After the servant had brought our breakfast, I asked Lavon to have him run back down and fetch a pen and paper, intending to use Naomi’s assistance to scribble out a basic diagram of the palace, so that we could have at least a semblance of a plan before we set off.
The archaeologist just laughed.
What we called paper in the modern world didn’t exist, and papyrus was far too expensive to hand out on a casual basis. Complicating matters still further, ancient scribes made their inks on the spot, just before use.
“The inks are organic,” he explained. “They’ll spoil if they are not used quickly.”
I sighed and began rummaging through my kit for a substitute, though I hadn’t made much progress when Lavon called out.
“I hear something,” he said.
I reinserted my ear bud and heard a male voice, but the translation was only gibberish. The speaker, whoever he was, wasn’t conversing in Greek.
It was only then that I recalled who the speaker probably was.
I gestured toward Naomi. “Knowing what they are talking about could make or break our enterprise,” I said.
The archaeologist cast me a dubious glance, but after considering our limited options, he shrugged, as if to say “why not?”
“Let’s just hope she doesn’t scream,” he said.
Lavon walked over to the bed and sat down beside her. He removed his ear bud so that she could see it. Then, he went through a charade of putting it in his own ear and taking it out again, several times.
Afterward, he held it up to the side of Naomi’s head. A few seconds later, the same voice I had heard earlier came through loud and clear.
She leapt from the bed.
“It is Azariah!” she gasped.
Lavon just smiled. “We know.”
I popped my earpiece out and smiled also as I showed it to her. Lavon and I both chuckled softly as she gaped at us, wide-eyed, in open astonishment.
She stood as if frozen in place for a few more seconds; then, suddenly, she dropped to her knees and pressed her face to the ground.
“Who wants to be Zeus?” I said.
Lavon didn’t reply. Instead, he reached down, gently grasped her hands and lifted her to her feet.
“We are men,” he said, “not gods. Do not be afraid.”
Naomi cast nervously about the room; her face a ghostly pale. When she appeared to have recovered a small fraction of her composure, he guided her back to the bed and once more sat down at her side.
She turned toward me. I tapped my ear and spoke.
“Tell her it’s OK,” I said to Lavon.
He did so, and then had an even better idea. He instructed me to disable the translation feature and to hold my device up to her ear. He walked over to the opposite side of the room, turned his back, and whispered in Greek.
She couldn’t hear his normal voice from that distance, but she understood his words perfectly. Whatever he said had a soothing effect.
Lavon came back, cupped her face gently between his hands, and lifted it up until their eyes met. Then he repeated what he had whispered into the transmitter.
“Did I not tell you that if you helped us, you would see wonders beyond your wildest imagination?” he said.
“Tell her if she doesn’t help us, she’ll be consumed in a giant fireball,” said Bryson.
I wasn’t sure whether the Professor was joking, and to his credit, Lavon knew a stupid idea when he heard it.
I glared at Bryson to remain silent, and after a little more time had elapsed, Naomi’s breathing dropped back close to its normal rate. Whatever this strange object was, she appeared to have concluded that it was unlikely to cause her immediate demise.
Lavon spoke again, even more softly this time, and asked her to translate the Aramaic into Greek. He helped seat the device properly in her ear, then instructed me to listen in as an additional safeguard.
Naomi listened with her eyes closed. At the first lull in the conversation, she turned to Lavon and explained.
“It is Azariah,” she repeated. “I would recognize his voice anywhere.”
“Can you tell where he is?” asked Lavon.
She listened for a few more seconds. “He is with the king.”
So Herod had kept his “gift” after all.
Naomi rattled off other names that were unimportant, all something-iah, who had gathered together with a flock of her fellow palace courtesans. From the way she described it, the denizens of Herod’s playpen were only now waking up.
“Do you know where they are?” I asked. “Where is the king right now?”
She considered this for a moment. “The king’s personal bed chamber is on the third floor, at the southern end of the palace complex. When he is in Jerusalem, he is always there at this time of day.”
This surprised me — pleasantly, for a change. I had always thought that ancient monarchs spent their entire lives in mortal fear of assassination. Such people tended to move around a lot, rarely sleeping in the same place two nights in a row.
“No,” she said. “This is the most luxurious room in the palace. Herod would have no other.”
“Can you take us there?” asked Lavon.
She didn’t say anything as she thought through the options.
“Yes,” she said. “I know a passage.”
But then she paused. I suppose she had too much tact to say so directly, but the question was obvious: what, exactly, did we plan to do once we arrived?
I had been thinking about the same thing.
I drew the outline of a rectangle on the floor with my finger. Herod’s bedroom was located on the southern end of the palace complex. The tower in which Sharon was being held was on the opposite side.
Both, I suspected, would be heavily guarded and equally impenetrable. The weak link, if one existed, would be the transit between the two.
As Lavon explained, Naomi’s eyes brightened. “I know just the place,” she said.
“That seems easy enough,” said Bryson, after Lavon had explained.
I nodded — and kept my thoughts to myself. However straightforward this scheme might have sounded, if any of us were still alive 48 hours from now, I’d concede that miracles truly did happen.
***
“We’d best get going,” said Lavon. “All the activity to the north of the fort will give us a limited window of opportunity to slip out the other way.”
As to what that activity would be; well, that was something I really didn’t want to think about. Lavon must have had a similar notion, for he directed our attention to our unfinished breakfast.
“Eat up,” he ordered. “This is all we’re going to get for a while.”
“Grab all your stuff, too,” I added. “Whatever happens, this is a one way trip.”
That seemed to jolt Markowitz into a higher level of awareness. He wolfed down his chow and walked back over to the window, where he just stared in silence into the Temple courtyard, watching the morning sacrifices, one last time.
I noticed also that the look on his face had changed, and I didn’t think it was just the effects of the wine wearing off. I sensed a newfound firmness, even a resolve, that I had not seen before.
“Next year in Jerusalem,” he said.
Bryson looked at him with a puzzled expression, though neither Lavon nor I cared to explain. Markowitz’s statement had been the Jews’ Passover rallying cry for nearly two thousand years, until the Israeli army seized the city in 1967.
Lavon and I exchanged a quick glance. Unless we found a way to stop him, he was definitely coming back.
But we had no time to worry about that now.
“Do we have anything resembling a weapon?” Lavon asked. “Just in case.”
I lifted my tunic to expose a gladius I had strapped to my right leg.
“I picked up a souvenir last night.” I said.
But this was more for show than anything. I had no illusions regarding my swordsmanship skills. In a fair fight, a trained soldier would kill me with ease.
Lavon had the good sense to recognize this. I only hoped the others did.
“Need I remind you that our success depends on stealth,” I said. “We can’t exactly call for reinforcements.”