The guardsmen of the Nazarenes resisted like souls possessed. As the first and then second ranks of horses piled up against the sheer mass of the dissidents, the mounts’ momentum slowed and then stalled.
David saw Telamon brace himself in the stance he called “castling.” The blade of a cavalryman’s swung saber missed the man-at-arms’ skull by fractions. David saw Telamon’s gladius drive forward and up, into the thigh of the rider above him. Horses are instinctively terrified of anything moving on the ground beneath their bellies. David saw one beast rear with panic in its eyes. Another followed, striking out blindly with its forehooves.
The Romans’ mounts began balking. Before and beneath the animals, defenders struck with staves and timbers. Many wielded pitchforks and quarterstaffs. Apparently the rebels had experience dealing with mounted troops in confined spaces.
Reinforcements of the insurrectionists began arriving, or perhaps these were simply the rearmost ranks swelling forward. In the crush David could glimpse only shadows. He saw rooftops swarming with resisters. From these elevated vantages men and women, and children as well, were slinging bricks and tiles onto the bunched-up horsemen. Cavalry’s worth, David knew, was in its speed and mobility on the open field and in the emotional terror produced by its seemingly irresistible rush. When such mounted forces are penned within a straitened compass, however, the mass becomes immobilized and its virtues of size and scale become liabilities.
From crouched positions beneath the horses’ bellies the defenders poked and thrust with spears and daggers. They struck even with bare hands. The beasts above them reared and bellowed. David could see the lieutenant bawling to his troopers to dismount and fight on foot. The cavalrymen’s down-slashes with their spathas were not only worthless against the crouched mass of insurrectionists but actively exposed each trooper, as his striking arm fell, to the fate of being seized from below and hauled from his saddle.
What had happened to the woman in white?
David, penned in the press beneath the horses, glimpsed for an instant this vision of a deliverer. She was alive! Defenders on the rooftops were hauling her clear of the fray. Somehow she had avoided being trampled.
Now further subversives appeared. These hurled themselves forward with the fury of desperation. They had broken out doors from the buildings of the slave market to use as shields and barricades. In pairs they bore heavy tables before them while hurling stones and pots and jars from behind these bulwarks. From the eaves of the slave pens, more rebels flung bricks and paving stones. David glimpsed one champion, bald as a goose egg, sending three sling bullets in a row ringing off the helmets of the horse troopers below.
“Simon!” someone cried exultantly.
David thought, The leader!
The boy turned back toward the center of the square. He saw the cavalry lieutenant, mounted above the crush, peer in the direction of this cry. The young officer’s glance fixed upon the man Simon. Plainly his intention was to rush upon him. The lieutenant could not advance, however, not even a single stride, amid the teeming press.
David saw Telamon wade into the melee. The witch’s medicaments had produced their miracle. As she had promised, the man-at-arms fought with the strength of three.
David saw him unhorse one dragoon with a hooking blow from the flank, then another and another. The mercenary did not loiter even to disable the men on the ground. Others of the rebels fell upon these. David himself swung his dolabra at the Romans’ horses’ knees. In such close quarters the weapon was miraculously effective. The beasts did not go down, but they reeled and reared in terror, lashing out with their forelegs.
Riders were tumbling everywhere. The technique of crab-walking that Telamon had taught Ruth and David proved spectacularly effective. Ruth slung her weighted darts from so close beneath the horse troopers that these missiles could not miss. The riders never even saw her. The girl hurled her darts point-blank into calves and thighs. With her dagger, she stabbed directly.
Again David spotted the Roman lieutenant. He was spurring his mount furiously, driving the animal within the crush, one stride at a time, toward the eave upon which the leader Simon stood. David thought, If he keeps this course, I can reach him! I will burst my heart to land a blow.
The youth waded forward, tucking his dolabra tight to his breast so it would not snag in the press. He thought only, Let me get near the lieutenant! Lord of Hosts, let me get close enough to strike!
But horses and grappling men intervened.
David pushed harder.
Through a screen of men on foot, the youth glimpsed the mounted officer. He was close, barely two sword-lengths away, driving toward the rebel leader Simon. The Nazarene champion, at the brink of a roof eave, was fending off another Roman, a foot soldier, who was thrusting a spear up at him from the square below. Simon’s back was turned. He could not see the mounted officer coming.
David shoved forward with all his strength, crying out the Christian’s name. But in the bedlam no sound could carry. The boy saw the lieutenant’s saber elevate to strike a blow.
David raised his dolabra to intercept this. The lieutenant’s blade drove downward upon the youth’s with the multiplied force of a mounted man striking from above with a weapon that weighed twice that of the instrument that sought to interdict it. A dolabra is an entrenching tool. A pickaxe. Its soft untempered iron tore apart at the haft. David felt himself driven to his knees. In his fists he held a wooden shaft and nothing more.
Above him the lieutenant raised his blade again to strike.
At that instant a man leapt from an adjacent wall—one of the slave enclosures—headlong onto the Roman, hauling him rearward over his horse’s crupper.
It was Telamon.
The man-at-arms and the lieutenant crashed together onto the ground beside David.
The youth sought to rise, but the cavalryman, with all the weight of his sodden cloak and armor, had pitched backward into him. David clutched at the officer’s arms, to pinion him from behind.
Telamon saw this. With a single blow, delivered with such speed and force that the boy could barely see it, the man-at-arms struck the lieutenant between the eyes with the butt-end of his gladius. David heard the sickening sound of bone giving way. He saw the horrible sheet of red-black ooze gush from the cavity beneath the officer’s brow and spill over the bridge of his nose to soak, augmented by heaven’s deluge, into the void that was his mouth.
David felt his knees beneath him shudder, as the Roman’s dead weight crashed full upon him. He felt the lieutenant’s life rush forth with a burst that was almost a sigh.
“Get up!” Telamon bawled, extending his left hand toward David.
For an instant that seemed to the youth interminable, the space within the melee became still and inviolate.
All sound ceased.
No motion intruded.
The moment was like that at the Narrows, when David saw Telamon’s arrow pass before his eyes within such a cone of heightened perception that he, the youth, could see the individual feathers of its vanes and the flex of its shaft as it flew.
David felt Telamon haul him to his feet. He sensed the mercenary pressing the grip of the lieutenant’s fallen spatha into his fist. David saw Simon, the Christian leader, materialize beside Telamon. He saw him clap the man-at-arms upon the shoulder—a gesture, man to man, of gratitude and respect.
At that instant a second mounted officer burst forward into the circle of stillness. At once all sound and frenzy returned. David turned toward the intruder.