SAMPLE THE STORY BY READING CHAPTER ONE

Book One

THE BOOK OF VERONICA

1. The Road to Gerasa

i.

THE LAND AROUND GERASA is brown and barren. 

The woman who walked the colonnaded terrace of the hillside villa let her eyes roam the distant red fields and black lava beds that lay eastward between Gerasa and the desert. The hot sun blazed down on the empty land and on the white stone houses with an impartial fervor, sapping the earth of its fertility as it drained the people of energy. 

Veronica Pomponia ran her palm idly along the marble rail of the terrace. She was a slender woman with pallid skin and large black eyes in which a haunting sadness seemed always to lurk. The white stolla she wore was of expensive Egyptian byssus, and her thick brown hair was cleverly gathered and set with silver ribbons. This land is not unlike myself, she thought wryly. She would be as barren as those lava flats, as arid as the low hills to the south. All her wealth was useless to her. 

She thought of Titus, and sorrow stirred in her with the faint sadness of the gentle gibleh winds that ruffled the branches of the terebinth trees rimming the highway to Jerusalem. She had known Titus Flavius Maximus since he had been a boy in Rome, fifteen years before. Her mobile mouth, drawn down a little at its corners with bitterness, attempted a smile. Together, she and Titus had stood in the family atrium when he was twelve and she only nine, and pledged themselves to marry. 

She would never marry Titus.

Veronica Pomponia knew that now. 

In her own way she had become resigned to the fact. She was a sick woman, afflicted with an internal hemorrhage that weakened and debilitated her. No man-not even Titus Flavius—wanted to marry an invalid. If only he would accept the decisions of the physicians and marry someone else! No, no! I don't want that. Not really. I love him too much to give him up to any other woman! Her hand tightened on the marble rail. 

The illness had come on her when she was twelve. At first, it had been only occasional pains and a few flecks of blood when she coughed, then steadily her strange malady had grown worse. The finest medical men in all the empire had come to the Pomponia mansion on the Alta Semita to examine her. One by one they shook their heads and pronounced her incurable. 

Only one held out any hope. Find a warm climate, he ad vised; heat and inactivity might allow the ulcerated intestine to heal naturally. 

"Go to Judea,” the physician told her, making a wry face. "It's a hotbed of politics right now but that needn't bother you. Besides, the legions are there. You'll have no trouble on that score.” 

Her heart sank. Judea! As well go to the end of the world where the waters of the endless ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules fell forever into a bottomless abyss. Judea, where a thousand armed rebels under Judas the Gamalite had been crucified some years before, where priests and people flouted Roman authority by preferring to die rather than permit the bronze eagles of the legions to be set up on their walls. 

For two days she cried softly to herself.

Go to Judea? She would rather die! 

She put her palms together, recalling her excitement when the wax cylinder had come to her from Titus Flavius. In just such a manner had she stilled her trembling on that remembered day as she broke the seals and read the words he ad dressed to her. 

Titus had been in Africa at the time, having been made a legate for his brilliant work in Spain against the hill rebels. Now that he'd smashed Tacfarinas with less than a full legion below Mount Jupiter in Mauretania, the emperor—Tiberius Claudius Nero—made him a prefect and gave him Judea for his province. 

Her heart had turned over in her bosom, reading that. Judea! Titus would be in Judea, where the doctors advised her to go for her health. A dry, dusty land. One of the forgotten corners of the empire. Oh, she knew about Judea, all right. She had read about it, often enough. It had little to offer Rome except a pathway route between rich Egypt and the fertile lands of Asia Minor and Cappadocia. 

Come to Judea, Veronica! 

His plea leaped at her from the words graven on the wax tablet. Come to Judea and marry me. Fulfill the vows to Juno we took so long ago. Ego te amo! I love you! Almost, she could hear his voice crying to her across the miles. 

In answer, she had written hastily that she would come. I will go to Judea, my darling, and be cured so that we may marry. Her tears had fallen onto the wax and onto the metal stylus with which she wrote. 

Pomponia wealth bought a house in Jerusalem, close by the Antiochus fort, but a local physician warned her about the winter rains and suggested the drier climate of the Decapolis. He knew a Roman censor, who, after ten years of tax collecting for the empire, was returning to Ostia a wealthy man. Veronica Pomponia bought his villa at cost. 

But heat and dryness did not help her. Nothing would help, it seemed. She knew that, now, and was resigned to it, more or less. In a few years more the sickness would have progressed so far that she would die. She had fought so hard this far, so hard, and so uselessly. 

In a way she was happy enough. Titus was in Judea, as prefect to the new procurator, Pontius Pilate, and Gerasa was less than sixty miles from Jerusalem, where he was stationed. He came often to visit her, bringing news of the world, intermingled with pleas that she don the crimson net and knotted girdle of the Roman bride and become his wife. 

Her gaze shifted to the river road where it wound back and forth among low red hills and groves of aspens. Titus would be coming along that stretch of basalt blocks and crushed stone before long. A hunger to be held in his arms and kissed, to hear him whisper that he loved her, made her tremble a little. Usually Veronica Pomponia despised these indications of womanly weakness-to give in to them was to mock herself for the sickness that would not let her enjoy them-but this day she felt differently. 

Veronica smiled faintly, turning so the soft wind off the desert hills to the east would cool her flushed face. It was a warm summer. Even old Rufinius, who tended the vegetable gardens and flower plots, had never known such heat. It tended to make the land even more parched, even as it added to the inner restlessness that was afflicting her. 

Her hand smoothed the veined Phrygian marble of the terrace rail. Her body was still suffering from the hemorrhages as it had since she was a little girl. She recalled the vast sums that her father, the senator, had paid to doctors from all over the empire. Well, the money meant nothing. More was always coming in from the tracts of olive trees that the family owned in Spain, from the iron mines in Puteoli or the brick factory just outside the walls of Athens in Greece. Pomponia wealth was equal to Pomponia pride. If it were not for the fact that Titus was a Flavius, she'd wonder if he wanted her for her money. 

Sometimes Titus worried her. He was a soldier, and took pride in the fact that he did what his men did and went where they went. If they slept on naked ground, he slept there too; if they broiled in their armor under a Cappadocian sun, he broiled also. His fingers could cup a pair of dice and manipulate them with all the skill of a Suburra gambler. 

If I marry him, she thought, I must get him away from the army. We'll return to Rome, and he can go into politics. Her father would help him there, she realized. They would live in the Flavian manse on the Via Lata. She would like very much to govern her own household. 

Of course she did so here in Gerasa, but she had only herself to please. There were no banquets to be made ready for important men, no slaves to be chosen for their looks and, sometimes, their vices. Only old Rufinius, who was the gardener and a handyman of sorts, little Gaia, her personal maid, a cook or two and a few male slaves for protection against the hill robbers, should they grow bold, comprised her staff of servants. In Rome, it would be different. 

Suddenly the cramp in her middle warned her of an approaching attack. She put her hand there, pressing the palm against the soft flesh. 

“Juno aid me! Why am I afflicted with this curse on my body? Mother of all births, why? Why?" 

There was a little bronze statue of the mother goddess in the vestibulum. She often offered scented Arabian incense before it at dusk. Perhaps her own mother had offended the goddess at some time or other; it was up to Veronica to appease her. 

She sank down on the edge of a couch, bent forward a little, trying to smile against the pain. It would pass in a little while; it always did, but there would come a time when it wouldn't. That was what the physician from Pontus had told her. Sometimes after the agony went away she felt uplifted and extraordinarily gay; at other times, she would be so debilitated that she'd remain in bed for days, scarcely moving. Even Aurelius Cornelius Celsus, whose medical writings were making his name a byword wherever men of medicine gathered, was puzzled by her condition. He and young Caius Marinus used to visit her and discuss her condition for hours. She always suspected that Aurelius Celsus looked on her, not as a woman, but as so many paragraphs on ulcers in his De Medicina. 

Antonius Musa, Agathinus the Greek and a dozen others had studied her case. Their remedies ran the gamut from wild licorice, either in stalk form or mixed with wine, to sea brine, acacia bark, egg albumen and even asphaltum. Aloes were commonly used externally against ulcers and could be taken internally as a tonic. Even squill vinegar was tried, without success. 

"Twelve years of listening to men talk about how learned they are," she whispered against the pain, "twelve years of misery. Ah, Juno, help me!” 

She wanted to scream, but she bit down hard on her lower lip instead. After a while the pain relaxed its hold and she straightened, breathing deeply. Perhaps the colonnade was too warm for her. Though she had purchased the villa because Celsus recommended a dry, warm climate—she was vaguely aware that it had something to do with heat softening the tissues of her flesh and making it more absorbent of the foul humors in her blood-she disliked the intensely warm winds that blew westward off the red Syrian desert. 

It would be cooler inside. She rose to her feet and moved across the tiles to the plain white pillars that framed the door way into the peristyle. It was a monument of luxury, of Paphian and Phrygian marble, with fine gardens and flagged walks bordered by high hedges. An outdoor pool was flanked by a number of statues of the gods, and there was even a fishpond close by the little marble summerhouse. Apparently the tax collectors of Tiberius Caesar knew how to conduct their affairs in the provinces. 

The peristyle, with its clear pools and paved court open to the sky, was somewhat cooler. The sun did not strike here directly, and such breeze as there was eddied lazily across two cooling fountains. There was a small plot of grass and flowers, white marble benches and frescoed walls. Saffron curtains hung between the columns to shut out the sunlight where it angled in above the iron railing that surrounded the light well. 

Veronica was about to seat herself under a canopy on a low couch when the sound of giggling made her turn toward the vaulted corridor leading to the kitchen. It was Gaia; no other woman had that silly laugh. Sometimes she thought the girl was empty-headed, with her interest in men and nothing else, but her fingers were nimble and she could do up Veronica's heavy brown hair and arrange it with gold thread and jewels until it was worthy of a royal banquet. 

As she came into the low scullery, Gaia and one of the local servants, a girl who came at dawn and left the villa at dusk, were standing at the kneading table and looking down at a leather wine-skin 

"Imagine,” Gaia hooted. “A generation of fine grapes are needed to produce good wine, but this man makes it with a wave of his hand. Truly, Philenia, you're an addlepate.” 

Philenia was a robust girl with an olive complexion and snapping black eyes. Her hands balled on her ample hips as she scowled darkly. “My Cleon was there. He saw what happened.” 

When they noticed Veronica standing in the doorway they drew back a little. Philenia looked sullen. Veronica came into the kitchen, past the low iron braziers, cold now, and stared down at the half-filled wine-skin 

"Go on, Philenia, don't mind Gaia. What's this about some magician making wine?” 

"Not a magician, mistress—a god! He calls himself Jesus. Cleon was at a wedding feast recently when some unexpected guests dropped in. The wine began running low and it was too late to go to the vintners' stalls and buy fresh. The bride began to cry, because it was a bad omen for their start in life together. Then Mary, the mother of this Jesus, drew him aside and began to speak very earnestly to him." 

“Does this Jesus own a tavern or a wine store?" asked Gaia.

“I'm talking to the mistress," shouted the Greek girl. 

"Please.” Veronica laughed, holding up her hands. "Go on, Philenia." 

"Well," said the cook blackly, frowning at Gaia, "finally Jesus went to the father of the bride and asked him to fill up the kraters and amphoras and wine-skins with water from the well. When they were full, Jesus lifted up his hands and whispered some words over the water. He told them to pour out the water and when they did, it was wine.” 

Gaia hooted loudly. "You see, mistress? Is she not addlepated to believe such a story?” 

“Cleon told it to me, and he does not lie!” the girl shouted angrily. 

Veronica lifted the wine-skin and removed the stopper. Bending her head she sniffed at it, then, reaching for a small cup, she poured a little wine and sipped it. “It is real wine, at any rate. I don't think I've ever tasted better.” 

Philenia flashed a triumphant look at Gaia. "You see? The mistress says it's real wine. That's what we wanted to know." Turning to Veronica, she said, “Gaia claims it is magic wine and will poison the insides." Her hands made the protective sign of Juno's peacock in the air before her. 

"The wine is excellent. Not too tart, not too sweet. Gaia has too much imagination." 

The little ornatrix pouted. “All very well to say that, but if it is wine and Jesus made it from well water, then perhaps this Jesus is everything he says he is. Did either of you stop to think of that? He calls himself a savior, the son of God, and if he is the son of God, then everything we believe in is false. It can't be one and not the other!" 

Veronica frowned. Gaia was not so much the scatterbrain as she had thought. Her logic, driven though it might be by injured pride, was unassailable. She shrugged. These were not things for a Roman lady to decide. Let the high priests of the Hebrews and the Sanhedrin, who were most concerned, argue over them. 

"Titus is coming from Jerusalem,” she said to Gaia. "I'll need to look my best." 

Gaia forgot her logic. She seemed to bubble as she cried, "A bath first, with a fresh strigil for the skin and liquid soap, then a massage with oil of palm and a nap. I'll lay out one of the new tunics that came from Alexandria last week.” 

Veronica smiled faintly. "And the Spanish jewelry, Gaia. Titus likes its enamel-work” “The matching sapphire necklace and bracelet!” 

"Oh, and, Philenia,” added Veronica, "the wine there. Don't throw it away. I'd like Titus to taste it." 

"I'll put it in the cellar arcade, mistress.” 

Veronica walked toward the caldarium. Titus Flavius fancied himself a hardheaded realist. It would be interesting to see what he thought about this man, Jesus. Still, Titus might surprise her and have an answer. 

Titus usually had an answer for everything. 

Also Available in a NEW Edition RePrint Paperback