“You understand,” he said at last, “that I and my men cannot go forward with you.”
Telamon’s expression acknowledged this.
“The sea crossing to Greece will be perilous in the extreme,” Timothy said. “The sailing season has ended. Already winter gales blow. The Romans themselves will not risk a crossing in any vessel smaller than a four-banker.” He paused and smiled. “Yet, for enough gold, I imagine you will find in the port of Pelusium some small-craft skipper reckless enough, or greedy enough, to try.”
Telamon did not contest this.
He extended his hand.
“Thank you, my friend.”
The man made of bees clasped Telamon’s hand in his. “What will you do,” he asked, “when you reach Corinth?”
The man-at-arms turned toward Ruth.
His eyes met hers and held them.
“That which this child commands,” he said, “I shall perform.”
BOOK TEN
ARCADIA
− 36 −
THE SEA IN WINTER
THE GIRL STRODE AHEAD, BAREFOOT, treading over spiny leaves of oak and sharp stones as if upon a carpet of wool. She waved back to the man and boy. Come! Follow! Why do you tarry?
The country called Hellas is constituted of two distinct regions—a northern and a southern—conjoined by an isthmus.
Upon this neck of land sits the city of Corinth. She is one of the great poleis of Greece, a mighty port of commerce and seat of power on a par, or nearly so, with Thebes and Argos, Athens and Sparta.
The High City, the Acrocorinth, rises upon an eminence overlooking the arms of the Gulf of Corinth and the Saronic Bay. From the headland northwest of the city one can see on clement days across to Iteas Bay and the bluffs beyond which the Priestess’s Road ascends to Delphi and the great sanctuary of Apollo.
To the east of Corinth twenty-two miles lies the city of Megara, a sea and land power and rival in ancient days to Athens. Trek farther and you enter Attica herself, whose principal polis, Athens, lies but twenty-five more miles down the shoreline road. This had been little more than a cart path when the Romans acquired dominion over Hellas. They built it up into a legitimate highway.
South of Corinth lies the Peloponnese, the mountainous spine of southern Greece. Argos, capital of ancient Mycenae and seat of Agamemnon of old, is situated but two days’ tramp away, forty miles. South of these lies the region of Lakedaemon, whose principal polities are Sparta and her tributaries, Pellana and Selassia, as well as Geronthrai and the port of Kythera. The inhabitants of these cities and of others in neighboring Messenia are called perioikoi, the “dwellers around.” Their armies are compelled by ancient treaty to follow the Spartans “whithersoever they shall lead.”
All these states of southern and northern Greece as well as their hinter villages lay now under the heel of Rome. Intercity and overseas commerce were conducted using Roman coin and currency and accounted by Roman weights and measures. Disputes at law were adjudicated in Roman courts, presided over by Roman magistrates. Days of the week and months of the year were Roman on all official documents and correspondence, though the cities and towns of Hellas retained for domestic usage their ancient calendars.
The navies of the Greek city-states trained and sailed under ensigns bearing the eagle of the emperor. Their oarsmen were paid in Roman specie and rowed under Roman command.
North of Lakedaemon, dominating the mountainous woodlands that transect the Peloponnese, sprawls the region of Arcadia, the largest in Greece and, save the wild northernmost provinces abutting Macedonia and Illyria, the least domesticated.
Across this region Telamon and the children advanced, bound for Corinth.
Timothy had remained with the mercenary four days beyond that terminal evening. The main of his company, seven men mounted, with four pack mules, set off at once on the recrossing of Sinai to the Lavender Valley. Three men, including Timothy, remained with Telamon and the children.
These were joined on the third day by a river barge captain from the port of Pelusium, an Egyptian Jew named Tomer (“Upright”), a cousin of one of Timothy’s comrades, and his son, a youth of fourteen years serving as mate and steersman. Their vessel was a raft constructed entirely of reeds. The craft looked as if it would sink under the weight of two men, but, upon the stream, its skipper declared, it could bear 220 sacks of grain, enough fodder to feed a cohort of cavalry for seven days, or forty hundredweight casks of oil or wine. The barge’s draft was so shallow that it could glide, propelled by a single stern sweep, across a plain of reeds no deeper than a man’s ankles.
Father and son transported the fugitives down the Nile not to Pelusium, which they adjudged too dangerous, but—transiting west via canals and tributary channels known, it seemed, only to them—to Alexandria herself. These would accept no remuneration, neither sire nor scion, but had embarked upon the journey, they declared, for the adventure only.
With gleeful satisfaction the barge skipper reported that the pursuit of Telamon and the girl Ruth had become a worldwide sensation.
“Songs are being written about you, my lass. You are more famous in Egypt than the first Cleopatra! Tales of your trials and hairbreadth escapes have crossed the sea even to Rome. The emperor himself clamors for your head!”
The final proposition urged upon Telamon by Timothy (which he declared of critical importance now, in light of the scale and intensity of the dragnet seeking the party’s capture) was that Ruth commit to paper the contents of the Apostle Paul’s letter. To this end he produced the necessary implements and pressed these into the man-at-arms’ keeping. “God forbid something should happen to this child. You must have the epistle in some form that may survive.”
Timothy would not release Telamon until he, the mercenary, had pledged on his honor to effect this.
It was the bargeman Tomer who saw Telamon and the children safely down the Nile to Alexandria, to the harbor precinct of Posidium, and into the tavern-based company of “those who know how to keep their cheese-holes shut.”
The westernmost embarkation quay of Alexandria—and the most likely to escape imperial observation—is called the Portus Eunostos, the Old Port. Posidium perches upon its extremity. The Great Harbor itself, lying immediately to the east, is called the Pschent, the “Double Crown,” because its arms, sixteen stades tip to tip, flank the Pharos lighthouse, setting it off like a jewel within a royal tiara. The Great Causeway, the Heptastadion, links the mainland to Pharos Island. Within these precincts and other neighboring quarters, declared the barge skipper, reside seamen of such intrepidity as would challenge the Hyperborean maelstrom in January.
In the event, Telamon and the children discovered, none would consent to put forth. David could see why. Stationing himself that first morning upon the strand between the seawall called the Pteron, “the Wing,” and the causeway that led to the Lighthouse, he experienced such a blow, ripping across even the protected precinct of the harbor, called the Goblet, that he must plant his feet wider than shoulder width and sink his soles mightily into the sand to keep from being blown over. Not a solitary craft dared the offing. Skiffs and bumboats were beached keels-up, with lines lashed to great stones to hold them from bowling. Whitecaps coursed across an arena of savage chop, their crests whipped clean by a hard, spumy gale. And this was within the harbor.