And there, caught between the two hordes, was a clutter of figures at the side of the road. Pantera caught a glimpse of white linen and black limbs and, beside them, long black hair and a single sword held high…
‘ Kleopatra! Iksahra! Move back! Keep out of the way!’
He saw them skip back into the shadows of the Upper Market, far enough not to be run down, and then he was past, bearing down on the garrison. He wrenched round in the saddle, torn, unable to slow, or break free. From three ranks back, he heard Yusaf shout, ‘I’ll see to them!’ and saw him peel his mount away from the margins of the group just ahead of the first clash.
In so far as there had been time to think at all, Pantera had hoped that sheer mass of numbers and the weight of their momentum might break the guards’ shieldwall early and fast. It did not do so.
The initial impact rocked the garrison back on their heels, but the men of Menachem’s army were largely untrained and their horses unused to war; they had no knowledge of how to form a wedge, how to split open the shieldwall and force apart the legionaries into ever smaller packs of encircled men.
Pantera had read of such things and knew them possible, but here, now, he found himself in a chaos of spooked horses and unseated men, of blades held cack-handed that failed to bite, of white, shocked faces and the sight of grown men weeping.
Ahead, the men of the garrison Guard set up a new shout and the rear ranks redoubled the thunderous drumming of their sword hilts on their shields. Hit broadside by the noise, horses reared and bucked in terror, unseating riders as unsuited to war as they were.
Pantera swore, viciously. Flinging his own mount round, he shouted above the throng. ‘Men of Israeclass="underline" dismount! Menachem! Order the dismount!’
Menachem tried. For honour, for sanity, for the chance of winning his city, the new king of Israel filled his lungs and bawled the order to dismount in four different languages: in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in Greek and in Latin.
The garrison Guard laughed to hear the last two, and raised the volume of their clamour. Menachem’s mounted men either couldn’t hear or didn’t understand, or were simply incapable of leaving the saddle and delivering themselves whole, on their feet, to the safe, solid ground, ready to fight.
Pantera wheeled his horse. Menachem was a dozen feet away, slashing his own sword left and right. The raging milk-white mare did more damage than a man ever could, striking out with teeth and feet at anyone, of either side, who came within reach.
Pantera saw her kill one of the garrison Guard who made the mistake of running at her, as if to mount behind Menachem. She wheeled, lashing out with both hind feet, and his face dissolved in a plash of blood and bone and white teeth. His body arced high into the air. At the apex of its arc, Iksahra passed him, running at a different, riderless horse. She was mounted before he hit the ground.
She spun the new mount without reins. Her face was spattered with dried blood, pale against her dark skin. Her arm was cut above the elbow; a clean wound, with sharp edges that had ceased to bleed.
‘Look out!’ Pantera killed the man who might have assaulted her. She swung her mount and let it kill another. He had not realized that this, too, was one of her horses. Perhaps it wasn’t, and simply all horses became trained to battle when she mounted; today, this morning, with the sun not yet on the hill beyond, anything was possible.
Feeling more confident, he swung back to face the mass of armed men ahead of them with Iksahra a white and black killing machine at one shoulder, Menachem fighting doggedly at the other and Mergus — blessed of Mithras, he heard his voice above the fray — martialling the foot soldiers somewhere beyond his left flank.
Even so, the garrison Guard was disciplined and well led; trumpeters sounded high, harsh notes and men moved to their command, pushing in, step by brutal step, crushing everything.
To his right and his left, Pantera shouted, ‘The captain! We need to kill the captain!’
He pointed ahead to where white plumes, tall as a man’s arm, waved like a beacon at the battlefield’s edge. Together, he, Menachem and Iksahra fought towards him, slashing, hacking, wounding more than killing, but staying alive, which was all that mattered.
The plumes danced ahead, always a little away from the fighting, always shouting out new orders to the trumpeters, who sent them to the men. As they approached, the Guard split into two groups and manoeuvred in perfect synchrony, so that one part stepped out and round, in a long wheeling arc, while the other pushed inwards.
Pantera shouted, ‘Kill him now or we’re-’
He stopped because everybody else had stopped; each man’s shout cut off as if a god’s hand had hammered past, sucking away all the air. But it hadn’t been a god; a thousand men had drawn breath all at once, in surprise, in shock, in terror, in delight.
In the hair’s breadth of hush, Pantera hauled his mount left, to the city, and so saw what the others had already seen.
‘God of all gods,’ he whispered. ‘Gideon has come.’ Nobody heard him, for Gideon had not come alone, nor with only the two hundred men he had taken with him; he had come with the whole of Jerusalem and the moment’s silence was annihilated under the sound of their cry: ‘ Jerusalem! ’
Hundreds came, thousands, tens of thousands, too many to count, all the men of Jerusalem, and their wives, their sons, their daughters, their grandmothers, lame on their sticks; everyone and anyone who could run or walk was flooding now from the streets on either side of the Upper Market, here to free their city from the yoke of occupation.
They surged towards the garrison Guard, armed with kitchen knives and pestles, with sickles and smithing irons and rods with sharpened ends for poking at goats, with axes and hammers and lengths of wood ripped from their doorways.
Most of all, as the hordes of Jerusalem always did, they came armed with stones and they threw them now, hard, aiming for their enemies’ legs, for the soft skin behind their knees, for their shins, for their Achilles tendons, where, like the hero, they might be weak.
A dozen or more had slings, and used them with startling accuracy on the men who were executing the pincer movement. Within a dozen heartbeats, thirty men of the garrison Guard had fallen, and the rest were no longer concentrating on the enemy in front, but were turning, haphazardly, to face those behind.
And then Pantera saw their captain. A break opened in the lines, a flash of sun on a helmet that drew his eyes past a trumpeter… he saw him in profile: soft nose, a little upturned, curls of dark hair escaping the confines of his helmet, and an arrogance that no other man in Judaea had ever truly matched.
‘ Saulos! ’
Pantera’s roar outdid the trumpeter. The standing plumes flew aslant as Saulos turned his head, not towards him, but back to a tent-party of eight men who stood a dozen yards behind the others, separate from the fighting. At his shout, they turned away and ran for the palace. He sprinted to catch up and they opened to take him, a smooth move that drew him in and held him secure in their heart. He flung the helmet away as he ran; white plumes lay rocking in the dirt behind them.
Pantera spun his horse so hard that it reared. He caught Iksahra’s eye. They did not need words; a look was enough, and in it, one name: Hypatia.
Together they pushed their horses away from the conflict, following where Saulos had gone.
Hypatia sat alone in the dark and the abominable cold and listened to the stamp and clatter of the last guard change.
Light flared at the corner. The incoming and outgoing guards exchanged murmured Latin: ‘There’s war outside; we’re winning. How is it here? Are they well? Yes, all well. As well as can be on their last night. They’ll be lucky if it is their last night. I’ve seen crucified men live three days.’