The Bronze Bow - Elizabeth George Speare [74]
In the darkness each boy reached out and clasped the hand of the one nearest him. "For God's Victory," they said together solemnly.
19
BEFORE DAWN the boys had found their position. In the darkness they had followed the shore road south past Magdala, striking inland to a place where the Via Maris, the road the Romans must follow to the coast, wound between steep, almost unscalable banks. There they worked their way painfully upward and hid behind rocky projections to rest. With the first light they ventured out, only one boy showing himself at a time, to collect the stones that would be their weapons. A very few carried spears and daggers. By the time the sun was fully risen, every boy was well fortified and concealed.
Even during the night there was traveling on this main road to the sea. During the early morning they counted five large caravans, with long files of burdened camels. Families, tradesmen, sometimes small detachments of soldiers passed beneath their hiding place. This had long ago been a dangerous section of road, but now travelers passed with confidence because, more than fifty years before, the great King Herod had wiped out the robbers who dwelt in the caves of Arbela, and now a Roman wall flanked the heights. So long had it been since bandits had inhabited this place that now Daniel dared gamble that the Romans would have no suspicion of attack.
On the steep cliff below where the boys were stationed, Daniel found the spot best suited to his own purpose. A fissure in the rock extended in an oblique line down the face of the rock, wide and deep enough in some parts to hide several men, ending on a narrow shelf barely ten feet above the road. In the crevice that dipped below the level of the rocky shelf he posted Nathan and Kemuel.
"I'll free Joel and lift him up to you," he told them. "You reach down and pull him up. If any soldiers follow, use your spears. Only one can climb up at a time, and I think the second will think twice before he tries."
"How do you get back?" Nathan asked, looking closely at Daniel.
"When Joel is up, then give me a hand," Daniel answered. He had no real expectation that he would get back up the bank, but he meant to see, with the last ounce of his strength, that Joel did. Nathan opened his mouth, then closed it, seeing in Daniel's eye a reminder that they had chosen a leader.
Through the noonday heat they waited, their energy draining away bit by bit under the merciless sun. As the hours went by, Daniel's foreboding deepened. This waiting was not the same as the times he had crouched behind a rock eager for Rosh's signal. It was no flimsily-guarded caravan they awaited. And behind him was no tight-knit band that would move with precision and cunning, only a cluster of untried boys. Even now, as he glanced up, the flutter of a coatsleeve betrayed one of them. Still, he could count on them. He knew that every boy in the band was prepared to give his life. It was up to him, the one they had chosen leader, to see that none of them had to.
But how different this was from the glorious battle they had hoped for! Would the day ever come when together they could pit their strength against the Romans for God's Victory? Daniel put that thought aside. A more immediate worry was the uneasiness that had persisted all night, the feeling that he was followed and watched, even in the darkness. Could it be that in setting a trap for the Romans he had led his band into some other trap? Almost, he was tempted to call them back. But there was Joel.
At midafternoon Joktan brought the warning. He alone, of all the band, was trained to this kind of attack. He wriggled and dodged his way along the roadside and skinned up the cliff into the crevice.
"Horsemen!" he gasped. "About e-eight. Then footsoldiers. Then the prisoners."
"Did you see Joel?"
"No. Too far away. But they've