A different servant was waiting for us as we trudged up the last set of steps. He opened the door and guided us in. After filling our goblets, he returned to his post outside.
We all chugged our wine fast, and Lavon and I watched cautiously as Markowitz took a few halting steps toward the window. Though he didn’t seem like the type to throw himself out, I eased myself closer just in case.
I needn’t have worried. He simply leaned on the windowsill for several minutes, watching the priests go about their business in the Temple compound below.
Suddenly, though, he turned around and hurled his empty goblet across the room.
“I’m going to kill every one of those Roman sons of bitches!” he shouted.
Lavon and I glanced at each other but decided to let him vent.
When he finally ran out of steam, I retrieved his goblet and poured him another cup.
“I know you’re upset,” I said. “But for the moment, we need to focus on getting Sharon back, and then making our way home.”
Markowitz didn’t give her a second thought. “I mean it,” he exclaimed. “I’m coming back. Those people are animals!”
He stood up, walked back to the window, and once again gazed at the crush of worshippers flowing into the Temple courtyard.
“I never paid much attention, growing up,” he muttered.
“Paid attention to what?” asked Bryson.
He gestured toward the Temple. “To this; to my heritage. I heard all the stories of course, but why should a kid growing up in the late twentieth century care? My family has lived in America since the time of George Washington. We had gotten rich. This stuff was ancient history.”
None of us replied.
“I was wrong. I should have paid more attention.”
He lowered his head and stared at the floor, mumbling something about being the only Jew in New York who hadn’t lost any known relatives to the Holocaust.
This triggered another unpleasant thought.
“Robert,” he asked, “When the Romans destroyed this city, how many people died?”
Lavon’s first response was evasive. He could sense where this was heading.
Markowitz, though, wouldn’t let up. “I’m not asking for an exact count. Roughly speaking, how many died in the siege?”
“The most plausible figures hover around a million,” Lavon said.
“One million dead Jews?”
“Yes — for the whole war, not just here in Jerusalem.”
“You’re saying these Roman swine killed one million of my ancestors?”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” he replied.
Lavon explained that as the siege progressed, three bands of Jewish fanatics took control of separate areas of the city. One occupied the Temple Mount; another controlled the Upper City around Herod’s palace, while a third held the district to the south.
As is often the case in such circumstances, each of the factions first slaughtered anyone they considered a moderate, before they turned against each other with as much gusto as they fought the Romans.
In the process, most of the Jerusalem’s food supply went up in smoke; and a city that might have held out for several years fell in six months.
This information, however, did not faze Markowitz.
“You said earlier that the Romans allowed refugees from other parts of Judea to stream into the city in the hopes they would eat through the grain stores even faster.”
“They did,” admitted Lavon.
Markowitz just shook his head. “Bastards!”
When he turned back to face the Temple, I refilled his goblet once more. With luck, he wouldn’t pay attention to how much he was drinking.
“The Ninth of Av,” he muttered. “I thought all that stuff was just something old people worried about.”
Markowitz continued to rant; none of us attempted to stop him.
“The Ninth of Av?” asked Bryson.
“The saddest day in Judaism,” said Lavon, “the day in their calendar when both the first and second Temples were destroyed.”
“The same day?” asked Bryson.
Lavon shrugged. “Close enough; probably.”
Markowitz turned back to our table. “The destruction of the Temple wasn’t the end of the fighting, was it? Weren’t there other revolts?”
Lavon nodded. Historians had recorded two: an uprising in 115 called the Kitos War after the Roman general sent to suppress it, and a final explosion of fury in 132, known as the Bar Kochba revolt.
“How many Jews died in each one?” Markowitz asked.
“Nobody’s really sure,” Lavon said. “We know even less about those conflicts than we do about the AD 70 siege. If either of the latter rebellions had the equivalent of a Josephus to chronicle the event, his writings haven’t survived.”
“What are the best estimates?”
“Accounts of the Kitos War only describe ‘a great slaughter.’”
Lavon didn’t elaborate, though after what we had seen so far, a mental picture of what that entailed required no huge imaginative leap.
“What about Bar Kochba?” Bryson asked.
Like most people outside Judaism and the Biblical scholar community, I had never heard of the man. I had no idea that this warrior — a messianic figure whose name translated as “Son of the Star” — had led the greatest rebellion of all.
Lavon explained that around AD 130, the emperor Hadrian — the same man who leveled the early Christians’ shrine — visited Jerusalem and decided to rebuild it as a pagan city along Roman lines.
For starters, he issued decrees outlawing Jewish customs like circumcision, which the Romans considered mutilation. But his crowning insult was his plan to build a shrine to Jupiter on what remained of the Temple Mount.
“What happened?” asked Bryson.
“As any fool could have predicted, the Jews rebelled,” Lavon said. “And in contrast to the situation sixty years earlier, this time Jewish resistance was unified.
“Ultimately, the Romans had to bring in twelve legions to put down the revolt — almost half their entire army at the time. The fighting dragged on for three years. Roman historians described their own casualties as enormous.”
“How many Jews died?” asked Markowitz.
“That’s even more of a guess than Josephus’s war, and I’m not trying to evade the question. Unlike the Great Revolt, the Bar Kochba rebellion didn’t end with the siege and fall of a major city. Instead, the last surviving rebels fled with their families to hideouts in caves.
“Rather than suffer even more casualties rooting them out, the Romans simply sealed up the cave entrances as they discovered them. The people inside eventually starved. Some of my colleagues have unearthed whole clusters of their skeletons.”
“So how many died?” asked Markowitz.
“Cassius Dio said about 500,000. Others cite figures in the millions.”
“Take an average; about a million, then?”
Lavon shrugged. “I suppose.”
“A million here, a million there,” said Markowitz. “It was as if the Nazis had risen up and had another go at us — twice!”
“Come on now,” said Bryson. “The Romans weren’t Nazis. There’s no record of their going for all that racial purity crap or trying to exterminate the entire population.”
Markowitz didn’t answer. Instead, he just stared out the window for a few minutes before turning back to face us.
He spoke with a subdued voice. “All we wanted was our small piece of land. We had our place, our Temple. They destroyed it and cast us out of our ancestral home forever — people who had done them no harm.”
“Don’t tell me you’d want to go back to sacrificing lambs and doves, literally?” said the Professor.
Markowitz stared down at the floor, lost in thought.
“We wouldn’t have to do that,” he finally said. “We’d figure something out. We always have.”
The two of them continued to wrangle back and forth, but I noticed Lavon had gone quiet. Given our current circumstances, he didn’t want to acknowledge that Markowitz’s last point was essentially true.
After crushing the revolt, Hadrian set out to eliminate the last vestiges of what he considered a stubborn and rebellious people. He banned surviving Jews from entering Jerusalem and renamed the area ‘Palestine’ after their traditional enemies.
The Diaspora had really begun only after Bar Kochba.
“I’ll buy a gun,” said Markowitz. “I’ll learn how to shoot. I’ll come back, and the first thing I do, I’ll kill Pilate. He’ll never know what hit him. None of them will.”
He turned back to watch the Temple ceremonies. “We’ll protect this place,” he said. “By God we will.”
Bryson started to reply when I held up my hand. I refilled Markowitz’s goblet again and handed it to him.
“I’ll show you how to handle firearms,” I said, “but in the meantime, drink up. For you to achieve what you’ve planned, we have to make it home first ourselves, and we’re not going anywhere else today.”
I watched with some relief as the combination of the alcohol and the waning of his adrenalin rush began to take effect. After a few more minutes, he yawned and rubbed his eyes. Lavon and I guided him toward the bed and covered him with a blanket.
***
While Markowitz dozed, the rest of us just stood at the window’s edge, lost in thought.
“You know he’s serious,” I finally said.
“He’s gone crazy,” said Bryson.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “All that stuff about tossing the Romans out of Judea — he meant every word of it.”
“He’s obviously suffering from the stress,” Bryson replied. “Anyone would be after spending a night in that hellhole, not to mention having to fight like he did.”
“That’s true enough,” I replied, “but that kind of pressure can drive a man to actions he otherwise never would have considered.”
Bryson grudgingly conceded the point.
“That’s why you must destroy that transport machine just as soon as we all get back safe,” said Lavon.
Bryson glared at him in shock, as if the archaeologist had asked him to butcher his first born child.
But Lavon had spoken my sentiments exactly.
“He’s right, Professor. You’ve admitted yourself that his father has legal rights to the fruits of your research. He’ll get in somehow, with or without your permission.”
“He has no idea how to operate it,” Bryson argued.
“Do you have documentation?” asked Lavon.
Bryson nodded.
“There you have it,” I said. “You’ve done the hard work of inventing the thing. The rest is simply a matter of following the protocols you’ve developed. Even if he can’t figure out how to work the device himself, he has the resources to hire someone who can.”
Bryson shook his head. “No. It won’t be a problem to keep him away. We have other safeguards.”
“I don’t think you understand what we’re dealing with here,” I said. “As for me, just buy some Wal-Mart and Cisco for my account and I’d go away a happy billionaire. But he’s not going to do that; not now.”
“Even if he returned, a single man acting alone wouldn’t be able to accomplish much,” Bryson argued.
Lavon started to point out the contradiction between that statement and the Brysons’ earlier position on changing history, but he decided to back off. The device, and what it could prove, was not something the Professor would give up easily.
Nevertheless, our problem remained.
“He’s probably aware of that already,” I replied. “If not, he certainly will be after he thinks this through. So let’s say he recruits some like-minded travelers — a unit of the Israeli army, perhaps — men with access to modern weapons and combat experience to boot. ‘Free Judea!’ he might say. What then?”
“We don’t know.”
“That’s the point,” said Lavon. “No one does. Fast forward two thousand years: would he return to our present world, or to a futuristic planet of Star Trek and the orgasmatron, or to a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland? Do you want to take that chance?”
***
Before Bryson could argue further, a piercing scream nearly shattered my eardrum.
I leapt to my feet, looking for a weapon, when I realized that the voice had emerged from my earpiece.
“Sharon!” I yelled. “Sharon, are you OK?”
I heard a loud pop, followed by shouting in Aramaic.
I swore. “Sharon!”
“What’s happening?” said Bryson.
I held my hand up for them to stay silent; then closed my eyes to focus on the background noise. For several minutes, I heard nothing but the shuffling of feet. Then, I could barely make out a frail, quavering voice.
“If you can hear me, they’re taking me back to the palace.”
And that was all.
I started toward the door as I explained what I had heard, but Lavon held me back, reminding me that the Antonia’s officials were unlikely to lift a finger to assist a woman who was not a Roman citizen.
He gestured to Markowitz. “Besides, I’m guessing we’ve played all of our high cards.”
I had to concede the point. Nevertheless, I insisted we find Publius, if for no other reason than to find out what Herod was likely to do with her.
***
Unfortunately, Publius had gone out on patrol and would not return for several hours. Decius was nowhere to be found, either, so we had no choice but to return to our room.
I took a seat and poured some wine, then thought better of it and asked Lavon to have the slave bring up some water. The kid also brought up some half-decent chow, so Lavon tossed him a denarius before directing him back outside.
“OK, worst case,” I said; “her transmitter no longer works and we get no help from anyone here. How do we spring her from that place?”
Bryson fingered his chip. “This should work by Sunday afternoon. Even if we can’t get her out, she’ll be able to return to the lab independently of us.”
“Totally unacceptable,” I said. “Plus, they may have already taken it away. I’m not leaving without her.”
Neither of the others spoke.
“We also have to assume that they’ll move Sharon to a more secure location than the dormitory,” I said. “What do we know about the palace complex? How is the interior laid out?”
“Quite frankly,” said Lavon, “we don’t know any more than what she described to you earlier. It was only a few years ago that an Israeli archaeologist uncovered the first definitive remains of the palace wall, and that was just part of the foundation.
“I keep trying to tell you: Jerusalem has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that what’s over there now would only be a wild guess.”
“Josephus wrote about it, didn’t he, in The Jewish War?” said Bryson.
“Yes, but not to the level of detail we need.”
“Right now, I’d say any detail is better than none,” I replied.
Lavon sighed. “Josephus’s book was an account of the revolt against the Romans, not a tourist brochure. He describes the lavishness of the palace mainly as a lament to its passing. His book had the usual blandishments about the extravagance of the place — rooms without number, luxurious furnishings, gold and silver and such.”
“But no real useful information,” I said.
“No.”
I was certain we could find a way in — a forgotten sewer line with a rusted grate, or a secret escape tunnel that any king with the reputation of the first Herod would have dug, just in case. But bumbling around without intelligence would do more harm than good. I had been there, and had the scars to show for it.
“Look, I don’t like it either,” said Lavon.
For now, all we could do was wait.