M. Scott - The Eagle of the Twelfth

Horgias was already moving. Pantera stood in the doorway and blocked our leaving.

‘Slowly,’ he said. ‘We go there slowly and with a lot of staring at the markets, at other people’s horses, at anything and everything but the Eagle. There is no quick way out of here if they find we are not what we seem.’

He was serious then, and it was as if the stench of unwashed tramp dropped away only to return moments later with his black-toothed leer as he let Horgias pass and ran searching eyes over me. He nodded and handed me my own knife, taken from my pack and concealed somewhere on his person; up a sleeve, I think, although I hadn’t seen him take it.

‘Let’s go and explore the city,’ he said, in his nasal northern accent. ‘We can see if the Hebrews have silver enough to buy our horses. Don’t show your weapons unless you must.’

The Hebrew priests were the same as every priest of every god I had ever seen; small men, full of their own self-importance, wearing their god’s gold and jewels as if they were their own personal wealth. Today, they were at the forefront of the procession, and they bore themselves with more pride than they had done on the day of the funeral half a year before.

Gideon’s replacement as high priest was a nervous man, prone to much glancing at the crowd, which was not surprising given that he was the third to hold his post in the last twelve months and his predecessors had met summary, and not necessarily painless, ends.

He wore his gold as if it were armour, guaranteeing his life; a headdress so weighted with bullion that he must have had a neck brace to keep it upright, and on either breast, tablets inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel that clashed with each stride.

Jewels the size of duck eggs stitched down the front of his tunic glowed in the rising sun: emeralds, rubies, turquoise, amber; a walking melody of light and all of it irrelevant beneath the blistering wash of gold that was the Eagle.

The Eagle. Our Eagle; close enough to touch. We could have done that, I think — touched it — before Eleazir’s men killed us.

Instead, we watched it borne along behind the high priest, carried by a younger man with the now familiar bearing of a zealot, who wore no gold but held aloft the greatest prize any Hebrew army had ever won.

He blazed with the pride of the victor, but in our eyes, if no one else’s, the Eagle’s blaze was the greater, flooding the street below the temple, and the crowds that stood in silence, here in Jerusalem where there was never silence, even in the middle of the night. On them, that blaze lay like a blanket beneath the shimmering gold of the sun-touched bird and held even the children to wide-eyed awe.

We stood with the rest, feigning a paltry interest, and believed ourselves inconspicuous.

A hand grabbing at my shoulder spoke otherwise. I turned, schooling my face to avarice. ‘You have silver? You wish to buy a good copper-chestnut mare with a colt foal in her belly?’

I faced a drawn knife with its blade honed so fine theiron had turned blue. Behind it I recognized the flat eyes of Nicodemus, the leader of the Hebrew youths who had brought us to the city. He did not smile. He did not so much as lift his lip.

‘You will come with me.’

‘Only if you’re going to buy a mare,’ I said.

Pantera leaned across me, favouring the youth with a wash of garlic, setting himself between me and the knife.

‘Better go with him,’ he said thickly. ‘There are more behind. We’ll never sell anything if they make a fuss here.’

They were eight again, and I was beginning to be able to tell them apart: Nicodemus of the subtly bronzed hair and flat eyes; Levius and Gorias, the twins with identical dark hair, dark brows, dark eyes and a particular curl to their lips that made them seem to laugh more often than their cousins. Manasseh was the tallest, and the most silent; in many ways he was like Horgias and I counted him amongst the most dangerous. Matthias was his cousin, thicker set and duller of wit, while Yohan, Sapphias and Onias made another small sub-clan of brothers or close cousins, all with the same gingery lift to their hair, the same stubble on their not-yet-adult chins.

They led, we followed, only today we were not protected by our horses, not held to wide, open streets where murder might conceivably be harder, but drawn into the dark winding alleys that stooped down into the deep heart of this city where the priests never went, and the small markets became smaller and smaller and finally stopped.

On the edge of a slope, with the wall not far away, we turned left and then left again and came to a halt at a door. Nicodemus rapped a particular rhythm and then stood back as the door opened, sending us alone into a house whose interior was quite at odds with its modest location and appearance.

Inside was not modest by anyone’s standards, but not ostentatious either. In the best Greek tradition the wealth of its owner was evident in the subtlety of its restraint: the marble on the floor, the nine-branched candlesticks in silver, the wall hanging of velvet in deep midnight blue, the oak and cedar table, inlaid here and there with subtle cuts of ivory and ebony, the carp pool, and the pad of well-trained Hebrew slaves.

The master stepped smartly forward. ‘Gentlemen, welcome.’ His voice was smooth, soft, unthreatening. ‘I apologize for the way you were brought here, but these days I’m afraid we must proceed with the utmost care. Even now, when we are winning all our wars, there are men who would betray us to Rome. You are the leader, I am told?’

He passed the velvet hanging and came to stand at a certain place where the water light of the pool met candlelight from the many-branching candlesticks, and both met fine sunlight filtering in from the ceiling.

Harlequin shades played across his face and I could not see him clearly, only enough to say that he was of middling height, with a beard that grew far more fulsomely than did the hair of his head, that his nose was the most prominent part of his face, and that his eyes hugged his soul tight beneath brows black as drawn charcoal. He looked tense and trying to hide it.

Pantera, by contrast, looked more slack-lipped and disreputable than ever.

The master smiled pleasantly enough. ‘I am Yusaf ben Matthias, elder of the sanhedrin of Jerusalem. You are…?’

He was looking at me. Startled, I said, ‘Demalion of Macedon. My father was a horse-trader of great repute in our land. I, who am unworthy of his name, nevertheless do my best to honour it. We have brought a dozen mares of good breeding and one in foal to-’

‘Yes, yes. I have heard.’ Ben Matthias held up his hands. ‘They are fast as the wind and will go all day without rest. But you come also straight from Antioch. You will forgive me if I have little use for your mares, but my master Eleazir, who is king here now…’ his restless gaze settled on Pantera a moment, so that their eyes met in passing, ‘is interested in what you know. We will recompense you for your time here if you will but talk to me about all you saw of Rome’s preparations for war.’

At the mention of money, gold flashed between his fingers: a sun-spark in the dark folds of his velvet gown. Pantera leaned in towards it and Yusaf ben Matthias swept his arm back, towards his table.

‘Sit! Please, do sit!’ He smiled again, and it was no more real than the first time, with no less tension about his mouth. ‘I shall call for food and drink and you can tell me all you know.’

I spoke for most of the time, with irregular interjections from Pantera that wandered far off the point but appeared to be telling ben Matthias things he found interesting, plus the occasional grunt from Horgias when a name came up that he evidently recognized with his paltry Greek.