Dan sat awake in the distance, of course, close enough to hear but not to be listened to. They’d not slept. The turkey leg was an enormous appendage, dripping, messy no matter how careful, and Bowman continued. The soldiers were indeed foolish brutes, while the Master of the Mallet was impressive. A big man with big forearms. Tan, rock-ribbed, a black cloth about his head. The kids of the Holy Land never forgot him, ate all their lentils right up without complaint when he walked past their doors at day’s end. The alleys were brown with dust. And in fact the stew was hot and good. He was just a man, mothers told their children. Same as they would be, though not so much the girls. He was always tired, like anyone else, hungry too, fast metabolism since a boy, with a thousand chores at home and his wife nagging him about the leak in the palm-frond roof. The wind across the Ridge of Thieves whistled at the town’s back, same as any wind through any line of posts. At sunrise, wolves sang. He had wishes like any man, the Master. “A drop of rain? Is it too much?” The Baker wondered the same thing. The Cooper stared up through the desert’s roof, chewed roots to help him sleep, bitter and pulpy. If not paid to miss, the Master aimed well, a professional. The feet were most difficult because of their hard shell of bone. He never learned the name of that bone. But if the damned who were saved screamed well enough, it passed for the real thing. Friends came in middle-night with crowbars, a ladder and knife, medicinal herbs too, lavender and frankincense. They hauled the condemned off to a cave outside the city for rehydration and treatment of wounds, tinctures and creams in sticky brown jars, cotton wads dabbed in cool water. Dogs snored in the caves’ corners, angels with tails instead of wings, thumping on stone. When ready, they hurried the rescue to a different city, hidden in a cart of pigs going to market, a pile of straw below snouts disguising legs, then some henna for his hair, trim his beard, a job on a fishing boat. No one noticed net menders. He would work his way up, become captain someday, join the army if he wanted to see the world, one of the Legions, as the dust settled. Most days no one paid to save those thieves and miscreants, though. The Master of the Mallet brought home his meager wages only, a set price per head from the Governor, from the Caesar of the day, which his wife dropped into the pocket of her aproned skirt. Crowds sat on blankets with children and watched the Master work. Mothers tied napkins around their necks, ate goat cheese on chunks of a fresh loaf purchased from a daughter of the Baker who had been sent out with a full satchel that swung across her slim young body. The men watched her pass, thought of cornering her alone in a manger, chatted about her with the Butcher who had run out of meat so took the day off, who cheated everyone. The Butcher was a bad man. The worst bad man in a town of so many. But no one spoke of his crimes for fear of his reprisals.