The Eagle of the Twelfth

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 andpicked 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 nervescast 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.’