The soldiers re-packed and formed a marching column with their customary efficiency. Seeing that all was in order, Publius gave the command and we trundled forward once more to the east. As before, Sharon rode in the wagon and did her best to tend to the injured Romans, while the rest of us kept pace on foot.
Once we had settled into a rhythm, I pulled Lavon aside.
“Decius noticed that you recognized the name of that village,” I said.
“I know,” he admitted. “It took me by surprise.”
“Why was it so important?”
“Luke’s Gospel records that after the Resurrection, Jesus met two of his followers walking down the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. They didn’t recognize him, and he had a little fun with them. He pretended to be a stranger who knew nothing of what had happened in Jerusalem over the previous few days.”
I was still confused. “OK, but that doesn’t explain the significance of the place.”
He considered this for a moment.
“It’s not the location,” he finally replied. “It’s the name itself. In our time, Road to Emmaus is the name of a well-known Christian retreat, along with Christian schools, an Orthodox journal, and all sorts of other things related to the church. I always thought of the town as more significant for that reason.”
“Is it mentioned anywhere else in the Bible?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“I’m starting to think I should have paid more attention in Sunday school,” I said.
It was not the last time I would find myself echoing that sentiment over the next few days.
Both of us pondered this for a few minutes; then Lavon glanced over toward Bergfeld.
“We might have another problem as well,” he said. “Decius asked about her. Who was she? How was she related to the rest of us?”
“And?”
“I told him she was the second daughter of her father, our king.”
I gave Lavon an odd look. That wasn’t the story we had cooked up in Boston.
“I know,” he sighed. “It sounds really stupid. But we need to protect her, and I thought that if she were a princess, the soldiers would be less likely to molest her. In the first century, the daughter of a merchant, even a rich one, was often just another trading commodity.”
“Did he buy it?”
Lavon shrugged. “Maybe. He commented that her clothing did not match her station. I answered that by telling him we concealed her status because we were a small party, unable to defend ourselves against robbers. We didn’t want to make ourselves any more of a target than we already were.”
“That sounds reasonable enough,” I replied.
“Yes, but now we’re safe from attack. He seems genuinely puzzled as to why she is still helping his soldiers instead of sitting back and expecting everyone to wait on her hand and foot. I think that has been his usual experience with the royal families around here.”
“How did you explain that?”
“I said our king required all women of high rank to spend time serving others, to keep them from becoming mean-spirited.”
He struggled not to laugh. Obviously Decius knew nothing about the ferocious social competition of the Dallas charity ball circuit. From Lavon’s description, it was even more intense than that of his native Atlanta.
“So what do we do now?” he finally asked. “What should I say if he brings up the subject again?”
I advised him to let it rest for the moment. “We’ll have to pretend to give Sharon some deference, though,” I added.
As soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t. Lavon glanced backward and waited for her to notice him. Then he bowed obsequiously, leaving her wondering just what on God’s green earth that was about.
Decius saw it, too, and though he chose not to comment, I had a suspicion that he would make inquiry at some point. I could see the wheels of his mind turning, trying to resolve a puzzle with a more than a few pieces still out of place.
***
For the moment, though, there was nothing to do but march on, and that’s what we did. We proceeded uneventfully for another hour as the road weaved its way through low, rocky, scrub-covered hills.
At first, we didn’t see many other travelers, although we could hear the bleating of sheep being driven on parallel tracks about a hundred yards to either side.
Perhaps the Romans had laws against flocks of animals soiling their roads. With everything that transpired later, I never found the opportunity to ask.
A short while later, Publius called for another break and the Romans went through the same well-drilled procedure — though with different squads stuck on guard duty.
Based on the Biblical account of the journey to Emmaus and the time we had traveled, Lavon guessed that we were about four miles from the city center. He and Bergfeld both stared up at two big hills to our right, trying to identify vaguely familiar landmarks.
“I think the modern freeway passes just over there,” she said. “We’re getting close.”
Lavon concurred. As for me, I could only shake my head at the incongruity of it all.
Sharon’s assessment of the geography turned out to be correct, and once we started up again, it wasn’t long before the city itself hove into view for the first time.
We all stopped in our tracks at the sight. Although it’s a bit embarrassing to recount, I’ll have to admit that I stood and gaped along with the rest of them, like backwoods hillbillies seeing tall buildings for the first time.
I had not expected to be impressed. I had done the tourist circuits across the globe and had become jaded to old ruins. After a while, one pile of ancient bricks was the same as another.
But this Jerusalem was not a museum piece.
The city itself stretched for about a mile from end to end. An outer wall, varying between forty and sixty feet high, ringed the perimeter, which was interspersed with taller battlements spaced about a hundred feet apart.
Situated, as it was, at the top of a hill, the picture was even more imposing. One didn’t have to be an old soldier like myself to shudder at the hazards of attacking this place.
Lavon explained that the fortifications were constructed mostly of tan crystalline limestone, known in modern times as meleke. These glowed in the mid-afternoon sun, only adding to the splendor.
“Match what you expected?” I said to Lavon.
“Honestly, I don’t know yet,” he replied.
As it turns out, much of what modern researchers know of Roman-era Jerusalem derives from a single source, the writings of the slippery Josephus, whose actions in the Great Revolt suggest that scholars employ at least a modicum of caution when interpreting his works.
Lavon directed my attention to three tall towers at the city’s mid-section which rose to a height of about twice that of the nearby walls. “How tall would you say those are?” he asked.
My eyes went back and forth from the towers to the people passing by on the road running just underneath the walls. Given the distance, I found it a bit hard to judge.
“Eighty or ninety feet,” I guessed.
“According to what I’ve read, the tallest one was 130 feet.”
I shrugged. “Maybe they added on to it later?”
“Perhaps,” said Lavon, though he remarked upon one other bit of modern conjecture that was clearly incorrect. A popular scale model of the ancient city in the Israel Museum depicted the center tower, the Phasael Tower, as square while the other two were rounded at the top, with a columnar base.
But we could see that only the southernmost tower bore that design, and the tower to the northeast, the Hippicus Tower, had no exterior columns at all.
I didn’t say anything else. I had a feeling that a lot of what we thought we knew would turn out to be wrong — a sensation which proved to be accurate, and concerned matters of far greater importance than the height of a tower.
***
Despite our fascination, we couldn’t linger. The Roman column had gone on about two hundred yards ahead when we heard a sharp command from Decius urging us to keep up.
It didn’t take long to see why.
As we got closer to the city, a growing tide of humanity began to travel in our wake. Though the pilgrims prudently gave our column wide berth, the more I studied their faces, the more their increasing numbers began to make me uneasy.
One glance at Decius told me that I was not alone in my apprehension.
To say that the locals were not overjoyed with our presence would be an understatement. Some, mostly young women, clasped their shawls tight and kept their heads down in an effort to avoid eye contact. The majority, though, stood to the side of the road and stared straight ahead as we passed, their expressions sullen and resentful.
“I don’t exactly feel the love,” I said to Lavon.
He shook his head.
“Those people hate us,” said Bergfeld. Her face could not conceal the fact that she found this deeply unsettling.
Making matters worse, a handful of young men glared at our procession with such undisguised odium that even the most hardened Romans grew nervous. I watched several of the legionnaires grip their weapons tighter, and the casual banter so common among soldiers on the march had ceased.
“Foreign occupation by godless degenerates,” Lavon explained. “And the Romans return the favor. They view the people in Jerusalem as uncultivated savages, longing for the imagined glory days of David and Solomon a thousand years earlier.”
As always, the real story was a bit more complicated, but that was the heart of the matter. At least, thank God, they didn’t have IEDs.
“I wouldn’t want to meet any of those fellows in the dark of night,” I said.
Lavon glanced back and forth at them as well, but was careful not to let his gaze linger. Neither of us was sure what it would take to set them off, and a person didn’t have to know much about counterinsurgency tactics to realize that the second these people thought they could get away with it, we’d have one hell of a fight on our hands.
Few of the pilgrims wanted to force a conflict, I was sure, but the atmosphere was so tense that it might just take one hothead -
I looked over to the supply wagon, glanced at Sharon, and then turned my attention to the spare swords and spears at the bottom. Fortunately, my true thoughts managed to escape notice, though Lavon did perceive my interest in the weapons.
“You ever use one of those things?” he asked.
I laughed. At one point in my career, I had spent six months in England, assigned to a squad whose commander led an enthusiastic Roman-era reenactment crew — fighting Caesar’s landing every other weekend.
“Only enough to be a danger to myself and innocent bystanders,” I replied. “What about you?”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t part of the curriculum at Parris Island.”
This surprised me; I never took him for a Marine.
“Lance Corporal Robert Lavon — retired,” he said. “In return for a few years with Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, the GI Bill paid for most of my college education.”
“See any action?”
He chuckled. “The closest I got was as an embassy guard in Beijing. I had orders to check everyone and everything going into the building; and you know how these politicians on fact-finding junkets can be when they forget their ID.”
I laughed, imagining Senator Blowhard turning red in the face with the do-you-know-who-I-am routine. Half of his own constituents probably wouldn’t recognize him. Why should some Jarhead on the other side of the world?
“And you?” he asked.
“Oh, a little bit; here and there,” I replied.