Faint light ahead.
David heard shouts. “This way! Hurry!”
The gasping, ragged mob emerged from the tunnel into a broad domed chamber sluicing with storm runoff from above. Faint light came from overhead through an iron drainage grate. People were running across this in the lane topside. Floodwater cascaded in torrents onto the fugitives below.
Ahead down a passageway David could see armed men. Not Romans. The men were waving the fugitives forward, shunting them up an adjacent stone stairway.
These guardsmen—shomrim Jews, apparently, of the Nazarene sect—formed a checkpoint, through which the refugees in flight must pass.
The men were checking faces, waving forward those they knew, rejecting all others.
David could see one kin group, including babes and ancients, being turned forcefully back. The rebuff was vigorous and violent. Even at a distance David could make out the whites of the guardsmen’s eyes above their masked and muffled faces. Shouts and footfalls of the pursuing legionaries echoed within the catacomb. The guardsmen appeared nearly as terror-stricken as the runaways who streamed past them.
The sorceress raced ahead to this chokepoint. She was shouting something in Aramaic to the guards. They were rebuffing her.
Telamon could only hobble, aided by Ruth as best she could.
David bolted ahead.
A second line of guards, behind the first and farther up the stairway, were dragging some kind of wood-and-iron barricade into place. The last of the fugitive families streamed past this.
“Get back!” one guardsman bawled at the sorceress. He struck at her with the butt-end of his staff.
David raced up to the guard. He indicated Telamon behind, and the girl. “These are the ones! They bring the letter from the Apostle!”
The same guard struck at David.
Two others blocked the boy and the witch. Both carried cudgels and raised them to strike.
“Betrayers!” the first guardsman shouted. “Do you think we are fools?”
From the tunnel behind came the Romans.
David felt Ruth tug his elbow. The family with the infants and elders was wriggling by turns into a pinched side channel with an iron grate door—a tributary storm drain of some kind. The entry was so narrow that only one person at a time could squeeze though.
“There!” cried the sorceress.
She propelled David in that direction. Telamon and Ruth plunged forward too. They had to hold up until the family with the little ones and the elders could be handed through.
David turned to Telamon. The man-at-arms appeared to be recovering his strength. Here came the Romans.
David and Ruth pushed through the tunnel entry. A torrent, icy and slick, struck them at thigh-height.
Against this they surged for half a dozen strides. David clutched at Ruth’s arm. “Where’s the witch?”
Both twisted rearward.
Through the slit entry partially blocked by the iron grate door the children could see Telamon and the sorceress—the final two figures still out in the main tunnel.
Upon these, bearing torches and swords, rushed the forwardmost element of the legionaries.
David could see Telamon clasp his gladius and turn to face the pursuers.
The sorceress seized his arm.
The mercenary jerked free and, raising his sword, made to turn upon the witch. Clearly he believed the woman was working treachery. The sorceress shouted something directly into Telamon’s ear. David and Ruth could hear nothing over the echoing din of the tunnel and the floodwaters raging around them.
The Romans were within fifty feet now.
The witch was pointing toward the slit entry and the iron grate door. With both hands she sought to propel Telamon in this direction.
The mercenary resisted.
The sorceress pushed with greater impetus.
Suddenly she cackled—a great, gleeful croak that carried above the cacophony, even to David and Ruth’s ears.
They saw Telamon turn from the witch and duck through the gratework door. He heaved against it from the inside and sealed it.
The last thing the children saw from their vantage within the tunnel was the sorceress, thrashing toward the Romans through the calf-deep flood and flinging herself, bare-handed, onto the shields and sword points of the onrushing legionaries.
The witch fell.
The Romans trampled over her.
David saw Telamon appear directly before him.
The mercenary turned him by the shoulder.
“Go! Now!”
Somehow they were outside.
Telamon sprinted before the children. He led them across a square. They raced down a lane between shops, and another. The same fugitives and guardsmen fled ahead.
David’s lungs felt on fire. His thighs seized like knots of wood. He had shucked his shoes. The soles of both his feet now bled. The throng ahead sprinted around a dark corner into a square under oaks.
Imperial cavalry waited.
Severus.
The lieutenant.
Someone shouted that “the Virgin” fled now among them. The name coursed the length of the column. It seemed to fire the partisans with courage.
David peered about him. The square appeared to be some sort of commercial enclosure—a broad rhomboid with stone walls on three sides.
A slave market.
The youth could see heavy iron rings mounted along the rearmost wall. To these would be chained the chattel, mustered in gangs of eight, called by the Romans servorum and by the Greeks andropodoi (“things with feet like a man”) before each individual was unshackled and borne forward to the stand for auction.
The boy saw the stalls into which children for sale were herded and the covered pens where the purchased bondsmen were held for delivery to their new owners. The enclosure was in breadth half a furlong, a quarter that in depth.
Roman cavalry filled this open side end-to-end.
The fugitives jammed up at the narrow end, trapped within the walls like wild beasts at the gladiatorial games.
David thought, What a place to die.
At once a lone female—young, barefoot, dressed in white, with long, dark hair spilling from beneath a cowl that obscured her face—broke from the throng and sprinted forward into the open, toward the Romans. The woman tugged at several others, urging them to follow. All failed of courage. David saw several jerk free and flee back into the multitude.
The woman advanced alone. She was unarmed. She took up a position midway between the Romans and her own people, facing the foe. With a swipe of her hand she flung back the hood that concealed her face. David glimpsed a strong jaw and eyes of fire. The woman was shouting something the boy could not hear amid the storm and the cries of the fugitives calling her back.
The youth could see, behind him, ranks of insurgents forming into a mass. These were arming themselves with paving stones and roof tiles and loose timbers wielded as cudgels.
David heard a trumpet.
The line of horses charged.
In seconds the woman in white was overwhelmed.
Telamon’s gladius sprang into his fist.
David saw Ruth clutch her dagger and her weighted darts.
The youth had barely drawn a breath before the equites were on him. He could not believe how quickly the cavalry covered the hundred paces between their skirmish line and that of the rebels. The riders came on “boot-to-boot.” Their horses’ breasts, striking the front ranks of the insurgents, seemed a wall of solid muscle. Their driving knees and booming hooves drove into the defenders like some great churning engine of harvest.