The five Romans knelt. As one, they spoke their oaths, in the name of Mithras and of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.
Menachem spoke his own oath in Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew. The men behind him shifted at this last, but none of them spoke against it and at the end they parted to let the five men, newly of their ranks, step away from the cliff’s edge and oblivion.
Mergus kept close to them, as a father with children. He took them a little way apart, and brought them water. Slowly, the rest began to disperse, to find water, to gather weapons from the dead, to eat, to sit, to rest.
Watching, Menachem wiped the heel of his hands under his eyes, leaving paler streaks in the battle-dust. It made him look more savage than even the blood on his pale tunic. ‘That was well done,’ he said. ‘This is not a time for needless deaths.’
He was not alone in thinking so. From their place by the store houses, one of the Romans made a joke in sketchy Aramaic. Nearby, a Hebrew man laughed. Death fled from the air.
Pantera said, ‘Mergus will set the banner for Eleazir to see so that the rest of your men know we have victory. If you have doves that will home to the city, have the men send them now so the word is spread as widely as it can be. This is not a time for secrecy; let them know that we are going to drive the legions out of Jerusalem.’
‘And you and I?’ Menachem asked. ‘What are we going to do while the others act for us? Stand and watch?’
The blood on his arm was clotting now, the flesh already beginning to shrink around the wound. He was shaking all over with exertion and the shock of living when others had died.
Pantera, when he took time to look at himself, was exactly the same. It occurred to him that they had not slept in over a day, that they had just fought to the death, and that Menachem did not yet know what the lives and valour of his men had bought for him.
‘Come,’ he said, and held out his hand. ‘Let me show you what Aaron died for.’
The sun was a sheet of spun gold, angling through a window set high in the vaulted roof so that the plane of its incidence fell square across the intricate patterns of red and blue, gold and green, black and white picked out in fine marble chips across the floor.
Menachem stopped at the edge; the brilliance held him back. ‘Herod was Greek, wasn’t he? Not by birth, obviously, but in his soul he worshipped the sun as the Greeks do.’
‘I think he worshipped wealth and power and what they could do for him.’ Pantera had seen the mosaic before. The impact was no less a second time. He said, ‘In this place, he has captured the sun. One does not imprison one’s god.’
‘No.’ Menachem looked down. ‘My feet are soiled.’
‘It’s blood, which is a sacred gift, and in any case, the floor will wash. We must go across. The greatest of Herod’s storerooms is on the far side.’
‘It’ll be locked.’
‘I know where the key is kept.’
Stepping inside, they left smears of old and new blood across the patterned floor, marring its beauty. At the far side, marble steps led down through a high-arched doorway. Beyond, water shimmered under sunlight.
‘Are these baths?’ Menachem asked, in wonder.
‘Have you never seen them?’
‘No. But that was not my surprise; rather that Herod should use water for bathing in a place where every drop is more precious than balsam.’
‘You swam through one of his cisterns and it was neither the largest, nor the nearest. The rock is riddled with others. When it rains here, water drowns everything. All Herod’s engineers had to do was find a way to catch and store it.’
‘They were remarkable men.’
‘They were Hebrews, as you are.’ Pantera stepped into the bathing room and, kneeling at the edge of the baths, ran his fingers along the under-ledge until he came to a recess and in that recess a ball of wax.
Bringing it out, he cracked it open between his hands, as he might crack the egg of a large bird. A four-tongued key glimmered in the centre.
Menachem was standing at the water’s edge, looking down at the mosaics in the pool. Here were gods and nymphs and fantastic beasts with wings and hooves and horns.
‘A golden key?’ he asked.
‘Polished brass.’ Pantera buffed it absently against his tunic. ‘The storeroom is here, by the door to the caldarium.’
The key held the surface shimmer of the wax. It turned the lock with a satisfying solidity. Pantera swung the door back and looked inside.
And looked.
‘Menachem?’ he said.
Menachem came slowly, still mesmerized by the water and the shapes beneath it. ‘I see why our teachers forbid images of men, of women, of beasts. They are too alluring. What have you got in here that could compare to- Oh! ’
Momentarily, he was a child, seeing gold for the first time. Or a starving man offered a banquet. Or the reality, which was a leader of two thousand men who lacked the armour and weapons with which to fight a war that was no longer avoidable.
Softly Pantera said, ‘Herod imprisoned the sun here, too, that it might burnish the arms and armour of his guard.’
Light blazed in from a dozen different windows. It tumbled down on to rack upon rack of mail shirts, of helmets, of greaves, of shield bosses, of sword hilts. It danced, dazzling from shoulder to crown to shin of a thousand imaginary guards.
‘There’s enough here to arm a thousand men, and rearm them when their blades break or they lose their shields over the edge. Elsewhere, there are provisions enough to feed them for ten thousand days.’ Pantera heard pride in his own voice and, this once, did nothing to smother it. ‘These are only Herod’s supplies. The garrison will have had their own: enough for five hundred, plus repairs. With these, we can fit out the foremost among your men as if each one was a legionary.’
Menachem was at his side, shoulder to shoulder, heartbeat to thudding heartbeat. They stood together, welded by sunlight and purpose. ‘And then all we have to do,’ Pantera said, lightly, ‘is teach each man how to fight as if he was Roman.’
Chapter Forty
M C Scott
In haste, but with Jucundus’ impeccable planning, the royal family of Judaea had abandoned Caesarea. In greater haste, with less planning, they packed to flee Jerusalem.
Kleopatra left Iksahra tending her great cat and the falcons in the beast gardens and pushed her way into the palace where slaves, servants, guards, attendants, secretaries, grooms, cooks, vintners, chambermaids and collectors of firewood for the royal family seemed bent on creating for themselves a unique kind of hell in which no one person could speak coherently to any other, or hear what was being said, but where each vied to increase his or her own volume, the better to be heard, and thus, manifestly, reduced the chances of anybody’s hearing him. Or her.
‘Where’s Jucundus? I said Jucundus. Have you seen Juc-’ Kleopatra let go the slave she had caught and ploughed down the corridor to a half-open door beyond which danced a helmet plume in black and white.
‘Jucundus?’ She caught him by the elbow. ‘They say you’re not going to Syria? Why not?’
His eyes were brown and sad, like an aged hound left behind in the kennels when the hunt bays on a fresh trail. ‘I am sent back to Caesarea, lady.’
There was a shadow in his voice that was worse than the pain in his eyes. She knew him, as he knew her: after Agamemnon, he had taken the rough skills of a wild rider and given them a stately polish. He had taught her to fire a bow and to use a sword in the way of the legions, which was more disciplined than Agamemnon’s wild warrior swings.
He had taught her history and Latin and the ways of men in the world. If she had a father, it was not the distant king in a foreign land, who had died too soon and sent her mother back to the court of her childhood, it was this man, who stared at her now, shaking his head, with his lips pressed in a string of silence that warned her — begged her — to ask no more.