On the Temple Mount David had watched the processions of Sadducees and their rivals the Pharisees, whom the followers of the Nazarene despised as toadies to the Romans. Were they? David noted the Pharisees’ worn soles and threadbare hems as they shambled in single file to worship within the court beyond which lay the Holy of Holies, singing psalms penned by King David himself. These were good men, God-fearing, impoverished by choice, who carried on the traditions of scholarship and devotion in the face of Roman conquest, who studied the Books of Moses so late beneath the lamp that their sight went bad and their shoulders became permanently stooped. These acolytes had dedicated their lives to preserving the living lore of the nation of Israel. The line of their fathers stretched back to those who had trekked with Moses, who had been carried off to captivity by the Babylonians, who had returned and with Ezra and Nehemiah had rebuilt the Temple razed by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar.
These men of God, the lofty Sadduccees as well as the humbler Pharisees, existed in David’s eyes upon a plane to which a boy like himself could never even dream to aspire. They dwelt, David could see, on a level apart from those who tended flocks or cultivated the land. They could read and write; they understood the Mysteries; they communed with the Almighty. They knew how to address Him, how to hear and comprehend Him; they divined His will. How, David thought, could a boy like himself not respect these learned men, who defended the barricades of the Lord against the folly of the good-hearted but ignorant and illiterate masses?
The Nazarene Michael stood not with these learned masters, David reckoned, but with the rustics and bumpkins. His “religion,” if you could call it that, was the faith of the street and of the barnyard, that is to say superstition and humbug, sacrilege indeed, spawned of the laying on of hands and the performance of so-called “miracles,” which were often, David had heard, no more than tricks and sleights of hand, staged “healings” and “restorations,” or else hysterical conversions brought about by the massed formation of the wretched and their collective desperation for surcease from sorrow.
And yet—David heard his own voice inside his head—who am I to judge? What do I know? A boy from a village without even a name, who can neither read nor write and never will.
Indeed, David thought, though he could recite the Books of Moses by heart, by what means had he learned these? Through the ministrations only of his equally unlettered father, an ignorant man who beat his boys habitually yet abased himself before the meanest private soldier of Rome or the lowliest cleric of the Sanhedrin. Yet how could he blame his father? David thought. What abuse has he worked upon me and my brothers that the God of our fathers has not visited a hundredfold on the children of Israel, century upon century, and which continues to this day? King of the universe? Then drive these bastard Romans out! Rout them as the Five Books say You did the Hittites and the Canaanities, Jebusites and Amorites. Where is our Joshua? Where may we find Saul or David and Jonathan? Where is Judah Maccabee?
The Zealots, David knew, bore the sword for Israel in this day. Their blades skewered the livers of Roman soldiers in the street, as the tribune Severus had declared. These were good men too, David knew. Indeed the boy had lain awake many nights scheming to enlist in their ranks.
Whom to follow? Which way was right?
Does God know all? Does He see the suffering of his people?
How can the Creator of the universe remain silent and remote as those who worship Him are debased and degraded, murdered even in their hundreds by the war engines of Rome?
David had no answer to such questions—until that evening at the inn called the Foot of the Grade, when first he set eyes upon the man-at-arms, Telamon of Arcadia.
The youth’s conversion took less than an instant.
At once, and to the core of his being, David knew that this was what he wanted, this was who he wished to be.
Here, the youth thought, stands a man whose feet are planted in the real world, not the sphere of dreams or delusion. Here is a man who fears death, as all do, and perhaps due to his vast experience of war reckons even more keenly the mysteries of fate and chance and destiny, yet who faces these down every day and bears the scars to prove it.
This man seeks not some sphere beyond the mortal or the mundane but instead dwells in this world of dust and strife, without illusion or self-delusion.
David knew at once that he would follow this man. What he taught, David would learn. What he commanded, David would perform.
He, the youth, would enroll himself in the academy of the highway and the school of conflict. Such secrets as the man-at-arms might impart, David knew, would have to be prized from him one lesson at a time, one action, one word. David did not care. Whatever the price, he would pay it.
Why this one? David asked himself now, as he trekked in the train of this solitary mercenary. Why him and not one of the thousands of pikemen and archers and cavalry riders, Jew and Gentile, whom David had encountered over his short but keenly observed span of years?
David sensed something about this individual. He could not have articulated its essence, even in part, even to himself. Yet the boy felt in this man something deeper and more profound than simply “strength” or “skill” or even andreia, “manly virtue” in the Greek sense.
This man-at-arms had a religion too. It was not a faith of the lamp or of the blessed by-and-by. It was not a soldier’s code or a code of honor. It was sterner and more solitary, a doctrine shorn of pity even for oneself but which touched somehow, David sensed, upon a truth as immutable as death and as primal as creation.
David resolved that he would give all he had, and all he ever would have, to acquire that which this man-at-arms possessed—this wisdom, this understanding, the knowledge of these mysteries. He would die to be and to become, himself, like this man.
BOOK THREE
THE LITTLE DESERT
− 8 −
THE STOCK PENS
DAVID TURNED THE CORNER TO the stock pens, and there was the horse—the stolen cavalry mount upon which the Nazarene Michael had made his escape. The animal was a chestnut gelding with a white blaze and four white stockings. It was missing its saddle and all equipment of war. It wore a halter but no bridle.
Telamon saw the horse in the same moment. If his expression altered in any degree, David could not detect it.
Yet clearly the mercenary had led them to this location expecting to find exactly this.
The place was a mixed Judean, Samaritan, and Egyptian settlement, a trading establishment sited at a highway junction called by the Israelites Anthedon and Bardawill by the sons of the Nile. It sat within sight of the Great Sea—Mare Nostrum, as the Romans named it.
Hot.
The place sizzled in the forenoon, pungent with horse, camel, and mule droppings, not to mention the pellets of sheep and goats hemmed in cactus-fenced pens baking in the sun.
The night before, David had suffered a second bout of irrational terror.
He had made up his mind to quit Telamon. He would go home. Better to face the wrath of his father than another day of trekking in silence, waiting for this strange, hard man to acknowledge his presence, let alone care about it. But in the morning, the youth could smell the breeze off the sea. He realized he was not as frightened at the prospect of venturing into the wilderness as he had been the night before. He upbraided himself silently for yielding to such phantoms as spawn in the dark.