Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (30 page)

Four storeys high, faced in unblemished white stone, it had guards set at the foot of its marble steps and an oak palisade stretching beyond one wall, from behind which came the sounds of—

‘Is that a beast garden?’

‘Well done.’ Tears was grinning widely enough to split his face in half. ‘They have Berber horses in there, and hounds from Egypt. Horgias says …’

Berber horses!
I felt my jaw grow slack. My father would have given his right arm even to see one of those. And to have a foal sired by one … I tried to remember where the bay mare was; I had left her with the cavalry, so Cadus must have brought her—

‘Demalion?’

‘Sorry.’ I was swaying like a tree in a storm. I caught Tears’ arm and made myself stand upright. ‘What was it that Horgias said?’

Tears was already moving me back towards the tent. ‘He said that until very recently there was a cheetah in a cage in the beast garden, but it’s gone now. He plans to find who’s taken it. Look … you need to lie down.’

‘No, I—’

‘Yes.’

He took me back to the cot, laid me down and pulled the sheepskin over me for warmth.

‘I’m glad you’re alive. We’ll get you well now you’re awake. And when you can stand for the count of a thousand without falling over, Lupus has a gift for you that’ll make it all worth while.’

‘A spear?’

It lay across Lupus’ hands, living silver in the sunlight, its shaft of dark walnut smooth as the skin of a newborn foal and pearled with grain marks. About the neck was tied a scarf of scarlet silk that rippled in the wind.

I tore my eyes from it to look at Lupus. ‘I don’t understand.’

He didn’t sigh. He didn’t smile, not even his ghost-smile with the half-raised eyebrow, but then there were twenty-three thousand men standing behind us, arrayed in front of the king’s palace in Jerusalem, and we had little time before Gallus wanted all of us at the walls for a fifth day of assault.

‘It’s a spear.’ Lupus drew out each word, slowly. ‘Strictly speaking, the Ancient Unadorned Spear granted for extreme valour in the face of the enemy, that valour having been displayed in a battle or skirmish that the recipient was not ordered to undertake. I have adorned it a little.’ He tilted it so the red scarf flickered. ‘I believe the gods of maniple and century will not be overly offended.’

‘Not ordered?’ I wasn’t thinking clearly; that was obvious to both of us.

‘I didn’t order you back through the Beth Horon pass. You
went
of your own volition and then, I am told, single-handedly attacked the ben Giora cousins. You have won honour for yourself, your century, your cohort and your legion.’

There was a gap, when I was supposed to speak, and could think of nothing to say. My gaze drifted to the Hebrew temple, which remained intact, unstormed, impervious to everything we had thrown at it.

For two days I had lain still, listening to Taurus and his engineers telling the centurions how to do their jobs, for the command post was less than ten paces away from my sick tent.

The conversations had become sharper, shorter and less amicable as the days went on, and still there were Hebrews on the temple’s heights and nothing we could do to them. Our ballistas were hurling Taurus’ reclaimed pieces of masonry, but the wall had not so much as shown a crack.

With the ram we had brought with us, the one that had burned at the end of the Beth Horon pass, we could have—

‘Centurion?’ Lupus sighed and scowled together, both of which were surprisingly unfrightening. ‘Just take the spear. I will assume your extreme slowness is as a result of your injuries and excuse you from the assault on the walls today.’

That got my attention as nothing else had. My head still ached, I vomited at unpredictable intervals and the cut on my calf, which was an inch deep along its length, had opened at its lower end and was oozing a clear, straw-coloured fluid, but now that I could stand unaided I had no intention at all of leaving the sixth cohort to assault the wall alone.

I held out my hands to receive the spear.

The whole XIIth legion cheered, and all the auxiliaries. Three days before, when first I woke, the thunderous noise they made would have driven me to my knees, weeping. But time is a great healer and the sight of a spear such as this, the chance to hold it, were worth even more.

I ran my hand down the haft, feeling the beauty, and tilted the head to catch the shimmer sheen of true silver. By accident, I caught sight of my own reflection there, a wedge of dark-hollowed eye and nose and the corner of my mouth with lines of pain and tension all round it.

‘Thank you.’ I glanced sideways at Lupus.

He smiled a rare, real smile. ‘You earned it. Now go back to your tent and drink some water, and if you can hold it down you can lead your cohort into the assault.’

I drank water. I kept it down for first time since waking. Horgias, who held the water jug before and after, said, ‘Amazing what a bit of silver can do for a man’s health.’

‘A bit?’ I hefted the spear. ‘This is solid silver. Melted down, it’s worth a small farm in …’ I drifted to silence. ‘Not anywhere you’d want to live.’

I had been going to say Hyrcania, but I was talking to Horgias, and anywhere in the Parthian empire was anathema to him.

So we left the spear in the wagon and I dressed and still was not sick and together we walked to the head of the century. Tears had been ready to lead them. Macer was there, holding his horn. I saw them both shrug and get ready to swap Tears’ shield for the horn.

‘No, stay as you are,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t hurt to have someone else learning the signals. Tears can stay as Macer’s shield-man. Taurus, stay with Horgias.’

‘And you?’ someone asked.

‘Don’t worry about me.’ I grinned, careless of the listening gods. ‘I’m indestructible. I’ll outlive you all.’

I remember very little of the assault on the walls of Jerusalem that day. The men of the VIth who had been at the left flank in the battle at Gabao were still taking the brunt of it; they
had
a dozen centurions all wanting to earn a crown that would trump my silver spear.

The first attack was competent enough; we had Taurus’ siege tower and any number of ladders, and engineers on hand to make sure the latter were the right height so that they were tall enough to reach the top of the walls, but not so high that they overlapped and so were easy to push down.

When the ladders made no impact and nobody had yet won anything but a blade or a slingstone shot at his face, then, exactly as I had heard done on the last two days, we rolled forward our three ballistas and hurled bits of masonry from the broken parts of the city at the walls, and when that made no discernible impact we hurled them over the walls at the defenders.

At last, when nothing else was working, we turned our attention on the gate to the northern end of the temple wall, which was at least made of wood, even if that wood was half an oak thick, studded with iron and solidly barred from the inside.

One look told us that it needed a proper ram to open it, which was one reason, I have no doubt, why the Hebrews had destroyed the one we’d brought with us.

In default of that, an enterprising centurion in the VIth had found some roof beams and lashed them together to make something almost as thick as a tree. Three times I saw him and his men try to get it near enough the door to ram it; three times they were forced back by the sheer number of stones, spears, arrows and – after we used the ballistas – great pieces of masonry that were rained on their heads.

We abandoned the assault at dusk and spent a frustrated night barely sleeping, with whole centuries of men set on watch in case the Hebrews tried to sally out of the gate and destroy our one remaining siege tower.

Lupus was outside my tent when I woke in the morning, before I had time even to walk to the latrines. He was carrying a length of dark brown, rough-woven wool, and what looked like a spear jutting beneath, and joined me as I threaded my way through the tents, talking as we went.

The morning was warm and cloyingly damp with a crimson tint to the clouds on the eastern horizon. I looked at them and made the sign against evil, for, more than anything, we wanted this to be over before the winter rains came.

Seeing me, Lupus nodded, tight-lipped. ‘Taurus and his engineers have been building us a new ram, a proper one on slings with a good thick roof over it, not the twig the Sixth were prodding away with yesterday. Gallus has given permission for a full-out assault on the gate at the northern end of the wall. He’ll deploy archers on either side to give us a chance at least to bring the ram within reach of it.’

It was what I would have done, only I would have done it five days previously. I pushed past a tent-load of auxiliaries to reach the latrine ditch and stood on its edge, pissing into the lime-dusted depths. Beside me, Lupus did the same.

‘Who takes the ram?’ I asked.

Lupus stretched a tight grin. ‘The Twelfth. The Sixth had their chance the past four days and failed: it’s our turn now. The first cohort will take the left side. Your men of the sixth will take the right, both sides in testudo. Horgias will lead them. Tears will take the standard and Macer the horn.’

I stared at him. My head ached as if someone had tied iron round it and was tightening the screw. ‘I’m well enough, I swear to you. I can—’

‘I’m sure you can. If you’re finished, come with me.’

I wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to squat at the latrine’s edge with Lupus standing over me frowning. I settled my tunic and followed him to the place behind the tents where the mules were tethered.

He turned abruptly to me. ‘Cadus says you can shoot a bow.’ And when I stared at him, ‘Apparently a spy called Pantera told him so when you were in Hyrcania.’

I frowned. Pantera hadn’t seen me shoot once. But Lupus wasn’t interested in my past; he was too busy enjoying my reaction to his own sleight of hand as he dropped the scruffy cloth he had been holding and revealed that what he held under it was not a spear, but a Parthian cavalry bow.

It was made of honey-coloured ashwood, deeply curved and sprung back at the ends, with a full, rounded belly wrapped in ramskin for a hand-hold and luck-marks of gods and heroes poker-burned all along the inner length of the pale, perfect wood. The string was horse sinew, rubbed with beeswax that sweetened the air between us.

It was alive with power and the promise of death; a weapon to die for, or at least to kill for.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

Lupus’ grin had a satisfied air. ‘I won it in a game of dice from a centurion of the first cohort. He found it on the battlefield after Cadus had decimated the cataphracts. You were occupied at the other end of the pass at the time or I’m sure you’d have had the chance to win it in fair play. Here.’ He passed it to me. ‘Try it.’

Nobody had asked if I was an archer when I first joined the XIIth and I had been too sullen to volunteer the information. Later, when I might have offered, we had our own companies of Pannonian archers who were jealous of their lines in battle. In any case, it had been over ten years since I last held any bow, still less one as good as this, and I had no idea if I could hit a horse at ten paces.

I was going to say so, but my body knew better than my mind. Just looking at it made my arms itch as if I had shot it yesterday and must do so again to stay sane. I braced my hand against the ramskin on the belly and felt the padding
under
it, which had moulded to a hand larger than mine, begin to ease to my shape. I flexed the string and let so much honey into the air that I heard bees dance in my head. I eased it back to stillness.

Perfect. As good as Uncle Dorios’ bow had ever been.

‘Cadus said you learned the skill in your youth?’ Lupus ventured.

‘Did he?’ I was fumbling in my belt pouch for a spare thong to wrap round my wrist as a makeshift guard, not paying attention to Lupus, or what Cadus might have said, or to anything that wasn’t the bow.

Wordless, Lupus handed me an arrow. It was goose-fletched with a small, unbarbed point, not enough to stop a boar or a bear – or a son who had usurped his father’s throne – but enough to test out the bow’s strength and my skill.

I licked my finger and held it up and found there was almost no wind, just a gentle, tugging breeze blowing east to west that could easily be managed. I looked about for a target.

‘The goat hide, perhaps?’ Lupus waved a vague hand at a skin draped over a sack of straw about thirty paces away; the kind of thing men set up to shoot at of an evening, when the dice games have grown cold. I didn’t ask if he had put it there; his expression was so bland as to be an admission.

Hissing wearily through my teeth, I nocked the arrow, drew and loosed all in one movement and was barely aware of the sting on my arm as the string snapped back; I was too busy watching the arrow’s flight, how it bucked a little because I had jerked the loose, and so flew wider than it should have done.

I hit the goatskin a hand’s breadth high and a foot to the right of the centre. I lowered the bow, slowly. ‘Not good enough to kill a man.’

‘Good enough to keep him from killing us, though,’ Lupus said. ‘The bow’s yours if you will use it. We have fifty arrows
per
man. Use them wisely, but don’t be miserly. If we don’t get through on this assault …’ He looked at the horizon, at the gathering rain, and didn’t have to finish that thought.

‘Who will I lead?’ I asked.

‘Syrians. We have two complete companies of archers, more or less. They’re mostly from King Antiochus’ personal troop. They know nothing of how we make war, and even if they did, they lost their commander to a thrown spear at the mouth of the Beth Horon pass. That’s why I want you to lead them today. Stay alive, and while you’re at it, do what you can to make sure we can ram that gate. It matters.’

‘Testudo … shields up! Raise the ram!’

Horgias’ voice rebounded off the walls. Ahead, the temple wall reared high as a cliff above us, and on its height men stood with spears and bows, slingshots and piles of rubble, just as they had before.