He nocked an arrow.
He drew.
David could not see the shaft as it flew. He only heard the sound and saw the bandit leader pitch first forward, then recoil wildly back, to spill, limbs unstrung, into the dirt as his mount, riderless now, pounded away past the wagons of the train and down the grade in the direction of the inn.
David stood now in the middle of the road. He had come down the slope from his post of observation though he later could summon no memory of executing this passage. He found himself immediately before the man-at-arms. David detected in the fellow’s eyes neither rage nor satisfaction. The man’s gaze was clear. He was not even breathing hard.
“Retrieve that arrow,” the man-at-arms commanded. His tone was neither harsh nor imperious. “Bring it back to me. Wipe nothing from its shaft or its vanes. Then collect my kit from up the slope.”
The warrior strode to the purse in the dirt and picked it up.
David, dashing after the spent arrow, passed in his rush the feral girl-child whom the man-at-arms had greeted beside the water ewer in the forecourt of the inn the night before.
Every other individual of the train, excepting the child’s father, had either made away back down the slope or taken up a position of concealment behind the freight wagons or among the clefts that bounded the road.
The girl alone stood forward, barefoot upon the summit track, her gaze fixed upon the man-at-arms.
− 4 −
EQUITES LEGIONIS
DAVID HEARD THE ROMAN CAVALRY before he saw them. He had scrambled down the track to the body of the bandit leader and was searching frantically among the folds of the fellow’s cloak for the arrow that had slain him, when the thunder of hoof strikes and the cries of the mounted legionaries rolled up the reverse grade of the highway, from the Jerusalem side.
Glancing back, David saw a half score of horsemen dismount, hem in, and overpower the man-at-arms, while their squadron mates, two score in number, with the drilled and practiced skill of all legion soldiers, cut off and enveloped the wagon train, its remaining constituents, and the surviving brigands, seizing control of the ambush site and all it held.
The arrow.
Where in the world had it gone?
David could locate the shaft nowhere, till a female pilgrim of the train, reckoning the object of his search, called out to him and pointed another twenty paces down the slope.
David scrambled to the spot. The arrow lay in the stony space between a mile marker and a nest of prickly pear cactus. David snatched it up.
The warhead shone clean in the sun, as did the shaft, absent all evidence of fluid or bone. But the vanes, the feathered fins at the rear of the shaft . . . these were soaked through with some viscous element that was not blood but tissue and gristle. David noted four shallow notches carved into the arrow shaft, just below the fletching.
David raced with his prize back to the wagon train.
The man-at-arms stood at the center of a ring of cavalry lance points. He was speaking in Latin, of which David possessed only a rudimentary understanding, to the cavalry lieutenant, who remained mounted. David recognized the word for “money.” The man-at-arms was holding up the drawstring purse.
He was claiming his due.
Up and down the train the legionaries, dismounted now, were tearing the wagons and their loads apart. They were searching for something. David saw two soldiers strip a pilgrim of the train to his ankles, rending his poor pack and baggage and strewing it into the roadway. Another pair of troopers pressed a dame of sixty years against a cartwheel, hoisted her robe to her shoulders, and began groping her buttocks and breasts.
“Where is it?” the soldiers cried.
Up and down the train this demand echoed.
“Which one of you is hiding it?”
David glimpsed the feral girl-child clinging to the skirts of her father. The Romans indeed were masters of terror. They knew how to rough people up, to overwhelm their will to resist, to drive them like sheep. Furious oaths ascended in Latin and pidgin Aramaic. Cuffs and kicks were delivered with fabulous violence.
David’s eyes found those of the man-at-arms. The fellow reckoned the arrow in David’s fist and with a flicker of a glance communicated, Keep it safe, don’t let these bastards get their hands on it.
David felt himself flush with pleasure to be acknowledged by this champion. He vowed silently to die before yielding up this bolt.
The Romans had taken in hand the father, the foot traveler with the feral girl. At once their fury found focus upon him.
“Here is the man,” one cried.
The legionaries fell upon him.
“Give it over!”
A violent cuff took the father off his feet. The girl was screaming the choked, strangled gurgle of one void of speech, and clinging to her guardian’s thigh. Two Romans seized the fellow by both ankles. They upended him, holding him high like a housedame stripping a pullet. Others beat the fellow’s ribs with the staffs of their lances.
The man-at-arms took in this spectacle, himself held at spearpoint by half a dozen.
The foot traveler, the father of the girl, had been stripped to the skin now.
His baggage, such as it was, had been sundered and scattered. One legionary, seizing the poor fellow by the jaw, the way a husbandman grabs a sick lamb or ewe, jammed his fingers down the man’s throat, as if seeking something secreted there. Next a pair of soldiers spread-eagled the man, while the third rammed three fingers up his anus. The girl flailed at the soldiers, seeking with impotent rage to defend her father.
Now the legionaries turned on the child.
David felt himself recoil with horror as a pair of soldiers seized the girl and tore her from her father. One prized the child’s jaw open and thrust his fingers down her throat. Next this man upended her, tearing her tunic over her head as she screamed in mute terror. Three fingers of the soldier’s right hand thrust toward the space between the child’s legs.
The man-at-arms’ face went black with fury. With a single violent stride the warrior broke from the circle of spearpoints and flung himself upon the legionary.
A blow to the temple sent the Roman sprawling. At once two, then three legionaries fell upon the man-at-arms’ back. As their weight drove him to the dirt, the girl squirted free.
The man-at-arms could not be contained. Despite the mass of his assailants’ bodies and the blows and cuffs with which they assaulted him, the mercenary rose to his knees, striking again and again with his fist into the face of the first legionary.
The girl had bolted now to her father, who sought with mighty urgency to draw her apart from the fracas. She would not budge, but remained rooted, staring with eyes like embers as the man-at-arms continued to pummel the legionary.
A blow to the skull from a heavy chain dropped the mercenary to the dirt.
“Seize him!” cried the lieutenant.
The Romans pinned the man-at-arms to the earth. Clouts from cudgels and lance shafts rained upon his back. Manacles were wrestled onto his wrists. Leg irons immobilized his feet.
David looked up to see the father spring onto the back of one of the Romans’ cavalry mounts, a chestnut gelding with four white stockings, and haul his daughter up behind him. The pair made away at a gallop.
Oaths and curses chased them.
Horsemen spurred in pursuit.
Along the length of the train, pilgrims and foot travelers scattered and ran.