He told Michael and the sorceress about the sighting last night.
“Why do they ride with torches? Not to help them see. They can do that easily by the light in the sky. The torches were for us. To show us how near our pursuers are and how fast they’re closing on us.”
Michael again pleaded with Telamon to leave him behind. “Take the child and flee. You have a chance without me slowing you down.”
Telamon ignored this.
“Severus’s own lieutenant was on the strand at Cut-Off Noses,” he said. “Why? The officer the tribune trusts before all others. Dispatched by thirty-oared cutter after the initial column of cavalry pursuing us. Why?”
The man-at-arms confronted the sorceress.
“Something changed, didn’t it? What? You were there in the prison. Severus cut you loose and put you on a horse. What did he tell you?”
The man-at-arms glanced, for the briefest of moments, to the girl-child. His look said, This is why I have kept the witch.
The sorceress insisted, in the most emphatic terms, that she knew nothing.
“What do you imagine,” said Telamon, “that the Romans will do with you when they overhaul us? They will hand you over to the Arabs for their pleasure. Tell us what you know, and we have a chance.”
“Nothing,” the sorceress declared. “I know nothing!”
Telamon indicated the wilderness ahead. The landscape was constituted of flat featureless desert cut by a series of dolomite ranges, some as high as two thousand feet.
“We don’t dare enter those mountains. They’re full of dead ends and blind canyons. But we can’t remain here on the flat. The Arabs and Romans will run us down in a another day, maybe sooner.”
The fugitives glanced behind them to the east. The twin columns of their pursuers’ dust could be seen maneuvering exactly as Telamon had pronounced, each advancing at the oblique, to contain and direct the party in its flight.
Telamon drove the company on.
Past noon they rounded the base of a ridge and, trooping along it for a quarter hour, found themselves walled off by a sheer face with no passage around or through. Fortune alone preserved them, at the ultimate instant, when an alley presented itself.
Behind them the raiders and Romans, both columns, had entered this runway. They were close enough now that the sun’s reflection off their elevated lance points could be glimpsed within the dust that obscured their actual mass.
Both mules were now lathered and flagging. The pony could no longer elevate its head. Telamon ordered it abandoned. He took its load onto his own back.
Twice Michael attempted to rise from the litter and walk on his own. Each time he faltered. Each time the girl helped him back onto the carrier.
The party had mounted now to an escarpment, a stony plateau of dolomite and schist without brush or cover.
The rising surface of the scarp seemed to extend to infinity.
The mule dragging Michael began to founder. Telamon put off the baggage he was carrying. He abandoned it. He took the Nazarene upon his shoulder. David dragged both mules. The girl bolted ahead in dashes, scouting the trail, then scurrying back. Behind them now they could see the twin columns clearly.
At Telamon’s orders the party dumped every item of kit that wasn’t essential. “It’s loot,” he said. “It’ll slow these sons-of-whores down.”
Indeed this proved true. The pursuers diverted, snatching up Telamon’s targeteer shield and pack blankets, and a single pilum that the mercenary had discarded. David peered behind. For an interval—how brief the boy could not say, so exhausted was he—he permitted himself to believe that they in flight had put additional daylight between themselves and their pursuers.
Then the girl came sprinting back from ahead.
David saw her eyes.
“What?” Telamon demanded.
The child was pointing up the trail and gesticulating in distress.
Telamon set Michael down. He dashed forward, trailing the girl.
David followed.
The escarpment ended.
A cliff fell off before them.
The plateau continued for miles ahead. They could see it. The same scaly dolomite, the same level schist, the same featureless pan.
Except a thirty-foot-wide chasm separated the plain they stood upon from its continuation of the far side.
Telamon peered down.
The rift plunged hundreds of feet.
David had hurried up now. So had the witch.
“There must be a way down,” Telamon said. He sent the woman and the boy over the edge to scout for trails. “Look for a path. An animal track. Anything we can use to get off this summit.”
He himself hastened back to retrieve Michael.
When he returned, the sorceress had found a goat trace.
Dragging the mules bawling and skittering, the party succeeded in descending fifty feet, more or less, by switchbacks so narrow that one person only could proceed and so precipitous that that solitary individual must advance only by clinging to hand-cracks in the sheer face.
The trail ended.
The mules refused to budge.
The party collected on a shelf barely broad enough to hold its number.
Telamon sent David back up the path to report on the raiders’ approach. “Don’t let them see you. There’s a chance they’ll miss our track down this face.”
Telamon set Michael down.
“You’re an optimist,” the Nazarene croaked hoarsely.
The girl stepped to her father. Taking his weight, she helped settle him into a cranny against the escarpment wall.
Telamon scanned the far cliff face.
So close!
His glance picked out a rock formation directly across—a stone tower with a tapered peak, perhaps a dozen feet high. Strong. As big around as a stone chimney.
“Get my bow,” Telamon commanded the sorceress, indicating one of the panniers on the stronger mule’s back. “My bow and a rope.”
“To do what?”
“Just get it.”
The witch obeyed.
From above, David called, “The raiders are coming straight at us! A thousand yards.”
Telamon rigged the rope to an arrow so that its first few feet formed a loop, like a lasso one might use to catch a horse.
Drawing his bow to its fullest stretch, he shot the bolt across the chasm toward the chimney outcrop on the far side.
“Are you mad?” cried the sorceress.
The others stared, equally incredulous.
The witch bawled. “If you want to shoot, shoot at the Arabs!”
Telamon was trying to lob the looped rope across the crevasse, to lasso the chimney outcrop on the far side.
The first shot fell far short. The weight of the rope was too great. Arrow and rope plunged away into the chasm.
“Have you lost your wits?” cried the sorceress. “The rope is too heavy. You can’t reach across this void, and even if you could . . .”
Telamon reeled the rope and arrow back.
He shot again.
Again.
Each time the heavy line fell short.
“Seven hundred yards!” David called.
“Give us weapons!” howled the witch. “Let us fight!”
Telamon tried again with the bow. His mightiest pull yet. Arrow and rope sailed with spectacular power across the chasm.
Still short.
Telamon hauled the line back, hand over hand, to try again.
Suddenly the girl-child appeared before him.