When I stood up to the line again, I had the bow in my hand and an arrow nocked, ready to shoot. No one was laughing now. The ease and peace of the morning was gone with the mist, in its place an unyielding hardness and an urge to kill and keep on killing.
‘If I live,’ I said grimly, ‘I will kill the king and the men around him. Just let them come within range so I don’t waste the arrows.’
‘We shall keep you alive, then,’ Lupus said. ‘You can be the last one to hold the Eagle.’
Around me, Tears, Horgias and Taurus spoke their assent in their different ways. It was a pact sealed with Macer’s blood, heard by the gods who knew our standard and all who had died beneath it already.
Taking the Eagle with us, we began to march towards the oncoming army.
They offered us peace.
A small man with a huge nose stepped forward from their ranks, bearing a shield decorated with the eagle’s wings and thunderbolts of the XIVth Martia Victrix, which was renowned for its role in suppressing the revolt in Britain.
He raised a gladius high above his head. I thought both it and the shield stolen, until he spoke in the nasal tones of northern Italy and labelled himself undeniably Roman; three of them, then, at least: three traitors to Rome. I spat on the ground.
‘Men of the Twelfth!’ That voice carried over us all, hoarse as a crow’s. ‘You have served your masters valiantly, holding this place while they scurried for safety. Your fight is no longer theirs. There is no reason for you to die here ina forgotten valley. Join with us who fight for Menachem, the rightful king of Jerusalem. He honours us, as the Emperor Nero honours us, and as he will honour you!’
He was met by silence. I was not in the front rank, but I felt no move from them to answer him. Lupus was our leader. I glanced at him and down at my Parthian bow.
‘In range?’ Lupus asked, barely moving his lips.
‘Easily.’
The men around me stepped away a little. Seeing the movement, the Roman smiled and spread his hands in welcome, presenting all his mailed chest as a target.
I could have shot him in the chest, but I remembered Macer and aimed instead for his face. He fell, soundless, just as Macer had done.
For one heartbeat longer, there was stillness. Then the killing — and the dying — began.
I didn’t use the bow to begin with; with Macer gone, I was Tears’ shield-man. He had no horn; I had no particular command. We were free to fight as brothers, shoulder to shoulder as we had done at Tigranocerta, but not truly since. It suited us.
We held our shields aloft when they showered us with arrows and slingshot, and when these stopped, having killed fewer than twenty of us, we brought our shields down and met the charge of their armoured men, Romans and Hebrews mixed, with a giant Parthian axeman somewhere in their midst and a Roman who commanded Hebrews as if they were legionaries.
I saw none of those. Nor, for a long time, did I see the king on the milk-white Berber mare. By default, we had made a block with each man facing outwards and I was facing west, away from Jerusalem, the rising sun and the king.
His men surrounded us and the fighting was much as it had been at Gabao — except that now we too had nothing to lose, and threw ourselves into the battle with the same careless frenzy as did the Hebrews.
I had not thought we had been restrained by fear of death before, but felt it gone now, and in its place a dizzying joy that gave speed to my sword arm, and weight to my shield, that bathed me in the light of the Eagle, so that I floated above the earth and moved from kill to kill to kill, at times cutting in and down, at times kneeling to come up under a carelessly high shield, and always with Tears at my right hand and Lupus at my left and Horgias with the standard just over my left shoulder and Taurus keeping him safe as a bull with its calf.
A spear stabbed for my face. I batted it down and stamped on it and felt it break and let my foot slide up the haft and my weight with it and put my whole body behind my shield and tasted blood as it crushed the nose of the man who had just tried to kill me.
I spat and stabbed and he was gone and there was another in his place, who lifted his sword too high and was killed by Lupus even as I slashed at the eyes of the man who was trying to kill Tears, and it was this we had trained for over and over, this was the machine we had become, where each man saved his fellows not for love or honour or mercy, but because it was what our bodies knew how to do. Freed at last from the burden of hope, they needed no other calling.
The sun rose over us as our square grew smaller. However well trained, men made mistakes, and when each one died, we stepped back and closed the gap, leaving a corpse on the damp turf. There were no wounded.
Lupus fell first of us who grouped closest to the Eagle. They sent a wedge of six against him, hoping to break us by his loss. He took the leader squarely on his shield, bracing against him, slashing down and up from shins to face and throat. I took the next and Tears the one after and we eachkilled our man swiftly enough, but someone faltered on Lupus’ left and three of them came at him, carving into the space left by one careless man so that there was room for a blade to seek the back of his head.
He saw them coming and turned away, not out of fear, but that I might see his face, and he mine, and that I might hear him when he said, ‘Into the centre. Your bow. Now!’
He was gone, hard as a felled tree, and the enemy were amongst us, pushing through the breach in our lines, heading for Horgias and the Eagle, which he had carried into the centre of the formation, although in truth we were so few and so close now that we were more of a bunch than a square.
‘Rally! To the Eagle. Stand hard!’ I screamed, hoping someone might hear, and felt Tears at my side, hacking, hacking, no longer in good order, slicing at limbs that might have been those of our side, but mostly were not.
I found myself back to back with Horgias, with the Eagle high above.
‘The bow!’ Tears shouted in my ear. ‘Use it now while there’s still time. We’ll keep you safe.’
I was already unslinging it, feeling for the arrows in the quiver at my belt. Ten; I had thought seven remained, but there were ten. I nocked and turned and scanned the horizon for the king on the white Berber horse.
And saw it, so close; a milk-white mare that my father would have given his soul to see even in a paddock of an evening. Here, in battle, it was a mount of the gods.
I was close enough to see the width and depth of its eyes, to see the broad, flat brow and the ears pricked small, beloved of Xenophon. I saw the red flare of its inner nostril, the soft moleskin velvet of its milk-white muzzle. I saw the prick of whiskers on its face, black on white.
And I saw the face of the man who rode it, who fought from horseback with long, swinging strokes of a cavalrysword. A man whose black hair flowed like a mane from under his gilded helmet, whose eyes were alert, darting back and forth, holding the edge of the battle that we might not break to our south.
And I saw his chest, and the mail that was on it, and remembered Pantera in a forest, who had killed another king. The bow I held now was better than his had been then; the arrows were longer, and the tips designed only for this one task.
I drew, sighted and loosed.
The brief bliss of honey and the hum of droning bees ended in the whistle-crack of a direct hit.
In the battle’s fury, very few on the enemy side noticed at first that their king had been struck. He himself sat a moment, staring in weary surprise at the arrow that grew from his breast, much as the treacherous son of the King of Kings had done all those years ago in Hyrcania. But this king fell slowly, not being strapped into the saddle as the usurper had been.
A ragged cheer spilled from half a hundred throats; all of us that were left.