“Because of this girl.”
Telamon stood.
“If you want a life, take mine.”
The chief and the council studied the man-at-arms. They took in Telamon’s many wounds and his state of physical infirmity.
“You are of these hills,” said the headman. “Yet in thrice ten years you have never returned.”
“I’m here now.”
“Not by your own wish. Are you a Christian?”
“No.”
“A Roman?”
Telamon shook his head.
“Are you this girl’s father?”
“No.”
“What relation, then?”
“None.”
“Why offer your life for hers?”
“And for the boy’s.”
The council conducted its deliberations where it sat. The judges debated earnestly and at great length, while the listeners attended with keen interest, following every nuance of the examination.
The prisoners’ fate turned, apparently, upon points both subtle and self-contradictory. Was the child truly the cause of the massacre? Indirectly, indeed. Yet the slaughter was carried out by the Romans acting for their own purposes. The child and her comrades had nothing to do with this. In fact, they, the captives, were not only in ignorance of this crime, but their own actions and objectives could not have been in greater opposition to it.
All night the council debated. Few listeners vacated, and those who did were replaced at once by others, all of whom seemed to be fully informed and conversant with the latest twist in the deliberations.
At noon, sentence was handed down.
The day passed, and the night. At dawn a dame appeared with a meal. The keepers unsealed the entry to the barrow—three heavy planks in the chamber’s outer facing—and handed her in.
This was the first chance the child Ruth had had to communicate with a woman of the canton. By sign the girl inquired of her mother. Did any in this village or that of the Three Ways remember her? Was she recalled fondly or with kind regard?
“She left to follow the legions,” declared the dame. “That will tell you all you need to know.”
Ruth blanched to hear this.
The woman took the bucket with the night soil and replaced it with a fresh vessel.
“Forget her,” the dame said to the child. “She was a soldier’s whore.”
All day David and his companions listened to the sounds of men coming and going. Hounds bayed. Horses could be heard, both ridden and led.
“The priests returning?”
Telamon shook his head.
Toward dusk they heard the clinking of armor and weapons and other sounds of horses being saddled. Men’s footsteps sounded immediately outside.
Planks were removed again from the barrow’s facing.
“Get out!”
Telamon and the children stepped forth into the fading daylight.
Their weapons and baggage were dumped at their feet.
Riders and armed men of the village could be seen hastening in all directions. Women and children followed carrying great bundles, apparently of their and their kin’s necessities.
“Go! Get away from here!” Telamon and the children were told again.
“What has happened?
The chief keeper, himself making haste to depart, answered.
During the night an elite reconnaissance element of Roman cavalry had appeared at an overhill hamlet, led by a young lieutenant who claimed to have crossed by sea from Alexandria. His detachment had been dispatched, this officer said, from a march-camp of two cohorts, eight hundred men, established two nights previous at Orchomenos, a day’s trek north of the village. Infantry and mounted contingents of this formation would be advancing into the canton within forty-eight hours, said the lieutenant.
This column would advance from village to village.
It would be seeking Telamon and the girl.
The lieutenant identified the mercenary by name and appended a physical description. He himself, the officer said, had clashed with this villain. He warned the leaders of the overhill hamlet that his commanders were in possession of reliable intelligence that they, or others of the adjacent villages, had captured this renegade and the girl-child he protected and that indeed they held these fugitives still.
The lieutenant demanded that the captives be handed over to him at once. He cited a reward of bountiful munificence, then threatened to devastate the entire region if he found that the inhabitants had indeed detained the man and the child but failed to turn them over.
“Where,” asked Telamon, “is this lieutenant now?”
“Rode off,” the keeper answered. “With nothing.”
The mountain people were packing up the whole village, clearly intending to move deeper into the hills, readying to fight.
“And us?” said Telamon. “Why have your people not turned us in?”
Mates of the keeper hastened up, leading horses. The fellow sprang aboard. He indicated the council elders, also mounted, preparing to move out.
“If the Romans want you dead,” he said, “our wish is that you live.”
The mountain men appeared cheerful, or at the least undaunted, at the prospect of abandoning their homes for the winter fastnesses. The dames’ and elders’ eyes shone. Even the dogs capered underfoot in hale spirits.
All animosity toward Telamon and the children had fled. The village seemed to regard their late captives as comrades, and even, in some unvoiced way, as family. As the man-at-arms and his charges collected their weapons and kit, the council chief reined in above them. Two youths brought parched meat in a wrapper of straw.
“Where will you go, brother?”
“Where we intended,” said Telamon, “before your hospitality intercepted us.”
The chief laughed. He offered the older of the youths—his own nephew, he said—as a guide.
A commotion intervened. Torches could be seen, mounting the slope from the watershed valley. “The priests,” someone cried. “Returning from the Three Ways.”
At once all decampment ceased. The people swarmed toward the arrivals. Telamon and the children swelled this crush.
The envoys were two, an older man and a younger, leading a single mule. Grieving relations surrounded them, eager for their report. How many were slain? Had any survived? What did the envoys find?
The priests distributed bundles from the devastated village—such possessions or personal effects of relatives as had not been lost to fire or pillage. A great number of these were taken in hand by the kin of the massacred. Toward the end, the elder of the priests produced a small parcel “for the child who came.”
This was for Ruth.
Few among the villagers took notice of this exchange. The priest himself handed off the bundle with barely a glance.
But the child Ruth received this parcel with grave appreciation.
The bundle was wrapped in a doeskin pouch cinched at its neck with a rawhide thong. David moved beside Ruth to help and to see. Telamon stood at the child’s opposite shoulder.
The parcel, the priest was saying, had been put together specifically for Ruth, by her kin, apparently years earlier, in anticipation of her eventual arrival. It held items sent home from foreign lands over a period of a decade or more by her mother.
The girl did not tug excitedly at the wrapper or eagerly tear the bundle open. Her eyes were wide with trepidation. She glanced first to Telamon, then to David.