Lavon just shook his head, as did I.
For all we knew, that woman’s son was one of the poor unfortunates writhing in agony outside the city gate. Perhaps her husband, or father, or brothers had lost their lives fighting the Romans.
Or maybe her family had been driven off the land by the crushing burden of taxation; or worse, her inability to pay the ruthless and corrupt tax farmers may have forced her to sell a daughter into a life of degradation and slavery.
The possibilities were endless as they were terrible.
***
We didn’t have long to reflect, though. A minute later, we turned another corner and entered a broad plaza. A ten-story crenellated wall on the opposite side dominated the square. Archers stood at the top, guarding their colleagues’ entry.
“It’s called the Antonia,” said Lavon. “The first Herod built this fortress about 75 years ago and named it after his patron Mark Antony.”
That seemed odd.
“I thought Antony lost,” I said.
“He did,” Lavon replied, “but Herod had a unique ability to curry favor with whoever held power in Rome. Unlike his contemporaries, he never sidestepped the fact he had chosen the wrong side. Instead, he told Augustus that he had had served Antony proudly, but would now serve his new master with equal devotion.”
“Obviously it worked,” said Bryson.
“Yeah,” he replied, “though I’m not sure Augustus had any other good candidates for the job. Despite his nasty personal reputation, Herod had demonstrated that he could keep order in a troublesome part of their world, which is what the Romans really cared about at the time.”
“Our son of a bitch,” I muttered.
Markowitz and Bergfeld eyed me strangely, but I didn’t reply. President Eisenhower had made that crack about a brutal Central American dictator who had proven adept at fighting the Communists. It was an era they were too young to recall.
“I thought a Roman governor ran Jerusalem,” said Bryson.
Lavon nodded. “One does now, though when Herod died, his kingdom was divided among three of his sons. The trouble was, the one who got Jerusalem inherited all of his father’s cruel bloody-mindedness without a speck of his administrative ability. After a few years, the Romans got rid of him and installed their own man.”
***
The soldiers we traveled with, however, couldn’t have cared less about governors. When they saw the fortress, the men spontaneously surged forward, like horses returning to the barn after a long, tiring ride.
The gate opened from the inside, and we pressed on until we halted near the center of an open courtyard about the size of a football field. I glanced up and counted eight rings of windows lining the walls, along with stone- lined passages into the interior.
“It’s bigger than it looked in those drawings,” said Bergfeld.
Lavon also seemed surprised by the scale of the place.
“The artists’ renditions don’t do it justice,” he said.
He steered our attention to the battlements. “At least this part is as Josephus described it. A few modern scholars have argued that the fort contained only one main battlement, but here, you can see that there are four; one at each corner.”
This made sense to me. I guessed that each one stood about forty feet above the rest of the fortress. Unfortunately, our circumstances were unlikely to afford us the opportunity to take more exact measurements.
As soon as we stopped, Publius called the men to attention and gave a brief speech, which, from his troops’ demeanor, sounded like congratulations for a job well done.
Their day wasn’t over, though. After being dismissed, the soldiers first stacked their shields on a rack along the front wall, where specialists inspected each one for damage and made chalk marks on the ones needing repair.
As they did this, I helped Sharon off the wagon; then Lavon and I carried stretchers bearing the wounded Romans to a shady spot. Attendants took them from us at that point and toted them inside — presumably to what passed for a hospital. I wasn’t sure what I could do, so I made no effort to follow them.
After a short break for water and a bite to eat, the soldiers set to work preparing their armor and weapons for whatever lay next, turning the courtyard into a veritable hive of industry.
Slaves brought wire brushes and joined the soldiers in scrubbing off the gore and the bits of rust that had accumulated earlier that day. Once they had finished this, others polished the armor with cloths until they could see their own reflections.
Additional servants turned grindstones as the soldiers re-sharpened their own swords, with each man stepping back occasionally to test his weapon for a razor-sharp edge; while still others applied oil to leather straps and repaired torn cloth.
I glanced over to Lavon. “Brings back memories, doesn’t it?”
As lowly recruits, both of us had spent hours after long training marches cleaning our rifles and equipment before we were allowed any rest.
***
Publius didn’t stick around to watch. His men knew what to do, and he had other tasks to complete. Just after he dismissed the soldiers, an older man in a white tunic stepped out from the shadows.
The centurion saluted him and then followed him back into the fortress — no doubt to give a brief summary of the day’s activities before spending the remainder of his evening producing a report, in triplicate.
“Do you think that’s the governor?” asked Bryson.
Lavon shrugged. He had no idea what Pilate would have looked like. No one from the modern world did.
We all pondered this for a moment before Sharon noticed an object at the far end of the courtyard. A cylinder, about eight feet tall and roughly the diameter of a telephone pole, had been planted in the stone floor. Two short chains hung from the top, with a metal shackle at each end.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A place none of us want to go,” I said.
“Flogging post,” said Lavon.
She stared at it a bit longer and then turned back to face us.
“Was this the place?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said the archaeologist. “Some scholars say Jesus was scourged here; others say it happened in Herod’s palace. The truth is nobody knows for sure.”
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” replied Bryson.
Chapter 23
We watched the soldiers work for another half hour before a young man wearing sandals and a plain brown tunic approached and beckoned for us to follow. He led us to the southeast corner of the fortress and started up a flight of stairs, taking the steps two at a time all the way to the top.
Except for Bryson, we all made it with a minimum of huffing and puffing. It had to be a test, though of what I wasn’t sure; nor could I know whether or not we had passed.
The kid waited patiently at the top landing for the Professor to catch up before leading us down a short corridor and inserting a key into a thick wooden door.
He gestured for us to go inside.
The room was larger than I had expected — about fifteen by thirty feet. The walls were built of the same
