"What's this? A glint of metal in the thickets.
Here's a thin hiss of a whisper.
Bandits.
Head down, head down, eyes to the dust; whistle and hum!
They won't care for shabby clothes such as mine.
Don't shake.
Not too fast."

With a lilt to his neck, the traveller kept his head aimed toward where he walked on the road.
The skulking thieves saw a sluggard, a slovenly vagrant trudge past their trap.
The tattered simpleton, blinkered as he was by stupidity in the heat, noticed nothing.
A hundred paces on, the timorous traveller, faint with trepidation, managed something more than shallow breaths swallowed in fright.
But the whistle of his first sigh was cut off in his chest.
The thud of hooves in front of him, and the sight of a cavalcade, a tight knot of armed riders hurtling before the spray of dirt and dust thrown by their mounts,
nearly knocked him to his knees.

"Here comes game for the robbers' snares.
And how shall I warn them?
But won't they run me down?
Won't they just turn and fly?
Either way I'm done and die."

The man's arms grew leaden in mid-rise.
He threw himself into the roadside ditch.
The ground shook under his chin as the band galloped past.
Moments later the din of ambush, percussive shocks, horse's screams, and men's cries, roared over him.
The first thing he spied from the cover of the ditch was a soldier on horseback, seen gigantic from below, breaking free from the melee to charge back towards him.
The terrified traveller flung himself into a headlong run through the fields.
He broke into an olive grove, tearing shirt and skin in desperate clawing up a tree.
To his horror, he saw at his heels the great soldier with sword drawn.
The lost traveller wilted, fainted away in the branches.

He revived to find himself still upon a bough, and watched in disbelief the soldier pacing in circles below.
Turning, turning round the tree went the shiny helmet.
The broad sword had the same, dull glimmer as the chain-mailed breast.

"How can he not see me?
Why does he wait?
What is this mad march?
Still, I'll not move a muscle.
I'll be the bark of this tree."

When the man in the branches shifted his weight to better his hold, he prised loose with his foot a dead limb.
The branch fell clang! upon the soldier's visor beneath.
The treed traveller cringed.
The soldier pursued his gyrations without so much as a shake or a nod.

What's this? "
Is he a mindless maniac, a teetotum set to run in circles?
Do I dream him out of nothing?
Is he smoke from my addled brain?
Let's test it with a toe."

Slowly, ever so gingerly, the man in the branches stretched out his foot towards a nether twig.
Whoosh boom! The soldier's sword sliced into the trunk.
The tentative foot dangled shoeless.
A great gape in the tree showed where the sword had struck.
If this was illusion, it was robust indeed.

The helpless traveller scratched to the tree's highest branches to roost there like an ungainly bird for three nights and two days while his tormentor trod a monotonous ring about the bole.
The trapped man, sickened from night chills, ate olives and then stems while fever fed upon him in return, baked him delirious.
Urine trickled down the olive's trunk, and where it dripped on the armour sent up harsh, bilious clouds that choked the miserable captive, sent his senses reeling, and stirred him to a last, frenzied thrust at escape.
He tore two leafy stubs from the tree, held them out for tufts of wings, and hurled himself into the wind.
He fell like two sticks and a stone.
Before he hit the ground, he felt the great, grey sword sear-sweep directly through him, severing his chest from his waist.

How is it then that he woke in a heap on the dirt, to divine from dull aches and sharp throbbings that his bones all were yet attached?
His keeper, the instrument of his torture, was nowhere to be found.
Even the wound to the tree had healed.
The muddled victim, a traveller again, limped off on his way with the neatly sliced sole of his shoe stuffed in his pocket.
He gripped it like a charm to beat back black swarms of doubt.