M. Scott - The Coming of the King

‘ Menachem!’

Pantera screamed the name above the havoc of combat while all around him other men screamed to their gods, to their brothers, to themselves, in agony, in victory, in the sheer exertion of striving to live, which meant striving to kill first, before a sword swung from nowhere, and one more name was lost in the maelstrom.

For an eternity after Pantera called out, Menachem did not move. Then he tilted his head as if his god had tapped him on the arm, and nodded and, turning, dropped his right shoulder, and the blade that would have split his skull instead sheared away the side of his tunic, taking a collop of flesh with it.

He bled. Therefore he was alive. Mergus was with him, shouting, holding a shield. Pantera saw that much before a body, perhaps living, perhaps foe, slammed into his back.

He took the power of the blow and let it catapult him forward, flying free of the carnage, suspended in the air, out of reach of the enemy behind, not yet within reach of the one in front.

The ground came at him fast; the hard, red rock of Masada, bounded by Herod’s double-skinned casement wall that had stopped him from falling over the edge at every other point along the perimeter, except here, at the gateway to the snake path where it wound up from the ground: here was the opening, and no wall — and falling was not just possible, but probable. It was a very long way down.

He tucked his head in, curved his shoulder, arced the sweep of his arm as the ground rushed to smash him, so that he rolled forwards and came up on his feet, facing back the way he had come. It was a tumbler’s move, learned as a boy, and it was his only weapon, now that he had thrown both of his knives.

A sheet of shining mail blinded him as he rose, so dazzling was its polish, so bright the morning sun beating against it. The legionary whose shirt it was shouted an oath to Jupiter and ran at Pantera with his sword held straight forward, like a spear.

Pantera dropped sideways, and rolled in at the coming feet, tripping them. Thrusting up on one elbow, he pushed out with his hands and let momentum hammer the other man hard against the edge of the wall even as he ripped the sword from his hand.

Bones cracked under the impact. A scream was cut off halfway as Pantera sliced the man’s own blade across his windpipe and the great vessels that hemmed it on either side.

Blood made a splashing fountain behind him. He ran from it, fast; he had seen men die because they had lost their footing in the gore of the man they had just killed. In the barracks afterwards, those who lived named it dead man’s revenge.

Pantera had a blade now, but no shield. He came at a man from behind and speared his new weapon upwards, under the edge of his enemy’s mail. It was a coward’s move, but he had no shame; it gained him a shield and he used it as a weapon, smashing the boss into the face of the next man who came at him, as he bent and cut low, to slice his enemy’s tendons. That one fell, and died, and Pantera walked over him, stamping, as the legions were taught to do.

The new blade was sharp and well balanced and it was the last proof, had Pantera needed it, that these men were the best veterans of the Jerusalem garrison, sent to Masada as a reward, not the lazy, the lame and the disobedient sent for punishment. They were, in fact, men exactly like his father, who had brought him here to show him its magnificence.

Pantera killed twice more, each time more difficult, each with increasing respect. The men that were left on both sides were tired, but they were alive because they were faster and better, and luckier, than the men who lay dead on the rock. Nobody was left who was slow or weak or deaf or part blind.

For a moment, nobody tried to kill him. He took a chance to look down the snake path, and saw no one sheltering there. He believed there might be bodies on the ground at the rock’s foot, but it was too far to see and he had no intention of stepping closer to look.

He pushed his shield against the casement wall and thrust himself back into the battle. The worst of the fighting was no longer here, near the gateway where Moshe had brought his men up to the plateau, but further north, near the Herodian storehouses.

Menachem, Mergus and Aaron were in the heart of it, fighting as a trio, back to back to back. Only Mergus had a shield and he was using it to cover Menachem. Five legionaries stood before them in an arc, pushing forward with their shields locked in classic tight formation. They had their backs to Pantera. Nobody stood between him and them.

He grabbed another sword from a dead man’s hand, and sprinted forward, wiping the hilt free of blood as he went. He jumped a body, and a shield, and chose not to take it up. Aaron faced towards him, Mergus and Menachem away. He shouted, ‘Aaron!’ and threw the sword as if it were a knife, sending it to turn, blade over hilt in the air.

Graceful, flashing in spinning rhythm, it curved over the heads of the five Romans. Aaron reached up and snatched it from the air and it must have seemed that the sky had opened and the gods sent a blade into their enemy’s hand, for the inexorable forward advance halted, and five legionaries stopped to gape up at the unbroken blue above.

Pantera hit them from behind with the shield held sideways across his body, so that it smashed into the kidneys of two men at once and caught a third under the ribs with one sharp edge hard enough to knock him off balance. That one stumbled under the fall of Aaron’s new blade, and died for his ill luck.

Four left, two of them down. Mergus and Menachem turned to fight the two still standing at either end as Pantera ruined his new blade by stabbing it down through the angle between the helmet and the mail of one of the two who had fallen before he could recover and rise. That one died nastily, but swiftly enough.

The second was not as winded. He rolled away, hunching himself against Pantera’s seeking blade, and writhed round, swinging his own sword out in a circle that hissed past Pantera, as close as any blade had ever come. He jerked back, cursing. The tip sliced on past and caught Aaron on the thigh, but it was at the end of its swing, when the power was gone, and Pantera did not have time to look.

He did not have time to do anything now but wrench himself sideways as yet another blade cut down past his head. His reflexes saved him, but sluggishly, slowed by exhaustion. He spun and parried and hacked and knew that each stroke was slower and later than it should have been and that he was only alive because the man he fought was as tired as he was.

This latest punched his shield into Pantera’s face. Pantera grabbed the top edge of it and thrust it down at his attacker’s foot, reeling sideways, to keep away from the stabbing, searching blade.

For a few frenzied moments, he fought for his life without thought of anyone else. He punched, he kicked, and, when a flash of flesh passed him by, he bared his teeth and bit.

He thought he was about to die and there, then, when it was not the slow death of Saulos’ pleasure, he discovered how much he wanted to live.

And he did so. By luck as much as speed or force, he ducked under a backhanded swing at his face and was there, with a short, savage gladius tucked tight to his side, so that he could spear it upwards at the wide, red mouth that roared death in his face.

The blade grated up through his enemy’s hard palate and lodged in the plates of his skull. Pantera let it go as the Roman fell and wrested the other’s blade from his dying fingers.

He wanted to rest, to sit with his back to solid rock and tip a skin of water over his head and down his throat. He desperately wanted water; just the thought of it made him dizzy. He spun on his heel to look behind, because this, too, was a time when good men died: when they had just killed, and were too shocked at their own survival, too wretchedly tired, to see the fresh death that came from one side or another, or behind.