In near dark, I listened to the shouted names, to the sounds of men embracing, to the murmurs of thanks given to their god, all the same as when the legions met.
They spoke briefly and with vehemence, and through the crook of Pantera’s elbow I saw Nicodemus spit to emphasize the end of one short, sharp comment. The men he had met looked around them, as if danger might come from the dark. I felt Pantera press himself ever backwards and dip his head, that the shine of his eyes might not betray us. I held my breath and felt my bladder clench and renewed my grip on my knife and tried to move my arm from where it was trapped against the rock, and failed.
From some distance, someone called Nicodemus’ name. The word ricocheted around the caves and came to rest in a dozen places. There was a shout of laughter, and some animated chatter and the whole small mob moved back away from us into the cave where the Eagle was kept, leaving us in almost-darkness and almost-silence.
A long time later, Pantera eased his way forward. Horgiasand I followed, easing the cramp out of our knees, our elbows, our necks. At length, we stood in the cave and watched the shadows and barely dared to move.
‘How many?’ Horgias asked.
‘Sixteen.’ Pantera shook his head. ‘Too many for us to take.’
‘But we don’t need to take them,’ I said. ‘We only need to take the Eagle.’
In the near-dark, I saw Horgias smile.
We drew lots. We argued over the result — silently, in mime, with grimaces for words. We drew lots a second time with different results and did not accept them this time either. We stood in the dark and not one of us wanted to leave the other two and be the hare that drew the Hebrew hounds from their lair.
In the end, in the compressed whisper that was all we dared manage, Horgias said, ‘Demalion and I are of the Twelfth. The Eagle was ours to lose and ours to take back. You can make convincing noise for three of us and have a chance to get away. If we don’t come out, you can tell Vespasian that the Twelfth is dead, and it will be true.’
Pantera closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was a changed man, shorn of the irony he held about him like a shield. He nodded to us both and it was as heavy as a salute. ‘If you don’t come out,’ he said, ‘make sure you’re dead. Eleazir can keep a man alive longer and in greater pain than either of you wants to think about.’
There was no more talking then. We drank from our flasks together, as men sharing the last wine, then Pantera took a few moments to check his knives while Horgias and I rolled our shoulders and eased our joints, the better to run when we had to.
Pantera said, ‘They’ve left the rope tied over the lip to get down with. Remember it’s there if you need to leave in a hurry.’I felt the weight of his hand one final time on my shoulder and then he was gone, a black shape lost in the black cave.
Left alone, Horgias and I backed into the fissure again to sit tight in the dark with our heads down. The waiting was worse than it had been before. We knew how many we faced now and Pantera’s last words, well meant as they were, repeated in an endless echo in the ears of my mind.
Make sure you’re dead… dead… dead…
I felt sick. I felt the rock shudder to the hammer of my heart. I heard the slow hiss of our breath and thought it a wonder that the men in the neighbouring cavern didn’t smell the waves of sour battle-sweat that flushed my armpits and rolled in wet lines down my limbs.
Horgias was no better. However often we had waited before battle, it had been in the open, with sword and shield to hand. I bruised my palm, so tightly did I hold the knife, and rehearsed the track it would have to take to my own heart if I needed urgently to die, but there was no comfort in that, and nothing of the battle-rage that buoyed us up before a fight.
I felt the shudder of Horgias’ breath and put my hand on the small of his back, and felt his foot creep back to press against my elbow, and in that small touch was more intimacy, more closeness, more sharing of souls than I had known since the battle at Lizard Pass.
I loved him then, and would have said so, perhaps, and cost us both our lives, had not there been a movement in the outer cave whither Pantera had gone: a whisper; a foot scuffed against stone; a man’s voice that cursed softly in Greek, and another that rebuked him, less softly, in heavy Thracian.
In the Hebrews’ cavern, the crackle of talk, which had been animated and sharp, fell to shocked silence. The air grew tight with a dozen breaths held and one stifled cry of joyful vindication, fiercely hushed.
In the outer cave, where Pantera wrought his subterfuge, Nicodemus’ rope scrapedacross the rocky lip over which we had all climbed and a third voice cried out in Latin, rising with fear at the end. To my ears, it sounded foreign, but I have no doubt that the Hebrews believed they had heard me.
It was more than enough: sixteen men hurtled out of their cavern, heedless of the noise they made, the lamps they kicked over in their haste, the Eagle they left behind.
Their passing caused a sudden lift in the sullen air, flavoured it with garlic and citrus and sweat. The slap of their bare feet sounded like a full cavalry ride and their voices, raised in rage and rejoicing, were those of any hunt on the closing trail of their quarry. They passed us in a mass, and were gone.
‘Now!’ I pushed on Horgias’ back and we writhed free of our hiding place, turned away from the havoc Pantera had brought on himself, and sprinted ahead into the Hebrews’ wide, airy, lamplit cavern — where we stopped, stunned by the vision that lay before us.
The cavern was vast; easily as big as the biggest audience room in the governor’s palace in Antioch. An opening halfway along the far wall led deeper into the heart of the cliff and another to our left opened out to stark morning sunlight, and the dense blue sky.
By my reckoning, this was the middle one of the three cavern entrances we had seen from our ledge. I gave thanks to the watching gods that the three birds had turned us away from it to the smaller entrance we had used.
The cavern’s interior was as well furnished as any Hebrew home. Many men had climbed up many times carrying many packs to create the comfort and ease they had here: thick rugs covered the walls and bedding rolls lay in a careful row for half the length of the far wall, stopping just before the place where daylight reached.
Near the mouth, where the morning sun painted gold across the cave’s floor, was a line of low desks with cushions behind them and scrolls laid open on top, pinned down by the small lead stones, the size of songbird eggs, that the Hebrews used to such effect in their slings. Other scrolls lay in tiered groups set with care to the side beyond a clearly demarcated line that was the limit of the sun’s reach.
And there, exactly where the hard light of morning met the soft light of a dozen oil lamps left in niches in the walls, stood our Eagle.
They had left its wings outstretched to catch the sun. I felt its touch then: the reflected light washed me clean from crown to foot, scouring me free of guilt, care, fear, shame; all the things that slowed me.
I reached for it, but Horgias was there first, moving as a man in a dream who finds that his lover, believed dead, has returned to him living with gifts of ambrosia and wine.
He swept it up and, although he bore no mail, and the wolf did not snarl from his head, he was what he had been born for: the aquilifer of the XIIth; glorious, full of honour, full of might. In a single moment I saw the changes in the planes of his face, the winter’s pain swept away for ever, the bitterness sweetening to the man I had known.
He grinned at me and there was such joy on his face that I could not help but weep a little. We embraced as victors, as men who have shared the same sweat, eaten the same sour terror, and come through victorious. My heart soared, and I felt the leap and press of his heart as he lifted the Eagle high into the sun.