Rule of God (Book Three of the Dominium Dei Trilogy) (2 page)

“Rome is on fire for the Lord!” he told the gathering, apparently unaware of the irony that the last time Rome was truly on fire, Nero blamed the Christians and used them as human torches to light his gardens at night. “You have heard the news of wars and rumors of wars, but you have not heard what is quietly taking place behind the scenes. Senators, generals, even those among Caesar’s household are coming to the Lord! They are asking for our prayers of protection for them as they seek to influence the empire for Christ.”

There were murmurs and praises.

Athanasius was all ears now, waiting for names. Surely Narcissus would talk about Flavius Clemens and his widow Domitilla and their boys Vespasian and Domitian. Perhaps he would even mention Athanasius of Athens as a great and secret martyr for Christ.

“I myself was counted worthy to share my own faith with the greatest thespian of our generation!” Narcissus said. “In a private audience with none other than the comic Latinus I personally shared the Good News, and he accepted!”

Latinus! Athanasius burst into a loud laugh that drew stares as he quickly coughed and cleared his throat and said, “Amen!”

Others chimed in as well, but Gabrielle held her stare at him.

Latinus was certainly on fire as a homosexual, and his hedonism back in Rome had made even Athanasius’s pale by comparison. Athanasius could only imagine which bathhouse this “private audience” took place in. This Narcissus stooge was a fool, and the Lord’s Vineyard a complete sham.

“The fields are white for harvest!” Narcissus concluded. “And it is my prayer that after this harvest, more will join me as I mount my hill, and those others on other hills. Together we can change the world for Christ!”

I know a faster way, Athanasius thought to himself, and it’s through the Angel’s Vault.

The reading of scripture and testimonial over, the service would now end with Communion. Bishop Paul stationed himself at the exit of the cavern with a large goblet of wine. “The blood of Christ,” he said each time a supplicant came forward and took a sip. To his right stood good, strapping Narcissus with a loaf of bread, breaking off pieces and adding, “The body of Christ” with dramatic flair. The supplicants consumed the bread on their way out.

For many of these poor souls, Athanasius realized, this might be their only meal of the day. Including, it seemed, himself. He was actually impatient for the line to move forward. When he reached Bishop Paul with his large goblet of wine, the bishop looked at him with disdain and almost pulled the cup away from Athanasius’s lips. Athanasius could barely hide his own disdain for the tasteless lora wine. Fortunately, the bread turned out to be substantial enough to satisfy the pang in his stomach as he chewed it slowly on his way out of the church cavern and into the caves.

“Gabrielle,” he called to her down a long cave where groups of people talked to each other, but not to her. Indeed, as he passed by he heard whispers of “whore,” “Jezebel” and “Babylon” directed at her as she walked away alone into a tunnel.

“Gabrielle, wait. Where are you going?”

She stopped and looked at him. “To say my prayers and retire for the night. We have much work in the fields tomorrow.”

By “we” he felt she actually meant to include him.

“As Dovilin knows, I’m not a field laborer,” he told her. “But I can help you with the storage and transport of wine if you let me see what you’re doing with the amphorae in the Angel’s Vault.”

She ignored his remark and asked, “So what did you think of our Communion?”

Athanasius realized she was looking at his Tear of Joy necklace, which once again had fallen out of his tunic, mostly likely when he bent over to sip from the Communion cup. She wasn’t interested in talking business. The interminable subject of God and doctrine seemed to be his only way to her heart.

“I didn’t expect the bishop to take the words of Jesus literally about the bread being his body and his blood wine,” he told her. “I would have thought it obvious to the disciples at the Last Supper that Jesus was not the bread he broke for them nor the wine he poured for them. But it’s certainly a great doctrine for the Dovilin brand of Communion wine among the churches of Asia.”

She looked him in the eye and said, “So near and yet so far you are, Samuel Ben-Deker. Like the Dovilins you would use Jesus to change the world according to your will, not the will of God.”

“Only because God hasn’t changed a thing,” he told her, and put his hand on her wounded cheek. “How good can God be if he allows such evil to happen to you and to me?”

She let his hand linger on her face for a moment before lifting it off with her own small but strong hand. “I can see you haven’t forgiven whomever you feel has wronged you, Samuel. But you must. Just as God has forgiven us through Jesus.”

He caught her glancing again at his Tear of Joy necklace and wondered for a moment if this man Cerberus he was supposed to meet in this literally underground “eighth church” of John’s revelation was in fact a woman. He decided to push the conversation.

“To forgive is divine, Gabrielle, but I am not. I cannot live here in a hole like you, working for hypocrites like the Dovilins to enrich them while they fleece Jesus’s sheep instead of feeding them and then sleep in soft beds at night without a care in the world. There is no peace in that.”

“And what do you propose doing, Samuel?”

“Jesus drove out the moneychangers from the temple. I would follow his example.”

“Jesus didn’t hurt or kill anybody.”

Athanasius paused. “Who said anything about killing anybody?”

She looked at him again with her big, dark eyes, smoldering in both passion and pain. “You look like a man who could kill, that’s all.”

Her words stopped him cold. Nobody had ever said that about him before, and he wondered if he had indeed changed so much in the weeks that had passed that as much was true and visible to others if not to himself. “I only mean to infer that it will take more than whips to drive the Dovilins from this land.”

“And for this you need access to the Angel’s Vault?” She looked at him suspiciously.

“Yes,” he told her flatly. “I cannot comprehend why you defend the Dovilins.”

“Exposing your hatred is not defending the Dovilins, Samuel. There are plenty of open alcoves in the bunk caves for the seasonal vineyard workers. You look tired, and tomorrow I will start you in the fields. We must soften the soil of our hearts as much as the soil of the vineyard.”

This I cannot do, he thought as she walked off and was swallowed up yet again into the darkness. Soften his heart when Rome had none? He could see the faces of Domitian and Ludlumus and now Dovilin before him. What frightened him was how hard it was to see the face of his beloved Helena in his mind’s eye, only her statue in Corinth, and even that was fading away like the image of his mother and family.

Soften his heart? If he didn’t hold onto his hatred, he feared he would no longer be able to recall even that.

Athanasius couldn’t sleep all night, so there were no dreams or even a nightmare to pass the time. Instead he had to lie awake inside a cavern with dozens of strangers, many of whom smelled worse than he did, waiting for the first stirrings of the caves before dawn. He then followed a few officious cave men who seemed to know where they were going toward the surface. Like the angels who rolled away the stone at the tomb of Jesus, they opened what appeared to be the underground city’s major gate, and he hurried outside into the vineyards, taking in the fresh and dewy air in great gulps like a man who barely survived suffocation.

At last the master Vibius arrived on a fine stallion and dismounted while a slave took the horse to the small winery stable. Then other slaves, including big Brutus from the villa, began to open up shop. Another servant put a spread of fish, cheese and eggs on the table under the olive tree, and Athanasius understood this was meant for the workers to come and help themselves as they reported for work and went out into the fields.

“You, Ben-Deker,” Vibius said, pointing at him.

Athanasius froze.

“You may give the blessing.”

Athanasius began to breathe quickly. His mind raced to remember the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. Something about blessing God’s name and daily bread. But it was too long. So he simply bowed his head like the others were doing, trying to come up with something. He slyly glanced up to see Vibius staring angrily at him.

“Heavenly Father, bless this bread we are about to receive, and your servants the Dovilins for sharing their blessings with us who deserve no good thing. Amen.”

Vibius grunted, and a legionnaire coughed. All heads save Vibius’s were still bowed.

Had he said something wrong?

Big Brutus leaned over and whispered, “In Jesus’s name. Amen.”

Athanasius spoke up and concluded, “In Jesus’s name. Amen.”

The heads came up with smiles, the hands unclasped, and the food was quickly consumed.

Athanasius watched everybody get to work, but there was no sign yet this morning of Gabrielle. He saw Vibius walk up the narrow flight of steps to the second-story offices of the winery. He could go up there and ask what to do, but the wine cave was open before him, and now was a perfect opportunity to look inside and act lost if found.

The wine cave was cool and dry inside, with rows of amphorae lining either side. He loitered by the rows, trying to figure out which labels were bound for Rome. He found a row of six black amphorae with red gladiators, exactly like the ones in the Angel’s Vault, and wondered if these could be the imperial vessels. He crouched down and tried to make heads or tails of the markings. There was the Dovilin insignia, both at the bottom of the amphora and on the cork seal on top. Where were the other markings?

He finally found them, cleverly hidden in the pattern of the Greek key that circled the neck of the amphora. These amphorae were marked for Ostia and then Rome’s city port on the Tiber and finally the Palace of the Flavians, marked with the Seal of Caesar.

All he had to do now was find a counterpart amphora in the Angel’s Vault, an unsealed amphora where he could poison the resin around the cork stoppage and then cap and substitute it for one of these.

“What are you doing?”

Athanasius stood up to see Gabrielle standing before him. He glanced beyond her at the back of the cave and the tunnel from which she had emerged. “I hear Caesar in Rome has a private tunnel like you between the Coliseum and the palace. We should all be so lucky.”

“We all work hard here,” she said. “Biblical principles, you know. There is no slave or free here. No male or female. No Jew or Gentile. We are all equal before Christ.”

“I think the Dovilins believe some Christians are more equal than others.”

“And you, Samuel. You seem to be avoiding work in the field this morning.”

“I told you, Gabrielle, I work with amphorae like these to improve the taste and preservation of wine. This is where I belong. I’m no ordinary field laborer.”

She took his hands and looked at them. “That’s for certain. I doubt you’ve ever done any heavy lifting your entire life.”

“I most certainly have,” he told her. “Every time I take a piss.”

She laughed for the first time with him, truly laughed, and her smile somehow broke his heart. Maybe it was the cut under her animated eyes, so full of life and yet filled with sorrow. She had an effect on him that no woman ever had before, including Helena, and it made him uncomfortable and curious all the same.

“Follow me, Sampson, and we’ll see how strong you are.”

•    •    •

Much to his disappointment, she took him far away from the winery, past rows and rows of vines to the middle of the vast fields.

“The Dovilins are in the business of celebrations,” she told him. “Communions. Weddings. Banquets. Baptisms. Everything and anything. Those celebrations begin with wine. Jesus turned water into wine. It was his first recorded miracle. It was at a wedding. We can’t turn water into wine. But we can turn grapes into wine. Good wine starts with good grapes. Good grapes start with good vines.”

“Yes,” Athanasius said. “Jesus said, ‘I am the vine. You are the branches. Without me you can do nothing.’”

Unlike Bishop Paul, she took no offense at his display of knowledge. But neither was she impressed. “Without the vine there is no wine, Samuel. My primary job as vineyard manager is to forecast the harvest. The Dovilins don’t like surprises. We must predict how much fruit we’re going to be getting come harvest.”

So that’s why she was the vineyard manager, Athanasius realized. Despite the contempt with which everybody seemed to regard her, her methodology for forecasting grape yields—and improving them—was simply too valuable for the Dovilins to ignore. It was a talent Vibius clearly lacked, as well as everybody else around here. Suddenly Athanasius wondered not how Gabrielle got her job but how the Dovilins’ business could ever thrive without her.

“So how do you do that?” Athanasius asked.

“You are going to count the clusters for me, Samuel.”

“Me?”

“Look,” she said, and lifted a branch on the nearest vine. “See these flowery little buds? These are the ovaries. They develop into grapes. Now count them.”

Athanasius got down on his knees in the dirt and with his hands lifted several branches on the vine and counted. “This one has 14 clusters.”

“You missed some, Samuel.” She lifted another branch. “This one has sixteen, see?”

He saw. He looked under the last branch she had lifted and accidentally broke it off. “Oops.”

“You might as well be dropping gold so far as the Dovilins are concerned,” she cautioned him. “You don’t want to cost them money in your counting.”

He sighed. Counting grape clusters was not what he had in mind in traveling all this way to Cappadocia. This morning he was further away from the wine cave than he was upon his arrival, doing mindless work for this maddening girl who was barely a woman and who in her Christian charity defended these Dovilins who beat her down along with everybody else in this forsaken valley.