The Last Disciple (24 page)

“You haven’t heard.” Tadmor seemed to be strangely amused and watched Ben-Aryeh closely.

“There is more to the events?”

“Ah yes.” Tadmor stroked his beard. “You’ve spent all that time in travel. You haven’t heard. When I tell you, just remember your own advice to us. And when you return to Jerusalem, see if you can get the people there to show the restraint you seem to so easily preach to us. See if you can prevent a riot in your own city.”

“We will abide by the law.” Again, Ben-Aryeh was speaking less to Tadmor than he was to Florus through the soldiers who would eventually report to him.

“We shall see whether you abide by the law,” Tadmor said. “If, as you say, it is war that Florus wants, it explains the message that reached us today from Caesarea. Yesterday Florus assembled two cohorts of soldiers and began to march to Jerusalem. The soldiers should arrive there today.”

Gallus Sergius Vitas! Here in Judea?

Florus stared across the wheel of the chariot at the smug look that Annas didn’t bother to hide, as if he’d enjoyed delivering the information. Florus kept the reins looped between his fingers and pressed his hands against his thighs to prevent them from shaking.

Gallus Sergius Vitas.

Florus knew of the family, of course, proud as it was of a lineage claimed to stretch back to the founding of Rome. Florus had met Vitas at various functions in Rome and hated him with the distrust that a corrupt man has for an honest man.

Insperata accidunt magis saipe quam quae speres,
Florus thought.
What you didn’t hope for happens more often than what you hoped for.

If there was a single man of influence in Rome who Florus hoped would never step into this land, it was Gallus Sergius Vitas. War hero. Patrician of unquestionable lineage. Favored by Caesar on one side and by the Senate on the other. A threat to neither. And a man known for integrity and uncompromising loyalty to the empire. Whatever reports he brought back would be seen as absolute, unbiased truth.

Nor could there have been a worse time for Vitas to enter Judea, not given what Florus needed to keep hidden from Rome.

Judea was a backwater, yet it had its riches to be plundered, as previous procurators had discovered. But it was far from the imperial courts, and for a century Rome had been accustomed to loud incessant complaints from the Jews, which meant that any complaints a new procurator generated did not seem unusual. In short, as long as a decent amount of taxes continued to flow from Judea to Rome, a corrupt procurator here could make a vast fortune, virtually untouched by the restraints of Roman law.

But Florus had been too greedy, worse still than his predecessor Albinus, and his recent abuses had gone too far. So far, in fact, that Florus desperately needed to find a way to cover up all his activities over the last eighteen months. He’d long anticipated an inquiry and had set aside considerable funds to bribe any representative sent by Caesar.

Any representative except for Vitas.

And from reports that Annas had gleaned from his extensive spiderweb of spies and passed on to Florus, Florus knew that Vitas had not intended to make this a public visit but a surreptitious one. Did it mean that Nero already had doubts about what had been happening in Judea?

Insperata accidunt magis saipe quam quae speres.
Any other man but Vitas and any other time, and Florus would be totally safe from punishment by Nero. It wasn’t the atrocities against the Jews that Nero would find offensive, but the fact that Florus had been siphoning far more tax money than he sent to Rome.

Even so, Florus might narrowly be able to escape the punishment of Rome. The army in front of him was his solution.

Annas did not know it, of course, but he was a fool. He actually believed that he would receive the silver that Florus had promised.

Just as Annas was stupid enough to trust that Florus had come with an army for the sake of appearance. His warning about making sure the soldiers didn’t break rank and cause a riot outside the city walls? Florus appreciated it, simply because now he could tell a centurion to ride ahead with fifty horsemen and do everything possible to antagonize the Jews so that any report would make it look like they were the ones responsible for the riot he hoped would ensue.

Tomorrow Florus would have two cohorts in the city. And he had a plan to get another two cohorts inside. Then the balance of power within Jerusalem would tip in Florus’s favor, and he could assure himself of such turmoil in the land that he would be absolved of any blame for treating the Jews as harshly as he had.

Yet if Vitas gathered enough information in a short period of time . . . and if Vitas lived long enough to get back to Rome with that information . . .

At these thoughts, Florus felt a rumbling within the depths of his bulk and a spasm of his guts. He told himself it was not fear but something he had eaten the evening before. He never liked or fully trusted food cooked in encampments, and this was the price he paid for leaving the luxurious accommodation in Caesarea.

“Sebaste? Vitas is in Sebaste?” Florus said to Annas. “You assured me that . . .” He paused to lick his lips. His mouth was dry—too dry. And it wasn’t the heat of day up here in the mountains. “You assured me that he intended to go to Jerusalem and that he would see nothing of the countryside.”

Florus left the rest unspoken. That Vitas would see nothing of the havoc Florus wreaked on the people of the countryside. That he would hear no reports to indicate how much wealth Florus had been stealing from the Jews.

“You know that Ben-Aryeh’s assistant spies on him for me,” Annas said.

Florus nodded impatiently. Annas always found a way to brag about his arrangements.

“I’ve learned from him, since you and I last spoke, that Ben-Aryeh is in debt of some kind to Bernice, a debt that forced him to meet Vitas in Sebaste at her request.”

“Bernice and Vitas? That is new to me.”

“And to me,” Annas said. “I’ve just learned it from Ben-Aryeh’s assistant, who listened in on his conversation with Bernice. There’s an ex-gladiator in Jerusalem, a friend of Vitas. This ex-gladiator has served as a go-between for Vitas and Bernice, so no government officials would realize that she is helping him.”

“What could she gain from Vitas?”

“The right-hand man of Nero?” Annas countered.

Florus grunted acknowledgment of the obvious benefits for Queen Bernice.

“The real question,” Annas said, “is what does Vitas want from Bernice that he is prepared to owe her political favors?”

Florus grunted again. “And you will find that out for me?”

“That is why you need me, remember?”

Annas had become too confident. Which meant he had sensed that Florus was rattled by the name of Vitas.

“Perhaps you should remember that I’ve had occasion to order a soldier to split a man open,” Florus said. “At which point I step on one end of his entrails and force him to walk away with the rest unwinding behind like a rope.”

“I’m aware of those stories,” Annas said, probably not as calmly as he wanted to appear.

Florus enjoyed his petty revenge. “You’d be surprised at how far a man can walk like that. And how long it takes for him to die. It can be amusing actually, watching some try to pile everything back inside. One man—”

“Yes, yes,” Annas said. “I’m aware of those stories.”

Annas ran his fingers through his hair several times. To Florus, it was an annoying habit.

“I want to know what Vitas wants here in Judea,” Florus commanded. “Or better yet, I want him dead. Find someone to kill him in Jerusalem.”

“A murder in Jerusalem would seem suspicious, would it not?” Annas said. “On the other hand, you already have bandits watching and waiting for Ben-Aryeh. It is more than likely Ben-Aryeh will travel back from Sebaste with Vitas. Simply send them orders to kill Vitas also. To Rome, I’m sure, he’ll appear to be a tragic victim of random thieves.”

“Vitas . . . dead,” Florus agreed after a moment’s thought. “It does have a pleasant ring to it.”

“Remember, however, even the great Maglorius has aged and now serves our family. What would you rather be? Master or employed freedman?”

Valeria’s stepmother, Alypia, stood with Maglorius. Maglorius held Valeria’s stepbrother, Sabinus, who had been born about a year earlier to Alypia. Both Alypia and Maglorius gazed directly at Valeria.

It was an indication of Maglorius’s status in the household that Valeria felt regret that he had overheard the insult. She would have had no such concern about the feelings of any other of the servants, slave or not.

In the past, Maglorius might have erupted in sudden fury, something he’d been famous for, even when he’d been their slave, not a freedman. This, too, spoke of his status in the household. Any other would have been flogged for such an action, yet it was something he had done regularly since joining the household.

But Maglorius had changed in the last weeks. He seemed more at peace, and the simmering fury had disappeared. He smiled first at Sabinus, then turned to Valeria and spoke calmly.
“Stultus est qui stratum, non equum inspicit . . . ,”
he said.

After years among the Romans, he spoke almost without an accent. His prowess had taken him to arenas across the world, including the one in Smyrna where he’d survived a sword attack before retiring and accepting a contract with the Bellator family as a bodyguard.

His statement in the courtyard now pierced Valeria.
“Stultus est qui stratum, non equum inspicit.”
The man who inspects the saddle blanket instead of the horse is stupid.

“M-Maglorius,” Valeria stuttered, “I did not mean . . .”

“. . . stultissimus qui hominem aut veste aut condicione aestimat,”
he finished. The corners of his mouth twisted upward slightly, to let Valeria know he was truly not angry as he completed his answer to the question she posed to Quintus about master or slave.

“Yes,” Alypia said, repeating the proverb that Maglorius had spoken, as if Valeria were too dense to understand it without help. “The man who inspects the saddle blanket instead of the horse is stupid; most stupid is the man who judges another man by his clothes or circumstances.”

But Valeria did not need her stepmother’s help. She’d understood full well what Maglorius had meant. Master or slave or freedman serving the wealthy—each was simply a condition of fate.

Valeria felt her cheeks burn, and she wanted to squirm at Maglorius’s gentle reproving of her rash question to Quintus. There was something about Maglorius and the way he gave her his attention, something that she could never quite define, something that made her secretly wish he was a Roman of dignified descent and she was a woman of another household. Maglorius always treated her with dignity and respect. She adored the way he showed love to Quintus, too, as if Quintus were his own son. Maglorius who had fashioned Quintus toys by carving them out of wood. Maglorius who had mesmerized her with tales of faraway lands and of noble warriors. Maglorius who was so gentle with the baby Sabinus he now held.

“Of course,” Alypia continued archly, “if Maglorius were a better man, he would resist using Latin in a way that makes his barbarian heritage obvious. Disgraced soldier, slave, gladiator, freedman, and now bodyguard. His airs are pretentious and fool nobody.”

Valeria did not know what had come over her stepmother in the last weeks. She’d changed too. Alypia was irritable and almost vicious in most of her remarks about Maglorius. She had begun treating Sabinus meanly, leaving the little boy in the charge of servants and slaves. Maglorius, in turn, had simply shrugged off her barbs and given extra attention to the little boy.

Just as now. Maglorius turned and began walking away from Alypia.

“Come back,” Alypia said to Maglorius. “You haven’t told me what request the messenger from the royal palace brought to you.”

“It is of no concern to you,” he said.

“So,” Alypia said bitterly, “the rumors I’ve heard about you and Queen Bernice are true?”

Valeria was startled. Maglorius and Queen Bernice? That filled her with dismay. Bernice was the most beautiful woman in Jerusalem. If the rumors were true, how could Maglorius resist her?