BOOK EIGHT
THE MINISTRATIONS OF EMPIRE
− 27 −
THE CISTERN
SUNLIGHT DANCED GAILY OFF THE surface of the pool. The water was so clear you could see twenty feet down to the bottom.
Into this, Telamon flung the fully clothed child.
The girl howled as if she’d been tossed into vinegar.
Thirty-six hours had passed since the night beside the fire. For this interval entire, save two brief halts to rest and water the horses, the party had trekked west paralleling a trace that Telamon identified as the “Sledge Road.” Along this course, the mercenary declared, two legions of Rome had toiled for nearly three years, transporting massive stone blocks and other construction materials for what would become, when completed, the longest and most ambitious aqueduct ever built outside the Italian peninsula.
Michael, tramping at the mercenary’s side, asked him how he knew this.
“I built it.”
The Tenth Fretensis labored for thirty-four months upon this enterprise, Telamon said. “I can show you the quarries in the mountains sixty miles south and the skid roads down which the cut blocks were hauled on sledges drawn by teams of a hundred mules.”
At one site along the way Telamon drew up and indicated a chiseled-stone marker, half buried by drifting sand, called by the Romans memento,
“I remember,”
LEG X FRE ET LEG VI FER
signalizing, he said, the labor of the Tenth Fretensis and the Sixth Ferrata.
“This work is what the legions call penitentiae, ‘penance.’ Its object was to whip a corps gone sour into shape for an upcoming campaign in Armenia. No women were permitted, no wine, no camp slaves, nothing.”
“Did it work?” Michael asked.
“Everything Rome does works.”
The party had trekked now to within sight of the aqueduct itself. Latin ambition had intended these works, upon completion, to supply an as-yet-to-be-built harborage and watering stop along the Gaza-Alexandria highway. The aqueduct’s source and terminus to the west and south, Telamon said, was a great cataract of the upper Nile. Roman engineers had here completed construction on a stairstep ascender powered by screw propellers buried in the current and pumping river water to a reservoir basin the size of a lake. Give these bastards credit, the mercenary said. With a declining slope as slender as one foot per mile they could make water flow.
Construction of the aqueduct had begun in the seventh year of the reign of Claudius—nearly two decades after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth—and had been abandoned after three years of labor with the outbreak of what would become, in Galilee and Jerusalem, the precursor of the First Jewish Revolt. The road remained unfinished still, four years later, in the second year of the imperatorship of Nero.
A spectacular double-tiered waterway ran for eight miles west-by-north toward the sea. It ended in the middle of a basalt wilderness, abandoned thirty-one miles short of its intended terminus, the projected seaport of Aquila Agrippina, a day’s trek east of the Pelusium mouth of the Nile, whose fortress is called in Hebrew Sin, at a coastal village called Firdana.
Twice on that morning and three times during the postnoon, the party was nearly discovered by mounted companies patrolling the aqueduct road. The third time, they found themselves exposed in a featureless basin. They had to lay their horses flat on the earth, holding them by their own weight on the animals’ necks. David was certain the party’s luck had at last run out. But the midday glare was so dazzling that the foe passed by, a hundred paces distant, and did not see them.
The company arose from this escape gravely shaken. When he had gotten them off the pan and under cover, Telamon called the party together. He sat. So did the others.
“Patrol activity will increase in intensity the closer we get to the Nile. One of them is certain to spot us, if not now, then after we have struck the river. Here is what we will do,” he said, indicating himself, Michael, and the sorceress.
“We three, upon first pursuit by a foe we cannot slip free of, will make a demonstration of flight. We’ll mount and ride, as fast as we can, leading the enemy after us.”
The sorceress glared. “What ruse is this?” She confronted the mercenary. “You will turn about and snatch the child yourself!”
“Shut up,” said Telamon.
“Is this,” said the witch, “what scheme you have been plotting all along?”
The man-at-arms motioned David and the girl to his side.
Into the palms of each he set a golden eagle.
“When Michael and the woman and I have drawn the enemy off, you will make for Pelusium, hire a boat, and cross to Corinth.”
At this, even the Nazarene drew up.
“Do you mean—” he began.
“By God,” declared the witch, “the sun has reversed his course in the sky!”
She turned to the child and to the youth, to mark their reactions.
David’s fingers closed about the heavy coin.
The girl pressed hers back at once into the mercenary’s palm. She shook her head adamantly. The child threw her arms about Michael’s waist and would not release him.
“A girl loves her father,” said the sorceress.
Michael stroked the child’s tangled hair. “Oh, I’m not her father,” he said, as casually as if this fact were, and had always been, self-evident.
The mercenary, and the sorceress as well, reacted with surprise.
“I don’t know who her father is,” said the Nazarene. “I encountered the child in prison, alone and made bereft by the death of her mother. I assumed responsibility for her. But I am not her father.”
Telamon studied Michael for long moments. Indeed, the mercenary’s expression seemed to say, I believe you. “The plan remains,” he said. “You, the witch, and I will draw the first patrol off. David and Ruth will flee on their own.”
“Let me be the one to ride,” said David at once. “Take Michael. You can protect him and the girl. I can’t.”
Telamon rejected this. “The pursuers, if they’re Romans, will believe I have the letter or the girl. They will think me too greedy to part with such a prize. Zealots or Nabateans will believe the same. If I know the hearts of these villains—and I do—their thirst for my blood will be even greater than their lust for gold.”
The month was now November. The day lacked but five or six hours till sunset. “We will press ahead to a safe site by the aqueduct itself,” said Telamon. “We’ll rest and water the animals there.”
He charged the sorceress with decocting some brew or chew that would keep the company alert through the hours of darkness. “We’ll rest and refresh ourselves and the animals at the aqueduct. The Nile lies less than five miles beyond. We can’t stop. We must get to the river and be under cover by dawn.”
David had never heard the mercenary’s voice so grave or so charged with fatal purpose.
“What I say next, take to heart, each of you,” Telamon said, “as if your lives depended on it.”
He paused to make sure he had every soul’s attention.
“If you are taken, remember this: break away at once.”
He spoke now directly to Ruth.