M. Scott - The Eagle of the Twelfth

‘You just killed the one man who could have made Israel a whole nation,’ he said, softly. ‘The only reason you’re still alive is because I have asked it and the only person who might conceivably help you is me.’

I was not afraid of his rage: in that moment, I was not afraid of anything. I spat on the ground between his feet. ‘I’d rather spend the entire winter dying.’

Winter in Caesarea: four months of excoriating idleness in which nothing happened and everything changed.

Governor Cestius Gallus died the month after we arrived; that was the first change. As Pantera had predicted, he had left Caesarea before we reached it, and marched the remnants of his sorry campaign in through the gates of Antioch. Soon after, he took to his bed and was dead by midwinter.

So said the messages written on onion-skin parchment wrapped to the legs of the messenger birds that fluttered into the dovecote in the yard outside the house in which Horgias and I had our secret billet.

Ishmael, a youth with wide, sad eyes, tended to the doves and to us with equal care. He had the shocked look of one who has brushed too close to death, too young. At other times, in other days, I would have wheedled his story out of him, but that winter in Caesarea I fed on the messages from other cities and took no notice of the messenger.

As Pantera had known we must, Horgias and I had travelled with him to the city on the coast, and done what we could to make ourselves ready to return to Jerusalem. We slept a great deal, ate well, and worked with our weapons asif we were still under Lupus’ command. We were harsher on ourselves than any centurion could have been, for in action, in sweat and bruises and curses, we were able to forget. Only when we relaxed did we remember who and what we had lost. Relaxation was rare.

The news of Gallus’ death came in the first month. It gave us hope that a new commander might put heart into the remaining legions and march swiftly on Jerusalem. We spent our evenings planning, thinking, creating ideas and dismantling them, piece by piece, until we knew all the ways — the very few ways — by which we might regain our Eagle.

Three months later, after the Saturnalia, the doves brought the name of Gallus’ replacement, the new governor of Syria and general of all the eastern legions. Corbulo had been the last man to command all the legions, but Corbulo had been recalled to Greece; his replacement could not be as good, but he could be better than some we had had. We knew hope for the first time.

Seeking more information, I walked through the market listening to the gossip and discovered that our new general, the man sent to quell the unrest in the east, was the second son of a provincial tax collector whose only claims to recognition were that he had commanded some legions in Britain in the heady, early days of the invasion, that his brother had once stood for consul, and that he had been a governor in some African province, where the locals had thrown turnips at him.

Despairing, I returned to the house, and that despair deepened later when Horgias came home with the news that our new paragon of martial virtue had until recently been hiding in Greece, in disgrace for having fallen asleep during one of Nero’s recitals in the theatre.

Until then, we had spent each day in training and eachnight in planning, but that night we abandoned all good living and drank ourselves into a stupor in a tavern.

‘He’ll be as bad as Paetus,’ I said, slumped across the table, drawing hapless sketches of Jerusalem in the spilt wine. ‘Worse, if that’s possible.’

‘We can give up any hope of Rome retaking Jerusalem,’ Horgias said miserably and all I could do was use Pantera’s money to buy another jug of wine and help Horgias drink it.

And then, before our heads had fully cleared, there came news that wiped away thoughts of everything that had gone before it.

It was a morning like any other. As was their habit, Hypatia and Pantera joined us shortly after dawn, leaving Mergus, Estaph and the two Hebrews, Moshe and Simeon, on watch at either end of the street.

Since we had left Jerusalem, these precautions had proved perpetually necessary. Three times so far, Eleazir had sent his agents to kill us, and three times we had killed the half-dozen men who had slid out of alleyways with sharp knives seeking our throats. Their bodies had gone into the sea, weighted with rocks and sand. We felt no safer afterwards.

On this particular morning, I caught sight of Pantera’s face as he pushed through the goatskin curtain and knew that he brought catastrophe with him.

‘What?’ I asked, and then, guessing, ‘Hypatia is leaving?’ I didn’t consider that a catastrophe, but thought Pantera, who often sought her opinion, might see it so.

‘No.’ Hypatia had followed him in; in Caesarea they were rarely seen apart. I don’t think they were lovers, but they shared a common grief, and a need to find restitution.

This morning, she sat down and helped herself to our flatbread, and she, too, looked more stunned than I had seen before. ‘I will leave when you do,’ she said. ‘Not before.’

It had the ring of prophecy to it, but didn’t answer my question. ‘Nero, then? Is the emperor dead?’

‘Not Nero.’ Pantera stood by the wall, just inside the door. His face was grey as parchment. ‘The man who should have taken his place.’

Of the two of us, Horgias was the faster to understand; Horgias, who could barely bring himself to look at Pantera, looked straight at him now, his features warped as if the messenger and the message were one ill-made mess.

‘Corbulo,’ he said. ‘He’s the only man truly fit to be emperor. It must be Corbulo who’s dead.’

‘Corbulo!’ I exploded from the fireside. ‘What have you done to him, you lying, underhanded, alley-bred-’

Horgias caught me. ‘Pantera didn’t kill him.’ He looked back at Pantera. ‘Did you?’

‘No.’

‘But you said he should take Nero’s place, which is as good as a death sentence. Men have died in the beast pits for saying less. If Nero were to find out…’

I ran out of anger. I had been like that since we came to Caesarea: easily moved to rage, to fear, to loose, unbounded laughter, and then down again, to empty despair.

Pantera had been patient with me all through the winter. He was no less patient now, only that it was clear today what it cost him to keep his voice calm, to stay flat against the wall, with his hands behind his back.

‘There’s nothing to find,’ he said. ‘Unless Nero can read the mind of a man halfway across the empire, I am guiltless.’

‘If Nero could read minds, he’d have slaughtered every man in the senate and half the empire by now.’ Horgias was unreasonably calm, I thought. ‘Corbulo was too successful and too popular, that’s all. Nero has killed every other man who’s shown himself a likely rival. We should have seen this coming.’

Horgias let me go. I felt sick. I had not thought aboutCorbulo since before we marched out of Antioch, but his loss left me bereft almost as Tears’ death had done, as if by his mere existence he had held the last thread of hope; as if he alone could have led the assault on Jerusalem we needed to avenge the disasters of the summer.

I had not dared to think beyond that, even in the privacy of my own mind. Now, I looked up at Pantera. ‘Why did you say that he should have been emperor?’

He didn’t answer at once, but scrubbed his hands across his face once in a sharp movement that sang to me of guilt, then sank down to sit cross-legged by the smouldering fire, where Hypatia gave him a torn piece of flatbread, and some of the goat’s cheese that Horgias bought each morning from the market.