Serpent of Moses

12



Jack was awake for five minutes before he moved, despite the feeling that an ant was crawling up his pant leg. He mustered every ounce of determination that he had to ignore it, trying to concentrate his attention on the world around him.

He thought dawn was still an hour off and he could hear Templeton’s light snoring from somewhere off to his right. After waiting to be certain that the man was indeed asleep, Jack tested the bonds around his hands. He’d convinced the Englishman to untie him the previous evening so that, under Templeton’s watchful eye, he could wash off with a rag and a bowl of water. When Templeton had bound him again, having Jack make the first loop around his wrists while the Englishman kept a gun leveled on him, Jack had been sure to keep his wrist curved. Now, as he worried at the coarse rope, he straightened his hand and felt the rope slacken. It wasn’t much, but beyond the few minutes given him to bathe, his range of motion was better than it had been since he’d first been tied up in the safe house. Even so, it took him several minutes to slip one of the loops past his hand. But once he’d accomplished that, the ropes were off in less than a minute.

That done, he listened for any change in Templeton’s breathing. Still sound asleep. As quietly as he could, he pushed himself up to a sitting position, stifling the groan that threatened to announce his collection of pulled muscles. Templeton had wrapped a rope around Jack’s legs, the other end secured to the jeep. Even with having the full use of his hands, it took Jack longer to loosen these, and during the process he kept expecting Templeton to awaken and end his flight attempt. But Jack heard no break in the man’s steady breathing.

A few minutes later he’d freed himself and gotten his feet underneath him, ignoring the pins and needles as the blood rushed back to his feet. Though the sun wasn’t up yet, it was hot, and Jack was sweating as he put a hand on the jeep and rose along its side.

A part of him wanted to see if he could overpower Templeton while the man slept, but he knew the man had bedded down with the gun and Jack wanted to avoid the prospect of getting shot if at all possible. And in lieu of turning the tables on his captor, there was only one other option.

He leaned into the cab. No keys in the ignition. With that means of exit unavailable, he turned away from the vehicle but then thought better of it before he’d completed his first step. Instead, he reached into the back of the jeep and pulled out a duffel bag holding the rest of their bottled water. He had no idea where he was, other than that they were somewhere in Tunisia. Before they’d bedded down for the night, all he’d seen in any direction was desert. He suspected the three water bottles in the bag wouldn’t take him far, yet in a situation like the one he was in, it did no good to pine for what he didn’t have.

There was, however, one additional item in the jeep. With the duffel bag removed, Jack could see the entire length of the bundled artifact, its length such that it could not rest even on the floorboards but at an angle, rising behind Jack’s seat, where it almost reached the window. Without a moment’s consideration, Jack removed the serpent staff from its resting place. There was no way Jack was going to leave without it.

By the time he started off into the desert, he could see a thin line of light touching the place where sand and sky met. He kept to the road, knowing his only chance of getting away was to put as much distance as he could between himself and Templeton before the man discovered he was gone. Heading into the desert—where travel would have been more difficult—would only have slowed him down. He remembered seeing some break in the sameness of the landscape a few miles back as he’d watched beyond the jeep’s windows. It had looked as if a thin strip of land perhaps a mile off the road suddenly came to an end, while the rocky terrain on both sides of it continued on. Jack imagined that he’d seen some sort of small cliff face, perhaps overlooking a gully.

Jack pushed himself to cover as much ground as possible before full light, but days of restricted movement had left him sore and made his escape more difficult. Still, he thought he’d covered about a mile in less than fifteen minutes, and in another mile or so he would leave the road and cut an angle for the drop-off. If he guessed wrong, he might miss it completely and then all Templeton would have to do would be to drive around in the daylight until he saw Jack’s form standing out against the eternal gray flatness.

He shifted the staff from where it had been resting on his right shoulder to his left. When one first picked it up, it didn’t seem that heavy, but carrying it for a distance with already sore muscles made it seem heavier with each step.

Legend had it the staff had been formed almost entirely of brass, yet he suspected there was also some gold mixed in, which would have accounted for much of its weight. He’d been deprived of the opportunity to examine it and so he could not verify that. He would have liked the chance to stop and unwrap it, just to get a peek at it. After reading the story in the book of Numbers, he had his own ideas about what it looked like and wanted to see if he was even close. He suspected he was. After all, there were few people in the world better equipped to look past a brief mention of a biblical item to the existing technology, materials, and methods the ancients would have used to craft such a thing. Consequently, while his visual picture might not have been accurate, he was confident he knew what it would not look like.

He thought he’d crossed another mile. Keeping his misgivings in check, he left the road, which essentially was nothing more than a well-traveled path through the desert. Even with the approaching sunrise, it was still quite dark. He realized then that while on the road, he stood a much better chance of avoiding an injury. Off the road he would have to exercise greater care. As if validating that, Jack’s foot settled into a hole in the ground before he’d taken more than a dozen steps.

As luck would have it, the foot in question was attached to the ankle Jack had already injured, which made the pain a good deal worse than it otherwise would have been. Before he could catch himself, he was stumbling and had to drop the staff in order to keep from coming down hard on the desert rock. He sat on the ground for several moments, massaging his ankle, but knew he had to get right back up and keep moving. He had to reach a hiding spot if he stood any chance of getting away from Templeton.

With a groan he pushed himself to his feet, dusted off his pants, and stooped down to retrieve the fallen staff. As he balanced the staff on one shoulder and resettled the duffel bag over the other, he glanced up into the lightening sky.

He thought back on how he’d spent a good portion of his life denying the faith his parents had taught him, although over the last few years he’d begun to believe. And yet he wondered why it seemed that God had it in for him. True, he was no saint and probably never would be. But he hadn’t expected the kind of obstacles that God seemed intent on throwing his way.

“Is this because I haven’t married Espy yet?” he asked.

The question was met with silence, and so Jack shook his head and started off again.

Off the road, time passed in a different fashion. Jack had a hard time determining how many minutes had passed or how much distance he’d covered. Periodically he turned to look back at the way he’d come, looking for the road, for a jeep on it, but he could see nothing—despite that the sun had risen enough to grant him a clear field of vision.

By this time, Martin Templeton would know that he was gone. The only thing in Jack’s favor was that the Englishman would not know which direction Jack had taken. On foot, the last village they’d passed would have taken Jack far too long to reach—longer than his meager water supply would have made possible. A logical man, then, would have proceeded on foot in the direction they were heading, hoping for cover along the way. Even if Templeton decided to backtrack, what were the odds that he would find the spot where Jack left the road, let alone the one patch of land in the desert for which Jack was aiming? True, Jack had kept his angle narrow, believing that the cliff face—if that’s what it was—was no more than a mile or so from the road, which meant Templeton could maybe spot him if he was looking in the right place at the right time. So Jack took periodic glances in that direction. If he saw the jeep, his plan was to drop to the ground, trusting in the vision-obscuring properties of the desert to cause Martin’s eyes to flit over him.

Although it wasn’t intensely hot yet, not in terms of the temperatures common to the desert, still, Jack’s thirst forced him to stop and sling the bag holding the water bottles from his shoulder. Kneeling down, he fished a bottle from the bag and downed half of it before replacing the cap and returning the bottle to its canvas cocoon. Then he started on his way again.

It seemed as if he walked for a long time. Long enough that he’d begun to suspect he’d missed the inland promontory and had crossed into some spot in the desert where he would not see a change in terrain until the environment shifted—until the barrenness gave way to the steppes to the north or the coastal plain to the east. By rights, he would be dead long before reaching either locale. But he reminded himself that he’d been in similar situations and had come out on the other side. He just preferred not to do it again if he didn’t have to.

As if in answer to that thought, he began to notice a slim line of darkness—a break in the terrain—ahead. Focusing on it, he pushed himself, switching the staff from shoulder to shoulder as necessary. Before long, the break in the terrain resolved itself into what Jack thought it was: a low cliff that provided a hedge against an aggregate of sand. Beyond that the desert stretched unbroken as far as he could see. In spite of his growing excitement, he stopped and took another drink before continuing on.

It took almost an hour before he reached it. Up close, it looked smaller than he’d expected. Leading up to it, the constancy of sand and rock meant that the only way one would notice it from the front was because of the ribbon of darker rock that topped it. Approaching from the side, Jack could see that it was a sheer cliff, dropping down about ten feet into a hollow bordered by rock. The closest approximation Jack could make was that it resembled a dead-end road that terminated beneath a bridge. It seemed a perfect place in which to hide, and he hurried toward it, reaching the near edge of it several minutes later. Once there, he traversed the line of the rock that extended past it before finding a place where he could slide down into a depression.

He backtracked until he could put a hand on the rock wall that extended some four feet above him. The sun was rising from the other side, which sent a shaft of shade for a good distance beyond Jack. In fact, Jack could stay in that spot until noon without feeling the first of the sun’s rays fall on him. He removed the staff from his shoulder and leaned it against the rock, then reached for a water bottle and took a drink, well aware that he had to conserve his resources if he hoped to last more than a few days.

After that, he settled down to wait.

Setting his back against the rock, he lowered himself to the ground, resolved to remain there until night came again and he could head back to the road and work his way toward the village. He had a few hours to think about shelter—how he might use the few items in his possession to create a barrier between him and the scorching sun.

How long he sat there he didn’t know, but at some point it occurred to him that he still hadn’t taken a good look at the thing responsible for his current predicament. The Nehushtan leaned against the rock just a foot away, the rotting cloth of centuries charcoal gray in the muted sunlight.

He reached for it, pulling it down across his lap, and began to free it from its bindings. In Jack’s estimation, the cloth itself was ancient, perhaps two thousand years old, maybe older. In fact, the fabric, by itself, would have commanded a great deal at auction. Yet, once the last of the cloth strips were undone he tossed them to the side, breaking every rule of antiquities preservation he knew.

Freed now from its bindings, the Nehushtan appeared both more and less than he’d expected. There was a sense of reverence, to be sure, as a thing crafted by a civilization long dead. However, there was also the letdown one felt from imagining something a certain way, only to find that the reality did not match the expectation.

The artifact was less than five feet in length. Jack’s practiced eye could see that, at some point, someone had chopped at least a foot from the staff. His initial thought was that the wood that made up the staff itself was oak. The passage of more than a millennium had rendered the surface dark and mottled. Jack ran a hand along it, taking in its age. He then let his eyes move to the serpent. Perhaps not surprisingly it looked much like he had expected it would. One of the things he’d learned during his years excavating ancient items was that a good many of the important ones had wrought significant influence on the world prior to their own passing into obscurity. The brass serpent—the metal darkened with the passage of centuries—that coiled about the staff had been reproduced countless times in various forms, from the Rod of Asclepius to Ningishita to the mythologies of more cultures than Jack could recollect.

Jack’s eyes moved over the surface, over the intricately carved scales that covered its form, to the face, the eyes set in anger, the tongue flitting in contempt. As when he’d pulled it from the wall in Libya, he felt much the same sense of accomplishment—an awe of the age and beauty of the artifact. If all he took away from the moment was this feeling, it would have been worth it.

He studied it for a while longer, taking in every detail, and when he was satisfied he reached for the aged cloth and carefully wrapped it. Then, after placing the artifact on the ground beside him, he settled in to wait.