The lowlands are soft. The hills are hard. The rule is as old as time. The lowlands yield. The hills resist. So it has ever been. The lowlands welcome. The hills shun. So it will always be.
And when the soft lowlands yield and welcome, the hard hills have to punish. For the hills and the lowlands are locked together in unbreakable embrace; they are two halves of one flesh, even if the lowlands have a wandering eye.
Down came the raiders to burn and to steal and to scourge out those who had been welcomed and to chastise the faithless ones who had welcomed them. The lowlands had cozied up to the latest conquerors. The hills raised up the latest rebel chieftain to try to push them into the sea.
When he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple. The garrison soldiers tried to take him then. They discovered, as others had before them and yet others would in centuries still to come, that the only thing worse than not trying is trying and failing. He rose against them, and his followers with him, and tried to drown the lowlands in blood.
Lowlanders knew what to do in times like those. It was not as if they had not seen them before. The rich and the accommodating fled their farms and took refuge in the cities, where the conquerors they had been accommodating would protect them from their unloving upcountry cousins. For the conquerors needed collaborators—almost—as much as collaborators needed the conquerors. This too is a rule oft seen in other lands and other times.
Some of the rich—fewer of the accommodating—did not run fast enough. Few crimes are worse than bad timing, and few more harshly punished. How the hillmen howled! "Generation of vipers!" they cried. "Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come! Repent, you—for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!"
And they sent those they caught to heaven, or wherever they went, with the sword and the axe and the rope and such other tools as an aroused ingenuity might suggest. And their chieftain looked at what they had done, and he saw that it was good. "Follow me," he said, "and I will make you reapers of men."
They howled louder and harder after that. They reaped men and burned fields and vineyards and cut down olive groves. "Now also is the axe laid unto the root of the trees!" they cried. "Thus every tree which does not bring forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire."
Trees were not all that went into the fire. So did many of the rich, and their wives, and their mistresses, and their children—legitimate and otherwise. "Happy shall he be," sang the hillmen, "who takes and dashes your little ones against the stones." By that measure, many hillmen were happy indeed.
They came down on a city, there in the plain. It was closed against them, of course. Its walls rose up five or six times as tall as a man. Up at the top of them, the defenders pointed out at the ragtag and bobtail force that presumed to stand against them, the greatest power in the world. Some of the defenders laughed. And why would they not? Those walls were thick as well as tall. The hillmen had no siege train. A siege train was the mark of a civilized army, not hairy, unwashed, circumcised barbarians.
The rebel leader—the Son of God, some of his fanatics named him in their madness and arrogance—called up to them, "Judge not, lest you be judged." Hardly any of them understood him. He spoke only the guttural local language, not the civilized tongues, the tongues of the West. If he grunted and brayed like that, how could anything he had to say possibly matter? Even the handful who could follow his worthless jargon laughed at his presumption.
A few of his men, wild with rage, tried to storm the frowning walls. The defenders' weapons smashed them. They were brave. Indeed, they were wild to give up their lives for the greater glory of their leader's Father. But courage would take even the bravest men only so far. It would not take them to the top of that wall.
He called them back. "I came not with peace but with a sword," he told them, and he drew one, and he brandished it. "He that is not with me is against me. For we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. Take to yourselves the whole armor of God so that you may be able to withstand them in the evil day."
"How shall we go up?" they cried.
"Many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first," he replied, and added, "Narrow is the way, and few there are that find it." And he met with his twelve chief followers, and they talked till after the sun went down.
Everything was quiet in the night. When day came again, the hillmen raged against the city—raged against it and were beaten back. Quiet returned on the second night. On the third day, the rebels once more surged like a restless sea. On the third night, quiet came again—and the defenders relaxed something of their vigilance. Quietly still, hillmen thrust stakes in between the stones of the wall, and used the ladders they thus made to mount to the very top.
Yes, on the third night they were risen, and they gained the wall, and they gained the city, and great was the slaughter therein. "This is the day the Lord has made!" they cried, and they killed the defenders, and they killed the collaborators, and they killed anyone else who happened to get in their way, and they put the place to the torch. And then, with a shout of, "He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the meat from their seats, and exalted those of low degree," they—and the Son of God—melted back into the hills.
The transport made its slow way into the harbor. Gulls wheeled overhead, skrawking for a handout. More transports followed the first. Warships flanked them, ready to pounce in case fanatics in small boats tried to hurl fire into them, killing at the cost of their own lives.
On the deck of the lead transport, Marcus looked ahead with interest. The green plains seemed reasonably familiar. The forbidding brown hills beyond them? No. Marcus had joined the army when he turned eighteen. It was that or spend the rest of his days staring at the north end of a southbound mule. He was still a good-natured, smiling kid . . . unless you happened to be the enemy, in which case you were in more trouble than you knew what to do with.
One of his buddies bumped up against him. "Watch where you're putting your big, smelly feet, Lucius," he said.
Lucius told him something that had to do with his mother. Lucius had got a girl in trouble, and gone into the army instead of facing her father. He was short and stocky, where Marcus had half a head on him and was on the lean side. Apart from their build, they both could have been stamped from the same tough mold. Lucius looked out toward the hills, too. "It's not much like Europe, is it?" he remarked.
"Gee, no shit," Marcus said. The two of them laughed again. Why not? They were young, they were strong, they were well trained, they had the best equipment in the world, and they were confident nobody but nobody could measure up to them. Considering the imperial reach, they had a point. Marcus added, "I was just thinking the same thing. Different kind of country."
"At least the sun's out," Lucius said. "That's something, anyway. When we were in Germany, you wouldn't see it for days at a time."
"We'll see it here, all right. We won't be so glad to see it when we're on the march, either." But Marcus laughed one more time—he really was a happy-go-lucky fellow. "We've been doing this for a little while now. We can complain no matter what the weather's like."
Thud! A gangplank smacked down onto the quay. Marcus slung his pack on his back, shouldered his weapon, and tramped down onto solid ground. After so long at sea, terra firma felt as if it were shifting under his feet. "Come on! Come on! Come on!" his company commander shouted. "Form up, then head for the market square. Once we're all there, the general will tell us everything we need to know." Quintus had been in the army a long time. His bass rasp said he'd seen and done everything. It also said nothing had been able to kill him yet, and he didn't think anything he ran into ever would be able to.
The soldiers roared out a dirty marching song as they quick-timed it to the square. Bearded locals in long, funny-looking robes gaped at them as they went by. The locals muttered to one another in their incomprehensible language. Even their writing looked peculiar to Marcus: strange squiggles that could have said anything. He'd heard the letters ran from right to left instead of from left to right. He didn't know, and didn't much care; he couldn't have read them either way.
None of the locals did anything more than murmur. Nobody shouted an insult in a language the soldiers could understand. Nobody threw a stone or tried to mix it up with the troops, either. Keeping a low profile was sensible of the locals. You didn't want to mix it up with people with body armor and the finest weapons and training in the world, not if you wanted to go on breathing you didn't.
Marcus had heard that some of the locals didn't care whether they lived or died, as long as they could take out their enemies as they went. He'd heard it, but he didn't believe it. You could say that, but meaning it once you got out on the battlefield was a different story.
That fierce sun beat down. He took a swig from his canteen, which held a mix of water and wine. When he got to the market square, he wondered if it would be big enough to hold all his buddies. He shrugged, and his body armor clattered about him. That wasn't his worry. He took his place, his company took its, and more and more units took theirs.
The general strode forward and stood on the rostrum. "Men, we are going to disarm and pacify this country," he said, pitching his voice to carry. He knew his business; he had no trouble making himself heard all over the square. He went on, "The fanatics here have given us too much trouble for too long. We are going to root them out this time. They don't respect Western values. They've made that very plain. They think their god and this so-called Son of God count for more, and they can do whatever they please as long as it fits in with their religion. They think they'll get a happy afterlife on account of it. What I think is, they'll change their way of thinking pretty quick if we send enough of 'em to the afterlife. So that's what we're going to do. Have you got it?"
"Yes, sir!" Marcus shouted along with the thousands of other young men who'd come from the West to restore order to this miserable place that kept flouting the authority of the strongest nation in the world.
"Are those wild-eyed maniacs going to stop us?" the general inquired.
"No, sir!" Again, the shout from Marcus and his comrades filled the square and echoed from the walls.
"All right, then." The general made his smile extra broad, so all the soldiers could see it. "These people are going to find out they don't know who they're messing with. Isn't that right?" The roar of agreement that went up then dwarfed the other two.
Word soon reached the hillmen that the Western soldiers were coming after them. The rebels had spies and sympathizers everywhere. One of the invaders couldn't step off the road and squat behind a bush without their knowing about it right away. But knowing about it and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
One of the rebel chieftain's most trusted counselors was a man they called the Rock. "We ought to just disappear for a while," he said as the rebels leaders squatted around a campfire. "Take off our helmets, throw away our weapons, vanish into the countryside. All they'll see when they get here is a bunch of farmers digging up weeds and trimming vines and pruning olive trees. How can they fight a war if there's nobody to fight?"
Several others from among the twelve nodded. The Rock was a practical man, a reasonable man. He'd given practical, reasonable advice.
But, as their chieftain saw it, they were not in a practical, reasonable situation. They were in a war. When men went to war, they threw practicality and reason on the rubbish heap first thing. Shaking his head, the chieftain said, "I told you before—I come not to send peace, but a sword. He that finds his life shall lose it: and he that loses his life for my sake shall find it."
The Rock exhaled heavily. "I am not sure this is a good idea. I am far from sure it's a good idea."
"Is it not lawful for me to do what I want with my own?" the chieftain demanded, growing angry in his turn. "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars—see that you are not troubled, for all these things must happen. And, I remind you again, he that is not with me is against me." He fixed the Rock with a stare of messianic intensity.
Against that stare, even the stalwart Rock had no defense. He bowed his head, murmuring, "Your will be done."
His will was done. The hillmen gathered. To the Son of God, their numbers seemed as far beyond counting as the grains of sand by the sea. "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," they sang, "for you are with me." The Son of God inclined his head. The hillmen marched.
Some of Marcus' buddies grumbled as they moved toward battle. He didn't mind getting there. Most of the time, he just stopped thinking about anything in particular and let his feet do the work. That way, the miles unreeled behind him, and he hardly even noticed they were gone.
Every so often, he had to cough. So many men and animals and vehicles on the move kicked up an ungodly amount of dust. He couldn't keep it out of his eyes, either. It was just one of the things you had to put up with.
Mobile troops and scouts went ahead to make sure the main body of the army didn't run into any nasty surprises. Then came a division to back them up in case they found trouble, the vehicles and the artillery, the high command and the rest of the supply train, the main body of the army, and the rear guards—more mobile forces, also stiffened by heavy infantry.
Trouble didn't take long to come. The locals thought they could shoot at the advancing army from the side of the road and get away with it. They caused a few casualties, but only a few. Body armor saved several men's bacon. And the soldiers deployed with practiced efficiency, hunting the locals down like dogs going after hares. Any one hare could usually get away from any one dog. But when the dogs outnumbered the hares and worked together better than they did . . . Not a lot of the bushwhackers who tried to harry the army on the march had joy of the outcome.
"They want to trap us," Lucius remarked after helping to get rid of another small band of raiders.
"Good luck, assholes. Pretty sorry-looking traps after they try and close on us," Marcus answered. He had a bloody rag rapped around one hand. The wound wasn't worth seeing a physician about, but it annoyed him just the same. Worse, it embarrassed him. Yes, the raiders would stand and fight when cornered, but that one skinny fellow had had no business whatsoever getting through on him, none. The bandit was dead now, dead with his blood soaking into the dirt, his guts spilled out on the ground, and carrion birds squabbling over his eyes and tongue. Plenty for everybody, birds, Marcus thought.
When night came, the army made sure trouble didn't come with it. The soldiers quickly built a camp with a fortified perimeter surrounding it. The square encampment conceded nothing to the local geography. Entrances were set in the middle of each side. The streets that ran from each entrance to the one opposite met in the center of the camp. The general and his leading officers were quartered there, at the heart of things. Heavy infantry, light infantry, mobile forces, artillery, logistics—all had their assigned places. They were the same here as they would have been in Spain or Germany. Marcus entrenched his stretch of the perimeter, strengthened the works with stakes, and then lined up for supper.
Come morning, the men would tear down what they'd built the night before, fill in the entrenchments, and go on their way. The locals wouldn't be able to take advantage of what they'd made. That, too, was standard operating procedure.
As he and Lucius got ready to sack out after eating their rations, Marcus said, "You know, I'd just as soon fight the battle and get it over with. I swear we don't work as hard going up against the enemy as we do when everything's routine."
"Yeah, I think you're right." Lucius wrapped himself in his blanket. "Tell you something else, too—I don't think we're gonna have to wait real long. Do you? . . . Do you?"
Marcus didn't answer. He was already snoring.
From a hill not far away, the rebel chieftain looked down on the Western imperialists' camp. In his own mind, he contrasted its good order to the straggling hodgepodge of tents and huts he'd left behind. The Rock stood behind him and, by his frown, was doing the same thing. "They are formidable," the Rock said, reluctant respect in his voice.
With a shrug, the Son of God replied, "Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down."
The Rock had a mind of his own, and a wry sense of humor. "Of course not," he said. "They'll take down the camp themselves."
"God is not mocked," the rebel leader said sternly. The Rock bowed his head again. If his chieftain thought he'd gone too far, he accepted the rebuke. The Son of God continued, "The word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword. It pierces even to the point of dividing soul and spirit and the joints and marrow. It discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart. Without shedding blood, there is no remission."
"I understand. The great Satan made me speak so," the Rock said. "I will be sober and vigilant, for my foe Satan is like a roaring lion walking about and seeking those he may devour."
"Watch and pray, that you do not enter into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak," the chieftain said, and the Rock bowed his head yet again. The Son of God added, "The children of that kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth."
"You have seen this?" The Rock looked up with regained hope, regained vigor.
"I have seen all the works that are done under the sun," the rebel leader said. "If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small."
"I will not," the Rock vowed. "Lead me. For it is better, if the will of God is so, that we suffer for doing well than than for doing evil."
"We shall smite them hip and thigh," the Son of God declared. And the Rock believed every word he said.
Horns blared, calling the army out of column and into line of battle. Marcus was glad to get off the road—which was no more than a dirt track anyhow—and get ready to fight. "Now we'll settle these ragheads once and for all," he said.
"You bet your butt," Lucius said. "They think they can stand up to us, they've got another think coming."
"Silence in the ranks!" Quintus yelled. The company commander was a stickler for doing things by the book. He added, "If you've got to talk about it, you're probably no stinking good when you really do it."
That stung. Marcus hurried forward, clutching his weapon. He'd show Quintus! That Quintus hoped to make him think that way never entered his mind.
Little by little, as the army spread over an ever wider front and less of its dust obscured Marcus' vision, he got a look at the enemy. He had to peer through the dust the locals kicked up. What he saw signally failed to impress him. They didn't keep good order, and not many of them looked to have much in the way of body armor. Even helmets were few and far between.
Lucius had hit the nail on the head. If these raggedy fools thought they could beat the best in the world, they needed to think again.
But evidently they did think so. There were a lot of them. Maybe that made them confident. They started yelling something—Marcus had no idea what. He hadn't picked up any of the local language, and didn't want to. It sounded more like choking than talking, as far as he was concerned.
"They're shouting about how great their god is," Quintus said. "Talk is cheap, boys. I don't have to tell you that. Any minute now, we're going to show them just how cheap talk is. Keep your eyes open, help your buddies, and don't do anything dumb."
Marcus found himself nodding. He'd been in skirmishes in Germany, but nothing major. This wouldn't be a skirmish. This was the real thing. He glanced over at Lucius and at the other men with whom he shared a tent, shared the march, shared food. Quintus knew what he was talking about. Marcus couldn't imagine letting his friends down. Better to die than to do that. If you died, nobody would turn his back on you afterward.
Horns squalled again. "Are we ready?" Quintus asked—an unnecessary question if ever there was one. The company commander waved. "Then let's go!" With a cheer of their own, his men—and the rest of the army—advanced.
"The Lord is one! The Lord is one! The Lord is one!" the hillmen shouted as they swarmed toward the soldiers from the West. The rebel chieftain watched from a hillside. His right hand held a sword. The calluses there weren't all from the hilt; some had come from carpentry before he went into rebellion.
"Here they come," the Rock said as the enemy moved forward.
"Yes." The chieftain left it at that.
"They have good order," the Rock said. "Our own men—well, they're fierce enough and more than fierce enough, but they fight with passion, not with skill. That's a wave we have rolling toward them, not a line."
"I shall fear no evil, for the Lord is with me. How should one chase a thousand and two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had sold them" —the rebel leader smiled at his comrade— "and the Lord had shut them up? Cursed be the man who trusts in man, and makes flesh his weapon, and whose heart departs from the Lord." He pointed toward the foe. "They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The foe is my washpot. Over them I cast my shoe."
Nodding, the Rock watched the fight unfold. His countrymen swarmed to the attack. The enemy moved more deliberately. And then, all at once, the air was full of missiles. They all flew at the same time; a single man might almost have cast every one of them. And when they struck home, the rebels wavered. Some went down, shrieking. Others threw up their shields to save their gore. But the shields did them less good than they might have. The long, thin iron shanks of the javelins bent when they hit, fouling the shields and leaving them next to useless.
When another volley of missiles flew from the enemy, more hillmen fell. Now they could not raise those fouled shields. The foe's artillery began to punish them as well. Great darts pinned one man to another. Flying stone balls smashed heads from bodies without even slowing.
A new cry rise up from the hillmen, not ecstasy for their god but a sort of pained astonishment. They had taken a town from the soldiers of the West. They'd harassed them in skirmishes. They had confidence they could beat the invaders when and where and as they chose. They had confidence—but the Westerners had weapons and doctrine and a relentless, driving precision that let them use both to best advantage.
After the volley of missiles, the enemy soldiers drew their personal weapons. The horns rang out again. The men of the West hurled themselves forward, not breaking ranks. Their big semicylindrical shields and body armor protected them from the rebels' swords and spears. And they used those shields not only as wards but as weapons in their own right, knocking down the hillmen and leaving them dreadfully vulnerable to a thrust in the belly or the chest or the throat.
The battle was decided before the hillmen realized as much. Instead of breaking off and saving what they could for a new fight on a different day, they kept pressing ahead into the killing zone—and the Western soldiers obligingly, methodically, killed and killed and killed.
"We are undone!" the Rock cried, no less astonishment and no less pain in his voice than in those of the men ahead of them, who were running up against something they did not understand and that taught understanding only through death. The Westerners' weapons were superior, but not overwhelmingly so. But marry superior weapons to superior doctrine . . . Here, the term had a meaning altogether untheological. And the weapons and the doctrine were married, and the hillmen burned.
In agony, the Son of God looked up to the heavens and raised his hands in reproach. "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!" he cried—My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?
As if to give him an answer of sorts, or at least to complete the rout and destruction of those he led, mobile forces thundered against both the rebels' flanks. After that, not even the most fanatical survivors could imagine anything but disaster had overtaken them. They turned and tried to flee.
But they had waited too long. By now, the Westerners all but surrounded them. Cavalrymen slashed them with swords. Archers stung them. The artillery still smashed men at long range. And the foot sloggers, the men who took ground away and held it, chopped them to pieces like a butcher chopping meat to stuff in a sausage skin.
Here and there, single men and small bands did manage to break free of the enemy. They ran. They threw away weapons and helmets and shields to run the faster. A couple of them saw the Rock and the Son of God on the hillside. "Flee!" they cried. "Flee from the wrath to come!"
"We should," the Rock said, setting an urgent hand on the rebel chieftain's arm. "If they catch us . . ." He shuddered. "If they catch us, they have no reason to love us."
"They shall deliver us up to be afflicted, and kill us," the Son of God agreed sadly. "We shall be hated among all nations for my name's sake."
"Even if I die with you, I will not deny you," the Rock said stoutly.
"Do you think I cannot now pray to my Father, and he will give me more than twelve legions of angels right away?" the chieftain asked.
"I see legions," the Rock said. "They belong to the Westerners, and they will take us if we do not flee." The enemy mobile forces had drawn very near. Even the fearsome enemy foot soldiers approached. The Rock shuddered. "They are liable to take us even if we do flee."
"Every one that has forsaken houses, or brothers and sisters, or father or mother or wife, or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold and inherit everlasting life," the Son of God said.
The Rock cared little for everlasting life just then. Preserving what life he had in the world suddenly looked more urgent to him. He shoved his chieftain, and the leader of the revolt reluctantly began to move. By then it was too late. The Westerners' scouts were ahead of them, the main body close behind.
"We've got all these stinking prisoners," Quintus said. That was literally true: the swarm of rebels the soldiers had captured did stink, not only because they hadn't bathed in much too long but also because fear had an odor all its own, a rank, wild stink that filled the victors' nostrils.
Marcus eyed the scrawny, dirty captives. They were so beaten, so demoralized, he would have pitied them—if they hadn't been trying so hard to kill his pals and him till the moment they threw down their weapons and threw up their hands and shouted, "Friend!" in as many languages as they knew. He didn't feel any too friendly toward them now. Neither did his buddies. Not all the locals who'd tried to surrender had succeeded.
Quintus held up a list. "We've got the top thirteen to sort out, see if they're alive or dead," he said. "Big reward for all of them, double reward for the rebel leader. With a little luck, some of us'll earn it."
"How are we supposed to know who the bastards are, sir?" Marcus asked. "One of these miserable, hairy assholes looks just like another one to me."
"The prisoners'll know who's who," Lucius said. "Some of them speak languages a civilized man can understand, too."
"Those are the ones who really piss me off," Quintus said. "They've got a good Western education, some of them, and they're still religious fanatics underneath." But he nodded. "Using the prisoners is just exactly what we're going to do. Either the leaders are hiding in among 'em, or else they'll know where the big guys are likely to have run off to. Do what you need to do to find out. Whatever it is, I don't want to hear about it." He made a production out of turning his back.
"Come on," Marcus said to Lucius. "Let's do it. I could use some reward money. How about you?"
"I wouldn't mind," Lucius agreed. "I wouldn't mind working out on the ragheads a little more, either." He had a small wound on one arm, and another on one leg. If he wanted to get a little revenge while he was interrogating, it was no skin off Marcus's nose.
Before long, they caught a break. They found a man named Bar Abbas. He wasn't one of the Big Thirteen; he looked like a thief. But he could understand them if they talked loud enough and thumped him a little, and he could talk to them some, too.
He pointed them at another man, a foxy-faced fellow with a red beard—uncommon even in the West and almost vanishingly rare here. Red Beard tried to deny everything, but Marcus saw the terror that stole across his face when he got pulled away from the rest of the prisoners. Lucius had fun persuading him that bullshit at a time like this wasn't a smart plan.
"All right! I'll talk! Don't get cross with me! Please don't get cross with me!" he said after a while. He talked funny, but you could make out what he was saying. He went on, "If you let me go afterwards, I'll take you to . . . him." He named no names, but he didn't need to.
"I think I'd sooner—" Lucius began.
Marcus grabbed his arm before he could. "You want the Senate to start investigating us or something? We need to find this guy. Besides, remember the reward."
"Oh, all right." Lucius still sounded sulky, but he went along. He nodded to the red-bearded local. "You got yourself a deal, pal. Take us to Mister Big and you go home free. Better than that—we'll even pay you a little something." He glanced over at Marcus. "There. You happy now?"
"I'm fucking jumping up and down," Marcus said, which made Lucius laugh. Marcus turned to Red Beard. "Come on, pal. You told us you were gonna do it. Now you better come through. If you don't, I'll just hand you to my buddy here and walk away. Nobody'll give a rat's ass what happens after that."
The local got the message, all right. He got it big time—he almost peed in his robes, in fact. "Let us go. If he is among the prisoners, I will show him to you."
"Uh-huh." Marcus and Lucius both said the same thing at the same time. They were both thinking the same thing, too. Marcus would have bet on that. If Red Beard tried to say the rebel honcho wasn't anywhere around, he was history. Extremely ancient history, too.
Red Beard went to and fro in the prisoner compound, and he went up and down in it. Marcus and Lucius tagged along behind, not too close but not too far. If the foxy-faced fellow tried blending in with the other captured rebels, that wouldn't work out so well for him, either, not considering what sorts of things were likely to happen to them pretty soon.
But he didn't. All of a sudden, he came on point like a truffle-sniffing pig getting a whiff of some of the juiciest goodies it had ever smelled. "Hey, hey," Marcus said to Lucius.
"Yeah," Lucius said to Marcus, and then, "I wonder if we ought to have some backup."
They weren't the only soldiers going through the compound looking for the worst of the bad eggs. Marcus thought about waving to bring some of the others over. He thought about it, and then he shook his head. "They're liable to try and split the reward with us," he pointed out. "Let's see if we can extract this guy all quick and smooth-like. If we have trouble, then we yell for backup."
"Deal," Lucius said.
They hurried after the guy with the red beard. He stooped by a prisoner who didn't look much different from any of the other bedraggled locals and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Then he pointed to the fellow next to the one he'd kissed and said, "And this is the man they call the Rock."
The Rock didn't seem to care anything about himself. He pointed to the rebel Red Beard had kissed and he gabbled, "This is not the Son of God. It is not. It is not!"
Marcus and Lucius looked at each other. They both knew lies when they heard them. Their swords cleared their scabbards at the same time. "Come along," Marcus said. "Both of you, and make it snappy."
Red Beard had to translate for the rebel chief. Marcus wondered if there'd be trouble, but the man just wearily climbed to his feet. He knew it was all over, then. He said something guttural. "What's that?" Lucius asked.
"He said to give Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to give God what belongs to God," the red-bearded local reported.
"His ass belongs to Caesar—and so does the Rock's," Marcus said. "Let's get moving."
They got the big shots out of the compound without the prisoners trying to mob them, which had worried Marcus. As soon as they made it outside, the guy with the red beard said, "You told me you'd let me go."
"Yeah, fine. You held up your end. We'll hold up ours. So long. Get lost," Marcus said. "Get lost and stay lost, in fact. We catch you making trouble again, we'll bury your sorry bones in a potter's field."
"My reward," the local whined.
"We haven't got ours yet," Marcus pointed out. Red Beard looked put upon. Marcus was tempted to scrag him. He didn't quite. He and Lucius hauled out their wallets and split the damage. "Here's thirty," Marcus said, handing the local the money. "Now fuck off, and be thankful you got this much."
Red Beard bowed almost double, like a slave. Then he disappeared.
The Rock eyed both the enemy general and his own chieftain. The enemy had not an ounce of give in him anywhere. The hillmen had rebelled, and they'd lost, and they were going to pay for it. They were going to pay for it in ways as nasty as the general could imagine, and he looked like somebody with a good imagination for that kind of thing.
His own chieftain, by contrast, still looked as if he didn't know what had hit him. The Son of God had been in shock since the men from the West shattered his army. The last betrayal only added insult to injury. The Westerners' awesome and awful display of power in the field would have made almost anyone doubt.
"What do you have to say before it's curtains?" the general asked.
"For myself, nothing," the Rock answered, and translated for the Son of God.
"Tell him he does not know what he is doing, and I forgive him on account of that," the rebel leader answered.
After the Rock translated that, the general laughed. "As if I need his forgiveness!" He pointed a stubby forefinger at the chieftain. "So you're the hotsy-totsy King of the Jews, are you?"
"You said it," the Son of God told him.
"Here's what else I say." The general turned to his aides. "Crucify both of them. One right side up, one upside down—I don't care which is which. Do it outside the compound. Let the prisoners watch before we send 'em to the mines and the arenas."
"Yes, sir, General Pontius!" the aides chorused.
"And fetch me a basin," the general added. "I need to wash my hands."