Roundabout, numbers of the mountain people were undergoing the identical proceeding—taking into their possession the terminal effects of their lost loved ones.
Ruth opened her packet and withdrew its contents—an ebony stylus and a wooden tablet with a beeswax writing surface, along with a sheaf of mismatched documents in Latin and Greek—common army administrative papers, orders, reports, invoices for materiel, many of these dog-eared and torn, with cross-outs and excisions. The papers were apparently scribal stuff thrown away by army secretaries. It was, David thought, the sort of discarded material that an unlettered individual might use to teach herself the alphabet and the shape and sense of the written word.
Ruth could find nothing more. She probed the pouch twice, even turning it inside out to scour its innards.
She glanced to Telamon in what seemed to be despair, then slumped, crestfallen.
David took the child’s shoulder to comfort her, but she flung his hand off and turned away.
The youth faced toward Telamon. “What was she looking for?”
“A sign,” said the man-at-arms.
“Of what?”
“Of something,” he answered, “that would link her and me by blood.”
Several of the mountain people, witnessing this exchange, drew up in their preparations of decampment. They turned toward the man and child. No few stepped closer to observe the moment.
Telamon crossed to Ruth and knelt, setting himself at her eye-level. The child remained faced away from him. She did not turn back.
The man-at-arms addressed her with great tenderness.
“You were thinking that I might be your father. That was your hope when you searched through your bundle, wasn’t it? To discover some artifact or correspondence that would establish this.”
The child offered no response, either by sign or posture.
“Of all the soldiers of all the legions in all the lands,” said Telamon, “and all the thousands of women who followed them?”
Ruth remained faced away. Yet her bearing indicated that indeed this was, against all odds, what she had hoped.
Telamon reckoned this.
“Will you hear the truth?” he said. “I wished this too. I have been calculating the years and the months . . .”
At this, the child turned back. Her glance searched Telamon’s eyes, as if to confirm for herself that his words were the truth.
“But of the time that your mother and I might have crossed paths and, unknown to me, produced a child of your years . . . I was, for that full interval, on punishment duty in the desert, laboring on the aqueduct that the three of us passed. No furlough. No leave. No women.”
One of the council elders, overhearing this exchange, stepped forward. Addressing not alone Telamon and the children, but all who attended upon this proceeding, he declared as follows:
“If the child indeed can identify no father of blood, it seems to me that heaven will take scant offense if she chooses, now, one of her own.”
David took to this idea at once. So, apparently, did the main of the others attending. The youth turned to the girl to see if she shared this feeling.
Ruth answered in sign.
“What did she say?” asked the elder.
David replied. “She said, ‘I have chosen one already.’ ”
In that instant, the council chief of the mountain men reined in above Telamon. “Collect your kit,” he commanded. “You must move out at once.” The chief declared the Roman attack force was marching south even now. He motioned to his nephew, the guide, to take charge of the man-at-arms’ party. “My boy will lead you by tracks that those sons-of-whores will never find.”
On all sides village families were packing out, on foot as well as mounted, upon different traces and trails heading deeper into the mountains.
The chief, on horseback, gestured in farewell to Telamon. “The Roman lieutenant,” the man said, “told one last thing of Corinth.”
The mercenary drew up.
David and Ruth turned toward the headman as well.
“They’re burning it,” he said. “Four legions, called in from as far away as Moesia and Macedonia. The Romans are torching the city, end to end.”
BOOK ELEVEN
CORINTH
− 40 −
MENS BELLATOR
LIKE ALL GREEK CITIES, CORINTH is constituted of two distinct municipal entities—“the city,” asty, and chora, “the town.” To this in Corinth’s case must be added a third division—the two harbors, Lechaeum and Cenchreae.
David ranged through the first two, sent in by Telamon to reconnoiter. A boy alone, the mercenary reckoned, would be the least likely scouting configuration to draw attention to itself. Unarmed and garbed as a common youth of the street, David could roam anywhere and enter any precinct. He could slip in and out of crowds and assemblies, strike up conversations with strangers, and even interrogate, feigning innocent curiosity, legionaries and officers of the constabulary. Pretending to be upon an errand or seeking, say, to deliver a message, a boy could ask directions, inquire of the unit names and dispositions of troops. He could ask about the underground communities.
The topography of Corinth is as follows:
The High City, the Acrocorinth, ascends above the town upon a natural eminence at once awe-inspiring and spectacularly defensible. Walls with five great gates secure the citadel, of which the most famous is the Dipylon, the Double Gate. Behind its battlements, which are thirty meters high at the city’s most vulnerable point, the southeast, and ten meters thick at its deepest, the city is banked and uneven, following the rugged shape of the land. Streets are steep, lanes narrow and stepped. The central avenue is so precipitous it is called “the Staircase” and in some places “the Ladder.”
The Roman administration of Corinth is headquartered at offices in the South Stoa, the central open space of the High City. Corinth has two markets—the Roman Market and the Greek Market. The grounds and covered stalls of both had been commandeered to make depots and command centers for elements of four legions—the Fifth Macedonica, the Seventh Claudia Pia Fidelis, the Eighth Augusta, and the First Germanica. Troops of these legions were quartered in cantonments about the city and in march-camps they had erected themselves. Cohorts of the first two legions had rotated between Moesia and Dalmatia, their operating bases, and Corinth for the preceding twenty-seven months to maintain order and to hold the restive Greeks in subjection. The latter two had been called forward from Novae in Moesia and Colonia Agrippipensis on the Lower Rhine to reinforce the first two in suppressing the rising unrest produced not only by the underground Christian movement and the reaction to the crackdown upon this, but also by a reinvigorated Corinthian irredentism that sought to restore the autonomy and self-determination of old. The heavier Rome’s hand had become, the more bitterly the subject populace resented it and the more violently it resisted.
Below the Acrocorinth sprawls the chora, the town, carpeting the slopes that descend to the north, west, and south of the citadel and spread out from the highways leading to the two ports, Lechaeum to the northwest on the Corinthian Gulf and Cenchreae on the southeast, facing onto the Saronic Bay. These lanes are home to the commons, the secondary marketplaces and gymnasiums, and the suburbs cascading down to the harbors.