Wrath of Rome (Book Two of the Dominium Dei Trilogy) (10 page)

“You are Dovilin’s wife?” he stammered, as if awed by her beauty.

She laughed. “His daughter-in-law. My name is Cota. My father-in-law is in the main courtyard. Is he expecting you?” She paused, as if asking for his name.

“Samuel, Mistress Cota. Samuel Ben-Deker.” He thrust his letter of introduction into her hand.

“Wait here, Samuel Ben-Deker,” she said with amusement and vanished with the letter.

The man who entered the atrium moments later was in his seventies with short-cropped, grey hair in the Roman style and a tanned face. He looked prosperous and confident in his light and tailored tunic. The oversized furniture, busts, urns and decorative amphorae among the marble columns and rippling white drapes framing endless vineyards only accentuated the wine merchant’s wealth.

So this was Dovilin, Athanasius thought. But was he also the leader of the Dei in Asia Minor? His ring certainly indicated so. It was almost exactly like Chiron’s, with the
Chi-Ro
symbol flanked by the Greek letters Alpha and Omega. All it lacked was the tiny amethyst inside the
Ro
loop at the top.

Dovilin gazed at his unexpected visitor, taking in the cheap tunic and sandals of a runaway slave or poor freedman. But his businesslike demeanor revealed this wasn’t the first time a man in rags had appeared at his doorstep. “Your name is Ben-Something?”

“Ben-Deker,” Athanasius stammered and acted shameful and overwhelmed in this display of wealth. “Samuel Ben-Deker.”

“Yes, another Jew. You are also a follower of Christ?”

Athanasius nodded. “I pray you may be able to spare me room and board.”

“Young man, surely you see the winery across the vineyard. Present yourself to the offices. My son runs the business and does the hiring and firing. But I’m afraid you picked the wrong time of season. We’re two months from harvest, which is when we do the bulk of our hiring for the fields.”

“It’s not work in the fields I seek, sir.”

“You don’t look skilled for anything more…”

“Amphorae,” he said, nodding to the letter of introduction from Croesus in Dovilin’s hand. “It is in the final vessel of its journey that the juice of a grape can ripen to perfection or turn to vinegar by the time it reaches the lips of an important customer.”

Dovilin paused, as if to consider whether or not to accommodate his friend Croesus, because he certainly didn’t seem to think much of Samuel Ben-Deker. “Come with me into the courtyard.”

Athanasius followed Dovilin through one grand atrium and hallway after another until they reached the large courtyard where a middle-aged man with a long beard was seated. Apparently Athanasius had interrupted a meeting Dovilin was engaged in.

“Bishop Paul, this is Samuel Ben-Deker. He comes by way of our friend Croesus in Ephesus.”

The bishop had an oily expression and examined him coolly. “You don’t seem like one of Croesus’ boys.”

Athanasius took a risk and made the sign of the cross with his hand, watching Bishop Paul exchange glances with Dovilin, who looked up from the letter of introduction.

“Croesus says you lived in Malta, Ben-Deker?”

“Yes, sir,” Athanasius said. “Several years, and before that Spain, working under the vine for General Trajan’s family in Hispania Baetica.”

“Then you’ll know his nephew and vineyard manager Marcus Ulpius Antonius?”

Athanasius stammered. “I am sorry, sir. I do not know him.”

“Good,” said Dovilin. “Because Trajan has no nephew by that name, and I don’t know who runs his vineyards. But whoever it is does a piss-poor job compared to ours.” He laughed with Bishop Paul, and Athanasius managed a weak smile. Then Dovilin stood up and said, “Ben-Deker, drop your tunic.”

Athanasius froze. “I’m sorry, sir?”

“You heard me, Jew, drop your tunic and loin cloth now.”

Athanasius heard a giggle in the distance and caught Dovilin’s daughter-in-law, Cota, watching from an arch, and now she had a dark-haired girlfriend with her, who also giggled. Feigning humiliation—it wasn’t difficult—Athanasius removed his tunic, stepped out of his loin cloth and stood naked before Dovilin, Bishop Paul and a duly impressed Cota.

Dovilin and the bishop, however, were not so impressed, even angry.

Dovilin said, “You call yourself a Jew and yet you are not circumcised?”

“My mother was a Spaniard, sir,” he said, quickly putting on his loin cloth and tunic, at which point Cota disappeared out her archway. “Aren’t we all free in Christ?”

Dovilin seemed to admit there was little argument to that, but Bishop Paul said sharply, “Don’t you dare quote Scripture to me, boy. Do you understand? Can you even read?”

“No, sir. But I hear, and faith comes from hearing the Word of God.”

“I told you to stop quoting Scripture, Ben-Deker,” the bishop said, emphasizing Samuel’s Jewish surname. “I have my own test for you.”

Athanasius feigned confusion. “I am being tested? I do not understand.”

“You don’t have to,” Dovilin said calmly. “Just answer the good bishop. He is the leader of the church here in Cappadocia and only wants to keep wolves away from the sheep.”

“Wolves?” Athanasius said in surprise.

“Yes, Ben-Deker,” said Bishop Paul. “Now answer me this: Who killed Jesus? The Jews or the Romans?”

Athanasius paused as the bishop gave a satisfied nod toward Dovilin, who was watching him closely. It was a cruel test, Athanasius realized, to put upon poor Samuel Ben-Deker. Obviously, as a nominal Jew, he had to say the Romans. But his understanding of the church in Cappadocia was that the Christians here blamed the Jews, or rather their religious leaders, and this was a source of division.

He was about to say, “Both,” when the impatient bishop started badgering him. “Come now, Ben-Deker, this isn’t a trick question,” he said. “Not for a real Christian.”

“Neither the Romans nor the Jews killed Jesus,” Athanasius said suddenly, a thought striking him from out of the blue.

“Neither?” the bishop replied and looked at Dovilin in amusement at this unusual response. “Then who did?”

“Jesus chose to lay down his life for us all.”

Dovilin looked genuinely surprised, the bishop outraged. He didn’t like the answer, but apparently couldn’t refute or berate him for it either.

“Who taught you this?” he asked.

Athanasius didn’t really know. He couldn’t remember the particular passage from the Christian scriptures he had poured over back on the Pegasus before meeting John. But he had definitely picked up the subtext, and he now recalled something about their God whispering timely answers to Christians when questioned by Roman officials.

“The Holy Spirit,” he began and was cut off.

“The Holy Spirit?” the bishop said, incensed. “You are an uneducated, unwashed Jew from Malta, a potter who works clay.”

Athanasius could restrain himself no longer. This bishop was an absolute fraud and knew it. No wonder he didn’t want Christians quoting Scripture—he considered it a weapon to be used, not a revelation of truth. Athanasius knew the type well—the Roman augurs and oracles were full of Bishop Paul’s kind. The only way to deal with self-appointed gatekeepers of truth was to stick them with their own Holy Writ in front of other believers.

“We are all earthen vessels,” he replied. “God is the potter, we are the clay.”

Dovilin started to laugh, delighted to see his red-faced bishop at a loss for words. “I see your proud attitude has gotten you into trouble before, Ben-Deker. You should watch that mouth of yours,” he said good-naturedly. “Let’s see what you can do with your hands. I’ll have Brutus take you out to the winery.”

Athanasius nodded, and Cota appeared again. “I’m going out there now, Father. I can take Samuel.”

“Well, do it now before the winery closes for the evening, and have Gabrielle put him up for the night and then put him to work in the morning.”

“You really want to hand him off to that little whore, Father?” Cota asked. “I thought we could put him up out back with the First Fruits.”

Athanasius’s curiosity was peaked by Cota’s references of this “whore” and these “First Fruits,” but he wasn’t surprised by Dovilin’s firm reply, directly addressed to him.

“You may have a sterling introduction by my good friend Croesus, Ben-Deker,” Dovilin said. “But we operate by biblical principle on my vineyards. Every man starts from the ground up like our grapes. You will reap what you sow with your work, and we’ll see what kind of seed you really are.”

“Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you,” Athanasius said with as much sincerity as he could fake. “I will not let your kindness and generosity down.”

“See that you don’t, Ben-Deker, because nothing goes to waste here. Even the bad grapes are used to fertilize our fields. Bad for the wasted skins, good for our soil.”

•    •    •

The winery itself was on the other side of the vineyard from the Dovilin villa, separated by six hectares of grapes. As he and his escort Cota walked the gravel path between the house and the winery, Athanasius saw the spectacular two-story façade cut right into the rocks of the mountains. The façade, with its arches and inset frames for statues, was positively scenographic, just like the stage buildings behind the orchestra for his productions in the theaters.

“That is the winery ahead?” he asked, dumbfounded and not feigning it.

“Yes,” Cota told him. “Behind it is our stone wine cave where we store our finished product before distribution. Upstairs is the office. Our vineyard manager oversees the harvest, fermentation and field workers. My husband, whom you’ll meet, oversees sales and distribution.”

“How much wine do you produce each year?” he asked, doing his best to get some information out of her during this opportunity.

“Almost ten thousand amphorae per year.”

“Ten thousand!” he exclaimed. This was multiple times anything even the Palace of the Flavians could serve up in a year. “Who drinks it?”

She laughed. “You and me, of course. The bulk of our shipments go to the churches of Asia Minor for communion worship. My husband knows all the numbers, but I doubt he’ll share the particulars with you.”

Cota herself didn’t seem to be in any hurry to introduce him to her husband, and she asked him if there was anything in particular he wanted to see.

“I find it best to simply follow the wine,” he told her.

“Then follow me, Samuel.”

She led him to a great gravel courtyard outside the winery, where men from the fields brought baskets of grapes into one of the two cavernous cave entrances and dumped them into stone treading lagars dug out from the floor of the cavern. Here women were treading the sweet grapes with their feet.

“We call this first or sweet press,” Cota explained.

“The good stuff,” Athanasius quipped.

He watched the juice run off down wide troughs into drains that went into special basins for fermentation deeper into the cave. After the free juice poured off, the women stepped out of the treading lagars, which were now filled with the waste of the grapes called the pomace.

“Mind if I look closer?” he asked Cota.

“Not at all, but do be careful,” she cautioned, although he couldn’t imagine why.

He looked into a lagar that had been filled with red grapes. The pomace was blackish-red grape skins, stems and seeds, which contained most of the tannins and alcohol. The juice from this pomace was the brand bound for Caesar’s palace, he concluded, and then examined a lagar for white wine production. Here the debris was a pale, greenish-brown color, which contained more residual sugars.

“You must save the green stuff for some special dessert wines,” he started to say when the entire tunnel began to shake.

“Step away, Samuel!” Cota shouted, and pulled him back by his tunic as the ceiling seemed to cave in.

For a moment Athanasius thought the whole mountain was collapsing upon them. The rumble was deafening. With amazement Athanasius watched large flat boulders as wide and long as the two main lagars descend from the cavern ceiling from large wooden capstans, pulleys and ropes. Then he saw how they defied gravity: teams of six men each were stationed at the spokes of two great horizontal turnstyles, pushing them in order to control the descent of the boulders until they pressed flat on the lagars. Suddenly a second burst of vast quantities of blood-red and pukish green pomace sprung forth from the lagars toward even larger fermentation pools beyond the first.

Cota laughed as Athanasius caught his breath. “We almost lost you, Samuel, and you haven’t even started yet!”

He nodded at the boulders. “You’ve got screw presses too. These are very rare.”

“So is that,” she said, and he realized she was looking at the Star of David with the Tear of Joy around his neck. She began to fondle it. It must have fallen out of his tunic when he had bent over the lagar. “Did a girl give you that?”

“It’s been in my family forever,” he replied and slipped it back under his tunic.

She looked relieved, then went on. “The cave provides the structure for the mechanisms. The free juice produces our highest-quality wine in the smallest quantities. But the screw press squeezes more juice and profits for good-quality wine in larger quantities. Now watch this, because this might be your job if my husband doesn’t like you.”

The boulders began to quake in the lagars again, and the men at the turnstyles were back at their positions, straining harder than ever to raise the stones like the mythological Sisyphus pushing his great boulder up the mountain only to see it roll back upon him. As soon as the boulders were back in place above the lagars, teams of scrawny young men, some mere boys, jumped into the lagars.

“Clear!” came the shout.

Supervisors pulled back planks that Athanasius hadn’t noticed before—they were stained by countless pomace grindings—to reveal holes at the bottom of the lagars. Then the scrawny sweepers began to push the remaining pomace down the holes.

Athanasius glanced at Cota and bent over the nearest lagar to look down one of the holes. Through it he saw the pomace dropping into vast pools of water in a cavern below.

“Fermentation pits for lora,” he said. “The bad stuff.”