BOOK ONE
LEGIO X
− 1 −
A MAN AT ARMS
IN JUDEA, AT MILE EIGHTY-ONE of the Jerusalem-Damascus highway, is a rising grade so severe and of such protraction that the pace of freight wagons and even travelers afoot grinds to a weary crawl by the time the parties approach the summit.
Here is an ambush site favored by brigands and highwaymen.
For a period during the final years of the reign of the emperor Claudius, imperial Roman cavalry made regular patrols of this point of peril. Travelers would break their journeys at the foot of the grade, awaiting sight of the dust that signalized the mounted legionaries’ approach. The equites legionis would escort the wayfarers through the zone of danger. But when the Revolt of the Hebrew Zealots began establishing itself in earnest in the months immediately preceding the succession of the new emperor Nero, the Romans no longer ventured so far from their fortress at Jerusalem, nor elected to hazard their skins in service to the subject populace whose insurrectionist sons were murdering their compatriots in the streets.
The bandits came back.
By this time an inn had come to be founded at the foot of the grade. This establishment, constituted at first of tents only, added after a time a palisaded court, which served as a sort of redoubt or bastion. The court held a kitchen under eaves, a saddlery, a wheelwright’s, and a stable master’s shop, with a communal area for the penning and watering of stock, along with a few common rooms with stone sleeping floors that could be hired for the overnight. The place had not at that time even a name. It was called simply “the Foot of the Grade.” It remains in use to this day. Any traveler familiar with the region will know it.
A local youth named David, son of Eli, age fourteen, unlettered but of sturdy limb and abundant ambition, chanced to find himself upon this site on a certain eve in the Hebrew month of Tishrei—the Roman October—in what would come to be called Anno Domini, the Year of Our Lord, 55. David had come out, with two friends of his village, to watch the morning’s ambush.
Foregathered in the inn’s court upon this evening were some dozen carts and freight wagons, mule- and horse-drawn, along with a number of foot travelers—peddlers, pilgrims, and other itinerants. Two families packing their worldly possibles, one upon a handcart, the other on a laden ass, rounded out the total. Toward midnight a final foot traveler, age about forty, tramped in from Jerusalem, accompanied by his young daughter, a mute whose years appeared to be nine or ten.
The youth David found himself struck by the child’s apparition. Feral, dirty, with bare soles and hair so matted it seemed neither comb nor brush could be pulled through it, the girl seemed more a wild animal than a human being. Her father, if indeed that was the relation of the adult traveler who seemed to watch over her, constrained her by means of a leash, as filthy as the child’s garment, tied about her waist. Man and girl made no attempt to insinuate themselves into the company within the court but withdrew at once to its most remote corner.
The most striking personage, however, within the enclosure that evening was a man-at-arms, trekking alone, who held himself apart from the main, exchanging speech, or even so much as the nod of a head, with no one. Upon the warrior’s right forearm could be descried the faded military tattoo
LEGIO X
of a soldier, or former soldier, of the Roman Tenth Legion. The youth David found himself intrigued by this fellow at once, though hesitant to approach or even to bid the man greeting.
A legionary’s enlistment, David knew, was for a term of twenty-five years. A soldier could earn an earlier discharge through being invalided or via an award for valorous service. Those who had completed their term almost always returned to their nations of origin—Spain, say, or Gaul or Germania. Few elected to remain in barren, inhospitable Judea. A colony of former legionaries had established itself at Gaza and another at Caesarea Maritima on the coast farther north, where they had received from the emperor grants of land. To encounter an unaffiliated man-at-arms, however, was extraordinary indeed. How, David wondered, did the fellow support himself? Who would hire a single infantryman? What could a man alone accomplish?
Others within the court had become as curious about the man-at-arms as had David, and in fact after an interval began to approach him, at first tentatively, then with increasing aggressiveness and importunity. The teamsters were organizing the able-bodied into a train for mutual defense, anticipating the morrow’s transit of the summit.
Would the man-at-arms participate? Would he assist in confronting the highwaymen?
Would he in fact lead the company?
The man declined.
Taking up his kit, the fellow withdrew to a corner alongside the saddlery, where a cask of drinking water sat upon a bench with a gourd dipper hanging beside it on a cord of rawhide. It chanced that the girl-child crossed with her father toward this pitcher at the same time. The child drew up, plainly fearful of the warrior. But the fellow smiled and held the dipper out to her.
“You first,” he spoke in Latin.
The girl, however, withdrew to the protection of her father.
The man-at-arms, reckoning that the child did not speak the occupier’s tongue, addressed her a second time, now in Aramaic.
“Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.”
This time the child stepped forward and accepted the dipper. Her eyes, trepidatious yet alive with intelligence, seemed to take in the man-at-arms from sole to crown. For the mercenary’s part, he studied the girl with no less penetrating consideration.
When she had drunk, the child returned the gourd to the man-at-arms. He thanked her and asked her name.
The girl made no response.
“Is the child deaf and dumb?” the man-at-arms asked her father.
“She can hear,” said the man. “But cannot speak.”
The father withdrew with his daughter to the recess within which the pair had originally established themselves.
The man-at-arms’ initial refusal of the teamsters’ overture had not deterred the company but had in fact prompted them to redouble their efforts to recruit him to their cause. The carters displayed before him their own crude weapons—spears and axes, bludgeons and cudgels—and swore mighty oaths that they would follow the man-at-arms’ commands in all actions. They would fight beside him with the zeal of the desperate.
Still the fellow demurred.
It is no trifling business, he declared, to draw arms with the intent to use them. “If I may suggest, gentlemen, why not pay the bandits what they demand? The summit is but a toll station to them. Give them what they wish and pass upon your way.”
“You don’t understand, brother,” said the captain of the teamsters. “We know these blackguards well. They will strip our party raw—and work hell upon us in the process.”
The hour was growing late. Torches in hangers lit the court. The yeomen of the train pressed with passion about the man-at-arms. The youth David wriggled through the crush and took up a station in the foremost rank so as better to witness the engagement.
Upon closer inspection, the stranger appeared to be not Roman but Greek. None asked his name, nor did he offer it. His frame was sturdy, indeed muscular; he stood at slightly more than average height. The man-at-arms’ years appeared to be between forty and forty-five, though to David’s imagination there appeared a quality of indeterminateness to the fellow’s age. Hints of gray could be seen in his hair and beard, yet his carriage and aspect were those of a man in the prime of youth. He was clad in the Roman-style paenula cloak, scarlet faded to brown, of water-shedding wool, which doubled as a sleeping wrap. He sat at ease upon the floor of the court, legs crossed beneath him, shoulders settled against his assemblage of kit, which itself rested upright against the outer wall of the saddler’s establishment.