Animals We Made [RETURNS June 7, 2024]

Consider Lily | Part 7

The Roman wished to journey alone forever. He now hiked until exhausted, grateful for the obscuring dark. In the morning after sleeping on the ground he considered patches of vegetation feathering the rocks, a huge sea twinkling acres beyond. Though he expected no welcomes from the place he'd inhabit by noon, at least he didn't have to obsess about the girl anymore.

Up the valley he climbed, then hiked along its outermost rim, where he could see the distant waves of the Mediterranean lap at the chalky white sand. Crabs scuttled there, and he remembered chasing them as a boy, when everything had appeared so immense and currently was so minuscule. Arriving at a gate in the belly of the wilderness, he leaned against a tree and waited to be noticed by one of the watchers probably on duty, out of sight, in a bush or a tree or even some hidden cave or burrow.

Sure enough the man emerged from the undergrowth, his face lean and his eyes sunken. He wore a skullcap tied to his head with a band, the excess cloth flapping about his neck.

"Issachar," blurted the Roman.

The newcomer laid a fist against his chest. "Shalom."

He whistled, and others surfaced too from different areas of the forest. Only some of these people were familiar to Quintus, but he felt they could be his kin in the burgeoning revolution if not by heritage. Each of them wore a skullcap like Issachar's and many of them had longbows slung across their shoulders, hidden blades glinting out from under the sleeves of the youngest men.

What concerned the Roman most was the silence as not one of the warriors approaching him uttered a word, but instead they circled him and panted, leering, as if they'd just run a race and gotten hungry from the effort—and would he be their next meal?

Then he did something awful.

He grinned.

Cheeks stretching to let his teeth flash under the vanity sun, he grinned as wide as he imagined he ever had and to his shock, Issachar, the first man who'd surfaced from the woods, grinned as well.

So Quintus knew he'd come to the right place.

"I met your friends in Judea," he announced to the group that circled him.

"What did they tell you?" replied a Zealot with a hole where his left eye should have been. "Are they still for us?"

"I'm for you." Quintus' drew his sword and thrust it into the ground under himself. "Caesar is nothing to me."

The wind held its breath, every leaf untroubled up in the frail red trees. It was quiet, too quiet, the kind of quiet rarely followed by anything but dissent or violence. His mind raced, since he anticipated a battle. One warrior couldn't fend off dozens. They'd kill him in an instant. He stroked his stubble, so thick, so warm. Fields out past the dark woods glittered with ice, and he realized the weather's treachery as the season went cold.

Issachar nibbled at his lips, the corners of which were crusted with hardened froth.

A mouth like Peter's.

Quintus focused on the weight of the bladeless scabbard against his thigh. "I've killed."

"Romans kill," taunted the Zealot whose left eye was a vacant hole, a pit in his flesh.

"I've killed Romans," added Quintus.

"Your own?" said a man wielding a heavy iron club.

Here, a little wind did trouble the trees above them, and it was soft, gentle, a breeze that chilled the air.

"If Caesar finds me," Quintus went on, "he'll have me executed."

"Welcome to remembrance, brother." Issachar stepped in front of the other Zealots. "Adonai has driven you from the joys of youth, the comforts of peace. He removes us from what we love so that we can learn to love more."