Again the man-at-arms proffered no verbal direction.
At one point the man struck a certain stance. He motioned to the boy, instructing him to approach. The man directed the youth to take up the twelve-pound iron shield that rested now among the mules’ unloaded gear and to secure this device as firmly as he could upon his own left forearm, planting his left shoulder within the upper rim of the bowl.
Rush upon me, commanded the man-at-arms.
Hit me.
The boy hesitated.
The man insisted.
Don’t come at half speed.
All-out.
Hard as you can.
The boy obeyed.
The bowl of the shield rang like a bell as the youth slammed at a flat-out sprint into the man-at-arm’s shoulder. The man’s stance did not budge even half a handsbreadth. The boy sprawled, dazed, upon the ground.
Again.
Again, harder.
Harder still.
The youth collided, each time, as if into a wall of stone.
The boy’s brow, left ear, and both hands were bleeding from sustaining the impact of the iron shield upon the fixed, immovable target.
The man indicated that the boy could stop. He assumed again the stance he had employed throughout.
“This,” he said, “is called ‘castling’. ”
He gestured for the boy to attack again.
This time, a split interval before the fatal instant, the man peeled to the side, out of the path of the youth’s onrush. The boy sailed wildly past, touching nothing. Amid the lad’s plunge, the man caught him by one ankle and upended him bodily, employing a gesture so compact it seemed he had barely moved, flipping the youth with powerful violence into the dirt. All breath shot from the lad’s lungs. The boy peered up, stunned and breathless. The claw of the man’s left fist clutched him by the privates, the talons of his right seized him around the throat.
“That turn,” the man said, “is called ‘beetling’.”
He helped the boy up.
All defensive actions in combat, Telamon told the lad, were variations on castling and beetling.
Man and boy took their lunch of parched barley mixed with oil. The man drained a bowl of posca. The boy took water.
“If I may ask, master.” The youth summoned courage to speak. “What was the nature of your acquaintance with the tribune Severus?”
The man-at-arms drew up at this. For a moment his brow darkened, as if he took offense at the presumption of the youth’s query. Then his countenance relented. He seemed, in his way, to approve of his apprentice’s temerity.
“These arts of combat I teach you now,” the mercenary said, “I taught to him.”
The train, repacked, pressed on westward toward the true beginnings of the desert.
The mirage began to clear with the postnoon.
At one point, at a distance to the flank, David sighted what appeared to be a column of smoke. Telamon with reluctance inclined the train to investigate.
The smoke was a man—naked and solitary, with no sign of a camp or of any baggage.
“Who is he?” said David.
“An anchorite. A hermit seeking God.”
The fellow danced barefoot across the fiery floor, chanting some ditty comprehensible only to himself.
“Leave him be,” said Telamon.
Man and boy passed on.
An hour farther, the noon mirage cleared completely. For the first time, David could see the dust of the rider trailing them.
He glanced to Telamon.
Telamon saw this too.
Deeper into the postnoon, man and boy entered a region of narrow, wind-sculpted canyons, whose walls rose high above them and whose smooth, pastel-hued flanks pressed so tightly about their lane of passage that they had to lead their animals from directly in front.
“The rider trailing us,” said the boy, “can pass no way but through this canyon if he follows our tracks.” The lad’s right hand clutched his dagger. “Let me leap upon him, sir.”
The mercenary smiled. “And what will you do with that chicken-sticker?”
“Teach him manners.”
The man laughed and trekked on.
The boy followed, sullen and grumbling.
The pair came minutes later to a singularly straitened passage, with rock shelves above the height of a mounted man on both sides.
“I can take him here from above. Please, sir. Let me!”
“And what if our pursuer is an innocent? Perhaps another holy man, as we encountered earlier.”
“This son-of-a-whore is no innocent.”
“He’s a whore’s son now, is he?”
The boy would wait no longer, but springing onto his mule’s back and launching himself from this platform, he scampered up the canyon wall to a ledge upon which he could remain hidden from any rider approaching along the canyon lane and from which he could with ease leap upon the intruder.
Telamon said nothing, only stretched his arm back from his position in the lead and took the halter rope belonging to the boy’s mule.
“Thank you, master. I shall not fail.”
Telamon hiked on for another half furlong, until the passage widened to a room-sized clearing. Here he hobbled the mules, set their nosebags with a portion of parched oats, and, taking a javelin and his sword, scampered soundlessly back along the sand floor till he came to a shelf across from the boy’s and some half dozen steps above it.
Minutes passed.
Man and boy strained their ears, seeking the clinking sound of a harness and buckle, or the snuffling nicker of an approaching horse.
Once the boy farted.
The man had to bite his lip, so comical appeared the expression on the lad’s face.
All at once here came the rider.
The pursuer rode hooded and muffled. His gaze appeared centered only upon the hoofprints in the sand before him.
With a cry, the boy launched himself.
He missed.
The youth had leapt with too much enthusiasm. His left shoulder first, then his skull above the ear crashed into the far wall of the canyon.
“Auggh!” the rider cried, struck sidelong by this unexpected projectile. His mount reared. The man was thrown.
David, burning with mortification, leapt upon the fellow, who swung his elbow wildly in self-defense. Telamon saw David’s dagger sail from the boy’s grip.
The rider fled afoot.
David tackled him.
But now each had become entangled in the other’s robes.
David punched and kicked at the interloper. He seized the fellow’s cowl and tore it back to reveal his face.
The rider was a woman.
The sorceress.
The female’s rat’s nest of curls spilled forth from beneath her hood. She rose and clawed at David’s eyes with her filthy talons. A furious kick struck the youth squarely in the testicles.
The witch was shrieking now, in Hebrew, calling down curses upon the lad, who, recognizing her (not to say being doubled over from her assault upon him), broke off his attack and toppled backward against the canyon wall.
The sorceress loomed over the boy with both fists clenched, hissing and spitting like a hellcat.
Telamon, laughing from his belly, looked on from his shelf above.
BOOK FOUR
THE ANTHILL
− 12 −
JUICE OF THE ELAH
THE NIGHT AND THE MORNING passed. The party of Telamon and David had cleared, now, the region of canyons. They trekked a plain of gravel serir. To their rear, so far behind that only the dust of her tread could be glimpsed, trudged the sorceress.