Telamon seemed to be thinking the same thing.
“This man I’m after,” said he to the master. “Would he have tarried here in his flight?”
“Ah, such a fellow would be far too canny for that.”
Telamon laughed and set a silver “Antony”—the old-time denarius minted in the wars against Octavian and still in use—into the master’s palm. The mercenary paid to have his own mules looked to. He desired especially, he told the stock master, that their hooves be examined by one possessed of veterinary competence, particularly the inner-sole “frogs,” which must be sound and clean of all stones or spines.
The master regarded him.
“This man you’re after? May I ask, is it he alone you seek, or some item of value that he carries?”
Telamon made no reply. He requested of the master that he have his stable attendants shave the backs of both mules and that he suffer the youth David to look on and learn. The coarse hairs along the beasts’ spines, sweated and matted beneath the weight of the pack frame and panniers, inevitably twisted themselves into knots that dug into the animals’ flesh like burrs under a saddle. Shaving cleared these irritants away.
The master said he would see to this at once.
“Him for whom you work this assignment . . . he resides in the Antonia Fortress at Jerusalem, does he not?” The stock master indicated the wilderness to the south. “So you would, in this officer’s service, venture out and back?”
The master cried up his boys, who came on the run to take hold of Telamon’s beasts and look to their needs.
“The desert is a gantlet of outlaws and desperadoes,” said the master to the mercenary. “Its way of life is banditry. If you own good sense, and I believe you do, you’ll not double your track and the jeopardy in which such a course would place you, but instead keep making west.”
The stock master took Telamon by the elbow and drew him close.
“And I will tell you something more, my friend. If this ‘item of value’ is what I think it is, you will upon acquiring it neither sleep nor eat until you stand within the court of the prefectus augustalis in Alexandria in Egypt. To him and not to Jerusalem will you render this prize. For Alexandria, a mighty city dear to Rome, may draw on the imperial treasury to reward those it favors, while Judea must rely upon the straitened coffers of its military establishment.”
David attended upon the stable boys while they looked to the mules’ hooves and backs and helped pad and re-rig the animals’ pack frames. When the youth sought to interrogate these lads about the contents of the Black Hoods’ camel packs, the boys giggled and glanced furtively about. They were Idumaeans, rude fellows of the frontier villages, who spoke a dialect David’s ear could barely penetrate.
From the barn the youth could see Telamon outside with the stock master. The pair knelt together. The master was drawing something with a stick in the dirt. Telamon put forward questions, indicating certain points in the scribble. David could see the stock master answer these.
After several minutes, the master and the mercenary moved together to a bench beneath the sunshade of the outdoor kitchen. There they shared a meal of alphita bread, boiled eggs, salt, and olive oil. At repast’s end the master made to make this meal a gift. Telamon declined with emphasis. David could see him set two copper coins beside the dishes and hand another to the kitchen urchins who had served them.
At the gate the stock master strode forth to see Telamon and David on their way. To the youth he passed a parcel wrapped in a frond of areca palm—a dinner of bread, eggs, salt, and oil, as he and the man-at-arms had just shared. David thanked him. The boy’s glance kept returning to the covered stockades, to the Black Hoods and their weapons and wares. “Shomrim,” said the master, employing the Hebrew term for “guardians,” as of the people and the faith.
“An army-in-waiting,” he observed to Telamon. “For that day when their God commands them to cast off the Roman yoke.”
Telamon and David took in hand the leads of their mules’ halters and turned the beasts toward the southwest, the direction of the wilderness of Sinai. The stock master pointed to a range of basalt ridges receding into the deep distance. He suggested that Telamon make his first camp at the westernmost shoulder of this formation, a place called the Lavender Valley, on the trace to Wadi Alnahl. A man there named Timothy would have observed and acquired intelligence of every party entering the wilderness by this route.
“You’ll need a dolet,” said the master. He used the Hebrew word for “gift,” as in that offering of respect that a guest donates to his host in return for haven and hospitality. The veteran indicated a row of clay vessels squatting in the sun. “Help yourself to as many as you like. A good wine jar is always welcome.”
At a nod from Telamon, David collected several. He secured them with scrupulous care among the mules’ loads, in such a manner as to keep them from jostling against one another. The stock master looked on with an expression of amusement.
“And can it be, my lad, that you own no trepidation about venturing into this cruelest of wildernesses, populated by the half mad and the wholly iniquitous?”
“I follow my master,” David declared. “And, reverencing heaven, seek no further surety.”
− 9 −
THE LITTLE DESERT
THE DESERT DID NOT BECOME desert all at once.
Man and boy came first to a village called Abusan al-Kabir, so destitute it had not even a market but one bought lupa melons on the roadside from barefoot waifs and toothless housedames; then a slightly larger village called Wadi Kabrit. David could smell the sea from both places and, at a third site, whose name he forgot, could glimpse palm trees above the shore, though he could not actually see the water.
A good Roman road, the Via Solitudia, stone-founded and two wagon-widths broad, ran along the coast. Telamon, however, kept clear of this.
“Him we pursue will not risk this track.”
Rather, the mercenary took the camel trace used by Bedouin and other nomadic grazers of stock, which followed the great circle route from Petra in Arabia Nabatea to Beersheba, and from there across Sinai to the Great Bitter Lake and Egyptian Pelusium and the easternmost mouth of the Nile.
Signs of civilization remained abundant in this region of pre-desert. Migrating birds passed in numbers. Droppings of sheep and goats littered each site against a cliffside or wadi wall beneath which animals could be temporarily penned or rested. Caravans passed. One spied renunciants, sometimes alone, other times in colonies, camped in cave pockets or tucked under stone shelves scoured from the faces of escarpments.
David had imagined that the wilderness would be untenanted, a landscape void of life and traffic. To his surprise the place bustled with activity, of men and beasts and even of vegetation. Early in the postnoon he and Telamon entered a depression between ranges of hills. Ahead David could make out a landscape of bushes, which he took to be tamarisk or perhaps acacia. Approaching these, he realized they were people—women harvesting desert plants.
The females were swathed head to foot in brightly colored muslin, with only a slit for eyes and nose. Each carried a skin of drinking water and, trailed behind her upon the earth, tied by a tether about her waist, a great billowing sack of linen.