Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (32 page)

‘Hold. Hold the cover. Don’t let them put it out yet.’

I nursed that flame as if it were my only son, and all round the ram nineteen other men did likewise. My small group leaned in over it with their shields against a volley of missiles that blasted down on us, for our archers were running short of arrows and saving their last for the time when the flames needed the greatest help. Men fell at the edges, but for every one that fell, another stepped in to take his place until the fire was no longer dancing but roaring, sucking in air, giving out heat that made my sore heart heal again.

And then, cutting over the havoc, a long, high note from the signallers on the palace rise—

‘
Run!
’ I screamed it, or Horgias did, or someone else back down the ranks who knew the calls we had arranged. ‘Hot sand!’

Before the threat of sand heated almost to melting point, we scattered like sheep before a wolf, like hares before hounds, only faster, and came to a stop at the tent lines, where Lupus
had
the archers shooting long, endless volleys until their fingers bled and their arms were strained out of their sockets.

I snatched up the pale Parthian war bow and joined them and, together, we killed men by the dozen, by the hundred, but there were tens of thousands in the city of Jerusalem and we had only twenty arrows left apiece.

They came to an end, as they must, and after that we could only wait and watch as the flames of our creation, the beautiful, vast, roaring fire that we had built, was quenched first by sand and then, later, by water.

I watched the final embers blink to darkness. ‘We’ve weakened it,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t take another day of the ram.’ And then, remembering, ‘Did Tears get all the wounded away?’

‘Before you ever lit the fire,’ Lupus said. ‘That was well done.’

‘But not the fire.’

‘It was well done,’ he said, woodenly, and then with more feeling. ‘It
was
well done. We’re fighting against men with talent in there, and we are led by one with none.’

Lupus stayed with us a long time, watching the smoke die to damp ashes before he bade us good night and took himself to Cestius Gallus’ tent, where our commander waited with our new orders.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
E
IGHT

WE MARCHED OUT
of Jerusalem with the dawn on the seventh day after we had entered it.

The XIIth legion had lost over two thousand men out of a full complement of nearly five thousand, with another eight hundred wounded drawn in ox wagons behind; the VIth had lost half their number, though with fewer wounded. The three cohorts of the IVth, of course, had been wiped out to a man.

Cadus’ legionary and allied horse were almost intact, barring the losses at the mouth of the Beth Horon pass, which had been few. The allied infantry likewise had lost only eight hundred men, most of them in the skirmishes and battles before we ever reached Jerusalem, but were otherwise largely untouched.

But the XIIth had sought the glory and the XIIth had borne the loss. In poor heart, knowing how failure further sullied our already desperate situation, we neither sang nor spoke to each other as we marched.

The rebels fell on us before noon, harrying the rear centuries who were guarding the wagons. Gallus gave us no order to
break
ranks and go to help them, but Priscus, a centurion of the third rank who had command of the VIth now, turned his men round anyway, to marshall a defence.

Thus it was that we lost half of the remaining men of the VIth, ten of the supply wagons and all of the wounded before nightfall.

We ran the last miles to the safety of a small legionary fortress at Scopus, halfway to the Beth Horon pass. I had lain unconscious through our first stay there, and would as readily have slept through this one; it was a dreary place with little to recommend it save that it put stone walls between us and the Hebrew spears, which meant at least we could light fires, cook food and sleep.

We slept badly and woke to a dull, damp dawn that threatened rain but did not deliver. We cursed the sky for that; it helped us to think that a good downpour would have hurt the Hebrews more than it hurt us.

We left Scopus, fervently hoping never to see it again, and began the rapid-march beloved of Caesar, who could get an entire legion with all the baggage across forty miles in a day. We made the four miles to Gabao, the battleground at the mouth of the Beth Horon pass, before Gallus called a halt.

Gabao is not a fortress, but we had built redoubts and staked them on the way down and those remained in place. I had rather more confidence in them than I had in the defences at Scopus, but that was little enough.

We centurions were so few now that we were all invited to meet Gallus in his tent. It was the first time I’d seen him close up and the first time I’d seen him at all since we set out for the Beth Horon pass.

My first thought was that he was sick with fright. My second was that he was simply sick: close to dying, in fact.

Always a tall, lean man, he was thin, now, to the point of emaciation, with the skin of his face stretched tight over his
skull
and his eyes sunk so deep in their sockets they seemed to glow from the back of his head. His hair was almost gone, but what was left, in plumes above his ears, was a rich, dark colour, as if it were twenty years younger than the man himself. His eyebrows, too, were thickly luxuriant.

I stared at him until Lupus, who was beside me, trod on my foot and brought me to silent attention.

Gallus began with no civilities. A brazier stood between him and us and he clasped his hands behind his back and paced back and forth on his side of it as he spoke, sending his shadows dancing against the far walls of the tent.

‘As you know, the pass of Beth Horon is a death trap. The enemy have already shown that they have a different, faster, route through the mountains to its further end and the heights are a gift for any man trying to ambush those going through. Still, with them harrying us as they do, we cannot afford the time to march round, which means we must run for it, literally.’

He waited for someone to say something. When nobody did, he paced the breadth of his tent and back once more and came to a halt behind the brazier. He swallowed, as if his throat were too tight. He looked the way I feel before battle, although I hope I hide it better. I watched his larynx bob up and down behind the drawn skin of his neck.

Drily, he said, ‘This has the merit of being a defensible position and therefore we will stay here for the rest of today and tonight. We will march out at daybreak tomorrow, by which time I want the mules and oxen dead and their carts destroyed, particularly the siege engines. Destroy every one and if necessary burn it. We must leave nothing to the enemy that they have not already got.’

That was it. We were dismissed moments later, with no time for questions, or discussion, or any plans beyond that.

Killing mules is a foul task and one best left to the butchers.
Every
cohort has half a dozen men whose skill is in killing cleanly and fast but even they hate mule-killing.

It’s not that they are harder to kill than horses, but they are so much more intelligent that after the first one, when they know what’s coming, they become almost impossible to handle. The oxen, by contrast, stand eating corn from a bucket and each one killed seems as surprised when the pole axe hits it between the eyes as the one before and the one after.

I stood apart from the slaughter, listening to the sounds of men cursing in the dull day. Lupus came to stand beside me.

‘Thank you for not speaking out,’ he said. ‘It would have gone badly had you said what was written on your face.’

‘Did he see it?’

‘Of course. But it’s different if no one says anything. He can manage it better then.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘I don’t know, but he passes blood when he passes anything at all and he barely eats now.’

‘Bloody flux?’ I gaped at him. ‘Then we’re all—’

‘No. He’s been like this since he joined us and none of us are the worse for it, nor any of his body attendants. At a guess, I’d say he has ill humours gnawing away at his bowels. If it were flux, we’d all have passed our innards into a bloody ditch by now, and no thanks to the Hebrews.’

‘But he’ll be dead by winter,’ I said.

‘I thought he’d be dead by now and I was wrong.’ A mule broke free and ran at the ditch and staked itself. Over the ear-harrowing screams, Lupus said, ‘He’s doing his best to keep us alive. It’s not good, but he is finally listening to us. If we can get through Beth Horon alive, we can run for Caesarea. He won’t try to do anything else.’

‘Was there anything else he could have done?’

‘He wanted to take us back to Antioch. Be grateful that he knows he hasn’t the strength.’

Without the wagons to slow us, we did actually run from Gabao into the Beth Horon pass, much as we of the sixth cohort had run down to the relief of the IVth, when we still thought there were men of that legion left to relieve.

There was an odd strength in the running, in the sweating, panting thrust and pump of it, so much like training that we could lose our minds in the count of stride and breath, staring at the man in front, listening to the men behind.

And we who had run it twice knew the places where we had to walk, where the path narrowed to a shelf along a precipice, fit for one man on a horse, or a narrow cart, but no more. Heading west now, as we were, the sheer rock wall reared up to our right and the cliff fell away to our left, while on the far side of the canyon the thick wooded slopes could have hidden half the Hebrew army.

We sent the cavalry along first, and then the men in single file. Lupus was way to the front. I found Horgias behind me, bearing the cohort standard. He came up until he was just behind my left shoulder. ‘What would you have done last night if you were the Hebrews?’ he asked.

‘I’d have sent men on above the pass through the night while we lost time killing mules. I’d have them waiting with rocks and spears, ready to force as many men off this ledge as I could.’ It wasn’t a new thought: I’d been playing it over in my mind the way a dog plays over a bone since we’d left in the morning. ‘There’s no way out but forwards.’ I slapped a hand on the rock wall to my right. ‘Even you can’t climb this.’

‘So we have to be ready to run,’ he said. ‘Soon.’

‘Can you see them?’

‘I saw the spark of sunlight on armour when we—’

‘
Down!
’ I pushed him sideways, clinging on to him at the
same
time, to keep him from falling off the ledge. The rock that hurtled down from above missed him by a hand’s breadth. Tears was wrestling with his horn a dozen paces behind. There was no time. I took a breath and screamed my lungs out.

‘
Run!
’

Like hunted deer, we ran, and like hunted deer they picked us off, one by one, harrying us ever forward, so that even when we made it off that bloody ledge and on to something approaching flat ground again in the valley’s depths, we were never able to come together in proper formation.

Their slingers and archers picked on the cavalry and then on the infantry, driving us from side to side across the pass and killing, killing, killing from mid-morning until the end of the afternoon and into the evening.

We should have been through and out the other side by then. We should have been halfway to Caesarea, but we had spent so much time scurrying for cover that we had made less than half of the progress we had done the last time we ran in this direction.

Only darkness saved us. When it was too dark to see, the Hebrews stopped wasting their spears, their arrows, their slingshot, their rocks, and we were left huddling in our units, waiting for instruction.

We lit no fires in the beginning, but sat where we had stopped, and Lupus had to walk amongst us, calling in the centurions.

We had no tents, and so met at a place only a little apart from the main body of our men.

Lupus gave the losses first. The allied infantry and cavalry had taken the greatest losses this time, for they were least armoured and least able to manage the constant unpredictable assaults. Most of them were dead. Out of a force of forty thousand that had left Antioch, and of twenty-two thousand that had left Jerusalem, we were reduced to ten thousand.

‘And by tomorrow we will all be gone,’ Lupus said. ‘There is no way out of here alive.’

‘Unless we go by night,’ Gallus said. ‘Now, in fact.’

‘No.’ Priscus was dead. The new leader of the VIth was named Festus and he spoke before Lupus as if rank had no meaning any more. ‘They’ll know. If we don’t light fires, if we don’t set guards that they can see, they’ll know we’ve gone. And if we can go, they can surely follow.’

There was a moment’s silence. I thought men were embarrassed at his intervention, but then I saw that Lupus was looking at Gallus and Gallus was looking back and there was an understanding between them.

‘The XIIth will stay,’ Lupus said. ‘We are less than a thousand men now. We shall stay here and light a thousand fires, so that it looks as if ten thousand men have camped for the night. The Hebrews won’t realize the deception until dawn. You should be clear of the pass by then.’

There was an uncomfortable moment in which nobody but me met Lupus’ eye. Then Gallus, nodding, said, ‘Name three centuries to escape with us. To carry the Eagle and the cohort standards that the XIIth might live beyond this night, and be honoured for your courage.’

‘
No!
’ Lupus and I spoke together.

I said, ‘We fought once before without our Eagle. We will never do so again.’

And Lupus, in much the same breath, said, ‘The Twelfth will never survive the shame of a second defeat. Let us die here, and be honoured at least for this much courage, and let our legion die with us.’

A new silence held the other men, of a quite different quality. Men touched their brows, in a mark of silent respect.

‘It will be as you wish,’ Gallus said. ‘We shall reach Caesarea and we shall return in spring with enough men to bring Jerusalem to its knees. Your sacrifice will not be in vain.’