The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The roar of a thousand voices shouting shook my skull. Pain speared down from it into the depths where I hid, piercing me awake and dragging me, unwilling, to the surface.

I opened my eyes into darkness and heard swords beat on shields and the discordant stamp of a thousand men on the march.

War. I remembered it distantly, as if it were a tale I had heard of men I once knew. War against Jerusalem. I felt for something to hold that I might pull myself up, and wondered how I was going to lead a century into battle when I was blind, and the ache in my head made me want to be sick. In fact, the sickness wouldn’t wait…

I found an edge, and leaned over it, and puked a thin, sour muck that felt as if it had come from somewhere down near my kidneys, and my stomach had turned itself inside out to be rid of it.

I spat, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and was trying to find a way to stand up without being sick again when a brilliant light lanced my face with a pain beyond imagining. I screamed, I think. Certainly I fell. Cautious hands caught me and drew me upright again.

‘Tears?’ I knew his smell, his feel. His arms curled round in the dark, crushing me against his chest. I struggled free.

‘I can’t see you.’ I lifted my hands to my face and touched my fingertips to my eyes. I felt my own pulse there, raging through my head to my eyeballs, but saw nothing.

‘Wait.’ Tears pressed down on my shoulders, as if I might otherwise leap off the bed, and I felt the chill of his leaving and then again that lancing light, which hurt more than the noise.

‘Sorry.’ A goatskin flapped and the light became less. ‘You’re in a tent; we kept it dark because light seemed to pain you.’

‘It does… What happened?’

‘You got a sword cut on the back of your left calf but that’s healing. More important, you were hit on the back of the head. The second man you killed — Jacob ben Giora — he had a sling. Your helmet saved you, but even so I don’t know how you stayed standing long enough to kill him. The physicians say it only caught you a glancing blow, but truly, we thought you were… gone from us.’

His voice caught on that last, and he bit his lip, hard. I saw him do it, and so, slowly, saw the rest of him, blurred about the edges, older, harder than the guileless boy who had come against his will to join the XIIth, but still the beloved of the gods.

Memories flapped at me like fire-sick moths: of a day’s fighting against cataphracts; of a run through the Beth Horon pass; of men burning, their armour melting like candle wax; of a strange small battle on a hillside and then, hazily, its reason. ‘How long have I been like this?’

‘Six days.’

Six? And I remembered none of them. ‘Have we taken Jerusalem?’

‘Not yet.’ Tears smiled down at me, full of pity andconcern. ‘In his wisdom, General Gallus decided to wait for three days after we got back from the pass. Agrippa, king of the Hebrews, wanted to send a peace envoy into the city. He swore he could bring the rebels back to peace without further bloodshed.’

I snorted. It hurt my head. ‘What happened?’

Tears smothered a grin. ‘The first one was decapitated and his head was fired at us with one of our own catapults. His ears and his genitals had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth before he died.’

I stared at him. ‘Tell me there wasn’t a second.’

‘There was. A man by the name of Borcaeus with great courage and little sense. He escaped with only a broken arm.’ Tears ran his tongue round his teeth, assessing my mood. ‘We waited another day after that and then Gallus allowed that we might attack Jerusalem. We took the outer walls two days ago, almost without a fight. We’re camped inside now; if you look out of your tent, you’ll see the ruins of the wooden markets. Gallus had us fire them, but the people had already pulled back to the old inner city, which has walls as thick as a house. We won’t get to them easily. But there are still some good things here. When you’re ready to look out, you’ll see the temple and the tower of the Antonia and Herod’s palace that Agrippa claims is his own.’

I wasn’t interested in palaces, not then. My mind was full of jumbled imaginings of siege engines and artillery. ‘The ballistas,’ I said. ‘The catapults. The ones they took…’

‘They haven’t used them against us yet. Lupus says they’re waiting until they really need them, in case it’s a long siege. Which it might well be. At the moment, we’re making no headway at all.’ He caught sight of my face. ‘If they do, Taurus says you’re out of range here, even if they draw them up to the walls.’

‘They won’t. Lupus is right. They’ll hold them till they needthem.’ I pulled myself half upright. ‘Let me look outside.’

I screwed my eyes shut as Tears brought me to the doorway and edged the goatskin aside. Sunlight bathed my face and my guts heaved so that I had to stop and clutch the side of the tent and swallow back a mouthful of vomit.

‘Demalion, are you sure you want-’

‘Absolutely.’ I kept my eyes on the ground that I might see less of the sun, and so instead I saw more of the devastation: the blackened stumps of houses and market stalls, the charred remains of bodies piled into heaps and incompletely burned; the same carnage, in fact, that we had wrought on other cities across the land, only here it was held within an unbroken city wall that circled us on all sides, while ahead was the Hebrew temple that the prisoners and collaborators had spoken of with such awe.

From this side, we couldn’t see the fabled jewelled doors that represented the worth of a kingdom, or the steps leading up to them that had caused so much comment with their height and width. All we could see, in fact, was a long, majestic wall the height of five men with a barred gate set into it near the northern end that looked solid enough to last a century of attacks and a tower at its southern end called the Antonia that was a further three storeys above the height of the wall and at this moment was housing a veritable horde of Hebrews, armed with slings and spears and arrows to be hurled down on the men below — men who were doing their best to push forward the single oak-boarded siege tower that we had brought across the pass in our first march to Gabao.

I saw the capricorn of the VIth legion and the vine leaves on yellow of King Agrippa’s auxiliaries amongst the units gathered at its foot. The siege tower itself was bigger than any I had seen before, but the Antonia still dwarfed it, and even the walls of the temple were as high as its roof.

Beside me, Tears said, ‘It took less than a day to subduethe outer city, but the hard nut is here. Our ballistas have loosed all their shot, our catapults are out of bolts and still we haven’t touched them. Taurus and his men are breaking up bits of the houses so at least we’ll have something to fire tomorrow. But you should take a look at this.’ He turned me gently by the shoulders until I was facing the other way.

‘What in the god’s name is that?’

‘That,’ Tears said cheerfully, ‘is the king of Judaea’s palace. It was built by Herod the Great who wanted it to outmatch anything in Rome. It does. There are baths in there. We have use of them.’

I should think there were baths in a place like that; public baths and private baths and small individual baths for the king and his wives. Or wife. I was never very sure with the Hebrews how many wives they took. Whatever it was, the palace was quite easily the largest, most opulent building I had seen in my life.

Four storeys high, faced in unblemished white stone, it had guards set at the foot of its marble steps and an oak palisade stretching beyond one wall, from behind which came the sounds of ‘Is that a beast garden?’

‘Well done.’ Tears was grinning widely enough to split his face in half. ‘They have Berber horses in there, and hounds from Egypt. Horgias says…’

Berber horses! I felt my jaw grow slack. My father would have given his right arm even to see one of those. And to have a foal sired by one… I tried to remember where the bay mare was; I had left her with the cavalry, so Cadus must have brought her ‘Demalion?’

‘Sorry.’ I was swaying like a tree in a storm. I caught Tears’ arm and made myself stand upright. ‘What was it that Horgias said?’

Tears was already moving me back towards the tent. ‘He said that until very recently there was a cheetah in a cage in the beast garden, but it’s gone now. He plans to find who’s taken it. Look… you need to lie down.’

‘No, I-’

‘Yes.’

He took me back to the cot, laid me down and pulled the sheepskin over me for warmth.

‘I’m glad you’re alive. We’ll get you well now you’re awake. And when you can stand for the count of a thousand without falling over, Lupus has a gift for you that’ll make it all worth while.’

‘A spear?’

It lay across Lupus’ hands, living silver in the sunlight, its shaft of dark walnut smooth as the skin of a newborn foal and pearled with grain marks. About the neck was tied a scarf of scarlet silk that rippled in the wind.

I tore my eyes from it to look at Lupus. ‘I don’t understand.’

He didn’t sigh. He didn’t smile, not even his ghost-smile with the half-raised eyebrow, but then there were twenty-three thousand men standing behind us, arrayed in front of the king’s palace in Jerusalem, and we had little time before Gallus wanted all of us at the walls for a fifth day of assault.

‘It’s a spear.’ Lupus drew out each word, slowly. ‘Strictly speaking, the Ancient Unadorned Spear granted for extreme valour in the face of the enemy, that valour having been displayed in a battle or skirmish that the recipient was not ordered to undertake. I have adorned it a little.’ He tilted it so the red scarf flickered. ‘I believe the gods of maniple and century will not be overly offended.’

‘Not ordered?’ I wasn’t thinking clearly; that was obvious to both of us.

‘I didn’t order you back through the Beth Horon pass. Youwent of your own volition and then, I am told, single-handedly attacked the ben Giora cousins. You have won honour for yourself, your century, your cohort and your legion.’

There was a gap, when I was supposed to speak, and could think of nothing to say. My gaze drifted to the Hebrew temple, which remained intact, unstormed, impervious to everything we had thrown at it.

For two days I had lain still, listening to Taurus and his engineers telling the centurions how to do their jobs, for the command post was less than ten paces away from my sick tent.

The conversations had become sharper, shorter and less amicable as the days went on, and still there were Hebrews on the temple’s heights and nothing we could do to them. Our ballistas were hurling Taurus’ reclaimed pieces of masonry, but the wall had not so much as shown a crack.

With the ram we had brought with us, the one that had burned at the end of the Beth Horon pass, we could have ‘Centurion?’ Lupus sighed and scowled together, both of which were surprisingly unfrightening. ‘Just take the spear. I will assume your extreme slowness is as a result of your injuries and excuse you from the assault on the walls today.’

That got my attention as nothing else had. My head still ached, I vomited at unpredictable intervals and the cut on my calf, which was an inch deep along its length, had opened at its lower end and was oozing a clear, straw-coloured fluid, but now that I could stand unaided I had no intention at all of leaving the sixth cohort to assault the wall alone.

I held out my hands to receive the spear.

The whole XIIth legion cheered, and all the auxiliaries. Three days before, when first I woke, the thunderous noise they made would have driven me to my knees, weeping. But time is a great healer and the sight of a spear such as this, the chance to hold it, were worth even more.

I ran my hand down the haft, feeling the beauty, and tilted the head to catch the shimmer sheen of true silver. By accident, I caught sight of my own reflection there, a wedge of dark-hollowed eye and nose and the corner of my mouth with lines of pain and tension all round it.

‘Thank you.’ I glanced sideways at Lupus.

He smiled a rare, real smile. ‘You earned it. Now go back to your tent and drink some water, and if you can hold it down you can lead your cohort into the assault.’

I drank water. I kept it down for first time since waking. Horgias, who held the water jug before and after, said, ‘Amazing what a bit of silver can do for a man’s health.’

‘A bit?’ I hefted the spear. ‘This is solid silver. Melted down, it’s worth a small farm in…’ I drifted to silence. ‘Not anywhere you’d want to live.’

I had been going to say Hyrcania, but I was talking to Horgias, and anywhere in the Parthian empire was anathema to him.

So we left the spear in the wagon and I dressed and still was not sick and together we walked to the head of the century. Tears had been ready to lead them. Macer was there, holding his horn. I saw them both shrug and get ready to swap Tears’ shield for the horn.

‘No, stay as you are,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t hurt to have someone else learning the signals. Tears can stay as Macer’s shield-man. Taurus, stay with Horgias.’

‘And you?’ someone asked.

‘Don’t worry about me.’ I grinned, careless of the listening gods. ‘I’m indestructible. I’ll outlive you all.’

I remember very little of the assault on the walls of Jerusalem that day. The men of the VIth who had been at the left flank in the battle at Gabao were still taking the brunt of it; theyhad a dozen centurions all wanting to earn a crown that would trump my silver spear.

The first attack was competent enough; we had Taurus’ siege tower and any number of ladders, and engineers on hand to make sure the latter were the right height so that they were tall enough to reach the top of the walls, but not so high that they overlapped and so were easy to push down.

When the ladders made no impact and nobody had yet won anything but a blade or a slingstone shot at his face, then, exactly as I had heard done on the last two days, we rolled forward our three ballistas and hurled bits of masonry from the broken parts of the city at the walls, and when that made no discernible impact we hurled them over the walls at the defenders.

At last, when nothing else was working, we turned our attention on the gate to the northern end of the temple wall, which was at least made of wood, even if that wood was half an oak thick, studded with iron and solidly barred from the inside.

One look told us that it needed a proper ram to open it, which was one reason, I have no doubt, why the Hebrews had destroyed the one we’d brought with us.

In default of that, an enterprising centurion in the VIth had found some roof beams and lashed them together to make something almost as thick as a tree. Three times I saw him and his men try to get it near enough the door to ram it; three times they were forced back by the sheer number of stones, spears, arrows and — after we used the ballistas — great pieces of masonry that were rained on their heads.

We abandoned the assault at dusk and spent a frustrated night barely sleeping, with whole centuries of men set on watch in case the Hebrews tried to sally out of the gate and destroy our one remaining siege tower.

Lupus was outside my tent when I woke in the morning, before I had time even to walk to the latrines. He was carrying a length of dark brown, rough-woven wool, and what looked like a spear jutting beneath, and joined me as I threaded my way through the tents, talking as we went.

The morning was warm and cloyingly damp with a crimson tint to the clouds on the eastern horizon. I looked at them and made the sign against evil, for, more than anything, we wanted this to be over before the winter rains came.

Seeing me, Lupus nodded, tight-lipped. ‘Taurus and his engineers have been building us a new ram, a proper one on slings with a good thick roof over it, not the twig the Sixth were prodding away with yesterday. Gallus has given permission for a full-out assault on the gate at the northern end of the wall. He’ll deploy archers on either side to give us a chance at least to bring the ram within reach of it.’

It was what I would have done, only I would have done it five days previously. I pushed past a tent-load of auxiliaries to reach the latrine ditch and stood on its edge, pissing into the lime-dusted depths. Beside me, Lupus did the same.

‘Who takes the ram?’ I asked.

Lupus stretched a tight grin. ‘The Twelfth. The Sixth had their chance the past four days and failed: it’s our turn now. The first cohort will take the left side. Your men of the sixth will take the right, both sides in testudo. Horgias will lead them. Tears will take the standard and Macer the horn.’

I stared at him. My head ached as if someone had tied iron round it and was tightening the screw. ‘I’m well enough, I swear to you. I can-’

‘I’m sure you can. If you’re finished, come with me.’

I wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to squat at the latrine’s edge with Lupus standing over me frowning. I settled my tunic and followed him to the place behind the tents where the mules were tethered.

He turned abruptly to me. ‘Cadus says you can shoot a bow.’ And when I stared at him, ‘Apparently a spy called Pantera told him so when you were in Hyrcania.’

I frowned. Pantera hadn’t seen me shoot once. But Lupus wasn’t interested in my past; he was too busy enjoying my reaction to his own sleight of hand as he dropped the scruffy cloth he had been holding and revealed that what he held under it was not a spear, but a Parthian cavalry bow.

It was made of honey-coloured ashwood, deeply curved and sprung back at the ends, with a full, rounded belly wrapped in ramskin for a hand-hold and luck-marks of gods and heroes poker-burned all along the inner length of the pale, perfect wood. The string was horse sinew, rubbed with beeswax that sweetened the air between us.

It was alive with power and the promise of death; a weapon to die for, or at least to kill for.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

Lupus’ grin had a satisfied air. ‘I won it in a game of dice from a centurion of the first cohort. He found it on the battlefield after Cadus had decimated the cataphracts. You were occupied at the other end of the pass at the time or I’m sure you’d have had the chance to win it in fair play. Here.’ He passed it to me. ‘Try it.’

Nobody had asked if I was an archer when I first joined the XIIth and I had been too sullen to volunteer the information. Later, when I might have offered, we had our own companies of Pannonian archers who were jealous of their lines in battle. In any case, it had been over ten years since I last held any bow, still less one as good as this, and I had no idea if I could hit a horse at ten paces.

I was going to say so, but my body knew better than my mind. Just looking at it made my arms itch as if I had shot it yesterday and must do so again to stay sane. I braced my hand against the ramskin on the belly and felt the paddingunder it, which had moulded to a hand larger than mine, begin to ease to my shape. I flexed the string and let so much honey into the air that I heard bees dance in my head. I eased it back to stillness.

Perfect. As good as Uncle Dorios’ bow had ever been.

‘Cadus said you learned the skill in your youth?’ Lupus ventured.

‘Did he?’ I was fumbling in my belt pouch for a spare thong to wrap round my wrist as a makeshift guard, not paying attention to Lupus, or what Cadus might have said, or to anything that wasn’t the bow.

Wordless, Lupus handed me an arrow. It was goose-fletched with a small, unbarbed point, not enough to stop a boar or a bear — or a son who had usurped his father’s throne — but enough to test out the bow’s strength and my skill.

I licked my finger and held it up and found there was almost no wind, just a gentle, tugging breeze blowing east to west that could easily be managed. I looked about for a target.

‘The goat hide, perhaps?’ Lupus waved a vague hand at a skin draped over a sack of straw about thirty paces away; the kind of thing men set up to shoot at of an evening, when the dice games have grown cold. I didn’t ask if he had put it there; his expression was so bland as to be an admission.

Hissing wearily through my teeth, I nocked the arrow, drew and loosed all in one movement and was barely aware of the sting on my arm as the string snapped back; I was too busy watching the arrow’s flight, how it bucked a little because I had jerked the loose, and so flew wider than it should have done.

I hit the goatskin a hand’s breadth high and a foot to the right of the centre. I lowered the bow, slowly. ‘Not good enough to kill a man.’

‘Good enough to keep him from killing us, though,’ Lupus said. ‘The bow’s yours if you will use it. We have fifty arrowsper man. Use them wisely, but don’t be miserly. If we don’t get through on this assault…’ He looked at the horizon, at the gathering rain, and didn’t have to finish that thought.

‘Who will I lead?’ I asked.

‘Syrians. We have two complete companies of archers, more or less. They’re mostly from King Antiochus’ personal troop. They know nothing of how we make war, and even if they did, they lost their commander to a thrown spear at the mouth of the Beth Horon pass. That’s why I want you to lead them today. Stay alive, and while you’re at it, do what you can to make sure we can ram that gate. It matters.’

‘Testudo… shields up! Raise the ram!’

Horgias’ voice rebounded off the walls. Ahead, the temple wall reared high as a cliff above us, and on its height men stood with spears and bows, slingshots and piles of rubble, just as they had before.

Until now, they had not faced archers in a solid block, but men scattered through the legions, King Antiochus of Syria not having wished to put his archers in the line of fire until specifically requested. Now that he had been made to understand the urgency, I had one hundred bowmen with fifty arrows apiece placed under my orders. At my request, I had a part-century of the VIth in attendance as shield-men, chafing under a strange command, and sour because their assault had failed and ours might succeed.

I stood alone in the centre of the rank, holding the bow Lupus had given me. I had no shield, nor any intention of having one; we were out of range of all but the longest bowshot and I needed to show that the men of Rome were not afraid. That was a lie, of course; my mouth was too dry to swallow and my guts were clenching and unclenching with horrible regularity, but I was learning how not to show it.

The archers stood in two ranks, fifty to my right, fifty to myleft. They were Greek-speaking Syrians, dark-haired, dark-bearded men who looked, dressed, ate and thought exactly like the Hebrews — and who would kill any man who said as much in their hearing, for they loathed their neighbours with a passion unmatched anywhere in the empire.

As bowmen, they were not the quality of Vologases’ horse-archers, or even the Pannonians we had fought with at the Lizard Pass, though they were easily as fond of finery. They wore ivory guards on their left forearms to counter the slap of the string and tabs of leather on the fingers of their right hands to ensure a smooth loose. I had been loaned the same, and took it as an honour.

‘Ram, ready!’ Horgias’ voice came back in time with his horn signals. Macer was almost as good as Tears at that.

I raised my bow. The men needed no command: they had orders to shoot as I did, unless told otherwise.

I drew. The air about me hissed to the sigh of one hundred bowstrings. I smelled honey again, and heard bees enough almost to drown out Horgias’ cry.

But not quite.

‘ Forward! ’

I loosed. My men did likewise. The air sang. One hundred and one arrows soared up to the top of the temple wall. I heard screams. Some of them were Roman. Most were not. I was already drawing on the next arrow, raising…

Boom!

Taurus’ new ram hit the temple door. I loosed again and this time the song of the arrows was lost in the deep belling note of the ram on the door and the deeper shuddering hum of the sling-ropes after it. Caught in that tone, with my whole body reverberating to its song, I loosed again, and again and again until ‘Stop!’

I held up my hand. My men held their bows still. Aheadof us, not a face looked over the temple wall. No man stood on the heights of the Antonia. I had no idea how many we had hit, but nobody could have survived that barrage for long.

‘Is that it?’ asked a Syrian from my left. Artacles, his name was, I think.

‘I doubt it.’ I squinted up at the top of the wall, shielding my eyes from the sun. ‘Unless we’ve killed the man who sent the Hebrews to take our siege engines, then he’s still inside there, and he’s not stupid.’

‘What will he do?’

‘What would you do?’

There was a pause, and the ram struck again. As the thunderous noise died away, Artacles said, slowly, ‘I would find shields to keep my men safe.’

‘Exactly. Or broad oak boards, which are of greater length and take fewer men to hold. I think, if you look up at the southern corner, you’ll see they are bringing some up the steps there now. If we shoot at once, we can delay them a while longer…’

I nocked, raised, loosed and hit the lead man who was carrying one end of a wide, flat board across the top of the wall. He fell outwards down the wall to lie still at its foot, so that I could be sure of the kill. In the flurry of arrows that followed, three others, I thought, went the same way, but they fell inwards, and so were uncertain. And by the time we nocked again, the boards were in place, raising the height of the wall by four feet.

‘Hold.’ I raised my hand. ‘Let me test this.’

I took three paces forward and tried one shot at a far steeper angle than we had before. It soared over the barrier, but, for the first time, an answering arrow came back. It struck the ground near my feet and skittered back towards me so that I had to take a step sideways to let it past.

‘They’ll get our range soon,’ Artacles said. ‘Best get yourself a shield.’

‘Later.’ My head still ached dully, but I was feeling expansive and calm. The buzz of bees was constant in my ears now and a knot had taken hold of my stomach that was beyond the usual stir of battle. I had an idea and wished I had not.

A ray of weak sun lanced through the clouds and, as if invited, I stepped forward into it and turned round to face the bowmen behind me.

‘The Hebrews will try to use the boards as cover to shoot back at us. If we step forward and aim high and long, we can keep them back from the wall.’

As if to test my theory, a man’s face appeared at the barrier. A sling whirled in a blur by his head. I drew and loosed without thinking, as Uncle Dorios had taught me. I missed, but so did the enemy slingshot. A small lead pellet big enough to break open my skull cracked on to the ground between me and the wall, kicked up a small plume of dust. The next did much the same, and the next. With my fourth arrow, I struck the slinger in the throat and he toppled backwards, out of sight. If he screamed, I didn’t hear it: we couldn’t hear anything over the thunder of the ram on the door, but I was still expecting ‘Look out!’

It was Artacles who called, I think, but it was Tears’ voice I heard, and in any case I had been waiting for this. I threw myself sideways, rolling on to my shoulder to keep my bow from harm. A ballista stone the size of my head hurtled past where I had been and gouged a hole in the solid earth big enough to hide a sheep in.

‘Loose!’ I screamed, over the noise of the archers’ shock. ‘Shoot as fast as you can along the line that stone came from before they-’

‘ Look out! ’

Two pairs of hands wrenched me out of the path of the second stone. By the third, we were running backwards, by the fourth we were just running, all tactics gone, all ideas abandoned, all chance of success fading with each running step.

And then the Hebrews brought up the catapults. They had taken thirty, plus fifteen hundred bolts that were the length of a tall man’s leg and nearly as thick, tipped with iron shaped to penetrate armour. Shot by a man who knew how to sight and loose, nothing could stand against them.

These, I thought, were aimed by an expert. The first volley were rangefinders and scattered on to empty ground. After that, every one was sent to kill.

I saw one pierce a bowman through his mailed chest, come out the other side and kill the man behind him, pinning his body to the hard earth. After that, they came in a volley so fast and so hard that all we could do was run as far as we could, and each of us try to find somewhere to hide. I ended up in the armoury tent, set far back against the beast garden, as far back, in fact, as one could go without leaving the city.

And among all the many deaths, there were perhaps only half a dozen of us who thought to look to the ram — and so discovered that the catapults had been a diversion, much as the attack on us at Gabao had been a diversion, and the real attack was on the ram as it tried to break through the gate.

The stones that had so nearly killed me had been the most distant from the wall. The rest had been sent at progressively steeper angles until they were dropping from the heights of the sky, just on our side of the wall.

They fell in volleys of three at a time and crashed on to the ram and the men about it, and these were not the small stones the size of a man’s head but massive rocks big as bulls’ heads and bigger; one in six was so wide a grown man could not wrap his arms round half the width.

The first volley crippled the ram. The rest — I counted thirty shots in all, but there must have been more — smashed into the men around it, crushing their shields to tinder and their bodies to bloody pulp.

‘Sound the retreat!’ It was Lupus who called it, although it should have been Gallus. ‘Call them back! Retreat in good order! Now!’

Nobody was listening to him. A broken horn lay to my left, waiting for one of the smiths to have time to weld the handle back on. I hauled it out of the clutter of other broken kit, hitched it over my shoulder and blew the retreat as loudly as I knew how.

It wasn’t pitch perfect by any means, but it was a rhythm every man knew second only to the order to advance. I wasn’t sure anyone would hear me over the screams of dying men, and was thinking to run in and haul them out bodily when Horgias and Tears emerged — alive! Both alive! — bellowing orders at the survivors that sent them running like hares for the safety of the tent lines.

‘That’s it,’ Lupus said, as the senior centurions gathered at the flags; only twelve of us were left. It felt like a repeat of Rhandaea, only that we had not yet surrendered.

Lupus, though, thought we were close to abandoning the fight, which was the next worst thing. ‘We’re finished,’ he said. ‘Gallus had little enough heart for this at the start, but he’s lost it all now, and more. He’ll have us marching out in the morning.’

Everyone but me seemed to have been expecting this; but then everyone else had seen Gallus dither over the assault in the first place. I stared at Lupus. ‘I thought you were worried about the weather closing in.’

‘That too.’ He turned away. I turned him back.

‘Then we have to break through the gate today,’ I said.

Eleven of my fellow officers looked at me and laughed. Allexcept Lupus, who was the only one who counted.

To him, I said, ‘Fire. All we need is fire. They’ve just turned the ram to matchwood. If we can pile it against the gate and set fire to it, we can still weaken it enough to get through. We know how well a ram burns now; trust me, they make a good fire. Nothing will stand against it if we can make it hot enough.’

Lupus blinked once, slowly, then nodded. ‘Do it.’

I asked for volunteers, and then had to turn half of them away. My century came, what was left of it; we had lost thirty-two men to the missiles at the gate, of whom at least half were dead. So that I might not seem to be favouring my own, I made up the numbers with men from the first cohort and brought along the first century of the VIth as well.

I set signallers on the rise by the palace with particular instructions to watch for missiles and let us know as soon as they saw them. We arranged different calls for stones and catapult bolts and a brief, easy system to let us know roughly where they were aimed. I set the archers to keep men from the temple heights while we worked, so that they might not attempt to put the blaze out too early, and while I did that Taurus led his engineers in gathering every bit of flammable material that could be found, plus the tallow, lamp oil and tinder to start a fire and keep it going.

The sun was a glowing orb behind Herod’s palace by the time we were ready. Taurus brought me a small green-enamelled ember pot with ties to fix it to my belt.

‘There are twenty of these,’ he said. ‘We found them in the king’s palace. As long as even one of us lives, we’ll get the fire going.’

I clapped Taurus on the shoulder. ‘Stay safe,’ I said simply. ‘And keep Horgias safe for me.’

I’m not one for speeches, but something was needed for themen and I could not address them all singly. To that end, I climbed halfway up the steps to the palace and turned to look down on them. They gathered in good order, effortlessly, even now when they were burdened with bags of wool and straw and the cloaks of dead men.

I raised my hand to speak to them, as Corbulo had done once, and if that was hubris I apologize, but it did not feel like it then: I was shaking with the battle-fear that I always felt, but pride, too, that we had come this far, that we had grown to be a fighting unit against such bitter odds, that these men — each of them — believed in me enough to follow me back to the carnage at the gate.

‘We have suffered enough at the hands of this rabble. Now is our chance to give them back the fire they gave us. And to rescue our wounded. Each man has his task. You know what to do. Do it well, and we will win this city before sundown.’

They cheered a little, but it was not a time for cheering. I jumped down from the steps, found the head of my small force, raised my right hand, and stabbed it forward.

‘ Go! ’

I carried a proper shield this time. Running in its shade, I saw only the churned ground beneath my feet. I jumped ballista stones that lay like hail in the dirt, and soon after jumped dead and living men, and splintered lengths of wood.

The air around the ram stank of blood and entrails and fractured timber. I pushed through until I reached the iron-capped head, where the great tree that Taurus had found and felled lay cracked on the ground in a mess of broken beams. Four men sheltered me with their shields as I dragged and threw and kicked fragments of wood, some of them longer than a man’s arm, into place around the ram.

‘Fleece,’ I called, and men passed me what they had carried bundled up under their shields, and soon, from the back, came jars of lamp oil taken from the palace, and then tallow, and behind me others and others were doing the same, so that soon enough we had the whole thing padded and wadded and ready to burn.

Horgias’ face grinned up near my own. ‘Have you the ember pot?’ he asked.

He was one of the twenty flame-holders — I had seen Taurus give him a red-coloured pot — but he was giving me first fire and I was not about to turn him down.

I unhooked the pot from my belt, and blew on it, and saw the charcoal glow to cherry red and blew again and it was the colour of fired apricots, and again and it was the noonday sun. Surrounded by the smells of tallow and oil, I fisted a hole in the wadding and leaned in and tipped the brilliant fragments on the bed there, and blew as on the face of a sleeping lover and saw a flame rise and dance and leap and catch.

‘Hold. Hold the cover. Don’t let them put it out yet.’

I nursed that flame as if it were my only son, and all round the ram nineteen other men did likewise. My small group leaned in over it with their shields against a volley of missiles that blasted down on us, for our archers were running short of arrows and saving their last for the time when the flames needed the greatest help. Men fell at the edges, but for every one that fell, another stepped in to take his place until the fire was no longer dancing but roaring, sucking in air, giving out heat that made my sore heart heal again.

And then, cutting over the havoc, a long, high note from the signallers on the palace rise ‘ Run! ’ I screamed it, or Horgias did, or someone else back down the ranks who knew the calls we had arranged. ‘Hot sand!’

Before the threat of sand heated almost to melting point, we scattered like sheep before a wolf, like hares before hounds, only faster, and came to a stop at the tent lines, where Lupushad the archers shooting long, endless volleys until their fingers bled and their arms were strained out of their sockets.

I snatched up the pale Parthian war bow and joined them and, together, we killed men by the dozen, by the hundred, but there were tens of thousands in the city of Jerusalem and we had only twenty arrows left apiece.

They came to an end, as they must, and after that we could only wait and watch as the flames of our creation, the beautiful, vast, roaring fire that we had built, was quenched first by sand and then, later, by water.

I watched the final embers blink to darkness. ‘We’ve weakened it,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t take another day of the ram.’ And then, remembering, ‘Did Tears get all the wounded away?’

‘Before you ever lit the fire,’ Lupus said. ‘That was well done.’

‘But not the fire.’

‘It was well done,’ he said, woodenly, and then with more feeling. ‘It was well done. We’re fighting against men with talent in there, and we are led by one with none.’

Lupus stayed with us a long time, watching the smoke die to damp ashes before he bade us good night and took himself to Cestius Gallus’ tent, where our commander waited with our new orders.