Blood made a splashing fountain behind him. He ran from it, fast; he had seen men die because they had lost their footing in the gore of the man they had just killed. In the barracks afterwards, those who lived named it dead man’s revenge.
Pantera had a blade now, but no shield. He came at a man from behind and speared his new weapon upwards, under the edge of his enemy’s mail. It was a coward’s move, but he had no shame; it gained him a shield and he used it as a weapon, smashing the boss into the face of the next man who came at him, as he bent and cut low, to slice his enemy’s tendons. That one fell, and died, and Pantera walked over him, stamping, as the legions were taught to do.
The new blade was sharp and well balanced and it was the last proof, had Pantera needed it, that these men were the best veterans of the Jerusalem garrison, sent to Masada as a reward, not the lazy, the lame and the disobedient sent for punishment. They were, in fact, men exactly like his father, who had brought him here to show him its magnificence.
Pantera killed twice more, each time more difficult, each with increasing respect. The men that were left on both sides were tired, but they were alive because they were faster and better, and luckier, than the men who lay dead on the rock. Nobody was left who was slow or weak or deaf or part blind.
For a moment, nobody tried to kill him. He took a chance to look down the snake path, and saw no one sheltering there. He believed there might be bodies on the ground at the rock’s foot, but it was too far to see and he had no intention of stepping closer to look.
He pushed his shield against the casement wall and thrust himself back into the battle. The worst of the fighting was no longer here, near the gateway where Moshe had brought his men up to the plateau, but further north, near the Herodian storehouses.
Menachem, Mergus and Aaron were in the heart of it, fighting as a trio, back to back to back. Only Mergus had a shield and he was using it to cover Menachem. Five legionaries stood before them in an arc, pushing forward with their shields locked in classic tight formation. They had their backs to Pantera. Nobody stood between him and them.
He grabbed another sword from a dead man’s hand, and sprinted forward, wiping the hilt free of blood as he went. He jumped a body, and a shield, and chose not to take it up. Aaron faced towards him, Mergus and Menachem away. He shouted, ‘Aaron!’ and threw the sword as if it were a knife, sending it to turn, blade over hilt in the air.
Graceful, flashing in spinning rhythm, it curved over the heads of the five Romans. Aaron reached up and snatched it from the air and it must have seemed that the sky had opened and the gods sent a blade into their enemy’s hand, for the inexorable forward advance halted, and five legionaries stopped to gape up at the unbroken blue above.
Pantera hit them from behind with the shield held sideways across his body, so that it smashed into the kidneys of two men at once and caught a third under the ribs with one sharp edge hard enough to knock him off balance. That one stumbled under the fall of Aaron’s new blade, and died for his ill luck.
Four left, two of them down. Mergus and Menachem turned to fight the two still standing at either end as Pantera ruined his new blade by stabbing it down through the angle between the helmet and the mail of one of the two who had fallen before he could recover and rise. That one died nastily, but swiftly enough.
The second was not as winded. He rolled away, hunching himself against Pantera’s seeking blade, and writhed round, swinging his own sword out in a circle that hissed past Pantera, as close as any blade had ever come. He jerked back, cursing. The tip sliced on past and caught Aaron on the thigh, but it was at the end of its swing, when the power was gone, and Pantera did not have time to look.
He did not have time to do anything now but wrench himself sideways as yet another blade cut down past his head. His reflexes saved him, but sluggishly, slowed by exhaustion. He spun and parried and hacked and knew that each stroke was slower and later than it should have been and that he was only alive because the man he fought was as tired as he was.
This latest punched his shield into Pantera’s face. Pantera grabbed the top edge of it and thrust it down at his attacker’s foot, reeling sideways, to keep away from the stabbing, searching blade.
For a few frenzied moments, he fought for his life without thought of anyone else. He punched, he kicked, and, when a flash of flesh passed him by, he bared his teeth and bit.
He thought he was about to die and there, then, when it was not the slow death of Saulos’ pleasure, he discovered how much he wanted to live.
And he did so. By luck as much as speed or force, he ducked under a backhanded swing at his face and was there, with a short, savage gladius tucked tight to his side, so that he could spear it upwards at the wide, red mouth that roared death in his face.
The blade grated up through his enemy’s hard palate and lodged in the plates of his skull. Pantera let it go as the Roman fell and wrested the other’s blade from his dying fingers.
He wanted to rest, to sit with his back to solid rock and tip a skin of water over his head and down his throat. He desperately wanted water; just the thought of it made him dizzy. He spun on his heel to look behind, because this, too, was a time when good men died: when they had just killed, and were too shocked at their own survival, too wretchedly tired, to see the fresh death that came from one side or another, or behind.
There was no one nearby. Mergus was fighting a dozen yards away, but safe; even as Pantera looked, he made the death blow and stepped in to finish.
Closer, in the wreckage of the last melee, Aaron was down. Menachem knelt beside him, his tunic drenched with wet blood down the side where his arm had been hit. Of their five attackers, none was left alive.
Pantera turned a full circle, counting. He had led a hundred Hebrews along the aqueduct in attack against a garrison of five times that number. Now, at the battle’s end, of the ninety or so men left standing, very few were Roman and even where they were knotted in small groups, none of them was fighting.
The fight had reached that point where men on both sides were so numb with exhaustion that it was all they could do to stand up. They wanted to sit, to celebrate the fact that they were alive, that they could see the sun, feel the wind, taste the water they craved. Nothing tasted as good as water after a battle, nothing felt so perfect as the wind’s caress.
‘Pantera?’
Menachem’s right arm hung limp by his side. Across his face were written new lines of grief.
Pantera forgot about water, and winning. ‘Aaron?’ he asked.
‘Dead.’
He nodded. He could think of nothing to say. A blade’s point had nicked the man’s thigh; he remembered that, vaguely. He had not thought it deep, or fatal, but even if it had been, he could not have done anything.
Menachem began to speak a prayer, slowly, as one who searches for the words. Pantera stood with him, and tried to remember the last time he had prayed with any meaning for someone dead, and found it far back and too painful to remember.
He stepped away then, and surveyed the scene and presently said, ‘The legionaries have ceased to fight. You have won, my lord.’
Menachem turned to look where Pantera was looking, north, to the storerooms, where a huddle of legionaries stood still, facing thirty or forty of their own men. The clash of weapons had stopped, and all were still.
He said, ‘Why are they not fighting?’
‘They’re spent,’ said Pantera. ‘So are we, but there are more of us than them. There’s a moment in a battle when everything stops. I’ve never known why it happens, but it does. Come-’ He began to walk, picking his way over the dead, past the still-living. ‘You will need to take their surrender.’