The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Forty

Voices from the small outer cave ahead reached us faintly as men argued, and called from where the rope was anchored on the iron ring to others who must have followed Pantera down it to the foot of the cliff.

We reached the crevasse where we had already hidden twice before, but the thought of crawling in there a third time left me sick.

Horgias, too, was hesitant. ‘They took no light with them,’ I whispered. ‘We could go on?’

I felt his nod, and we drew our knives and went on step by wary step through the tunnel that led to the cave at the front.

The dark held us close. Ahead, eight of the Hebrews were caught in the brilliant morning light that bathed the cave’s mouth. We could count the hairs on their heads and their faces, the beads of sweat rolling down the backs of their necks as they leaned over the lip of rock and shouted imprecations, advice, curses down to their brethren below. Their god did not tell them we were there, nor did any instinct let them feel our gaze on their backs.

We edged as far as we could away from the mouth of thetunnel, that they might not discover us by accident when they returned to their cavern.

And then we waited again.

The making of a legionary is in learning to wait, everyone knows that, but this waiting was as new as had been the others of this day. Here we sat, armed, within touching distance of our enemy — and we did nothing.

This once, our lives mattered more than honour and so we kept still and breathed slowly and ignored the straining ache in our bladders as the sun crawled across the sky and the light at the cave’s mouth became ever more finely angled, until there was no sun spilling over the lip at all, but only the perfect blue sky outside, and the ever more somnolent men whose outlines marred it.

‘Nicodemus!’

We all jerked awake. One of the men leaned over and shouted the name a second time, loud in the liquid silence. Nicodemus’ voice from below shouted up a stutter of angry Aramaic and the men at the cave mouth moved from near-sleep to frenetic animation. The rope hanging over the ledge sprang tight and five of the absent eight men were hauled up into the cave.

We didn’t need to know the language to understand that three of the group were missing and probably dead: one of the twins — Gorias, I think — Manasseh who had been like a brother to Nicodemus, and his cousin Matthias; all had disappeared.

Both Nicodemus and Levius, the remaining twin, had smears of drying blood on their tunics. Levius wept a torrent of grief and would not be consoled. He raged around the cavern so that I shut my eyes and set all my thoughts inwards, lest he be drawn to Horgias and me purely by the power of his passion.

He moved away. I breathed again, but did not look up. Presently, amidst much swearing of oaths and promises of retribution by heaven — the sounds of a man in anguish are the same in any language, and the vengeance he craves rarely varies — the entire group swung back towards the dark, to the tunnel, on their way to the rug-bedecked cavern.

Nicodemus led them.

Two more came after him. Three… five… ten out of thirteen passed us safely into the dark and I let my eyes open and began to measure the distance from where I sat to the cave’s mouth. I flexed my fingers and slowly rolled my neck that I might rise smoothly when the time came to move, and not alert the enemy to my presence by the crack of joints grown solid with sitting.

The remaining three ran at last into the tunnel. I counted to fifty as Horgias had said, and felt him move as I did. We scented the first heady wine of freedom, and raced towards it.

At the cave’s mouth the rope was still in place, tied to the deep-sunk iron ring and hanging loose over the edge. Freedom was truly ours. All we had to do was slide down it and run. I passed the rope to Horgias.

He shook his head. ‘You got here first.’ He clapped my shoulder. ‘Go!’

Eight men and then five had safely come up it. I told myself that as I grabbed hold and looped my leg over the lip of the cave.

Thirteen men up. Others down. Including Pantera.

Safe. Safe. You will be safe. Both legs over the edge and a moment’s blinding terror as I swung free in space with only my sweating hands on the rope holding me up. I found a knot that gave me some purchase, and breathed out, and my questing feet found another. My chest was level with the lip. I looked up at Horgias.

‘There’s a knot for your feet; you-’

A noise behind. He spun away from me. His knife armjerked. In the dark heart of the cave, a man screamed and fell.

‘Horgias!’ I tried to pull up on the rope, to come to his side where he needed me. The rope slid on my sweat and I fell back to the knot. Luck and panic held me, nothing more.

‘Go!’ Horgias could have come over the lip to join me. He could have drawn his other knife and thrown it. He could have done any one of a dozen things.

What he did was to wrest the wrapped wings of the Eagle from his belt and thrust them down the neck of my tunic to join the body nestling at my belt.

‘Go!’ He shoved my chest. ‘I’ll keep them from cutting the rope.’ And, when I didn’t move, he said, desperately, ‘Demalion, please. For the Twelfth. And for me. Please go!’

‘Horgias-’ But he had turned and this time he did have his blade in his hand, and was slicing with it, fast and sharp and hard, so that the iron was a blur in the part-light above me. ‘Remember me!’

I heard a blade meet flesh and did not know whose it was.

Would you have stayed and lost the Eagle? I wanted to. Perhaps I should have done, but it shifted like a living thing against my breast and the fervour in Horgias’ voice ran onward through my ears. Please go! For me…

His voice and his will pushed me down so that I loosed my hold on the rope until it slipped through my hands and I slid down fast and faster, skidding over the knots set every ten feet, losing skin with every foot until I hit the bottom, with the raw flesh of my palms bleeding.

But nobody had cut the rope while I was on it and nobody leaned over to hurl spears at me, or rocks or knives or the small lead pellets they used in their slings. Looking up all the while, I backed down the great rock stairway that had led to the foot of the cliff.

‘ Demalion! ’ I heard my name. You must believe that; Iheard Horgias call my name, and I looked up at the cave in time to see the rope snake down towards me, cut clean through at its top end, so that none of the Hebrews could speedily follow me. Nor Horgias, who must still be alive.

Make sure you’re dead. Eleazir has ways of keeping a man alive… Pantera’s words burned again in my head so that I prayed for a swift battle-death for Horgias.

And if I had heard him call me earlier, then he heard me now, for the prayer had only just gone to the gods when I heard his voice again, like the voice of a living god speaking aloud the names of the dead men who were waiting for him: Proclion first, and then Taurus, and then the oath to the Eagle. I saw him hook his knee over the cave’s lip and, slashing at the hands clawing him backwards, thrust himself off the edge.

Like the Eagle he had so loved, Horgias flew down from the heights of the cliff. A fierce, burning joy lit his face as he sailed towards me, and at the end a kind of peace I had not seen in any man.

‘ Demalion, don’t stay with me. Get the Eagle to Vespasian.’ He said it in my head, not my ears; there was not time enough to speak aloud before he ended his flight on the hard rock of the Hebrew cliff-foot.

The crack of his landing spun me backwards. I turned to see him lying not five paces away on a flat shelf of rock with his eyes open to the blue, blue sky and peace still etched deep on his face.

I didn’t need to feel at his neck or his wrist for the hammer of his heartbeat to know he was dead, but my heart ruled my head and I had hope, even then. My seeking fingers rested on the great vein at his neck, waiting for a beat that did not come.

His skin was warm. His flesh was whole and solid. His smile had not yet faded, but the back of his head had crackedopen like a hen’s egg and yellow fluid was leaking out and his life had leaked out with it.

I wanted Hypatia there, suddenly; she knew how to send a man cleanly to the lands of death. But she was long gone, and I was his friend.

Standing, I took a step back, and sent him to the gods, mine and his, in the only way I knew how.

‘ Given of the god,

Given to the god,

Taken by the god in valour, honour and glory.

May you journey safely to your destination.’

I spoke it aloud, why should I not, here, where the gods were all around? Shouts came from the cave mouth above. I ignored them and fumbled in my belt pouch for two of the silver coins that were left from the sale of the mares. Speaking the last words, I placed one on each of Horgias’ eyelids, weighing them shut.

Truly, I don’t know if the ferryman requires payment for his services, but in that moment all that mattered was that Horgias travel whole across the Styx to greet the men who waited for him on the other side.

I wept as I placed them, slow tears that might have unmanned me then, but that a stone lumbered down past my shoulder and, looking up, I saw Nicodemus lowering another rope down from the heights.

Even at this distance, the hatred on his face was as pure and undiluted as I have seen on any battlefield. It shocked me to sense, and as I stood Horgias’ shade touched me, whispering in my ears. Go! The Eagle is all. Don’t let them take it a second time.

I bent and kissed the cooling skin of his brow, tasting his sweat, and then turned and ran for the path that had broughtus here, and on, and round and up to where the horses had been tethered.

Three dead men waited there, feasting-tables for a legion of fat flies. The blue roan filly was safe; with Horgias’ burnt-almond gelding and Pantera’s bay, she had moved into the shade of a rock and stood dozing, slack-hipped in the heat.

I looked around for Pantera and saw nothing but uneven rock, set about with potholes and scoured clean by sun and wind. I was set to cut the tethers when I caught sight of a particular mound of grey that was not exactly as it should have been. I reached it just as Pantera thrust himself to his feet.

He began to dust himself down and then stopped, his eyes searching my face. I wasn’t weeping by then, but the signs of it must have been clear. ‘Horgias?’ he asked.

‘Dead.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Would you go back for him if Nicodemus had him alive?’

‘If necessary.’ He meant it. I could read the truth on his face. Strange that he was so easy to read now, when I had least need of it.

The Eagle burned against my chest. I busied myself loosing the tethers from the horses. ‘There’s no need. He heard what you said as well as I did. He cut the rope after I climbed down it and then threw himself from the cave mouth. He landed at my feet. I left him silver for the ferryman.’

‘And Nicodemus?’

‘He’s coming for us. We need to ride.’ I mounted, and took Horgias’ horse by the reins. ‘I have an Eagle to deliver to Vespasian.’