The riders came up fast and loud.
Their leaders reined in, ringing the children. Steam jetted from the horses’ nostrils; slaver slung from their muzzles. The iron bits of their bridles worked in the beasts’ jaws. David could hear the metal scraping against the animals’ teeth as they, the horses, sought to bite the iron and keep it from digging into the flesh of their gums.
The lead rider sprang down. He wore thorn boots beneath the baggy silwar khammous trousers favored by brigands and long-distance raiders. The weapon in his fist was a Syrian saber with a curved blade and a crossguard. With this he indicated Telamon, who had managed to rise, somehow, to his knees.
“This is the man!” the leader called to his comrades.
Two more riders dismounted. The first, with a blow of his lance, disarmed David of his gladius. The second seized the youth by the hair and drove him knees-first into the sand.
“Unarmed,” he called to the others.
The lead rider loomed above the girl. “You are the mute,” he said.
The child backed before him, clutching her blade.
“And you?” The leader addressed David. “The novice-at-arms.”
Telamon struggled to rise. He could not. He lurched, unarmed and barely able to see or speak, to a position on his knees before the leader, as if to defend the children. The girl dashed to his side. David felt himself hauled roughly to his feet by the rider who held him. The boy could sense the fellow’s saber at his neck. He thought, They will take my head now.
The leader regarded Telamon.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?”
The rider extended his right arm before the mercenary. David and Ruth stared. Crawling upon the back of the fellow’s hand and wrist, and emerging in twos and threes from beneath the hem of his sleeve, came a tidy cluster of bees.
BOOK NINE
THE NILE
− 34 −
THE MAN MADE OF BEES
THE MAN MADE OF BEES’ name, David recalled, was Timothy.
He and his comrades had a Greek doctor with them. The physician’s name was Eryximachus—Eryx for short. The company called themselves by the Hebrew term kvutzot, “young warriors.” David recognized a number from the Anthill.
For nine days Timothy and his companions remained with Telamon and the children, moving them—sometimes in daylight, more frequently after dark—from cave to cloistered camp to cave again; then, when such refuges became untenable on account of the number and frequency of patrols of Romans and Arabs and Egyptians scouring the region, to such stilt-founded hamlets and “shy camps” of the riverine tribes as they deemed safe, at least for a night or part of one. Clearly these fellows knew the ground and every covert upon it.
For the first time in what seemed like months David had enough water to drink. “I could guzzle the whole river,” he said. The physician would not let him. He restored the boy, and Ruth, by stages. Their meal was a gruel made of the stalks of fennel baked in a cone-topped clay oven called a tagine with a type of river bream that the locals ate—head and all—and assorted root vegetables whose names David could neither pronounce nor remember.
These reed lands, made fertile by the rich silt that descended out of the highlands of Ethiopia and the Sudan each year with the flood, grew flax, rice, wheat, and millet in quantities unimaginable. David marveled at such a landscape of bounty. No hills were found in this quadrant of Egypt. One mounted for a vantage to towers made of woven weeds and transited from place to place not by foot but by raft or reed boat. A traveler went “down to” Alexandria, though the direction by the stars was north.
The villages along this section of the Nile were not independent but for millennia had been ruled as precincts of the fiefdoms of the Twenty-Seven Great Families of Egypt. The fellahs of these colonies had survived twenty-two centuries of bondage under the pharaohs, as well as conquest by Alexander, subsequent rule of the Ptolemies, and, since the days of Caesar and Mark Antony, of incorporation into the empire of Rome.
A hard, proud poverty illumined these riparian races. Faces shone as charcoal, burned by the sun. Hair was worn short by the women and long by the men, wound and wrapped within white cowls called toctinai, or “tocks.” At dusk the tillers bathed, not in the river, which was too thick with sediment, but in elevated side channels called mantera, to which the water had been lifted by weighted cranes and sluiced till it was clear as sunlight. Here, at this hour only, the men unbound their hair. They sang as they bathed (and their wives and daughters serenaded them as well), flinging their jet tresses over their heads to float before them in the current, while each man wrung his own with arms outstretched.
To David this was a sight of unwonted charm and delight. With such toil these fellows labored, and for such slender compensation! Yet how contented they seemed. Men of the Reed Lands wore neither tunics nor trousers but short wrapped skirts called pteratai, “waders,” made of linen. Foremen wore a skirt of longer length to show that they didn’t have to tread so deeply into the mud.
Dwellings were built on stilts in this country. One passed between these upon plank walkways that had been laid out, not above the water’s surface in plain sight, but tucked below at ankle- and even calf-depth to confuse and frustrate an invader. Toddlers and grandmothers knew these tracks by heart. They glided upon them as swiftly as darting carp. Those of Timothy’s party, on the other hand, as intimate as they were with the villagers and their ways, plunged to their hocks in the muck when they dared these covert walkways, much to the amusement of the river dwellers.
The Nile dominated everything in this land of reeds. Tillers harvested in the manner of their ancestors. The gods here were the sun and the river. Such affairs of state as dominated discourse in Alexandria or Pelusium seemed in this quarter so remote they might as well be proceedings upon the moon. In fact, this orb, called here by her Greek names Phoebe, “Bright,” and Europa, “Broad Face,” was closer, as she ruled over the night with gentle benediction, bringing surcease from toil.
By the fourth day, Telamon could speak. He could sit up and take food, even rise to his feet, though only with extreme difficulty and incapacitating pain. To take a step, or even stand for more than a moment, was out of the question. The girl and boy attended upon him, never straying more than a few paces from his side.
“Why,” Telamon asked Timothy that evening, “did you come after me?”
“To kill you,” said the man made of bees. “Or save you, whichever course you permitted.”
Telamon sat this evening in a near-upright position, supported against a saddle with its blanket rolled for a bolster. The company, including several of the kvutzot, roosted around a pit fire of acacia upon a small, dry island, called a “traveler,” adjacent to a village of the Reed Lands.
“News of the calamity at the Anthill reached us in the Lavender Valley within thirty-six hours. Another day, and Roman cavalry from Jerusalem appeared in force. They were searching for the letter—the epistle written by Paul the Apostle and intended for the polis mysteriodis, the hidden community in Corinth, Greece.
“The Romans had learned that the Nazarene Michael and the girl-child had stopped with us for a night in their flight. The soldiers believed that Michael carried the letter, or that he knew where it was, and hastened now to acquire it. They had no idea, then, that the girl herself was the letter, that she bore its contents within her memory.”