by Don Dewey
Finally he found them across a large crevasse. He knew he’d lost the almost necessary element of surprise, because they eyed him as he studied them. They howled their ferocious challenge at him, and he knew he he’d have to bring down their pack leader fast if he wanted to survive this hunt. He flashed a savage grin as he saw the torn ear and scarred right shoulder of the pack leader. Gheret had given him that scar two years before, but the mighty beast had gotten away and healed. The great wolf had injured Gheret that time as well, and both had healed. This prey was worthy of his skills.
The pack started around the long crevasse, since it was far too wide and deep to cross. He thought through his position, and decided that staying near it would give him an edge; literally an edge to death, which could save his life. He’d sent other predators into such places, having only to unbalance them enough to start them down the edge. Then he could concentrate on the others. In this case he might need that edge to survive.
Even as the pack leader snarled his challenge, close enough now for Gheret to more clearly see the scars along the beast’s right shoulder, confirming that it was the wolf he’d confronted in that previous hunt, Gheret sensed that something was wrong. The beast was so close that Gheret could smell the fetid stench of the brute’s predatory breath as it growled at him. As they sized each other up the roar began. Gheret looked up and watched as the mountain seemed to come crashing down. There was no way to avoid it. The avalanche was far too wide, and the wave was coming too fast. He hunkered down, as wild eyed as the crouching wolves nearby. All of them watched the descending snow, mesmerized by it for a moment. The wolves peeled off as a group, racing for their lives. Just before it hit, Gheret slid over the edge of the crevasse, frantically grasping for handholds as he fell. He was pushed further down, caught himself, and as the snow began to fill the crevasse, he slipped into a natural shelf on the side of it, gripping the rock and ice with his fingertips for a better grip, and waited to see if he would live. The sound was crushingly loud, so loud that it numbed his senses, leaving him deaf and blind as he clung to rock, ice and life.
When the avalanche had ended he tried to dig out, but realized that he could not. There was simply too much snow above him. He wouldn’t live long enough to reach the surface, and his own motions would very probably send him deeper into the crevasse, like struggling in quicksand. He lay on the narrow rock shelf, shaking from the cold, but realized that he might have just one chance. He forced his breathing to become shallow, and his heart to slow. It took some time due to the bitter cold, but slowly he did it, and his heart no longer beat. He lay still and alone under sixty feet of ice and snow, a veritable mountain of ice above him now. His last, fading thought was that perhaps his decision to move to this cold place was not the best he had ever made.
Chapter 10
The Return of Maximus
Maximus left the caves weak, but strong in his resolve to sort out this new time. It was quickly obvious to him that it had been long that he lay there. His clothing had rotted away. He left his armor, but wore what rags his clothing had become, and kept his sword and knife, though the leather parts of the scabbards were brittle and cracked, and of course he kept his pouch of jewels and precious metals. Long he walked, seeking a town, until he spotted one far ahead. “How long has it been?” And he started the last leg of his journey to find out.
He approached the town with caution, uncertain what reception a former Roman warrior would receive from these people. Perhaps Rome was still the greatest force in the world, and perhaps Rome was gone. He had to know. When he came to a sturdy house of sawn wood there was a line outside with clothing on it, no doubt to dry after being washed, or perhaps just to air out. He took what he needed, put it on, and crept back to the dirt road, turning again toward the town, brown robe tight over his stocky frame. His weapons were wrapped in more clothing, tied to his back. He hoped it would pass for a normal burden.
He went to the older men at the gate of the large town and asked if there was a teacher he could learn from nearby. “Which teacher?” one man asked somewhat acerbically.
“I don’t know any, sir, but I desire to learn. I’m new to these parts, and there is much I don’t know about. Any good teacher will do.”
Another man was less sarcastic than the first. “Well, there aren’t many teachers in our area, but you may want to speak with Mu’dar. He’s a good man, though perhaps not as keen a mind as some other teachers. He’s older, and I don’t think he has a student now. Most won’t take on an unknown student like you, nor one your age. You look what, twenty five?”
“Less, but I do look that age. Where may I meet him, kind sir?” Maximus seemed to be very subservient in his manner.
The man pointed down the narrow street, building pushing in on either side. “He’s next to the stables just there, ten or twelve buildings down.”
A third man laughed outright. “Can you count to ten or twelve?” The others joined his laughter.
Maximus wasn’t a patient man when it came to such things, and had long been a soldier with well honed battle reflexes. Their laughter, and the remarks, were really annoying to him after having just weathered what should have been his death. With a speed none of them could follow, even had they been expecting it, he grasped the man who started the laughter by his robe front, hoisted him and his enormous belly a foot off the ground, and said to him quietly, “Am I a man to be laughed at, sir? Or should I show you what my last job was?” The man turned white, and with some attempt at saving face, demanded in a quivering voice to be put down. Almost in a whisper, heard only by the man he held, Max said, “Give me grief and I’ll slice your gut open. Understood?” A second man stepped up and gripped his arm, but Maximus kicked him away with one foot, while balancing on his other foot and still keeping his heavy victim in the air.
The man nodded, not trusting himself to speak. No one else moved, so Max lowered the man heavily enough that he almost fell in front of his friends. With a wave of his hand Max called out a jovial thanks to them, and walked on toward whatever his destiny in this place might be.
When he’d gone far enough, he asked for the teacher they had described, Mu’dar, who in turn asked his business.
Max was as straightforward as usual. “You’ve been recommended as a teacher, and there is much I would learn.”
With a gentle smile, the tall, thin Mu’dar rubbed a hand over his shaved pate as he thought. “Do you ask to be my student? It’s most unusual, for a teacher normally chooses his own students from those who come to hear him in his public teaching.” He pulled his robes more closely around him as he awaited an answer.
“I don’t know your ways here, sir,” Max replied in his archaic Italian. “But, yes, I am asking.”
Mu’dar lifted one hand to indicate he would now speak as an authority, as a teacher. “I will make some observations. You must also learn to always make observations about anything and everything, if you would study with me. I’m an old man, and you’re young. I don’t know how long you would stay with me, nor exactly why you desire to study. But my first observations are these: You speak with a strange accent, and your words are hard to understand. I’m fairly sure no group of people still use that variation of our tongue. Secondly, you’re not a man of letters, that is, you aren’t a man of academia, but a man of action, a soldier perhaps. Thirdly, you perhaps are seeking how to best fit in this place, with these people.” He waved his arm to indicate those about them. “Am I at all accurate, young student?”
“Sir, you are accurate in all. I see that I’ve come to the right man for what I desire. I need to speak as they speak.” He also motioned to indicate those around them. “I need to gain much in the way of writing, numbers, and logic. I think you’re the man to teach me.” Max allowed himself a rare smile, and Mu’dar responded in kind. Maximus opened his purse to show the glow of golden coins and the flash of precious gems and went on. “I’ll gladly pay for the teaching.”
“I see. But I expect yo
u will find that we have little need for such things. Some, of course, but not much. Very well, let us begin.”
The days became months, and the months stretched into years. Max had a keen mind, great instincts and an unusually accurate intuition. He learned at a greater rate than any student Mu’dar had ever taught.
Over time they developed a deep and relaxed camaraderie, and thoroughly enjoyed one another’s company. They became more associates than teacher and pupil, and Max was no longer taken for a stranger or foreigner. For all his posturing about being old, Mu’dar was still a vigorous man.
***
A few months after their relationship began, the two were walking to the next town, and planned on being there before evening. They rarely took any kind of transportation, because Mu’dar had a saying, which he expressed far too often for Maximus’ liking. “The going is far more important than the arriving, and teaches one as the journey unfolds.” Max had learned more patience with him, and they walked along the road, still paved these many years since Maximus had watched Roman work gangs perform that task. The thieves jumped out from behind the rocks at the side of the road, and immediately demanded their possessions. “Give them what they want, Maximus.” Mu’dar spoke quietly and urgently. “Perhaps we shall live.”
“Sorry, master.” Max turned from Mu’dar to the bandit leader. “You’ll take nothing from this good man, and you cannot take anything from me. Leave while you’re still breathing.”
That brought peals of laughter from the bandits, eight in all. Laughing so hard he could barely speak, the leader began to tell Maximus why it was so funny. But before he could get it out, he found a dagger hilt protruding from his chest. He stared at it as if in amazement, and then sank to his knees. “Any more volunteers?” Maximus asked with a fey smile.
One of the geniuses before him voiced his lack of understanding. “Volunteers?”
“Let me rephrase it: does anyone else wish to die today, or will you leave us in peace?”
As brutes were wont to be, they were infuriated by the attack on their leader, even though they were the initial aggressors. The others rushed Maximus, expecting to put him down from sheer weight of numbers. Their weapons were at all angles, and Maximus abruptly found himself, once again, Sub-Commander Maximus, an elite killer for the Empire, his sword in hand, eagerly meeting the pitifully undisciplined charge of these brigands. He knew from vast experience that of these men, two would have to die quickly, leaving probably three to approach him more slowly, while most likely two would try to run off at some point after their comrades started dying.
He rendered the front two weapons, spears, into mere sticks as he swept their top two feet of length off with one sweep of his blade. On his backswing he cut into a bandit’s neck, slicing a major artery, which prompted a fountain of blood as the bandit screamed and fell. The one to the left of the two brash frontrunners fell with Max’s blade in and out of him so fast the man wondered what was happening to him as he died, and the others, a rabble really, fell quickly to his homicidal blade. Only one had the time and sense to run for his life, and Max calmly took a small throwing knife from his pouch and flung it expertly into the back of the bandit. That one fell to the road, scrabbling to keep going without his legs working properly. Max walked to him and lifted his head by his hair. “I did tell you to leave while you could. Fool.” He slashed the bandit’s throat with one clean movement, dropping his neck to bleed out on the road.
Max walked from that corpse back to where the seven other bodies were lying about in various tumbles and heaps. A couple of arms and one head were no longer attached to bodies, and lay by themselves. The bloodlust held him for a moment when all was done, in the abrupt stillness. As the adrenaline faded away he shook himself, and turned to face Mu’dar.
His teacher was aghast, having now seen the other side of his pupil. He gripped folds of his cloak, his hands clenching and unclenching, sweat running from his shaven head like a small stream. “What have you done, Max? They’re all dead! By the true God of heaven!” The anguish in his voice cut Max to the quick, and disturbed him.
“They are dead, but we’re alive. We would not be if they were. It’s simple deductive reasoning, that to eliminate them was the best and more secure path to our continued living.” He looked at his teacher for a response.
“Oh, Max, my friend. Just who are you, that you are able to do this, and that you could do it in seconds?”
A long lifetime of killing could not be erased by the time he had been with Mu’dar. Maximus was taking all of this very casually, which seemed to be callousness to Mu’dar. Max decided to treat it as a lesson, howbeit a grisly one. “Is my logic flawed, good teacher? Are not these men most probably wanted for banditry and murder? Did I not just execute justice and also save our lives? Are you wroth with me?”
“This is not a new thing to you, is it Max? The killing I mean.”
“Of course not, master, but it’s been a long, long time.” He lifted his blade to look at it, saw the blood dripping from it, and knelt to clean it on the tunic of a dead bandit. “A long time indeed, but my skills are still good. I had wondered about that. Hmmm, I seem to have not escaped injury after all.” He looked down at his side to see blood running in a sizable stream from his side to his leg, leaching into the ground around his sandal, turning the dry soil into a discolored mud.
“Max, you’re injured!” Mu’dar knelt to inspect the wound, trying to stop the flow of blood with his bare hands.
“It’s nothing my friend, so leave it. We must be away from this soon, or others will come upon them and we’ll have to answer too many questions. And how would you answer those questions?” He gave Mu’dar a very pointed look. As he’d been speaking, Maximus had torn a long strip of cloth from a fallen bandit’s cloak, and tied it tightly around his mid section to stop the bleeding. It wouldn’t do to leave such a trail for others to follow.
Mu’dar was an educator, a wise man, and ever practical. “And you can travel with that wound?”
“Come, let us away, Teacher.” Maximus hurried Mu’dar down the road with his left hand on the small of his master’s back, and his right hand holding his Roman short sword.
That night they chose to camp, instead of seeking out a lodging place, which might have invited too many questions. As the fire created stomach stirring smells from the now succulent looking hare Maximus was slowly turning on their wooden spit, Mu’dar broke their silence. “What would you have me know, Max?” The question was a gracious one, asking not for information per se, but rather giving Maximus an invitation to share as much or as little as he felt a need to share.
That earned Mu’dar a long stare from his current student, his last, he’d decided some time ago. “Let me tell you a tale my teacher, my friend, and you must not doubt the fact that I am indeed your friend, as I speak.” He said it in a tone that made it a question as he held his teacher’s eyes with his own. Mu’dar nodded solemnly, oddly still trusting this man he had come to know, in spite of the bodies lying on the road behind them. “There was,” Max began, “some centuries ago, a soldier of Imperial Rome, the sub-commander of a legion. He fought in the service of Caesar, his Emperor; he was a very good soldier, and his name was Maximus Palamos.”
Chapter 11
Session 4
“You still don’t believe me, do you Kenneth?”
“I’m trying to, really,” protested Kenneth, looking a bit glassy eyed. He thought his host was way better looking than the Grinch, but just as nuts.
“Let me share some history closer to home for you, and a wonderful example of your own country’s horribly immoral actions. This was in 1692, I believe. Ruby was going by another name by then, and living another life. She picked the wrong place, filled with folks who couldn’t accept anyone different from themselves.” He looked down at Kenneth. “Although that seems to be the general attitude of the majority of you Normals. She’d married and outlived her husband yet again. I don’t know what happened to
him; perhaps she offed him, and then again perhaps he died a normal death.” He paused and seemed lost in thought for a moment. “I would guess it was not old age though; we can’t hide our age until a spouse actually is old enough to die from old age. That would make us freakish, and open to investigation and even experimentation.
“Dear old Ruby was one of the witches your people burned at the stake; no wait, she was hanged, actually. I want to get this right, even though your people didn’t manage to. She was hanged by the neck as it’s said, but not actually until dead. Witch or not, convicted or not, they just couldn’t get her dead.” He laughed loudly, and Kenneth did not find it a pleasant sound.
Chapter 12
Mary Parker (Ruby)
Condemned Witch
“The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft—the Devil’s magic—and 20 were executed.”
Smithsonian.com
Mary Parker was a wealthy widow who had moved to Salem alone. There was, coincidentally, another family named Parker in the town as well. It’s obvious where this is going. Mary Parker was really Ruby, and she was accused of being a witch.
Her background wasn’t viewed as proper by the people around her. After all, she was a woman who was in charge of her own affairs, and a woman of means at that. It was a combination almost unheard of in that day and age. Yet Mary seemed very comfortable with her position and her independence. Many of the other women in town were quick to criticize her. Perhaps their outward dislike of her came from a deep, secret place inside where they envied her freedom. That brought about a resentment for her living as they would wish to live.
