Again without a word Telamon kindled a hasty fire. Laying the stalks of elah across the flame, he succeeded in extracting a quarter-cupful of the bitter, stinking sap. He mixed this with vinegar and reduced it over the blaze until it clotted into a rank, viscous paste.
“Bring the woman.”
David obeyed.
“What is that?” The witch eyed the extract dubiously. Telamon commanded her to sit upright and extend her bare, lesion-ravaged calves before her in the sand.
Telamon instructed David to seize the woman by both elbows and hold her fast. He himself sat full weight, straddling her knees, facing toward her soles.
“Turpentine,” he said.
He applied the paste to both the woman’s ankles, directly upon her sores.
The witch shrieked and struggled to break free.
After moments the pain seemed to abate slightly.
The woman remained yet sobbing when Telamon plucked a glowing twig from the fire. With a sudden motion he touched this brand to one ankle, then the other. The turpentine flared into flame.
The woman’s eyes ignited in agony, then rolled back into their sockets. She collapsed rearward, deadweight upon the sand.
David had sprung to his feet as if scalded. He stared at his mentor with wild eyes.
“That should do it,” Telamon said.
The mercenary stood. He collected his mule, ready to move out, and signed to David to collect his and the witch’s pony as well.
“If she doesn’t die tonight, she’ll be walking by the day after tomorrow.”
− 13 −
FIRE FROM THE UNDERWORLD
DAVID COULD SEE THE SMOKE from ten miles and smell it from five. The youth and his mentor came over the final ridge. The Anthill lay before them at a distance of two thousand paces. Figures, too far away to identify as afoot or mounted, scurried in all directions. Dense plumes billowed from multiple clefts in the earth.
“Hell is upon them!” the boy exclaimed.
David began stripping the panniers from his mule, clearly intending to leap upon the beast’s back and rush to the aid of the burning colony. Telamon seized the boy by the shoulder.
“How,” the mercenary spoke in a voice devoid of haste, “does a warrior cross an open plain?”
David turned to his master with eyes frantic with distress. “Sir! People are dying down there!”
The man-at-arms’ expression did not alter. “How does a warrior cross an open plain?”
David’s jaw clenched. The veins pulsed upon his temples.
With effort the youth brought himself under control.
“A warrior crosses an open plain at arms,” he said. “And approaches in stealth from the flank or rear.”
“Good,” said Telamon.
He released the boy.
Forty-eight hours had passed since Telamon had dosed the witch’s wounds with the resin of the elah tree and abandoned her upon the gravel plain.
The woman had indeed regained to capacity to walk, but haltingly and with near-crippling pain. As before, she set out upon the trail of the man and boy. She too saw the smoke of the Anthill. She struggled forward, making such haste as she was capable of.
She mounted the final ridge with pain that nearly dropped her faint.
The smoking colony lay before her. For moments the sorceress could not catch her breath. She could see now, far in the distance, the man and boy. The pair was crossing, leading their animals, wide to the north of the inferno that was the Anthill.
When the mercenary and his apprentice came abreast of the blaze’s north-south axis, still nearly a thousand paces out from the northernmost extremity, they turned by the flank and began to transit back toward the colony. Telamon led. Man and boy maintained a lateral interval of fifty paces and the same margin fore-to-aft. Both bore weapons at the ready.
The sorceress had started down the ridge now, advancing straight toward the Anthill. She was still too far away to make out details. She lost sight of Telamon and the boy as they entered the precinct of the conflagration and their passage became obscured by the dense, billowing smoke.
The woman pressed forward with all her strength. She could see now individuals and groupings of half dozens, some rushing about, others collected in companies in postures of shock and horror. The emergency clearly had not expired. Peering through the murk, the witch espied a figure spilling forth from one smoking portal, clutching a bundle that appeared to be the size of an infant. Other figures dashed forward. The man delivered the babe into the arms of these, then himself collapsed upon the earth. About the infant, women first crooned and goggled, then gave themselves over to shrieks of woe.
The sorceress had reached the margins of the calamity now. She did not need to ask what had wrought this fiasco. A course of horse and camel tracks, made by scores of men, led away to the north from the site of the holocaust.
Marauders.
Upon both flanks of this highway could be seen figures of the dead and dying—denizens of the Anthill—some shot with arrows, other speared through by belly- and back-thrusts of lances. Numbers more sprawled in postures of extremity with the rags of their garments smoldering.
The woman caught sight of Telamon and the boy now.
The mercenary strode through the swell with furious purpose, calling the name “Michael” and peering intensely into the faces of the wraiths kneeling, squatting, and staggering about.
“Michael!” the man-at-arms continued to cry.
The boy called the name as well but in a voice muted by horror. His glance, void and hollow, took in the chaos on all sides as if unable to assimilate its reality.
The sorceress had now fully entered the precinct of catastrophe. Distraught figures approached her. All were out of their minds with grief and woe. When these remarked the witch’s ravaged lower extremities, they took her for one afflicted in the conflagration. They helped her. From these sufferers—women and girls of the Betar Yazidi, boys whose bloused trousers showed them to be bustard hunters of the Tamarizda, even elder dames bearing the cheek and brow tattoos of the Cicatricea—the sorceress gleaned a sketchy chronicle of the calamity.
The blaze had begun underground. Raiders of the Idumaeans, riding out of the Negev, or perhaps Nabatean Arabs marauding via Beersheba—none could say for certain amid the bedlam—had set fire to stores of dried fodder in the subterranean stock pens used to hold sheep and goats. The brigands’ aim had been to sow panic by the volume of smoke and thus to drive the inhabitants of the colony up into the open. In the event, however, numbers of sheep caught fire themselves. A stampede ensued. The animals, mad with terror, broke through all barriers. They entered the belowground market area of the Anthill, overturning stalls and setting further shops and passages alight.
It chanced as well that on this date a gathering of Mithraic Yazdani tribesmen had assembled at the colony to celebrate the birth of their archangel, Tawusi Melek, who took form, the pious believed, as a peacock. The Yazdani in their pilgrimage had brought with them, or purchased from shopkeepers who had in advance laid in a stock for this purpose, a number of live peacocks and peahens. These creatures are notoriously vicious when cornered and are possessed as well of no mean strength. By scores they too stampeded, causing even greater injury and confusion than had already existed. How many inhabitants of the underground city were trampled in the populace’s rush to escape, no one could yet reckon.