David, addressing Telamon, gestured toward this trailing wisp.
“Sir, might we, without producing hazard to ourselves or our mission, display some measure of pity for the poor woman?”
“It was you who begged me to let you kill her.”
The witch, once she had affirmed her victory over David in the canyon, had collapsed to her knees, unstrung by exhaustion and desiccation. Her pony appeared in equivalent straits. Telamon collected the beast. He stripped the woman naked and confiscated her weapons, of which she bore three—a sica dagger; a sling with twelve lead bullets; and a weighted dart concealed in her waistband. The man-at-arms donated enough water to bring the sorceress’s animal to lifting its head again. He would give none to the woman.
“I am not following you,” the witch swore. “I escaped from the prison. I make now for the Anthill, as do all fugitives fleeing the armies of Rome.” The sorceress beseeched Telamon’s mercy, citing her own aid of him during the jailhouse interview.
“You told me nothing,” said Telamon. “You are sent now by Severus, with treachery alone in mind.”
The first night fell. The man-at-arms would not permit the female to make camp within a hundred paces. He gave David leave to look to her horse but refused all accommodation to the woman herself. Setting the first night’s watch, he bound the witch at the wrists and the ankles and staked her to the earth. He directed David to kindle a lamp-fire beside her and to keep this alight throughout his turn on watch. If the female managed to free so much as one limb, the boy was to kill her.
The woman swore a mighty oath that she bore no confederacy with Severus or any entity of Rome. She had broken free of the Antonia Fortress by means of the black arts, she declared, and trooped now upon this trace only because it was the most direct route to the Anthill.
Telamon inquired of the woman how she got past Timothy at the Lavender Valley.
“That fool? You think I let him see me? I soared past as a raven, black in the night!”
Telamon smiled. “You and your pony?” The man-at-arms indicated areas of swollen flesh about the witch’s limbs. “But other sentries spotted you, didn’t they? Those are bee stings on your hands, arms, and face.”
The sorceress snarled.
Telamon instructed David in how he was to make an end of her.
“You have slaughtered sheep and goats?”
The boy nodded, grimly and reluctantly.
“One strong blow here,” said the man-at-arms, “between the eyes, to stun her. Drop her into the dirt facedown. Set your knee between her shoulders with all the weight of your body holding her in place. Set your blade in your right hand beneath her jaw. Press your left palm against the back of her head. Jerk up hard with your right hand, making sure you open the windpipe as well as the artery. She’ll bleed out quicker than a goose.”
The boy protested that he could not do this.
Telamon regarded him.
“That sica in her kit. Whose liver do you think she aims to pierce with it? After she pierces mine?”
Hearing this, the woman cried, in Hebrew, for David’s ear, that Telamon was a brute and an enemy of heaven and that he, the youth, would find his soul accursed forever if he acted in such a monster’s abettance.
The youth turned toward Telamon to translate.
“I understood,” he said.
The man-at-arms declared that the witch was his, David’s, responsibility. “Kill her now or kill her later. You will have to do one or the other.”
The boy could not.
The man-at-arms turned away toward the camp.
Morning came. Man and boy, now leading three animals, passed out of the region of canyons and emerged onto a broad stony plain cut by numerous dry riverbeds.
They made their early camp in the shade of a shallow ridge. Telamon looked to the animals’ needs, performed his calisthenics, then prepared a ground oven for baking the day’s loaf.
Out on the wasteland, the sorceress staggered into view, afoot.
David watched her.
After an excruciating interval the woman managed to stumble into such proximity of the camp as to make her voice heard.
“I will not beg,” she cried.
Telamon was standing, facing her. The witch’s state had clearly become extreme.
“May I come out of the sun with you?”
“Remain where you are.”
“May I make a collection?”
The sorceress meant would Telamon permit her to gather roots and herbs.
“You may not,” he said.
“Will you spare me at least enough water to make a tea?”
“I will give you nothing,” said Telamon. And, setting a hand upon the hilt of his sword, he advanced upon her.
The witch withdrew.
Telamon caught his mule’s halter and turned to David. “We will move to make our night camp now.”
The man started off.
The boy resisted.
“Sir,” said he, “we cannot leave the woman in this state.”
“Why not?”
“Do you see her ankles?” Suppurating sores ran along the flesh of both the sorceress’s legs. “Leprosy devours her!”
“Those are sores from prison irons,” said Telamon. “Either way, her broths and poultices will do nothing to allay the affliction. She’ll be dead before two more dawns.”
David bore over his shoulder one of the party’s three water skins. Defying his master, he strode back to the woman. He splashed the liquid into her cupped palms. The witch gulped greedily. Among her kit David spied a small bronze basin. He filled this as well and left it with her.
The boy marched back to Telamon.
“Your heart is too kind,” pronounced the man-at-arms.
But he did nothing to overturn David’s intercession.
The pair moved on, establishing their night camp upon an elevated promontory about a mile farther west.
With dawn they moved out again, leading their two mules and the pony they had taken from the sorceress. They glimpsed wolves in the half-light, and a herd of a hundred gazelles, so shy they bolted at thrice the distance of a bowshot.
“Sir!” David exclaimed of a sudden, pointing rearward. “Do you see?”
The sorceress could be descried in the distance, hobbling toward them upon a crooked staff. “She must have been tramping all night,” David declared. The youth begged his master to help. “Sir, the wolves! They will scent her!”
With a gesture Telamon silenced the boy. He signed his permission to bring help to the woman. David seized a water skin. He grabbed the pony by its halter and bolted at once to the witch’s aid.
Telamon looked on, unmoving.
As the youth assisted the sorceress in her painful passage, the man-at-arms stepped away toward a stand of elah trees, called by the Arabs butm. The mercenary cut several green branches, carved slits in them lengthwise, and laid them out in the warmth of the fast-ascending sun.
David and the woman came up.
Telamon permitted the witch to take water. He allowed David to tear for her a few scraps of last night’s bread.
Clearly the sorceress was suffering terribly.
The man-at-arms rearranged the branches of elah, apparently drying them in the sun. He tested them for some quality known only to him. He still had not spoken. Neither had the witch. She lay now in a scrap of shade beneath the bellies of the mules.