The lion held herself aloof until the flailing hooves had stilled. Then, she gave a coughing grunt that summoned her three cubs from a fissure in the rock.
Too young to hunt, too starved to live much longer without food, with knife-sharp ribs staring through their mottled sand-coloured hair, they crept forward on their bellies until the smell of meat drenched their fear and, in a delirium of bloody joy, they hurled themselves to the feast. Goaded by their mewls, their dam ripped open the belly and let the guts spill out, and set her jaws to the steaming liver.
Pantera slid back then, dry-bellied and soundless, back along the ledge to a place he could wriggle into, and stand up and turn round and slide across the top of the bluff to the other side. Here was a fissure with steps cut in the side so that he could climb down, and find a place — at last — to urinate, and then climb back up to yet another hard, harsh rocky plateau on which was a camp that was both hidden and yet had a view across the whole of Judaea in any direction.
Menachem waited for him, sitting on a rock with his saddle bags tied, and his knife across his knee, and his eyes trained on the darkening sun: no lilacs now, only deep, bloody red and purple, like a bruise. His black hair shone in the reddening light. His brows were solid lines, carved by the hand of a god. A scroll lay rolled and fastened at his side. ‘Did she come?’
He held up a water skin. Pantera took it and drank. ‘She came, she killed, she has fed her young.’
He had seen the lion first on his third day here, and had watched her daily since. The desert healers had thought him sun-struck, but they had also thought he was going to die and had been content to let him occupy his mind with something other than the pain of breathing.
That he could observe her now with little pain was down to the healers’ ministry; to the bindings of linen and poultices of black mud from the poison-sea that were said to suck the illness from any wound, of body or soul. Their care had been exemplary and effective, but the day he had shown himself well enough to get to the ledge by himself they had washed their hands in the ritual vessels set beside him and turned away, not wishing to soil themselves further with one not given to their god.
Menachem had paid them with his own gold as they left, and, with the ever-present Mergus, had taken over the application of the stinking black mud to Pantera’s abdomen, to his shoulder, to his left ankle, which had never fully healed after the interrogations in Britain. It was improving now, or they had told him so, and he had not the strength to disbelieve them.
The days had passed in a stupor of hot, stinking mud, but they did pass, and with each one he had been less prone to sleep without warning and more inclined to discourse and always, when he woke, Menachem, not Mergus, had been the one at his side, awake and willing to talk.
Over the course of a dozen nights, they had discussed the mountains, the desert and the beasts that lived therein. They had talked of the sky, the stars, the naming of the constellations, which was different in every tongue and creed, and the ubiquitous presence — or otherwise — of the sand-spirits that the Syrians believed in, the ghuls, the ifrit, the djinn.
If it was late, and they were tired, they discussed the differences between their gods: Mithras, god of truth who required of his followers that they face their own fears, that no man might have mastery over them, but had no written creed, and desired none, lest men come to worship the written word over the truth; and the Hebrew god, whose name could not be spoken, whose laws were so plentiful and written so completely that men did, indeed, fight and die to uphold one or other truth of them.
‘There is a simpler truth beneath all the written laws,’ Menachem had said, ‘and the people are ready to hear it. But first we must take Jerusalem, or they will not have peace to listen.’
And so they had discussed the possibility of taking Jerusalem, which was under Saulos’ control now; ruled from the tower-fortress of the Antonia that was built so close to the Temple as to be part of it. They talked of how the tower could be taken with the least loss of life; how the garrison Guard might be lured out into full battle and outflanked; how, if that failed, they might drive tunnels under the walls of the Antonia to collapse them, and how the emperor might be brought to denounce Saulos in ways so unambiguous as to be fatal.
What they had not ever discussed was Masada and the possibility that they might assault it.
The whole idea might have been a dream born of a fever, except that each day of the last five Pantera had walked to the top of the nearest mountain and stared south towards the high, flat bluff on which Herod had built his stronghold, with its impregnable wall all around and its astonishing hanging palace, and its storerooms to provide for any who lived there: enough food and water — and weapons — to last a thousand men for ten thousand days, or so it was said, or ten thousand men for a thousand days, nobody was ever clear which, but enough, certainly, to take Jerusalem.
Pantera came to sit now beside Menachem. ‘We have waited long enough,’ he said. ‘We should go.’
‘The lion’s kill was an omen?’ Menachem stretched a rare smile. ‘I did not think you a man of superstition.’
‘The omen, if we need one, was that I could climb up unaided on to the rock, and lie for an afternoon still enough for a lion and an antelope not to see me, and climb down again afterwards. I am fit enough, therefore, to lead you into Masada.’
Menachem’s smile faded. He turned his face to the east, where the first silver blade of the moon sliced open the night, letting the stars leak in, one at a time, dimly. He looked down at his hands. ‘I did not betray you.’
‘I know.’
‘I thought perhaps-’
‘That we had not spoken of Masada since we came here because I feared you would betray me further? That was true at first.’
‘And now?’
‘Now?’ Pantera rose, walked a few paces and scooped up a small stone and juggled it from hand to hand. ‘You are a patient man, but Saulos is not. If you were going to betray me, I would be dead.’
He threw the stone hard and fast, slanting across the desert. It bounced five times before it fell. ‘The traitor, therefore, is someone else. Perhaps someone in Jerusalem.’
‘Which means that Hypatia is in danger,’ Menachem said. ‘Iksahra, Kleopatra and Estaph also.’ They had stayed when the rest left: Hypatia, for a dream; Iksahra and Kleopatra, because they would not leave her; Estaph because… Mergus had not been clear why Estaph had stayed behind. It seemed most likely he had been asked to cleave to Hypatia and thereby make Jerusalem safe for Pantera’s return.
‘We are all in danger,’ Pantera said. ‘Which is why we must assault Masada.’ He nodded south, whence came the fickle, blustery wind that made knives out of dust and scraped them across his eyes.
Menachem came to stand beside him. Together, they gazed at the distant mass of rock that hogged the horizon, the only truly flat-topped mountain in the whole Judaean desert.
‘If a man were to stand on the edge of the casement wall and fly a banner of white silk enough to clothe a tall man,’ Pantera said, ‘I think it would be seen by a sharp-eyed observer who sat here, waiting. Who among your men could see it best?’
‘My cousin Eleazir has especially long sight,’ said Menachem. He glanced sideways at Pantera, so that he did not have to say, Eleazir might be the traitor who sold you to Saulos. Both knew it might be true, but had no proof, and so could not yet act.
Pantera said, ‘Would you trust your cousin to convey news of a victory to the rest of your men?’
‘I would. He wants the weapons as much as we do. Afterwards… we will worry what happens afterwards if we are alive.’ Menachem stretched his arms above his head until his shoulders cracked. ‘When you say “the rest of my men” — which will they be?’