− 7 −
AN APPRENTICE AT ARMS
THUS THE MERCENARY AND HIS apprentice set forth. Each bore his necessaries upon his back. The mules were laden with such impedimenta as the making of camps required, as well as helmet and armor, straps, spare footgear and weaponry, and the beasts’ own fodder and water, as much as they could carry without breaking down. The man would not let the boy ride the animal he led or even mount for a moment onto the creature’s back. Instead the two trekked afoot, each at the head of and to the left of his mule.
The network of traces and tracks that crisscrossed the Judean hills from Beit Shemesh to the coastal plain of Philistia had been in use by travelers for hundreds, even thousands of years. Sites congenial to the overnight, possessed of springs or shelter, or simply a location out of the sun and wind, had long since been cognized and established as encampments known to, and open to, all. These were protected under Jewish custom so ancient as to predate even the laws of Moses. Pack trains encamped here, and dealers driving livestock, as well as pilgrims and traders and religious celebrants. Wedding parties pitched their tents upon these grounds en route to their destinations, as did kin groups making for the Great Temple to celebrate the Passover or to observe other holy occasions. One recognized these layovers by the dirt trails leading to them, stamped hard as stone by footsteps over the centuries or the brick-rimmed firepits scorched black by blazes dating from the age of Solomon.
The man-at-arms shunned such bivouacs except when they served his purpose, and his purpose he kept to himself alone. This made the youth David anxious and uneasy.
When the boy felt unsettled, he talked. He could not stop himself. The man-at-arms did not answer. In two days the mercenary had initiated one exchange only. This was three hours out of Jerusalem, where the traders’ road tacked north toward the Jerusalem-Damascus highway, that thoroughfare upon which the ambush at the Narrows had occurred.
“Your village lies down that road,” said the man-at-arms.
“So?”
“Do you not wish to tell your father what course you now strike out upon?”
Beneath the hem of the boy’s tunic, still-livid welts could be seen. “Tell him? Why? So he can gift me with a fresh set of stripes?”
The mercenary said nothing, but turned his mule south onto the fork that led toward Gaza and the wilderness of Sinai.
“You’re my father now,” said the boy.
The man-at-arms only grunted.
The countryside sprawled stony and featureless in its descent to the plain and the sea. Toward day’s end, at the Well of Avishag outside the village of Bet Natan, the man addressed the boy again.
“I have taken you on because you’ve shown spirit. But I am not your father or your brother or your friend. You may watch me and learn what you can. If you should be killed as we fare together, I will bury your bones.”
And he gave the lad a copper coin, for his labor thus far.
“I expect pay for my work,” said the man. “And I offer it.”
Man and boy traversed civilized country now, that region that had been six centuries earlier the kingdom of the Philistines before its conquest by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar and later the Hasmoneans but that fell to the Romans in the time of Caesar and Pompey. Farmsteads and vineyards dotted the landscape. Still the man-at-arms avoided communal grounds. His appearance, David came to reckon, inevitably drew attention. The man found this tedious, not to say improvident. So the party, man and boy, made camp upon such eminences and promontories as appeared unoccupied.
“Why do we trek in this direction?” David asked on the initial night. “Won’t the Nazarene be fleeing north? South leads only to desert. Our quarry would seek to cross to Corinth by sea from Seleucia Pieria or one of the northern ports, wouldn’t he?”
Telamon permitted a fire this evening, but advised the boy that it would be their last.
“Before your sweat or mine had dried after the fracas at the Narrows, our friend the cavalry lieutenant had sent one of his troopers galloping back to Jerusalem to inform Severus of the man Michael’s escape. Twelve hours after that, other dispatch riders had alerted every toll station and constabulary along the entire northern route. The Tenth Legion is at Cyrrhus, the Twelfth Fulminata and the Sixth Ferrata at Raphanaea. Elements of the Third Gallica are based at Antioch. The Eastern Fleet holds Ephesus and Methymna and Mytilene and all the ports of the Aegean. Every imperial unit at land and sea will be hunting for the Nazarene in that direction.”
On the fourth day, man and boy entered the province of Gaza. No boundary demarcated this but a road marker so stubby a man might trip over it, and that was so abraded by sand and wind that its inscription
ASCALON|GAZA
could barely be distinguished.
The youth sought earnestly to portray his understanding of this scription. The mercenary made no remark, but David could see that he had discerned that the boy could not read.
“We are entering the province of bandits and brigands,” declared the man-at-arms. “From this point, you and I will conduct ourselves as if at war.”
Telamon set into the youth’s hand from his own kit the legion-issue dolabra—the pickaxe-shaped entrenching tool with which he, the mercenary, had disemboweled the second bandit at the Narrows.
“From this hour, you and I take no action without a weapon at our side. We don’t eat, we don’t sleep, we don’t heed nature’s call empty-handed. No moment shall pass between now and the accomplishment of our mission in which both of us slumber at the same time. One will always be awake and on guard. If I catch you sleeping, you will never wake again.”
They camped that night on a promontory, with no flame.
For the first time David discovered himself experiencing fear.
He thought of his father’s house, and of the cramped cubby that he and his two younger brothers shared. He thought of his mother and his three sisters.
He thought of Jerusalem. David had visited the place only once before—with his family, for a Passover seder, when he was too small to appreciate either the city or the political situation in which it was entangled. It was not until this occasion, traveling with the man-at-arms, that he perceived the metropolis for the first time with grown-up, or nearly grown-up, eyes.
There, David now recalled, above the warren of lanes and alleys that comprised the walled city, rose the plateau of Mount Moriah, where Abraham had bound Isaac, when an angel stayed that pitiless blade. The youth saw the Tower of David and the City of David, the original gated Jerusalem, a thousand years old. He trekked to Skull Hill, upon which Jesus of Nazareth, the rabbi proclaimed as messiah by the common and the unlettered, was crucified. And the lane called now by these the Via Dolorosa, over whose stones the martyr bore the cross upon which he would meet his end.
David in his chores of provisioning had passed the Garden of Gethsemane and stood atop the Mount of Olives, looking down upon the Kidron Valley. He saw the field of graves of generations of Jews awaiting the true messiah. In the forecourt of the Temple he observed the money changers at their stalls and tables, amid the clamorous importunities of pilgrims who had trekked across leagues to pray and offer sacrifice. One may not procure an offering of devotion—a kid, say, or even a dove or an unblemished pigeon—with secular coin. Such would pollute the offering and render it unholy in the sight of heaven. A pilgrim’s drachmae or sesterces must be exchanged here for temple coinage. This was the site, so David had heard, upon which Jesus of Nazareth had driven these men out and overturned their tables with a violent rush. Could such a lawless fellow truly be the savior for whom Jews had waited for twenty centuries? The idea seemed preposterous. Yet David knew that thousands, even tens of thousands believed. And more every day.