Fiction: Sixteen Hours

He began his watch before the sun did. The heat of the day had yet to come, and the vanguard winds of a distant storm made the night air even colder than usual. His coat was buttoned tightly, but the cold bit his bones regardless.

More of them would be caught by the storm than would make it here safely, he knew, but for the sake of the lucky few that reached this harbor he would have to wait. Standing there in the dark, it weighed heavily upon him all the more knowing that this would be the final rescue. All available intelligence reported that any route of escape past Damocles' army had disappeared. Anyone who had failed to make it out by now had lost any chance of flight, and anyone left on the sea when the storm hit would be in worse straits than those still under siege.

He checked his watch. There was still no natural light with which to see, but his goggles compensated for that. It was an hour before dawn when the first band of refugees came into view on the horizon. They were little more than a speck of dust in the distance and his goggles zeroed in on them before he did, but in seconds they had refocused and he could see them clearly enough to read their facial expressions.

Patiently he waited until they reached the shore, and then he extended a hand to lift the nearest of them out of their shanty boat. "The Free City of Azotus extends his greetings to the refugee children of Babylon," he said. "Are there any sick among you?" he asked.

They nodded, but the woman that they pointed out was still in the earliest stages of the plague. Infection was not good news, but he was relieved that she was, at least, still treatable. "You still have some distance to go," he told them. "We cannot maintain any overt presence here. Follow the Road Asahel two days, and Azotus may gather you in to safety. And treatment, " he added, looking at the woman.

They went away slowly, and his attention was again consumed by the sea. How many had broken the siege? How many would outrun the mouth of the storm?

In his mind were all the figures that he had heard regarding the city, most especially the population before the siege. Every day he had deducted from that number based on estimated casualties and reports of refugees that had made it across the border. The current figure stuck, emblazoned in his mind, and with every boat that came he reduced it ever so slightly.

He wondered how low he might be able to bring down the number of those still caught by the siege. Compared to it, the number of refugees successfully rescued was dreadfully low, no matter how literally lifesaving even a statistic of one was to the refugee behind that number.

The hours crept on and he continued in his task, waiting for boats to come, to tell them how to reach the city of refuge. Boats came, in ones and twos, and were abandoned at the the harbor. Too soon, the time came to end it. He stood at the edge of the pier as the sun fell, every thought in his mind a prayer that one more boat might appear.

The night came, and he turned away. He walked slowly, and when the storm finally came, howling with teeth bared, he was still close enough to look back behind him and see it tear apart the platform on which he had stood not so long ago, and all his thoughts he forced to turn from pessimism to how many, whether great or few, had reached the pier in time and been found so gloriously alive. For there were yet many within the walls of Babylon, or caught by the storm without them, but had he been offered opportunity to wait and watch for but one soul in all his time, how quickly and how exultantly he would have seized it!

Follow-up: Never too little