I spun, and came up against Pantera’s sword, jabbed at my face.
‘Leave it. There are too many of them.’
‘For you maybe, but-’
‘For anybody.’ His sword fell. ‘There’s a route out at the back of the cave. If you stay here, you’re dead men.’ And he was gone, shouting in Aramaic to men who lifted the body of the king.
I looked at Horgias. I looked at the Eagle, which was thirty paces away and might as well have been a thousand. I looked at Eleazir’s men, at the hate on their faces: they didn’t know that we were the enemies of their enemy and therefore their friends; nor did they care.
We had two choices that were only one real choice. I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the Eagle. ‘We can’t get it back if we’re dead,’ I said.
We ran.
I rode a Berber colt in the fighting retreat from Jerusalem and hated every silken stride.
He was younger than the mare, and more skittish, an iron grey rather than the full white of age; her son, perhaps, or a distant cousin. Sharp and wary of combat, he jilted and napped and kicked and bolted so that only the horsemanship of the woman Hypatia behind me kept him facing in the right direction and kept us both upright, and unscathed.
I could have held him. I could have ridden him better, but I sat before her, as children are seated, or captive women, and the shame broke my heart.
Pantera rode behind us, last of the line, holding Menachemin front of him on his milk-white mare, for if they had lost the Eagle and the kingdom they still had the dead man, and would not leave him behind, however much he hampered our escape.
Pantera bore the bow I had dropped and my quiver with nine arrows remaining and he used all nine in our flight and others that were brought him, firing back over his saddle in the way of the Parthian bowmen.
In spite of myself, I skewed round to watch and saw him hit at least two out of three that he aimed for and in the end this must have caused our pursuers to drop back because we reached our destination at a walk, unchallenged, with only the old moon rising to show us what we faced.
It was as well, I think, for by then we were exhausted and parched and light-headed for hunger. To have seen in full daylight the jagged mountains that reared high above the desert, to have understood what we must climb — that would have finished us.
As it was, we followed Mergus, the wiry centurion, as he dismounted and led his horse along a winding path in the semi-dark and it was enough to see the horse in front, to keep in line as he climbed an ever steepening gully with a fall on either side. They cut our bonds partway up that we could hold our balance, and there was no risk to it; by then we were beyond all thoughts of escape.
The way was harsh and hard and we trudged it as men in a nightmare, not knowing where we were going or why.
At the top, the path opened out into a kind of cleft, a valley of sorts, surrounded on three sides by rock and on the fourth by a makeshift wall of rock rubble piled up to keep men from blundering over the edge in the dark.
There were signs of others here before us: fist-sized stones set in rings for fires; a stinking area to the east that had been used as a latrine not long ago; steps cut in the mountain rockleading up to sentry points. Half of Pantera’s men went to these now, unasked, to keep watch back down the way we had come.
Horgias and I were given water and food and lay down behind a rock and slept fitfully, to busy, blood-filled dreams.
Chapter Thirty-One
‘I will shroud him in nothing less than light itself.’
I woke in the dark from dreams of Tears and this voice, the arrogance of it, dragged me upright.
‘Build here, where the sun strikes at dawn and dusk. He will have first light in the morning and last light at night. In this place, it is possible. We didn’t carry him all this way for nothing.’
Dreamstruck as I was, I rose and flung myself from the shade of the rock in which I had been lying out into blistering sunshine.
But no Pantera. Instead, I faced a small gaggle of men, just over a dozen in all, the last remnants of his group. Hypatia, the woman, was moving stones and scribing lines on the valley floor where they must create the tomb they needed.
The centurion Mergus was nearby, and Estaph the Parthian axe-giant, and a handful of Hebrews, all of them bearing wounds of varying severity from yesterday’s battles. But no Pantera.
I looked around for him, and they, in their turn, looked at me, save for a nearby slave who wrestled with a blockof stone the size of a bull calf. The size of the stone and the effort he put into moving it were not exceptional, but what caught my eye, what made me stand and stare when I myself was the object of other men’s attention, was the scarring on his back.
Rarely have I seen flesh so scarred on a living man, certainly not on a man of healthy proportions as this one was. His muscles corded like iron as he put his shoulder to the block, but the skin that lay over was white with lines, not of a whip, but of burns, as if men had drawn them with heated irons, over and over, so close together that the scars outweighed the whole flesh.
He turned, stung by my silence, and I saw, with shock, that his chest bore the mark of the IInd legion and this was certainly poker work, for the words LEG II AUG were drawn with such clarity that he must have been tied firmly, or unconscious, when it was done.
More than the burns, his right shoulder was a cluster of ruined tissue, caught in sworls that I have only seen when a spear has been passed straight through from one side to the other. His left ankle bore much the same signs of destruction.
I looked last at his face, and only then because he had finally ceased his labours and was standing with his hands on his hips, giving every sign of weary patience, which was not usual for a slave.
‘ Pantera? ’
‘Demalion.’ Pantera swept the sweat from his face with his forearm. ‘If you want to help us build Menachem’s tomb, you’re free to do so. Otherwise, I recommend you drink water and eat and rest. Today is for Menachem; it’s already past the time when he should have been laid to rest. Tomorrow, we can begin to work on how to get your Eagle-’
The sun, the skin-stripping wind, the height; all of themwere with me. I was as naked as he was; unclothed by strange hands in my sleep, deprived of my weapons.
But in a valley this high, I needed no knife, or blade, or bow. I ran at him, head down like a bull, aiming for the place on his chest where the legion mark had been wrought with fire and pain, crashing into it, powering on, aiming for the lip of piled rocks at the high edge that was all that kept us safe from carelessness, but not safe from anyone bent on dying.
I carried Tears with me, and Lupus, Syrion and Macer, Taurus and Proclion: every man of the XIIth who had died for his treachery. We powered together towards the frail rock wall and the long, long drop below it, and Pantera was swept with us, his fingers fighting for a hold on my back, where was only skin, and nothing for him to grasp.
I heard him cough an oath, felt the moment when he saw the danger, when he felt his own death rushing at him. Then, cursing, he dropped down, slid from my grasp, writhed his sweat-oiled body beneath me and, with the elastic skill of an acrobat, raised a knee, I think, or an elbow, and slammed it into the soft parts of my belly, raising me up, throwing me over his head, spinning towards the high, lethal edge I hit the rubble wall and fell, and lay at its foot, crumpled, bleeding from a scalp wound, too winded to move, or even to breathe.
A fist grabbed my hair and dragged my head up. Pantera’s face loomed close to mine. ‘You can die when you’ve got your Eagle back,’ he said tightly. ‘Until then, you have a duty to stay alive.’
He dropped my head and stood. ‘Tie him,’ he said to someone beyond my shoulder. ‘But bring him when the tomb’s ready. He needs to understand the enormity of what he’s done.’