But he could confirm Michael’s whereabouts neither by sight nor by reliable intelligence. He could not determine with certainty even if the Nazarene had been brought to this place.
“I will find him,” said the sorceress when Telamon returned to the wadi.
“Go with her,” said Telamon to David. The sun had begun its plunge to the horizon.
Telamon passed the interval approaching twilight alone with the girl at their encampment.
The man-at-arms performed his calisthenics. He whetted the edges of his weapons. He repacked the mules’ side bags and panniers, making them ready upon sudden notice. He set these rigs beside each animal but did yet load their weight onto the beasts’ backs.
The girl observed every move the mercenary made. She studied with particular keenness his weapons drills. When Telamon practiced the stance called “castling,” the girl planted her own feet exactly as he did and struck the pose with identical scrupulousness. Rehearsing the tumbling motion called “beetling,” the mercenary looked up to see the child mimicking his moves with uncanny exactitude.
At intervals the girl approached the mercenary, making urgent sounds and gestures to the effect—or so the man-at-arms presumed—that the rescuers, meaning Telamon and David, must not delay but strike at once against the raiders, before her father Michael had been tortured or killed.
Telamon sought to communicate with the child, but the signs by which she attempted to express herself left him confounded. He could not tell if she was simpleminded or merely unnerved, as any child might be in such circumstances.
The girl, discerning Telamon’s scrutiny of her, glowered back with knuckles on hips and a glare of indignation. Her stance seemed to proclaim, Because I am dumb does not mean I am stupid.
“How old are you?” Telamon asked.
The child shrugged.
“Where from? Where were you born?”
Another shrug.
“Could you ever speak?”
The girl shook her head.
Telamon studied her.
“How does a sprat like you know how to write? Who taught you? Can you make more than the one word you scribbled at the Anthill?”
The girl scrawled in the sand.
MITERA
“Your mother taught you?”
The child confirmed this.
“Where is she now?”
The child faced Telamon defiantly.
“Dead? How long?”
Two fingers.
The mercenary absorbed this.
“When we go in tonight after your father, you’ll stay here with the mules.”
The girl stamped and shook her head vehemently.
“Someone must watch the animals. They must be ready when we flee.”
The child mimed the posture of the sorceress. So perfectly did she catch this attitude that Telamon could not hold back a laugh.
“Not her,” he said. “You.”
The girl stomped again and scowled. Again she struck a likeness of the witch. This time she pointed forcefully to Telamon’s gladius. She drew her hand across her throat.
“Don’t trust her, do you?”
The child’s motion again urged, Kill her! Why, the girl’s expression seemed to demand, do you permit this evil woman to remain?
Telamon again studied the child. He seemed unable to decide if she was a crude little brute or a cunning and keen observer of the issues of war.
“Does the name Caesar mean anything to you? I mean the original Caesar, who commanded my legion, the Tenth, a century past, in Gaul?”
The child’s look answered yes.
Telamon was not sure he believed her. But his posture seemed to soften somewhat. The man-at-arms had been standing. He had loomed over the girl at his full height. Now he bent at the knee and knelt, so that his eyes descended to the same level as hers.
“In Gaul, a great enemy of Caesar’s, named Vercingetorix, once sent scouts on horseback to dog the legions’ column. Keen young officers of the Romans urged their commander, ‘Let us ride out and kill these barbarians.’ But Caesar would not permit this. ‘The foe sending scouts believes he spies upon us. But it is we who spy upon him,’ Caesar explained to his officers. ‘I fear the enemy only when I cannot see him. So long as he remains close, I rest at ease.’ ”
The child absorbed this.
Does she understand? Telamon’s expression seemed to wonder.
The girl straightened and gestured in the direction of the slavers’ camp. She struck her chest with the flat of her palm.
Take me! Tonight take me!
Telamon shook his head.
“There will be armed men in that camp. Eight at least, maybe more.”
The girl’s jaw worked. She had a fistful of stones and now hurled these one after another, hard, against the wall of the wadi. She did not throw like a girl.
Night fell.
The sorceress and David had not returned.
The girl had become so agitated that Telamon was not certain he could constrain her.
“Will your father give up the letter to the Arabs?”
The child’s glance flared.
“If they torture him? Do you think he has given it up already?”
Never, declared the girl’s expression.
“Why does he care so much? Why do you? What is the letter to you? What good do you imagine it will do?”
The girl stood to her full height, jaw jutting.
A rustle came from the seaward approach. Footfalls could be heard and then David and the sorceress materialized from the dark.
“The man you seek, called Michael, is bound and muffled upon the strand,” said the witch. “The slavers are scourging him with the knotted rope and with fire.”
− 16 −
THE SLAVERS’ CAMP
DAVID COULD SEE MICHAEL NOW. The Nazarene hung limp, lashed by his wrists to the flank of a beached sardine boat. A fire of mounded coals glowed in the sand at his feet.
The raiders’ camp squatted among careened fishing vessels on the strand of the disused anchorage. A pair of sentinel fires flanked the site with a space of about fifty paces between them. The Great Bear had reached its nadir; the blazes had begun to burn down. Time was the Roman third watch, past midnight but not yet into the Hour of Embers, when watch fires must be restoked and banked to last till dawn.
Telamon had left the sorceress in the wadi with the mules and the horse. The girl-child had pleaded desperately in her wordless tongue to be permitted to go with Telamon and David. Instead the mercenary had left her to stand sentry over the witch. Into the child’s hands he set David’s dolabra, the whetted entrenching tool with which he, Telamon, had slain two of the bandits in the original clash at the Narrows. He instructed the child, for the sorceress to hear: “If this woman attempts treachery, split her guts.”
Telamon took only the boy with him, arming himself with the gladius and a length of rope. He strapped two throwing daggers to his ankles. David he outfitted with a single javelin. The youth carried a dagger of his own.
Man and boy entered the sea a quarter mile east of the slavers’ camp, slithering out beyond the flare of the bonfires. The water was so shallow here—reaching barely to a standing man’s calf—that the mercenary and the youth could not swim or even dog-paddle but must, lying prone upon the gravelly bottom, propel themselves like crayfish, by fingers and toes, while their heads and the upper portions of their shoulders and backs peeked visibly above the surface.