The Last Sacrifice (4 page)

Helius knew that if there was any one thing Nero could not control in the empire, it was the mob. He could influence it, bribe it, placate it, but never control it. Nero feared the mob; it was a beast as unpredictable and dangerous as himself.

Nero leaned into Helius. “Do I have a choice?”

Helius shook his head.

Nero stood, and all eyes of the thousands of spectators were upon him.

Bitterness filled Helius’s stomach. How he wanted Vitas destroyed. He should have suggested to Nero that the man be poisoned. Or directed to empty his veins. But Helius had wanted to see Vitas humiliated in death. And this was the result. Yet another chance for Vitas to become a hero.

Nero raised his arms.

The crowd instantly quit chanting.

“Release that man!” Nero’s voice echoed through the silence. “Let him fight!”

Catus and Gordio found a spot among the mob and looked downward in satisfaction. They’d bribed the bestiarius into sending out one of his least skilled gladiators—a
retiarius
.

Considered the lowest of gladiators, the retiarius fought with a net and a trident, a spear tipped with three points. His only piece of armor was the
galerus
, a piece of metal that protected his left shoulder. The method of fighting employed by a retiarius was simple—dart in and out, looking for a single moment to throw the net and attack.

Catus and Gordio were confident that Vitas, weakened as he might be from the beating, would still be able to handle an inexperienced retiarius.

Below them, on the opposite side of the amphitheater, musicians began to play the long, straight trumpets they would use to accompany the rhythm of the battle, their music intended to rise and fall in waves that heightened the drama.

On cue to the beginning strains of music, the retiarius ran onto the sand and squinted upward, as if judging the interest of the crowd. If he was looking for support he received none, as most were chanting the name of Vitas.

Then the prisoner stepped into sight. In the animal pens, he’d been removed from the tusk and hurriedly equipped for the battle.

Both soldiers frowned. They turned to each other and exchanged perplexed glances.

Something was wrong.

The will to live is an unreasoning creature.

The prisoner had spent hours in thought and prayer, finding the strength to face death. Now, with the chance to fight for his life, he could think of nothing except what it might be like to kneel again with his daughter and stroke her hair and hug her close. Or to run across open grass with his sons. Or fall asleep with his wife at his side.

He did not hear the roars of the crowd, feel the heat of the sun. He’d been given an honorable solution that might lead him back to his family. He would only face one opponent, and all it would take was a single fortunate blow for him to be declared victor. Yes, there were glory and joy in eternity with the Christos, but if it was the Father’s will, perhaps he would be allowed more time on earth with his family.

So he gripped the handle of the sword and held out his shield as best he could.

His arms were weak, his legs sluggish. His eyes were swollen, and the weights of the sword and shield were unfamiliar to him. None of this mattered. At worst, he would die, but that was no worse than he’d expected, and his death would be merciful and quick, something he had not expected. At best, no matter how remote his chances of surviving, he would live. And see his family again. He was glad for the chance to fight for love.

He turned in slow circles, trying vainly to see his opponent through swollen eyelids. He held his sword in position, ready to swing at any flash of movement.

Then came the ragged breathing of his opponent closing in. He staggered in one direction, then another, trying to get a glimpse of the retiarius.

His efforts were in vain. Far more quickly than he could dodge came the swoosh of net. It draped him completely, and he dropped his sword, clawing uselessly against the webbing. He felt the blow to his side, a body blow that knocked him onto his shield. The weight of a foot squeezed against the soft cartilage of his throat.

Dimly, he could see the outline of the man above him, a man with a trident poised to pierce his chest. A man waiting for the signal from Nero.

Hope of life on earth was gone. With its departure came the truest test of faith any man or woman could face—the specter of looming death.

He closed his eyes in prayer again. Joy returned to his soul. Yes, he would die but, in so doing, would give life to his wife and children, for their release from this same arena had been part of the bargain he’d made with a stranger the day before. He would die, but this close to the door to the other side, he fully sensed the presence of the Christos, even more than in his most joyful moments of worship. This was the truest and greatest hope, worth far more than death. And with prayer came peace, an outpouring of certainty that his faith was justified, and a full understanding that he would see his family again.

But not in this life.

Helius was surrounded once again by boos and catcalls from the crowd.

This time the mob’s anger was directed not at Nero, but at Vitas.

The fight was over before it had begun. Within seconds, the retiarius had trapped Vitas in netting and knocked him over, and he now stood with one foot on his throat, ready to deliver the death blow. There’d been no entertainment, no rising up of the hero against death. There’d barely even been time for the musicians to trumpet the macabre melody of battle.

The angry shouts grew louder as the retiarius gazed at Nero, waiting for a signal that would give him permission to dispatch his opponent.

This should have been a moment of joy for Helius. Vitas had been defeated, so humiliated that the crowd had turned against him.

Yet something was wrong.

What is it?
What is it?

Then it hit Helius.
The shield!

Vitas had been equipped with a visored helmet and a short sword. His thighs and torso were bare as was customary, and he wore a wide leather belt designed to protect the area below his waist. None of this was unusual, nor was the oval shield he’d been given.

What was unusual was how he held the shield.

For a moment, Helius wondered if he should alert Nero, but in that same moment, Helius understood the disastrous political implications if Nero realized the same thing. So Helius, too, remained silent and waited for Nero’s decision, hoping Nero would suspect nothing.

With the eyes of all in the amphitheater upon him, Nero delayed his decision. He knew drama and when to prolong it.

Finally, Nero nodded.

The spear came down and the retiarius walked away, raising his arms in victory.

Helius could only close his eyes in stunned disbelief as the man on the sand bucked in his final moments of life, his blood soaking the sand below him.

What had gone wrong and how?

The matter with Sporus was suddenly utterly insignificant. Helius knew he should immediately rush from his seat and get to the penned area behind the spectators. He needed to examine the body of the dead man before it was thrown among all the other corpses.

Yet if he left now, Nero would certainly wonder why, and that, too, might raise dangerous questions. Helius had no choice but to pretend the same satisfaction that Nero showed in the death of Gallus Sergius Vitas.

Nero might believe it was over.

Yet Helius knew differently.

And again cursed the gods.

Part II

22 months after the beginning of the Tribulation

AD 66

Rome

Capital of the Empire

Tyrrhenian Sea

Off the coast of Sicily

I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.

—Revelation 13:1-2

Moon

Hora Quarta

When Gallus Sergius Vitas woke, he was weak and parched, unsure of the swaying sensation that moved his body. He had no sense of the passage of time, only that he’d fought a long and restless fever. Flashes of the delirium still lingered, and he screwed his eyes shut to force them from his mind.

He shifted without rising to a sitting position, and a blanket fell from his chest. He didn’t remember covering himself with the blanket.

Drawing a full breath, he looked upward and slowly found some focus. Though the sky was gray and featureless, the light still pained his bleary eyes. Above him was the foresail of a ship, full with wind. He heard the slap of waves against the hull, the dull murmur of voices farther down the deck.

A ship. It was the swaying of the ship that had taken him from Ostia, Rome’s port. He dimly remembered that evening. A small riverboat had taken him in the darkness from Rome, down the Tiber to Ostia. There sailors had forcibly escorted him onto this seagoing ship, where the
magister
—the captain—had taken him below decks to a cabin. But he could not recall moving up to the ship’s deck away from the stench of the stifling air below.

As Vitas tried to make sense of the fragments of memory, one thought exploded into his consciousness.
Sophia!

The horror flooded back. His unsuccessful attempt to defend his wife against Nero. The blow from an emperor’s guard that had knocked him out. Waking in a cell below the stands of the amphitheater. The beating in the cell from a stranger who had drugged him.

Vitas fought to a sitting position and touched his face, exploring it gingerly with his fingers. The pain was a brutal reminder that he could not deny the horror. Nor the overwhelming ache in his heart.

Sophia!
Back in Rome!

Vitas groaned and fell back on the netting that had served as a bed. Another memory returned. He had been expecting guards to take him to his execution in the arena at any moment. Instead, that stranger had entered his cell and spoken cryptically before methodically beating Vitas across the face with a leather-wrapped dowel.

“I am going to leave you with a letter. You must decipher it to find the answers you need,”
the stranger had said, thrusting a scroll upon Vitas
.
“Second, there is an obscure matter that Tiberius once brought to Senate vote. You will find it somewhere in the archives. It will be marked with a number. Remember this, for the life of your family may depend on it someday. It is the number of the Beast. Six hundred and sixty-six.”

Vitas swallowed hard, trying to work moisture into his mouth. He tried to find enough concentration to puzzle over this memory.

The answer to this mystery was in the scroll. He patted his body for it. His last memory of it was hiding it beneath his tunic.

No scroll!

When he’d boarded the ship, it had been night and far too dark to even glance at the contents. What was in the scroll? Would the answers inside lead him back to his wife? In his delirium, had he left it behind in the captain’s quarters?

Vitas pushed up on his elbows. He had to find the scroll.

Hundreds of miles away, on a hillside estate in Rome, the brother of Gallus Sergius Vitas sat beneath the shade of an olive tree with several oranges in his lap as his giant of a slave approached with a bound man.

Damian was several years younger than Vitas. His hair was a mixture of blond and red. His nose had been broken several times and not once set properly before healing. The lower portion of his left ear had been bitten off in a drunken brawl years earlier, and the baby finger of his right hand was still crooked from a punch so poorly timed that he’d smashed a wall behind his opponent in that same brawl. Damian was a devout disciple of wine and parties, and it was more a factor of heredity than physical work that left him with a lean, trim body.

He frowned now, seething with frustrated rage, a mood hardly helped by a ferocious hangover. He was determined to leverage this mood into the resolve he would need to torture the man that his slave Jerome was about to deliver to him.

Jerome walked as effortlessly as if he carried a child. The captive was folded over Jerome’s left shoulder, legs wrapped against Jerome’s chest by one of the slave’s monstrous arms, his head dangling down Jerome’s back. Damian doubted the captive had struggled at all during the journey from a shed at the edge of the estate to the olive press; few men, unbound or even armed, would have dared to fight the monstrous slave.

When Jerome reached Damian, he squatted and rolled the captive off his shoulder onto the grass at Damian’s feet.

Damian wrinkled his nose. The captive was a middle-aged man in rough clothing and smelled of body waste. This did not surprise Damian. The man had been in that shed with ankles and wrists bound since the afternoon of his capture, two days before. After refusing to speak a single word in answer to Damian’s questions, Damian had allowed the man no more water. No more food. It had been Damian’s intent to bring him to a horrible thirst and hunger and to humiliate him by making him soil his clothes like a baby.

“Too close,” Damian told Jerome. Damian did not like treating a man like this, but the stakes were high. And, in a foul mood because of what had happened to Vitas, he was glad for a way to vent his anger.

Jerome grunted understanding and dragged the man a few steps farther away.

Damian looked at the captive, feigning disinterest. Although their glances met, the man, as expected, did not say a word.

Damian picked up an orange from his lap. The man’s eyes followed it in silent desperation. He had been captured late afternoon of the day of Saturn. This meant he’d gone without water for a night, a day, and one more full night.

Damian bit through the skin of the orange, welcoming the oily, acrid taste of the small chunk of peel as a distraction from the hangover’s foulness that clung to his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He spat the chunk of peel to the side, eased his head back, squeezed the orange with his right hand, and sucked the juice from inside. The relief of the fruit’s juice was insignificant compared to the throbbing of his head and the queasiness of his stomach, but it was better than nothing. Thirsty as he was, he was not ready for water. He’d tried gulping some at dawn and had immediately heaved it out again, the effort leaving his body in trembling weakness.

This was a hangover Damian intended to conceal from the captive, but one that he welcomed as punishment. For yesterday, while the blood of his brother, Vitas, had soaked the sands of the amphitheater, Damian had been in the privacy of a rich woman’s villa, enjoying in equal measures her wine and her lack of inhibition to fill the hours that he needed to wear down the captive.

In a way, Damian could not be blamed; he had not even known that Vitas had been sent to the arena. During the day that followed Vitas’s arrest, Damian had been in pursuit of the man now bound in front of him. He’d spent the following morning at home, but had departed for the rest of the day to spend time with the lonely rich woman. Damian had been unreachable by any of his slaves who could bring the news; discretion had forced him to enter and leave the woman’s villa unannounced. No one except Jerome had known where to find him, and Jerome had had his orders to guard the captive at the shed without straying from his post for a moment. For two days, then, Damian had been totally unaware of the efforts of Helius and Nero to arrange for the arrest and execution of Vitas and of the invitation sent to Sophia, Vitas’s wife, to commit suicide.

Damian had only discovered all of this upon returning to his own estate last evening, and, in near shock, he had savagely consumed more wine until he passed out. While Damian doubted he could have done anything to prevent his brother’s death, he loathed himself for entertaining a woman during the moments that Vitas had entertained Nero and Helius in the amphitheater.

Unconsciousness had provided far too short a period of oblivion for Damian. The discomfort of this day’s early heat had woken him and spurred him out of his villa to pursue whatever revenge he could inflict upon Helius for his brother’s death. Beginning with what he could learn from the captive in front of him.

“Well, Jew,” Damian addressed him, “are you ready to speak?”

The captive blinked several times but did not answer.

“Lay this man across the olive press,” Damian ordered Jerome, finally rising. “I’m tired of waiting for answers.”

“Father!”

Leah rushed across the courtyard to hug him. What an answer to prayer! When guards had taken her from the prison cell just after dawn, Leah had expected her destination would be the arena. And the death that came with it.

She had not expected to be escorted here, to the royal palace. Nor that female slaves would help ease her into a hot bath to wash away the stink of the prison, then dress and perfume her as if she were the emperor’s wife.

But she was not an emperor’s wife. She was a poor Jew, from an area of Rome crowded with
insulae,
apartments. She was young—at the age of marriage—and so modest that she’d unsuccessfully protested the attention of the slaves, taking no pleasure in their comments about her beauty.

She’d been arrested a day earlier and had spent the entire time in the prison, alternating between prayer and hymns with other Christians in her cell and silent worry about her elderly father, Hezron. He’d been arrested with her but taken to a different cell. She had expected never to see him again, and she agonized far more over how he might die than the prospect of the torture that awaited her.

After all, she’d been responsible for their arrest.

So as the female slaves had escorted her through the gardens, she had been too distracted by worry to enjoy the scent of the flowers and the gentle breeze and the ornate sculptures that filled the garden.

Then she saw her father through the arched entrance in the courtyard, and joy overwhelmed her. She did not even feel her feet touch the inlaid bricks as she flew toward him.

Now he was holding her in his strong arms, the arms that had always welcomed her all through her childhood, no matter how busy he might have been in his studies or how engrossed in conversation with the men who came to sit at his feet for teaching.

“Father,” she said again, burying her head in his shoulder.

He stroked her hair.

Leah was aware that not all Jewish fathers were so affectionate to their daughters and that not all Jewish fathers treated their daughters with the same respect they accorded their sons. It made her treasure his respect and affection that much more.

“My child, my child,” he murmured.

He did not push her away, but waited until she slowly withdrew from his arms.

And gradually became aware that they were not alone. She’d only had eyes for Hezron in her rush through the courtyard. Now she noticed two other men. One sat on a bench. The other stood beside the bench, arms crossed, staring at them with an expression difficult to read.

The first man she knew. Chayim, who had told her he was a Greek from the city of Agrigentum in Sicily and, like her, a Christian. Unlike her, though, he was wealthy. She knew all this because of what they had endured together just days earlier—a visit by soldiers to a secret meeting of Christians. This young man with handsome dark features drew her as if she were a shy doe seeking clear waters.

The other man, wearing a toga edged with purple, she also recognized. Helius—Nero’s Helius. She knew his reputation well; he was a man capable of Nero’s cruelty and who wielded almost as much power.

Her joy began to diminish. Who had betrayed them? What could this be about? Why was Chayim here? Had he been arrested too?

Perhaps Nero had special plans for them. Leah tried to push away the stories and rumors she had heard about the hideousness of Nero’s perversions and how freely he indulged them. Surely she hadn’t been bathed and perfumed for the enjoyment of the one man responsible for the Great Tribulation forced on those who chose allegiance to the Christos.

Dread weakened her legs. Nero had murdered his own mother, taking three very public attempts to succeed. He had divorced then murdered his first wife and kicked to death his second wife. He’d become a master of every sin known to man and openly reveled in it. As any ordinary man of ordinary means he still would have been a monster without compare, but as the most powerful man in the world ruling the most powerful empire in history, his unbridled absolute power allowed him to pursue evil as if evil were merely a whim. This was a man who believed he was a deity and killed Christians because they would not worship his image, the man who had killed the apostles Peter and Paul and seemed intent on ridding the earth of the first generation of Christians.