The man-at-arms’ appearance at the stock pens created its expected stir. The pen boys and stock wranglers, the local farmers bringing their rams and ewes to market . . . none failed to note the LEGIO X tattoo on the mercenary’s forearm, or the quality of his weaponry, or the burnt-leather cast of his face. David had to admit to himself that he enjoyed the notoriety of being associated with this man.
“How did he come into your hands?”
This was Telamon, addressing the stock master. The pair stood in the sun-dazzle beside the third of some half dozen rings. In this country where wood was scarce, the stock pens were compassed in stone intermixed with prickly pear cactus in stands as high as a man’s chest, with pole gates at intervals. Boys and stock handlers leaned against or perched atop these rails, eyeing the horse. A rope enclosure of its own had been rigged for the animal.
“Blind luck,” said the master. “Though such good fortune could cost a man his neck.”
David noted the military mark on the stock master’s right forearm:
LEGIO VI
This settlement, the youth reckoned, must be a “grant hold”—conlocationem, in the Roman tongue—that is, land given to retired legionaries as a mustering-out reward for service.
The stock master himself was a salt of some fifty years, bald as a turnip, with gray in his beard, a sawed-off left ear, and four front teeth made of ivory. Beneath the hem of his tunic could be seen ancient but still-lurid burn scars down the backs of both legs. David saw the man take notice of the soldier’s mark on Telamon’s forearm, as the mercenary noticed that of his new comrade.
Neither proffered a word in acknowledgment of this, but the tone of each altered when now they bespoke one another. At a nod from the master, a stock boy brought cool water in an earthen crock with a gourd skimmer. Telamon thanked his new mate. He accorded the first refreshment to David. Only then did he drink himself.
The horse, it fell out in conversation over the succeeding minutes, had been discovered running free in the dunes northeast of a place called Rafiah, which site was apparently within several miles of these stock pens. The animal was parched and famished but still needed two teams of riders to be brought to hand. The men recognized the beast at once from the brand on its hindquarters—the x of the Tenth Legion—as a runaway or stolen stock. To be caught by the army with this prize in one’s possession was death on a Roman cross.
“What d’you think of this specimen of horseflesh, lad?” said the master to David, clapping a hand upon the boy’s shoulder. “His worth is more than the likes of you and me will earn in a lifetime. Ten years’ schooling went into this bastard—and better care and feed than any road-slapper beneath the rank of file-sergeant. He can charge boot to boot, execute a Laconian counter-march at the full gallop, and hold a surveyor’s line amid the trumpets. Smart? This fellow can do everything but stand on his hind legs and talk.”
David’s glance swung to Telamon. That this horse was free meant two things for certain:
Telamon had been right about the direction in which the Nazarene Michael had fled.
And the fugitive was now on foot.
“See this hobble?” said the stock master to Telamon. He held out a stout leather wrapping, like a man’s belt, lined with lamb’s wool and meant to be cinched about a horse’s forelegs, below the fetlock, to hold the animal in place for grazing or an overnight camp. The binder between the buckles had been chewed through.
“This animal had been secured in such a manner every night since he was a colt and never gave a thought to so much as a nibble. But the first night the thieves hobbled him so, he waited till they corked off, then ‘chomp-chomp’ and away he goes!”
“No saddle or bridle?”
“You’ll find ’em where the runaways last made camp, I’ll wager. Burned now, or buried so deep no one will ever find them.”
“Where,” Telamon asked, “would you guess that camp would be?”
The stock master smiled. “Exactly where you’re going.”
As Telamon and the master yarned, a camel-and-horse train appeared from the south, emerging from the mirage upon the track that arose out of the wilderness of Sinai.
The caravan entered the pens by a hinter trace screened by a line of tamarisks—an entrance intended, it seemed, to obscure the train’s apparition from observation from the main road.
David noted the stock master hailing the leader in welcome by name, while whistling up the stable boys, who came scurrying to take charge of the stock, to water and feed them, see to their tack and pack rigs, and to offer food and drink to the men of the caravan. David found himself glancing to Telamon. The man-at-arms observed these new arrivals closely.
What struck David about the company, aside from the thick and heavy coating of dust and loess—the talc-like grit of the desert that seemed to adhere to every surface of flesh or fabric—was that, though the freight their beasts bore was of extremely modest dimensions (only five camels, with panniers that lay almost flat against their flanks), yet the detachment was protected by no fewer than a dozen riders—black-hooded, with their faces masked—all Jews of the orthodox sect of Sadducees, identified by their balloon trousers and nine-foot lances, mounted on the swift, hardy runt ponies of the peninsula, and all armed to the teeth.
“A train out of Alexandria,” the stock master remarked, observing David’s puzzled expression. “Twelve days these have made, across the full desolation of the wilderness.” The freight borne by this train was bound, the master said, for the Great Temple in Jerusalem. It would return in twenty days and make the run again.
“What’s in the bags?” David asked.
“That which,” said the stock master, “no Roman tax collector will ever see.”
David noted that the mounted warriors took especial notice of Telamon and the legion-derived aspects of his kit, before concluding apparently that he was neither spy nor serving soldier but a solitary man-at-arms on the tramp.
The caravan riders handed their animals into the care of the stable boys. They themselves, dismounted now yet retaining their arms, made their way to the shade of the outdoor kitchen. Four of the warriors detached themselves from their fellows. These remained beside the laden camels. They took at this time neither food nor drink.
The stock master turned again to Telamon.
“He’ll be going for the Anthill,” the fellow said.
“Who?”
“The man you’re after.”
David’s ears perked up at this. The youth had heard tales of this place, an outlaw refuge so deep into the desert that not even the Romans dared venture there.
The Anthill, so the stories said, was a city entirely underground, populated by three wildly disparate communities—ascetics and anchorites seeking ecstatic visions in the wilderness; political refugees hunted by the Romans; and outlaws and slave traders, bandits and freebooters of the native tribes whose raiding territories encompassed all Sinai. These abided communally within the Anthill under a truce ancient as Adam. “But you reckoned that,” said the stock master to Telamon, “before you came.”
David studied the cagey old fellow. Roman cavalry, he thought, had surely come through these pens in the past few days, seeking the stolen horse and the man and child who made off with it. They would keep no secrets in such a place and with such a mate.