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sponge with the same desperation Vitas had shown.
    “She belongs in a brothel,” Arella said, speaking to both of them. “The Roman with orange hair. Already it’s whispered that she spent the night with a Greek, and her husband not yet cold. The Greek was there, you know, in the market.”
    All Vitas could manage were a few more croaked words. “You stayed?”
    “No,” she said. “The Greek pulled her out from the table. She kicked me as he helped her leave. He was there when she shouted for soldiers to arrest you.”
    The old woman pushed the sponge back up to Vitas. He could barely concentrate, and the poppy tears were beginning to dull his senses. He drank from the sponge again.
    Soon, though not soon enough, his mind and body would no longer be connected. There was one thing he needed to know before he let himself go into a timeless void. Separated by soldiers, put into different jail cells, he had not had a moment to address his brother’s slave.
    “Jerome!” Vitas said.
    On a cross barely a couple of feet away, joined by the intimacy of dying, the mute turned his head to look at Vitas.
    “You meant to kill me in the market,” Vitas said. “Yes?”
    Vitas did not care that the old woman was listening.
    Jerome strained to give a single ungh sound, the best he could muster, meaning yes .
    Vitas often thought language was the single greatest thing that separated man from beast. Jerome could not speak, could not read or write. Because of it, the world had too often treated him like a beast.
    “You changed your mind and spared me,” Vitas said. “Yes?”
    The answer was another strained ungh .
    There was a way to communicate with Jerome, but it was slow and frustrating and not always fruitful. It was to ask a series of yes-or-no questions—the success depended highly on the agility of the questioner’s mind.
    “You had a good reason to kill me? Yes?”
    “Ungh.”
    “If you could, would you tell me why?”
    “Ungh. Ungh.” No.
    Another mystery that would not be solved before he died. Along with the letter that had sent him to Caesarea, the question of who had saved him from death in the arena in Rome and arranged his escape by ship with the disciple John, and the identity of the man who had just appeared at the synagogue this Sabbath, obviously looking for Vitas.
    Vitas stared at the old woman and felt the tears glistening again in his eyes.
    “May the remainder of your life be blessed,” he said. “You have no idea how much mercy you’ve provided.”
    “I do,” she said. “Two of my sons died to Roman crosses.”
    She dipped her sponge in the bucket again and pushed it up to Vitas.

Hora Septina
    The sun had moved beyond the midpoint of the day, a ferocious white ball of attack that pressed down on Vitas as he gasped for each new breath. Even with a cloth that the woman had draped over his face to offer shade and a privacy of sorts from the curious stares and occasional jeers of passersby, Vitas’s lips had cracked into fissures because of his body’s desperate need for water as it battled between suffocation and pain, exhausting him beyond his endurance. But Vitas was unaware of how he constantly swept his tongue across his lips in a useless effort, for the poppy tears had put him into pleasant dullness, where it seemed he had the freedom to rove through his mind, like a foreign visitor seeking idle amusement.
    His awareness drifted away from the wailing cries of mothers tending to sons on nearby crosses and of little girls begging their fathers to come down and hold them.
    Mercifully, he found himself no longer on a rough cross made of hewn wood, but in his childhood home at age twelve, climbing a tree in the villa’s garden with his brother and trying to stop Damian from throwing oranges at slaves in a neighboring garden—oranges Damian had stolen from the kitchen and carried into the tree in a sack. He remembered his sense of outrage when he was caught in the tree, appearing as if he