“What calling or vocation? What was your father’s fondest wish for you?”
The youth answered at once. “A rav. He wanted me to be a rav.”
“What is a rav?”
“A teacher. A kind of priest.”
The boy felt himself flush to declare this ambition. He glanced on the instant toward Ruth, then turned with an expression of discomposure back to Telamon.
“It is true, I cannot read or write. But I can recite the Books of Moses end to end.”
Telamon regarded the youth.
“A teacher,” he said, and set a hand warmly upon the boy’s shoulder. “This night, perhaps, you will teach me something I have never known.”
− 41 −
THE CITY AND THE TOWN
DAVID STAYED IN THE CITY fourteen hours. He could have made his way out sooner, having acquired with ease the intelligence Telamon sought. He chose to stay. He was enjoying himself.
The polis of Corinth was being put to the torch, but in a desultory, most un-Roman-like fashion. Elements of four legions, as David confirmed now at firsthand, had concentrated upon the site, each apparently refusing to consult the others or to work in coordination with them. The populace had either vacated or been herded into provisional camps to await the conquerors’ pleasure.
Nature herself seemed to conspire in the protracted, agonizing reduction of the city. All morning, storms rolled in off the gulf, retreating briefly—the signal to Roman firebrands to resume their labors—then returning, quenching and frustrating, for an interval anyway, the incendiarii’s endeavors.
David ranged the city with impunity. Packs of youths, locals and incomers from the countryside prowled the lanes seeking loot and excitement. David fell in with several of these gangs. Telamon had instructed him to acquire the identities of the legions and their commanders. How many? Where camped? With orders to do what?
From the boys, and later with his own eyes, David learned that a detachment of the Tenth Fretensis was here from Judea. “Commanded by whom? Arrived when?”
An hour of investigation, and David had his answer.
Severus.
Marcus Severus Pertinax, senior tribune and commander of the garrison of Jerusalem, was here with two companies of the Tenth Legion. These had crossed by sea, a sergeant of this very detachment informed David, from Judea via Pelusium in Egypt. Two Moesia-based legions, the Fifth Macedonica and the Eighth Augusta, were the ones doing most of the dirty work. These had made a demonstration of burning the High City, sparing the Greek and Roman markets, the law courts, both Stoas, the imperial administration buildings, the Bouleterion, and the Temple of Apollo. Over sixty thousand inhabitants of the town and the city had been displaced or detained.
“What of the Nazarene communities?” David asked.
“Dead or crucified, save an odd lot or two still at large.”
“Where would they be?”
The sergeant touched the leather purse at his hip.
“There’s a silver actium in it for you, boy, if you find out and tell none but me.”
Like the fortified camp that David, Telamon, and Ruth had encountered on the Hill of the Dolphins, the legions had thrown up campaign-style bivouacs with staked ditches and palisaded walls in a number of locations about the city, including the Ball Fields; both extremities of the Diolkos, the portage road between Lechaeum and Cenchreae; and upon the entry lanes to both harbors.
David found no trouble entering these camps. Though the city was being incinerated precinct by precinct, commerce in day-to-day necessities continued to be conducted with undiminished vigor. David advanced to the portal of a castrum just outside the High City. Barefoot in his dirty tunic, displaying only a cast-off dispatch scroll he had picked up as trash in the street, he called out, “Laundry pickup!” He was waved in without so much as a glance.
Camp streets were mud. Within the walls, six great pits of smoldering sulfur had been set up, from which incendiaries—not legionaries only, but contractors of the towns roundabout and even volunteers from the city itself—acquired their firebrands and ignited them. Piles of filthy, tar- and tow-spattered tunics sat outside the contubernia, the eight-man tents of the legionaries. David grabbed several and slung them over his shoulder. With these and a brisk stride, he could move with impunity throughout the camp.
One hour in, he spotted Severus.
The commander cantered past at the head of a company of equites. The hour was nearly noon. “Who is that?” David asked a corporal standing beside the mire track that was the camp’s via principalis. “From Judea,” the fellow answered. “Some big auger, come in by sea.”
David dumped his bundle and scurried in the outfit’s train. Severus’s troop exited the camp onto the flat outside the Dipylon Gate, called in pre-Roman days the Ball Fields but now the Campus Martius, the Field of Mars. The column crossed the High Street that lapped the citadel upon the west-facing side, and thundered down the hill called the Street of the Tripods for its lineup of hero shrines. The pavement of cobbles was slick from the ongoing downpour. A horse lost its footing and spilled, slinging its rider and skidding downhill with eyes wild and all four legs thrashing. Half a dozen others tumbled as well, snarled in the pileup.
At the head of the column, Severus saw and heard nothing. The detachment pounded away into the lower quarter toward Lechaeum harbor. Behind the tribune’s company came two others, moving as fast and fanning out. In the train of these, apparently from tributary camps, came infantry legionaries in their visorless Gallic helmets with their crests black in the rain and their rear deflectors sluicing the deluge. They wore segmented armor without cloaks. They carried firebrands as well.
David followed on foot. All through the postnoon he ranged across quarters that seemed abandoned when Roman forces transited, only to spring to life in the aftercourse of their passage. He approached and put questions to half a score of freebooting youths and looters, as well as numbers of armed partisans erecting barricades, housedames defending their streets with brooms and cudgels, and elders denouncing the occupiers and urging their compatriots to resistance with fiery harangues. David could locate with certainty neither the seat of local political resistance (apparently no such site existed) nor learn the hiding places of the Nazarene underground.
Yes, the youth determined, the rebel called Simon of the Harbor yet lived and fought, though where and in what manner none could or would say. The “harbor” of his name was Lechaeum. That, half a dozen confirmed.
Night was coming down. A steady downpour continued to sluice off the rooftops of the city. David decided he had acquired enough intelligence to permit Telamon to determine the next step. To linger would risk being cut off by a curfew or cause his master to fear he had been killed or captured—and stir him into hazarding an incursion prematurely.
The boy would go back.
He traversed the potters’ quarter, called the Keramicos, and the Roman agora, keeping to shadow, seen, he was certain, by no one. As he climbed the hill to the pine copse David rehearsed what he would report and in what order he would report it. He felt pride in himself. He was eager to impart his intelligence to Telamon. He felt certain that the man-at-arms would approve his work and praise him.
Dropping prone some thirty paces shy of the summit, David hissed the password. He had to do this twice before receiving the countersign.