Highlander - Donna Lettow [30]
Avram picked up his mantle and followed his father out of the room. Deborah closed the door behind them.
As soon as they had passed out of earshot of Avram’s room, his father took him to task. “Why do you fill her head with such things?”
“What things?”
“You know. This nonsense about children…and the future. She should know the truth.”
“Why? So we can all share this pit of despair you’ve been living in? What’s the harm in living with a little hope?” Avram stopped walking and turned to face his father, angrily. “What should I tell her, Aba? That in a week’s time she’ll be forced to pleasure some oily Senator and his pagan friends in a house of decadence in Rome? Or that by sundown tomorrow I’ll be dead on a cross along the road to Ein Gedi? Or that maybe I’ll be lucky, and face the wild beasts in the arena at Caesarea instead? Is that what I should tell her?” He could feel his eyes beginning to well with tears, tears he could never allow his father to see. He turned away from the old man and started walking quickly down the corridor that ran between the two walls ringing the fortress.
Mordecai hurried to catch up. “Son, I—”
“She’s not stupid, Aba. She knows. Everyone knows. But when we give up hope, we’ve lost.” He tried to look his father in the eyes, but the tears came again. He turned away and leaned his head against the stone wall, his shoulders shaking with sobs.
“Avram…” Mordecai reached out and touched his son on the shoulder.
Avram shook him off roughly and turned on him with an icy glare. “Why did you come here? You said you wanted to talk about something. For once, let it not be about my wife.”
“The wind has shifted. The last barricade is on fire,” Mordecai said quietly. “Now even God has forsaken us.”
Avram’s heart sank. When the giant Roman battering ram built at the top of the earthen ramp had broken through first one, then the second stone wall just days before, the defenders of Masada had quickly built wooden walls in the breach with loosely packed dirt between to cushion the blows of the battering ram and render it useless. But what the Romans couldn’t batter down they attempted to burn, hurling flaming torches at the wooden wall. When the fires were fast lit, the winds suddenly shifted to the south, blowing the Romans’ fire back upon them and their siege engines, clearly a sign of God’s intervention in the eyes of many of the besieged.
Now the winds had shifted to the north, driving the fire quickly through the barricades. There was no use in denying that the Romans would try to take the fortress at first light. “So now we fight,” Avram said, resigned. “After three years, maybe it’s finally time.”
“I don’t know what we do, Avram,” his father said. “There are ten thousand men down there, and we are less than a thou-sand, even if you count the women and children. I don’t know what we do.”
Through the stone walls, they could hear the sounding of the shofar, calling the men of Masada to gather. “It sounds as if we’re about to find out,” Avram said, putting on his mantle as he led the way to the door leading to the interior of the fortress.
Chapter Six
Masada, Idumaea: 14 Nissan 3833 (A.D. 73)
The men gathered at the crossroads near the northern end of the mesa, where the paths between the palace, the villas, the barracks and the storehouses all converged. It was a long walk, nearly a third of a mile from the tiny stone room in the southern wall Avram shared with Deborah. a walk made longer by his father’s halting gait. Far below them in the camps of the Romans, they could see the lights of a thousand campfires, hear the shouts and obscene songs of the soldiers passing the night as clearly as if they occupied the rock with them. Tonight Avram thought he could detect more activity and a tension-filled energy from the camps than on other nights, as if the Romans could sense as well that the coming dawn would spell the end of the siege