The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Twenty-Nine

We were eight hundred; all that was left of the XIIth legion, not including the cavalry. Cadus had begged to be allowed to stay, but he was the only surviving officer of the cavalry and Gallus had ordered him to lead his men safely through the pass.

And so we were left, we veterans who had lived through the humiliation of Raphana, and those who had joined us since, and we were not divided now; only by thinking hard could we remember that we had not always been as brothers.

I don’t think any man amongst us begrudged those who were leaving. In that, if nothing else, it was like the battle at Lizard Pass, when we counted ourselves lucky to be allowed to face Vologases’ cataphracts while others fled. This time, though, we intended that those who left us must get clear away, and so we threw ourselves into the deception.

Taurus organized five hundred men in groups of four to forage for firewood, noisily. The rest of us built fires, lit them, stood around them, spoke quietly, laughed, cooked and shared a meal, then passed on to the next one and did the same again, all with our standards in the centre; not so close to any fire that they might be counted, but closeenough for the Eagle to catch the light of a dozen fires and be burnished by them, so that it hung over us, suspended in the black night, casting its own light back down on our helms and our armour as we moved and talked and moved again. None of us slept.

I found Tears just before daybreak; or rather, I allowed myself to go to him, when I had not through the night. He was sitting on an upturned shield with his knees hugged to his chin. He said nothing as I came near, only shifted a little by his fire as if to make space in a crowd and handed me a new-baked oatcake, hot and steaming, scorched a little at the edges, as I liked it, so that I could taste fire and corn and the melting sweetness at its heart, where the dough was still soft.

I had the Parthian war bow with me, slung over my shoulder. He had still not seen me shoot it, not properly; he had always been too busy.

‘Have you any arrows for that?’ he asked.

‘None.’ I unhooked it and held it balanced on my open palms. ‘I could burn it. The wood’s strong and true. It would hold a flame a long time.’

‘No, you couldn’t.’ His smile flashed and was gone. ‘If you were going to do that, you’d have done it half a night ago, when the cold began to bite. Let someone find it. A good bow deserves to be used.’

‘Even against us?’

‘It won’t be against us. We’ll be dead. We won’t care, and I don’t think the bow will care either. You’ve killed enough with it to balance your side of the scales. It can help another man to do the same.’

‘Maybe.’ Firelight rippled the white wood in colours of amber, copper and bronze. I watched it a while, seeing the glyphs on the inner face march up the length of the body to the curved horn tips and back again. I still had no idea what they said.

Presently, I put it away and we sat in silence, watching the flames and each other until Horgias and Taurus came to stir the embers of a fire nearby and we joined them, to lay on more wood. When, shortly after, Macer joined us, and then Lupus, we felt complete.

Taurus, too, had made oatcakes, which we shared, along with those from Tears’ fire, as if it were a god’s day, to celebrate.

I had two in my hands, and was steaming myself in their scent, when Macer lifted from his tunic a small fired pot the size of a hen’s egg, with honey bees marked in scored lines round the sides.

‘I have this,’ he said, and we all looked at him, for the shyness with which he had said it; Macer had never been a shy man.

‘Honey?’ Tears laughed. ‘Have you carried that all the way from Antioch, just for this?’

‘Further than that.’ Macer was grinning like a fool. ‘I brought it from Moesia when I was ordered to leave the Seventh. I thought that if I ever had occasion to share it, I would know I was a man of the Twelfth at last.’

He stopped smiling. ‘In Antioch, I thought I would die of old age and never have reason to open this. Many times these last days, I have feared I might die with it still in my tunic when we should have had it already.’

He held the jar on the flat of his palm, near the fire. It was sealed with dark red wax that stood in a blob over the top surface and ran down in uneven runnels about the bees. With all eyes on him, he drew his knife and cracked it open, and the smell of honey drenched us, like the smell of waxed bowstrings, multiplied a thousandfold.

As a priest at a sacrifice, Macer used his knife to lift a nugget of comb from the pot. He offered it to Lupus, then a second to me, then Horgias, Tears and Taurus. Last, he helped himself and spread it on his oatcake.

‘There was just enough,’ he said. ‘Some god guided us to this; just us.’ He raised his head. I had never seen his eyes so clear, so set in their purpose. Macer the Mournful had gone in the night and a new man inhabited his skin. ‘I would help to hold the Eagle,’ he said. ‘If you will permit me?’

‘Every man will hold the Eagle,’ Lupus said, ‘All eight hundred of us. It’s the only order: that we die before it is taken. But if you wish to be shield-man to Horgias’ shield-man, you are free to do so.’ He stood, a little stiff from the cold. ‘We’d best make ready. I can see you all by more than firelight. And if I can see you, the Hebrews will soon see how few of us there are here. It won’t take long. By noon, it should all be over.’

I stood at the heart of the increasing crowd who gathered about the standards and there was a sense of quiet competence as we fastened buckles and checked the grips on our blades. There was none of the fire, the zeal, the heroism-in-waiting that had attended us at the Lizard Pass when we faced the King of Kings’ army; just a job to be done and then peace at the end of it.

Day was coming on us more strongly with every heartbeat. The sky was heavy with the scent of rain, and a low, thick cloud held the valley walls, hovering just above our heads. We knew that it had been sent by the gods to aid our subterfuge; for a long time after true dawn we were still no more than helmets flashing in the mist, swords and shields scraping into position and units of men muttering amongst themselves, giving thanks to Jupiter, to Mithras, to Helios.

Lupus walked quietly among the men. ‘Hold the Eagle as long as you can. There is no other order.’ I heard his voice echoing back through the mist, over and over, impossible to tell its direction.

‘What will you do?’ He spoke in my ear. I jumped, andsnatched away my sword, which had stabbed upward without my asking.

‘Fight,’ I said. ‘What else?’

‘Do you have your bow still?’

‘Yes. But I have no arrows.’ The bow lay near the fire where Tears had made his oatcakes. I reached down to pick it up and held it out to Lupus. ‘Do you want it?’

‘Regrettably, now is not the time for me to learn how to use a bow with true skill. But you have the skill. And I have a gift for you.’ From behind his back, Lupus brought a fistful of arrows. Even at a fast glance, I counted eight. In the grey light, their shafts were dark, almost black, and the feathers sullied, but still intact.

He read the question in my eyes and gave a brief, almost shy, shrug. ‘They’re from the bodies of the men you hit the other day. You and the others. I went back in the night and took them out. I thought you might have use for them.’

His brow rose as it always had, but there was an honesty in his eyes that stabbed me with sorrow for the first time since we had made our decision to stay.

‘I won’t waste them,’ I said, and heard the thickness in my own voice.

‘Good.’ He looked about us, frowning. ‘The mist is lifting.’ He took a sharp breath. ‘This is it.’

We were already in position; buckles fast, swords out, shields to hand. As one man, in stillness, we watched the mist thin and rise until, at last, we could see this place where we had chosen to die.

Wide and flat and shallow, we had come without knowing it to a bowl in the very foot of the pass. The path to freedom meandered up the mountainside before and rose steep and narrow behind, but here was the perfect battleground, a plate of turfed earth with little by way of boulders or rocky debris to hamper us.

The heights were hemmed about by winter trees, blowing ragged in the coming breeze, shading the grey hillside with copper. The scent was of dying fires, and oiled leather, and iron; the scent of any army in the morning; the scent of awaited death; a scent so peaceful, I could have lain down with that as my shroud, and slept.

And that was when the sun scraped through a finger’s width of mist and Helios cast a single ray, spear-straight, at our Eagle, washing it with living light, the breath of the gods.

Horgias took hold of the haft and raised it up so that it flew above us, our guardian and our care, ours to protect until death.

We cheered, how could we not? And so revealed how very few we were.

There was a moment’s raggedness, as the wind caught the last hurrahs and tore them to shreds. Then I caught a glint of sun on iron somewhere on the hill high to my left, and another along the valley, and another on the shoulder of the mountain to my right, and another, if I craned my head to look behind, along the pathway that led out of the valley, and another and another, as our enemies rose from the places in which they had been hidden, and so revealed how very many they were.

They began to group together, moving easily through the scrub and debris of the pass as if they knew each bush and rock. The first we saw were not the Roman-clad men we had faced before, but lean warriors in rough tunics belted in plain leather, bareheaded and barefoot, carrying long-spears, small shields and side swords. Each one carried a sling, and a pouch of lead shot over his shoulder.

They took stances above us on left and right, before and behind, and one among them put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, as a boy does to his goats.

What came then down the wide, meandering path that led from the east was not goats but men on horseback and on foot, men in mail and helmets, bearing shields and spears, men mounted on…

One man mounted on a Berber mare, milk white in her coat, with her mane down to her knees flowing black as a Parthian heart and she as beautiful as any living thing might be, with a long, loose-limbed walk that made my heart turn over and my eyes sting, so that I had to dash away tears with the back of my hand and even then I could not tear my eyes from her to see whom she bore.

‘There’s gold on his helmet,’ someone said nearby; Horgias, I think. ‘That’s the king.’

‘Demalion, is there any chance…?’ Lupus was still close by. His voice snapped me back into myself. The bow lay at my feet, but even as I eyed the distance, I knew there was no point in picking it up. ‘Too far,’ I said. ‘I’d only waste an arrow. But if he comes closer, I’ll take him.’

‘Take the ones near him, too,’ Tears said. ‘The giant with the axes near to his right is Parthian and on his left is a centurion, a traitor to Rome.’

‘But neither of those is giving the orders,’ Lupus said. ‘See to the right hand of the king, in the tunic and the red shoulder cloak, bearing only a shield and a sword? That’s the man they’re listening to. And he’s a Roman or I’m a Gaul.’

‘Are you not?’ Horgias eyed him in mock horror. ‘All those years and I thought you were one of us.’

‘So it’s Gaulish you are, is it?’ Taurus asked cheerfully. ‘Is that why you never told us?’

‘Horgias is no more Gaulish than I am,’ Tears said. ‘My bet is that his mother had a late night meeting with a Briton.’

‘Or a Dacian.’

‘Or a-’

Macer died, with a lead slingshot embedded in the bridgeof his nose. He stayed upright a moment, caught in the tight press of men, then I stepped back, cradling him, and eased him to the ground.

When I stood up to the line again, I had the bow in my hand and an arrow nocked, ready to shoot. No one was laughing now. The ease and peace of the morning was gone with the mist, in its place an unyielding hardness and an urge to kill and keep on killing.

‘If I live,’ I said grimly, ‘I will kill the king and the men around him. Just let them come within range so I don’t waste the arrows.’

‘We shall keep you alive, then,’ Lupus said. ‘You can be the last one to hold the Eagle.’

Around me, Tears, Horgias and Taurus spoke their assent in their different ways. It was a pact sealed with Macer’s blood, heard by the gods who knew our standard and all who had died beneath it already.

Taking the Eagle with us, we began to march towards the oncoming army.

They offered us peace.

A small man with a huge nose stepped forward from their ranks, bearing a shield decorated with the eagle’s wings and thunderbolts of the XIVth Martia Victrix, which was renowned for its role in suppressing the revolt in Britain.

He raised a gladius high above his head. I thought both it and the shield stolen, until he spoke in the nasal tones of northern Italy and labelled himself undeniably Roman; three of them, then, at least: three traitors to Rome. I spat on the ground.

‘Men of the Twelfth!’ That voice carried over us all, hoarse as a crow’s. ‘You have served your masters valiantly, holding this place while they scurried for safety. Your fight is no longer theirs. There is no reason for you to die here ina forgotten valley. Join with us who fight for Menachem, the rightful king of Jerusalem. He honours us, as the Emperor Nero honours us, and as he will honour you!’

He was met by silence. I was not in the front rank, but I felt no move from them to answer him. Lupus was our leader. I glanced at him and down at my Parthian bow.

‘In range?’ Lupus asked, barely moving his lips.

‘Easily.’

The men around me stepped away a little. Seeing the movement, the Roman smiled and spread his hands in welcome, presenting all his mailed chest as a target.

I could have shot him in the chest, but I remembered Macer and aimed instead for his face. He fell, soundless, just as Macer had done.

For one heartbeat longer, there was stillness. Then the killing — and the dying — began.

I didn’t use the bow to begin with; with Macer gone, I was Tears’ shield-man. He had no horn; I had no particular command. We were free to fight as brothers, shoulder to shoulder as we had done at Tigranocerta, but not truly since. It suited us.

We held our shields aloft when they showered us with arrows and slingshot, and when these stopped, having killed fewer than twenty of us, we brought our shields down and met the charge of their armoured men, Romans and Hebrews mixed, with a giant Parthian axeman somewhere in their midst and a Roman who commanded Hebrews as if they were legionaries.

I saw none of those. Nor, for a long time, did I see the king on the milk-white Berber mare. By default, we had made a block with each man facing outwards and I was facing west, away from Jerusalem, the rising sun and the king.

His men surrounded us and the fighting was much as it had been at Gabao — except that now we too had nothing to lose, and threw ourselves into the battle with the same careless frenzy as did the Hebrews.

I had not thought we had been restrained by fear of death before, but felt it gone now, and in its place a dizzying joy that gave speed to my sword arm, and weight to my shield, that bathed me in the light of the Eagle, so that I floated above the earth and moved from kill to kill to kill, at times cutting in and down, at times kneeling to come up under a carelessly high shield, and always with Tears at my right hand and Lupus at my left and Horgias with the standard just over my left shoulder and Taurus keeping him safe as a bull with its calf.

A spear stabbed for my face. I batted it down and stamped on it and felt it break and let my foot slide up the haft and my weight with it and put my whole body behind my shield and tasted blood as it crushed the nose of the man who had just tried to kill me.

I spat and stabbed and he was gone and there was another in his place, who lifted his sword too high and was killed by Lupus even as I slashed at the eyes of the man who was trying to kill Tears, and it was this we had trained for over and over, this was the machine we had become, where each man saved his fellows not for love or honour or mercy, but because it was what our bodies knew how to do. Freed at last from the burden of hope, they needed no other calling.

The sun rose over us as our square grew smaller. However well trained, men made mistakes, and when each one died, we stepped back and closed the gap, leaving a corpse on the damp turf. There were no wounded.

Lupus fell first of us who grouped closest to the Eagle. They sent a wedge of six against him, hoping to break us by his loss. He took the leader squarely on his shield, bracing against him, slashing down and up from shins to face and throat. I took the next and Tears the one after and we eachkilled our man swiftly enough, but someone faltered on Lupus’ left and three of them came at him, carving into the space left by one careless man so that there was room for a blade to seek the back of his head.

He saw them coming and turned away, not out of fear, but that I might see his face, and he mine, and that I might hear him when he said, ‘Into the centre. Your bow. Now!’

He was gone, hard as a felled tree, and the enemy were amongst us, pushing through the breach in our lines, heading for Horgias and the Eagle, which he had carried into the centre of the formation, although in truth we were so few and so close now that we were more of a bunch than a square.

‘Rally! To the Eagle. Stand hard!’ I screamed, hoping someone might hear, and felt Tears at my side, hacking, hacking, no longer in good order, slicing at limbs that might have been those of our side, but mostly were not.

I found myself back to back with Horgias, with the Eagle high above.

‘The bow!’ Tears shouted in my ear. ‘Use it now while there’s still time. We’ll keep you safe.’

I was already unslinging it, feeling for the arrows in the quiver at my belt. Ten; I had thought seven remained, but there were ten. I nocked and turned and scanned the horizon for the king on the white Berber horse.

And saw it, so close; a milk-white mare that my father would have given his soul to see even in a paddock of an evening. Here, in battle, it was a mount of the gods.

I was close enough to see the width and depth of its eyes, to see the broad, flat brow and the ears pricked small, beloved of Xenophon. I saw the red flare of its inner nostril, the soft moleskin velvet of its milk-white muzzle. I saw the prick of whiskers on its face, black on white.

And I saw the face of the man who rode it, who fought from horseback with long, swinging strokes of a cavalrysword. A man whose black hair flowed like a mane from under his gilded helmet, whose eyes were alert, darting back and forth, holding the edge of the battle that we might not break to our south.

And I saw his chest, and the mail that was on it, and remembered Pantera in a forest, who had killed another king. The bow I held now was better than his had been then; the arrows were longer, and the tips designed only for this one task.

I drew, sighted and loosed.

The brief bliss of honey and the hum of droning bees ended in the whistle-crack of a direct hit.

In the battle’s fury, very few on the enemy side noticed at first that their king had been struck. He himself sat a moment, staring in weary surprise at the arrow that grew from his breast, much as the treacherous son of the King of Kings had done all those years ago in Hyrcania. But this king fell slowly, not being strapped into the saddle as the usurper had been.

A ragged cheer spilled from half a hundred throats; all of us that were left.

From the Hebrew side came a single cry of anguish, high-pitched, like a woman’s: ‘Menachem! My lord king is struck!’

And then the enemy did notice who had fallen and it was as if the force of their fighting slammed headlong into solid stone.

Never have I seen the flow of battle stemmed so completely. In one moment they were assaulting us on all sides and we were close to overwhelmed, and in the next we had room to move, to swing our sword arms, to reach out and kill men whose attention was all turned away from us, towards their stricken lord.

‘He lives!’ The voice cried in Greek, from a Roman throat, but the men that called it afterwards in Aramaic were Hebrew.

‘A line!’ I dropped the bow and raised my sword. Stepping forward, I shouted left and right, hoarse from the screams of combat. ‘Make a line on the Eagle! Advance!’

Battles can turn on a single moment and we, who had seen enough of them turn against us in the past, felt the gods lay this one open for us to turn it our way.

I felt Tears to my right, Horgias on my left; I think Taurus was still there as his shield-man. With our shields locked, we stepped forward and forward, building speed and power with each stride. I was dizzy with pride. I saw Hebrew men half turn to me and slew them without care, without pause. I sang, I think, but cannot remember what.

The enemy parted before me like corn before a storm. I looked down the long tunnel of space they made and there was a man lying at the end of it, with the stump of a broken arrow rising up from his chest.

A single man dressed in perfect white knelt and cradled his head, except when I looked again it seemed the white-clad aide was a woman: nothing was impossible now, not even that a woman should be on a battlefield.

She raised her eyes and looked at me and I saw darkness and heard the songs of all the dead and knew that he had gone, this self-styled king, and that grief for such a death made men weak.

I raised my shield and drove forward my sword and thought that if we could get to him we could kill also his successors, because the heirs always gather round the death-place of their fallen lord.

And so our line became a wedge, that fabled machine of Alexander that can cleave a battlefield in two if the lead man has only the courage of his charge. I was the tip of the arrow, the nose of the boar as it hurtles at its victim. I had all the courage in the legions.

‘ For the Twelfth! ’

I charged, screaming, drawing the wedge with me. Together, we split the enemy asunder.

Men fell over themselves to get out of our way until somewhere near the king a man stood who had been kneeling and in a voice that had commanded battlefields shouted in Greek, ‘Stop them! Mergus! Estaph! Block that wedge! ’

The voice sank into my lungs, my loins, my heart, unsettling all of them. But it did not stop my charge.

I was five paces from the king… four… two… my whole weight behind my shield, bowling fast as a horse, and then Stopped.

Stopped on the rock of the giant Parthian who had picked up a shield and punched it at mine. I ran into it as into the face of a cliff.

The full weight of my charge pounded into him and he did not so much as shudder. I felt men crowd in behind me, Tears at my right shoulder, Horgias at my left, and even the three of us, with others behind, could not push him over.

I abandoned the effort, shouted instead, ‘Shield ring on the Eagle!’ and in three beats Horgias was enfolded within our shields and we stood again, bare yards from the fallen king, while a Latin voice shouting in Hebrew and Aramaic drew order out of the enemy’s chaos.

Looking past the Parthian giant’s flank, I watched a small group of men lift the stricken king and bear him from the fray. I saw the Roman with the red shoulder cloak pause in salute, then turn and, still shouting orders, throw himself into combat.

We held our ground but our advantage was gone and they came at us savage with a grief-rage that we all knew too well, but could not raise in ourselves, for we were spent by then, fit only to stand and die.

We were two dozen, and then a dozen, and then eight andthen four, me and Tears, Horgias and Taurus, back to back with the Eagle above us and dead men crowding our feet.

I felt Taurus go down and would have turned to help Horgias, but Tears was under pressure from a small, wiry Roman with legion marks on his arms and a look of such impossible anguish on his face that I thought he might die of it, there, in front of us.

Instead, he assaulted Tears with a savagery that made the whole battle seem like the pattering of fools; he struck his shield against Tears’ sword hand, batting it down, cut with his gladius under Tears’ own shield, then feinted over the top and even as I was turning, trying to get my blade between them, stabbed in and down and through and suddenly my face was awash with Tears’ blood and the sounds of his dying and I would have dropped my blade to catch him but that Horgias screamed, ‘ Demalion! Look out!’ and I swear it was the sun’s flame on the Eagle that made me spin to my right and catch the blow that came for my head, and twist it away and stab through to pierce the eye of the one who had just tried to kill me. He died, screaming, clutching at his face. I pulled my gladius free and stepped back.

And now we were only two. Horgias and I were left alone, the last to die, and we did not have to say aloud that we must die together. I caught his eye or he caught mine and we knew it our last look, and cherished it. A last breath, a last sight of the Eagle, of all that we cared for, and in that breath’s end, together we raised our blades and hurled ourselves at ‘ Demalion? ’

The sword that struck for my chest jerked away.

A half-remembered face stared at me, blinking, and that inescapably Roman voice, the one that even now commanded the battlefield, said, in astonishment, ‘Demalion of Macedon?’ And then, ‘Mergus, leave him! Estaph, stop! Take them alive! It’s over.’

‘No!’

I punched my shield at his face and swung my sword in a killing arc around my head, and threw myself bodily at the traitor who had controlled this battle and those before it.

I reached him. I cut straight for his face. He was gone. I slewed to my left ‘Estaph! Take him!’

He was a giant of a man, that Parthian. I felt his shadow fall over me and arms come round me and too late knew what he planned. There was no shield in his grasp, no sword, only two fists like bear paws that met under my diaphragm and rammed the air out of me even as they raised me up and slammed me down; once, twice, three times, until the sword fell from my numbed fingers and my shield was gone and even my helmet rattled beyond my knees.

Horgias was similarly held, though the men who tried to capture him were smaller and he fought like a wild beast until they had to sling ropes about his shoulders to subdue him.

Other men took the Eagle. I saw the sun-kissed gold passed back from hand to hand to hand as if it were just another spoil of war until it was lost from sight in the greater mass of the Hebrew army. Soon there were shouts and a tussle as men fought over its possession.

Locked in the giant Parthian’s embrace, I was still struggling, desperate to die. The Roman commander stood in front of me holding the bow I had dropped. The quiver was still at my hip, with the white fletchings plain to see, naming me openly as the one who had killed his king.

He raised his hand. I thought he was about to strike me and braced myself for it, but he turned it into a gesture so eloquent in its futility that I knew him: Sebastos Pantera, former spy for the emperor, had turned traitor and was leading the Hebrews.

In shock, I spat at his face. Pantera barely noticed. He was staring past my shoulder to where his men squabbled over the Eagle. He shouted an order in urgent, fluent Aramaic, and others after it, curt, sharp, hard as any legate on the field.

Twisting round, I saw some measure of order drawn from the chaos, enough for a phalanx of men to gather round the body of the dead king and his milk-white Berber mare. I saw the woman in white raise her arm from the thick of it, a signal of success.

Pantera spun back to me. His tunic was awash with other men’s blood; his king’s foremost, I think. His skin was as dark as any Syrian’s, but his hair, once oak-brown, had been burnished by the sun to a dark straw, with shades of bronze and almost-copper scattered through. A scar notched his right eyebrow, dragging it upward in a perpetual query.

And those eyes… In Hyrcania I had thought them aged and cynical and understood now how young he must have been, for a lifetime’s pain and weariness had grown in them since then, and only the sharpness remained as it had been: hard-edged and thoughtful.

He raised the bow and held it between us. ‘Three mistakes,’ he said softly. ‘First: I never should have told Cadus that you could shoot with any skill. Second: I should have gone back to look for the bow when I knew I had dropped it. And third…’ He looked past me again to where men still fought over our Eagle. ‘I should have struck Eleazir’s head from his shoulders nine months ago, when we first crowned Menachem.’

He slung my bow over his shoulder, reached for the quiver at my hip. ‘You have lost your Eagle,’ he said, to me, ‘but we have lost a king and a kingdom, and may yet lose our lives. I give you a choice: I will leave you here, to die at Eleazir’s hand — he will crucify you, of that you can be sure — or you can come with me and we can fight our way out of this messand there may be a chance afterwards to recover your Eagle. Choose now. Time is not on our side.’

The taste of death was like iron in my mouth, twisting my tongue. The memory of men gone was all around me, their shades but a step away, beckoning, offering peace beyond measure and the welcome of the gods.

More than anything, I wanted to join Tears. But I felt the shadow of fate settle around me and before my courage could fail I answered as I must, for myself and for Horgias, who had been dragged to my side.

‘We choose life,’ I said. ‘If we have the chance to recover the Eagle, it is our duty.’

Pantera left us then, shouting again in Aramaic. I thought for one moment that we were to be given our weapons, and could follow and kill him, for I wanted to do that very badly.

But he felt the thought and turned on his heel. ‘Bind them,’ he said swiftly. ‘And get the horses. I’ll bring Menachem. We have to get to the tomb before Eleazir’s men. They may have the Eagle, but we have the king and the crown.’