Two hateful days later, we emerged into the flat, open eastern end of the pass that the Hebrews called Gabao. It lies a bare eight miles north of Jerusalem in a natural bottleneck with forested mountains rearing up on either side, and the nightmare of a pass behind. Battles have been fought there for hundreds of generations and the men kept finding the debris of dead men’s armour as they dug the latrines: a dented shield boss; a spear head; a clutter of arrowheads left where they fell and never shot, with the shadows of the shafts dark in the sand.
It was a perfect place to hold against a threatening army and we dug in there, building a full legionary marching camp with ditches and spiked redoubts and guarded gates at each quarter. With the mountain slopes rising high on either side and the sky unblemished blue above, it was almost as beautiful as Melitene, and ten times as deadly.
We doubled the watch and slept with our weapons naked by our beds and were glad not to have used them yet.
We woke to a fine, crisp autumn morning, not yet beset by winter rain, where the cook-fires sparked readily on dry tinder and the air rang to the bleat of goats herded in the near distance.
I was standing just outside my tent, fastening a new silvered buckle on my belt, when Horgias found me.
‘Listen!’ He jerked his chin to the south. ‘What do you hear?’
I heard little that I hadn’t heard all morning: the goats, of course, and beyond them the low grumble of armed men making ready for the battle we knew must soon be on us. Swooping birdsong wove through it all, fine as spun silver, snaring my attention.
But Horgias was never wrong, and if I let go of the light, high birds I thought I heard something else beneath and behind them, and then was sure of it: a deep wall of sound like the grinding of mountains across the earth. I wouldn’t have heard it had he not spoken, but it was definitely there.
‘Horses?’ I asked, and when he nodded, ‘How many?’
He looked round to see who was listening. Taurus was within earshot, and Macer, Tears’ shield-man. Neither of them loved us, but both were ready for a fight.
Loudly enough for them to hear, Horgias said, ‘Ten thousand? Maybe more. It takes a lot of cavalry to make that kind of noise.’
Tears sat on a log closer than either of the others, rubbing tallow into the straps of his shield. ‘They can’t be from Jerusalem,’ he said. ‘It’s their Sabbath. They never fight on the Sabbath. Their god forbids it.’
We had men with us, first-born sons of the elders of Sepphoris in Galilee, who had come with us as hostages to their fathers’ good behaviour. They counted the days in sevens and refused to do anything but eat and pray on oneday in the cycle. They had told us all other Hebrews were the same and we had believed them.
‘Maybe their god’s given them special dispensation,’ I said.
‘Or maybe they’ve abandoned that god for one that allows battle any day they like.’ Tears propped his shield near the fire where the tallow could warm its way into the leather and rose to grip my arm. ‘Either way, I think we might have a battle on our hands.’
An actual battle. At last.
Around me, men were stirring with a new fire. I saw smiles, none of them directed at me. Then I looked at Tears and saw a look on his face of the kind I hadn’t seen in four years.
‘Someone had better tell Lupus,’ I said, and Horgias bounded off, leaving the rest of us to prepare.
‘It’ll be a good fight.’ Tears let go of my arm, but the prints of his fingers stayed, like living ghosts.
‘It had better be.’ I was grinning like a fool. I clasped his shoulders in return. ‘The men will mutiny soon if it isn’t.’
Dipping into my tent, I caught up my shield, my helm with its red plume set crosswise, my neck chain with the rings I had won in the siege at Tigranocerta a lifetime ago, when I was a different man.
Normally, I had to shout simply to catch a man’s attention. Here, now, the eyes of five hundred men followed every step I took and every man among them had surged to his feet before I turned back to shout the order.
‘Get yourselves dressed! We have a battle to fight!’
They moved fast as mice in a corn spill, and not only my cohort. Around us, other centurions took up the cry and soon the whole camp was arming.
All around, I saw tight battle-grins on the faces of men who had spent four years barely managing not to spit when I passed. They were not my friends yet, but they were not the enemies they had been the day before.
Horgias returned, bearing the cohort standard of the open hand with the double thunderbolts beneath it, and the mule’s tail hanging free. He wore a wolfskin, not the muleskin, for that had been Syrion’s and had gone on to his pyre. The gape-mouthed wolf suited Horgias better: he had the same wildness in his eyes, the same white teeth to flash at the enemy.
Now, he held out his own hand, palm up. I laid mine on it, and Tears laid his atop both. ‘Come out alive,’ I said, and felt the pulse of each, above and below, and believed it a promise of the gods.
For the first time in four years, the cohort lined up behind us without my asking. Not a man was out of place. Most of them didn’t love their legion yet, but they were determined to march disciplined to war.
Like this, in tight order, we marched forward to take our place in the right hand side of the rearmost rank battle lines; the place of honour, where we would take most pressure, and must not yield.
We had a steep, treeless slope to our right, and two lines of men before. Behind was nothing but the ditches and spiked earthworks of our marching camp, and, a long, long way back, three cohorts of the IVth who held all our heavy artillery and had no idea what we were doing.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The sun was in our faces, not quite low enough to be difficult. In front, the Hebrew army was a ripe pestilence spread across the perfect land ahead of us; rank upon ragged rank of men marching in no particular order.
Some wore mail and helmets, some bore shields and swords and spears exactly as if they were just another legion, but the bulk of them were barely armoured, and bore the long-hafted spears of the sort whose heads littered the dry soil of Gabao, and short shields, and arrows with piebald fletchings. They looked like no army I had ever seen, and even at this distance, with more than an arrow’s flight between us, they howled with a hatred we had not yet met in Judaea.
A proper fight. My hands were wet with sweat. I flexed my fingers on the grip of my shield and was glad of the soft leather there and the moss padded tight underneath it. My gladius was in my hand and I didn’t know I’d drawn it.
To my left, I saw Tears wet his lips and raise the horn, ready to sound the advance. But not yet. We were the third rank and for now we had to stand firm, hold our place and watch the lines in front of us step forward into battle. Which they did, shouting.
The two sides met in a clamour of flesh and blood and armour. Men screamed in pain and fury. Horns brayed commands, sweeping great blocks of fighting men left or right or forward, to hold a line or pull it back.
Legion, cohort and century banners dipped and swayed, sending out orders that stitched together those parts of the lines where the din was too loud for the horns to be heard, and in the thick of it men died, and their killers were killed, and those killers died in their turn, some swiftly, spraying blood from wide wounds, some more slowly, of crueller strokes. Some lost their balance and died underfoot, which is the worst way to go in this kind of fight, lying in the dark, clawing for breath, seeing the nails come at your face.
Our men fought well. Even the second and fourth cohorts, which had been ranged in a thin line in front of the main battle ranks, had thrown themselves at the foe with a fervour I wouldn’t have believed they owned, so that the first clash of men and iron had sent the carrion crows crying into the air, flapping raggedly off to less dangerous shelter in the trees that ranged the pass, there to await the evening’s bounty of dead and dying men.