Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (26 page)

Horgias was paired with a bull of a man, rightly named Taurus; a volunteer from Herculaneum with skills as an engineer who had been sent to us as his first posting and who, I thought, might one day become another Proclion if he could only get over his sullen ill temper. Tears was likewise protected, if that’s the word for it, by Macer, a hard-bitten Athenian who had been sent to us from the VIIth and resented every breath taken in the company of the XIIth.

For four years we drilled, and made mock battles against the IVth, and those of us who remembered the XIIth as it had been prayed nightly that we might see some real action, enough to weld us into a fighting unit, if not to forge the bonds of friendship that might make us something stronger.

Our chance came in the thirteenth year of the Emperor Nero’s reign. By then, Corbulo had crossed the Euphrates and back,
done
battle with Vologases and forced the King of Kings to a truce that seemed likely to hold.

By now, the general’s standing had risen so high in the east that if he had marched to Caesarea and declared himself emperor, every legion under his command would have followed him to the gates of Rome to unseat Nero and place their hero on the throne. Knowing this, Nero recalled Corbulo to Greece and sent Gaius Cestius Gallus to take his place as governor of Syria and general of the Syrian legions.

When I tell you that Gallus was a senate-climber cast from the same mould as Caesennius Paetus, you will know how hard it fell on the veterans of the XIIth who had fought at Rhandaea, but we suffered his generalship believing that it was transient and he could do us little harm.

And then a band of Hebrew rebels broke into an armoury in the desert south of Jerusalem, armed themselves and took the city, crushing the garrison that had kept order there for as long as anyone could remember. Overnight, our entire world was ablaze with insurrection.

By all accounts, the Hebrew king had abandoned his people at the first hint of violence. Certainly he arrived with us in Antioch barely behind the news, bringing with him a train of family and retainers all of them bearing tales of men armed with Roman weapons and fighting in Roman style; of a mint where men struck Hebrew coins swearing they would never be paid in taxes to Rome; of a god which threw off Roman gods, and would not acknowledge Caesar as its superior.

Cestius Gallus was no soldier, but faced with that kind of provocation he had no choice other than to hurl the legions at the Hebrews like a bolt, sending us in hard and fast before winter ended the fighting season and rendered a positive outcome impossible.

We saw our chance; how could we not? The governor had to choose between the IVth and the XIIth to spearhead his
attack
and even the most hardened naysayers amongst our men believed that we were the better legion. Overnight, men walked with more life in their step than I had seen in four fighting seasons. They began to mend things without being told. They lined up on parade with a crispness I had come to believe was impossible. They didn’t smile, they didn’t hate us any less, but by heaven they wanted to fight.

But then so did the men of the IVth, who had the same difficulties and as much to prove: they, after all, had not even attempted to hold Lizard Pass.

As camp prefect, Lupus held our future in his hands; to him fell the job of persuading a weak man that we were his strength. There’s a rumour that he knelt before Gallus, begging that we be allowed to march against the new enemy. Nobody believes that, but whatever he did, it worked: we were given our wish.

Three cohorts each from the IVth and the VIth accompanied us, with substantial numbers of allied foot and horse, so that forty thousand men marched out of Antioch in the end. But we of the XIIth, made up to full strength, trained to battle fitness and straining to be let off the leash – we were the only legion to march whole, entire, intact from Syria into Judaea to put down the Hebrew revolution.

In the beginning was no honour. From Zebulon in Galilee to Joppa in Judaea, we picked off the cities as we came to them, without ever having to resort to the siege towers and catapults, the sapper’s kit and the ram that the mules pulled behind us every day.

We went in hoping for a battle and we came out disappointed. We lost two men of the second cohort to falling masonry in a city we demolished and one of the fourth to an unlucky slingshot when he removed his helmet in the heat of battle, but other than that we faced no more resistance than the pitiful
defences
of old men and women, for the young men had all run to the mountains, or so we were told by those few whose lives we spared.

They lied, although we only discovered that later: in truth, the young men had all gone to Jerusalem to swell the ranks of the Hebrew rebellion.

I don’t think it would have made any difference had we known that. We marched twenty, thirty, forty miles a day, crushing the countryside and all who lived there in an orgy of devastation that left us sour-mouthed and irritable.

When, finally, there was nothing left to burn, we turned towards Jerusalem, taking the narrow, difficult pass they call Beth Horon that cuts from west to east through the mountain ranges north of the city and was said by our guides to be the most direct route. If we baulked at its difficulties, they assured us we could expect to spend ten days or more in detours to reach the same end, by which time, most assuredly, the winter rains would be upon us.

Like every other Hebrew who claimed to help us, they lied, but we didn’t find that out until a long while later, either. At the time, our main concern was to find a means by which forty thousand men, their weapons, fodder, food, wagons and siege engines might pass through Beth Horon.

The local guides said that a lightly armoured man could run through from the western entrance to the eastern mouth of the godforsaken pass in a morning. Horgias and Tears came back after trying it and said that a fully armoured legionary could, indeed, do it at a fast march in half a day, but that there were places where the path wound along the lee of the mountain and was barely wide enough for an ox cart.

They said it would take us a full two days to cross; three or four if we took the ballistas, catapults and siege towers we had brought with us, for they must be dismantled and loaded on to carts. The ram, they thought, was impossible to take.

We didn’t have three or four days to lose, not when Horgias had already killed two Hebrew scouts and they were only the ones he had seen; we all knew there were others and none of us wanted to come out of a nightmare of a pass to be met by a Hebrew rabble that had already annihilated the Jerusalem garrison.

After some discussion, we left the bulk of the siege engines at the wide westerly mouth of the pass, guarded by three cohorts of the IVth legion who had orders to wait three days and then begin to dismantle them, ready to move them across in stages if we needed them.

We took with us three light ballistas that fired stone shot the size of my head or smaller, half a dozen catapults with enough bolts for three days’ shooting, and one siege tower that took us half a day to dismantle into numbered pieces and load on to the mule carts.

Two hateful days later, we emerged into the flat, open eastern end of the pass that the Hebrews called Gabao. It lies a bare eight miles north of Jerusalem in a natural bottleneck with forested mountains rearing up on either side, and the nightmare of a pass behind. Battles have been fought there for hundreds of generations and the men kept finding the debris of dead men’s armour as they dug the latrines: a dented shield boss; a spear head; a clutter of arrowheads left where they fell and never shot, with the shadows of the shafts dark in the sand.

It was a perfect place to hold against a threatening army and we dug in there, building a full legionary marching camp with ditches and spiked redoubts and guarded gates at each quarter. With the mountain slopes rising high on either side and the sky unblemished blue above, it was almost as beautiful as Melitene, and ten times as deadly.

We doubled the watch and slept with our weapons naked by our beds and were glad not to have used them yet.

We woke to a fine, crisp autumn morning, not yet beset by winter rain, where the cook-fires sparked readily on dry tinder and the air rang to the bleat of goats herded in the near distance.

I was standing just outside my tent, fastening a new silvered buckle on my belt, when Horgias found me.

‘Listen!’ He jerked his chin to the south. ‘What do you hear?’

I heard little that I hadn’t heard all morning: the goats, of course, and beyond them the low grumble of armed men making ready for the battle we knew must soon be on us. Swooping birdsong wove through it all, fine as spun silver, snaring my attention.

But Horgias was never wrong, and if I let go of the light, high birds I thought I heard something else beneath and behind them, and then was sure of it: a deep wall of sound like the grinding of mountains across the earth. I wouldn’t have heard it had he not spoken, but it was definitely there.

‘Horses?’ I asked, and when he nodded, ‘How many?’

He looked round to see who was listening. Taurus was within earshot, and Macer, Tears’ shield-man. Neither of them loved us, but both were ready for a fight.

Loudly enough for them to hear, Horgias said, ‘Ten thousand? Maybe more. It takes a lot of cavalry to make that kind of noise.’

Tears sat on a log closer than either of the others, rubbing tallow into the straps of his shield. ‘They can’t be from Jerusalem,’ he said. ‘It’s their Sabbath. They never fight on the Sabbath. Their god forbids it.’

We had men with us, first-born sons of the elders of Sepphoris in Galilee, who had come with us as hostages to their fathers’ good behaviour. They counted the days in sevens and refused to do anything but eat and pray on one
day
in the cycle. They had told us all other Hebrews were the same and we had believed them.

‘Maybe their god’s given them special dispensation,’ I said.

‘Or maybe they’ve abandoned that god for one that allows battle any day they like.’ Tears propped his shield near the fire where the tallow could warm its way into the leather and rose to grip my arm. ‘Either way, I think we might have a battle on our hands.’

An actual battle. At last
.

Around me, men were stirring with a new fire. I saw smiles, none of them directed at me. Then I looked at Tears and saw a look on his face of the kind I hadn’t seen in four years.

‘Someone had better tell Lupus,’ I said, and Horgias bounded off, leaving the rest of us to prepare.

‘It’ll be a good fight.’ Tears let go of my arm, but the prints of his fingers stayed, like living ghosts.

‘It had better be.’ I was grinning like a fool. I clasped his shoulders in return. ‘The men will mutiny soon if it isn’t.’

Dipping into my tent, I caught up my shield, my helm with its red plume set crosswise, my neck chain with the rings I had won in the siege at Tigranocerta a lifetime ago, when I was a different man.

Normally, I had to shout simply to catch a man’s attention. Here, now, the eyes of five hundred men followed every step I took and every man among them had surged to his feet before I turned back to shout the order.

‘Get yourselves dressed! We have a battle to fight!’

They moved fast as mice in a corn spill, and not only my cohort. Around us, other centurions took up the cry and soon the whole camp was arming.

All around, I saw tight battle-grins on the faces of men who had spent four years barely managing not to spit when I passed. They were not my friends yet, but they were not the enemies they had been the day before.

Horgias returned, bearing the cohort standard of the open hand with the double thunderbolts beneath it, and the mule’s tail hanging free. He wore a wolfskin, not the muleskin, for that had been Syrion’s and had gone on to his pyre. The gape-mouthed wolf suited Horgias better: he had the same wildness in his eyes, the same white teeth to flash at the enemy.

Now, he held out his own hand, palm up. I laid mine on it, and Tears laid his atop both. ‘Come out alive,’ I said, and felt the pulse of each, above and below, and believed it a promise of the gods.

For the first time in four years, the cohort lined up behind us without my asking. Not a man was out of place. Most of them didn’t love their legion yet, but they were determined to march disciplined to war.

Like this, in tight order, we marched forward to take our place in the right hand side of the rearmost rank battle lines; the place of honour, where we would take most pressure, and must not yield.

We had a steep, treeless slope to our right, and two lines of men before. Behind was nothing but the ditches and spiked earthworks of our marching camp, and, a long, long way back, three cohorts of the IVth who held all our heavy artillery and had no idea what we were doing.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
F
OUR

THE SUN WAS
in our faces, not quite low enough to be difficult. In front, the Hebrew army was a ripe pestilence spread across the perfect land ahead of us; rank upon ragged rank of men marching in no particular order.

Some wore mail and helmets, some bore shields and swords and spears exactly as if they were just another legion, but the bulk of them were barely armoured, and bore the long-hafted spears of the sort whose heads littered the dry soil of Gabao, and short shields, and arrows with piebald fletchings. They looked like no army I had ever seen, and even at this distance, with more than an arrow’s flight between us, they howled with a hatred we had not yet met in Judaea.

A proper fight
. My hands were wet with sweat. I flexed my fingers on the grip of my shield and was glad of the soft leather there and the moss padded tight underneath it. My gladius was in my hand and I didn’t know I’d drawn it.

To my left, I saw Tears wet his lips and raise the horn, ready to sound the advance. But not yet. We were the third rank and for now we had to stand firm, hold our place and watch the lines in front of us step forward into battle. Which they did, shouting.