After dark of this third night, David ventured abroad, seeking any sign that might tell the children where they were. Their camp sat, though neither knew it, within a day’s march of Memphis and forty miles from the port city of Pelusium and the easternmost mouth of the Nile.
The country was populated.
From a shallow rise a quarter mile from their hiding place (the desert ran right up to the salt waterline below), David could see fires—a dozen scattered to the south and more in clusters along the shore to the north.
“A village,” he reported back at camp. “People.”
By sign the girl communicated, We must go back. Into the desert. We will be found here.
“Are you crazy?” said David.
Both children had become so burned by the sun and so desiccated from want of water that their mouths would not close. The ducts of their eyes could no longer produce tears. Desert sores ravaged their faces, hands, and feet, producing open cracks and fissures that grew wider each day and sent the pain of rending flesh through them with the slightest bump or jostle. Their lips were so blistered that even the few swallows of water they dripped down their throats each evening produced a sensation like fire.
The inside of David’s skull felt like it was roasting, as if the brain in its pan were being cooked—even at night, even out of the sun.
David realized he could no longer tell reality from vision.
“We must risk approaching one of the villages,” he told Ruth. “For help. For water. We can’t continue like this.”
Twice in that night patrols passed—one mounted, one afoot—so close that the children could hear the speech of the searchers and smell the palm-grease stink of their torches.
David almost cried out.
Recalling later, he believed he had.
The patrols passed on.
Later that night—or maybe, David thought, it was the following night—the youth sat watching Ruth minister to Telamon’s wounds and abscesses. What water they could find during the day went to this tendance, not to quench their own thirst.
David considered killing Telamon.
A thrust with his dagger . . . even a feeble blow to the head from a stone would suffice.
The boy would have water then.
He might survive.
He debated murdering Ruth.
The youth weighed a number of options. I must be canny, he thought. The girl is clever. And she fights like a wildcat.
The boy was debating between strangling her in her sleep or suffocating her by burying her face in the sand, when he noticed the child react to something.
He looked and saw what it was.
One of the slits that were Telamon’s eyes had opened partially.
The sight struck David with horror. He peered. The mercenary’s eye reminded him of orbs he’d seen in the shore market on dead, or nearly dead, fish. The pupil had that same flat, affectless stare. This was, to David, the most grotesque apparition he had ever seen.
Ruth’s reaction was the opposite. She sat up at once in an aspect of sudden and soaring hope.
Telamon managed somehow to turn his head toward the girl and open his eye a tiny jot wider.
The mercenary’s right hand, which had been lying palm-down on the ground cloth beneath him, turned over, becoming palm-up.
Ruth set at once her child’s hand within the bowl of the man-at-arms’ palm. Telamon’s eye fell shut, as if he lacked the strength to hold it open even a moment longer.
But his fingers closed about Ruth’s hand.
When David’s glance rose to the girl’s face, he saw a single tear tracing a trail down the grime of her cheek.
− 33 −
PURSUERS
DAVID SAW THE DUST FIRST, at noon in the blue distance, advancing out of the north, the direction from which the main of the parties seeking them had emerged during the trek from the aqueduct. The youth at first took the cloud for a squall of wind or migdal, “dust tower.” Such whirlwinds appeared in this wilderness by the hundreds during the heat of the day.
Then the migdal parted and became two.
The pair of towers continued advancing, one along the margin of the reed lands, the other east in open desert.
David stood.
The girl held for a count of thirty. Then she rose too.
The boy and girl scrambled now, struggling to manhandle Telamon’s weight onto the drag litter. “Which way?” David peered about him.
Ruth had become as unstrung as he.
The children simply grabbed the poles of the litter and dragged it, as best they could, away from the approaching horsemen.
The Hebrew language, as has been noted, is bereft of profane expression. David employed Arabic instead. He cursed the child Ruth, and the black heart of heaven, and his own rotten luck.
We will be captured!
Put to the flame!
Crucified!
The boy cursed his own cowardly heart, which would abandon the man-at-arms if only shame and self-outrage would release their grip upon him. How heavy his master had become! How could the man weigh so much still, when every drop of fluid had been wrung from his guts?
The litter gouged deep creases in the earth, leaving tracks that a blind man could follow.
The girl’s strength was gone. Her limb of the litter veered and tottered.
“Pull, damn you!”
The verge of a dry wadi stood only half a furlong from where the children labored. A place to hide if they could but lift the stretcher so it would not leave tracks! But their final vigor had fled. David cut the man-at-arms free.
“Drag him by his heels!”
The children did.
With excruciating exertion the boy and girl succeeded in hauling their cargo to the lip of the dry riverbed. They slid him down like a log sledge. The man-at-arms’ head dragged in the sand. Nothing on his body moved. He was dead weight. A corpse.
David dropped his master into a trough at the bottom of the cutbank. The boy clambered with what little force he retained back up to the crest.
The two clouds pursuing them had converged.
The youth could see horses now.
He slewed back down the slope. “Bury him!”
With their hands the children scraped sand and gravel over the man-at-arms’ prostrate form. From the bank they tore up hyssop and winter broom. They stacked these sedges about and atop the mound of sand, from which half the mercenary’s body yet protruded.
Telamon groaned and rolled onto one elbow. “Give me a blade!”
The children stared.
The man-at-arms’ features contorted from the pain of trying to lift his own weight.
“My sword! Give it to me!”
The girl obeyed.
The man’s fingers could not close.
The gladius spilled from his hand.
David could hear the horses now. The earth in the wadi trembled.
The girl stood, facing in the direction from which the first pursuit party advanced.
She clutched her X dagger.
David snatched the man-at-arms’ sword from the dirt.
He too stood.
The children could hear men’s voices now.
Around one wing of the dry riverbed rode the foremost pursuers.
More emerged around the facing flank.
Not Romans.
Not Black Hoods.
Not Nabateans.
David straightened to his full height, gripping the gladius. He faced toward the horsemen advancing from the left wing.
Ruth with her dagger turned to the column spurring from the right.