Antioch's Daughter : Generations of Faith Book 2 by Jenna Van Mourik

Author:Jenna Van Mourik [Van Mourik, Jenna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“MANY PLANS ARE in a person’s heart, but the Lord’s decree will prevail.” - Proverbs 19:21

43 A.D., On the Road to Tyre

Servius Arrius could postpone the inevitable no longer. After everything that needed to be carried out in order for the transition of power to occur had been done, Servius bid farewell to the bed he’d called his for the past several years. He said farewell to the familiar tents, training areas, and halls that he had come to know as well as the back of his hand. He even felt a twinge of remorse once he had ridden far enough away from the city to no longer be able to see its walls. As wretched as his time there had been, he would miss it.

Why couldn’t he have been sent anywhere else but Judea? Why did the gods insist that he spend the last good years of his career in a dusty, dry wasteland where he would deal only with the petty squabbles of dissatisfied occupants of the city, rather than in active service? If Servius had known then that all of his glory years were behind him, soon to become distant memories, he might not have tried so hard to ensure that Pax Romana lived on in a place as far from Rome as Jerusalem was.

When Servius began his administrative post in Jerusalem, he had initially achieved remarkable success. As Pilus Prior, he was the most experienced man among them all and kept order within the cohort. He was not the most popular, but he made sure that he was at least the most respected. Where other officers in a cohort would accept bribes from their men to look the other way when they wanted to take an unofficial leave of absence or explore a form of entertainment otherwise prohibited by the laws of the Roman army, Servius would execute the law without faltering. He never needed to accept bribes from his men for insubordinate behavior because those in his command feared him too much to even attempt such actions. What good had it all been for now? He’d received no promotion, no special commendations. Just the pension in the exact amount that was promised to him.

Of all Servius’ regrets in his career, the biggest he carried was allowing the young Cassius to enlist in the first place. It was one of the only times he’d ever faltered in his exact execution of the law, and it set into motion a chain of events that would lead to the even darker black mark on his career as a soldier: the incident with the Jewish man they crucified. In the fallout of the whole ordeal, the Roman Army, Pontius Pilate, and the chief Jewish priests ended up in cahoots to cover up a scandal that could rival those of the Roman imperial dynasty. It was the only time Servius had ever compromised, and his career suffered ever since. Perhaps if things had gone differently, Servius might have one day adopted Cassius after a long and glorious career for both of them.

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