Jesus Triumphant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 8) (4 page)

Demas spared no second. He aimed for the left eye of the wolf and ripped it out of his enemy with a well-placed snap.

The crowd rose to its feet with wonder and applause.

But the beast would not stop. It turned to look at Demas with its good eye.

Demas snapped again and shredded half of its right front leg. Another aim and hard yank, and the back of its skull was popped open, exposing the brain. The animal stumbled toward Demas and fell dead at his feet.

A deafening cheer roused his hopes.

He turned to see the bear reach up with one of its paws and drag the lion off its back onto the ground. They tumbled in the dust with voracious claws and fangs.

But it was not an equal match. The bear was much bigger and heavy.

It reared back with a roar before stomping on the feline.

A leather lash wrapped around the bear’s neck from behind and iron bits dug into its flesh. This kind of move would not choke the bear, and it could not even do a bit of harm to it. It would only allow Demas the ability to hold on tight and ride its back.

The bear pulled away from the wounded lion and tried to free itself from the flea that now rode it like a bucking bronco.

Demas held on with his weakened left arm and pulled out his gladius with his aching right arm. He aimed to plunge it into the brain of the behemoth.

But his grip loosened. The sword flew from his hands. He lost his hold and followed the sword with a big thud into the dirt. The landing knocked his breath out of him. His ribs were bruised.

He looked up to see the bear standing over him on its hind legs to its full nine-foot-plus height. This thing could defeat a Nephilim. It roared. Demas could see blood and saliva splashing from its flapping jowls. He expected it to crush him any moment.

From out of nowhere, the lion leapt. It grabbed the unsuspecting bear right in the throat and pulled it to the ground.

Demas rolled out of the way as the crowd erupted in applause.

He looked around desperately for his sword. He spotted it and limped over to it.

The bear was on top of the lion. But the bear was still.

The lion struggled to pull itself out from under the dead monster that had crushed it with its weight. The lion’s jaws were dripping with the blood of the bear’s esophagus ripped from its throat.

But it could not get out.

Demas approached the lion.

The crowd gave a standing ovation. This was true entertainment worth the price of admission.

He walked up to his fighting partner with heartfelt sadness. He said to it, “Thank you, old friend,” and plunged the sword into its heart. The lion opened its mouth in a silent roar and died.

The crowd fell silent. Their cheering stopped almost instantly at Demas’ surprise finale. They could not believe it. Booing peppered the crowd. It was anticlimactic. It was animal cruelty to the very creature that had saved him from the claws of the bear.

Demas looked around him at the mob. He didn’t trust their passions. They were fools carried along by their lust for blood and circuses. Of course he had to kill the beast. No amount of partnership against a common enemy could change the fact that this beast was still ultimately an enemy. It would turn on Demas, kill him and eat him after it had killed the bigger enemy. No temporary friendship would change its inbred natural instincts. The masses were idiots to project a relationship between man and beast. In the long run, a lion is a lion and a human is its enemy.

Damn the mob to Gehenna. He limped out of the arena to his iron gate.

When he arrived inside the gathering area for fighters beneath the stadium, he was accosted by the sight of two bestiarii hanging dead by their necks from the rafters. They were beaten bloody. One of them had his tongue hanging from his mouth in a hideous contortion. A gladiator in iron armor stopped on his way out to the arena. “Those are the two culprits who released the animals upon you.”

Demas stared with amusement at the hanging corpses. The gladiators had discovered the betrayal and reinforced their code of honor. Maybe this gang of guilded thugs was not so bad after all.

Demas made his way through the graveyard of tombs just outside Scythopolis. His wounds had been dressed. His shoulder ached with the pain of vicious animal punctures. His ribs and left arm were bruised from the bear brawl, but he was whole. He was not too sure he was glad to be alive though.

He found a tomb marked with his adopted family name, “Samaras.”

He paused, unsure if he could follow through with this. It would have been so much easier had he just been mauled to death in the arena. Then it would be his brother here, bringing Demas’ body, or what remained of it, to lay in the crypt. Demas would no longer have the dark shadow over him that followed him everywhere he went.

He had to do this. He used a large wooden post as a wedge to move a circular stone that covered the grave opening.

He bent down and entered the four foot high entrance.

Tombs were the luxury of the upper classes in society. The average poor man was buried in a shallow grave with nothing but a mere stone with markings to indicate who it was who awaited their resurrection from this spot. The rich were able to afford crypts where entire families would be able to “go to sleep with their fathers,” as the saying went. Sleep was the common metaphor used to express their hope that one day Yahweh would return and resurrect the dead for judgment. There was a debate within the Pharisee and Sadducee circles about resurrection. The Pharisees believed it, but the Sadducees did not. Demas was inclined to agree with the latter, more liberal group. But in the end, such petty debates over dogma didn’t really matter to him anyway. He would never get his beloved back.

The burial chamber was just tall enough for him to stand with a slight stoop, and wide enough to contain several “beds” carved out from the walls to lay corpses upon. Enough sunlight leaked in through the entrance to light the interior with few shadows.

He walked up to a carved out shelf at the back where several ossuaries rested. They were small stone boxes, about three feet long and two feet wide, marked with prayers that housed the bones of his deceased parents. These were his adopted parents who lost their lives in a plague years back.

This world was cold and brutal, like the edge of a gladius. Not many lived into their thirties or forties with all the sicknesses, thuggery, war and revolution under Roman oppression. Demas and his brother Gestas had survived too much in this life, and that was one of the reasons why Demas had given up. Their birth parents had been lower class Jewish citizens of Sepphoris, not too far from Nazareth in the west. Their father had been a stone mason who helped build some of the Herodian structures that he and his brother had ended up performing within later in life.

In the thirty-third year of the reign of Augustus Caesar, a Jewish rebel named Judas the Galilean rose up and led a revolt against Rome. The Roman governor had ordered a census of Judea in order to increase their taxes. Judas and a fellow Pharisee, Zadok, were driven by a holy zeal for the Law of God and used as their model of inspiration the Maccabean revolt of a hundred and seventy years earlier.

Jews had a particular animosity toward censuses because they felt it was an encroachment upon Yahweh’s right to number his people and upon his ownership of the land. Judas considered armed rebellion the only option for faithful Jews and even started a slogan, “No king but God.” “Caesar” was Latin for emperor or universal king. Such slogans were therefore a denial of the emperor’s universal rule. And for Romans, such insurrection would not be tolerated.

Judas gained two thousand followers, but was ultimately defeated in Sepphoris when the Romans sacked the city. They crucified all the rebels on poles along the thoroughfares of Galilee as a warning sign for the disobedient. The Imperial legions were not known for respecting innocent civilians and killed too many of them as collateral damage in their frenzied retribution. Demas’s parents were among the victims of this barbarous atrocity. He and his brother were but two and one-years old respectively. They were then adopted by their Hellenistic Jewish parents in Scythopolis, which remained their home to this day.

But this evil of Rome was only the half of his grief.

In response to this provocation from Judas, Caesar placed Judea under direct provincial administration from Rome. The Herodian rulership over the Jews was restricted to Galilee, but the Roman army made its presence felt with quartered troops all over the territory. They delivered harsh punishments for every minor offense. The people lived in abject fear for their lives with the grip of Imperial Rome around their throats. It was within this disarray that Demas had grown up.

His face grew flush with hatred of these vile memories as he picked up an empty ossuary box. He breathed a sigh and turned to face the body that lay on the other side of the crypt.

He could not hold it back any longer. Tears flooded his eyes as he looked upon the bones of his beloved wife, Natasa. She had been dead over a year. The flesh and blood had decayed from her bones, leaving an intact skeletal form in quiet rest on its burial chamber bed. It was now time to take her bones and place them in the ossuary as was the custom.

He knelt before her and set the box next to him. As he looked upon the remains, he thought what a tragic pity it was for this to be the end of all men. Everything that made her unique, her beauty, her loving and kind personality, her creativity and talent, had all melted away, leaving the same bones that every other worthless and cruel criminal had. In the end we are all the same—dead bones.

He now really hoped the Pharisees were right and that there would be a resurrection. His beloved Natasa deserved it. Demas would, no doubt, burn in the fires of Gehenna, but at least she would have a reprise of existence.

He gently lifted her forearm bones to place them in the ossuary. Touching the bones of his beloved triggered memories of that fateful day. He broke down in a trembling howl.

They had been married but a few short years when Roman legions quartered in his city’s homes again. One of the soldiers had seen Natasa’s beauty and had come back one night to take her. When Demas was out of the home, the soldier broke his way in and tried to rape her. But in her defiant struggle, he accidentally broke her neck and killed her.

By the time Demas had tracked down who it was, and what company he belonged to, he was too late. The soldier had been killed in a battle with wilderness brigands.

Not only was she taken away from him, and made to suffer horrific terror, but Demas was denied the ability to exact revenge on her behalf or to receive even a shekel of satisfaction. From that moment on, he lived a life of eternal emptiness and despair.

That was why Demas no longer retained a belief in a just god. Yahweh was not just. He allowed terrible suffering to the good and innocent, while rendering satisfaction to the guilty and evil. No, Yahweh was not just. He was a cruel jokester of death and suffering in whom Demas could no longer maintain faith.

Will these bones live?
If he could only find the bones of her killer, he could at least grind them to dust and cast them into the flames of Gehenna, so that he could insure the evil would not resurrect along with the good and somehow find forgiveness. That would be the worst mockery of all.

He placed the forearm and humerus into the box.

He stared at the skull. Her precious skull. He lifted it gently, as if it were a glass object of inestimable value. He looked into the sockets, trying to imagine the face that once filled his life with grace, beauty, and love.

“Demas.” The voice came from the grave entrance.

It was Gestas, his brother. A year younger, and a more passionate soul than Demas. He was more handsome as well.

“I knew you would be here.”

Demas placed the skull softly into the box.

Gestas said, “Here, let me help you, brother.” Gestas stepped in and took a place next to Demas to help him respectfully place the bones in an orderly pile in the box.

Gestas felt terrible for his brother. He knew how deeply he had loved. In fact, he envied Demas. As an actor in the theater, Gestas had become quite well known and allowed to frequent the elite circles of Herodian power. He developed a reputation for being a philandering cocksman, seducing the women of wealth. But he saw that his immoral frivolity resulted in an aching emptiness of soul. He didn’t believe in love. He only saw it from a distance in his brother.

Until he fell for an Herodian princess. A brunette beauty unlike any he had ever encountered. She was a rare and honest soul in a pit of immoral snakes, as he considered these treacherous Herodians. He wanted her purity to save him. When Gestas sought to marry her, he came to realize the delusion he had been living. He was suddenly cut off from the inner circle, disinvited from the palaces and parties. He, a lowly actor, no matter how famous he became for his talent in the theater, was still a lowly craftsman. He had never been and would never be nobility. They had been using him as much for their pleasure as he had been using them for his ambition. But in the end, it could never be. He could never transcend his social class. He had believed the masquerade he had been playing, and it had blindsided him.

His one chance at being known and loved by a woman had been dashed forever on the rocks of the Herodian ruling class. These were the traitors that fornicated with Rome and exploited the Jewish poor. These were the wealthy who bought and paid for the priesthood of Israel, turning the holy into an abomination. These were the bastards who were responsible for his brother’s loss.

They finished placing the last of the bones in the ossuary.

Demas placed it on the stone bed and fit the top onto it.

“She was a good woman,” said Gestas. “I still do not understand why she chose you and not me.”

Demas forced a smile. There had been no competition. He was only trying to cheer him up.

“I could not make it to the venatio,” Gestas interjected. “I had preparation for the play tonight. Did you slay the audience?”

“You could say that,” muttered Demas.

Then Gestas spoke what he came there for. “Come to the play tonight, Demas. I want to take you somewhere afterward.”

“Where?”

“Just trust me, brother.” Gestas looked at the ossuary before him and pressed his palm against the engraved prayers and images along the exterior. “Opportunities for justice and retribution have a way of presenting themselves when you least expect it, when all other avenues have been exhausted.”

Demas looked askance at Gestas. “What do you mean, ‘retribution’?”

Gestas got up and stopped at the grave entrance. “Just come tonight. You will not regret it.” And he left him.