Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (36 page)

In a tangle of limbs and oaths, we tumbled together on to the raw earth, leaving Pantera, who stood behind Gideon, as the hurtling knife’s new target.

He dodged. The knife missed, and clattered in the back of the cave-tomb. As I freed myself from Gideon’s flailing limbs, I saw Horgias dive towards it.

I had no time to look for him; I was caught in the midst of a fight, unarmed and unarmoured, with Pantera on my left and Eleazir on my right.

The crown lay on the dirt between us. All three of us launched ourselves at it, clawing and grasping, fighting like curs over a bone, while all around us was pandemonium.

Gideon fell beside me, caught by another thrown knife. He died gasping, with blood foaming from his mouth and throat.

I ignored him. Two things mattered: the crown and the Eagle. Scrabbling, clawing, reaching, my fingers found the first of these, wrapped triumphant round the thin, cold wire—

‘Demalion!’ Horgias grabbed my shoulders. ‘The Eagle!’

I rolled to my feet. Somebody dragged the crown from my hand, but my attention was all on the Eagle, twenty paces away and retreating, protected by eight of Eleazir’s men.

Around us, Pantera’s few were using their advantage of height to good effect, but from below another fifty of Eleazir’s men were running up to overwhelm them while the Eagle was heading downhill to the safety of the crowd.

I spun, and came up against Pantera’s sword, jabbed at my face.

‘Leave it. There are too many of them.’

‘For you maybe, but—’

‘For anybody.’ His sword fell. ‘There’s a route out at the back of the cave. If you stay here, you’re dead men.’ And he was gone, shouting in Aramaic to men who lifted the body of the king.

I looked at Horgias. I looked at the Eagle, which was thirty paces away and might as well have been a thousand. I looked at Eleazir’s men, at the hate on their faces: they didn’t know that we were the enemies of their enemy and therefore their friends; nor did they care.

We had two choices that were only one real choice. I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the Eagle. ‘We can’t get it back if we’re dead,’ I said.

We ran.

I rode a Berber colt in the fighting retreat from Jerusalem and hated every silken stride.

He was younger than the mare, and more skittish, an iron grey rather than the full white of age; her son, perhaps, or a distant cousin. Sharp and wary of combat, he jilted and napped and kicked and bolted so that only the horsemanship of the woman Hypatia behind me kept him facing in the right direction and kept us both upright, and unscathed.

I could have held him. I could have ridden him better, but I sat before her, as children are seated, or captive women, and the shame broke my heart.

Pantera rode behind us, last of the line, holding Menachem
in
front of him on his milk-white mare, for if they had lost the Eagle and the kingdom they still had the dead man, and would not leave him behind, however much he hampered our escape.

Pantera bore the bow I had dropped and my quiver with nine arrows remaining and he used all nine in our flight and others that were brought him, firing back over his saddle in the way of the Parthian bowmen.

In spite of myself, I skewed round to watch and saw him hit at least two out of three that he aimed for and in the end this must have caused our pursuers to drop back because we reached our destination at a walk, unchallenged, with only the old moon rising to show us what we faced.

It was as well, I think, for by then we were exhausted and parched and light-headed for hunger. To have seen in full daylight the jagged mountains that reared high above the desert, to have understood what we must climb – that would have finished us.

As it was, we followed Mergus, the wiry centurion, as he dismounted and led his horse along a winding path in the semi-dark and it was enough to see the horse in front, to keep in line as he climbed an ever steepening gully with a fall on either side. They cut our bonds partway up that we could hold our balance, and there was no risk to it; by then we were beyond all thoughts of escape.

The way was harsh and hard and we trudged it as men in a nightmare, not knowing where we were going or why.

At the top, the path opened out into a kind of cleft, a valley of sorts, surrounded on three sides by rock and on the fourth by a makeshift wall of rock rubble piled up to keep men from blundering over the edge in the dark.

There were signs of others here before us: fist-sized stones set in rings for fires; a stinking area to the east that had been used as a latrine not long ago; steps cut in the mountain rock
leading
up to sentry points. Half of Pantera’s men went to these now, unasked, to keep watch back down the way we had come.

Horgias and I were given water and food and lay down behind a rock and slept fitfully, to busy, blood-filled dreams.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
O
NE

‘I WILL SHROUD
him in nothing less than light itself.’

I woke in the dark from dreams of Tears and this voice, the arrogance of it, dragged me upright.

‘Build here, where the sun strikes at dawn and dusk. He will have first light in the morning and last light at night. In this place, it is possible. We didn’t carry him all this way for nothing.’

Dreamstruck as I was, I rose and flung myself from the shade of the rock in which I had been lying out into blistering sunshine.

But no Pantera. Instead, I faced a small gaggle of men, just over a dozen in all, the last remnants of his group. Hypatia, the woman, was moving stones and scribing lines on the valley floor where they must create the tomb they needed.

The centurion Mergus was nearby, and Estaph the Parthian axe-giant, and a handful of Hebrews, all of them bearing wounds of varying severity from yesterday’s battles. But no Pantera.

I looked around for him, and they, in their turn, looked at me, save for a nearby slave who wrestled with a block
of
stone the size of a bull calf. The size of the stone and the effort he put into moving it were not exceptional, but what caught my eye, what made me stand and stare when I myself was the object of other men’s attention, was the scarring on his back.

Rarely have I seen flesh so scarred on a living man, certainly not on a man of healthy proportions as this one was. His muscles corded like iron as he put his shoulder to the block, but the skin that lay over was white with lines, not of a whip, but of burns, as if men had drawn them with heated irons, over and over, so close together that the scars outweighed the whole flesh.

He turned, stung by my silence, and I saw, with shock, that his chest bore the mark of the IInd legion and this was certainly poker work, for the words
LEG II AUG
were drawn with such clarity that he must have been tied firmly, or unconscious, when it was done.

More than the burns, his right shoulder was a cluster of ruined tissue, caught in sworls that I have only seen when a spear has been passed straight through from one side to the other. His left ankle bore much the same signs of destruction.

I looked last at his face, and only then because he had finally ceased his labours and was standing with his hands on his hips, giving every sign of weary patience, which was not usual for a slave.

‘
Pantera?
’

‘Demalion.’ Pantera swept the sweat from his face with his forearm. ‘If you want to help us build Menachem’s tomb, you’re free to do so. Otherwise, I recommend you drink water and eat and rest. Today is for Menachem; it’s already past the time when he should have been laid to rest. Tomorrow, we can begin to work on how to get your Eagle—’

The sun, the skin-stripping wind, the height; all of them
were
with me. I was as naked as he was; unclothed by strange hands in my sleep, deprived of my weapons.

But in a valley this high, I needed no knife, or blade, or bow. I ran at him, head down like a bull, aiming for the place on his chest where the legion mark had been wrought with fire and pain, crashing into it, powering on, aiming for the lip of piled rocks at the high edge that was all that kept us safe from carelessness, but not safe from anyone bent on dying.

I carried Tears with me, and Lupus, Syrion and Macer, Taurus and Proclion: every man of the XIIth who had died for his treachery. We powered together towards the frail rock wall and the long, long drop below it, and Pantera was swept with us, his fingers fighting for a hold on my back, where was only skin, and nothing for him to grasp.

I heard him cough an oath, felt the moment when he saw the danger, when he felt his own death rushing at him. Then, cursing, he dropped down, slid from my grasp, writhed his sweat-oiled body beneath me and, with the elastic skill of an acrobat, raised a knee, I think, or an elbow, and slammed it into the soft parts of my belly, raising me up, throwing me over his head, spinning towards the high, lethal edge—

I hit the rubble wall and fell, and lay at its foot, crumpled, bleeding from a scalp wound, too winded to move, or even to breathe.

A fist grabbed my hair and dragged my head up. Pantera’s face loomed close to mine. ‘You can die when you’ve got your Eagle back,’ he said tightly. ‘Until then, you have a duty to stay alive.’

He dropped my head and stood. ‘Tie him,’ he said to someone beyond my shoulder. ‘But bring him when the tomb’s ready. He needs to understand the enormity of what he’s done.’

The dying sun was a rage of red silks flung across the western horizon; a bruised and bloody memory of battle.

As Pantera had wanted, the king’s rough-made tomb was bathed in its light, unshadowed by everything else, flooded in ochre and umber, drawn as if by the power of prayer into the bloodied vengeance of the sky.

A pile of high rocks fashioned into the likeness of a cave with the top surface flattened to accept this scarf of sunlight, the king’s tomb had not the grandeur of a Latin mausoleum, nor the beauty of a Greek one, but in its very rudeness carried a kind of majesty.

Menachem lay within its heart, as one newly asleep. I have heard it said that Alexander lay in state for months after his death and his flesh was not corrupted. It may be that way for all kings. Certainly this one had not suffered in the day’s heat as I had expected. His face had sunk a little, deepening the hollows under his cheeks, but he was still recognizably the man I had killed.

A priest mumbled in Hebrew when they slid him into the cool dark, wrapped in white linen and anointed with oils, but it was Pantera’s barely accented Greek that rang over us now, that reached the far corners of this valley and the hills beyond so that the few who were left could hear, and the rocks around could store the memory.

‘Men and women of Jerusalem; friends … Menachem was our king, but before that he was our brother in arms, the quiet voice in our midst with the strong arm and the swift eye. He it was who had the vision to see how he might rid this land of Rome and yet remain apart from Parthia. He it was, great-hearted, who battled on the field for freedom, and in the temple for justice. He it was whose wisdom held us firm while the legions besieged us. He it was who led the charge out of here, to destroy those legions as they fled from his wrath. He it was who, hearing the oracle’s words, still
ventured
on to the field of battle, not fearing what he knew must come. We grieve him as a brother, as a comrade, as a friend and as a king. Each of these is lost to us.’

He paused there. The sun was losing its fire. Broad, cold shadows chilled us, except across the tomb, where a single sheaf of light remained. Pantera stood with his back to it, making of his own shadow the gnomon that pointed over the dead king and away.

Horgias and I were standing, bound hand and foot, at a place where we could see everyone and everything. We saw how the grieving men drank in Pantera’s words as if they might heal the unhealable; how, in that moment, each man was his, to mould as he wished. If he had told them all to turn and leap from the dangerous edge behind us, they would have done it without question.

What he asked for, showman that he was, cost them more than that.

‘We who are left now have not the strength of numbers nor the power to assault Jerusalem and remove Eleazir from his throne. What we must find instead is patience. Patience through the long winter, while we gather numbers and find what Eleazir has planned. For it may be that, caught between Parthia and Rome, we must side with one power or the other, to see Eleazir defeated. I will not hold any man of you to this.

‘If you wish to leave, to join your families, you can go freely with no shame. Those of us who remain will winter in Caesarea, where we few amongst many will draw no attention. We leave in the morning. You have until then to make your choices.’

Two of the Hebrews chose to stay with Pantera, joining Mergus and Estaph as his bodyguard. The rest went back to their families, leaving singly or together, to ride out into the
villages
and take the risk of being known later by Eleazir’s men.

It was near dark when Pantera came to Horgias and me, bringing a knife.

‘You still have the same choice you did yesterday,’ he said. ‘I will cut you free now, and set you out in the desert with a horse, and you can go where you will. Or you can come with us to Caesarea. There’s a chance you might catch up with your general, but I doubt it. He belongs in Syria and will have gone back to Antioch or Damascus. You may certainly go on to join him, but you will do so as men who have failed. If you stay with us, you have a chance to come back here in the spring and regain what is lost.’

‘Why not now?’ Horgias said. ‘We could go back in now and take it.’

‘You can certainly try.’

Pantera rolled his tongue around his teeth and then said something in the native tongue that neither of us understood. When we made no response, he repeated it, more slowly, louder.

We looked at each other, and at him. He smiled tightly. ‘I said, “You are Roman and we of Eleazir’s party take great pleasure in slaughtering your countrymen. We took five days to skin alive a man who tried to join you. Imagine what we can do now, when we have all winter.”’