The Artifact (37 page)

My next recollection was from the small room in which I had slept on the many occasions I had remained overnight in Vespasian’s home, in this instance with Shana, a young household servant sitting beside my bed. When I queried her regarding my circumstances, she told me that her Mistress, Lucrentia, had summoned a surgeon to sew my wound. I had slept through the remainder of the previous day, and the sun was setting in the west as we spoke. After propping me up with pillows, giving me water, and a plate of fruit, she left me.

By the time I had eaten the fruit, the beautiful dark-haired woman I recalled from the courtyard entered my room in a flowing, sleeveless robe of beige trimmed in green, a gold brooch imbedded with jewels clasped upon her shoulder mantle, her low bodice revealing the top of prominent breasts, her narrow waist cinched with links of gold chain. The regal woman stood some distance from my bed as she introduced herself as Lucrentia, Vespasian’s mother; who had surely seen many more seasons than my own, but looked not much older.

She inquired politely about my wound but did not offer any consolation for it, ignoring the obvious malice of her son in its infliction. She had evidently learned the history of Vespasian’s and my relationship, announcing that certain changes would be instituted in the household and family priorities, which meant that Vespasian would have less free time to spend in leisure activities, a pointed implication that my visits to their home would henceforth be curtailed. Lucrentia told me that her message to my parents regarding my absence minimized the minor accident of our swordplay to prevent their needless concern. She had assured them that I was well cared for and would return home on the morrow. So much for malingering Jews, I thought.

No further mention of Vespasian was made until the following morning after the surgeon examined my stitches, gave me instructions for their removal and re-bandaged the wound. I had just finished dressing in the clean toga laid out for me by Shana and was adjusting my leg brace when a girl about my age walked into the room wearing a short lemon colored scoop-neck toga hemmed in red, a narrow silver belt pulled tight, stretching the silky fabric down from her left shoulder across small round breasts whose nipples pressed into the cloth, culminating in a young female body far more enticing to me than my curiosity about my sister Sarah’s. Her broad countenance presented a high forehead from which thick auburn hair was swept atop her head and casually tied with a yellow ribbon. A prominent nose between wide-spaced eyes reflected a familial resemblance, all in all possessing the nascent hint of her mother’s beauteous features.

“Only incredible stupidity,” she said in Latin, “could account for a small crippled Jew fencing with an accomplished Roman swordsman.”

She approached me where I sat on the edge of the lounge, bending over my knee to unwrap the cloth that held the bandage against the wound.

“Hold still, Jew boy!”

“Are you just overcurious, or one of those ghouls who roam the empty battlefields stripping the bloody corpses of sandals and armor?”

“I am going to be a surgeon,” she said.

An uncontrolled grunt escaped my throat as she pulled the bandage away from the stitches.

“Brave swordsman,” she scoffed. “The reason that hurt is the gash is still draining. That Syrian butcher should have placed a piece of raw wool with salve on the wound and bound the cloth looser.”

I had not been paying attention to her words as I enjoyed the cool touch of her hands on my skin, and the wonderful view I had of her breasts down the neck of her robe as she leaned over me.

“I, I, I. You are a stupid boy! But you cannot go home with that cut leaking fluid or it might get inflamed and cause a fever that could be more difficult to cure than the wound.”

“Where did you learn this stuff?”

“A friend of mother’s,” she said as she pranced out of the room for the wool.

Tanya left me with erotic visions that prevented my concentration on Homer’s epic poem as I sat on my balcony whiling away the afternoon, gazing across the courtyard below into the hills covered by a green forest in the near distance. Vespasian came to me after dark, lit the lamp, sat on the edge of my couch and shook me out of a half sleep.

Vespasian went to a small table across the room to pour diluted wine in two cups. When he returned to my side, he called a toast of friendship.

“
Procul omen abesto
.
¹¹
”

Yehoshua was in rare high spirits that year, for father had agreed to his betrothal to Rebekah, despite the modest dowry afforded by her father, a peasant farmer with a small plot to the east of town. I recall her as a shy girl a year or two younger than my age, quick of mind and pretty, with curly black hair, for whom my brother had shown affection since early childhood. Their obvious happiness at a future life together infected relatives, friends and probably half of Nazarat, because it was rare that a couple matched by parents began their marriage with mutual love.

Father’s continued employment in Sepphoris consisted of various building projects, but mostly inside furnishings such as tables and chairs and cabinets, some of which could be better crafted in our shop by father and Yehoshua, then driven to the city in our ass-drawn cart when completed. We also spent a good deal of time constructing my brother’s new home beyond the hillocks at the far end of the broad meadow that stretched from our house to the edge of the forest. For my own part, father assigned me the task of harvesting lumber for those commissions in Sepphoris and the house we were building for Yehoshua, who at the end of each day would help me drag logs trimmed of their branches home behind Intak, our aging ass.

Since the forest behind father’s shop was becoming scarce of suitable trees due to our own felling and that of others, we began taking Intak in harness a greater distance to drag back the fruits of our labor, working our way to the north, beyond the crest of a hill that separated our land from that of my mother’s sister Elizabeth and several other families spread out below.

With an opportunity for a wide swath of freedom open to me again, I usually rose before

dawn, broke my fast and was deep in the forest swinging my ax shortly after sunrise. On one

occasion, after a midday meal and respite, I lay down the ax, and walked through the woods toward the meadow seeking game for my trusty slingshot. At half between noon and dusk, having bagged a rabbit and two pheasant, I was about to return to my ax to fell a few more trees before going home when I spied movement behind a copse of distant bushes. I crept silently up on my prey, hoping to add one more creature to my game bag, when my eyes discerned not an animal, but Vespasian’s younger sister, Tanya, lying on a grassy knoll in the sun, her eyes closed, the blue skirt of her short toga drawn up on her thighs.

“A pretty fawn is fine prey for the hungry hunter,” I said, standing above her.

She gave a startled shiver, but did not open her eyes. “The hunter had best not be too hungry or the brother buck of the pretty fawn will thrash him again.”

“I am flattered that you remember the sound of my voice.”

She opened her eyes, pushed her skirt down and sat up. “Your Latin pronunciation is not perfect to the practiced ear of a woman from Rome.”

“Woman? I would have thought you were a girl about my age.”

“Some girls are born women, stupid boy.” Her face took on the wanton look I had seen on the visages of the prostitutes in Sepphoris, sending unbidden blood pumping through my loins. I do not often lose my wits, but that girl/woman had been confounding from the very moment she appeared in my room in her home.

When she stood up, absently brushing the grass from her toga, we were face-to-face, inches apart. “Well, you had better get back to kill more of those beautiful trees, had you not, Shimon?”

A sudden thrill ran through my body at the first time she had called me by name. All I could do was nod, turn, and walk away, breathing hard before I had taken three steps.

Several months later, I was attempting to maintain Yehoshua’s long strides across the meadow, he for the moment unmindful of my handicap, as the sun rose in a cloudless sky with the heat of day beginning in earnest, sweating profusely under the weight of my sack of small tools with which I would cut branches from the main trunk after Yehoshua had felled a tree. He decided to cut timber at the far side of the rocky slope that stretched from the caravan road up a long incline to a stand of trees suitable to our purpose. When we arrived there, Yehoshua untied the water skin from Intak and handed it to me while he unpacked his ax, saw and heavy tools. We rested briefly in a grassy shade drinking slowly with our backs against a large oak.

After our respite Yehoshua stood, shucked his robe, squirmed his shoulders through the neck hole of his shift and tucked the top of it into the plaited hemp belt around his waist. He seemed massive to me in that short skirt, curly black hairs plastered against the sinews of his dark skin already slick with perspiration. He picked up the long–handled ax without a word and swung it deep into the nearest trunk. I stood off to his left gawking as he added several more swings to the initial gash, which caused the stout poplar to lean precariously.

“Stand over there,” Yehoshua said, pointing behind him with the ax.

“I am fine right here,” I said, looking up through the high branches. “It is leaning the other

way.”

A frown closed over his face as he stared at me. I stared back as though we were locked in a contest of wills for some golden prize. Finally, he turned again to the tree, brought the heavy double blade high over his shoulder and swung at the wedged trunk with the strength of Goliath. The huge poplar shuddered for prolonged moments before it began to fall away almost imperceptibly, but swiftly gained momentum, twisting on its base, reversing the direction of its descent, accelerating by geometric proportions as it plummeted directly toward me. All I could do was stand in place, my sandals turned to boots of iron, gaping up in awe at the crashing monster rushing down upon me, its trunk cracking in the agony of its own death as it came, the sound of teeming branches bearing their mass of verdant leaves, smashing against adjacent trees, blotting out more and more of the blue sky as the enormous trunk covered in rough bark with jutting limbs descended implacably toward me.

My next sensation was being hit by an ox, catapulting through the air with tremendous force, landing in the soft grass not less than a single pace from the wide branches of the fallen tree, still reverberating on the ground where I had stood two heartbeats past.

a wagon turning off the caravan road below onto the narrow path to the isolated home of Aunt

Elizabeth.

“Look!” I said, pointing across the meadow. “The tax collector. “Are not Uncle Aecheticus and Cousin John away trading in Jerusalem?”

Although the occupying army did not maintain garrisons amid the hundred or so tiny villages and towns throughout the Galilee, the Empire assessed and collected taxes from its inhabitants on a regular basis. The publicans granted authority to do so were primarily opportunistic Jews, who if not actually sympathetic to our Roman rulers, feigned that attitude in order to bid for the position of collector and the lucrative commissions they reaped for the task.