'Thank heaven you've come,' he said. 'We've got to get Miss Dean to hospital. She's in the ambulance already. I'll explain everything on the way. There's been a series of mishaps all round. Babcock ill, Robin missing, it's been a disastrous day.'
Kate seized his arm. 'But you?' she said. 'Are you all right?'
'Yes, yes… Of course I'm all right.'
He dragged her towards the ambulance. He did not even look at Jill. Bob hesitated, wondering what he ought to do. Then he turned, and saw Jill standing beside him.
'Where have you been?' he asked.
'I don't know,' she said wearily. 'In a sort of garden. I was looking for you but I couldn't find you. Kate was with me. She was worried about her husband. He can't stand crowds.'
'Nor can any of us,' he said, tut we'll have to face them again. Young Robin is lost, and I must go and find him. There's nobody else left.'
'I'll come with you.'
'Are you sure? You look absolutely done in.'
The Fosters were climbing into the ambulance. The siren wailed, and the spectators moved away. Jill thought of that endless winding street they called the Via Dolorosa, the chanting pilgrims, the chattering vendors, the repetition of a scene she never wanted to see again, the clatter, the noise.
'I can face it,' she sighed. 'It won't seem so long if we're together.'
Robin was enjoying himself. Being on his own always gave him a sense of freedom, of power. And he had become very bored trailing along in the path of the pilgrims, with people going down on their knees every other moment. It wasn't even as if they were walking the right way. The city had been pulled down and rebuilt so many times that it was altogether different from what it had been two thousand years ago. The only way to reconstruct it would be to pull it down again, and then dig and dig and reveal all the foundations. He might well become an archaeologist when he grew up, if he didn't become a scientist like his father. The two professions were rather similar, he decided. He certainly would not become a clergyman like Mr Babcock. Not in this day and age.
He wondered how long they would stay inside the church. Hours, probably. It was full to the brim with priests and pilgrims wanting to pray, and they would all bump into each other. This made him laugh, and laughing made him want to go to the toilet-his grandmother hated the word toilet, but everyone used it at school-and so, as there wasn't a real one handy, he went and relieved himself against the wall of the church. Nobody saw. Then he sat down on a step, opened his two maps and spread them across his knees. The thing was, Jesus had either been held in the Antonia Fortress or in the Citadel. Probably both. But which one had he been held in last, before he had to carry his Cross with the two other prisoners, and set out for Golgotha? The description in the Gospels did not make it clear. He was brought before Pilate, but Pilate could just as well have been in the one place as in the other. Pilate delivered Jesus to the high priests to be crucified, but where were the high priests waiting for him? That was the point. It could have been at Herod's Palace, where the Citadel stood now, and in that case Jesus and the two thieves would all have left the city by the Genath Gate. He looked from one map to the other: the Genath Gate was now called Jaffa Gate, or in Hebrew Yafo-it depended which language you spoke.
Robin looked at the church door. They would be ages yet. He decided to walk to the Jaffa Gate and see how it was for himself. It wasn't very far, and with the help of the modern map he wouldn't lose the way. It took him less than ten minutes to reach the gate, and here he paused to take stock of his surroundings. People were passing in and out, and there were cars drawn up outside, as there had been by St Stephen's Gate at the opposite end of the walled city. The trouble was, of course, that instead of the bare hillside and gardens, which was how it would have been two thousand years ago, there was now a main road, and the modern city spreading itself everywhere. He consulted his old map once again. There used to be a fortress tower called Psephinus, standing proud and mighty by the north-west corner of the city, and this was the tower that the Emperor Titus rode to inspect, when he camped with his Roman legions before capturing and sacking Jerusalem in A.D. 70. There was something built on the present site called the College des Freres. Wait a moment, though. Was it the College des Freres or a hotel called the Knight's Palace? Either way it was still inside the walls of the city, and somehow that was not right, even with the walls having been rebuilt.
'I'll imagine,' he told himself, 'that I'm Jesus, and I've just come out of the Genath Gate, and all this is bare hillside and sloping gardens, and they don't crucify a person in a garden, but a decent distance away, especially before the Feast of the Passover, otherwise the people would make a disturbance, and there had been enough riots already. So Jesus and the two other condemned prisoners were made to walk a fair way, that's why they made Simon the farm-labourer-and Cyrene means farm-labourer in Aramaic, the Headmaster told me so-carry the cross. He was just coming in from work in the fields. Jesus couldn't manage it, being weak from all that scourging. And they took him and the others out to some rough scrubby ground overlooked by the Psephinus tower, where the soldiers would have had a guard posted, so that if there should have been an attempt at rescue the attempt would fail.'
Pleased with his deduction, Robin turned to the right out of the Jaffa Gate and walked along the main road until he judged that he was the right distance from the long-vanished tower of Psephinus. He found that he had reached a junction, with main roads going in all directions and traffic roaring by, and the great building across the other side of the central square was the town hall, according to his modern map.
'So this is it,' he thought. 'This is scrubby ground, with fields where the town hall stands, and the farm- labourer is sweating, and so are Jesus and the others. And the sun is overhead in a blazing sky, as it is now, and when the crosses are set up the men nailed on them won't see the fields behind them, they'll be looking at the city.'
He shut his eyes a moment, and turned, and looked back at the city and the walls, and they were a golden colour, very fine and splendid. For Jesus, who had spent most of his life wandering about the hills and lakes and villages, it would have seemed the finest and most splendid city in the world. But after staring at it for three hours, in pain, it would not seem so splendid-in fact, it would be a relief to die.
A horn blared, and he stepped out of the way of the incoming traffic. If he didn't watch out he would die too, and there wouldn't be much sense in that.
He decided to walk back to the city through the New Gate, which was just along to the right. Some men were repairing a place in the road, and they looked up as Robin approached. They shouted, pointing to the traffic, and although Robin got the message, and skipped to safety beside them, he couldn't understand what they were saying. It could be Yiddish, or possibly Hebrew, but he wished it could have been Aramaic. He waited until the man with the drill ceased his ear-splitting probe, and then he called to them.
'Does anyone speak English?' he asked.
The man with the drill smiled and shook his head, then called out to one of his companions, who was bending over a piece of piping. The man looked up. He was young, like the rest, and had very white teeth and black curly hair.
'I speak English, yes,' he said.
Robin peered down into the pit beneath. 'Can you tell me, then,' he asked, 'if you have found anything interesting down there?'
The young man laughed, and picked up a small animal by its tail. It looked like a dead rat.
'Tourist souvenir?' he suggested.
'No skulls? No bones?' Robin asked hopefully.
'No,' smiled the labourer. 'For that we have to drill very deep, below the rock. Here, you can catch?' He threw a small piece of rock up to Robin from the pit in which he stood. 'Keep it,' he said. 'The rock of Jerusalem. It will bring you luck.'
'Thank you very much,' said Robin.
He wondered whether he should tell them that they were standing within a hundred yards or so, perhaps, of a place where three men had been crucified two thousand years ago, and then he decided they would not believe him; or, if they did, it would not impress them very much. For Jesus was not important to them, not like Abraham or David, and, anyway, so many men had been tortured and killed around Jerusalem since then that the young man might very well say, with justice, so what? It would be more tactful to wish them a happy holiday instead. It was the 14th day of Nisan, and at sundown all work would cease. He put the small piece of rock in his pocket.
'I hope you have a very pleasant Pesach,' he said.
