P. Deutermann - The Last Man

He peered out the doorway, scanning the terraces, then drew back as another ballista stone came hissing directly overhead. It missed the pool building roof by a few feet and shattered in the darkness against the hardpan rock of the mountain. He bolted across the pool terrace and dived into the anteroom of the other bathhouse building as a bolt from a catapult whined behind his back. He stood up, brushed off his robe, and drew the long iron dagger. He had no need to test its edge; a Sicarius with a dull weapon was a contradiction in terms.

There was a ragged cloth curtain hanging between the anteroom and the chamber inside. He paused, steeling himself. It was one thing to accede to mass suicide while in thrall to Eleazar’s rhetoric. It was another thing altogether to kill people he knew, men and women and, yes, God cleanse his soul, children, alongside whom he had lived, fought, and prayed for nearly three years. His heart pounding, he took a deep breath and touched the curtain with the point of the dagger. Then he realized it was heavy — and wet. He let go of it and stared down at his hand in the dim light, frowning at the dark stain. Then it hit him: The curtain was soaked with blood. He took another deep breath and pushed the curtain aside. What he saw took his breath away.

He had been at war continuously now for the past seven years, first in Galilee, then at the Siege of Jerusalem. When the city finally had fallen and almost the entire surviving population, reportedly some one hundred thousand Jews, had been put to the sword, he had seen the city’s streets literally awash with blood. What he beheld now, in this tiny room, still managed to shock him. Simon, son of Giora, had apparently been the executioner. He had cut their throats. Judah counted, his lips moving silently. Ten people. The entire room, the walls, the low ceiling, the back side of the cloth curtain, and every square foot of the floor had been painted in arterial blood. The bronze stench of it nearly overwhelmed him, and he had to swallow hard to keep from gagging. Simon had taken an easier way out, he noted, stabbing himself in the inner thigh and then wrapping a prayer shawl around his head and face, unable to bear further witness to the horrifying thing he had done. It is still an eligible thing to die after a glorious manner, Eleazar had said — but this was not glory. This was simply slaughter.

Judah’s eyes filled with tears at the horror of it… but Simon had done the thing, hadn’t he. There was no need here for the Last Man, in this ghastly place. He sobbed out a quick prayer and backed out through the sodden curtain, the hair on his neck rising at the touch of it. He had personally separated more than thirty men’s souls from their bodies with the fourteen-inch iron dagger he held in his right hand. He had killed scores more than that in the battles of the Revolt, most of them Romans or their allies, for whom he was beyond counting or caring.

This , though… My God, he thought, his mind trembling: They actually did it. The wind shifted slightly, and the smell from the interior room seeped through the curtain. My God ! What have we come to?

A big, ten-mina ballista stone crashed short of the building and rattled by the back door of the anteroom, skipping neatly over the empty pools and out into the shadows behind the bathhouses. He was seized by a sudden burning desire to finish himself, right there, to end it before he had to confront any more scenes like the one inside. He held the dagger point up under his chin for a second, and then a quirk of the night wind carried the sound of laughter, Roman laughter, across the desolation of the mountaintop. He let the dagger point drop and glared out into the night. The laughter was coming from the burned-out siege tower. A coldness settled on his chest, and he went back inside the blood-soaked building to find their weapons. There was one long-range war bow standing in a corner, an old Parthian, by the look of it. He slipped his dagger into its thigh sheath, retrieved the oversized weapon and one arrow, and went back to the anteroom, steeling himself to look at all the grotesquely huddled bodies, to memorize this scene from hell.

He carefully wiped blood spatters off the heavy bow, then stepped through the curve to set the gut string, grunting with the effort. The bow had probably been “liberated” during the Siege of Jerusalem, most likely from the body of a Roman auxiliary. He crawled out of the doorway and around to the eastern wall of the bathhouse. There, protected from the sight line of the siege tower, he could stand up. There were some large, empty clay amphora stacked against the wall. He turned one upside down and used it to stand on, keeping his head just beneath the edge of the flat roof. When he heard the laughter coming again, he carefully lifted the heavy bow over the edge of the roof, fit the arrow with its three-bladed iron head, then stood up straight. The tower was nearly a hundred cubits distant. He was firing directly into the wind, so it was simply a question of range. Aiming dead center but over the tops of the tower, he drew and released in one fluid motion. He caught a brief glimpse of four helmeted faces, red in the backlight of the flames, then heard the satisfying scream as his unexpected bolt struck home.

He dropped the weapon, his shoulder trembling from the effort of pulling the heavy bow, and jumped down. He scrambled across the space between the bathhouse and the main storeroom building. Eleazar’s wind sent spark-filled clouds of wood smoke across the ruined buildings of the fortress, enveloping him entirely. Zigging and zagging across the open space, he ran for the southeastern wall, where the bulk of the Zealots’ living quarters were.

He made it down to the eastern casemate walls without attracting any more catapult fire from the siege tower. He scuttled through a small doorway and turned right, not wanting to push his luck with the Roman snipers. Fortunately, the ground sloped down from the ritual bathhouse, so he was not too badly winded by his sprint. Even so, he crouched down on the dirt floor for a moment to catch his breath. A ballista had punched a hole in the mud brick wall, so he could see out onto the open area. The flames were now visible only as a red glow behind the walls of the western palace building, itself afire in spots. Thanks to the slope, most of the heavy wood smoke from the smoldering wall fire was blowing overhead. The gloomy corridor formed by the casemate structure was no more than a man’s height wide, filled with right-angle twists and turns to make it easier to defend against invaders. There were tiny oil lamps guttering in wall niches, their own wisps of smoke casting a visible pall along the ceiling. Once the Romans had managed to bring the heavy ballista catapult, capable of throwing the ten-mina stones, up onto the western slopes, most of the Kanna’im had moved their quarters into the eastern and southern casemate walls. The living quarters were little more than hovels, one or two rooms formed by poles and hides stretched partially across the corridor, leaving barely enough room for a man to squeeze by the improvised walls. There were larger, more permanent dwellings down at the southeastern corner of the fortress, where there was also a large rim cistern. Normally all the warriors would be holed up in the northern palace buildings, but on this night…

He took one of the tiny oil lamps and started down the corridor. Being taller than most, Judah had to bend forward to keep from hitting his head on the overhead beams. He could still hear the occasional cheering from the main Roman camp whenever a gust of the night wind carried the sound across the fortress grounds. The steady thumping of war drums pulsing through the night sounded like Death’s own heartbeat. He could just visualize what first light would bring, a seething mass of metal-plated Romans swarming over the ruined ramparts, short swords and pila, the dreaded javelins, bristling as they fanned out to end this awful siege.