Devil's Island (29 page)

“Look in the other room,” John said in between gulps of air. “On your left, about ten feet in, there's a passage. It leads to the large chamber where we slept.”

Marcellus was gone several minutes; when he returned, he was carrying Rebecca wrapped in a blanket. “She's been hurt,” he told John. “It's too dim in there. I need daylight to work.”

Dropping to one knee, the medical officer carefully placed Rebecca on the ground just outside the cave. “By the gods . . .” Marcellus swore as he saw the extent of her injuries.

John shifted to get a better look at Rebecca, and he blanched. Purple and black bruises covered her face. Her lip was cut and swollen, and John thought he saw a bite mark on her neck. Marcellus tried to pull the blanket away to examine her further, but she clutched it tightly, her eyes wide and frantic.

“She's conscious,” Marcellus whispered to John, “but I couldn't get her to say anything. I thought she might recognize me out here in the light.” He touched her hand gently. “Rebecca, I'm the medical officer, Marcellus. Do you remember me?” She offered no response. “You've been hurt and I need to examine you. Would you let me open the blanket?” Still no response.

John moved closer so Rebecca could see him. “It's me, Rebecca. The Apostle. What happened? Who did this to you?”

At the sound of his voice, Rebecca turned her head and focused on John, then she started crying soundlessly. Finally, her hands relaxed their hold on the blanket, and Marcellus moved it away from her body.

Both men gasped. Her clothes had been ripped to shreds, and her body bore multiple contusions. John looked away quickly, shocked at her suffering, and wanting to afford her a bit of privacy while Marcellus looked at her injuries. When he finished the brief exam, Marcellus wrapped the blanket around her and motioned for John to stand.

They walked a few feet away from Rebecca. Marcellus's jaw was set in a hard line. “She must have fought like a tiger,” he said. “There's dried blood under her fingernails, so whoever attacked her will be wearing some deep scratches.”

Marcellus's eyes turned to flint, and he softly said, “She was violated. Raped.”

“Whoever did this is a wild animal, worthy of death,” John said. He had difficulty comprehending that a human being could have pummeled Rebecca so savagely.

John's hand went to his chest. He felt the pang as keenly as if he had been stabbed in the heart. He stood with his head bowed for a long time, grief-stricken at what had happened to this dear innocent child, this precious girl he had loved all her seventeen years.
Dear
God,
he cried out silently,
I can understand how there could be a purpose
in sending a worn-out old preacher to this damnable place. But
what purpose could there possibly be for this young woman, with her
entire life ahead of her, to be sentenced to a life of cruelty and then to be
so brutally attacked?

When he turned back around, John saw that Marcellus had picked Rebecca up and was carrying her in his arms.

“I have to get her to the hospital,” Marcellus said. “I'll come back and help you down the mountain after that, all right?”

“I got up here on my own,” John said gruffly, “and I'll get down the same way.” He stooped down to pick up his new walking stick. “Lead on.”

23

JACOB'S HEAD POUNDED WITH EVERY STRIKE of the hammer. His position on the lower level put him in close proximity to the barrel-chested oarsmaster, who set the beat for the rowers by banging a heavy mallet on top of a sturdy oak beam projecting upward from the ship's floor. With each earsplitting
thwack
, Jacob reflexively pulled back on the oar. After three long days as an oarsman on the
Jupiter
, Jacob no longer bothered to watch the oarsmaster. Even with his eyes closed, Jacob could see the man's biceps bulge with every downward swing, see the impact of the hammer send a rippled response back up his muscular arm.

Just one week ago I was a free man,
Jacob thought as he rhythmically rowed in unison with his shipmates. His temples throbbed and his back ached, but he never missed a stroke. Jacob could scarcely believe it had been only a week since he had been dragged to the Temple of Domitian and ordered to sacrifice to Caesar. The intervening seven days had seemed like seven years, so much had happened.

When they had left Patmos on Sunday morning, Jacob was unaware that Damian had boarded the transport just before it sailed. By nightfall the ship had made port at Smyrna, and early the next morning, Jacob was transferred to the
Jupiter
.

Standing on the dock, his legs shackled and his hands cuffed, Jacob had watched Damian disembark and stride imperiously into the city.
Will he wreak destruction on the church of Smyrna as he did
in Ephesus?
Jacob had wondered. He breathed a prayer for Polycarp and the other Christians he had met when he'd visited Smyrna a few weeks earlier, when he and John had sailed there on the
Mercury
.

John had sought out Polycarp as soon as they arrived, and the Apostle's two protégés had quickly established a rapport. Like Jacob, Polycarp had been a disciple of John from a young age; now, at twenty-six, Polycarp was a leader in the church at Smyrna. The three of them had spent hours talking about the problems facing the church. After John retired one evening, Jacob and Polycarp had stayed up talking about the significance of the times in which they lived.

“Some of our church people don't believe in the Lord's return anymore,” Polycarp had said, “even though I have always preached it. But it's been more than sixty years since Jesus made that promise, so they have a hard time believing it will come to pass.”

“I guess I've been around John so much that I've never doubted it,” Jacob had replied.

Polycarp smiled. “I know what you mean. John was an eyewitness to everything that happened—he heard Jesus make that promise personally. It's all still so real to John, there's no room for doubt. And when you're with him, that confidence is contagious.”

“I wonder why, though, the Lord hasn't returned. Why has He left His church here to endure sadistic persecution?”

“I don't have an easy answer for that,” Polycarp had said, “and it's a question I hear frequently. Especially when so many in our congregation are suffering.”

Polycarp described for Jacob some of the difficulties the believers in Smyrna had endured. They couldn't get business permits or jobs because they were Christians, although that was never the stated reason. Some flimsy excuse always accompanied the denial, but it was discrimination, and they knew it. They also feared that official persecution was coming.

“We're not a wealthy church to begin with,” Polycarp had said, “and with so many of our people going through hard economic times, it's been difficult.” Worse than the financial struggles, though, were the doctrinal differences that threatened to divide the church. “I continually have to combat the teaching,” Polycarp said, “that true believers don't have to suffer—that if you suffer, it's the result of sin in your life, or you don't have enough faith. Some believers have even advocated compromise with the Roman government and society. They think it's all right to attend the games and to host dinner parties at pagan temples.”

That sounds like Naomi,
Jacob had thought.

The next day, John had invited Jacob to preach at a gathering of the church. He was excited as he stood in front of the congregation to bring the Word of the Lord. It was a heady feeling, being part of the inner circle around John and being accepted among his peers in the ministry. But Jacob also felt the burden of preaching to people he knew were suffering for their faith. He decided that being the shepherd of a flock was a far cry from the evangelistic work he had done in Ephesus, and Jacob was sure that pastoring was a burden he hoped God would not ask him to carry.

At the end of the service, John had laid hands on Polycarp and anointed him as bishop. Then the Apostle admonished the congregation to follow Polycarp's leadership as he followed Christ and encouraged them to be patient in suffering.

Patient in suffering.
Those words came back to Jacob now as his powerful arms continued to pull the wooden oar methodically through the water. He hadn't been very patient in suffering, and his impetuous response to difficult circumstances had landed him in the bowels of a warship.

Jacob would not have believed he could miss Devil's Island, yet he did. Mostly he missed Rebecca and John, and he worried how they were faring in the quarries without his help. But Jacob also missed working in the fresh air and sunshine, missed the privacy of their cave, and missed the ability to stand up and walk around— even if the price of such unrestricted movement had been carrying a heavy load of rocks all day long. Here, the work was equally mindless and backbreaking, but it was carried out in the dark hole of a floating cell block. Only a few rays of sunlight filtered through the small opening where his oar reached into the water mere inches below his seat.

In his short time as one of the
Jupiter'
s 170 oarsmen, Jacob had learned a lot about the ship and the imperial navy. The
Jupiter
was a
trireme,
so designated because of its three different levels of rowers. Each oarsman sat on a short wooden bench and pulled a single oar. The two upper banks of oars were stacked on the outrigger, a rowing frame attached to the hull, and staggered to allow the oars to dip into the water at different angles. The lowest bank of oars, where Jacob was stationed, passed through the hull itself. Built long and narrow— roughly 110 feet long and only twelve feet wide—the
trireme
was lighter and faster than the older
liburnicae
. With the oarsmaster setting a swift beat, the
Jupiter
could accelerate from standstill to half-speed in under ten seconds, and could hit top speed—eight knots—in about thirty seconds.

One thing Jacob did not miss about Devil's Island: the threat of the overseers' whips. Here, no patrolling guards used force to motivate or manipulate the workers. For one thing, the
Jupiter
carried a relatively small crew in addition to the oarsmen, plus a detachment of only fifteen to twenty marines; that's all the ship would hold. Moreover, cracking the whip would not have worked on board a warship: a single injured rower unable to maintain the stroke could cripple the ship during a crucial moment.

Jacob had learned something else about life on a warship, something that gave him a faint glimmer of hope. His presence on the
Jupiter
was something of a fluke. Because of the necessity of a highly skilled and motivated crew, the imperial navy rarely used slaves or prisoners on a
trireme
anymore, resorting to such measures only during wartime emergencies. With the Empire at peace for the moment— except for a few minor skirmishes on the northern frontiers where the army remained to solidify the borders—there was no state of emergency. However, with an aging peacetime force, the navy found itself shorthanded and had struck a deal with several penal colonies, like the one on Patmos, to take the occasional troublemaker off their hands— as long as the troublemaker was reasonably young and powerfully built. Jacob had fit the bill.

What gave him hope was the custom of offering freedom to prisoners or slaves serving as oarsmen before an impending battle. The warships still plying the Mediterranean enforced the
Pax Romana
against potential marauders, keeping the seas free for commercial traffic. The only battle Jacob was likely to see would be an encounter with the occasional pirate ship, and he didn't know if the wartime tradition of granting freedom would apply in that situation. But he had begun to pray that a foolhardy gang of thieves would challenge the
Jupiter
so he could find out.

Meanwhile, he rowed. And rowed. Hour after hour. Day in, day out.

The steady fall of the hammer and the swing of the oar had an almost hypnotic effect; sometimes Jacob's mind completely shut down while his muscles continued to move. He closed his eyes now, and the words in his head began to take on the rhythm of the oars-master's hammer . . .

Patient . . . in suff 'ring . . . Patient . . . in suff 'ring.

John sat on a stool by Rebecca's hospital cot. It was at the end of the row, by the supply table under the window—the bed he had occupied a few days earlier. The swelling in her face had gone down, he noted as he patted her hand, willing her to respond. Rebecca turned and looked at him, but she didn't speak. She had not uttered a single word since they'd found her.

That was Monday,
John thought.
Three days ago.

Rebecca closed her eyes again. She did not appear to be in pain; John thought it was more a matter of being unable to face the world. He stood and began to pace the length of the room. He was still pacing several minutes later when Marcellus entered and looked at him, a question mark on his lined face. John shook his head to indicate there had been no change.

Marcellus walked to the far end of the room and bent over his other patient. John watched as the medical officer examined the man briefly and then stood back up.

“I don't think he's going to make it,” Marcellus said wearily. “His internal injuries must be too severe.”

A rock slide in the quarries had crushed two convicts to death several days earlier. A number of other prisoners had been hurt in the accident. Most of their injuries had been minor; Marcellus had treated and released them. This man, however, still hovered between life and death. John had stood by his cot and prayed for the man several times.

“Do you think she'll ever speak again?” John asked now, motioning toward Rebecca. “Does some injury prevent her from talking?”

“No, she's physically capable of speech. I've heard her cry out in her sleep.” Marcellus wrinkled his brow with a look that conveyed both worry and frustration. “I suppose her silence is a result of the trauma. We have to give it time. Her body will heal . . . I just don't know about her spirit.”