“I accept,” said Telamon. “What’s the job?”
Inch by inch, the youth David had now crept to a spot upon the overhead beam nearly abreast of that occupied by the man-at-arms. He dared not tug the mercenary’s kit and weapons so far out from the wall but kept touch with this bundle, barely, by a rawhide strap around one ankle.
Below David now, the garrison commander nodded to the lieutenant. This officer motioned in turn to the pair of sergeants standing in attendance to the rear. These came forward and, with a mawl and pliers designed for this purpose, unpinned the manacles and leg irons that had bound Telamon.
The commander addressed the mercenary.
“That Hebrew whom your reckless intercession helped to free . . . the fellow who took flight on the back of a legion cavalry mount . . . I want him. I want you to find him and bring him back to me.”
Severus declared for Telamon’s information that the fugitive had been detained in this very fortress, in the underground dungeon reserved for political prisoners and Messianic insurrectionists. It was at Severus’s own direction that he, and the mute girl-child in his care, be released. That was four days ago.
“I was hoping that this villain would lead me to an article I seek. But events, as you well know, have transpired otherwise.”
David felt a stirring beneath his left heel. He craned to look. A brown rat the size of a man’s fist was working its whiskers over the sole of David’s exposed foot. David bit hard into his lower lip to stay himself from crying out. He clung with one hand to the beam beneath him and with the other to the rawhide strap that bound him to the man-at-arms’ kit and weapons, straining with every fiber to hold silent.
“Who,” Telamon asked Severus, “is this man?”
David thought, Do I dare kick? No. The rat will tumble and I am discovered.
Below David’s perch, the garrison commander continued:
“There are three types of Jews in this godforsaken country. Temple Jews, Zealots, and Messianics. The first can be bought off for riches or power, the second can be dealt with by force. The last resist everything. They cannot be suborned, coerced, or reasoned with. They occupy not this world but another. The man you will pursue is one of these.”
Severus asked Telamon if he had heard of, or owned acquaintance with, that Jewish subversive calling himself Paul the Apostle.
The mercenary replied that he knew the name but little else.
“He is a Roman citizen,” said the commander, “a Cilician Jew and former senior functionary under the Sanhedrin known as Saul of Tarsus—and a merciless persecutor of so-called ‘Christians’ in that capacity. The story goes that he experienced some sort of miraculous ‘conversion,’ whereupon he became an adherent of that cult which he had formerly scourged—throwing himself into this new role with the same zeal with which he had pursued the prior. Now, based at Ephesus and styling himself ‘Paul the Apostle,’ he oversees an operation of empire-wide scope in support of and evangelizing for this new religion.”
Telamon absorbed this. “He was the man who escaped at the Narrows?”
“No. But the fugitive is a close associate and in regular communication with this Paul. His name is Michael. He is either carrying a letter from the Apostle or is bound for some location or to some individual who will give him the letter.”
Telamon inquired of the contents of the letter. Did Severus know what was in it or to whom it was addressed?
“What’s in it is easy. Sedition. Where bound? To the Christian underground community at Corinth in Greece. This city is familiar ground to the Apostle. He himself established the Nazarene sect there.”
The commander explained that the epistle to Corinth was no brief love note. Its length was three thousand words or more.
“In a scroll, probably, tightly wound, inscribed in minuscule script. It could be as small as a thumb.”
The fugitive called Michael, declared the garrison commander, would not be content to deliver this letter to one community only. Severus knew this, he said, from the oaths of defiance the man had spewed when he was racked, in the fortress, upon the wheel.
From Corinth, the Apostle’s words would be copied and disseminated to a hundred other colonies, fomenting rebellion and insurrection.
“Rome cannot permit this. The letter must be stopped.”
Severus paused at this point, meeting the mercenary’s eyes with an expression that sought to convey the urgency and critical consequence of this assignment.
“I don’t know where this Nazarene has hidden the letter or how it will be delivered into his hands. That’s your job, peregrine. Bring me the document and bring me the man.”
David felt the rat step across his heel and mount onto the back of his bare calf. David’s privates hung exposed beneath the hem of his tunic. He could feel the rat’s whiskers probing ahead of its passage up the inside of his leg and hear the eager sniffing of the rodent’s nostrils. The youth’s soundless prayers intensified.
The garrison commander continued to the man-at-arms, “This man, Michael, the one whose escape was made possible by your actions, is the most dangerous man in Palestine.”
The commander loosed the drawstring of the pouch he had tossed earlier onto the table. A double handful of coins spilled forth.
“Twelve golden eagles,” said Severus. “Four years’ pay when you were a serving man. And another dozen when you bring back the Nazarene and the letter.”
Telamon whistled.
The rat’s whiskers now probed the flesh inside David’s thigh. For a moment the boy considered leaping from his perch, even if it meant prison or death. Instead his right hand, the one clutching the roof beam, shot toward the rat, snatching the beast at the nape of its neck and crushing its cervical spine with one quick, violent twist. The men below heard the sound, or thought they did, but, after a moment or two of glancing about and discovering nothing, dismissed the intrusion. David clung to the rodent, wringing its neck further lest it spasm even in the throes and give him away.
He felt a sharp pain and realized he had been bitten.
A pellet of blood tumbled off David’s thigh, dropped into space, and landed with a soft splat on the pine floor between the feet of the man-at-arms. The mercenary made no move and offered no reaction. Neither the garrison commander nor the other Romans seemed to notice.
David dared draw a breath.
“And what will be his fate, this Nazarene Michael,” the man-at-arms asked, “when I bring him back to you?”
Severus indicated the crucifixes lining the walls of the shop.
“The same as yours if you fail.”
The commander slid the purse and coins across to Telamon. The mercenary took them.
The commander offered further intelligence to assist the man-at-arms in his errand. He declared that an informer of the prison had delivered certain particulars to the warders, obtained as confidences from the fugitive Michael.
The man-at-arms asked if he might speak to this fellow.
“The informer is a woman,” said the commander. “A sorceress, no less.”
Severus employed the Hebrew term kishshephah, pronouncing it with amusement, as at the depths of superstition and ignorance that flourished in this god-deranged country, as opposed to the Greek term magissa, related to the Farsi magi, which took the manipulation of the black arts seriously and treated the field with respect. “The woman claims to fly free of this fortress each night, as a raven, and declares that she can strike a foe fatally by incantation if she but first acquire a clipping of that man’s fingernails or a lock of his hair.”