Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (28 page)

Our shields made a new line and we took the long steps of a forward wall and heard-felt the smack of the bosses on armour.

I heard the enemy try to rally, but without their commander they failed, and within ten paces they were backing their horses away from us, step by bloody step, and I had time to pause and look to my left and found Macer grinning at me – grinning! – holding a stolen Parthian shield with silver
worked
thick on the boss and edges. So he was the one who had saved me, not Tears or Horgias.

‘All right?’ He hefted the shield, as if pleased with its weight.

I had flogged him five times with my own hand and tied him to the cartwheel for two nights as one of the worst thorns in my side. And he had saved my life in battle.

‘All right,’ I said, and smiled back.

We came to a halt at the edge of the bluff. With the retreat of Monobasus’ cataphracts, the line of Hebrews facing us had fallen back and Lupus was not fool enough to send us after them. In the valley beyond us the Hebrews were retreating, as if their cavalry’s defeat had knocked the fight out of them.

I signalled Tears to halt our men and we stopped where we stood while the slaves ran from the supply lines with water.

My arms were shaking. My whole body, in fact, was shuddering like a horse at the end of a race. My shoulders felt bruised; my knuckles bled where I had smashed my shield boss too often and too hard. My bladder was full and my bowels loose, and I wanted more than anything to find the blue banner that had fallen near the place where Macer had saved my life.

Horgias was there before me, standing over the still-warm body of the black horse. Its rider lay on his back, his eyes wide open. His armour was silvered, with gems on his gloves. His eyes were black. His face was fox-like, but a young fox. Horgias had kicked off his helmet. His hair shone sleek in the noonday sun – and it was red.

I said, ‘Monobasus had black hair. Black going grey. It’s not him.’ I tilted the face back with my foot and we both looked down at a man younger than either of us.

Horgias said nothing. I didn’t push him. Taurus stood nearby, watching with a new closeness.

Tears came to join us. He had a ragged cut on his cheek just below one eye. He saw me looking and shook his head. ‘Later.’
He
nodded over to Horgias. ‘He killed Monobasus. You took the horse, but Horgias took the rider.’

‘It isn’t Monobasus,’ Horgias said woodenly.

‘His son, then?’ Tears said.

‘Does he have sons?’ Taurus asked.

‘Bound to have,’ I said. ‘The way they are in Adiabene, he probably has half a village of sons sired on a dozen different women.’

A slave passed with a crate of water skins. Grabbing one, I tipped my head back and tipped half the contents down my throat and over my face.

‘Well, anyway,’ Taurus said, ‘they’re going. We beat them.’

I was halfway to agreeing with him when a scurry of wind caught my ear, and what I heard within it made me cough up the water. ‘No … listen.’ I held up my hand. ‘Someone’s still fighting.’

I turned, seeking the uncertain breeze, and heard again the sounds it carried so very faintly down the long pass from its western end half a day’s march away, where three cohorts of the IVth held the rear guard.

Tears said, ‘Is that smoke?’

It was: a sudden black belch billowing to the sky. I swung round. ‘Tears, signal Lupus that the Fourth legion is under attack. Tell him we’re going to their aid.’

Four notes, then three, then two, rising, and with them our standard swung back and forth towards the valley’s other end. And on that, we of the sixth cohort of the XIIth re-formed, grabbed what water we could and, taking a collective breath, threw ourselves into the open mouth of the Beth Horon pass, leaving our allies behind to keep the pass closed against rabid men who might regroup for a second attack.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
F
IVE

THE HEBREWS DIDN’T
attack our front lines a second time, but many thousands of them had evidently used the original assault as a cover and, marching through supposedly impassable mountains to the far end of the pass, had laid waste to the three cohorts of the IVth who had not only been keeping our backs safe, but had been guarding the giant siege engines we had left behind.

The guides had been right when they told us that a lightly armoured man could run the length of the pass in a morning. Still fired by the fury of battle, we of the sixth cohort pushed ourselves to our limits and, having left before noon, arrived at the far end in time to see the winter sun layer itself along the western horizon.

We were too late, of course.

The battle, such as it had been, was over. The IVth was destroyed, not a man left standing. Worse, the siege engines and artillery had been either stolen or – those pieces that were too big to remove – broken up and piled together and set alight in a fire of such monstrous proportions that nobody could approach closer than thirty paces of it without blistering their skin. Dead men’s armour melted on the bodies nearby,
oozing
like candle wax in the heat. Even as we watched, parts of our siege towers collapsed in on themselves with a crash and we had to spring back out of the way of the new, flatter flames.

The Hebrews were long gone. Setting light to the fire had been their parting shot, and even that had been done by men with fast horses. Horgias found their prints or we wouldn’t have known of them at all, but there was no dust cloud to show where they had gone.

I sent men off to track the enemy, hoping to find some stragglers, while the bulk of us stayed where we were, to put out the fire and assess the damage.

In the first of these, we failed soundly. Hot as a furnace, it would have taken a lake full of water and ten units of Rome’s fire brigade with piston-pumps even to stand a chance of quenching the blaze and we had no more water than the skins we carried with us. Not wishing to waste it on the fire, we found a store wagon that had not been destroyed and took thirty shovels and used them to throw earth on to the blaze, but we might as well have spat at the sun.

There was nothing to do but watch, and curse and count our losses.

On that account, I sent Tears to number the dead men of the IVth while Taurus and his engineers set to work calculating how many of the siege engines fed the flames, and therefore how many had been stolen to be used against us.

Taurus came back first. He was soot-stained, and there were blisters on the backs of his hands. His gaze was haggard, but not, now, with the shame of our legion but at the horror of what he was seeing: engineers can take the destruction of their equipment harder than they do the deaths around them.

He saluted, a thing I had never seen him do unprompted. ‘Report, if you’re willing to hear it?’

I found my face becoming smooth, as Lupus’ did, not to smile at his new enthusiasm. ‘I’m ready. Thank you.’

He ticked them off on his fingers, working from memory, and it was as if he detailed the deaths of his sons.

‘Four out of five siege towers have been burned – the fifth, you’ll remember, we took with us through the pass. So they have no siege towers, which is a blessing. Of the forty-four catapults we left, thirty have gone, plus all their bolts. The remaining fourteen are burning. Of the seven ballistas, the six smallest have been taken and the carts that carried their shot have gone with them.’

He paused to look at me, to see if I grieved as he did. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the havoc that an army inside a city could wreak on its besiegers with that kind of equipment. The catapults shot spears the length of a man, and caused devastation when loosed into crowded cities. I could only imagine the horror they might wreak on a massed assaulting army.

The ballistas were no better. They shot graded stones from the size of a man’s head up to the size of a balled tent bag; one volley could kill a dozen men if they were closely grouped, and injure as many more so that they soaked up the medical resources and reduced the morale of the troops. Nothing makes men nervous like the sight of their fellows with their limbs crushed to matchwood.

I opened my eyes. Taurus was watching me closely. ‘What of the Son of Zeus?’ I asked.

Son of Zeus was the largest of the ballistas, a wall-breaking monster that shot stones that had the height of a man as their diameter.

‘They didn’t move it,’ Taurus said. ‘It was too big.’

I smiled at that. ‘Well, at least we still have that. If we can get it through the pass, then—’ I caught sight of his face. ‘What?’

‘They broke the lever arm and cut the strings. It’ll take days to make it fit for use.’

‘We haven’t got days. We’ve got about one night before they get home and work out how to use the things they’ve taken.’ I bit my lip. ‘What of the battering ram?’

‘The ram is at the heart of the fire,’ Taurus said miserably. ‘The rack’s more or less intact, but there are no trees near here anywhere close to the size of the one we’ve lost.’

The ram had been a thing of strange, unwieldy beauty. The oak tree that formed the ram itself was the length of three men, one atop the other, and as wide as all three tied together about the waist. The cradle built to carry it had consumed fourteen trees. The armoured rack from which it was suspended to give protection to the men as they approached a gate was drawn by a team of twenty oxen.

The oxen, I had already seen, had not been driven away. Some things simply move too slowly. By this stage, I was only grateful that they had not all been slaughtered, and wondered why.

I must have spoken aloud without meaning to, for Horgias, who had just come back from tracking up in the hills, answered me.

‘If our oxen are still alive, we have to feed and water them and they slow us down. If they’d killed them, there’d be rotting meat here at the end of the pass through half the winter. The first Hebrews came down that way.’ He pointed up to the steep, forested hillside at the south of the pass. ‘But half of them cut across the pass at the place where it narrows halfway down so they could come in from both sides and behind. A third arm came at them from the west.’

‘The Fourth was surrounded,’ I said.

‘Completely.’

Tears joined us then, with news that there were no wounded, ours or the enemy’s. ‘The Hebrews cut the throats
of
the fallen before they left,’ he said. ‘And there’s a group of ten centurions at the far side who have been beheaded. Not very cleanly.’

‘Gods.’ I rubbed my hands into my face, kneading my cheeks. ‘I suppose we should count ourselves lucky they weren’t crucified. Everything else they’ve done is Roman.’ I looked at Horgias. ‘How many Hebrews did this?’

He took off his helmet and ran his hands through his sweat-sodden hair. ‘Twenty thousand,’ he said. ‘At least. And if you allow that there were another ten, maybe fifteen keeping us busy at the other end, that’s a lot of armed men.’

‘Too many.’ I kicked at a flaring lump of wood that had fallen from the fire. ‘Hebrews and Parthians all working together. And disciplined, too. This took real tactical skill to conceive and to execute. The Hebrews aren’t supposed to be like this. They’re a rabble. They fight amongst themselves sooner than fight the enemy. Everybody knows that.’

‘Not any more,’ Horgias said.

‘Exactly. That’s my point.’ Sparks hit my face; I turned away. ‘Whoever’s leading them thinks like a Roman. This is exactly what you or I or Lupus would have done.’

‘If we had fifteen thousand men to spare for a diversion.’

‘Which evidently they did. And now they have ballistas and catapults that they can fire at us from inside Jerusalem.’ I raised my arm, and men began to withdraw from the stripping of the enemy. ‘Tears, send runners to Lupus with the news. Let them go in pairs; they’ll be running through the night. Horgias, we need to give the dead of the Fourth a proper funeral. Have the men gather the bodies while Taurus and I devise a way to get them on to that bloody fire without burning ourselves in the process.’

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
S
IX

‘
Given of the god
,

Given to the god
,

Taken by the god in valour, honour and glory
.

May you journey safely to your destination
.’

I SPOKE FROM
a platform built from the parts of six wrecked wagons. The XIIth legion stood in a semicircle around, with the fire filling the gap.

The unarmoured body of a man I had never known lay in front of me on a bier made from two shields strapped together. At my word, Tears and Macer lifted him slowly, and slid him on to a chute greased with tallow; Taurus had found the quarter-stores of the IVth almost untouched and had bent his ingenuity to the problem of disposing of the dead. The result would have honoured an emperor.

Released, the body shot down into the blistering heart of the fire. There was a pause before the reek of burning hair and flesh hit us, and the oily black smoke that followed. We stood in silence until it had died away to the brilliant flame that had been before.

Two other chutes stood around the fire. I spoke the words
of
leaving twice more, over one man from each cohort to stand for them all, and then the men began the appalling work of feeding their comrades to the flames.

I stepped back after a while and let others take my place. I had never seen the men of the sixth push ahead of each other to volunteer for a task, nor bend themselves to it with such alacrity. They did not sing as they worked, nor even chant, but they were a team, a true welded unit; the thing I had prayed for these past four years.

I stepped back, and took my helmet off and ran my fingers through my hair, feeling the sweat cold on the crown of my head. Tears came to stand beside me.

‘This could take all night,’ he said.

‘We’ll be done by midnight,’ I said, with a confidence that grew only from the men in front of me. ‘We’ll sleep and then go back.’ I turned round on my heel. ‘Where’s Horgias?’