Severus.
The commander saw Telamon.
“You!” he cried.
The tribune’s arms to the elbow were slick with gore and tissue. The steel of his saber was deformed and misshapen from the blows it had struck. Blood ran from his mount’s jaw, sawn by the iron of the bit.
The commander’s heels drove into his horse’s flanks. The animal lurched forward. Its breast bowled into Telamon.
Severus’s eyes within the frame of his helmet seemed to David like those of a wild beast.
Telamon struggled to sidestep the massive form driving into him, but the horse’s churning knees and hooves overwhelmed him. The man-at-arms began to spill. David grabbed him to haul him clear. The youth felt Severus’s spatha pass with a furious swish fractions from his left ear.
At this instant the child Ruth appeared directly before the Roman. She was standing at the brink of the eave of the slave pens, eye-to-eye with the tribune. In her fist she clutched a heavy clay roof tile.
The girl slung this with all her strength into Severus’s face.
The tile struck the commander full in the teeth, shattering into shards against the cheek-pieces of his helmet. Severus’s head rocked violently back. His left hand hauled rearward on the reins as his thighs, calves, heels, and knees clamped hard about his horse’s rib cage.
A Roman cavalry mount—any mount, including this charger, which surely was not Severus’s own but acquired here in Corinth from the cream of the on-site units—is trained from a colt to back clear of a press when it feels its rider reeling. This the tribune’s horse did now.
In that instant, a great cry ascended from legionary reinforcements swarming into the square. They saw their commander struck. They marked his mount’s withdrawal. The detachment, foot troops all, now flooded into the square. The mass of legionaries, above a hundred, did not charge blindly across the open center but divided into two flanking forces. Each wing took one wall of the slave pens, right and left, and surged along it with a front of four, in ranks a dozen deep. The insurgents, including Simon, fled before this irresistible advance.
David struggled to his feet. As earlier with the cavalry charge, his eyes could not believe the speed and violence with which the imperial troops had executed this evolution, which would have been difficult even on the parade ground. The youth turned to Telamon.
What he saw froze his blood.
The man-at-arms’ face had turned the color of ash. His knees faltered.
Were the sorceress’s drugs wearing off?
Legionaries at impossible speeds were rushing from both flanks toward Telamon.
The mercenary’s glance to David said, Flee!
The boy could not.
Blows rained upon him. Again he went down. He saw Telamon battered by shield-strikes pummeling him from both sides.
The rebels bawled and howled from the slave pen rooftops.
Above the din, David heard Severus’s voice.
“Leave him! He’s mine!”
Two of the troopers had somehow gotten a rope about Telamon’s shield arm. With this they lashed him to the slaver’s post, using the very iron ring for which this upright had been planted. The man-at-arms strained but could not free himself.
“Back away! The man belongs to me!”
Severus had dismounted now.
His horse, superbly trained, did not balk or shy, but maintained its station, precisely where the tribune had stepped down.
The ring of legionaries withdrew, leaving the central space of the arena clear. Above on two sides, the insurrectionists hurled oaths and tiles. The foot troops below cleared them with volleys of arrows and javelins.
Severus advanced at a pace toward Telamon.
“Will you castle now, peregrine? Teach me, as once you did.”
Telamon’s strength seemed to have failed him utterly. He hung, exhausted, from the line that bound him to the slavers’ post.
Severus pounded him backhanded upon the mercenary’s sword side.
Somehow Telamon’s gladius deflected the blow.
David cried and thrashed wildly to free himself from the grasp of the legionaries who held him.
The tribune remarked the boy for the first time. A dark glint lit his sockets.
“Your apprentice would preserve you.” He spoke toward Telamon.
The mercenary hacked with all his strength at the bonds that lashed him to the slavers’ post.
He could see Severus stepping toward David.
The tribune turned his speech now to the youth. “You and I are students of the same master,” he said. “Show me what you have learned.”
With a nod he commanded his troopers to release the boy. They did.
David hurled himself upon the tribune.
Severus’s heavy spatha took the youth full in the belly. The boy ran onto the steel, bare hands stretching to claw at the commander’s eyes.
A cry of agony broke from Telamon.
This wail echoed and resounded from the throats of hundreds.
With a final blow, the man-at-arms cut himself free.
In two strides he had reached Severus.
The commander had turned back toward his foe, eager to direct the same fate upon him that he had visited upon David.
But the youth would not let go of the tribune’s spatha.
Impaled as he was, David’s hands, both slashed open to the bone, grasped the commander’s blade and held on.
Telamon’s gladius entered the tribune’s abdomen at a point below the nexus of the rib cage and drove upward in one practiced motion between the lungs and into the heart.
Cries of woe and exultation erupted from both witnessing sides.
With his last impulse of consciousness, David beheld Telamon’s eyes. In them was rage and grief, but both were superseded by the cold, professional mask of predation.
In one motion Telamon slid his blade free of Marcus Severus Pertinax. The man-at-arms sheathed this weapon, and, lowering himself to one knee upon the rain- and blood-slick stones of the slave market square, seized with both arms David’s life-fled form. The legionaries who had pinned the boy backed away before him. Telamon stood, lifting the youth onto his right shoulder. He bore him from the arena, as one comrade will for another fallen in battle.
− 44 −
OF MEN AND OF ANGELS
IT SEEMED EACH PERSON THEY chanced upon offered aid.
Guides materialized at each farmstead and crossroads. Tracks and footpaths were pointed out in the dark. Three times the parties in flight were led by strangers to gates in walls or pathways bypassing roadblocks—getaway routes that no person not intimate with the country would even know about, let alone be able to find.
Telamon yet bore David’s body. Ruth hastened at the mercenary’s shoulder. Twice, when he stumbled, she attempted to take the youth’s weight upon herself. Her strength, however, was not equal to this; each time Telamon took the burden back. Clearly the man-at-arms’ reserves had reached their limit. Ruth recalled the doctor Eryximachus’s warning—that the mercenary’s vulnerability would be in his lower extremities. The child watched Telamon lose his footing again and again.
Others among the refugees sought to assist him, to take the weight off his shoulders. The mercenary rebuffed this fiercely. He would permit no one to touch David’s body, nor would he allow any to aid him in bearing it.
Ruth, in the moments when she could collect her thoughts, marveled at the fortuitousness by which the insurrectionists had escaped the slavers’ impound. At Severus’s end, the ring of legionaries, loosing a great cry of woe, had concentrated about their commander, retrieving his corpse behind a wall of their body-length shields. Cavalry closed in to protect the wings. This phalanx retreated, step by step, pelted from the eaves by salvo after salvo of stones and arrows and bricks.