Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (34 page)

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 each
killed
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 cavalry
sword.
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.

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 and
then
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.

Pantera spun back to me. His tunic was awash with other men’s blood; his king’s foremost, I think. His skin was as dark as any Syrian’s, but his hair, once oak-brown, had been burnished by the sun to a dark straw, with shades of bronze and almost-copper scattered through. A scar notched his right eyebrow, dragging it upward in a perpetual query.