The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Thirty-Nine

We lay on our bellies on the cold cave floor and listened to the Hebrews’ progress.

They climbed more slowly than we had done, pausing often for rest and water. When they reached the rock face, they dropped their packs, drew rope from each one and tied them together in pairs, attaching the long line to the waist of each second man.

On the rock itself, they followed the route we had done, so that the first one was at the lip of our cave as the sun touched it.

We had backed away before they began, and found the two openings Pantera had described. ‘No white birds here,’ he said softly. ‘Do we have any reason to choose one or the other?’

‘There’s more of a draught from the left hand one,’ I said. ‘If I were going somewhere, I’d choose that way. I say we hide in the one to the right.’ The others did as I bid; today, I was the god-marked wayfinder.

We lay together, shoulder to shoulder, that each might know where the others were. Dark held us like a blanket, still and dense and tight, warmer than the air outside, and itbrought us the Hebrews’ voices long before they reached us.

Nicodemus of the bronzed hair was first into the cave. He stepped over the lip and sank down, speaking aloud prayers to his god. The rope tied to his waist sprang tight as he finished and he leaned back so that Manasseh, who was second, might climb up more easily after him. Between them, they hauled up all eight packs, and then the remaining six men swarmed up the ropes like rats on to a ship.

We could see them easily against the light of the cave mouth, and so we had warning when Nicodemus produced a flint and tinder from his pack and began to spark a light, buzzing all the while in his native Aramaic, which sounded to my ears ever more like a flight of bees trapped in a box.

I felt Pantera flinch beside me before the first strike took light. ‘They found our horses.’ His voice in my ear, soft as death. ‘Tell Horgias we have to move back.’

As snakes, we writhed backwards, soundless, or as near to it as living men can be. The tunnel curved along its length and there came a point when we could see the light of the spark and the shadows it cast, but only against one wall, and knew we were safe from the men in front. I was about to stand up when Horgias caught my arm and dragged me round. ‘Light!’ he hissed in my ear. ‘Men behind!’

I turned, and followed where he led, to another bend, and there was the shine of strong light from many torches, with shadows that barely flickered. And in those shadows were men seated and standing, men leaning on spears, or against the wall.

And something that was not a man, something that made my head spin and my heart burst wide in my chest.

‘ The Eagle! ’ I nearly said it aloud. Pantera reached past me to catch Horgias in the moment before he launched forward.

‘ Not yet! ’ The words were holes breathed into the silence. ‘They are too many. We have to hide.’

‘Where?’

‘Back.’ I tugged at them both. ‘There’s a draught behind us.’

And so we hid again, writhing backwards into a fissure barely wide enough to take a man, which grew progressively lower as we squeezed inside.

Without thought or comment, I went first because I had found it, Horgias next because Pantera was herding him away from the Eagle as a leopard herds a stag, and Pantera last, as the cork in our bottle, holding us in and the Hebrews out.

I crouched in the sweating dark, and peered past both of them as the growing lights from outside merged with those from ahead that had moved to meet them, and then grew dimmer as men set lamps and torches down on the cavern floor to greet each other.

In near dark, I listened to the shouted names, to the sounds of men embracing, to the murmurs of thanks given to their god, all the same as when the legions met.

They spoke briefly and with vehemence, and through the crook of Pantera’s elbow I saw Nicodemus spit to emphasize the end of one short, sharp comment. The men he had met looked around them, as if danger might come from the dark. I felt Pantera press himself ever backwards and dip his head, that the shine of his eyes might not betray us. I held my breath and felt my bladder clench and renewed my grip on my knife and tried to move my arm from where it was trapped against the rock, and failed.

From some distance, someone called Nicodemus’ name. The word ricocheted around the caves and came to rest in a dozen places. There was a shout of laughter, and some animated chatter and the whole small mob moved back away from us into the cave where the Eagle was kept, leaving us in almost-darkness and almost-silence.

A long time later, Pantera eased his way forward. Horgiasand I followed, easing the cramp out of our knees, our elbows, our necks. At length, we stood in the cave and watched the shadows and barely dared to move.

‘How many?’ Horgias asked.

‘Sixteen.’ Pantera shook his head. ‘Too many for us to take.’

‘But we don’t need to take them,’ I said. ‘We only need to take the Eagle.’

In the near-dark, I saw Horgias smile.

We drew lots. We argued over the result — silently, in mime, with grimaces for words. We drew lots a second time with different results and did not accept them this time either. We stood in the dark and not one of us wanted to leave the other two and be the hare that drew the Hebrew hounds from their lair.

In the end, in the compressed whisper that was all we dared manage, Horgias said, ‘Demalion and I are of the Twelfth. The Eagle was ours to lose and ours to take back. You can make convincing noise for three of us and have a chance to get away. If we don’t come out, you can tell Vespasian that the Twelfth is dead, and it will be true.’

Pantera closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was a changed man, shorn of the irony he held about him like a shield. He nodded to us both and it was as heavy as a salute. ‘If you don’t come out,’ he said, ‘make sure you’re dead. Eleazir can keep a man alive longer and in greater pain than either of you wants to think about.’

There was no more talking then. We drank from our flasks together, as men sharing the last wine, then Pantera took a few moments to check his knives while Horgias and I rolled our shoulders and eased our joints, the better to run when we had to.

Pantera said, ‘They’ve left the rope tied over the lip to get down with. Remember it’s there if you need to leave in a hurry.’I felt the weight of his hand one final time on my shoulder and then he was gone, a black shape lost in the black cave.

Left alone, Horgias and I backed into the fissure again to sit tight in the dark with our heads down. The waiting was worse than it had been before. We knew how many we faced now and Pantera’s last words, well meant as they were, repeated in an endless echo in the ears of my mind.

Make sure you’re dead… dead… dead…

I felt sick. I felt the rock shudder to the hammer of my heart. I heard the slow hiss of our breath and thought it a wonder that the men in the neighbouring cavern didn’t smell the waves of sour battle-sweat that flushed my armpits and rolled in wet lines down my limbs.

Horgias was no better. However often we had waited before battle, it had been in the open, with sword and shield to hand. I bruised my palm, so tightly did I hold the knife, and rehearsed the track it would have to take to my own heart if I needed urgently to die, but there was no comfort in that, and nothing of the battle-rage that buoyed us up before a fight.

I felt the shudder of Horgias’ breath and put my hand on the small of his back, and felt his foot creep back to press against my elbow, and in that small touch was more intimacy, more closeness, more sharing of souls than I had known since the battle at Lizard Pass.

I loved him then, and would have said so, perhaps, and cost us both our lives, had not there been a movement in the outer cave whither Pantera had gone: a whisper; a foot scuffed against stone; a man’s voice that cursed softly in Greek, and another that rebuked him, less softly, in heavy Thracian.

In the Hebrews’ cavern, the crackle of talk, which had been animated and sharp, fell to shocked silence. The air grew tight with a dozen breaths held and one stifled cry of joyful vindication, fiercely hushed.

In the outer cave, where Pantera wrought his subterfuge, Nicodemus’ rope scrapedacross the rocky lip over which we had all climbed and a third voice cried out in Latin, rising with fear at the end. To my ears, it sounded foreign, but I have no doubt that the Hebrews believed they had heard me.

It was more than enough: sixteen men hurtled out of their cavern, heedless of the noise they made, the lamps they kicked over in their haste, the Eagle they left behind.

Their passing caused a sudden lift in the sullen air, flavoured it with garlic and citrus and sweat. The slap of their bare feet sounded like a full cavalry ride and their voices, raised in rage and rejoicing, were those of any hunt on the closing trail of their quarry. They passed us in a mass, and were gone.

‘Now!’ I pushed on Horgias’ back and we writhed free of our hiding place, turned away from the havoc Pantera had brought on himself, and sprinted ahead into the Hebrews’ wide, airy, lamplit cavern — where we stopped, stunned by the vision that lay before us.

The cavern was vast; easily as big as the biggest audience room in the governor’s palace in Antioch. An opening halfway along the far wall led deeper into the heart of the cliff and another to our left opened out to stark morning sunlight, and the dense blue sky.

By my reckoning, this was the middle one of the three cavern entrances we had seen from our ledge. I gave thanks to the watching gods that the three birds had turned us away from it to the smaller entrance we had used.

The cavern’s interior was as well furnished as any Hebrew home. Many men had climbed up many times carrying many packs to create the comfort and ease they had here: thick rugs covered the walls and bedding rolls lay in a careful row for half the length of the far wall, stopping just before the place where daylight reached.

Near the mouth, where the morning sun painted gold across the cave’s floor, was a line of low desks with cushions behind them and scrolls laid open on top, pinned down by the small lead stones, the size of songbird eggs, that the Hebrews used to such effect in their slings. Other scrolls lay in tiered groups set with care to the side beyond a clearly demarcated line that was the limit of the sun’s reach.

And there, exactly where the hard light of morning met the soft light of a dozen oil lamps left in niches in the walls, stood our Eagle.

They had left its wings outstretched to catch the sun. I felt its touch then: the reflected light washed me clean from crown to foot, scouring me free of guilt, care, fear, shame; all the things that slowed me.

I reached for it, but Horgias was there first, moving as a man in a dream who finds that his lover, believed dead, has returned to him living with gifts of ambrosia and wine.

He swept it up and, although he bore no mail, and the wolf did not snarl from his head, he was what he had been born for: the aquilifer of the XIIth; glorious, full of honour, full of might. In a single moment I saw the changes in the planes of his face, the winter’s pain swept away for ever, the bitterness sweetening to the man I had known.

He grinned at me and there was such joy on his face that I could not help but weep a little. We embraced as victors, as men who have shared the same sweat, eaten the same sour terror, and come through victorious. My heart soared, and I felt the leap and press of his heart as he lifted the Eagle high into the sun.

‘The Twelfth will live,’ he said. ‘We’ll march at its head when Vespasian rides to take Jerusalem back for Rome.’

‘First we have to get to safety,’ I said. ‘And we may have to climb.’

‘Always so sober, Demalion. You need to learn to love the small victories we are given.’ He pulled a face at me, laughing, but the shaft was sliding through his hands as he did so, bringing the Eagle down to stare us fiercely in the eyes, prideful as any living bird.

The god looked through it then at both of us and we ceased to laugh and were silent while Horgias began to dismantle that which held the soul of our legion.

Whatever else they might have done, the Hebrews had looked after it well, for it came off the shaft as easily as the day it had first gone on, with a twist and a pull and a slight suck of grease as wood parted from metal.

The wings each lifted off, each rounded end popping cleanly free of its mooring, and I saw for the first time the crack under the left one that Horgias had mended, and knew that only a man who had lived with it every day for years on end would have noticed it, and then seen it gone.

‘Your cloak,’ he said, and I tore a strip from the hem, and Horgias wrapped the gilded body with the skill of repeated practice until he had a small anonymous bundle.

Which he held out to me.

I took a step away. ‘It’s yours.’

‘No.’ He pressed it urgently against my chest. ‘It’s ours. You take the body and I’ll take the wings. That way, if only one of us makes it back, we’ll still have enough to start the legion again.’

He turned away and tore a strip from his own cloak for the wings and I was left holding the body of our Eagle.

For something with such power, it was so small; not much larger than the head of a yearling ewe, made to fit in the front of a man’s tunic that it might be taken secretly from the battlefield in case of near-defeat. The big standards of cohort and century were designed to be left behind; they didn’t matter.

I slipped the body down the front of my tunic to nestle against my belt and felt it warm, like a living thing, a lambto be nurtured, an eagle chick, awaiting its first taste of hot, bloody flesh.

Horgias wrapped the wings and tied them to his belt, then flexed his fingers, grinning. He was like a boy who steals apples for the fun, not the taste. ‘Shall we go back to where we hid before?’ he asked. ‘Or on into the dark?’

I had already looked around for the answer to that, but there were no birds to see, no spiders, ants, or beetles; nothing from the living world by which the gods might speak to us.

‘What does the Eagle say?’

He closed his eyes a moment in question, and then frowned, listening to the answer. ‘It says that we should go back,’ he said slowly. ‘If we go deeper, there’s no clear way out.’ His eyes sprang open. He caught my arm. ‘Quickly then, before they realize Pantera is alone and come back for us.’

We ran. Near the entrance, he said, quietly, urgently, ‘If they come back once we’re hidden then as soon as the last one is past us, count a slow fifty and get out. Keep running, don’t look back.’

‘If you’ll do the same.’

‘Agreed,’ he said, and I knew he didn’t mean it, and he knew the same of me.