Or just chance? Bad luck?
The leader turned at last to Telamon.
“Go!” he said. “Get quit of this place, all of you, before the Almighty thinks better of the clemency He has shown you.”
BOOK FIVE
CUT-OFF NOSES
− 14 −
THE WILDERNESS OF SALT
THE RAIDERS’ TRAIL WAS NOT hard to follow. The marauders had made no attempt to conceal their passage. They rode, it seemed, in a state of heedlessness.
Telamon’s eye, and even David’s, could with ease identify intervals where sub-parties had galloped off from the central trace, perhaps chasing game—gazelles or ibexes or the wild asses the Arabs call ariama. Or perhaps youths among the freebooters were chasing each other for sport or from the exuberance of hope for fortune. Even the raiders’ camps were left like dumps, with refuse blowing in the ground-scouring gale that arose each evening the closer one got to the sea.
The earth across which the man-at-arms’ party pursued was salt—crusty and acrid. Saline flats threw up shrouds of bitter ash that whirled and gyrated on the wind. Telamon trekked with a scarf wound to cover his nose and mouth, as did the others.
The mercenary would let no one ride save the child, whose burns were more severe than the man-at-arms had at first reckoned and more debilitating than the girl would admit. Telamon compelled the sorceress, who yet straggled in the party’s train, to collect such medicinal herbs as she could to make poultices and salves. The witch exploited this opportunity to insinuate herself, by the balms she produced, into the man-at-arms’ graces, or at least to hold him off, day by day, hour by hour, from abandoning her.
“The Nazarene will need my help even more than the girl,” she declared, “if indeed we find and free him.”
In truth the sorceress’s medicaments worked to remarkable effect, not only in easing the child’s torment, but in fortifying the entire company upon the march. The witch produced a tea of tansy and desert hawthorn that kept the watch alert at night and a chewable resin of samwa leaf and horsemint that worked wonders to mitigate thirst on the tramp. She even manufactured a cud of baatharan and eilejaan—“cure” in the Bedouin tongue—whose effect upon the animals was to calm them amid the sudden squalls and whirlwinds of the wilderness and to temper their impulses to spook at the smells and sounds of wild animals prowling outside the camp at night.
The witch, emboldened by Telamon’s momentary sufferance of her presence, began to afflict David. “How many days till we reach the sea?” she inquired of the youth late in the first postnoon out of the Anthill.
The boy did not know.
“Ask him,” said the sorceress, indicating the man-at-arms, who tramped ahead across the crusty, sun-dazzling flat.
David demurred.
“You fear to approach him,” declared the witch in mockery.
She called David “my little warrior” and made sport of him out of earshot of the others.
“Why do you serve this man so slavishly? He will abandon you the moment you become a burden. You are a Jew. You should be true to your people. Why bow to this servitor of Rome?”
David made no answer, only lengthened stride to free himself of the woman’s tongue. The witch matched him, however.
“You remain above the earth only by the incantations I have cast to protect you, though you are ignorant of them.”
David fled again.
“Stop plaguing me! Why did you track us from Jerusalem in the first place? My master believes you work treachery for Severus. Do you think he doesn’t remark you making your ‘collections’? He sees you loiter. You are leaving signs, marking our trail.”
The sorceress mocked David even more boldly. “Think I work perfidy, boy? Do something, then. Kill me, if you dare!”
The mercenary and the girl turned back at this, drawn by the altercation.
The sorceress took note of their attendance.
“You dare not, do you?” the witch addressed David, but with such force as to be heard by the man-at-arms and the child. “Because you know I will strike you blind or render you a leper!”
The girl, watching, hooted in scorn.
The witch spun toward her. “What are you looking at, you feral rat?”
The child assumed a posture of derision, scowling exactly like the sorceress, with snarling lip and crooked, accusatory finger.
The witch snatched up a stone and hurled it at the girl.
The child laughed and trotted away, on the woman’s pony, which had by default become her own.
In camp that night, the witch made a point of laying her bedding beside the girl’s. When Telamon had moved apart on watch, the sorceress spoke to the child alone.
“Your father has the Apostle’s letter now, doesn’t he? He met up with a confederate at the Anthill. That was the scheme, wasn’t it? It was why you went there.”
The girl spat and moved her blanket away, toward the spot where the man-at arms had taken up his post.
The witch cackled. “Think this man is your savior, girl? He serves Rome, this villain—to overhaul your father and bring him back in chains. He will not preserve him, you boob, but turn him in for gold.”
The second morning the sorceress fell in beside Telamon as they marched. David, who had held that station, edged apart.
“He has the letter now, the Nazarene,” the witch declared. “Someone brought it for him at the Anthill. That filthy urchin virtually confirmed it last night.”
Telamon regarded the woman skeptically.
“Tucked in his guts,” said the sorceress. “Or wedged up his ass, if the Arabs haven’t pried it out of him yet.”
The woman adopted with the man-at-arms a more conciliatory tone than she had taken with the youth or the girl. It seemed that she had miraculously acquired a speaking knowledge not only of Greek but of Latin as well—with a Judean accent.
The sorceress observed to Telamon that the tradition of accord at the Anthill was of such antiquity, not to mention that its effect—a haven free of fear for all—was so critical to the survival of the contending clans, tribes, and kin groups who took refuge at the colony, that something of great moment must have intervened to incite the Nabatean raiders to commit the irrevocable breach of violating the truce.
“What can this be but Roman treasure? A bounty on the Nazarene! No longer are you the only one, mercenary, who vies for this reward—if indeed you ever were.”
Telamon interrogated the sorceress, as he had at Jerusalem, as to what she knew about the letter of the Apostle. “You were the one who gave up the Nazarene in prison. How did you get him to confide in you?”
“If that pirate proffered a truthful word to me,” declared the witch, “it was for his purposes alone. Not I, nor any other, could extract from him a single syllable that he did not wish to render. If you don’t believe me, ask Severus, who racked the man for two days and nights to no avail. It was the Christian who used me, not I him.”
The sorceress claimed to know nothing of the letter itself, save that it would be long—five thousand words at least—and that its contents would be compelling.
“He who composed it, the so-called Apostle Paul, is a poet. Give him that. The man is a genius. Whatever is in that epistle, it will ignite a conflagration among all who receive it. The Romans fear these verses, sight unseen, more than all the daggers of the Zealot sicarii, more indeed than a revolt in full strength by all the sons of Israel.”