At last the master Vibius arrived on a fine stallion and dismounted while a slave took the horse to the small winery stable. Then other slaves, including big Brutus from the villa, began to open up shop. Another servant put a spread of fish, cheese and eggs on the table under the olive tree, and Athanasius understood this was meant for the workers to come and help themselves as they reported for work and went out into the fields.
“You, Ben-Deker,” Vibius said, pointing at him.
Athanasius froze.
“You may give the blessing.”
Athanasius began to breathe quickly. His mind raced to remember the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. Something about blessing God’s name and daily bread. But it was too long. So he simply bowed his head like the others were doing, trying to come up with something. He slyly glanced up to see Vibius staring angrily at him.
“Heavenly Father, bless this bread we are about to receive, and your servants the Dovilins for sharing their blessings with us who deserve no good thing. Amen.”
Vibius grunted, and a legionnaire coughed. All heads save Vibius’s were still bowed.
Had he said something wrong?
Big Brutus leaned over and whispered, “In Jesus’s name. Amen.”
Athanasius spoke up and concluded, “In Jesus’s name. Amen.”
The heads came up with smiles, the hands unclasped, and the food was quickly consumed.
Athanasius watched everybody get to work, but there was no sign yet this morning of Gabrielle. He saw Vibius walk up the narrow flight of steps to the second-story offices of the winery. He could go up there and ask what to do, but the wine cave was open before him, and now was a perfect opportunity to look inside and act lost if found.
The wine cave was cool and dry inside, with rows of amphorae lining either side. He loitered by the rows, trying to figure out which labels were bound for Rome. He found a row of six black amphorae with red gladiators, exactly like the ones in the Angel’s Vault, and wondered if these could be the imperial vessels. He crouched down and tried to make heads or tails of the markings. There was the Dovilin insignia, both at the bottom of the amphora and on the cork seal on top. Where were the other markings?
He finally found them, cleverly hidden in the pattern of the Greek key that circled the neck of the amphora. These amphorae were marked for Ostia and then Rome’s city port on the Tiber and finally the Palace of the Flavians, marked with the Seal of Caesar.
All he had to do now was find a counterpart amphora in the Angel’s Vault, an unsealed amphora where he could poison the resin around the cork stoppage and then cap and substitute it for one of these.
“What are you doing?”
Athanasius stood up to see Gabrielle standing before him. He glanced beyond her at the back of the cave and the tunnel from which she had emerged. “I hear Caesar in Rome has a private tunnel like you between the Coliseum and the palace. We should all be so lucky.”
“We all work hard here,” she said. “Biblical principles, you know. There is no slave or free here. No male or female. No Jew or Gentile. We are all equal before Christ.”
“I think the Dovilins believe some Christians are more equal than others.”
“And you, Samuel. You seem to be avoiding work in the field this morning.”
“I told you, Gabrielle, I work with amphorae like these to improve the taste and preservation of wine. This is where I belong. I’m no ordinary field laborer.”
She took his hands and looked at them. “That’s for certain. I doubt you’ve ever done any heavy lifting your entire life.”
“I most certainly have,” he told her. “Every time I take a piss.”
She laughed for the first time with him, truly laughed, and her smile somehow broke his heart. Maybe it was the cut under her animated eyes, so full of life and yet filled with sorrow. She had an effect on him that no woman ever had before, including Helena, and it made him uncomfortable and curious all the same.
“Follow me, Sampson, and we’ll see how strong you are.”
Much to his disappointment, she took him far away from the winery, past rows and rows of vines to the middle of the vast fields.
“The Dovilins are in the business of celebrations,” she told him. “Communions. Weddings. Banquets. Baptisms. Everything and anything. Those celebrations begin with wine. Jesus turned water into wine. It was his first recorded miracle. It was at a wedding. We can’t turn water into wine. But we can turn grapes into wine. Good wine starts with good grapes. Good grapes start with good vines.”
“Yes,” Athanasius said. “Jesus said, ‘I am the vine. You are the branches. Without me you can do nothing.’”
Unlike Bishop Paul, she took no offense at his display of knowledge. But neither was she impressed. “Without the vine there is no wine, Samuel. My primary job as vineyard manager is to forecast the harvest. The Dovilins don’t like surprises. We must predict how much fruit we’re going to be getting come harvest.”
So that’s why she was the vineyard manager, Athanasius realized. Despite the contempt with which everybody seemed to regard her, her methodology for forecasting grape yields — and improving them — was simply too valuable for the Dovilins to ignore. It was a talent Vibius clearly lacked, as well as everybody else around here. Suddenly Athanasius wondered not how Gabrielle got her job but how the Dovilins’ business could ever thrive without her.
“So how do you do that?” Athanasius asked.
“You are going to count the clusters for me, Samuel.”
“Me?”
“Look,” she said, and lifted a branch on the nearest vine. “See these flowery little buds? These are the ovaries. They develop into grapes. Now count them.”
Athanasius got down on his knees in the dirt and with his hands lifted several branches on the vine and counted. “This one has 14 clusters.”
“You missed some, Samuel.” She lifted another branch. “This one has sixteen, see?”
He saw. He looked under the last branch she had lifted and accidentally broke it off. “Oops.”
“You might as well be dropping gold so far as the Dovilins are concerned,” she cautioned him. “You don’t want to cost them money in your counting.”
He sighed. Counting grape clusters was not what he had in mind in traveling all this way to Cappadocia. This morning he was further away from the wine cave than he was upon his arrival, doing mindless work for this maddening girl who was barely a woman and who in her Christian charity defended these Dovilins who beat her down along with everybody else in this forsaken valley.
Perhaps she was a dead end, a waste of time, and he would have to pursue a less direct yet faster route to the Angel’s Vault.
“So how long do I do this?” he asked her, already thinking that Dovilin’s daughter-in-law Cota might be his better bet inside the winery.
“Until you reach the end of the row,” she said, pointing down the long line of vines. “Then you go down all the other rows and count how many clusters there are and write them down.”
She handed him a leather strip with a lead puncher to mark numbers and walked away.
“There are going to be grapes on the vines by the time I finish counting,” he called out after her. “No, there won’t be any grapes, because they will have already been picked!”