‘So we have to be ready to run,’ he said. ‘Soon.’
‘Can you see them?’
‘I saw the spark of sunlight on armour when we-’
‘ Down! ’ I pushed him sideways, clinging on to him at thesame time, to keep him from falling off the ledge. The rock that hurtled down from above missed him by a hand’s breadth. Tears was wrestling with his horn a dozen paces behind. There was no time. I took a breath and screamed my lungs out.
‘ Run! ’
Like hunted deer, we ran, and like hunted deer they picked us off, one by one, harrying us ever forward, so that even when we made it off that bloody ledge and on to something approaching flat ground again in the valley’s depths, we were never able to come together in proper formation.
Their slingers and archers picked on the cavalry and then on the infantry, driving us from side to side across the pass and killing, killing, killing from mid-morning until the end of the afternoon and into the evening.
We should have been through and out the other side by then. We should have been halfway to Caesarea, but we had spent so much time scurrying for cover that we had made less than half of the progress we had done the last time we ran in this direction.
Only darkness saved us. When it was too dark to see, the Hebrews stopped wasting their spears, their arrows, their slingshot, their rocks, and we were left huddling in our units, waiting for instruction.
We lit no fires in the beginning, but sat where we had stopped, and Lupus had to walk amongst us, calling in the centurions.
We had no tents, and so met at a place only a little apart from the main body of our men.
Lupus gave the losses first. The allied infantry and cavalry had taken the greatest losses this time, for they were least armoured and least able to manage the constant unpredictable assaults. Most of them were dead. Out of a force of forty thousand that had left Antioch, and of twenty-two thousand that had left Jerusalem, we were reduced to ten thousand.
‘And by tomorrow we will all be gone,’ Lupus said. ‘There is no way out of here alive.’
‘Unless we go by night,’ Gallus said. ‘Now, in fact.’
‘No.’ Priscus was dead. The new leader of the VIth was named Festus and he spoke before Lupus as if rank had no meaning any more. ‘They’ll know. If we don’t light fires, if we don’t set guards that they can see, they’ll know we’ve gone. And if we can go, they can surely follow.’
There was a moment’s silence. I thought men were embarrassed at his intervention, but then I saw that Lupus was looking at Gallus and Gallus was looking back and there was an understanding between them.
‘The XIIth will stay,’ Lupus said. ‘We are less than a thousand men now. We shall stay here and light a thousand fires, so that it looks as if ten thousand men have camped for the night. The Hebrews won’t realize the deception until dawn. You should be clear of the pass by then.’
There was an uncomfortable moment in which nobody but me met Lupus’ eye. Then Gallus, nodding, said, ‘Name three centuries to escape with us. To carry the Eagle and the cohort standards that the XIIth might live beyond this night, and be honoured for your courage.’
‘ No! ’ Lupus and I spoke together.
I said, ‘We fought once before without our Eagle. We will never do so again.’
And Lupus, in much the same breath, said, ‘The Twelfth will never survive the shame of a second defeat. Let us die here, and be honoured at least for this much courage, and let our legion die with us.’
A new silence held the other men, of a quite different quality. Men touched their brows, in a mark of silent respect.
‘It will be as you wish,’ Gallus said. ‘We shall reach Caesarea and we shall return in spring with enough men to bring Jerusalem to its knees. Your sacrifice will not be in vain.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
We were eight hundred; all that was left of the XIIth legion, not including the cavalry. Cadus had begged to be allowed to stay, but he was the only surviving officer of the cavalry and Gallus had ordered him to lead his men safely through the pass.
And so we were left, we veterans who had lived through the humiliation of Raphana, and those who had joined us since, and we were not divided now; only by thinking hard could we remember that we had not always been as brothers.
I don’t think any man amongst us begrudged those who were leaving. In that, if nothing else, it was like the battle at Lizard Pass, when we counted ourselves lucky to be allowed to face Vologases’ cataphracts while others fled. This time, though, we intended that those who left us must get clear away, and so we threw ourselves into the deception.
Taurus organized five hundred men in groups of four to forage for firewood, noisily. The rest of us built fires, lit them, stood around them, spoke quietly, laughed, cooked and shared a meal, then passed on to the next one and did the same again, all with our standards in the centre; not so close to any fire that they might be counted, but closeenough for the Eagle to catch the light of a dozen fires and be burnished by them, so that it hung over us, suspended in the black night, casting its own light back down on our helms and our armour as we moved and talked and moved again. None of us slept.
I found Tears just before daybreak; or rather, I allowed myself to go to him, when I had not through the night. He was sitting on an upturned shield with his knees hugged to his chin. He said nothing as I came near, only shifted a little by his fire as if to make space in a crowd and handed me a new-baked oatcake, hot and steaming, scorched a little at the edges, as I liked it, so that I could taste fire and corn and the melting sweetness at its heart, where the dough was still soft.
I had the Parthian war bow with me, slung over my shoulder. He had still not seen me shoot it, not properly; he had always been too busy.
‘Have you any arrows for that?’ he asked.
‘None.’ I unhooked it and held it balanced on my open palms. ‘I could burn it. The wood’s strong and true. It would hold a flame a long time.’
‘No, you couldn’t.’ His smile flashed and was gone. ‘If you were going to do that, you’d have done it half a night ago, when the cold began to bite. Let someone find it. A good bow deserves to be used.’
‘Even against us?’
‘It won’t be against us. We’ll be dead. We won’t care, and I don’t think the bow will care either. You’ve killed enough with it to balance your side of the scales. It can help another man to do the same.’
‘Maybe.’ Firelight rippled the white wood in colours of amber, copper and bronze. I watched it a while, seeing the glyphs on the inner face march up the length of the body to the curved horn tips and back again. I still had no idea what they said.
Presently, I put it away and we sat in silence, watching the flames and each other until Horgias and Taurus came to stir the embers of a fire nearby and we joined them, to lay on more wood. When, shortly after, Macer joined us, and then Lupus, we felt complete.
Taurus, too, had made oatcakes, which we shared, along with those from Tears’ fire, as if it were a god’s day, to celebrate.
I had two in my hands, and was steaming myself in their scent, when Macer lifted from his tunic a small fired pot the size of a hen’s egg, with honey bees marked in scored lines round the sides.
‘I have this,’ he said, and we all looked at him, for the shyness with which he had said it; Macer had never been a shy man.
‘Honey?’ Tears laughed. ‘Have you carried that all the way from Antioch, just for this?’
‘Further than that.’ Macer was grinning like a fool. ‘I brought it from Moesia when I was ordered to leave the Seventh. I thought that if I ever had occasion to share it, I would know I was a man of the Twelfth at last.’