‘I will stop the war,’ Menachem said. His voice was quietly reasonable, as it had always been, but resonant now with a new authority. ‘Yusaf is right, we are not ready. I will give you to the guards myself before I will allow you to drag us to our destruction.’
‘Then what do you suggest, cousin? We will have war; even you cannot stop it. As Yusaf has rightly said, my death would bring it on faster, not delay it.’
‘ Masada,’ said a whisper of dry linen dragged on stone. Pantera’s throat hurt, hearing it, as if someone had just scrubbed his windpipe with a fistful of sand.
‘He’s awake!’
Three voices said it together. A single hand clutched his, then withdrew, swiftly, but it was enough to wrest his eyes open, to let him see that he was, indeed, the centre of a circle of heads bent over, looking down on him.
Hypatia was nearest, still with the feel of silk bandages about her although her hair was a black flag, caught behind her ears. He sought her hand, which lay still on the counterpane. ‘The hounds…’ he whispered. ‘Sorry.’
She pressed his hand again, shook her head. ‘They died in battle, a credit to their ancestors.’ He wanted to believe her.
His eyes roamed on. Mergus was next to her, grey-white and sleepless, his face pinched as a gull’s, and next to him stood Estaph, a ghost of a bear, watching with great, hurt eyes that smiled a little when Pantera’s gaze settled on them. Iksahra was there; he smelled her cat first, and his eyes found her second. He sent her thanks with his gaze.
Yusaf was next, then Menachem, who might yet become his friend, and then… he did not know who was next, except that it might have been Menachem’s paler brother, his hair one shade lighter than black, his eyes a shade towards grey, his soul… his soul very different from Menachem’s.
His identity was couched in his tone as much as his words. What do you suggest, cousin? Enlightenment came with the memory, and Pantera let his gaze rest on Eleazir ben Simeon, younger cousin to Menachem, who wished to lead the War Party, and was not fit.
Menachem lifted Pantera’s hand, brought his wandering attention back. ‘Did we hear you aright? Did you say Masada? That we might get our weapons from there?’
Eleazir hawked and spat, fluidly. ‘Masada’s a death trap. No one can get near it.’
Pantera closed his eyes. Darkness gave him solitude and allowed him strength to push the necessary words past the fire in his throat.
‘My father said… your grandfather, the Galilean… should have raided Masada. The armoury is bigger than the one at Sepphoris. It lies on a bare rock, guarded only by Romans. No Hebrews there to be slain in reprisal.’ He felt better, speaking, than he had when silent. He opened his eyes again.
Menachem was staring down at him thoughtfully. ‘Even so, my cousin is right,’ he said. ‘Since Herod built his first palace there, no one has assaulted the rock of Masada. There is one path in, and that is so narrow that two guards could hold off an army. There are five hundred legionaries on the rock. If there is a safe way in, or out, nobody knows of it.’
‘I do.’
They dared not believe him, except Hypatia, who closed her eyes and raised one brow, as if questioning a voice within, and at the end of it said, ‘Tell them.’
And so to her, to Mergus and Estaph, to Yusaf and to Menachem, he said, ‘My father took me to Masada. I have walked inside its walls. I know a way it can be assaulted so that no innocent life will be lost.’
‘Why would you do this?’ asked Menachem. ‘It does not prosper your battle against Saulos. He has taken control of the fortress of the Antonia, next to the Temple. He commands the garrison Guard and the cavalry from Caesarea. Only the auxiliary from Caesarea under Jucundus is still loyal to the royal family. If we take you, and wait until you heal… it will be nearly a month before we return. Saulos’ power will have risen by then like leavened bread under a morning sun.’
This close, Menachem’s eyes were not black, but a deep, deep brown, shaded in places with amber. They were the eyes of a man who has taken the harsh decisions of leadership, who bears the weight, and has not fallen under it, who can think clearly, and weigh risk against gain and keep his ardour for when it was needed.
To Menachem alone, therefore, Pantera gave his dwindling breath. ‘Saulos plans a war that will destroy Jerusalem. If we cannot stop him, then we will make war on our terms. A war we will win.’
He lay back, spent, and heard them argue as to his fitness and how he might be healed, and what must be done and could be done and might be done, here, or in the desert, where men lived as healers.
In the end, sleep claimed him, and so he was spared the pain of movement, as they loaded him on to a litter and carried him along narrow alleys to a gate used chiefly by the night soil collectors.
He woke at night in the desert, to the sounds of emptiness and the songs of the stars and a morning sun that spilled bright, prophetic blood across the sand.
III: Masada and Jerusalem, Mid Summer, AD 66
Chapter Thirty-Two
In the red desert mountains south of Jerusalem, a bloody sunset scorched the western sky, blurred to lilac at its margins. In the lengthening shadows, a lioness stalked a long-horned oryx as it drank from a drying wadi.
Pantera lay belly-down on a ledge a spear’s throw above, with his chin propped on both fists, barely breathing. His bladder ached with the need to empty; he ignored it, as he ignored the sharp stones digging into his elbows and the dull ache from his diaphragm that accompanied every careful breath, each one timed with the lion’s footfall, that the sounds of her own movement might keep her from hearing him.
She was ten yards away… eight… five… effortlessly balanced on three broad feet, one forelimb lifted, frozen while the oryx raised its white head and twitched its tall ears a full circle and snuffed the light evening breeze. The lion was downwind of her prey, as Pantera was downwind of her, so that their scent came to him mingled, sweet-sour fermenting grasses overlaid with the hunting cat’s mellow meatiness. Water dripped from the antelope’s muzzle, splashing fat drops on to the dust; a profligate waste in this land, where water was scarce as gold, and infinitely more valuable. The beast stared at the sunset a while, and then turned, ears a-twitch, to contemplate the distant inland sea whose waters were poison to drink.
A slow cloud crossed the sky. Its reflection crossed the sea’s surface, perfectly mirrored. Pantera and the antelope watched it together, while the she-lion stood, carved out of time, waiting.
Presently the oryx dropped its head again. Pantera breathed. The lion made the last step and drew in her long back, shrinking into herself until her hind legs were coiled beneath. Her tail flagged left to right and was still.
Pantera held motionless by an effort of will, the pain in his torso, his elbows, his bladder lost in the lilac night. The lion was the best he had seen in eighteen days of looking out for lions from his desert ledge, where the vultures had watched early for his death.
He would not have minded dying here in the austere beauty of the desert, away from the palms and the olive groves, far from the timid sheep and the stench of humanity and its politics.
Here was only sky and rock and wheeling hawks and the small locusts that fed on dust, and mountain ibex that could spit a man on their scimitar horns, and wild asses that could never be tamed, and white oryx, whose beauty made poets weep. And the lioness who must make a kill here, now, that she and her young might not starve.
There passed a stillness long enough for Pantera to breathe and breathe again, and then she was flying through the air, swift as a thrown spear, perfect in the certainty of her intent.
The crack of the beast’s neck breaking rebounded threefold off the rocks. It crashed to the ground, its galloping legs sweeping the dust long after it died, carrying its soul to an afterlife set aside for white antelopes, where they might graze on lush grass on gentler inclines, where wadis ran with clear water, where the lions fed on other beasts.