Lycanthropos (36 page)

"Yes, my lord," the centurion replied.

"Well, my good fellow..."
Pilatus
began and then frowned
as he realized that the prisoner was not even looking at him. The man who stood bound before him was staring intently at Pilatus' wife Claudia, a look on his face of complete and total bewilderment.
Pilatus
glanced at his wife and said, "Claudia, I told you to leave. Now, leave!"

Strabo watched as Claudia Procula turned and stormed angrily back upstairs, and then he laughed. "My lord, I do believe the lady Claudia thought that your suggestion was
serious!"

"Don't be too certain that it wasn't," he muttered
darkly, and then returned his attention to the prisoner. "I
would strongly recommend to you that you gaze upon Roman
ladies with a bit less impertinence." He took another drink
of wine, draining the flagon, and then he asked, "What is
your name?"

The prisoner's attention had been raptly held by the woman who was even now disappearing up the stairs, and he
did not respond at first. After a moment he said, "I...I
do not know my name."

Pilatus
looked at Strabo. "What is this man, an idiot?"

"I don't know, my
lord,"
the centurion replied. "All he would tell us is that he is a Chaldean."

"Very well. Chaldean, if you choose to go nameless into
your grave, it is all the same to me. I hear that you know the preacher, Yeshua of Nazareth. Is this so?"

"Know him?" Chaldaeus asked. "No, I do not know him. I have followed him and watched him and listened to him, waiting to see if he would be able to help me. At long last I realized that what he offers is not what I desire, and so
I never approached him."

"Indeed,"
Pilatus
said, beginning to suspect that this prisoner would be of no use to him. "And what does he
offer?"

"Eternal
life,"
Chaldaeus replied simply.

"Eternal
life,"
Pilatus
echoed with mock pensiveness.
"And you do not wish to have eternal
life."

"No."

"And what is it you wish to have?"

Chaldaeus sighed. "Death."

Pilatus
laughed. "Well, I believe that we can accommodate
you, Chaldean. Strabo, what was he arrested for...?"

"Murder, my lord," the centurion replied, "but might it not be a good idea to question him as to the things he heard the Nazarene say? He told me that he has been following him
about for a long while."

Pilatus
turned back to Chaldaeus. "How long have you known...I mean,
how long have you been observing the Nazarene?"

"Since his birth," Chaldaeus replied.

Pilatus
repressed
a smile, for the prisoner standing
before him
was quite obviously younger than Yeshua. "Since
his birth, you say?"
I was right
,
Pilatus
thought.
He is an
idiot
.

"Yes," Chaldaeus said. "I was in
Chaldea
when he was
born. There
were travelers, men of knowledge and wisdom,
whom I
met there. They came from a land farther east, and
somehow
their language seemed familiar to me, so I followed
them. They had been vouchsafed a prophecy and were going to pay homage to a deliverer. I desired deliverance, and so I
went with them to his birthplace. I bided my time, I waited, and I watched, and..."

"Strabo,"
Pilatus
interrupted, "any doubt as to this man's guilt?"

"None, my lord. We found him covered with blood,
surrounded by the bodies of his victims."

Pilatus
nodded. "Do you have anything to say in your
defense?" Chaldaeus did not reply, and so
Pilatus
said, "You have been found guilty and have been sentenced to death.
Execution of the sentence will be immed..." He stopped, and s
miled as his eyes widened with a sudden idea. "Strabo, do
you have any idea what his name is?"

"None, my lord."

"Don't these people always identify themselves by giving
their fathers' names? I mean, so and so the son of so and so?"
Pilatus
looked at Chaldaeus. "What was your father's
name, Chaldean?"

The prisoner shrugged. "I do not know my own name. How
then should I know my father's name?"

Strabo coughed. "May I ask my lord what he is considering?"

"You know more of the language of these Jews than I do,
Strabo."
Pilatus
said, ignoring the question. "How do you
say the word ‘father' in their tongue?"

"It is
abba
, my lord," Strabo replied, confused.
"But…"

"And
ben
means ‘son of,' does it not?"

"In their ancient language," replied the soldier who had
brought Chaldaeus into the room, "the language of their priests and books. In the tongue of the mob the word is
bar
. "

"Yes, of course,"
Pilatus
nodded. "We have Yeshua bar
Yoshef outside right now." He leaned forward and smiled at
Chaldaeus. "Are you a gambling man, my friend?"

Chaldaeus returned the smile with a sad one of his own. "Fate has not graced me with sufficient fortune for me to have confidence in my luck."

"Well, you are about to become a gambling man, son of
your father." Pilatus had been conversing in the Greek tongue, that universal medium of communication in the eastern
Roman Empire
, and spoke these last words in a Hellenized manner, addressing the prisoner, ‘son of your father,' as Barabbas. He stood up and said to Strabo, "Bring him outside."

As
Pilatus
walked back out toward the dais, Strabo turned to the soldier and asked, "How did you know that, about their ancient language and such?"

The soldier shrugged slightly. "I have a woman here from among these people, centurion."

Strabo nodded as he pulled Chaldaeus out after the procurator. A reasonable explanation. Soldiers are men, no matter where they are stationed.

The mob outside the procurator's residence had diminished neither in number nor in noise, and the din rose even more fiercely when
Pilatus
walked back out into view. He allowed them to scream for a few moments and then slowly
raised his hand to command silence. At a subtle gesture from
the high priest Caiaphas the screaming subsided. "You have a custom, I believe,"
Pilatus
said loudly, "that on this, your most holy day, your Passover, your ruler release to you one prisoner who has been condemned to death..."

The prisoner called Chaldaeus or Barabbas or any of a dozen other names was not listening as the procurator offered the mob a choice between his life and the life of
Yeshua the Nazarene. At the moment
Pilatus
began speaking,
Yeshua turned his head toward his fellow prisoner and captured Chaldaeus's attention with his gaze. Chaldaeus stared deeply into Yeshua's eyes, and those eyes were fathomless and sorrowful, filled with understanding and love. Chaldaeus began to shiver as he felt wave after wave
of unbounded pity wash over him, and the waves of pity seemed to envelope his very being. The waves of pity seemed to roll out from Yeshua's eyes as if those eyes were the ocean of infinity. Yeshua continued to look at Chaldaeus. No word was
spoken, no gesture made, but Chaldaeus realized
instinctively the significance of that look.

He knows! He knows! The Nazarene knows, he understands! He can help. He can help me!

"Not this man, but Barabbas!" the voice of Caiaphas
boomed out, breaking into Chaldaeus's thoughts.

"Barabbas! Barabbas!" was the frenzied refrain of the mob. "Give us Barabbas!"

They are going to kill him! Chaldaeus thought madly. If he dies, I am lost, I am lost!

"I am the guilty one, not Yeshua!" Chaldaeus screamed. "Kill me, not him! Me, not him! I am a murderer, a murderer! Kill me, not him! He is guilty of nothing! I am guilty!" But his voice was drowned out by the screams of the mob that was determined to free him from the death he could not suffer so that they might kill the man who was his only chance to die.

"But what of Yeshua?"
Pilatus
asked, shouting to be
heard.

"Crucify him!" Caiaphas cried, and the mob took up the words as a chant, repeating them over and over in a
deafening rhythm.

Strabo cut the leather thong which bound the hands of Chaldaeus together, and then the centurion pushed him from the dais into the hands of the crowd below, who largely
ignored him. And as the rest of the drama was played out in the courtyard and on the execution
hill,
Chaldaeus was an
impotent spectator. Yeshua bar Yoshef, the preacher from
Nazareth
, was crucified, died, and
was buried
.

And when the day ended, and the sun set, and the moon rose, a werewolf
crept through the
streets of
Jerusalem
.

The creature was making its way toward the residence of
the procurator, its
subhuman mind obsessed by a
drive which was new to
it,
which it could
neither understand nor
control.
It was seeking the woman, seeking the one whose face had
been emblazoned on the mind of its human self earlier that day. The werewolf did not remember seeing Claudia Procula,
it did not remember
its
human self, it had no memories of
anything other than the moon and the hunt and the taste of human flesh; but something was different on this night, something had happened, and it was as if the creature felt
an itch it could not scratch, an irritation, an urge, and it
sought out the woman without rational thought, for it was incapable of rational thought, without knowing whither it
went nor why.

It climbed up the southern wall of the
residence of Pontius Pilatus and his wife Claudia, quietly,
furtively, stealthily. It ignored its hunger, it did not pounce upon the guards. It crept in silence, a consummate hunter, through the corridors of the residence, until it
found the woman.

She was lying in a deep sleep upon a large, soft bed
which was swathed in fine, almost transparent linen. The werewolf moved closer and gazed down at her for a moment. It
did not remember the shock its human self had suffered when he first saw the woman, but that which had caused the prisoner Chaldaeus to stare at Claudia Procula so intently was the same thing which even now told the werewolf that it had found the object of its search. On her forehead, glowing red in the darkness, invisible to all the world save to the eyes of the beast, was a circle of blood-red light within which rested a pentagram, a five-pointed star.

The creature ripped away the linen and attacked, but it did not kill. It only bit, and in
its
bite was damnation.

It was to be years, centuries, before Claudia Procula
became the companion of Chaldaeus, before the horror of what
he had done to her and the unspeakable monstrosity he had caused her to become was overpowered by her need to be with someone and her desperate drive to know and to understand. She fled from him and he followed her, from Jerusalem to Syria, from Byzantium to Rome; and though she sought to escape from the presence of the sad-eyed, tragic young man, she awoke in his company on the morning after each full moon, for when the power of the beast rose in her, she sought him out and feasted alongside him upon the flesh of the innocents, bound to him in a perverse Eucharist of
blood.

Eventually she accepted his presence, and eventually she came to cling to him with the same pathetic loneliness with which he clung to her. He was, she told him, like the Roman god of the doorway, the god Ianus, with two faces, one looking out and one looking in; but for Ianus Chaldaeus,
Janus Chaldian, Janos Kaldy, one face was the face of sorrow and the other the face of the death.

 

Weyrauch's face was flushed with anger as he shook Kaldy
roughly. "Wake up, Kaldy!" he barked.

Kaldy opened his eyes and gazed up at the minister, though he seemed to be looking through him. "So that was what happened." he whispered. "She always said that she had a memory, a dim recollection. She always believed that somehow I was responsible for making her what she is..."

Weyrauch had been sitting on the cold stone floor beside his subject, and as he rose stiffly to his feet he said, "An
interesting coincidence, don't you think?"