In dialect, Telamon asked if the men knew of a village where three ways met beneath a pair of oaks.
The bear-men responded at once.
“Gone,” said one in rude but comprehensible Greek. “And all who dwelt there.”
Ruth reacted with anguish.
“Murdered by Rome,” said the fellow. “Three days past.”
− 39 −
THE TRIAL
A FORUM OF JUSTICE WAS CONVENED, constituted of a council of seven men, apparently tribal leaders of the district and kinsmen of the slaughtered habitants of the village of the Three Ways. Telamon, David, and Ruth were charged as accessories to, or agents of, the imperial troops who had carried out the massacre. Deliberations lasted for a night and a morning.
The accused were found guilty and sentenced as follows:
The mercenary and both children were to be put to death. A single grave would be dug in a precinct of the watershed reserved for disposal of the bones of murderers, traitors, and outcasts. Over this pit the trio’s throats would be slit. When the life had been bled out of them, their heads would be severed from their bodies and their hands and feet cut off. They would be buried naked, facedown, without arms or any identifying talismans or amulets. No marker would signalize the site of their interment.
This was to ensure that their spirits wandered havenless for eternity.
As punishment was being pronounced, David, to his consternation, found himself weeping. Tears sheeted. He experienced a burning shame at this, yet could not call his despair under control.
The child Ruth stood immediately upon his left, between him and Telamon. Neither she nor the man-at-arms reacted. Both stood unblinking.
The three were ordered remanded to a site of detention, where they would await execution. As the keepers—four warriors of the canton—took hold of the prisoners to remove them to this location, Telamon requested leave to speak.
Could the child, he asked of the council, at least be permitted to visit the devastated village? This was the birthplace of her mother, the mercenary said, and the site to which she had been faring over sea and land from Jerusalem, seeking her kin, whom she had never known. Might she at least see her home, the village of her origin, before the sentence of death was carried out?
This plea was denied.
The issue—as nearly as David could grasp it, delivered as it was by the council chief partly in the Pelasgian tongue and partly in legion-crude Latin—was one of piety and reverence for heaven.
Arcadia herself, the tribunal chief declared, and this region in particular—the canton of the Aleuadai—had in ages past been the province not of the Olympian gods but of the generation of Titans that preceded them. Here this race of immortals had reigned in the eons before the ascension of Zeus. From this place the Titans had been expelled to Tartarus. The clefts and vales of Arcadia retained to this day the grief and woe of that extinguished nation.
Within this territory, the chief declared, all crimes involving blood-guilt or ritual pollution—as this massacre enacted by the Romans—must be cleansed and purified according to the Lost Ways, rites of such antiquity and preserved in such secrecy that they could be carried out by none save the elders and priests versed in this ancient lore.
The council principal took pity, however, on the child Ruth. A representative would be dispatched to the site of slaughter, he pledged, to retrieve and to return to such kin as remained those effects of the slain deemed appropriate by the elders.
This proxy was sent forth.
Telamon and the children were led away to an underground barrow—a sort of root cellar excavated into the side of an eminence. Here they would abide until summoned to their fate. Water in a clay pitcher and bread in a wooden bowl were handed in to them, along with a bucket for their physical necessities.
“How soon?” said Telamon to the senior of the warders.
The execution would be carried out, the man replied, immediately upon the return of the priests from the devastated village.
Telamon took a seat against the rear wall of the cell. The girl sat across from him, looking straight ahead.
David took station as far away from the man-at-arms and the child as the constricted interior would permit.
He could not stop himself from sobbing.
A day passed, throughout which, despite all exertions to the contrary, the youth relived, over and over in his mind, the ordeal of the tribunal and its issue.
Telamon and the children had been held for the trial in the central communal lodge of the village—a pit, like the den of a she-bear, half underground, contrived like a fort, with a bare dirt floor, walls of stone, and a roof of massive hardwood timbers that could not, save with monumental effort, be hacked or sawn through or set ablaze. The single entryway was as narrow as that of a crypt, studded with embrasures, and twice left-turning—clearly meant to expose the men of an invading force to attack on their unshielded side.
The man-at-arms and the children were led into this burrow and seated between two rows of mountain men armed with axes and longswords. By this time, thirty-six hours after the party’s capture, the men of the district, which apparently included a dozen adjoining watersheds whose inhabitants considered themselves blood kin or relations-by-marriage of the despoiled village, had collected both to grieve and to debate a response to the massacre and to other recent outrages.
Numbers of these fellows, it became clear, had served like Telamon as soldiers-for-hire in the war divisions of Rome. The interrogation, when it began, was conducted in Latin, or such pidgin argot as these former legionaries and auxiliaries yet retained. David reckoned he could make out one word in three. These veterans’ wives and children attended as well, along with what seemed like half their livestock. Goats, pigs, stoats, and dogs mingled and settled upon every surface.
The interrogation began at sunset and continued throughout the night.
“Who are you?”
“Where are you from?”
“Why did you come here? Upon what errand?”
The chiefs of the mountain men apparently knew the answers already, or at least so David surmised by their expressions and the interchanges between and among them. They had heard of the imperial dragnet. They knew of the bounties offered by Rome.
Telamon answered for himself and for David and Ruth.
He spoke in dialect and soldier’s slang. He kept his responses short. He appealed to no shared lineage or nationality. He did not attempt to extenuate any actions taken by him or the children, nor did he endeavor to mount any elaborate defense. Clearly the tribunal respected this. Here was manly conduct, worthy of a warrior. David dared to indulge a glimmer of hope.
Telamon declared for the council that the child Ruth sought the village of her deceased mother, believing that her kin would welcome her and that she and her companions would be safe there.
The council considered this.
“Where do you go now?”
“Our aim is Corinth.”
“To do what?”
Telamon told of the Apostle’s letter and the party’s intention to deliver it to the underground community in that city.
“Our village, then,” declared the chief interrogator, “was burned because of you. Our people were massacred on account of your errand.”
Telamon did not contest this.
The chief indicated the child Ruth.