M. Scott - The Eagle of the Twelfth

‘Antioch,’ he said, at last, when we had begun to fear he might not have swallowed the hook. ‘What did you see there?’

I was wet-kneed with relief and hid it behind a creased brow. ‘We saw the legions massing under their new commander. Vesu… Vesari… Vespa-’

‘Vespasian,’ Pantera said helpfully. ‘The son of a tax collector. The Romans know how to pick good men.’ He favoured them with his lopsided, gap-toothed leer andpicked his nose. They looked away, rolling their eyes.

‘I saw the standards of the Fifth and Tenth,’ I said, as if only now remembering. ‘They were performing manoeuvres for the new general. And men were saying that his son, Titus, has sailed from Alexandria with the Fifteenth. They’ve got King Agrippa’s forces and the garrison from Caesarea which has been sent to join them. All of them need horses, but we chose to come here, because you Hebrews have been good to us, and promise lower taxes if Rome is defeated, and we thought you might need good fighting horses more. If you don’t, the quartermasters of the legions will pay good silver, far more than we have asked from you.’

The flat-eyed leader nodded at that last, as if I had finally spoken some pass code that only he had known.

‘Come.’ He jerked his head back towards the city. ‘There are men who will want to know all that you know, in as much detail as you can tell it. For that, we may consider buying your broken beasts. As a favour.’

They formed a guard on either side of us, like a tent-party of legionaries. I mounted again and fussed the blue roan filly when she did not need it as a way to keep walking, not to panic and run. Horgias caught my eye as we passed in through the gate and gave a bleak smile that showed all of his tension and no humour at all.

At my other side, Pantera was whistling tunelessly, as a man will who has lost three of his lower front teeth, which was little short of terrifying given that I knew he had blacked them again just that morning, and that all it would take to expose the subterfuge would be for a man to hold him still and run his hand across his mouth.

I remembered him holding a bow at full draw, facing the combined ire of the petty kings of Parthia after he had killed Vardanes II, King of Kings. I had forgotten that he had nervescast in iron, and did not know the taste of fear. It was a poor time to remember.

Now, we were inside the walls of Jerusalem, oldest of cities, built on a high table of rock with ravines of vicious steepness curving round its southern side and edges. We were kept safe by our mares, or must believe so; with fifteen horses in our train, we could not be diverted down some winding alley and killed in the dark. Thus we kept to wide, open streets and moved at the pace of the slowest horses’ walk, which gave us time to look about.

Where Rome is built on seven hills, Jerusalem, it seemed to me, is built on seven valleys. Or at least, it has been forced to bend itself around the schisms that knife into the plateau. And in that winding is great, great age: some of the houses here must have dated back fifty generations, each one showing in the gently sloping walls and the layer upon layer of additions that had expanded each one outward until it met its similarly growing neighbours.

They were strewn along the sides of hills and valleys and none showed any sign of damage from our catapults; we were, I think, too far away from the battle front. When we had advanced with the XIIth, we had come from the north and west and reached Herod’s palace, which was set against the wall there. Now the temple and the tower of the Antonia stood proud on the plateau a long way to our right, for we had entered at a small northeastern gate, well away from the destruction we had wrought at the other side of the city.

I didn’t know if they had rebuilt the wall yet, and brought the market back to life in the place we had camped. I was trying to find a way to ask without giving us away when Pantera said, ‘We heard you had suffered the legions’ assault, and sent them packing. Is it true?’

They preened, these young men; they grew half a hand taller, just walking at our sides. I wanted to break their heads on the paving stones and instead had to grin at them admiringly and wait for their leader to tell us what we already knew.

‘We smashed them into pieces. We held out against the worst they could throw at us and when they had run out of arrows, out of rocks, out of men with heart, we turned them back and took their Eagle for ourselves. The battle of Beth Horon will live for ever in the mouths of men as the first of Rome’s many defeats.’

It would have been easy to ask, then, ‘What of this Eagle?’, to have wheedled out of them all they knew: where it was kept, when and where paraded through the streets.

I was halfway to asking when Pantera, swaying a little, trod on my foot and I bit the words back and glanced at Horgias, who had seen and gave the barest nod and continued to grin in the mindless manner of a man who only understands one word in every dozen that he hears. The Hebrews didn’t notice; they were too busy reminding each other of their victories, of the men killed, the stones dodged, the slingstones hurled.

They brought us in time to a tavern marked by the sign of a cedar tree. It took up the entire length of its own short, broad street, with the horse stalls below and a barn full of last season’s hay that must have been brought in since the siege. Above were rooms for hire and a wide galleried room from which came the scents of garlic, spices and meat, so that we were slavering before we came near it.

‘You have silver to pay your rent?’ asked the flat-eyed leader.

‘Of course.’ I could afford to be imperious now. ‘We shall settle the stock and give them time to recover from the journey before we consider whether Jerusalem is a fit place to receive them.’

‘A fit place…’ He coughed a crow’s dry laugh. ‘I, Nicodemus, will take you to the man who will buy them. You will sell. Tomorrow, after the Roman Eagle has been shown to the sun.’

Dawn crept up on us quietly; a footpad stealing our sleep.

We rose from our disparate dreams. Mine had been of battle, with Tears alive, and then dead, with Lupus thrusting his shield high over my head, and slingstones raining down, so that Pantera had to wake me carefully, as he had done every recent morning, by grasping the big toe of my left foot and pressing ever harder until I woke and kicked him off.

Horgias was already awake, sober and watchful, too alert to be a horse-trader. Before my eyes, he dimmed himself to a more suitable boredom.

Pantera was filthy; he stank of garlic and old sweat and hot, mouth-burning spices I could not name and this morning, as every morning, the clash between this and the fastidious, careful man I had known threw me so that I had to stare out of the window for a while to bring myself back to being Demalion the horse-trader, who despised the legions and had no particular hatred for the Hebrews.

Our window faced west, towards the Hebrew temple. The sky had blushed a faint peach at the sun’s touch and was fading now to citron, deeper in the far west where night still held the edges of the world. Against that, the Hebrew templestood out like a clay brick on a white marble floor. It was not a beautiful thing, but it had command of the whole western part of the city; it and the tower of the Antonia that reared above like a raised phallus.

I saw a flurry of movement at its height, where the wall met the steps, and a scurry of men, made small by the distance, and a spark of gold, warmer than the sun, and moving at the pace of a walking man.

‘The Eagle!’ I spun from the window and only as I spoke remembered to keep my voice low. ‘They’re parading it at the temple now!’