He took one of the tiny oil lamps and started down the corridor. Being taller than most, Judah had to bend forward to keep from hitting his head on the overhead beams. He could still hear the occasional cheering from the main Roman camp whenever a gust of the night wind carried the sound across the fortress grounds. The steady thumping of war drums pulsing through the night sounded like Death’s own heartbeat. He could just visualize what first light would bring, a seething mass of metal-plated Romans swarming over the ruined ramparts, short swords and pila, the dreaded javelins, bristling as they fanned out to end this awful siege.
The walls seemed to echo his fatal mantra: I shall be the Last Man.
The first makeshift quarters he came to were empty. Holding the lamp high, he scanned the few possessions — cooking pots, jars for water and oil, some clothes hung on pegs. Three or four crude toys stacked neatly in a corner. A tiny fire pit against the inner wall, with a hole above to let smoke out. A tiny rug for prayers. No weapons. He felt a twinge of relief, but it was extinguished when he stepped back into the corridor and saw the pool of black blood that had seeped out from under the hides of the next cubicle. He drew his dagger and pushed aside the stiff flap of cowhide. Inside were three women, one young, the other two elderly. All had been killed by a deep slice across the side of both wrists. The short knife used to do the killing lay like a small obscenity out on the dirt floor. The women sat propped up against the outer wall, their heads and faces covered in shawls, their wounded forearms drooping like broken wings.
He pushed aside one shawl and then the other with the tip of his dagger. He knew them, as he knew almost every one of the nine hundred and sixty souls left on the mountain. This was the family of Jeshua, son of Matthias, veteran Kanna’i, from Galilee. Then he frowned. So where was Jeshua? There had been little children, too — where were they? He remembered something else: There had been an elderly aunt. She was also missing.
He whirled at a sound outside the inner casemate wall and brought up the long dagger. He was half expecting skulking Roman scouts. He listened hard, and this time he recognized the sound — a sob. It had come from outside. He stepped back out through the hide curtains and went down the corridor to the first bolt-hole, stooped down, and climbed out onto the rocky slope leading back up to the western palace and walls. A hundred years before, Herod had kept gardens out here. Now there was only rock.
There he found Jeshua, slumped in the shadows of a rubble pile, his back against the casemate wall. He was weeping. A coldness gripped Judah’s belly. He was going to have to do it after all, despite his fervent hopes to the contrary. Jeshua had been a hero at Jotapata, where Josephus, that ultimate traitor, had gone over to the filthy Romans to save his miserable life. Jeshua’s left arm hung uselessly, the result of a Roman pilum thrust deflected by his shield into the meat of his shoulder. Jeshua had been one of the few survivors of the slaughter at Jotapata. He had also been one of the final ten.
Judah commanded his feet to move toward Jeshua, even as his heart tried to hold him back. The old warrior saw him at last. He stiffened by the wall, his face a mask of tears. They looked at each other for a long moment. Then Jeshua spoke, holding up his bloody right hand, his eyes flaring under heavy, scarred brows.
“Come, Destroyer,” he croaked. “I’ve done the hard part.”
“Jeshua,” Judah said, his own voice strangely weak. He swallowed to wet his throat. “Jeshua, I don’t want to do this thing. Not to you, not to any of us.”
Jeshua looked down at his bloody hand for a moment and then dropped it into his lap. He let his chin slump onto his chest. The expression on his face, barely visible in the dim light, broke Judah’s heart. Never had he seen such utter despair.
“We are the accursed of God,” Jeshua whispered. “Everything has been destroyed, everything, and we’ve been reduced to killing our own flesh and blood.” He looked up at Judah. “With sunrise comes the end of the world, Judah. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it!”
Judah stepped closer, trying to keep the long dagger out of sight. To his surprise, he found himself trying to determine how he would do this killing. Then Jeshua pointed with his chin to a small ballista, perhaps four mina. He kicked it over to where Judah was standing and then lay down sideways, face alongside the wall, the back of his head toward Judah.
Judah understood. He sheathed his dagger and picked up the heavy stone, and in one swift chop brought it down on Jeshua’s head. The man grunted, twitched, then lay still. Judah knelt alongside and watched for a moment. Jeshua lived still, a pulse visible in his throat. He drew his dagger and opened the large artery on the left side, standing up quickly to avoid the spray. Then, his heart as heavy as the bloody ballista, he wiped the dagger on Jeshua’s cloak and crawled back inside the casemate walls. The Roman drums boomed again as he pressed on down the dark passageway. There was still the question of Jeshua’s missing children. Judah didn’t want to think about what he would do if he found them. He mouthed a silent prayer that he never would.
After methodically searching all of the eastern casemates for bodies, Judah paused at the northern end of the mountain, waiting to make a dash for the huge granary storehouse that was next to the main, northern palace. Eleazar had exhorted them to burn their belongings and weapons but to leave all of the provisions — grain, oil, wine, and dried fruits — untouched, so that the Romans would know they had not been starved into the act of mass suicide. Nor was there any dearth of water: Even after two and a half years of siege, the great cisterns along the western wall were still more than half full, with water enough for years remaining.
He watched the open space between the end of the casemate wall and the palace storehouse. The eastern night sky was subtly changing in anticipation of morning twilight. Up here, though, on the higher northern promontory, the western wall fires were now sending sheets of eye-stinging smoke billowing across the open ground. The tops of the siege tower were just visible, peering over the smoldering walls like some war dragon whose eyes had been burned out by its own exertions. Twice Judah had seen what he thought were human figures slipping silently through the smoke out there along the palace walls. He could not afford to encounter a squad of Roman skirmishers at this late hour, as there was one final mission he had to perform once he knew that all were dead. He had to seal the great cavern.
There! Man-shaped shadows in the smoke, fifty, perhaps sixty cubits from where he hid watching at the end of the casemate corridor. He blinked several times to clear his eyes. He was tired, very tired. They had been fighting hard ever since the Romans had advanced the siege tower to the western gates, and Judah, an officer of some rank and much bloody experience, had been in the thick of it. When the great battering ram had finally been shoved into position, there had been desperate fighting indeed, with waves of screaming Jews charging across virtually open ground, dodging a hail of arrows and catapult bolts from the high tower, to swarm over the western wall and stab through curtains of armor and tinned hides at the tower defenders, while others flung pots of burning oil onto the ram crew, sending them shrieking back down the siege ramp, their garments aflame. This had gone on for three days and three nights, the tide of ferocious battle sweeping back and forth, until Eleazar took the desperate gamble and fired the walls themselves to burn out the siege tower and destroy the huge ram.
He stared hard into the swirling smoke but saw no more running shadows — and shadows they probably were, he thought. I’m imagining things out there. The Romans don’t have to risk sending scouts. They know the dawn will bring an end to all this. He gathered himself to make the dash across open ground. He would aim for the double-door portal on the east side, the Lake Asphaltites side. Once inside he would make a final check of the palace before torching it. He knew what he was going to find there, because that was where most of the defenders had gone to execute the compact. With no family of his own, he had fled the palace when the killing began, unwilling to just sit and watch the slaughter, piteous children writhing on the marble floors, pouring out their lives through carmine mouths, mothers tearing at their eyes to blind themselves from the bloody spectacle, stone-faced warriors standing over the human wreckage, their faces and robes bloodred in the torchlight, stunned at what they had done, many of them turning their daggers into their own bodies with the hot shame of it.