Troubled, Lagos said nothing.
* * *
Atretes breathed easier with the night-shadowed hills around him. When he reached the knoll beyond and above the villa, he squatted on his heels and drew the furs around him. Here, beneath the expanse of the starry heavens, he felt closer to freedom. No walls to close him in. No one watching him. He could smell the earth and it smelled good. Not as good as the forests of Germania, but far better than the confines of a ludus or even a luxurious villa.
Releasing his breath slowly, Atretes lowered his head to his knees. The wine was beginning to take effect. He felt a flush of warmth and light-headedness, but knew he hadn’t drunk enough to accomplish what he wanted. Oblivion. He wished he had thought to bring another wineskin with him so he could get so drunk he’d forget everything, even who he was.
He’d give everything he owned for one night of dreamless sleep and a sense of well-being in the morning. He gave a bleak laugh that sounded hollow in the darkness. Everything he had wouldn’t be enough to undo the past, to give life back to those he had killed, to wipe away the grim memories and his own foul guilt. He was twenty-eight years old. He had been eight when his father had begun training him for combat. It seemed since that time combat consumed his thoughts, his actions, his very being. His talent lay in taking life. Swiftly. Brutally. Without remorse.
His mouth curved bitterly. Without remorse?
He had felt no remorse when killing warriors from other tribes who had dared enter Chatti boundaries. He had felt no remorse when killing Romans who had invaded his homeland. He had felt triumph when he had killed Tharacus, the first lanista at the ludus in Capua where he had been brought in chains.
But the others? He could still see their faces. He couldn’t forget Caleb, the Jew, kneeling before him, head tilted back. Nor could he obliterate the face of the Chatti clansman he had killed during his last battle in Rome. The boy’s words still reverberated in his mind. “You look Roman, you smell Roman . . . you are Roman!” What had it felt like to be a child running free in the woods? He couldn’t remember. He tried to remember what his young wife, Ania, had looked like and couldn’t. She had been dead more than ten years now, a faint memory of a life that no longer existed, if it ever really had. Perhaps he had dreamed those happier times, a trick of his imagination.
He closed his eyes tightly and felt the darkness close in around him.
“Out of the depths I have cried to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice!”
The words came back unbidden, fleeting, springing from his anguish. Where had he heard them before? Who had said them?
Soft light filled him as he remembered Hadassah standing in the opening of a cave. He wished she was here with him, that he could talk with her, but she was dead by now. Another casualty of Rome.
“Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,” she had said of her god the last time he saw her. She had been in the dungeon beneath the arena, awaiting her own death. “God is merciful.”
He looked up at the night sky and other words came back to him in a soft whisper.
“The heavens tell of the glory of God, and their expanse declares the work of his hands.”
He buried his head in his hands again, trying to press the words away. Hadassah was another of his burdens, another whose life had slipped through his hands. If her god had such power, if he were really the “one true God” as she and Rizpah claimed, why had he allowed Hadassah to die? No god worth following would allow such a faithful follower to be destroyed! But the fact that Hadassah’s god had let her down didn’t bother Atretes so much as the fact that he had let her down as well. Hadassah had saved his son, and he had let her die. Had he stayed he couldn’t have saved her, he knew that—but he could have stood beside her and died with her. That would have been honorable. That would have been right.
Instead, he had chosen to live in order to find his son.
And then he had let him go again.
Atretes closed his eyes and lay back against the cold ground. “One more day, Rizpah, and then I’m coming after you,” he said into the stillness. “One more day, and you die.”
9
John sent Cleopas and another young man to bring those who had come earlier, seeking advice about leaving the city. Within a few hours, the apostle’s house was crowded with men, women, and children. Of those who arrived with their families, Rizpah knew only Parmenas, the beltmaker.
Parmenas arrived with his wife, Eunice, and their three children, Antonia, Capeo, and Philomen. The beltmaker owned his own shop in which he displayed the cingula for which he was best known. These elaborate belts made for members of the Roman army served as badges of office. The apron of decorated leather strips protected the soldier’s groin in battle and, when the soldiers marched, made such a horrific sound as to spread terror through most adversaries.