Part I

The Mountain Fortress of Masada in Judaea, A.D. 73

 

Judah scrambled across the earthen floor of the watch-room as the ceiling fell in, barely staying ahead of the tumble of dust, timbers, and royal plaster as he rolled into a corner, covering his face against the flying debris. A battered round rock about a foot in diameter, fired from a Roman ballista, smashed a final massive dent into the end-wall masonry before rolling to a stop three feet away. Through the wreckage of the ceiling, Judah could now see the sheets of fire consuming the tops of the western ramparts. He barely had time to collect himself before another stone came hissing across the night sky, passing invisibly over the ruined timbers of the watch-room to batter down a building somewhere beyond him in the darkness.

Damn them and their machines, he thought. Their machines and their implacable Roman power. A distant crash marked the impact of yet another ballista stone, hurled across the night sky by the catapult in the burned-out siege tower. Ever since the treacherous desert wind had turned on them, firing the wooden ramparts overlooking the siege ramp, the Zealots’ fate had been sealed. By dawn the casemate walls would have burned through and the howling hordes of the Legio X Fretensis would spill in like a swarm of armored beetles. Even now, at the third hour, the ominous rumble of kettledrums and the cheering roars from the Roman formations gathering below echoed in waves across the desert darkness. It was the same sound the mob made in the hippodrome at Caesarea during the procurator’s games.

I am Judah, Sicarius. I shall be the Last Man, he thought, as he tried to make himself small in his corner of the watch-room. He had drawn the final tile, the tenth lot, and with it the horrific responsibility to finish it. The room shook as another ballista round careened across the open ground outside and ricocheted off a nearby storeroom wall. A woman shrieked, a pathetically human sound amid the dull thudding of collapsing masonry. Had she cried out from fear of the stones, or from seeing her husband coming for the family with a knife?

Not long now, he thought, rolling over on his side and shifting his own glinting dagger from his left hand to his right. Not long at all. The smell of burning timbers was suddenly strong as the streaming, treacherous wind veered across the top of Herod’s fortress, pushing acrid smoke through the holes in the building, stinging his eyes to sudden tears. The tears ambushed his memory. He had lived a very long time. It had been almost forty years since those heady days in Galilee, when the teenagers who would become Sicarii formed their first cell in the mountains. Now he was the last of them, the last man in more ways than one. The Daggermen were a bloody memory now, their bones scattered over Galilee and beyond, along with the bones of the thousands slaughtered in the broken streets of Jerusalem. Death to Rome, indeed. He shivered again, imagining he could hear his own bones rattle. The Romans were about to show them the final cost of their supremely naive rebellion.

Another stone rocked the walls of the watch-room. He inspected the dagger again, his badge of honor as a Sicarius, the Roman word for Daggerman. Judah, son of Joseph, later outcast son of Kerioth. One of the very first Galileans to take up the long knife against Romans and other undesirables. Old Judah Sicarius. The oldest Kanna’i, or Zealot, as the people called them. Sixty-one seasons he had lived. Gray now in beard, long in tooth, but still tough as an Egyptian chariot harness. Without a doubt, he had been the oldest warrior on this mountain. The last of the Kanna’im, too, after the judgment of the ostraca, the fateful tiles, cast earlier in the royal precincts. I shall be the Last Man!

A smaller projectile crashed down somewhere up along the casemate walls, and this time the prolonged screaming of a mortally injured child rent the night air. Judah winced but did not move. On this night of nights, one way was as good as another to die. In a little while he would have to go out there, dodging across the deadly open spaces, within sight of Roman archers in the fighting tops of the charred siege tower. He would be a scurrying bundle of old rags under the deadly gaze of their catapult, one more rebel to nail with their iron quarrels if they could manage the shot. Nevertheless, this old Jew had a final mission. If he could just make it across the open ground, glinting dagger in hand, he was honor-bound to carry out Eleazar’s final, terrible orders. By so doing, would he finally make amends for what he had done forty years ago? Was this final, bloody mission the cost of his redemption? Could it be?

He drew his tattered cloak closer as he thought about their glorious leader, Eleazar ben Jair. Kanna’i extraordinary, a stunningly effective demagogue right to the very end. It had been ben Jair’s idea to fire the casemate timbers in order to destroy the siege tower, and it had worked, too. For a while. He recalled with relish the screams of the Romans as the lower hide shields caught fire, and then the lashings and the very timbers of the eighty-foot-high tower, crouched atop the blood-soaked siege ramp. He had watched with the other Zealots, secreted like rats in their burrows along the western wall, firing arrows into the blaze each time a roasting Roman poked his head out of the smoke, screaming desperately for help from the legionaries behind the tower.

Then, just after nightfall, with the tower’s massive timbers only half consumed, the fateful desert wind, the very breath of their own vengeful God, had turned on the defending Jews. It had veered into the north and then swept back onto the western wall, away from the tower. The Zealots, who had cushioned the outer face of the wall with sand and timbers to defeat the tower’s battering ram, could only watch in horror as the capricious flames began to burn the wall timbers, sealing Masada’s fate. The Romans had been able to withdraw the siege tower to just beyond the flame front and put out the fires in its fighting tops, but the great battering ram and even the tower were superfluous now because, with the makeshift wooden walls ablaze on the mountain’s rim, the fortress would be totally exposed by dawn.

Ben Jair’s coal black eyes in the guttering lamplight had revealed the extent of their calamity. “The core of the walls is aflame,” he croaked, his voice hoarse from the smoke. “They have finished the ramp, and by first light the maniples of the Tenth Legion, soldiers in their thousands, will break through. By the Lord God, we tried, we surely tried, but the accursed wind…”

Ben Jair had paused to catch his heaving breath and to drink some water. “So now,” he continued, “now that the fateful hour is at hand we must choose. We are the final warriors of the Jewish race. God’s Temple is demolished; Jerusalem is a defiled, corpse-ridden ruin. Our lands, our villages, our hearths and homes, gone, all gone. Our kinsmen’s bones bake in the desert. The Romans have hunted down every last patriot and slaughtered them all like leprous dogs. They even buried the old hermits alive in their caves at Qumran and then posted guards until the smell told them it was finished. They leveled Machaerus and killed everyone who surrendered, and now they have laid siege to this final fortress, here at the bottom of the world, for nearly three years. At dawn, it will be finished here as well. At third cockcrow, the Roman juggernaut will march up the ramp to kill and rape and torture, and any survivors here will envy the dead.”

Ben Jair had stared at the hollow-eyed warriors standing around the main audience room in Herod’s palace, his gaze hot, eyes blazing like a demon’s as he seduced them one last time with all the hypnotic urgency of a prophet. Always the posturer, he had gathered himself in front of them, coiling his dirty robes like a Levite, chanting his final exhortation.

“We long ago, my generous friends, resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God himself. The time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice. We were the very first that revolted from them, and we are the last that fight against them. I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God hath granted us that it is still in our power to die bravely and in a state of freedom. It is very plain that this place shall be taken in a day’s time. We are openly deprived by God himself of all hope of deliverance. That fire which was driven upon our enemies did not, of its own accord, turn back upon the wall which we had built. This was the effect of God’s anger against us, for our manifold sins which we have been guilty of in a most insolent and extravagant manner with regard to our own countrymen, the punishments of which let us not receive from the Romans, but from God himself, executed by our own hands.

“Let our wives die before they are abused, and our children before they have tasted of slavery, and after we have slain them, let us bestow that glorious benefit upon one another mutually and preserve ourselves in freedom as an excellent funeral monument for us. But first let us destroy the fortress and our money by fire, and spare nothing but our provisions, that they may be a testimonial when we are dead that we were not subdued for want of necessaries, but that we have preferred death before slavery.”

Judah’s face twisted in a grimace as a ballista stone cracked the steps by the doorway. He wiped some dust off his face and realized that it was getting cold. The final hours before dawn were always the coldest. He waited and listened. The artillery bombardment seemed to be slacking off.

It had been an amazing exhortation, and, equally amazing, the surviving warriors had done exactly what ben Jair proposed. Men went among their families, gathered most of them into Herod’s palace, shawled their faces and heads, and then killed them all. Then they reassembled and drew lots to choose ten among them “to bestow that glorious benefit” on themselves. The second slaughter completed, the bloodied ten had assembled one last time to again draw lots. Judah Sicarius had drawn the fateful tile. He had withdrawn to the southern end of the fortress to wait until the last hour before dawn, so that the remaining nine could fulfill their compact with honor. If they failed to do that, well … He ran his fingers along the well-oiled blade of his own dagger.

It had been an amazing exhortation. Also a glorious, masterful lie, of course. Yes, they would die, and willingly. They were Kanna’im. Zealots. Fanatics. Yet they chose death not just to deprive the Roman beast of its final triumph. This self-inflicted immolation was for something far more important than that. Over and above a final, glorious defiance, their mass suicide would also protect the holy relics hidden in the heart of the mountain. The holy things spirited out of the Temple on that last horrific night, when the combined legions of Titus and Vespasian had run amok through ankle-deep gore in the streets of Jerusalem, their sandals splashing blood onto the very walls in a manner reminiscent of the times of Moses and the plagues in Egypt.

He peered through a hole in the building’s walls again. The flames inside the western palace and along the walls were unremitting. It was time to move, time to begin the hunt through the battered ruins atop the mountain. The final ten had included ben Jair. Judah, as the Last Man, must now ensure that all had died before he took his own life. Especially ben Jair himself. He could make a fine speech, ben Jair, and he had been a stalwart commander and lethal warrior, but Judah knew the man of old. He did not think Eleazar had the courage to turn his dagger upon himself.

It was strangely quiet now across the open ground outside. He shook his head in wonder at all that had happened in these past six years, and the dreadful duty he faced. Once he had confirmed that all the defenders were dead, he would be the last Jew alive of all the uncounted thousands of warriors flattened beneath the Roman yoke during the civil war. They would never find him, though. He would be with the treasure, a treasure to which he, the last Daggerman, the despised Judaean, the last of the Kanna’im, would add one final, supremely ironic object before honoring the fate decreed by the tiles.

I shall be the Last Man.

The wind shifted yet again, and the smoke suddenly surged thick in the ruined room. He could not breathe. It was definitely time. He hefted the long dagger with a deep sigh. In a way, he would have it easy. He had had no wife or children to slaughter this dark night. All that was left was for him to go through the surviving buildings in search of any stragglers and, especially the body of ben Jair. Coughing in the smoke, he lunged for the door, pausing only to get a breath before launching himself into what was now indisputably the Roman night. From the plains stretching below the sheer red walls of the mountain he could hear the soldiers’ massed cheers swelling over the crackle of flames and the keening of the bitter desert wind. You bastards won’t be cheering on the morrow, he thought grimly as he bolted from the smoke-filled building. We have rebuffed your best efforts for almost three years, and now, in death, we shall defy you.

I shall be the Last Man!

Judah barely avoided the slashing bolt from a catapult as he rolled into the rubbled floor of the mikveh, the ceremonial purification baths near the western palace. Roman bastards! He peered back through a crack in the wall. Above the billowing flames, the charred tops of the siege tower, hulking just below the rim of the mountain, harbored a dozen or so snipers who were probably calling targets for the ballista artillery catapult farther down the ramp. The hard rock plain that was the top of the mountain was totally illuminated now by the burning western walls, and his mad dash across the open space between the palace watch-room and the mikveh had apparently been spotted. He winced as another bolt came ricocheting through the doorway and skittered around the cluttered anteroom. The demons knew he was in here, he thought. There were weapons stacked in one corner. He longed to return the fire, although the tower was probably out of range now. Besides, he had things to do.

He looked around. The mikveh consisted of two buildings, with the purifying baths, now empty and dry, between them. The first room was for undressing and ritual cleansing. It had remained relatively intact since the bombardment, except that one glancing hit on the roof had covered the mosaics of the floor with bits of mortar and broken roof tiles. Three families had taken refuge in the small building directly across from the purification pools after their quarters had been overtaken by the fire along the western walls. Most of the Zealots’ families had lived inside the casemate walls themselves during the siege, existing in tiny rooms that allowed them to defend against climbers and stay out of range of the Roman snipers on the other side of the deep ravine called Wadi Masada. If they had not sought shelter in the palace, and the killing had been done, he should find bodies in the building on the other side of the empty pools.

He peered out the doorway, scanning the terraces, then drew back as another ballista stone came hissing directly overhead. It missed the pool building roof by a few feet and shattered in the darkness against the hardpan rock of the mountain. He bolted across the pool terrace and dived into the anteroom of the other bathhouse building as a bolt from a catapult whined behind his back. He stood up, brushed off his robe, and drew the long iron dagger. He had no need to test its edge; a Sicarius with a dull weapon was a contradiction in terms.

There was a ragged cloth curtain hanging between the anteroom and the chamber inside. He paused, steeling himself. It was one thing to accede to mass suicide while in thrall to Eleazar’s rhetoric. It was another thing altogether to kill people he knew, men and women and, yes, God cleanse his soul, children, alongside whom he had lived, fought, and prayed for nearly three years. His heart pounding, he took a deep breath and touched the curtain with the point of the dagger. Then he realized it was heavy—and wet. He let go of it and stared down at his hand in the dim light, frowning at the dark stain. Then it hit him: The curtain was soaked with blood. He took another deep breath and pushed the curtain aside. What he saw took his breath away.

He had been at war continuously now for the past seven years, first in Galilee, then at the Siege of Jerusalem. When the city finally had fallen and almost the entire surviving population, reportedly some one hundred thousand Jews, had been put to the sword, he had seen the city’s streets literally awash with blood. What he beheld now, in this tiny room, still managed to shock him. Simon, son of Giora, had apparently been the executioner. He had cut their throats. Judah counted, his lips moving silently. Ten people. The entire room, the walls, the low ceiling, the back side of the cloth curtain, and every square foot of the floor had been painted in arterial blood. The bronze stench of it nearly overwhelmed him, and he had to swallow hard to keep from gagging. Simon had taken an easier way out, he noted, stabbing himself in the inner thigh and then wrapping a prayer shawl around his head and face, unable to bear further witness to the horrifying thing he had done. It is still an eligible thing to die after a glorious manner, Eleazar had said—but this was not glory. This was simply slaughter.

Judah’s eyes filled with tears at the horror of it … but Simon had done the thing, hadn’t he. There was no need here for the Last Man, in this ghastly place. He sobbed out a quick prayer and backed out through the sodden curtain, the hair on his neck rising at the touch of it. He had personally separated more than thirty men’s souls from their bodies with the fourteen-inch iron dagger he held in his right hand. He had killed scores more than that in the battles of the Revolt, most of them Romans or their allies, for whom he was beyond counting or caring.

This, though … My God, he thought, his mind trembling: They actually did it. The wind shifted slightly, and the smell from the interior room seeped through the curtain. My God! What have we come to?

A big, ten-mina ballista stone crashed short of the building and rattled by the back door of the anteroom, skipping neatly over the empty pools and out into the shadows behind the bathhouses. He was seized by a sudden burning desire to finish himself, right there, to end it before he had to confront any more scenes like the one inside. He held the dagger point up under his chin for a second, and then a quirk of the night wind carried the sound of laughter, Roman laughter, across the desolation of the mountaintop. He let the dagger point drop and glared out into the night. The laughter was coming from the burned-out siege tower. A coldness settled on his chest, and he went back inside the blood-soaked building to find their weapons. There was one long-range war bow standing in a corner, an old Parthian, by the look of it. He slipped his dagger into its thigh sheath, retrieved the oversized weapon and one arrow, and went back to the anteroom, steeling himself to look at all the grotesquely huddled bodies, to memorize this scene from hell.

He carefully wiped blood spatters off the heavy bow, then stepped through the curve to set the gut string, grunting with the effort. The bow had probably been “liberated” during the Siege of Jerusalem, most likely from the body of a Roman auxiliary. He crawled out of the doorway and around to the eastern wall of the bathhouse. There, protected from the sight line of the siege tower, he could stand up. There were some large, empty clay amphora stacked against the wall. He turned one upside down and used it to stand on, keeping his head just beneath the edge of the flat roof. When he heard the laughter coming again, he carefully lifted the heavy bow over the edge of the roof, fit the arrow with its three-bladed iron head, then stood up straight. The tower was nearly a hundred cubits distant. He was firing directly into the wind, so it was simply a question of range. Aiming dead center but over the tops of the tower, he drew and released in one fluid motion. He caught a brief glimpse of four helmeted faces, red in the backlight of the flames, then heard the satisfying scream as his unexpected bolt struck home.

He dropped the weapon, his shoulder trembling from the effort of pulling the heavy bow, and jumped down. He scrambled across the space between the bathhouse and the main storeroom building. Eleazar’s wind sent spark-filled clouds of wood smoke across the ruined buildings of the fortress, enveloping him entirely. Zigging and zagging across the open space, he ran for the southeastern wall, where the bulk of the Zealots’ living quarters were.

He made it down to the eastern casemate walls without attracting any more catapult fire from the siege tower. He scuttled through a small doorway and turned right, not wanting to push his luck with the Roman snipers. Fortunately, the ground sloped down from the ritual bathhouse, so he was not too badly winded by his sprint. Even so, he crouched down on the dirt floor for a moment to catch his breath. A ballista had punched a hole in the mud brick wall, so he could see out onto the open area. The flames were now visible only as a red glow behind the walls of the western palace building, itself afire in spots. Thanks to the slope, most of the heavy wood smoke from the smoldering wall fire was blowing overhead. The gloomy corridor formed by the casemate structure was no more than a man’s height wide, filled with right-angle twists and turns to make it easier to defend against invaders. There were tiny oil lamps guttering in wall niches, their own wisps of smoke casting a visible pall along the ceiling. Once the Romans had managed to bring the heavy ballista catapult, capable of throwing the ten-mina stones, up onto the western slopes, most of the Kanna’im had moved their quarters into the eastern and southern casemate walls. The living quarters were little more than hovels, one or two rooms formed by poles and hides stretched partially across the corridor, leaving barely enough room for a man to squeeze by the improvised walls. There were larger, more permanent dwellings down at the southeastern corner of the fortress, where there was also a large rim cistern. Normally all the warriors would be holed up in the northern palace buildings, but on this night …

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.

Judah the Daggerman had finally had enough of slaughter. He just wanted it all to end. He had himself been a killing machine ever since those dramatic days in Jerusalem, almost forty years ago, when the Romans, aided and abetted by fat Levites, had crucified an insignificant, deluded visionary from Galilee in a grotesque public execution, thereby igniting the fuse that led ultimately to the utter destruction of Israel. Just precisely as that ragged prophet had predicted, he reminded himself. He surveyed the war-ravaged grounds of what had been Herod the Idumean’s pleasure dome. This is the last of our works, he thought, and I shall be the Last Man.

The smoke cloud thickened momentarily as he gathered himself. He could see nothing of the palace now and had to bend his face into the crusted shroud of his outer sleeve to keep his eyes from tearing in the acrid smoke. Then it cleared, and he made his run, staying low, not even looking toward the siege tower as he scrambled across the rubble as fast as he could go to the palace wall, where he flattened himself out of sight of any watchers in the tower. The smoke coiled upon him with a vengeance, and he had to inch his way across the stone wall, eyes clamped shut, until he felt the double doors, which were partially open. He bent low and took one last look around in the gloom for intruders, then slipped through the doorway and pushed first one and then the other man-high door shut behind him.

It was nearly full dark inside the storeroom building, but Judah, like all of the warriors, knew his way around these corridors blindfolded. There were three main parallel passageways, off of which were the storerooms themselves. The building was attached to the northern palace, whose spacious throne room had that night become the communal killing ground. He moved quickly through the storeroom passageways, blinking back tears. Even here, in the storeroom building, he could detect another smell above the wood smoke. He knew all too well what it was.

He pushed open individual storeroom doors, looking for anyone who might have lost his nerve and hidden in the labyrinth of small rooms. There was no one. He slowed as he finished his survey of the third and last passageway, dreading what he had to do next.

What’s the point, he asked himself as he stood in front of the connecting door between the palace complex and the storeroom building. They’re all dead in there. Anyone left alive would want to kill himself, just from seeing the spectacle of death behind that door.

Because you promised, he told himself. You, Judah Sicarius, will be the Last Man, but not until you have made sure that none of them is left alive. Only the ten most senior officers among the Kanna’im even knew about the great cavern’s existence, and only Eleazar, Jeshua ben Matthias, and Judah knew what was secreted there. At least, that’s what Eleazar had told him, but who could know what rumors might have leaked out among almost a thousand defenders? It was tragic enough that the pagan bastards had burned God’s Temple in Jerusalem, carrying off sacred scrolls, vestments, and the glorious golden fixtures to one of their tawdry triumphs for the mob in Rome. Nothing could be done about that. Perhaps one day, however, in the distant future, the Jews would establish a new kingdom, and if they did, what was hidden in the heart of the mountain might once again adorn a great Temple.

He pushed open the doors to the main palace and gagged at the stench. His stomach clenched, and for an instant he thought about stepping outside for a lungful of wood smoke—anything would be better than this horror in the darkened audience room beyond. Directly ahead was a short corridor and then a guards’ room, and beyond—well, there were no words for what lay beyond. There were no lamps burning here, no more royal torches flaring in their iron holders.

He was supposed to fire the palace but not the storerooms. For that he needed flame. He went sideways down a small corridor to a complex of what had been offices in King Herod’s time, beyond which was a second, larger guards’ dayroom. He felt his sandals slipping on the marble floors and realized there were bloody footprints running down the center of the hallway. Someone had fled the massacre inside. He stopped.

Was that someone still alive?

The hallway was too dark for him to see much other than the slick smudges on the marble. Slick, but also sticky. Not fresh blood, then. He reached the larger guards’ room and saw what he needed, a small oil lamp burning high up in a niche on the outer wall. All he would have to do would be to roll a few amphorae of oil into the audience chamber, crack the seals, and ignite the oil.

There were windows in the guards’ room, and it was definitely growing lighter outside than in. He could see the clouds of smoke rolling past, looking like huge amorphous ghosts on a mission of vengeance. The sound of the kettledrums penetrated this end of the palace. Very soon now, he thought.

He reached high and picked off the oil lamp. Turning around, he froze. The gaunt, soot-streaked face of another man stared back at him from the gloom of a corner in the room. Not just any face: It was Eleazar himself.

Judah raised the tiny oil lamp to make sure. “You?” he gasped. “How can this be?”

Eleazar was a lean and intense warrior who had led the defense of Masada from the beginning. He was not much younger than Judah, and he was a descendant of that Judah who had instigated a tax revolt against Cyrenius, which had in turn led to the formation of the Sicarii. Judah was suddenly furious that Eleazar, of all men on the mountain, had failed to keep the covenant, the one he had preached in the first place. He lifted the oil lamp higher, better to look into the leader’s gaunt face. He noted that Eleazar’s sleeves and shins were bloody, but there was no other mark upon him. When he thought about the sights he had witnessed in the outer precincts of the fortress, and the catastrophe that lay beyond in the great hall, he trembled with anger.

“It is still an eligible thing to die after a glorious manner?” he growled, throwing Eleazar’s earlier words back at him. “And after we have slain them, let us bestow that glorious benefit mutually and preserve ourselves in freedom? Glorious benefit?”

Eleazar wouldn’t look at him, nor would he speak. He stared down at the white tiles of the guards’ room, his hands empty in his lap, his mouth set in a grim, flat line. Judah moved closer, his right hand closing on the haft of his dagger.

“You said these things,” he spat. “You convinced them—you convinced all of us—to kill ourselves to spite the Roman beast. ‘Where now is that great city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein?’ you said. ‘It is now demolished to the very foundations, where unfortunate old men lie upon the ashes of the Temple, and a few women are there preserved alive, for our bitter shame and reproach’? Were these not your words?”

Eleazar still refused to look at him. “I couldn’t do it,” he said softly. He shook his head, slowly, from side to side, as if amazed at his own cowardice. “I could not bring myself to do it.”

Judah drew the long dagger and pointed it down at Eleazar’s wan face. Eleazar raised his eyes and made a gesture of resignation with his hands. In one swift movement, executed too many times throughout his career as a professional assassin, Judah stabbed down, impaling Eleazar just below the breastbone.

“‘Let us make haste to die bravely,’” Judah roared, as he pushed the blade deeper, ignoring Eleazar’s mortal, convulsive groan and desperately grasping hands. “‘Let us pity ourselves, our children, and our wives, while it is in our power to show pity to them. Let us go out of the world in a state of freedom!’”

Eleazar’s back arched in agony, the blood now running like a river from his open mouth, his feet kicking helplessly alongside Judah’s legs.

“‘Let us die before we become slaves under our enemies,’” Judah recited, as he twisted the blade, severing every vital link to life within Eleazar’s body, “‘and let us go out of this world, together with our children and our wives, in a state of freedom, so that we leave an example which shall at once cause their astonishment at our death, and their admiration at our hardiness.’”

Eleazar collapsed back against the wall, a great wheezing, bubbling sigh escaping from his mouth and nose as the blood slowed, his eyes fixed now in that rigid contemplation known only to the dead.

Judah withdrew the blade and straightened up, exhaling forcefully. His arm was shaking, and he found himself weeping. He had followed this man through the hell of civil war, the immolation of the Jewish state and most of its population, and finally the long and dreadful siege in this God-forsaken place, only to have Eleazar, the commander, the leader, the fiery heart of the revolt, lose his nerve? He could not abide it.

A gust of wind blew smoke into the palace, stirring once again the reek of mass death coming from down the passageways. The rumble of the drums seemed to be growing louder. The formations must be massing down below the ramp.

An hour at the most until dawn. It was time to fire the palace. Then he would slip down the Serpent Path to the great cistern. To his own end. Unlike Eleazar, he had no doubts that he could do what he must. He was anxious to die.

*   *   *

Judah had to lower himself on a rope over the eastern parapets, the gate to the Serpent Path having long been sealed by the defenders. He felt doubly exposed as he slid down, because this was the sunrise side of the mountain. The Zealots had seen Roman patrols on the Serpent Path, but always down toward the bottom. General Silva had allowed the path itself to remain open in hopes of encouraging defections from the mountain. He had closed it only after discovering that Jews were using it to join the defenders.

He crunched down into the loose sand and gravel below the walls and flipped the rope a couple of times until the special knot let go, dropping the full length of it at his feet. He gathered it up and trudged down the path, moving from boulder to boulder as best he could, stopping to listen for the tramp of Roman sandals. The air was fresher here, as the diurnal winds prepared to change. The smells were no longer of death and smoke but of brine and long-burned sand. He reached the tiny cave, dragging the coil of rope behind him to smooth out his tracks, and then stepped inside. There had been a rain two weeks ago, and the sand on the floor of the cave was still wet.

He stopped to rest, very much aware now that the opening of the cave was gray against the darkness inside. Soon the Romans would advance up the siege ramp. What a sight they would find! He had never found the missing children and the two women. Perhaps they had taken refuge in one of the dry cisterns at the southern end of the fortress. A few inconsequential survivors wouldn’t be all bad, he thought. The Romans would find them and hear firsthand what had befallen their triumph. Then, unfortunately, they’d throw them off the ramparts.

It was time. He went to the back of the cave and began to dig away the sand until he exposed the hole into the great cavern. It was covered with a closely fitted wooden hatch, which he was able to pull up, turn on its side, and then drop through the hole. It took a frighteningly long time before he heard the crash of splintering boards below. The cavern was at least sixty cubits from the ceiling to the floor. Then he moved more sand, exposing the heavy stone slab that had been buried next to the hole. It was much too heavy for one man to move without levers, but they had prepositioned five small round logs under it to serve as rollers. On the top was an iron ring, bolted to an iron shaft that penetrated the slab. There was a smaller ring on the bottom side. He attached the rope to this underside ring. Then he rolled the slab over to the very edge of the hole, leaving enough room for him to climb through. He used his sandals to sweep mounds of sand right next to the hole and on top of the slab, so that the sand would fall in behind the stone and conceal it.

He sat for a moment on the edge of the hole. Once he lowered himself onto the rope, the slab would begin to move. He would have a few seconds to get beneath it before it rolled into the cambered hole, sealing him into the cave forever.

It was well and truly over. His entire life. Old as he was, he could still remember it all, even as far back as the heady days in Galilee when he’d joined the wild bunch, after having been expelled from his family and his village for mocking the religious pretensions of his older brother. The expulsion, when he was just fifteen years old, had come as no surprise, really. He had been a rebellious child from the first, a fighter and a scrapper and much more interested in hunting and trapping in the hills than in boring scripture and the study of long-dead prophets. Increasingly forced to endure endless lectures on how much better his older brother was, how much more worthy, devoted, scripturally brilliant, such a good son, all of it, he jumped at the chance to join the small band of ruffian teenagers who roamed the northern hills of Galilee, living off the land and the occasional stolen herd animal. His parents had renounced him and stricken his name, while his brother, the saint, went off to study with the priests and scholars about minutiae in the holy book.

He stopped to listen. Something was different. The drums. The drums had stopped. He closed his eyes and recaptured the images from the palace above and the desperate, bloody hovels in the casemates, the glorious defenders of Jewish honor and history reduced now to sodden lumps of carrion.

For a moment, his faith in the cause almost broke.

Implacable Rome. Vengeful Rome. Divine Rome. Conquerors of the whole world, masters of the visible horizon who even called the entire middle sea Mare Nostrum, our sea. Challenged by tiny, insignificant Judaea.

They had been mad to even imagine they could break the Roman yoke.

It was time to end it. The treasures were secure. The people’s testaments were all collected at the bottom. The Romans were coming.

He sighed, grabbed the rope, turned sideways, put his weight on it, and slid down beneath the edges of the slab hole. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the slab responded, moving toward his face as he slid farther down beneath the rectangular opening, the wooden rollers dropping through, banging off his shoulders, and then the slab seating with a granitic, sandy thump, leaving him suspended in utter darkness. The roller logs crashed down onto the rock floor of the cavern a very long way beneath him. He listened and thought he could hear the whispering flow of sand covering the slab. Hand over hand, his fingers clutching the rough knots, he lowered himself into stygian darkness.

He continued to slide down the rope until his sandals came up against the big knot at the bottom. He could see absolutely nothing; the darkness was profound. He tried to visualize the great sphere of the cavern but had no way to orient himself, so he began to swing, pumping the rope back and forth until he was swinging through the darkness, initially in one line but then in a sweeping circle, wider and wider, until he finally felt his feet bang up against the rock wall. He kept it up, expanding the arc, until one of his feet engaged the scaffolding wall they had erected. It was a lashed pole-and-crosspiece affair, rising from the floor of the cavern to the entrance of the side cave.

He lost it and then found it again. It took three more tries before he could hook a foot into the lattice of the ladder and stop his swing. He was puffing from the exertion and took a minute to regain his breath. He was now hanging like a hammock, his feet locked around the ladder structure while the rest of his body hung out over the blackness as he gripped the rope. He considered just letting go. It was some forty cubits to the floor of the cavern, certainly far enough down to smash the life out of him when he landed. There were two more things he had to do, however, and they had to be done in the cave.

He extended his feet through the lattice, hooked his knees, and then let go of the rope. He felt it swing back out into the center of the cave, his last connection to the world above gone forever. He raised himself on the scaffolding and began to climb in the total darkness, visualizing the ladder wall and the tiny cave entrance in his mind from the times before. Then there had been torches. When he got up to the top lattice of the scaffolding, he felt his way along it until the lip of the side cave entrance came under his hands. He stepped up onto the top of the lattice, swung around it, and crawled into the narrow tunnel. Keeping his head low, he eased his way up the tunnel on hands and knees until he felt the tunnel widen as it opened into the cave itself.

He stood up then and reached into the leather pouch at his waist. He carefully extracted the smoldering ember of wood he’d taken from the palace and blew on it. One end glowed red, revealing just the tips of his fingers. From a second compartment in the pouch he took a twist of lint that he had dipped in lamp oil. He pressed it to the ember and blew on it steadily until the lint flamed. Holding it upside down, he found the first of the oil pot lamps on the wall of the cave and lit it. Using that lamp he lit the rest, until he had a dozen flickering lamps going, their tiny lights throwing eerie shadows onto the walls. He walked across the sloping floor of the cave to the wooden altar where the Temple artifacts gleamed in the lamplight. Then he bent down and probed the sand beneath the altar with his dagger until he felt it hit something solid. He dug in the sand with his fingers and extracted a small, unadorned bronze wine bowl. Straightening up, he poured all the dry sand out of the bowl and held it in both hands, overwhelmed once again by a flood of memories. Holding the bowl in one hand, he picked up a piece of charcoal and began to write on the wall.

When he had finished writing his testament, the oil lamps were guttering. He stood up by the altar and faced the entrance to the cave. He bent down and positioned the haft of his dagger in a crack in the cave’s floor with the blade pointed straight up. He took one final deep breath, stiffened his back and his arms, and fell forward like an old tree.

He never felt the floor of the cave smash him in the face. Instead he felt a white-hot lance of pain transfix his consciousness even as it paralyzed that final deep breath in his chest. He opened his eyes but could not see. So this is what it felt like, all those men he had killed. A roaring red haze gathered in his mind. His last thought was that he was dying exactly like a Roman general who has been defeated on the battlefield. For some strange reason, he found that amusing. He tried to laugh, to make one last time that most human of sounds, but he could not.