THE MOSES
STONE
James Becker
Copyright © James Becker 2009
To Sally, for everything
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks go to Selina Walker at Transworld, one of the most talented editors in the business, who worked tirelessly to make sure that this book was as good as we could make it. Her ideas and suggestions helped shape and refine the manuscript and the finished work is so much the better for her efforts. Thanks also to all the other people involved in the publication and marketing of the book at Transworld and especially the cover designers and the sales and marketing experts – producing any book is a team effort, and they've done their absolute best to make sure the book gets on to as many shelves in as many bookshops as possible, and stands out from all the rest!
And, as always, my thanks to my agent Luigi Bonomi – a good friend, a sounding-board for ideas and a source of unrivalled inspiration. As I've said before, without him, I am nothing.
Prologue
Masada, Judea. AD 73
'We can wait no longer.'
Elazar Ben Ya'ir stood on a heavy wooden table almost in the centre of the fortress and looked down at the faces of the men and women who surrounded him.
Outside the massive stone walls, a torrent of sound – shouted orders, the noise of digging, and of stone falling on stone – formed a loud and continuous backdrop to his words. The racket was interspersed with the occasional thud and crack, as a missile from one of the ballistae, the massive Roman siege engines, crashed into the fortress walls.
Ben Ya'ir had led the Jewish Sicarii rebels for the last seven years, ever since they'd seized Masada from the resident Roman garrison. The Sicarii were radical Zealots. They were so radical, in fact, that they now numbered even the Zealots themselves, as well as almost everyone else in Judea, amongst their enemies. For over two years they'd used the hilltop fortress as a base for raiding both Roman and Jewish settlements throughout the country.
The previous year, Lucius Flavius Silva, the Roman governor of Judea, had finally lost patience with the Sicarii and attacked Masada with the Fretensis legion – some five thousand battle-hardened soldiers. But Masada was a tough nut to crack, and all the Romans' attempts to breach its defences had failed. As a last resort, they had built a containing wall – a circumvallation – around part of the fortress and had then begun creating a ramp that could reach high enough to use a battering ram on the massive wall that surrounded the citadel.
'You've all seen the rampart that is now touching our walls,' Elazar Ben Ya'ir said, his voice strong but tinged with resignation. 'Tomorrow, or the day after at the latest, the rams will breach our defences. We can no longer prevent that, and when they break through the Romans will overrun us. We number less than a thousand – men, women and children. Outside the walls, our enemies can muster five times that number. Make no mistake about this, the Romans will prevail, no matter how fiercely or bravely we fight.'
Elazar Ben Ya'ir paused and looked around. A salvo of arrows flew through the air from beyond the battlements, whistling over the heads of the assembled defenders, but hardly any of them so much as glanced up.
'If we fight,' Ben Ya'ir continued, 'most of us – the lucky ones – will be killed. Any who survive will be either executed, probably by crucifixion, or sold in the slave markets on the coast.'
An angry murmuring rose and fell in the crowd in response to the words of their leader. The Romans had employed a refinement that had severely restricted the ability of the Sicarii to retaliate: they had forced slaves to construct the ramp, just as they would no doubt use slaves to drive the battering rams. And to attack a fortress held by Jews, the Romans had used Jewish slaves. To protect themselves, the Sicarii would have had to kill their own enslaved countrymen – something that even they, who were not noted for their compassion or tolerance towards anyone, found distasteful.
That was why they hadn't been able to stop the building of the ramp; it was why they would not to be able to stop the rams.
'Our choice is simple,' Ben Ya'ir concluded. 'If we fight, and if we aren't killed in battle, we will either die nailed to crosses in the valley below us or become slaves of the Romans.'
The crowd looked at him, their murmurs silenced.
'And if we surrender?' an angry voice asked.
'That's your choice, my brother,' Elazar Ben Ya'ir replied, looking down at the young man who had spoken. 'But you'll still face slavery or crucifixion.'
'So what can we do, if we can't fight and we can't surrender? What other choices do we have?' 'There is one way,' Ben Ya'ir said, 'just one way, that we can achieve a victory here that will resound for all time.'
'We can defeat the Romans?'
'We can beat them, yes, but not in the way you mean.'
'Then how?'
Elazar Ben Ya'ir paused for a few moments, looking round at the people with whom he'd shared his life and the fortress for the last seven years. Then he told them.
As night fell, the sound of construction work outside the ramparts died away. Inside the citadel, teams of men made preparations for what would be the final act in the drama of Masada.
They stacked wood and containers of flammable oil in all the storerooms at the northern end of the fortress, except one group of rooms that Elazar Ben Ya'ir specifically told them to leave untouched. Then, as the last rays of the sun vanished from the peaks of the surrounding mountains, they built a large fire in the centre of the main square of the fortress and lit it. Finally, they set fire to the wood piles in the storerooms.
Their preparations complete, Elazar Ben Ya'ir summoned four men and gave them explicit instructions.
The creation of the ramp had focused the attention of the Romans on the western side of the citadel; that was where the majority of the legionaries had gathered, ready for the final assault. There were guards posted around the rest of the fortress, on the desert floor far below the rocky outcrop, but far fewer than in previous days and weeks.
At the eastern edge of Masada, the cliffs fell some thirteen hundred feet. It was not a sheer drop, but such a difficult and dangerous descent that the Romans clearly didn't think any of the Sicarii would be foolhardy enough to attempt it, and so the number of sentries they'd posted there was small. And until that night, they'd been right.
Ben Ya'ir led the men to the foot of the massive wall that guarded the edge of the Masada plateau. He handed over two cylindrical objects, each well wrapped in linen cloth and securely bound with cord, and two heavy stone tablets, again wrapped and padded with linen. Then he embraced each of the men for a few moments before turning and walking away. Like ghosts in the night, the four men climbed the wall and vanished silently into the tumble of boulders that marked the start of their perilous descent.
The assembled Sicarii, 936 men, women and children, knelt in prayer for what they knew would be the last time, then formed a line at a table set against one wall of the fortress to draw lots. When the last person had taken his straw, ten of them moved forward from the multitude, returning to the table where Elazar Ben Ya'ir stood waiting. He ordered that the names of the ten men be recorded, along with the name of their leader, and a scribe faithfully wrote them down on eleven shards of pottery, one name on each.