The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Thirty-Four

‘What do you want?’

We were outside a tiny stinking hut at the darkest end of a snake-alley on the edge of old Antioch, right up against the western walls. In front of us, a small windowless room stank of unwashed camel-hair rugs and burning ox dung.

The question came from inside, rattled in rough northern Greek, thick with phlegm, as if he were halfway to death with the coughing sickness, this grubby grandfather who limped to the doorway, with his grizzled hair and a whitening beard and skin dark enough to be an Egyptian.

He smelled of ox dung and spat at our feet and leaned on the door jamb and asked again, with rising hostility, ‘What do you want?’

Anodyces’ note had very clearly led us to this place: out of the governor’s palace, south into the city centre and then through a series of ever narrower alleys to this last one where the sun never reached.

The pass code had been at the foot of the note. In a voice not at all my own, I said, ‘The moon is fine and full tonight.’

He stared at me a moment longer, then gave a short, dry laugh. ‘If we go fishing, we may have luck. Indeed.’

He smiled, showing a mouth with three teeth missing on the lower jaw. His accent was suddenly less rough, his throat less filled with catarrh. ‘You had better come in.’

Stepping back, he stooped in under the lintel and thrust back the woven camel-hair mat that formed a door. Inside was an ox-dung fire and a sleeping mat; nothing else that I could see and little room for more. When we joined him, Horgias and I took up most of the space.

In the firelit dark, Pantera said, in Pantera’s voice, tinged a little with wonder, ‘Demalion of Macedon. I truly would not have known you. Nor Horgias. It is Horgias?’

‘It is.’ Horgias took off the shapeless hat he had been wearing. Underneath, his filthy hair kept the shape of its crown. It made little difference. Even to me, he was barely recognizable as the Horgias we knew; he looked like some savage ready to cut your throat if you looked at him wrongly.

In the three days of waiting, we had let our beards grow, had not washed, had worked with our small band of horses until we stank of horse muck and straw and had the filth of the streets on every part of us. We were, I was quite sure, as unlike two Roman legionaries as it was possible for any legionary to be.

Pantera was easily as well disguised, but I would have known those eyes anywhere, and as they met mine the anger that had been building since we left Vespasian’s study reached boiling point in my head.

‘Why?’ I asked harshly.

‘Why am I going to Jerusalem to regain your Eagle? Or why am I taking you with me?’

His face was bland, as far as it was possible to read anything in the strange concatenation of age and cunning that seemed to cloak him. His gaze was not bland at all and I was learning to read him.

‘You’re not taking us with you,’ I said. ‘We’re taking you. Or not. We’ve been planning this for months. So stop playing games.’ I was tired, suddenly. I sat down opposite him, and found that my head was below the smoke and it was easier to breathe.

I held his eye. ‘Vespasian said you have to prove your loyalty to Rome and I’d say he was understating the case. You fought for at least a year for the Hebrews. You helped lead the attack on Jerusalem that wiped out the garrison guard. You organized and led the defences against the siege organized by Rome’s governor in the east. You let Eleazir take the throne when you knew he favoured Parthia.’ This last was unfair, but he said nothing to stop me and I wasn’t in the mood to back down. ‘What is amazing,’ I said, ‘is not that you feel beholden to help us regain the Eagle, but that Vespasian has let you live at all. What did you tell him?’

‘That everything I did while I was in Judaea was for the good of Rome. That I had contained an insurrection and held it to one city when it could have inflamed an entire province. That I had done all one man could do to prevent Judaea from making an alliance with Parthia-’

‘You didn’t stop them making an alliance with Adiabene,’ said Horgias. ‘One of Monobasus’ sons led a cavalry charge against us when we first came through Beth Horon.’

Pantera shrugged. ‘I was not the king, only his adviser: some things I could not change. But yes, I should have killed Eleazir in the battle for Jerusalem. The first battle for Jerusalem. I had the chance and I took the time to kill someone else whose death seemed more important. Everything that flows from that is my responsibility: the cataphracts who fought against you, the tilting of Judaea towards Parthia… the loss of your Eagle. I could have held it safe on the battlefield but I was so lost in grief for Menachem that I didn’t realize Eleazir had sent his men to bring it out. So yes, I have a lot to prove — to myself as much as to you or Vespasian.’

Horgias had come to sit beside me. ‘I didn’t feel blamed by Vespasian,’ he said. ‘I blame myself daily and nightly, but he showed no signs of it to me.’

‘He knows, I think, how much we blame ourselves.’ Pantera leaned in and tossed another chip of ox dung on the fire and watched as it puffed smoke, and then burned with a greasy flame. ‘Who does he remind you of?’ he said to me.

‘Corbulo.’ I surprised myself, but it was true. ‘He’ll have to go more carefully if he doesn’t want to find himself forced to fall on his sword.’

‘He’s survived so far when many others would have died. Not many men have slept through one of Nero’s recitals and lived to see the next dawn.’

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 andAramaic. 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 batteringram 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.’