Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth

by M C Scott

  Pantera leaned back, looping his hands behind his head. I studied his face in the falling firelight, to see if I could find the line where he had dyed his skin. I failed.

  When he spoke, he was more cautious than I had ever heard him. His eyes flicked between Horgias and me, testing the impact of each phrase.

  ‘Vespasian warned me that I would have to earn your trust before we left Antioch, or the mission was destined to fail. I told him I had spent the winter doing exactly that. He told me it would take more than simply being in your company.’ His smile was as dry as it had ever been. ‘He hadn’t met you; I thought I knew better and that he was wrong.’

  I said, ‘He was right.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  He looked down at his hands, at the fire, back at us. Dirty orange flames etched out the lines on his face that were not, now, the disguise, but the first and best signs of a new tension.

  In Hyrcania, he had killed a king’s son and it had cost him less than this. I leaned forward, devouring his words.

  ‘Moshe and Simeon are prepared to accompany you back into Jerusalem,’ he said. ‘Each is fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic. Neither has any experience of horse-trading and so you might need a different cover story – I am assuming that’s what the youngstock were for? To sell in Jerusalem? Yes? Well, it won’t work with them and you’ll have to think of something else. You can’t afford to have a weak cover. But they have said they will go with you if you ask it.’

  ‘And leave you behind?’ I had to be sure.

  ‘Obviously. This endeavour will work best with fewest at risk. The more men involved, the greater are the chances of disaster. You know by now that Eleazir will have no mercy if he suspects there are spies in his city.’

  Of all possibilities, I had not expected this; that we might leave Pantera and go in other company, risking other men’s lives for a quest in which they had no stake.

  I glanced at Horgias, but his half-shrug left the decision to me and I … I found myself like a man who has set himself to shove against a shield, and has found that shield suddenly removed. With nothing to push against, where was there to go?

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why are you stepping back now?’

  ‘When I’ve worked all winter to get you to take me?’ Pantera was not smiling now. His eyes fed on my face. ‘Because you need to go and I don’t. Because it’s your right, and only my wish. Because if one of us has a chance to survive, to win, to make this happen, it is you. I have pride, and as you have noticed, I have a lot to prove, but not so much that I will endanger your legion for my own sake.’

  He waited then, not speaking. The fire smouldered in the space of his silence.

  I said, ‘Moshe and Simeon are your men. They won’t follow me.’

  He laughed at that, quietly. ‘The man who walked out of the sick tent to lead the archers that nearly wiped out our slingers on the walls of Jerusalem? Who led the battering ram that came so close to breaking open the north wall gate? Who killed their king with a single shot on the battlefield and then was last left alive beneath the Eagle? They are warriors, and they have seen you fight. Trust me, they’ve seen in life what I saw only in promise in Hyrcania. They’ll follow you as readily as they follow me; more so, for you shine the brighter on the field.’

  It may be that he was humouring me, but if so it succeeded, for my anger broke apart like a ripe grape crushed underfoot.

  I studied Pantera afresh, not seeking the evidence of his disguise this time, but of the man beneath. In Hyrcania, I had mistrusted him, and he had not only kept me alive, in circumstances more dangerous than I had ever understood, he had sent me home with the best mare I had ever ridden and enough gold to arm half a legion. I know: I spent it later doing just that.

  In Jerusalem, he could have killed Horgias and me and we would have thanked him for it. Afterwards, he could have abandoned us in Caesarea. Until now, I had hated him for each of these. Now …

  I thought of Moshe and Simeon, both good men, and what I knew of them, and whether I trusted them with my life, in the centre of a city run by a man who would spend five days skinning us alive if we were caught.

  The long wait lengthened. The heat became stifling and the smoke from the fire barely bearable.

  At long last, I pushed myself to my feet. ‘The blue roan filly’s in season,’ I said slowly. ‘If we were to cover her with your grey Berber colt, the foal would be worth a fortune.’

  Pantera raised his head. ‘But why would you want to sell such a paragon?’ he asked. ‘If you kept it, it would be the start of a dynasty.’

  ‘She will not be for sale. But to found her line, we need to bring her out alive, with ourselves and the Eagle.’

  Pantera rose, unevenly, hawking a cough. Even here, now, with Horgias and me as his only audience, he did not forget that he was an old and crippled horse-trader, not a man with the suppleness of an acrobat and the reflexes of a trained assassin.

  That was when I knew I had made the right choice. I said, ‘What will we need to do before we go?’

  Pantera rubbed the side of his nose but failed entirely to hide a flush of pleasure. To Horgias, he said, ‘What languages can you speak besides Greek and Latin?’

  I winced. Not one of us who were his friends had ever dared ask that.

  But Horgias only nodded, as if it was the right question for the time. ‘I speak this,’ he said, and let fly in a tongue that I did not recognize and had never heard.

  I was alone in that, evidently, for when Horgias paused for breath, Pantera said, ‘Thracian? Am I right?’

  Thracian! All these years we knew him a barbarian, but not of that calibre. I felt my throat grow tight at the thought of Proclion, of Taurus, of all the men who would have given a month’s pay to know this. Pantera looked me a question, but I shook my head, unable to speak.

  ‘So we are Greek-speaking Syrians and you are our Thracian brother,’ he said, to Horgias. ‘With a skill, I think, perhaps, in bone-setting? Can you do that?’

  ‘A little. Enough to set a horse sound for a day or two.’

  ‘It’ll do; we’ll try not to put it to the test. For now, take this’ – Pantera hefted me a pouch of silver – ‘and buy some brood mares: they want fertility in Jerusalem, as well as youth. Put your filly to the colt tomorrow and then again two days later if she’ll still stand to him.’ He flashed a smile and was young again, vital; the man who had laughed as he fletched arrows in Hyrcania. ‘We’ll leave to get your Eagle the day after that.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  ‘YOU CAME TO sell that? It’s broken in wind and leg. I wouldn’t pay to eat it, much less ride it. How much do you want?’

  They were eight, the youths who stopped us outside the small northern gate at Jerusalem: eight dark-haired, olive-skinned Hebrew zealots, swaggering as they halted us and laying their hands ostentatiously on the knives at their belts, in case we were blind and hadn’t seen them.

  Our own knives were in our packs, on the backs of our horses, and however easy they were to reach, however often we had practised – and we had practised until we could reach them in our sleep – it was never going to be fast enough. I looked at Pantera, who was looking at his toes as if the sight of armed men terrified him.

  Sighing, I stepped ahead of Horgias. ‘My lords, I offer deepest apologies, but my brother is Thracian. His Greek is not good and his Aramaic is pitiful. He can ask for a whore and pay her, but when it comes to setting the price for youngstock of the quality of these—’

  ‘Why did you hire him, then?’ They spoke Greek as if they hated the feel of it on their tongues, these young Hebrew men.

  ‘He’s our brother!’ I was fulsomely affronted. ‘And he is the best bone-setter we have ever met. If, may the gods forbid, one of these mares were to break a leg, well …’ My spread hands offered the assumption that these were intelligent men of the world, who understood the ways of trade, and could see why we might forgive some basic lacks, language, perhaps, and manners, for
someone so patently valuable.

  The youths stared in flat-eyed silence. I began to calculate how fast we could mount and run, and whether we could take with us at least a bright copper mare, pregnant to a good stallion, in whom I had some hope.

  Before I could move, Pantera spoke in a rattle of phlegm from just behind my left shoulder. ‘My brother here …’ he laid a lazy hand on my arm that stopped me from going anywhere, ‘knows horses better than any man east of Gaul, where they breed the best chariot horses the world has ever seen. He wouldn’t sully his reputation by bringing rubbish to sell in the newly free Jerusalem.’

  Along with the youngstock, we had brought an additional ten mares to sell, good ones, though not the best.

  Pantera kept talking fast and thickly so that they had to concentrate to understand him. I had to admire that; a man who is straining to listen is not planning an attack. It was the density of his words that grabbed the young Hebrews, and the obvious passion therein.

  ‘Ten denarii for each of the barren mares and fifteen for the copper-chestnut and the colt foal she carries within her or we have made a loss on the journey from Antioch.’

  ‘Antioch?’ The leader had a slight bronze cast to his hair that set him apart from the others. He was neither the eldest nor the tallest, but he had the cold, flat eyes of a man who has killed and found that the experience did not touch his soul. He spat at our feet. ‘You are spies, then? Our cousin will be happy to see you.’

  ‘Spies?’ Pantera’s laugh rattled into a cough. His own gobbet of spit was directed respectfully away. ‘If we were spies, would we tell you where we came from? You can pay us for our horses, our good, Alexandrian colts, as different from the broken-winded donkeys and mules you have here as the sun is from a candle, or you can tell us now that you will not pay and we will leave you to your fastness and misery. What is Rome to us? What is Israel? We are traders; we care nothing for your wars. Will you show us the colour of your silver? Or shall we leave now?’

  His hand was still on my arm. He turned me away from them and I, in turn, pulled on the halter of the copper mare with the kind eye who was pregnant to a lively bay colt that Pantera had left behind in Antioch.

  ‘Wait!’ One of the younger men ran round ahead of me. ‘How do you know she’s carrying a colt?’

  ‘There’s a witch in Antioch who tastes their piss,’ I said. ‘She sniffed at half a cup and swore it was a colt. I’ve never known her wrong.’ I had never known her at all, but Pantera had found her and swore she was genuine and found a dozen men to testify and I was happy to believe him. ‘She’s due in two months’ time. When we come this way again, I’ll give you two denarii back if it’s a filly, but you won’t be disappointed even if it is. She’ll be the best brood mare you’ve ever had.’

  They stared at us, and seven of them waited while the leader made his mind up.

  ‘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 and picked 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 nerves cast 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.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  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 temple stood 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.