The Coming of the King

Chapter Thirty-Four

With Mergus riding at his shield side, Pantera led a hundred men on a moonlit ride far more exacting than the one from Caesarea to Jerusalem. Near midnight, he brought them to the foothills south and east of Masada, leading them to a place where they could find shelter from the ruinous wind.

They tethered their horses in care of one boy to every twenty mounts and, wrapping their faces against the grit, came as close as one hundred men reasonably could to the base of the vast, flat-topped bluff that was Masada. Menachem, Mergus and eleven hand-picked climbers moved forward to gather round Pantera.

‘Masada is a diamond shape…’ Pantera took up a stone and drew a rhomboid in outline on the flat piece of rock at his feet. He felt clear-headed again, as he had on first entering Jerusalem. This time, newly, he felt the presence of the god, close as a lion’s breath behind his right shoulder. Mergus held the left, quiet as a ghost, viewing every Hebrew as a potential threat.

Pantera closed his eyes and took his mind back to his childhood and, with the shapes fresh in his mind, drew his stone in a line along the map.

‘The rock’s long axis runs north to south. Herod’s three-tiered hanging palace lies here — at the north end, sheltered from sun and wind: we will not attack that, nor near the water gate on the west side. To the east, the snake path runs up to a narrow guarded gate: the Romans believe this is the only way men can enter. Moshe-’ Moshe stepped forward, the only man of the eleven in armour. ‘You will lead your men up this path as soon as night falls. You will need to walk with care, one foot in front of the other, feeling out the route. A misplaced step will spell your deaths.’

‘Such a death would not be quiet,’ Moshe said, frowning. ‘If we scream, the legionaries will hear us.’

‘When Alexander had his men climb the fortress of the Sogdian Rock, they stuffed their mouths with silk scarves so that they might not scream and alert the defenders. I took the liberty of bringing some.’ Eighteen silk scarves spilled from Pantera’s saddle bag. Black, fine, perfect.

Moshe stared at him. He was a small man with arms furred like a goat, perfect for climbing. Stony-faced, he said, ‘Alexander paid the first man to the summit an entire talent of gold.’

‘You will have weapons enough to take Jerusalem.’ Mergus’ voice came out of the dark. ‘Would you rather have gold?’

In silence, Moshe took the scarves, noosed them on his arms and returned to his team. Pantera watched the other men, who did not have to climb the snake pass in the dark, and did not know yet that it was the easy route.

He said, ‘The gate at the top of the pass is guarded by two men at any one time. They will not sleep on duty, you can depend on that. Therefore, keep out of sight until you hear us. Menachem has already told you the signal.’

‘If Moshe’s men wait on the only route up, how are the rest of us to gain access to the top?’ asked Aaron, who was older than most, balding all the way to a line that crossed behind his ears, so that it looked as if he shaved the front half of his head. Nevertheless, he sat at the head of the ten decade-leaders who sat in the moon-shadows beneath the bluff; by their silence, he had their respect.

‘We will gain entry in the south, here.’ Pantera marked a circle on his map. ‘The palaces and guardhouses — and their storerooms — are all north of the east-west line. The south is minimally guarded, if at all.’

‘There is no access from the south,’ Menachem observed quietly; the first time he had spoken since their arrival. ‘Which is why it is not guarded.’

‘The garrison believes there is no access from the south,’ Pantera said. ‘But my father was part of the garrison here and he brought me to Masada when I was twelve years old, not long after my mother died. We were here for three months and he set me the task of imagining how I might assault it. I chose the south. And I tested it.’

‘Did your father tell anyone of your success?’

‘Not that I know of, but I left Jerusalem soon afterwards. Which is why I will go first. If I’m wrong and he shared what we found, or if someone else has discovered the same route, then I will die, but the rest of you will have time to withdraw and to call back Moshe’s men from the snake path.’

‘I have studied this place all day,’ Menachem said, and indeed he had wrapped himself in cloth the colour of grit and wormed closer to the rock in the afternoon’s heat. ‘I see no way to ascend the south of the rock unless you would have us climb a sheer wall in the dark?’

‘Did you see the aqueducts?’

‘I saw a channel cut in the southern mountains, leading away from the wadi. And yes, an aqueduct crossed from there to the rock of Masada. It emptied straight into a cistern cut in the heart of the rock at the southern end. It casts a shadow now, even in moonlight, like a thread of a spider’s web.’

‘It is stronger than spider thread,’ Pantera said. ‘And it empties into the side of the cistern, as a pipe might empty into a jug, so…’ He drew a square box, and then at one side drew a lipped opening. ‘The engineers cut it so that there’s a lip that juts into the interior, so that none of the water is lost. If we lower ourselves down from the aqueduct, we will land in the waiting water.’

‘Unless the cistern is empty,’ Menachem said. ‘In which case we’ll fall a great distance on to solid rock. What are the chances of that? A garrison of legionaries must use more water than this holds many times over and there hasn’t been rain for months.’

Pantera rubbed his hand over his sketch. ‘Herod intended that this place keep a thousand men for ten thousand days,’ he said. ‘There’s another aqueduct to the north that fills cisterns to supply the fountains and baths as well as drinking water, and two others nearer to the barracks. The one we will enter is the furthest distant from the garrison and is drawn from only in extremity. There will be enough water to cushion our fall.’

Ten uncertain men huddled round him. Each led nine others. To reach the hundred, then, he must reach these ten. Pantera turned a slow circle and squarely met the gaze of each one.

‘Nobody will force you to come. If your ten wish to stay here to greet us as we come down, no one will think less of you for it. Speak to your lieutenants and let them know what we plan. Those who wish to come with me should wind their tunics tight about their loins and have no scarf hanging free. You must be as if you were naked, while still clothed. It will be best to leave your sandals behind.’

He did not look at them as he took the hem of his own tunic and pulled it up between his legs to fasten in his belt. He did not listen to the murmurings in fast, accented Aramaic as he took the scarf that had protected his eyes against the withering wind and wound it so tight about his head that it became a second skin. But when he was done, and looked round, ten men stood likewise ready, and the ninety behind them were finishing what must be done.

Not a man of the hundred remained unprepared, and when he and Mergus led them, not towards the giant bluff of Masada, but up the rock face that rose from the desert behind them, they followed without protest.

*

Pantera had been twelve years old when he climbed to the aqueduct. Then, the places chiselled into the rock where feet and hands might find purchase had seemed impossibly far apart. Now, if anything, they were too close together so that he must hinge his body about his waist, or risk pushing his weight too far back.

But they were there, precious handholds, even more precious toeholds, that made of the sheer rock if not a ladder, then at least something that could be climbed in the dark, nursed on by the spare light of the rising moon, while the vagrant wind, that blew from the north as easily as the south, flung grit in his eyes, up his nose and through his teeth to his throat.

He spat away a mouthful, and reached up into a shadowed cleft. He stroked the rock; he had come to love it, to care for it as he cared for a good horse, or a well-balanced blade. Sliding his fingertips over roughness and projections and cracks… there, he found the ledge, a finger’s length long, where he could brush away the accumulated dust and rubble of three decades and fasten his hand on the flat ledge beneath, and hold himself steady while he crooked his leg up a foot’s length and his bare toes sought a counterpart ledge below; and found it, and it took his weight and let him ease on up and up again, with the rising moon at his back and a hundred men below, testing the selfsame handholds and finding them, silently.

The climb did not go on for ever, only seemed to. The moon was not at its full height when Pantera’s searching hand felt over the next small ledge and did not stub his fingertips at the back, but slid on a full arm’s length to find a small fissure angled down and back, so that he could fix his fingers in it and haul himself bodily on to a wide platform with a water channel cut through the centre, and a half-pipe aqueduct stretching away on a small incline towards Masada.

There was no time to look at that: already an arm came up over the ledge, fingers stretching, seeking. Pantera lay flat on his belly and leaned over. Menachem’s scarf-huddled eyes came level with his.

‘We’re here.’ Pantera guided his hand to the hold. ‘Stay by me when you’re up. The others can move to the back, out of the wind. Tell them to drink and eat, but sparingly.’

Mergus came next and then, after him, the Hebrews. A hundred times, Pantera guided a hand. At the hundredth, there was room on the ledge for perhaps three more men. It was Pantera’s father who had made the estimate of how many it could hold. He sent thanks to his memory.

To Mergus and to Menachem, he said, ‘That was the easy part.’

Mergus grimaced. ‘I thought it might be.’

Masada stood below them, an elongated platter, stretched under the moonlight: they had climbed its height and half as much again. The aqueduct stretched down into the night, a single strand of spider’s web that swayed in the wind.

‘The aqueduct is bigger than it looks,’ Pantera said, ‘and it takes a weight of water when it’s full that is far more than the weight of unarmoured men. We crawl down it with two body lengths between each man, lying flat, and don’t bring our heads above the edges.’

‘Is it big enough to hide us?’ Menachem asked.

‘It was when I was twelve years old.’ From somewhere beyond the reach of memory, Pantera found a smile, and saw it repeated, nervously, through the massed men behind him. In the desert, they had not believed him; he had been a stranger, spinning fables. Now, they sucked in his words, and used them to bolster their courage.

‘You are all lean. Nobody will get stuck,’ he said to them now. ‘And at the bottom, we drop off the end into the lip of the cistern.

Menachem drew his scarf tighter around his head. ‘Which is the worst part, I assume?’

‘It is,’ Pantera said. ‘If you can do that, you can do anything at all. After that, all we have to do is swim across the cistern. If we’re lucky, the stars will shine in to guide us.’

‘And if we’re not lucky?’

‘Then it will seem like the edge of Hades, and we will have to hope that I can find the ladder that leads up out of it. If we don’t we’ll be climbing back along the aqueduct. And going back, it’s all uphill.’