The man’s weaponry was of legionary provenance but adapted in a way that David had never seen before. His throwing weapon was the Roman pilum, but cut down to a shorter, five-foot length and stripped of the heavy iron shank at its balance point so that it flew like a javelin and would not bend upon striking, as the legions’ pila did intentionally, but would penetrate as deeply as the strength of the throw would allow. The ash shaft of this weapon doubled as a carrying pole, set upright now against the wall of the saddler’s shop, from which the man-at-arms on the tramp suspended his rolled tent fly, ration sack, cooking kit, and so forth. Across the fellow’s lap, sheathed within a cover of leather lined with sheepskin, lay a Roman gladius, the short fighting sword of a legionary foot soldier.
The butts of two throwing daggers could be glimpsed peeking from the braces of the man-at-arms’ caliga boots. Lashed to his primary bundle, which clearly held all the man possessed, was a bow of extraordinary length, constructed of the Amazon science, glue-laminated of ibex horn and mountain ash, swathed for carry in a wolfskin case that held as well a sheaf of arrows, between a dozen and twenty, whose shafts appeared to be not of the weighty, salvo-range length used by the legionary sagittarii but of the lighter, point-blank measure employed by Syrian and Parthian horse archers.
The man-at-arms’ cap was of wool with the oil left in, like those favored by seamen for their repelling qualities to rain and sea spray, but topped with the skin of a fox, complete with agate eyes and teeth of marble.
“Will you lead us?” the chief wagoneer demanded again of the man.
“I work for pay,” declared the mercenary.
At the teamster’s shoulder, a half dozen others of the train pressed forward. Scouts, mainly boys of the district like David, had reconnoitered the ambush site only a few minutes earlier. They reported a force of at least ten bandits barring the road, armed and waiting, clearly purposing to interdict the wagon train when it mounted to the summit in the morning.
“How much?” asked the wagon master.
The mercenary showed ten fingers twice.
“Sesterces?”
“Denarii.”
A denarius is worth four sesterces. Twenty denarii is a month’s pay for an armored infantryman. The teamster’s profit from his entire wagonload would not make half so much.
“I admire your sense of humor, sir,” declared the wagon master, though his tone indicated nothing of the sort. “Twenty denarii is twice what the bandits will demand of me.”
“But a fifth only,” said the mercenary, “of the toll they will exact upon the train entire.”
Collective outrage greeted this. Maledictions were cast upon the man-at-arms. Teamsters cursed his arrogance. One man against ten? What warranties would the fellow make against his own flight under fire . . . or even that he would still remain present in the morning?
“A month’s wages? Outrageous! I’d rather be robbed by the bandits at the summit than be extorted here by the likes of you.”
“As you wish,” said the man-at-arms. He tugged his cap down over his brow and settled as if for a nap.
From their corner, the girl-child and her father looked on with keen attention.
The wagon master pressed the man-at-arms one last time. “You must traverse the ambush site yourself if you wish to pass on from here. The brigands will confront you in turn. Would you not rather fight with our armed company at your back?”
The mercenary settled more snugly into his snooze.
At this the wagon master hurled his straw cap to the dirt. “Remain in this place, then! And may you roast in hell! We’ll face these sons-of-whores on our own.”
And, turning to his comrades, the teamster declaimed in a great voice that the times had reached a pretty pass when men-at-arms lacked the bowels to take on the scum of the highway but instead made sport of their own fellows in need.
− 2 −
ORDER
TO UNDERSTAND THE TEMPER OF the historical moment in which the events of this tale took place, one must first acquire an appreciation of the alteration—material, political, and spiritual—wrought by Roman conquest upon the Hebrew inhabitants of Judea.
The people respected the Romans for their military prowess and the ruthlessness with which they applied their power, yet hated and despised them as idolaters and agents of evil. The conquered Jews tolerated the legions and administrators of the empire in the certainty only of these invaders’ fixed and inevitable overthrow. The male polity of Judea constituted at that hour, in the vividly recalled triumphs of the Maccabees and the Hasmonean dynasty, a yet-formidable fighting force, armed and seething with insurrectionist spirit, if indeed and of necessity covert.
Recall too that the foundational basis of the Hebrew faith lay in the might and invincibility of their God, the Lord of Hosts, who did not, in their view, look passively upon the affairs of His people but took a fearsome and active part in their protection and defense. Rome the lawless would find herself not merely expelled from the Holy Land but ground to dust beneath the engines of the Almighty, at the hour of His choosing and in a manner that would demonstrate to all the world the majesty of the One God.
How, for their part, did the Romans look upon the Jews? The senior commanders and administrative officers regarded the elite of Judea with a keen and deeply puzzled wariness. They did not understand them—their zeal, their piety, and the depth and passion of their identification with their role as recipients of the Laws of Heaven, of their history of suffering as a people, and their belief in their appointed destiny as purveyors of redemption for all humanity. The procurators and prefects of Rome chose to rule not directly but by proxy, appointing over the subject populace such functionaries of the Jews as could be counted upon to court the favor of the conquerors and to hold their own people in check.
As for the meaner Roman orders, these abhorred and detested the Jews. The degree of Latin arrogance toward the natives of Judea knew few bounds, even those evinced by the miles gregarius, the common soldier, serving in what to him was the most remote and forsaken precinct of the empire. The legionaries cursed this hellhole of a posting, peopled by such a pious, refractory, insufferable rabble. To them, the Jews were less than beasts, for at least a wild ass or even a dog could be domesticated to provide service and thus justify what few grains or scraps its earthly overlords deigned to cast before it.
In contrast, the populace of Syria, immediately to the north of Judea, had accommodated itself readily to the ways of the conquerors. The Syrians traded, they collaborated, they blended in.
The Hebrews resisted. Their necks would not bend to the Roman yoke. The Jews rejected every initiative of inclusion and spurned all offers of comity and assimilation.
The Romans, as they had done with unbroken dominion in every quarter of the empire, remade the locals’ world in the image of their own.
They constructed dams and erected aqueducts. They rechanneled rivers and dredged out harbors. Roman engineers made fresh water flow to desert places from mountains hundreds of miles away. The conquerors planted strongholds and fortifications; they erected seawalls and carved out ports and anchorages.
Rome built roads. Not the two-rut tracks or caravan traces that had sufficed for centuries in this land, but stone-founded highways broad enough for two wagons to pass abreast. Roman engineers made crooked ways straight and precipitous tracks level. Grades and floodplains that had throttled trade for a thousand years were vanquished now by Roman science and shaped to accept the new throughways.