The man-at-arms said he would speak with her.
With a nod to his adjutant, the commander ordered the woman summoned. “You’ll need a translator,” he said to Telamon. “The witch speaks only Hebrew and Aramaic, or at least refuses to communicate with us in any other tongue.”
The man-at-arms declared that no interpreter would be necessary, as he had brought his own.
With that, he wheeled swiftly, snatched a board from the carpentry bench behind him, and, thrusting it powerfully skyward, struck the underside of the overhead plank upon which the youth David had made his perch.
The lad plunged in a welter of limbs and timber. The man-at-arms’ kit landed with a great crash, scattering utensils and weapons in all directions. Even the wrung rat tumbled. The Roman officers, and the prisoner-workmen at their benches, fell back in surprise and startlement, before bursting into laughter.
“This is your translator?” asked Severus.
The man-at-arms stood over David, extending his hand to help the boy up.
David could find no words, but sputtered unintelligibly, all the while scrambling to collect the warrior’s armor and weapons and to reassemble his kit.
“And has this sprat been eavesdropping in the rafters all the while?”
“And even bled a little onto your workshop floor.”
The interview concluded upon this note of amusement. The sorceress being sent for, the man-at-arms took up his gear (or such freight as he himself wished to carry, leaving the remainder for David) and stepped out, escorted by the lieutenant and the two sergeants who had loosed his bonds, onto that stone-founded way called by the Romans Via Papilio and by the Jerusalemites the Street of the Martyrs, that led to the southeast forecourt of the Antonia Fortress, in which his interview with the witch would take place.
As he crossed the floor of the workshop, Telamon’s glance took in the stacks of crucifixes waiting to be put to use. These instruments, he seemed to note, came in all sizes—some diminutive enough, it appeared, to serve for women or even children.
“Does it work?” the man-at-arms inquired of the garrison commander.
“For what?”
“To hold the populace by terror.”
Severus considered this.
“Not really. But it breaks the tedium.”
BOOK TWO
GAZA
− 6 −
THE SORCERESS
“SHE IS NO SORCERESS BUT a common root doctor,” the youth David declared. “And a cracked-pate one at that.”
Man and boy had made two camps out of Jerusalem. The pair had put the province of Judea beneath their heels and trekked now across the coastal plain of Idumaea, the ancient kingdom of Edom, toward the city of Gaza, under Roman rule since the death of Herod the Great. From there—Telamon had replied reluctantly and only after repeated importunities from David—their route would bear them into the territory of the Egyptians, via that crossroads called Rafiah, and from there into the wilderness of Sinai. Their train was two Jericho mules, purchased for a single silver “actium” (eight actiums made one Scythian “coson,” also called a Roman “eagle”) in the stock market outside the Jaffa Gate.
The interview with the sorceress had taken place immediately following the man-at-arms’ release, in the packed-dirt court downslope of the Tedi Gate, the ceremonial entrance to the Antonia Fortress. The woman was led out in chains by a single jailer, not a Roman but a Hebrew trusty of the prison. She took her seat upon neither of the two benches provided, nor in the shade, though such was abundant, cast by the eastern wall of the court, but in direct sun with no headdress or veil to cover her face. Telamon sat cross-legged in the dust across from her. David took a place between the two and to one side to perform his duties of translation. The mercenary offered cool water. The witch would not take it.
“You are the one who would hunt the Nazarene Michael,” said the sorceress before Telamon had offered a word. “Not for God but for gold.”
David found himself, at once and in his bones, terrified of this female.
He took her at first for a leper, so ravaged appeared her cheeks and jaw and so gnarled the flesh of the backs of her hands. Her hair, which was black and thick with curls, grew about her face in an unruly tangle. The sorceress seemed at first a crone of seventy, though upon closer examination David reckoned her years at little more than two score.
She would tell Telamon nothing, the witch declared straightaway and with passionate defiance—neither the content of her conversations with the prisoner Michael nor how she came to establish herself in his confidence. She would speak neither on the nature of her arrangement with the garrison commander nor reveal upon what charge she had been arrested and was being held.
Telamon put his queries directly. “Did you actually see the letter or only learn of its existence by hearsay? Does Michael have it in his possession now? If not, will it be conveyed to him by a third party at some place along his passage to Corinth? Where? By whom?”
The witch regarded the man-at-arms with hostility and contempt. “I saw it, all right. With these two eyes. The Nazarene had it, then burned or destroyed it.”
“How long is the letter?” Telamon asked. “Could it be rolled tight and secreted in some orifice of the body? Who is the little girl? Michael’s daughter? Why is a child her age being held by the Romans?”
The mercenary declared—from experience, he said—that Roman prisons were rats’ nests of informers. “Who else knows what you told Severus? How did he compensate you? What did you trade for such priceless intelligence?”
The man-at-arms sought to quiz the witch about the immediate destination of the fugitive Michael. Did she have any idea where the man was bound first on his route to Corinth?
“If I did,” the sorceress declared, “you’d be the last person I’d spill it to.”
The mercenary offered money.
The witch spat in the dirt.
Telamon offered to use his influence with Severus to get the sorceress’s sentence commuted or even to obtain her release. The woman only laughed.
When she addressed the man-at-arms, which she did repeatedly, interrupting him in the middle of a question or speaking before he had put one forward, it was with such prodigality as is taken in affairs only by one personally wronged in the most intimate and grievous manner, as a lover spurned or a comrade played false.
“What kind of man works such an errand for money? Have you no fear of heaven?”
David had sought in his translation to moderate the ire of the witch’s pronouncements, but the vitriol with which she spewed these could not be dissimulated. As well, the man-at-arms’ understanding of the Hebrew tongue (the sorceress disdained to employ the more accessible Aramaic) was not as limited, it seemed, as he had professed.
Throughout the interview, the man-at-arms maintained a bearing of equanimity. Never did he raise his voice or respond in kind to the venom spouted by the sorceress. “Ask only, woman,” he said at the end, holding up one of his golden eagles. “I will purchase your freedom.”
The witch responded as if acid had been flung in her face. Oaths sprang from her lips. She flew free of the prison every night as a raven, she declared, and could claim her liberty at any hour. Neither Severus nor all the armies of Rome could stop her. The woman indicated the