The resisters clambered over the enclosure wall, making their escape across the roof beams and gables of the slave pens. Though numbers of these assisted in clearing a passage for Telamon and Ruth and indeed guided them in their flight, it was clear to the child that few, if any, knew who these strangers were or how they had come to be among their number.
Plainly none, including those who seemed to be leaders, were aware that they bore the letter of the Apostle.
Ruth clutched the scroll she had scribed in the pine copse. She did not know what to do with it.
About her the throng, which had numbered in the hundreds in its initial flight from the city, began to peel off into cells and groups, dispersing into the darkness upon tributary tracks and traces. Some fled east toward Attica and Athens, others took flight west along paths leading to Sicyon and Achaea and the islands of the Ionian Sea.
The main made off south into the Peloponnese.
Twice, when the companies rested, Ruth sought to press the Apostle’s scroll into Telamon’s hands. By sign she urged him to make himself and their errand known to one in authority.
The man-at-arms either would not or could not hear her. His eyes had gone the color of stone. His limbs seemed to have lost all sensation. He would not let go of David, nor would he permit the girl to aid him, even for a moment.
For what seemed like hours the parties in flight pressed on. Factions integrated, trekked in concert for an interval, then melted away into the dark. Ruth found herself trudging alongside one fellow or lass, only to discover each vanished with a quick clasp of the hand or a hasty farewell.
The storm had passed. At one lightless crossroads—the frontier to the Argolid, someone said—the child found herself in a group led by the woman in white from the slave market square.
This was, she learned, Josepha, called Parthenos, the Virgin. The lady’s party at this juncture numbered less than two dozen, though other companies in greater numbers continued to stream through the intersection.
Ruth made a decision. Deliberately stepping apart from Telamon, and with premeditation electing not to inform him of her intention, she made her way to the Virgin. Others of the lady’s company surrounded her. By sign the child sought to communicate that she and Telamon, along with the youth whose remains the mercenary carried, had made their way here from Jerusalem, bearing, for the Virgin herself and for the other community leaders, a letter from Paul the Apostle.
Ruth produced the scroll itself. She extended this in both hands to the lady.
To the child’s astonishment, the Virgin rejected her. Her acolytes recoiled with even greater vehemence. The lady refused to speak with Telamon or even to permit him to be brought forward. She would not examine the letter, even to assess it for authenticity, nor would she countenance any of her attendants to do so.
Ruth could not understand. The child felt confusion, exasperation, even outrage.
The Virgin’s reaction to her approach was one neither of anger nor hostility but rather of anguish and despair.
“For your own safety, leave this company!” the lady commanded Ruth, first in Greek, then in Aramaic and Hebrew. “If you follow, I cannot protect you.”
Ruth reported nothing of this to Telamon. She struggled to make sense of it on her own.
Clearly, the girl apprehended, the Christian community of Corinth was riven. At least two factions—and apparently numerous splinter elements—contended for supremacy.
As night wore on and the elements of the community came together briefly in their flight, then parted to independent ways, Ruth sought to overhear such converse as might illuminate or dispel her state of consternation. Two men she tramped beside spoke of the Virgin and her faction. The hearts of these had been broken by the night’s “victory” against their Roman persecutors.
“Why?” one asked the other.
“Because the act was accomplished through the employment of arms. We fought. We gave in to hatred. We took lives.”
A matron, trekking at Ruth’s shoulder for a quarter hour, spoke of Simon and his sister Miriam. The partisans of this faction reveled in the night’s resistance and the coming together in action of the mass of the community. “This is how we will survive! There can be no other way.”
As for the letter of the Apostle, its apparition at this hour—if indeed the epistle was genuine—was a matter of inconsequence to both camps. To followers of the Virgin, the Apostle’s sacramental words could appear only as a bitter reproach and a measure of how far short the community had fallen of the ideals of faith and love to which it aspired. To adherents of Simon and Miriam, on the other hand, the letter, or that counterfeit peddled by knaves and double-dealers, could be regarded as nothing other than a ruse of Rome, meant to expose the community to murder and destruction.
By midnight, fear, fatigue, and exertion had exhausted the congregations in flight. Halts became dismayingly frequent. Companies with elders and minors began to fall out. Telamon himself could barely hobble. His kit and weapons must be borne by Ruth, who herself began to flag severely.
At last a peopled settlement came into view. Word coursed along the column.
Water!
Shelter!
Rest!
The factions came up one by one. The settlement was not even a hamlet but three freehold compounds within sight of one another along a narrow valley. The companies found a welcome. A springhouse with troughs relieved the fugitives’ thirst. The column, which had become strung out for miles, now trudged in, element by weary element, to this site of refuge.
With a sign only to Ruth, Telamon bore David’s body apart toward the loftiest and most remote redoubt immediately apparent—a notch beneath crags, some hundred feet above the first of the three compounds.
At the man-at-arms’ direction the girl remained momentarily below, to fill her water skins and to make certain none of either faction followed up the hillside. Indeed, youths of both divisions, Simon’s and the Virgin’s, watched her every step. The child was careful to bespeak no one and to draw as little attention to herself as possible as she worked her way up the lines to the springhouse. She filled the skins and hastened, with vigorous strides despite her fatigue, back up the hill to Telamon.
The man-at-arms had scraped a trench, narrow but deep, at the eastern limit of the promontory. The site looked out over a pretty vantage beneath the moon. Ruth scurried up. Telamon had just finished winding David in his own campaign cloak. Together the man and the child lowered the youth’s remains. Ruth looked on as the man-at-arms scooped and drove a fall of dirt and stone into the void that remained over their friend.
She thought, How many times across decades has Telamon performed this dolorous service? And yet, the child felt certain, never heretofore has he enacted it in grief this profound.
The mercenary stood. A glance told Ruth where she must take station.
The man-at-arms spoke one word only,
“RAV,”
then knelt and pressed, until its hilt had disappeared into the freshly overturned earth, the X dagger he had carried in his right boot since his time at the inn called the Foot of the Grade and earlier.
Ruth’s concern in the instant was for Telamon. All strength seemed to have fled his limbs. Could he even rise?
As the child stepped forward to help, she heard a branch snap and glimpsed shapes advancing swiftly in shadow. Rough sounds came from the path below. Onto the site scrambled guardsmen and armed youths of the faction of Simon and Miriam.