The slaves and their guards and foremen rose to their feet and gazed at the cloud. They spoke low, trying to divine its meaning. Was this something the Romans caused? The cloud continued to climb into the sky, even as the thunder died. More sounds reached them, sharper like the cracks of a whip. Then they too died away, and all was silence.
Yasak ordered one of his cousins to run to the Roman camps and see what was happening. The man looked at him with whites all about his eyes. Yasak picked up a stone and flung it at his cousin who turned and ran to the quarry opening to the road. Yasak climbed the ladder to the watchtower where two more cousins stood guard. This vantage point offered him nothing but a view of the roadway where it turned away down the deep canyon to the exit where the foreigners’ camp lay. He could see his cousin trotting reluctantly away and finally out of sight around the curve.
The slaves were driven back to work, the more experienced to use hammers and mauls to cut and shape the uniform blocks the Romans desired for their fortress. The less skilled, the new arrivals, to haul slabs for cutting and to fill baskets with gravel to clear the field of scree.
It was dangerous and punishing labor and injuries were a daily occurrence. Many slaves were killed or crippled and had to be done away with. Thus the quarry needed new laborers constantly. Even with the high price of human flesh, the Zakais made a healthy profit selling to the occupiers. These Romans seemed to be building constantly and consumed stone and brick and even gravel with an insatiable appetite.
The sun was rising and the shadows receding from the cut of the quarry. The full heat of the sun would bake the western rock face until later in the day when it moved to the eastern wall. Atop the open watchtower, Yasak took the full brunt of the sunlight on his face. He wiped his brow with a cloth to remove the sweat from his eyes.
He blinked at the place where the road turned in toward the quarry. A figure moved there. To Yasak’s astonishment, it was a woman. She wore black armor and carried the banner of the Roman legion. The polished horse affixed to the top of the crosspiece caught the rays of the sun.
Behind the woman came two men. They walked easily, boldly. Each carried in his arms a black rod that was too short to be a spear. Yasak turned in the tower and called to his cousins and others to take up arms. They answered his call with swords and lances and rushed to the foot of the tower to defy the intruders standing where the canyon widened, well out of range of even their slings.
The woman, lewdly bare-legged and wearing her black hair free to her shoulders like a whore, stood with the Roman banner upright in her hand.
“We have come for your slaves,” she called in stilted Hebrew. “We have slain the Romans. We will spare you only if you free the slaves you hold.”
The overseers glanced at one another in consternation. Who was this bitch, and what was she saying to them? They were Jews, but most of them spoke only the local dialect of Aramaic, and only knew the old language from the words sung to them in the Holy Days.
Yasak’s father was a man of God and letters and insisted that he and his brothers learn the old language.
“You are mad, woman!” Yasak called back in kind. “The Romans will see you nailed up for this intrusion!”
“The Romans are dead,” she called back. “As you will die unless you free all within this place.”
Yasak repeated her words for the others and, after a moment to consider the absurdity of it, all barked with laughter.
“You will die,” the madwoman said when the men recovered from their mirth. “And I will choose the first to suffer my wrath.”
With that, the woman raised her empty hand and pointed a finger at the clutch of armed men gathered before the watchtower in a ragged line.
“This one!” she called.
A peal of thunder sounded and, simultaneously, one of the men, a second cousin to Yasak, stumbled backward to fall to the ground. He lay there for a moment, his legs kicking and his life’s blood pumping from a hole in his chest. Then he was still.
“Now that one,” the woman called with hand raised.
A second sharp crack, and another in the rank of armed men dropped as though struck with an ax, his arm near torn from his body and a spray of blood splashing over those close enough. The men parted in terror from their fallen cousins.
Yasak looked from the two still bodies bleeding out in the dust to the three strangers still standing on the roadway. The two men held their strange black rods to their shoulders. Wisps of white smoke rose from the rods as though they each contained a hidden flame.
“Release your captives!” the woman called. “Lay down your weapons and step aside, and no more will die.”
“It is a trick! She is a witch!” Yasak called to the men quailing below. “Take her, you cowards! Take them all! They are few, and you are many.”
Yasak’s throat closed tight as he saw the brazen woman raise her hand to point a finger directly at him.
The Rangers and Bat walked forward into the open floor of the quarry.
After Chaz’s shot took most of the head off the loud guy in the watchtower, the rest of the tough guys threw down their
