“How did you know?” Telamon asked.
The man made of bees made no answer.
“We in the valley feared that you had worked this out somehow on your own and would overhaul Michael and the girl, take them captive, and return them to the Romans, as was your commission from the tribune Severus.”
“When did you learn that the girl was the letter? Did you know it when you welcomed me and the boy?”
Again Timothy simply smiled.
“The Romans believed that we in the valley possessed intelligence of Michael’s route. They commanded us to guide them in pursuit. When we refused, they beat and then murdered the officials of the settlement. They devastated the crop in the fields and ravaged what stores of oil and essence we had set aside for future trade.”
Telamon absorbed this gravely. He asked if the Romans had known of his own passage through the valley. Did they, he inquired of Timothy, interrogate you or others about this, or attempt to learn from you our intended route? “Did they ask if you had seen or spoken with me and the boy?”
“The Romans knew your route, or guessed its contours, from your earlier stop at the stock pens in Gaza. And they knew that your path would follow that of Michael and the child.”
The man made of bees volunteered nothing about his own treatment at the hands of the equites legionis. It was not hard to deduce from his silence, however, that the horse troopers of the Tenth Legion had scourged the fellow with their customary thoroughness.
“We followed your trail from the Anthill to the strand at Cut-off Noses,” said Timothy. “Then from well to well to the site of the Black Hoods’ attack, and finally to the aqueduct.”
Timothy said that he and the kvutzot had found the cairn that sheltered Michael’s bones. They discovered signs of Telamon’s crucifixion and of the children’s labors to succor and resuscitate him.
Twice during the next three days the company had to move, displaced by the proximity and frequency of patrols. The riverine villagers, declared the man made of bees, could be counted upon to shield the fugitives for only so long. They were poor, and fortunes were being offered for information leading to the fugitives’ apprehension.
The gravest danger to Telamon and the children, Timothy said, would come not from the Romans or the Arabs but from the Hebrew communities in Pelusium and especially Alexandria. This city, the greatest not only in Egypt but in all the East, held the most prosperous and prestigious population of Jews in the world, second only to Jerusalem. These were merchants and magistrates, sea traders, army officers, scholars, patrons of the arts. The Great Library had been funded since Ptolemaic times by this community’s largesse.
The Romans may control Egypt militarily and administratively, Timothy declared, but the Jews owned it financially, culturally, and philosophically. The prosperity of their community and indeed its very existence, they believed, was as threatened as the Romans’, though for different reasons, by these missives of the Apostle Paul.
“The emperor blames them, the Jews, for the rise and spread of this Messianic cult, as it has taken root and expanded so spectacularly almost entirely within the Hebrew community.” Indeed the so-called “good news” of the Kingdom of Heaven was intended, Timothy said, at least so far, exclusively for the children of Israel. “The Zealots and the Judaic establishment fear this new cult as it aims, they believe, to supplant and even replace the religion of Moses and the prophets. The secular masses are more afraid of Rome, which may, and already has, struck at the Hebrew community as accomplices to political sedition.”
Such bounties as the emperor had published, Timothy continued, would seem a pittance alongside that which the Pharisaical and Saduceean establishments would put abroad and no doubt already had. “And those who hunt you will be no ragged bands of vigilantes or freebooters, but crack professionals—contract man-hunters, militia, or other organized companies, funded for profit and centrally coordinated, so that if you should elude one such band, allied forces will learn immediately your direction of flight and converge to overhaul you.”
Throughout these initial days, the physician Eryx labored to restore Telamon’s limbs to sensation and mobility. Assisted by others of the party, the surgeon re-dislocated the mercenary’s shoulders. He set the bones again within their sheaths, splinted them, and sucked the inflammation out with compresses of honey, hyssop, and vinegar.
The party had brought gallons of honey in clay jars.
“A man expires on the cross,” the doctor said, “not from loss of blood or trauma to the sinews but from ravagement of the nerves and the internal organs, caused by the drainage of fluids into the lower extremities and the deprivation of the more elevated ones. A man goes blind and deaf. He cannot breathe. The heart cannot support such distress. It gives up.”
The physician explained Telamon’s state in detail to David and to Ruth, who attended, rapt, to his discourse.
“Your friend’s upper limbs will recover. They are coming around already. What concerns me is the trauma sustained by his lower extremities—his legs and feet. They are gangrenous. It is a miracle he has not lost them. The pooled blood over days has ravaged the lower joints and tissues. He must not stand or walk.”
From locals, the kvutzot acquired contemporaneous intelligence of the imperial dragnet. Roman patrols out of Pelusium and Herodopolis ranged along both shores of the Great Bitter Lake. Others, including pursuit parties of Nabatean and Senussi raiders, as well as Black Hoods from Alexandria and Saduceean and Pharisaical shomrim out of Memphis and Heliopolis, prowled the Nile as far upriver as Cene and Aphroditopolis. These place names meant nothing to the boy and girl at first, but with the assistance of maps scratched by Timothy and others in the earth, they came quickly to grasp their position in relation to the desert out of which they had come, the Nile and Alexandria that awaited to the west, and the Roman Sea to the north.
A bounty had been offered by the legate of Alexandria, Tiberius Claudius Modestus, for information leading to the capture of Telamon and the children. The reward was sixty thousand denarii—five years’ pay for a centurion, twenty years’ for a legionary infantryman. Entire downriver tribes including their women and children, Timothy said, had vacated their villages to comb the wastes between the Pelusian Nile and the Reed Lands seeking this prize.
Evening was the time when Telamon suffered most. Heat seemed to leave his body with the retiring sun. He quaked and shivered. Fits of palsy seized him, accompanied by a terror whose source appeared to be possession by spirits or demons. These bouts could not be quelled except by the child Ruth clamping his hands in both of hers and crooning to him as a mother sings for a babe.
Timothy too sat with Telamon through these hours. He fed him honey, dipped upon a wooden spoon and slipped between the mercenary’s lips. Timothy spoke to the man-at-arms in Latin and Greek, though he said he could not tell if the mercenary heard in these hours or, if he did, if he could comprehend.
David attended these sessions as well. It seemed to him that the man made of bees spoke not so much for Telamon’s benefit as to instruct the children in a philosophy, even a faith, that was neither Nazarene nor Roman but derived of his own private suffering and occult thought.
He spoke as if to the man-at-arms:
“All your life you have striven, my friend, to be superior to adversity, to endure heat and cold, hunger and fatigue. You have trained yourself in the academy of privation to want nothing and no one, to need nothing and no one. Now look at you. You are helpless. Dependent utterly upon the charity of others.”