The Third Day

version is correct as opposed to all of those artist’s conceptions floating around?”

It was a question he couldn’t answer, and we both knew it.

“I haven’t quite worked that out yet.”

We never made any more progress resolving that issue, for at that moment, Sharon let out a horrified gasp.

Each of us turned in her direction, where we were confronted by the most gruesome spectacle I have ever had the misfortune to witness.

The nightmares still occasionally return.

Just off the side of the road, at the junction between the road we were on and the path running along the city wall to the southwest, stood what had once been the trunks of a dozen olive trees.

Horizontal beams were lashed to two of them, and hanging from those beams, suspended by nails, were objects that first appeared only as dark, reddened gelatinous masses. Shreds of flesh dangled downward from each, and both were covered almost entirely by hideous swarms of black flies.

Psychologists tell us that our minds have their own internal tricks to avert recognition of true horror, and it took us a few seconds to internalize that these ghastly objects were in fact men, still alive, with their faces contorted in agony and desperation.

Markowitz took one glance and immediately ran to the other side of the road, where he knelt and heaved his insides out. Bergfeld held her head down with her hands over her eyes, while Bryson stood motionless, transfixed by the dreadfulness of it all.

The next few minutes passed in a blur. I struggled to focus my attention forward and put the spectacle out of my head, but after we had gone about fifty more yards, Decius glanced back and saw that Markowitz and Bryson had not moved. Markowitz, in fact, remained on his knees, with his head down and his eyes staring blankly into the pool of vomit.

Decius said something to Lavon, but the archaeologist had turned pale as well and didn’t respond. Since I could gather the gist of what the optio was trying to say, I went trotting back to retrieve the others.

I saw no guard around the victims, so I reached into my first aid kit and ripped open two white packets. I removed the small cylinders, pulled off the lids, and jabbed one into the foot of each man.

I got lucky. Both had visible veins.

I turned and pushed Bryson in the back toward the general direction of the city; then I lifted Markowitz up by his robe.

“Hurry up,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

I gave them both another shove, and we pressed forward in silence, with Markowitz still wiping the spittle from his mouth. It wasn’t until we had almost reached the tail end of our column that Bryson finally spoke.

“What did you give them, cyanide?”

“Sufentanil,” I replied. “It’s a synthetic opioid; like morphine, only much stronger.”

Bryson glanced back, as did I. Both victims’ heads had dropped.

“Are they dead?” he asked.

I shrugged. The dosage I had given them would keep them unconscious for the next three to four hours. I could only hope nature would take its course by then.

At least I had tried.

When we got back to the wagon, our party remained visibly shaken. Those of us who hadn’t grown up Catholic had all, at one point or another, made the tourist circuits through the cathedrals of Europe. The crucifix looked nothing at all like what we had just seen.

Lavon closed his eyes, hoping to banish the image from his memory, though I knew he would never completely succeed. He mumbled something to Sharon about the hymn-writer having it wrong — that there was nothing wondrous about any of this — but she only gave a weak half nod and grunted in reply.

His words struck me as a restatement of the obvious, though I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about and decided not to press the issue.

Lavon finally explained that that the cross had not become the outward, visible symbol of Christianity until the latter half of the fourth century — after at least a generation had passed who had been unfortunate enough to see one for real.

The logic of that was not difficult to comprehend. Nor would any of us find it hard to refute the idea, still bandied about by fringe conspiracy theorists, that Jesus had somehow survived his execution.

For one thing, I doubt he would have wanted to.

Hospitals would run out of sutures before the wounds from that type of flogging could be sewn up, and without a massive infusion of antibiotics, infection would have killed him within a month anyway — a month in which he would have known nothing but the most intense and terrible pain.

Lavon spoke quietly. “Now we know what Paul meant by the stumbling block.”

Sharon just stared ahead. “I never really understood until now.”

“You couldn’t have, could you?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Understand what?” asked Markowitz.

“In his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul wrote about people not accepting Christ’s message because of the stumbling block of the cross,” she replied.

“In other words,” said Lavon, “how could a Lord, the Son of God, die in such a horrible and degrading manner?”

I couldn’t argue with that.

For the next few minutes, we walked forward in silence. In fact, none of us even noticed that we had passed through the Damascus Gate and into the city itself.

“Who do you think those men were?” Bryson finally asked. “I glanced up at the sign above their heads, but I couldn’t read it.”

I had seen it, too. A wooden placard described their crimes in three languages, none of which I could understand.

“The Greek word is lestes, answered Lavon. “Literally, it means ‘bandit,’ but in our world, we’d pick a different term — ‘terrorist,’ probably. Not just an ordinary brigand, but one acting from a political or religious motive.”

“Zealots, then?” asked Markowitz. “Jews fighting the Romans, like the ones we saw earlier today?”

Lavon nodded. “Probably.”

Chapter 22

A few minutes later, we got another reminder of the seething cauldron into which we had inserted ourselves.

Our column passed through a narrow alleyway that ran between a continuous row of three story stone buildings. A small boy — he couldn’t have been older than five or six — stood in a third floor window. Sharon looked up at him and waved.

The kid giggled and waved in return for a brief moment before we saw a hand reach out and jerk him back into the apartment. We heard shouting, and though we could not understand the words, the scolding tone was not hard to interpret.

The boy protested, and moments later we cringed as we heard the impact of a slap. The child bawled for a few seconds before a second slap brought about a pitiful whimper.

We looked back to see a weather-beaten old woman step up to the window and make a rude gesture, before spitting in a truculent display of loathing and disgust.

Bergfeld turned to Lavon, her expression uncomprehending.

“All I did was wave.”