The Third Day

“Well, however you concocted your scheme, that bow was a piece of work. Where on earth did you learn to do that?”

She chuckled softly. “It’s called the Texas Dip. You were never a debutante, were you?”

I admitted that the honor had eluded me.

“But only because my gown wouldn’t fit properly on my big day.” I said.

She laughed again. “Of course.”

“Seriously, if you don’t mind me asking, how did you deal with the shame of being paraded through the palace naked like that? You had to have been scared.”

She considered this for a moment.

“I was terrified,” she finally said. “I thought I was done for; that I really was going to have to sleep with that pig.”

“If it’s any comfort, he wasn’t the one with the worms,” I said.

“I know; I finally remembered that was his nephew Agrippa. But I wasn’t thinking about worms. I was more concerned about the disappointment — that in my first real test, I would fail to stand up for my principles.”

“Defying the king would have been suicide. Anything you would have done would have been under extreme duress.”

“The other women didn’t see it that way. From what I could tell, they viewed their situation as a great opportunity.”

“The first century’s version of the ‘casting couch,’ I suppose.”

“Yes. I’ll never forget this one girl — she couldn’t have been older than seventeen — who spotted me as her primary rival from the first minute I arrived at the palace baths. In other circumstances, the situation would have been almost comical.”

“So what kept you going? How did you manage to hold your head up so high?”

“I wanted to live,” she replied. “I wanted to see my home again. I decided I’d do whatever I had to do to accomplish that.”

But she sounded ashamed of herself for doing so.

“Do you know how I justified it?” she asked.

“In the Book of Esther, a young woman had to take part in a contest: whoever could screw the king’s brains out better than the others won the prize. Hers was the safety of her people. Mine — well, like I said, my goal was to stay alive one more day.”

That wasn’t quite how I remembered the nuns telling the story, but that was the gist of it.

“There’s no fault in that,” I said.

“You didn’t see him this morning,” she replied. “The whole time they were mocking him, I cried. He wouldn’t have compromised.”

“You did nothing wrong,” I repeated.

“It wasn’t what I did, it’s what I had already made up my mind to do. I can thank you that in the end, I didn’t actually have to go through with it, but that doesn’t negate the choice I had already made inside.”

“Well, if you’re going to thank anyone for getting you out of there, thank Naomi. And if anybody has cause for shame regarding his conduct last night, it’s me. In spite of all that duty, honor, and country stuff we talk about so much, I didn’t exactly sacrifice my life to save a damsel in distress.”

“You wouldn’t have accomplished anything if you had.”

“No, nor would you, had you refused the king.”

She thought about this for a moment.

“If you want to dwell on what you did, focus on your escape,” I reminded her. “Even some of my old Ranger colleagues would have struggled to pull that off. You should have seen the way Publius described how you got away; the look of admiration in his eyes. If it makes you feel any better, even Herod was impressed.”

She smiled, though her pensive mood remained.

“What’s going to become of us?” she finally asked.

I knew what she meant; though I wanted to focus her mind on less troublesome topics for the moment.

“I sincerely hope that within forty-eight hours, we will find ourselves seated comfortably behind the first-base dugout at Fenway Park,” I replied.

This was true enough.

She chuckled quietly, though I could tell that she wouldn’t let me dodge the question indefinitely. The trouble was; I had no answer, even if we survived — an outcome I still considered problematic at best.

“I’m still working on that,” I said. “I think we all are.”

“Whatever happens, it’s going to be hard to listen to those preachers,” she said. “From what I’ve seen, the ones who jabber the loudest about remaining steadfast in the face of great peril have never been in the remotest danger of encountering it themselves.”

Except for those clowns on TV, that seemed a bit unfair, though I could sense where she was coming from.

I told her that for six months, I had the ‘privilege’ of serving as a US Army liaison to Mobutu’s forces in Zaire. The missionaries I had encountered in that country easily surpassed me both in raw courage and in their ability to navigate through exceptionally challenging circumstances.

“Did they bluster and pontificate?” she asked.

They had not, which I took to be her point.

“As they led me to Herod this morning, I thought back to a trip I had taken a few years ago,” she continued. “I had gone to Rome with my mother, in February, so we could see the sights before the hordes of summer tourists invaded the place.

“One beautiful morning, we took our coffee into the Colosseum, and just sat there on the stone benches, reflecting on the early Christians and what they had to have been thinking as they were herded into that very arena, to be torn apart by wild animals.”

I had done the same, years ago, and told her so.

“I’m sure they had all heard the story of Daniel,” she said. “Yet he was saved and they were not. Why?”

I had no answer.

“And what about the ones who were burned alive? They had to have known of the men who were rescued from Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. Yet out of all the thousands, over the centuries, only three were saved. Three! The rest died screaming in agony, on the orders of the king, or the emperor.”

Or the Pope, I didn’t add. That last part was an inconvenient fact I had been brought up to ignore.

“These people had been just as faithful,” she exclaimed. “They had to be asking why; why God didn’t save them?”

She started to cry softly. I turned and slid my arm around her, and felt her warmth.

“It’s OK,” I said.

She rested her head on my chest and squeezed tight.

“I shouldn’t ask these questions, but I can’t make them go away. Can you believe it? There in the palace, I didn’t believe God would save me from Herod, even after I saw him.”

My first thought was to ask what he looked like, just to divert her mind to another subject, but the time didn’t seem right.

I also considered telling her that the Lord had sent his angels of mercy, in the unlikely form of a sympathetic Roman official and a clever, imaginative palace courtesan.

But as I looked around, I couldn’t be sure of that, either. We weren’t yet out of the woods, and that same official, over the next couple of days, might be the very man charged with hunting us down.

So I just wrapped her in my arms and spoke softly.

“It will be OK,” I repeated. “God is complicated. I’m not sure we’re meant to understand everything.”

Aside from an occasional glance around — after all we were still on guard duty — we just held onto each other and barely moved.

Some time later, I heard rustling coming up the hill. By instinct, I reached for my gladius, though I needn’t have bothered. Our interlopers were only Lavon and Naomi,