The rocky trail—named the Snake Path—twisted up the sheer cliffs of the infamous mountain of Masada. Its summit was only a handful of yards overhead, sheltering the ruins of the ancient Jewish fortress. From his current perch on the trail, Tommy searched out over the baked tan earth of the Jordan Valley below.
He wiped sweat from his eyes. Being from Orange County, Tommy thought he’d known heat. But this was like crawling into an oven.
His head drooped forward. He wanted to sleep again. He wanted to feel cool hotel sheets against his cheek and take a long nap in air-conditioning. After that, if he felt better, he would play video games.
He jerked awake. This was no time to daydream. But he was so tired, and the desert so quiet. Unlike humans, animals and bugs were smart enough to take cover during the day. A vast empty silence swallowed him. Would death be like this?
“Are you okay, honey?” his mother asked.
He startled. Why hadn’t he heard her approach? Did he fall asleep again? He wheezed out, “Fine.”
She bit her lip. They all knew he wasn’t fine. He yanked his cuff over the new coffee-brown blotch of melanoma that disfigured his left wrist.
“We can wait as long as you need to.” She plunked down next to him. “I wonder why they call it the Snake’s Path. I haven’t seen a single snake.”
She spoke to his chin. His parents rarely made eye contact with him anymore. When they did, they cried. It had been like that throughout the last two years of surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation—and now through his relapse.
Maybe they’d finally look him in the face when he lay in his coffin.
“Too hot for snakes.” He hated how out of breath he sounded.
“They’d be snake steaks.” She took a long drink from her water bottle. “Sun-broiled and ready to eat. Just like us.”
His father trotted up. “Everything all right?”
“I’m just taking a break,” his mother lied, covering for him. She wet her handkerchief and handed it to Tommy. “I got tired.”
Tommy wanted to correct her, to tell the truth, but he was too exhausted. He wiped the cloth across his face.
His father started talking, like he always did when he was nervous. “We’re close now. Just a few more yards, and we’ll see the fortress. The actual fortress of Masada. Try to picture it.”
Obediently, Tommy closed his eyes. He pictured a swimming pool. Blue and cool and smelling like chlorine.
“Ten thousand Roman soldiers are camped out all around here in tents. Soldiers with swords and shields wait in the sun. They close off any escape route, try to starve out the nine hundred men, women, and children up there on the plateau.” His father talked faster, excited. “But the rebels stand firm until the end. Even after. They never give up.”
Tommy tugged his hat down on his bald head and squinted up at him. “They offed themselves in the end, Dad.”
“No.” His father spoke passionately. “The Jews here decided to die as free men, rather than fall to the mercy of the Romans. They didn’t kill themselves in surrender. They chose their own fate. Choices like that determine the kind of man you are.”
Tommy picked up a hot stone and tossed it down the trail. It bounced, then vanished over the edge. What would his father do if he really chose his own fate? If he offed himself instead of being a slave to the cancer. He didn’t think his father would sound so proud of that.
He studied his father’s face. People had often said they looked alike: same thick black hair, same easy smile. After chemo stole his hair, no one said that anymore. He wondered if he would have grown up to look like him.
“Ready to go again?” His father hitched his pack higher on his shoulder.
His mother gave his father the evil eye. “We can wait.”
“I didn’t say we had to go,” his father said. “I was just asking—”
“You bet.” Tommy stood up to keep his parents from arguing.
Eyes on the trail, he dragged forward. One tan hiking boot in front of the other. Soon he’d be up top, and his parents would get their moment with him at the fort. That was why he had agreed to this trip, to this long climb—because it would give them something to remember. Even if they weren’t ready to admit it, they wouldn’t have many more memories of him. He wanted to make them good ones.
He counted his steps. That was how you got through tough things. You counted. Once you said “one,” then you knew “two” was coming, and “three” right after that. He got to twenty-eight before the path leveled out.
He had reached the summit. Sure, his lungs felt like two flaming paper bags, but he was glad he’d done it.
At the top stood a wooden pavilion—though pavilion was a pretentious word for four skinny tree trunks topped by more skinny tree trunks laid sideways to cast patchy shade. But it beat standing in the sun.
Beyond the cliff’s edge, desert stretched around him. In its dried-out and desolate way, it was beautiful. Bleached brown dunes rolled as far as he could see. Sand slapped against rocks. Millennia of wind erosion had eaten those rocks away, grain by grain.
No people, no animals. Did the defenders see this view before the Romans arrived?
A killing wasteland.
He turned and scanned the plateau up top, where all that bloodshed had happened two thousand years ago. It was a long flat area, about five football fields long, maybe three times as wide, with a half dozen or so crumbling stone buildings.
This is what I climbed up here for?
His mother looked equally unimpressed. She pushed curly brown hair out of her eyes, her face pink from sunburn or exertion. “It looks more like a prison than a fortress.”
“It was a prison,” his father said. “A death row prison. Nobody got out alive.”
“Nobody ever gets out alive.” Tommy regretted his words as soon as they left his mouth, especially when his mother turned away and slid a finger under her sunglasses, clearly wiping a tear. Still, a part of him was glad that she let herself feel something real instead of lying about it all the time.
Their guide bounced up to them, rescuing them from the moment. She was all bare legs, tight khaki shorts, and long black hair, barely winded by the long climb. “Glad you guys made it!” She even had a sexy Israeli accent.
He smiled at her, grateful to have something else to think about. “Thanks.”
“Like I told everybody else a minute ago, the name Masada comes from the word metzuda, meaning ‘fortress,’ and you can see why.” She waved a long tan arm to encompass the entire plateau. “The casemate walls protecting the fortress are actually two walls, one inside the other. Between them were the main living quarters for Masada’s residents. Ahead of us is the Western Palace, the biggest structure on Masada.”