reverie.
“I’ll never go back to that monster,” she said.
I took her hand and led her forward. “Then let’s do what we must to ensure that doesn’t happen.”
She didn’t say anything, so after a brief moment, I halted and repeated Lavon’s question.
“Are you with us, Sharon?” I asked.
Finally, to our great relief, she answered as though she meant it.
***
“Keep ‘em busy,” is a proven technique I learned in the Army to divert upset soldiers from troublesome thoughts, but as I turned around to look for a task I could assign Sharon, I only saw a visibly agitated Naomi.
By now, she had put her clothes back on. She whispered, insistently, to Lavon while she gestured for Markowitz and Bryson to pull the two unconscious guards back out of the tunnel through which we had come and to lay them in the corridor.
They looked at me in confusion, but I directed them to comply with her wishes.
Once they had done so, Lavon instructed Bryson to help him carry one of guards while Markowitz and I toted the other.
“Don’t let their clothing drag the ground,” he ordered.
We carried both men about a hundred feet until we arrived at a storage closet. From the dust patterns around the door, I could see that it received regular, but infrequent, use.
I glanced over to Naomi and smiled, nodding my approval at both her choice of disposal site and the remarkable stroke of good fortune that had brought us together. She smiled back, though her worried expression didn’t entirely go away.
The others stood out of our way as Lavon and I carried the first man inside and laid him on a stack of what appeared to be scrap lumber. We came back out and repeated the drill with the second man.
This time, though, Naomi blocked our exit.
I knew immediately what she wanted. Without saying a word, I unwrapped the cloth belt around my outer robe and signaled for Lavon to do the same.
The archaeologist wasn’t slow on the uptake. He started to protest, but he could see that her eyes had hardened.
“No blood,” was her only comment.
“I don’t like it either,” I said.
And I truly didn’t; but we couldn’t take the chance that one of these people would wake up unexpectedly. Some things just had to be done.
We each wound a cloth strip around our man’s neck in the manner of a tourniquet. I counted off several minutes and then checked each soldier for pulse or breathing. Sensing none, I signaled for Lavon to move on.
Once we had rejoined the others, Naomi explained that leaving evidence that Herod could trace to the tunnel could have devastating consequences for the girls left behind, though personally, I think her motivations ran deeper.
After a lifetime of degradation and servitude, she had her first chance to strike back. I only hoped she wouldn’t learn to enjoy it too much.
Chapter 55
We scurried behind Naomi through a confusing labyrinth of passageways and had gone about two hundred paces when she stopped suddenly and raised her hand.
By instinct, I pressed myself flat against the wall and listened. I held a finger up to my lips to warn the others, but my caution proved unnecessary. The others understood, and were doing their best imitation of wallpaper as well.
We heard voices and the noise of large objects being thrown, but at that moment, I couldn’t place the sound. The conversation’s tone seemed casual, though, and after a few minutes, whoever these people were headed the other way.
Naomi’s face didn’t reflect any real anxiety, so whatever had just happened must have been normal. She listened for another brief moment and then finally gave the all-clear signal, directing us forward once more.
We rounded a corner about thirty feet away and entered an open chamber about the size of the transit room back in Boston. Stacked against one wall were piles of split logs, which proved to be our exit ticket from the palace.
I hadn’t given the matter any thought when I had taken my bath in the Antonia, but it finally dawned on me that a furnace capable of heating the equivalent of my hometown Y’s swimming pool consumed enormous quantities of fuel.
In the first century, this fuel was wood, which meant that a facility the size of Herod’s employed an army of timber cutters to keep it supplied.
Naomi knew their routines. At dawn each morning, the lumbermen fanned out across the hills to the west. Typically, these men spent their entire day in the field, and though they occasionally dispatched a heavily laden wagon back to the palace in the early afternoon, she had never seen one return before noon.
“What did we just hear, then?” I whispered
“She says that a few workers stay behind to stoke the furnace,” Lavon replied.
This gave us a window of opportunity. We reached another tunnel, this one a broad sloping incline, and we scrambled up until we came to another stack of freshly split logs.
“They dry here,” Naomi explained.
I looked beyond the pile and could see daylight for the first time. As it turned out, we had already passed through an opening in the main wall.
Except for Lavon, this surprised the others, who had always imagined a city’s fortifications as being a single monolithic block.
“They could seal these small gaps very quickly if they needed to,” he explained,” just like the sewer drains. But in the meantime, servants and craftsmen who needed to go inside could pass through without interfering with the regular palace business at the main gates.”
This wasn’t as odd as we had first thought.
In the twenty-first century, few realized that even as recently as a hundred years before, one of the most common US occupations had been that of household servant. These workers used one entrance; the family used another. Their paths only occasionally crossed.
“Herod wants his creature comforts,” Lavon said, “but he doesn’t have the slightest interest in the mundane details of how those comforts are provided.”
***
The structure in which we found ourselves had begun its existence as a temporary storage shed leaning against the city’s main wall. Over time, the workers had expanded it into the present facility. Aside from the piles of cut timber, a motley collection of axes and saws leaned against the opposite wall.
Naomi crept around the firewood toward the outside entrance. Once there, she watched carefully for a few minutes and then signaled for us to follow.
After we had caught up, she first wrapped her scarf around Sharon’s hair. Once she was satisfied that the blonde tresses were properly concealed, Naomi whispered to Lavon, who in turn signaled Markowitz.
The two of them each grabbed one end of a long cross-cut saw and sauntered outside. I watched them go about fifty yards before they disappeared into a brushy ravine.
The rest of us understood what to do next. We each grabbed a tool and followed the others into the scrub.
Once we had reunited, we continued south for another quarter mile until we found a collapsed limestone overhang partially concealed in a tangle of dense brush.
Out of force of habit acquired during many years of service, I did a quick head count and set up an observation post. From there, I stared back at the city, half expecting to see Herod’s thugs charging down the slope
