M. Scott - The Eagle of the Twelfth

The binding cords dropped away from my wrists and ankles. That was the gift Tears had sent me: the understanding that, although neither Horgias nor I could free ourselves, each could free the other while everyone’s attention was elsewhere.

We had no plan, no weapons, nowhere to go but down the hill, and there awaited a hundred thousand enemies, but I was ready even as Pantera raised the filet of understated gold and held it high over Gideon’s head so that it must seem tothe crowds as if the crown had appeared from nowhere and was choosing its rightful owner.

‘ People of Israel! ’

His voice boomed out, louder than any normal man’s, and I saw that he had turned his head and was using the echo of the cave, and thought that Hypatia had set him to do that.

‘See now your rightful-’

Eleazir’s knife flew after I moved. To the end of my days, I will swear that: no man can move faster than a thrown knife and I reached Gideon before the blade took his throat, so I must have been moving first.

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 Menachemin 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 rockleading 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.

‘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 blockof 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.