M. Scott - The Coming of the King

There was no one nearby. Mergus was fighting a dozen yards away, but safe; even as Pantera looked, he made the death blow and stepped in to finish.

Closer, in the wreckage of the last melee, Aaron was down. Menachem knelt beside him, his tunic drenched with wet blood down the side where his arm had been hit. Of their five attackers, none was left alive.

Pantera turned a full circle, counting. He had led a hundred Hebrews along the aqueduct in attack against a garrison of five times that number. Now, at the battle’s end, of the ninety or so men left standing, very few were Roman and even where they were knotted in small groups, none of them was fighting.

The fight had reached that point where men on both sides were so numb with exhaustion that it was all they could do to stand up. They wanted to sit, to celebrate the fact that they were alive, that they could see the sun, feel the wind, taste the water they craved. Nothing tasted as good as water after a battle, nothing felt so perfect as the wind’s caress.

‘Pantera?’

Menachem’s right arm hung limp by his side. Across his face were written new lines of grief.

Pantera forgot about water, and winning. ‘Aaron?’ he asked.

‘Dead.’

He nodded. He could think of nothing to say. A blade’s point had nicked the man’s thigh; he remembered that, vaguely. He had not thought it deep, or fatal, but even if it had been, he could not have done anything.

Menachem began to speak a prayer, slowly, as one who searches for the words. Pantera stood with him, and tried to remember the last time he had prayed with any meaning for someone dead, and found it far back and too painful to remember.

He stepped away then, and surveyed the scene and presently said, ‘The legionaries have ceased to fight. You have won, my lord.’

Menachem turned to look where Pantera was looking, north, to the storerooms, where a huddle of legionaries stood still, facing thirty or forty of their own men. The clash of weapons had stopped, and all were still.

He said, ‘Why are they not fighting?’

‘They’re spent,’ said Pantera. ‘So are we, but there are more of us than them. There’s a moment in a battle when everything stops. I’ve never known why it happens, but it does. Come-’ He began to walk, picking his way over the dead, past the still-living. ‘You will need to take their surrender.’

They came close, and the men parted to let them through. The legionaries were led by an optio; all their centurions were dead. He was lean and wiry, Roman to the ends of his toes. He took his sword and held it across the flats of his palms and knelt, and put it at Menachem’s feet. He was bleeding from a wound on his shoulder, not badly. He said, ‘We are dead men. We commend ourselves to your care.’

Menachem looked down at the sword, at the notches on its blade made in the battle just gone.

‘A prisoner,’ he said, in the clear Greek they all spoke, ‘is the man who in the last breath was trying to kill me, and in the next wishes me to feed him and give him water.’ He turned to Pantera. ‘What do we do?’

‘If you were Roman,’ Pantera said, ‘you would crucify them in sight of their brethren in Jerusalem so they would know what awaited those who stood against you.’

‘I am not, and I will not.’ Menachem spat. A ripple ran through his men, of pride, perhaps.

‘You could let them fall on their swords,’ Pantera offered. ‘Or walk off the edge of the plateau. Either death is swift, honourable and takes considerable courage. They would go cleanly to their gods. You would be doing them a kindness.’

A long moment passed, with no words to fill it, nor none needed. At the end, Menachem turned to Moshe and nodded, and with that as the only order, his men opened out and made a column, lined on both sides, between the stores and the edge of the plateau, to the one place where there was no wall to keep men from falling. They did it with pride, and with a sense of honour that shone from them.

The legionaries watched it and they too did not need to speak. With a glance at Menachem for permission, the optio bent to retrieve his sword, buckled it on and turned to face eternity.

His men fell into line behind him, two on two; thirteen of them in all. A standard-bearer took the hindmost place, for all that their only standard was a small military pennant; the eagle of their legion was miles away.

In the heavy silence, the optio spoke aloud his own name, and that of his god. His men spoke after him, all at once, so that for a moment the sound was once again the discord of battle. And through that sound came Mergus, breathing hard, sweeping blood from the hilt of his sword.

He said, ‘My lord, there is another way. If you will allow me?’

Menachem’s eyes flashed. ‘Does this way avoid bloodshed? And yet leave my men safe?’

‘I believe it may.’ With a bow, Mergus laid his sword on the ground in place of the one just lifted. Beside it, he laid his helmet, so that he stood bareheaded, his hair slick to his scalp with sweat. In short order after these, he shed his mail shirt, his undercladding and his shirt, until he stood before them half naked.

The Hebrews turned away, but Romans took in the marks of his past and his present; the scars of old floggings, ubiquitous in the legions, the tattoos of his rank: centurion of the Twentieth; the brand of Mithras on his sternum and the later marks that took him from the lowest rank of Raven to the higher one of Lion, a priest of that cult.

In Latin, in the cadences of the parade ground, Mergus spoke.

‘I am Appius Mergus, centurion of the Twentieth legion, in Judaea in the service of my emperor. With me is Sebastos Pantera, known as the Leopard, citizen of Rome, made so by the hand of the emperor himself in consideration of his services to the city and the empire. The one who has taken control of Jerusalem is a traitor and a spy. He it is who burned Rome two years ago; we fought him then, and we fight him now. I swear to you now in the name of my god, by the bull-slayer, first Father, god of the nights and of the days, that this is true. If you join with us, if you take a new oath to Menachem, rightful king of Judaea, you will be rewarded for it by the emperor when this conflict is over.’

The silence when he finished was more dense than it had been before. Mistrust flooded from both sides, from men who had killed and had no desire to take the enemy as a brother.

Only from Menachem was there a measure of equanimity. In good, clear Latin, he said, ‘If you will swear an unbreakable oath to serve in my interests, I will accept it.’

For a dozen slow heartbeats, Pantera dared to hope. Then the optio shook his head and turned back to face the edge of the plateau. He looked over his shoulder at Mergus.

‘If it offend you, I apologize; I would not go to my death carrying one more man’s hurt. But I prefer to die now, than to serve against my brothers.’

He marched as he would to war, fast and straight, two dozen strides to the edge, kicking up dust to his knees so that he seemed by the end to float on a cloud of heavy air.

He might have gone on walking on that cloud, out into oblivion, but the weight of his armour caught up with him, and he was gone, suddenly, shockingly, fast as a stone.

Not a scream came from him or from the four ranks of men who followed, dropping in pairs, so that there was silence, for a while, and only the faintest crashing impact as they met the valley’s floor.

Menachem had closed his eyes and was speaking a prayer to his god, and so he did not see, as Pantera did, when the standard-bearer changed his mind.

‘Strabo, Silanus, Ralla, Bassus, on me! About face!’ The order snapped and the four named men snapped with it in a perfect turn. The rearmost, who had been foremost, teetered a hand’s breadth from the edge; the merest gust of a breeze would have pushed them over.