Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (29 page)

‘He thought he saw something moving in the trees up there.’ Tears jerked a thumb over his shoulder, south, to where the bleak, black wall of the pass rose up from the desert. Stark winter trees covered it completely. In the firelit evening light, they were a black fur that could have hidden half an army.

I felt a prickle of danger on the back of my neck and turned fully to look at them. And that was when I saw what Horgias had seen: shadows of men shifting between the trees.

‘Tears! Sound the alert. They’re there. Call the first two centuries. Line on me.’

But even as I spoke, a clot of about fifty men were forming a line just below the last layer of trees – and to their left, a single pair stood on a small rocky outcrop, apart from the rest, directing, ordering: the officers.

Whoever’s leading them thinks like a Roman. This is exactly what you or I or Lupus would have done
.

But Horgias or Lupus or I would not have sent fifty men against five hundred, not after a day with such successes as
this
one, which meant there were more men hidden in the trees, waiting for orders from the two on their rock.

I tugged my helmet from under my arm and unscrewed the centurion’s plumes. Three twists, maybe four, and they were out. I handed them to Tears. ‘Form the men into a square, all of them. Lead them towards the rebels in the trees. Keep your shields up and hold the line. Get Taurus to hold the banners for you until Horgias comes back. If he does. Can you do that?’

‘Of course.’ He didn’t ask where I was going; he had seen what I had seen. ‘Stay safe.’ He pushed me into the dark.

The night was not quite dark. I ran over rough ground, stumbling on stones and the debris of the day’s battle. Near the trees, I came upon a small, round hand-shield about a foot across with an iron boss and a good leather front. Dropping my own, larger shield, I picked up the new one and slid it on to my left fist.

Ahead, trees held the western edge of the mountain and I reached them undetected, or so I hoped. The Hebrews were all watching Tears, who had donned my transverse crest and was putting on a display of formation skills that would have impressed even Corbulo. He had horns and banners showing clear in the light, and nearly five hundred men in a foursquare block, advancing slowly, to the beat of hilts on shields, towards the rabble at the tree line.

Among the twisted shadows of the trees, I squirmed forward on my belly with my gladius in one hand and the small circular shield in the other.

The two lines clashed to my left, and below. The backs of the officers were in front of me, up a short, steep, bouldered rise. I was a dozen paces away, and all of them uphill. But I could run uphill. How often had I done so in the Hawk mountains? In the gullies of the Lizard Pass? In Antioch in all the years of shame?

‘
For the Twelfth!
’

Running like a lunatic, I smashed the boss of my shield into the face of the officer on the left, and thrust my blade at the open neck of the second.

They stumbled, but neither fell, and came back fast as vipers, with blades hissing at my ears, at my calves, so that I must twist two ways at once to get my tiny shield against their weapons.

I heard the clash of iron on hide only once; the second sound was iron skidding on armour, and striking flesh. I felt the sting of a blade on my calf, but in my rage I did not care.

They were on either side of me, left and right. I bellowed and thrust out my fist-shield and hit the one on my left hard enough to knock him over. But that exposed my back to the one on my right and I felt a blow to the back of my head as I spun round and wrenched sideways and caught his blade on my own and slid it on, down, iron on iron until the hilts caught and I could wrench it up and twist … and fall back.

A lesser man would have lost his blade then. This one twisted free and sprang away and looked round for a shield. But even then he was watching me, waiting, with his head cocked, as if I might at any moment fall over, and I did not know why except that my head was ringing and blood from the wound on my calf was running down my left leg, oozing between my toes. I dared not look down.

He smiled at me through the almost-dark, a wide, mocking smile that drove away the last vestiges of my sanity and tipped me into a true blood-red battle-rage for only the second time in my life.

I threw my little disc-shield edge first at the grinning face in front of me, and hurled myself after it, which at least wiped away his smile and gave me time to bend down by the fallen man and pick up the sword he had dropped and stamp on his head as he tried to raise it, and feel his nose break and his
teeth
after, and then I was facing the one still standing, two swords to his one, and breathing thanks to Horgias who had made me practise with my dagger hand until I could use it as well as the other.

The Hebrew was good; in fact, he was exceptionally good. If we had been evenly matched, I would have lost; I will own that now to anyone. But we were not evenly matched, for I had the two swords to his one and it took less than four strokes, blade against blade, high to the head and then low to his legs, for me to find the weak line in his lead and cut his sword down with my right hand and slice in at the back of his right knee with my left.

He dropped like a sack to kneel on the rock, looking up at me in shocked surprise, as if his god had promised him a long life and only now did he see the lie.

I killed him as I had killed my first man so long ago in the forests of Tigranocerta: a single backhanded cut that opened the whole side of his neck and sprayed blood in a spectacular arc across the stone.

My rage died as he did, leaving me gasping. I caught my enemy as he fell and held him until the last life left his eyes and then laid his body on the rock with his blade flat on his chest as I would have left one of our own.

Only then did I discover that my head ached savagely, and that I could not stand as easily as I might, but must kneel there beside him a moment to catch my breath while the small battle, that had never properly started, wound to its close below.

Horgias found me.

‘It’s over. Demalion? Did you hear me? It’s over. The rabble lost heart when you killed the first of their leaders and fell apart completely at the second. I asked a man their names before I killed him. The elder was Jacob, one of the
sons
of Giora. His cousin is Daniel, who led the assault on us this morning. They came to see what their brethren had done and saw us weeping over our dead and thought they’d take advantage, but— Demalion?’ He shook my shoulder, I remember that. ‘
Demalion!
Tears! Over here! Help me carry him.’

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
S
EVEN

THE ROAR OF
a thousand voices shouting shook my skull. Pain speared down from it into the depths where I hid, piercing me awake and dragging me, unwilling, to the surface.

I opened my eyes into darkness and heard swords beat on shields and the discordant stamp of a thousand men on the march.

War
. I remembered it distantly, as if it were a tale I had heard of men I once knew.
War against Jerusalem
. I felt for something to hold that I might pull myself up, and wondered how I was going to lead a century into battle when I was blind, and the ache in my head made me want to be sick. In fact, the sickness wouldn’t wait …

I found an edge, and leaned over it, and puked a thin, sour muck that felt as if it had come from somewhere down near my kidneys, and my stomach had turned itself inside out to be rid of it.

I spat, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and was trying to find a way to stand up without being sick again when a brilliant light lanced my face with a pain beyond imagining. I screamed, I think. Certainly I fell. Cautious hands caught me and drew me upright again.

‘Tears?’ I knew his smell, his feel. His arms curled round in the dark, crushing me against his chest. I struggled free.

‘I can’t see you.’ I lifted my hands to my face and touched my fingertips to my eyes. I felt my own pulse there, raging through my head to my eyeballs, but saw nothing.

‘Wait.’ Tears pressed down on my shoulders, as if I might otherwise leap off the bed, and I felt the chill of his leaving and then again that lancing light, which hurt more than the noise.

‘Sorry.’ A goatskin flapped and the light became less. ‘You’re in a tent; we kept it dark because light seemed to pain you.’

‘It does … What happened?’

‘You got a sword cut on the back of your left calf but that’s healing. More important, you were hit on the back of the head. The second man you killed – Jacob ben Giora – he had a sling. Your helmet saved you, but even so I don’t know how you stayed standing long enough to kill him. The physicians say it only caught you a glancing blow, but truly, we thought you were … gone from us.’

His voice caught on that last, and he bit his lip, hard. I saw him do it, and so, slowly, saw the rest of him, blurred about the edges, older, harder than the guileless boy who had come against his will to join the XIIth, but still the beloved of the gods.

Memories flapped at me like fire-sick moths: of a day’s fighting against cataphracts; of a run through the Beth Horon pass; of men burning, their armour melting like candle wax; of a strange small battle on a hillside and then, hazily, its reason. ‘How long have I been like this?’

‘Six days.’

Six?
And I remembered none of them. ‘Have we taken Jerusalem?’

‘Not yet.’ Tears smiled down at me, full of pity and
concern.
‘In his wisdom, General Gallus decided to wait for three days after we got back from the pass. Agrippa, king of the Hebrews, wanted to send a peace envoy into the city. He swore he could bring the rebels back to peace without further bloodshed.’

I snorted. It hurt my head. ‘What happened?’

Tears smothered a grin. ‘The first one was decapitated and his head was fired at us with one of our own catapults. His ears and his genitals had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth before he died.’

I stared at him. ‘Tell me there wasn’t a second.’

‘There was. A man by the name of Borcaeus with great courage and little sense. He escaped with only a broken arm.’ Tears ran his tongue round his teeth, assessing my mood. ‘We waited another day after that and then Gallus allowed that we might attack Jerusalem. We took the outer walls two days ago, almost without a fight. We’re camped inside now; if you look out of your tent, you’ll see the ruins of the wooden markets. Gallus had us fire them, but the people had already pulled back to the old inner city, which has walls as thick as a house. We won’t get to them easily. But there are still some good things here. When you’re ready to look out, you’ll see the temple and the tower of the Antonia and Herod’s palace that Agrippa claims is his own.’

I wasn’t interested in palaces, not then. My mind was full of jumbled imaginings of siege engines and artillery. ‘The ballistas,’ I said. ‘The catapults. The ones they took …’

‘They haven’t used them against us yet. Lupus says they’re waiting until they really need them, in case it’s a long siege. Which it might well be. At the moment, we’re making no headway at all.’ He caught sight of my face. ‘If they do, Taurus says you’re out of range here, even if they draw them up to the walls.’

‘They won’t. Lupus is right. They’ll hold them till they need
them.’
I pulled myself half upright. ‘Let me look outside.’

I screwed my eyes shut as Tears brought me to the doorway and edged the goatskin aside. Sunlight bathed my face and my guts heaved so that I had to stop and clutch the side of the tent and swallow back a mouthful of vomit.

‘Demalion, are you sure you want—’

‘Absolutely.’ I kept my eyes on the ground that I might see less of the sun, and so instead I saw more of the devastation: the blackened stumps of houses and market stalls, the charred remains of bodies piled into heaps and incompletely burned; the same carnage, in fact, that we had wrought on other cities across the land, only here it was held within an unbroken city wall that circled us on all sides, while ahead was the Hebrew temple that the prisoners and collaborators had spoken of with such awe.

From this side, we couldn’t see the fabled jewelled doors that represented the worth of a kingdom, or the steps leading up to them that had caused so much comment with their height and width. All we could see, in fact, was a long, majestic wall the height of five men with a barred gate set into it near the northern end that looked solid enough to last a century of attacks and a tower at its southern end called the Antonia that was a further three storeys above the height of the wall and at this moment was housing a veritable horde of Hebrews, armed with slings and spears and arrows to be hurled down on the men below – men who were doing their best to push forward the single oak-boarded siege tower that we had brought across the pass in our first march to Gabao.

I saw the capricorn of the VIth legion and the vine leaves on yellow of King Agrippa’s auxiliaries amongst the units gathered at its foot. The siege tower itself was bigger than any I had seen before, but the Antonia still dwarfed it, and even the walls of the temple were as high as its roof.

Beside me, Tears said, ‘It took less than a day to subdue
the
outer city, but the hard nut is here. Our ballistas have loosed all their shot, our catapults are out of bolts and still we haven’t touched them. Taurus and his men are breaking up bits of the houses so at least we’ll have something to fire tomorrow. But you should take a look at this.’ He turned me gently by the shoulders until I was facing the other way.

‘What in the god’s name is
that
?’

‘That,’ Tears said cheerfully, ‘is the king of Judaea’s palace. It was built by Herod the Great who wanted it to outmatch anything in Rome. It does. There are baths in there. We have use of them.’

I should think there
were
baths in a place like that; public baths and private baths and small individual baths for the king and his wives. Or wife. I was never very sure with the Hebrews how many wives they took. Whatever it was, the palace was quite easily the largest, most opulent building I had seen in my life.