From the Hebrew side came a single cry of anguish, high-pitched, like a woman’s: ‘Menachem! My lord king is struck!’
And then the enemy did notice who had fallen and it was as if the force of their fighting slammed headlong into solid stone.
Never have I seen the flow of battle stemmed so completely. In one moment they were assaulting us on all sides and we were close to overwhelmed, and in the next we had room to move, to swing our sword arms, to reach out and kill men whose attention was all turned away from us, towards their stricken lord.
‘He lives!’ The voice cried in Greek, from a Roman throat, but the men that called it afterwards in Aramaic were Hebrew.
‘A line!’ I dropped the bow and raised my sword. Stepping forward, I shouted left and right, hoarse from the screams of combat. ‘Make a line on the Eagle! Advance!’
Battles can turn on a single moment and we, who had seen enough of them turn against us in the past, felt the gods lay this one open for us to turn it our way.
I felt Tears to my right, Horgias on my left; I think Taurus was still there as his shield-man. With our shields locked, we stepped forward and forward, building speed and power with each stride. I was dizzy with pride. I saw Hebrew men half turn to me and slew them without care, without pause. I sang, I think, but cannot remember what.
The enemy parted before me like corn before a storm. I looked down the long tunnel of space they made and there was a man lying at the end of it, with the stump of a broken arrow rising up from his chest.
A single man dressed in perfect white knelt and cradled his head, except when I looked again it seemed the white-clad aide was a woman: nothing was impossible now, not even that a woman should be on a battlefield.
She raised her eyes and looked at me and I saw darkness and heard the songs of all the dead and knew that he had gone, this self-styled king, and that grief for such a death made men weak.
I raised my shield and drove forward my sword and thought that if we could get to him we could kill also his successors, because the heirs always gather round the death-place of their fallen lord.
And so our line became a wedge, that fabled machine of Alexander that can cleave a battlefield in two if the lead man has only the courage of his charge. I was the tip of the arrow, the nose of the boar as it hurtles at its victim. I had all the courage in the legions.
‘ For the Twelfth! ’
I charged, screaming, drawing the wedge with me. Together, we split the enemy asunder.
Men fell over themselves to get out of our way until somewhere near the king a man stood who had been kneeling and in a voice that had commanded battlefields shouted in Greek, ‘Stop them! Mergus! Estaph! Block that wedge! ’
The voice sank into my lungs, my loins, my heart, unsettling all of them. But it did not stop my charge.
I was five paces from the king… four… two… my whole weight behind my shield, bowling fast as a horse, and then Stopped.
Stopped on the rock of the giant Parthian who had picked up a shield and punched it at mine. I ran into it as into the face of a cliff.
The full weight of my charge pounded into him and he did not so much as shudder. I felt men crowd in behind me, Tears at my right shoulder, Horgias at my left, and even the three of us, with others behind, could not push him over.
I abandoned the effort, shouted instead, ‘Shield ring on the Eagle!’ and in three beats Horgias was enfolded within our shields and we stood again, bare yards from the fallen king, while a Latin voice shouting in Hebrew and Aramaic drew order out of the enemy’s chaos.
Looking past the Parthian giant’s flank, I watched a small group of men lift the stricken king and bear him from the fray. I saw the Roman with the red shoulder cloak pause in salute, then turn and, still shouting orders, throw himself into combat.
We held our ground but our advantage was gone and they came at us savage with a grief-rage that we all knew too well, but could not raise in ourselves, for we were spent by then, fit only to stand and die.
We were two dozen, and then a dozen, and then eight andthen four, me and Tears, Horgias and Taurus, back to back with the Eagle above us and dead men crowding our feet.
I felt Taurus go down and would have turned to help Horgias, but Tears was under pressure from a small, wiry Roman with legion marks on his arms and a look of such impossible anguish on his face that I thought he might die of it, there, in front of us.
Instead, he assaulted Tears with a savagery that made the whole battle seem like the pattering of fools; he struck his shield against Tears’ sword hand, batting it down, cut with his gladius under Tears’ own shield, then feinted over the top and even as I was turning, trying to get my blade between them, stabbed in and down and through and suddenly my face was awash with Tears’ blood and the sounds of his dying and I would have dropped my blade to catch him but that Horgias screamed, ‘ Demalion! Look out!’ and I swear it was the sun’s flame on the Eagle that made me spin to my right and catch the blow that came for my head, and twist it away and stab through to pierce the eye of the one who had just tried to kill me. He died, screaming, clutching at his face. I pulled my gladius free and stepped back.
And now we were only two. Horgias and I were left alone, the last to die, and we did not have to say aloud that we must die together. I caught his eye or he caught mine and we knew it our last look, and cherished it. A last breath, a last sight of the Eagle, of all that we cared for, and in that breath’s end, together we raised our blades and hurled ourselves at ‘ Demalion? ’
The sword that struck for my chest jerked away.
A half-remembered face stared at me, blinking, and that inescapably Roman voice, the one that even now commanded the battlefield, said, in astonishment, ‘Demalion of Macedon?’ And then, ‘Mergus, leave him! Estaph, stop! Take them alive! It’s over.’
‘No!’
I punched my shield at his face and swung my sword in a killing arc around my head, and threw myself bodily at the traitor who had controlled this battle and those before it.
I reached him. I cut straight for his face. He was gone. I slewed to my left ‘Estaph! Take him!’
He was a giant of a man, that Parthian. I felt his shadow fall over me and arms come round me and too late knew what he planned. There was no shield in his grasp, no sword, only two fists like bear paws that met under my diaphragm and rammed the air out of me even as they raised me up and slammed me down; once, twice, three times, until the sword fell from my numbed fingers and my shield was gone and even my helmet rattled beyond my knees.
Horgias was similarly held, though the men who tried to capture him were smaller and he fought like a wild beast until they had to sling ropes about his shoulders to subdue him.
Other men took the Eagle. I saw the sun-kissed gold passed back from hand to hand to hand as if it were just another spoil of war until it was lost from sight in the greater mass of the Hebrew army. Soon there were shouts and a tussle as men fought over its possession.
Locked in the giant Parthian’s embrace, I was still struggling, desperate to die. The Roman commander stood in front of me holding the bow I had dropped. The quiver was still at my hip, with the white fletchings plain to see, naming me openly as the one who had killed his king.
He raised his hand. I thought he was about to strike me and braced myself for it, but he turned it into a gesture so eloquent in its futility that I knew him: Sebastos Pantera, former spy for the emperor, had turned traitor and was leading the Hebrews.
In shock, I spat at his face. Pantera barely noticed. He was staring past my shoulder to where his men squabbled over the Eagle. He shouted an order in urgent, fluent Aramaic, and others after it, curt, sharp, hard as any legate on the field.
Twisting round, I saw some measure of order drawn from the chaos, enough for a phalanx of men to gather round the body of the dead king and his milk-white Berber mare. I saw the woman in white raise her arm from the thick of it, a signal of success.