying for, Atretes, we’ve nothing worth living for.”
He felt an aching sadness that this gentle young woman would die such a foul, degrading death. “You did a foolish thing, Hadassah. You should have done what was expedient and saved your life.” Just as he had done, and countless others before him.
“I gave up what I can’t keep for something I can never lose.”
Looking upon her, Atretes felt an aching hunger for a faith like hers, a faith that could give him peace.
Hadassah saw his torment. “You must hate this place,” she said softly. “What brought you here to me?”
“I’ve had a dream. I don’t know what it means.”
She frowned slightly. “I’m not a seer, Atretes. I have no prophetic abilities.”
“It has to do with you. It started the night you came to me in the hills and it hasn’t stopped since. You must know.”
She felt his desperation and prayed God would give her the answers he needed. “Sit with me and tell me,” she said, weak from confinement and days without food. “I may not know the answers, but God does.”
“I’m walking through blackness, a blackness so heavy I can feel it pressing against my body. All I can see are my hands. I walk for a long time, not feeling anything, and then I see the Artemision in the distance. As I come closer to it, the beauty of it amazes me, just as it did the first time I saw it—but this time, the carvings are alive. They’re writhing and uncoiling. The stone faces stare down at me as I enter the inner court. I see Artemis, and the symbol she wears upon her crown glows red.”