‘The Twelfth will live,’ he said. ‘We’ll march at its head when Vespasian rides to take Jerusalem back for Rome.’
‘First we have to get to safety,’ I said. ‘And we may have to climb.’
‘Always so sober, Demalion. You need to learn to love the small victories we are given.’ He pulled a face at me, laughing, but the shaft was sliding through his hands as he did so, bringing the Eagle down to stare us fiercely in the eyes, prideful as any living bird.
The god looked through it then at both of us and we ceased to laugh and were silent while Horgias began to dismantle that which held the soul of our legion.
Whatever else they might have done, the Hebrews had looked after it well, for it came off the shaft as easily as the day it had first gone on, with a twist and a pull and a slight suck of grease as wood parted from metal.
The wings each lifted off, each rounded end popping cleanly free of its mooring, and I saw for the first time the crack under the left one that Horgias had mended, and knew that only a man who had lived with it every day for years on end would have noticed it, and then seen it gone.
‘Your cloak,’ he said, and I tore a strip from the hem, and Horgias wrapped the gilded body with the skill of repeated practice until he had a small anonymous bundle.
Which he held out to me.
I took a step away. ‘It’s yours.’
‘No.’ He pressed it urgently against my chest. ‘It’s ours. You take the body and I’ll take the wings. That way, if only one of us makes it back, we’ll still have enough to start the legion again.’
He turned away and tore a strip from his own cloak for the wings and I was left holding the body of our Eagle.
For something with such power, it was so small; not much larger than the head of a yearling ewe, made to fit in the front of a man’s tunic that it might be taken secretly from the battlefield in case of near-defeat. The big standards of cohort and century were designed to be left behind; they didn’t matter.
I slipped the body down the front of my tunic to nestle against my belt and felt it warm, like a living thing, a lambto be nurtured, an eagle chick, awaiting its first taste of hot, bloody flesh.
Horgias wrapped the wings and tied them to his belt, then flexed his fingers, grinning. He was like a boy who steals apples for the fun, not the taste. ‘Shall we go back to where we hid before?’ he asked. ‘Or on into the dark?’
I had already looked around for the answer to that, but there were no birds to see, no spiders, ants, or beetles; nothing from the living world by which the gods might speak to us.
‘What does the Eagle say?’
He closed his eyes a moment in question, and then frowned, listening to the answer. ‘It says that we should go back,’ he said slowly. ‘If we go deeper, there’s no clear way out.’ His eyes sprang open. He caught my arm. ‘Quickly then, before they realize Pantera is alone and come back for us.’
We ran. Near the entrance, he said, quietly, urgently, ‘If they come back once we’re hidden then as soon as the last one is past us, count a slow fifty and get out. Keep running, don’t look back.’
‘If you’ll do the same.’
‘Agreed,’ he said, and I knew he didn’t mean it, and he knew the same of me.
Chapter Forty
Voices from the small outer cave ahead reached us faintly as men argued, and called from where the rope was anchored on the iron ring to others who must have followed Pantera down it to the foot of the cliff.
We reached the crevasse where we had already hidden twice before, but the thought of crawling in there a third time left me sick.
Horgias, too, was hesitant. ‘They took no light with them,’ I whispered. ‘We could go on?’
I felt his nod, and we drew our knives and went on step by wary step through the tunnel that led to the cave at the front.
The dark held us close. Ahead, eight of the Hebrews were caught in the brilliant morning light that bathed the cave’s mouth. We could count the hairs on their heads and their faces, the beads of sweat rolling down the backs of their necks as they leaned over the lip of rock and shouted imprecations, advice, curses down to their brethren below. Their god did not tell them we were there, nor did any instinct let them feel our gaze on their backs.
We edged as far as we could away from the mouth of thetunnel, that they might not discover us by accident when they returned to their cavern.
And then we waited again.
The making of a legionary is in learning to wait, everyone knows that, but this waiting was as new as had been the others of this day. Here we sat, armed, within touching distance of our enemy — and we did nothing.
This once, our lives mattered more than honour and so we kept still and breathed slowly and ignored the straining ache in our bladders as the sun crawled across the sky and the light at the cave’s mouth became ever more finely angled, until there was no sun spilling over the lip at all, but only the perfect blue sky outside, and the ever more somnolent men whose outlines marred it.
‘Nicodemus!’
We all jerked awake. One of the men leaned over and shouted the name a second time, loud in the liquid silence. Nicodemus’ voice from below shouted up a stutter of angry Aramaic and the men at the cave mouth moved from near-sleep to frenetic animation. The rope hanging over the ledge sprang tight and five of the absent eight men were hauled up into the cave.
We didn’t need to know the language to understand that three of the group were missing and probably dead: one of the twins — Gorias, I think — Manasseh who had been like a brother to Nicodemus, and his cousin Matthias; all had disappeared.
Both Nicodemus and Levius, the remaining twin, had smears of drying blood on their tunics. Levius wept a torrent of grief and would not be consoled. He raged around the cavern so that I shut my eyes and set all my thoughts inwards, lest he be drawn to Horgias and me purely by the power of his passion.
He moved away. I breathed again, but did not look up. Presently, amidst much swearing of oaths and promises of retribution by heaven — the sounds of a man in anguish are the same in any language, and the vengeance he craves rarely varies — the entire group swung back towards the dark, to the tunnel, on their way to the rug-bedecked cavern.
Nicodemus led them.
Two more came after him. Three… five… ten out of thirteen passed us safely into the dark and I let my eyes open and began to measure the distance from where I sat to the cave’s mouth. I flexed my fingers and slowly rolled my neck that I might rise smoothly when the time came to move, and not alert the enemy to my presence by the crack of joints grown solid with sitting.
The remaining three ran at last into the tunnel. I counted to fifty as Horgias had said, and felt him move as I did. We scented the first heady wine of freedom, and raced towards it.
At the cave’s mouth the rope was still in place, tied to the deep-sunk iron ring and hanging loose over the edge. Freedom was truly ours. All we had to do was slide down it and run. I passed the rope to Horgias.
He shook his head. ‘You got here first.’ He clapped my shoulder. ‘Go!’
Eight men and then five had safely come up it. I told myself that as I grabbed hold and looped my leg over the lip of the cave.
Thirteen men up. Others down. Including Pantera.
Safe. Safe. You will be safe. Both legs over the edge and a moment’s blinding terror as I swung free in space with only my sweating hands on the rope holding me up. I found a knot that gave me some purchase, and breathed out, and my questing feet found another. My chest was level with the lip. I looked up at Horgias.
‘There’s a knot for your feet; you-’
A noise behind. He spun away from me. His knife armjerked. In the dark heart of the cave, a man screamed and fell.