MASADA. THERE WAS a rock, not small in its circumference, and very high. It was surrounded with valleys of such astounding depth downwards that the eye could not perceive their floors. They were so steep that no animal could walk upon them, except at two places of the rock, where it subsides, in order to afford a passage for ascent, though this be exceedingly difficult On these paths, there is nothing but destruction should your feet slip, for on all sides there are vast chasms and precipices that are sufficient to suppress the courage of any man by the very terror that it places in the mind... Upon the very summit of this mighty hill did Jonathan the High Priest first of all build a fortress. And he did call it by the name of ‘Masada’.
From the ‘Works Of Flavius Josephus’, 37-100 (?) A.D.
‘There it is. We’ve been here for nearly nine months, and for the first time, I really believe that the end of the affair is near to hand. I pray to the Gods each night that it is. I can’t stand much more of this damned heat.’
Marcus stood with the young Legate, gazing up in awe at the fortress of Masada, fifty miles south-east of Jerusalem, overlooking the placid waters of the Dead Sea. It was truly a daunting sight, and he could understand the feeling of defeat that had come to the Tenth Legion when they’d first arrived in the previous year. And the exaltation they must now be feeling as they saw their labors coming inexorably towards their end.
It was unbelievably hot in the desert, with the sun hanging like a bowl of molten gold, suspended between the surrounding mountains. And the fortress dominating the scene. It stood well over a thousand feet high, and there were, it was said, only two ways up. And both were guarded by Zealots.
‘Trouble is, Marcus Britannicus, the paths are so damned narrow that an old woman armed with a willow staff could hold off a whole Legion.’
‘But the siege must be taking a dreadful toll of the Jews up there. How many are there?’
‘We don’t exactly know. That’s where your mission’ll come in useful, if you can get in. And if you can get back again in one piece. The last spy they caught up there they cut up and threw down to us a bit at a time. Took a week for it all to reach us. We think about a thousand. Men, women and a few brats. The place up there is supposed to have huge storehouses, still full of food.’
‘Water?’
The Legate shaded his eyes against the sun and pointed up at the red-brown flank of the mountain. ‘Aaah. That was where old Flavius Silva thought we’d got them. There’s those aqueducts, bringing water from the other hills. That’d be no good, but it seems that they’ve got massive holes hollowed out in the middle of the rock. The Jews must have labored like rabbits to get it done. Those holes are the openings to a system of culverts and cisterns. That’s what stores the water.’
‘Rain?’ In the weeks he’d been out there, Marcus had not even seen a single drop of rain. And the sky was its usual cloudless blue.
‘Aye. Twice in the last few months we’ve had rain. And such rain! Like nothing you’ve ever seen. Although your father was from Britain, and I hear it always rains up there, doesn’t it?’
At the mention of his father, and of Britain, Marcus had automatically steeled himself for an insult or a sneer, but the Legate was obviously making a simple and innocent remark. They didn’t always.
It had only been a year or so back that a group of young officers were gambling and drinking and one of them had seen Marcus enter. There had been words spoken. Loud enough for him to hear. Deliberately so. Sneering. He had gone to the officer and asked him if he would repeat the words. When he had refused, for the fighting reputation of Marcus was well known, he had called him a coward and slapped him hard across the face.
Encouraged on by his fellow patrician officers, the young man had risen and walked out, followed by Marcus. They had gone round the back of the wine-shop, and the others had remained behind. Becoming more sober as they waited, for the youth with Marcus was the son of a senator, and carried great influence.
After a few minutes, Marcus had walked back in, unmarked, and told them to go and fetch their friend. They had found him stretched against a wall, with both eyes pulped to bloody jelly. His father had been told of a murder by natives, and everyone had kept quiet. Thinking of the honor of the Legion. And of the safety of their own skins for having been concerned in the affair.
After that, there had been less and less of the sneering, thanks also to the intervention of Flavius Silva. And now Marcus stood below the walls of Masada, the fort upon the rock, with a commission from the General himself to try and enter Masada and find out what their disposition was, and how their spirits ran.
Ignoring the fact that he hadn’t answered his question, the Legate went on. ‘The rain falls down faster than a whore’s drawers. And heavier than old Flavius’s tongue when he’s in one of his rages. The sky turns black and it pours out of those holes like a fountain, showering clean down the side of the mountain. And that’s when they fill up their culverts.’
Marcus stared up at the walls. And then down to the earthworks that surrounded it. His fingers went up to his lucky stone, worn smooth by his constant touching. He tried to remember what he knew of military tactics, and he could see that Flavius Silva had done everything he could to try and crack this most difficult of nuts. The camp where he now stood was on the western side of the rock, and the main buildings, he knew, lay on the left as he looked at it. On the northern rim of Masada. Although there was a wall clear round the top, there had been attempts to rush the paths, but the Legate was right. There was no way up them past the determined defenders. And if there was no path up that the Romans could use? Then what could they do?
The answer was simple.
Using a multitude of labor, the Romans built another path. Shifting thousands of tons of rock and earth, they had built a massive ramp up the west side of the fortress, and it steadily inched its way towards the top.
‘Another few days, and we shall be ready to plunge into that place and there will be nothing any of their pagan Gods can do to stop us. Five. Perhaps four days.’
The General’s eyes had lit up at the thought. The fort had been an open ulcer in the flank of the Empire since it was captured from them some six years previously. And now it was going to fall. And it would fall to him. And the reputation of Flavius Silva was assured.
‘How will you get in there? Someone said that he thought, and pardon me for repeating this, that you looked a bit like a Jew yourself, and that you could somehow smuggle yourself in and pass yourself as one of the Zealots.’
Marcus wondered that himself. The paths were impossible. That great ramp was not yet near enough to the top. He wiped sweat from his brow, cursing the order that kept them all in armor when they were within slingstone range of the rock. But he had seen a soldier killed with a stone. No bigger than the egg of a hen, yet it had burst his skull apart, splattering his brains all over the baked earth. He looked up at the sky, wondering if they’d get any rain that might cool the place down, and saw a small cloud, tipping the horizon, no bigger than a maid’s brooch.
‘Will that bring rain?’ he asked, pointing at it.
‘Perhaps. They begin like that, and sometimes they go away and sometimes they get bigger. With this light wind it’ll be near midnight before it reaches us anyway.’
He looked at the preoccupied expression on the face of the young scout, wondering if all the tales about his fighting skill were true. And if his father had truly been the traitor some men said. Flavius Silva might be a hard leader, but he was a fair one. He’d been prepared to give the boy a chance, so maybe he was all right. Certainly looked capable enough.
‘What are you thinking, Marcus Britannicus? Wondering if you can hook a ride on a cloud that’ll float you into their fortress?’
Marcus smiled at the laughter. ‘If I told you what I was thinking, then you might laugh all the more. Leave me here. It’s very nearly time for the meal, and I want to sit here and look at Masada, and think how I might fly into it.’
The Legate laughed at him, and marched off, his heavy sandals raising a puff of dust at each step. Left alone, Marcus again stared up at the rock face, paying particular attention to those holes, which he had been told were outflow vents for their water system. Over his head, the sun slowly dropped away behind the hills, and the darkness crept towards him from over the glittering bowl of the Dead Sea. And the darkness brought the clouds, lowering over the stars, and masking the country in a black veil.
It was a fine night for a murder. Or for a secret raid on an invulnerable fortress.
Once, he and his father had gone on a long hunting trip, accompanied only by Argos and a bare dozen soldiers and slaves. They’d ridden westwards from the sea, across the trackless forests of Britain, through Durobrivae, and over the central plain to Viroconium. There, they were entering the lands of the Ordovices, and they picked up an extra military escort into the mountains. They’d gone as far as Segontium, not risking any further exploration of the wild peninsula of Ganganorum.
It had been among the hills, snow-capped, though it had been near the end of winter, that Marcus had gone climbing, under the tuition of Argos. They’d scrambled up a sheer face, hanging on by toes and nails, bodies pressed to the cold rocks as the howling furies of the freezing wind tried to pluck them off and dash them to their deaths on the scree a thousand feet below. Marcus had been terrified, and exhilarated, all at the same time, and he had always regretted that they never repeated the expedition, and he was never again to travel light-heartedly over the damp, green land with his beloved father. Never again.
His foot slipped, and he hung for a dizzy moment by the fingers of his right hand, until he could regain a toehold. He cursed himself for losing his concentration, and letting his mind wander back to the days that were now only ashes of a near-forgotten fire. What was dead was dead, and it was now only important to live for the day.
The binding on the cloak was coming loose, and the wind was nibbling at an exposed edge of the dark wool, threatening at any moment to tear it away, setting it flapping about his head. Yet he couldn’t rest to set it to rights. The words of old Argos came back to him, and he could almost hear that husky voice, and see the face, with the puckered skin round the wounded eye.
‘Keep two hands and a foot on. Or two feet and a hand. Never less, if you want to lay another maiden in the straw when your mother’s not watching.’
Even if there hadn’t been the low cloud scudding over the moon, he doubted if he would now be able to see the earth, shimmering far below him. The rock wasn’t quite as sheer as it had looked. There was no way that any large force could have made the climb. By night it would have been utterly impossible for them to keep together. By day they could have been picked off by a handful of children who would merely have needed to have rolled down a few stones to send every attacker crashing to a fearful death.
Because of the impossibility of the scheme, the Zealots seemed as though they weren’t protecting that side, beyond the normal guards that Marcus had been told patrolled the top of the fortress. Far below him, and to his right, he could see the torches of the camp, glittering like tiny sparks in the blackness. While he was still on the lower slopes of the hill he had even been able to hear some men singing one of the bawdy songs of the Legion. Concerning a certain Centurion and a lobster, and the odd adventures that arose when they travelled together to Rome to see the ladies. He’d found himself humming the chorus as he scrambled over the loose rock, moving as quietly as he could towards the steeper face.
Now the wind had risen, and he could hear nothing from the camp. He managed to reach a small ledge, about a hundred feet below the summit, as he judged, and he tucked the cloak back into its wrapping. He wore a plain tunic of the type that most of the Zealots were dressed in. Woolen, with a broad belt that carried a simple dagger in a leather sheath.
For a moment he thought that he could hear voices above him, but the main paths were on the far side of the mountain, and he guessed that it was a freak of the wind carrying up a snatch of conversation from below him. From his review of the face during the afternoon, he thought that he must be somewhere near the mouths of the culverts, where he hoped to climb in and hide.
The blast of thunder was so loud and seemed so close that Marcus came within a fraction of losing his grasp on the rock and plummeting down to his doom. The crack of lightning burned across his eyes, and he closed them, hanging on to his handholds, bracing his body against the face. The sandstone felt rough to his fingers, and tiny pieces of it rolled away, falling like dust into space.
The next flash was even closer, and he wondered if it had actually struck Masada. The tang of ozone filled the air, and his hair seemed to crackle on his skull. Thunder rolled around him, making his ears sing, overflowing the precipice and bouncing back in echoes from other hills.
Opening his eyes, he squinted around, trying to see where the mouths of the cisterns were. The brightness of the light had left him with a residual red glow, burning at the back of his eyes. The wind had risen, flattening him against the sun-warmed rock. There was a third flash, and a fourth and fifth. Gradually his sight cleared, and he was able to use the lightning to see where he was and where he wanted to go. Above him, and slightly to his left, was the gaping mouth of one of the caverns. To reach it he had to move like a crab, along the slope, knowing that there was a sheer drop of several hundred feet yawning below him.
The wind was now rising fast to a gale, tugging at his clothes, and making every single move a hazard. But at last he found himself safe in the shadow of the hole, and he was able to reach up and grasp the lip.
At that moment, it began to rain. Pattering off his head and back, bouncing in red lumps off the rock into his face. Rain such as Marcus had never seen before. It had rained often enough in, Britain. Damp, driving drizzle that swept in low off the sea, over the flats and estuaries and soaking through into a man’s bones.
But this rain! It fell in solid masses, filling his hair and ears and eyes with its screaming force. As it fell back off the rocks, it carried with it a sludge of red sand that poured into his mouth nearly drowning him. His tunic was weighed down with rain, dragging him backwards off the cliff.
His fingers scrabbled at the edge of the outlet, trying to lever himself up and in. But the years of water flowing over the stone had worn it down until it was as slippery as glass, and it seemed as though he would never do it. His legs felt like jelly, and Marcus knew that he was not going to be able to stand there for much longer before the strength seeped from his body and he simply toppled backwards, sliding down for a hundred feet or so, gradually going faster. Fingernails breaking and flesh ripped raw. Then he would be over the sheer brink of the precipice and falling free, the breath torn from him, until he was smashed to bloody flesh and bare bones on the boulders far below.
One of his favorite games as a child, in the long evenings when his parents were entertaining guests, was to compose short epigrams, modelled after Catullus. A poet that many matrons would have banned for a boy as young as he was, but his mother enjoyed the earthy quality of the poet, and encouraged him to read.
And there, plastered to the rock wall of Masada, one of his sayings came back to him. ‘Endeavour will carry you through the times of little hope better than hope will carry you through times of little endeavor.’
It was truly a time of little hope, with the storm growing in fierceness, and his clothes weighing him down more and more. He drew in a deep breath of the cool, fresh air, and then thrust up, like an arrow leaving the string, pushing off both footholds at once, his hands reaching for the overhanging lip of the cistern, finding it, and hanging on. His toes scratched at the rock, the leather of the sandals kicking away small chunks of the soft stone in his endeavor.
And it worked. There was the hint of a foothold and he was able to lever himself up enough to slide inside, feeling the instant relief of being out of the wind and the rain. The one problem was that nobody in the Roman camp had the least idea how deep the tanks were, and how far he would have to fall to reach the bottom. Inside, the light from the storm hardly raised more than a flicker, and Marcus couldn’t even guess at how far it was. It was even possible that it was a hundred feet down, and he would let go and drop to lie a mangled corpse for all eternity.
‘Never gamble with your life, unless there are no other roads open to you,’ Argos used to say. To leave himself weaponless in the heart of the Zealot fortress seemed madness, but the only thing he had that he could drop to learn the floor height was his dagger. If he didn’t use it, and dropped, then he would still have his weapon, but he might be dead.
There was also his lucky pebble, but it never even crossed his mind to use that. Hanging on to the rim of the opening with one hand, he fumbled and dragged out the knife from the wet sheath, holding it out at arm’s length and letting it fall. There was the briefest pause before he heard it strike with a dull thud on a stone floor. It sounded as though it was only a few feet.
And it was.
His sandalled feet slapped on the rough floor with a flat crack that horrified him, but it had been impossible to judge his landing exactly in the blackness. Fortunately, the storm seemed to be directly overhead and there was an almost continuous rumbling and crashing of thunder, making it sound as though there were giants on top of the mountain rolling huge boulders together.
Hands outstretched, fumbling over the dry stone, Marcus quickly found his dagger and stuck it in his belt again. Unrolled his wet cloak, and spread it out to dry, placing it near a vertical wall so that he could rest on it.
Then, all he could do was wait until it grew lighter and he could see if there was a way out of the cistern. If there wasn’t... If there wasn’t, then he doubted if he’d ever be able to make the climb back down again. Not even with all the endeavor in the world.
One of Marcus’s great skills was to be able to relax no matter what the danger was. Since there was nothing he could do by staying awake, it was common sense that he should sleep. And so he did.
Outside, the rain continued to beat down with unrelenting force. On all the hills around Masada, it lay in pools, dribbling into streams. Rushing through gulleys into small rivers that quickly became foaming torrents. The aqueducts into the beleaguered fortress overflowed with the volume of water that ran into them. From those pipes, the water entered the complex system of water-carrying ducts and culverts that had been designed when Herod first built Masada as his palace.
The first that Marcus knew of all this was when he heard the noise of water bubbling against the floor, and suddenly felt it rising about his legs. With an exclamation, he leaped to his feet, picking up his cloak, still sodden, and leaned his back against the wall. The noise of splashing increased, and he could actually feel it getting higher. Reaching his ankles, and then creeping up his calves, even as he stood there.
Outside, the thunder had stopped, and there were no further flashes from the lightning to show him what the situation was in the cistern. This was one enemy that Marcus had no way of fighting, and all he could do was stand there and wait. And see just how high the water was going to rise.
It reached his knees, and was now gushing in faster than before.
From the noise, the torrent seemed as though it was coming in from the top corner of the tank, somewhere up to Marcus’s right. Carefully, feeling with his hand against the wall, and probing at the floor with his outstretched foot, he began to move round his prison. The walls were smoother than the floor, with the gouge marks of the builders’ chisels still there. They were completely vertical, with not a prayer of a handhold, and no ledge of any kind.
He ducked as he felt his way under the weight of water cascading in through the channel somewhere up in the ceiling. It beat down on his head, almost forcing him to his knees with its power. Then he was past it, and moving on the third side. As far as he could judge, the cistern was about fifteen paces square, and the roof sounded as though it could be as much as thirty feet in height.
By now, his movements were slower as the water reached the hem of his tunic and began to climb his thighs. For a moment, the black germ of panic attacked him, and he tried to move faster, almost falling from the wall and losing all sense of direction. Then he realized what was happening and deliberately stopped walking, and leaned back against the wall, fingering the stone of Boadicea, and calming his breathing as Argos had always told him.
It was only when he was halfway round the third side that a thought struck him. There must be times when the cisterns needed cleaning out. And that had to be done...
‘Mithras! From inside!’
His shout almost drowned out the thunder of the water as it poured in the dark room. Or, was it quite as dark as it had been? There seemed the faintest patch of grey smearing high up on the opposite wall. The hole that he’d come in through showed the first trace of the morning light.
Hope redoubled, Marcus pressed on further round the chamber, until his hand finally found what he’d hoped for. There was a staircase, the steps hewn from the living rock, up the wall where he stood. He found it with his hand, and quickly clambered up on it, going up several steps before he was clear of the water. Just before he found the stairs, the chill had climbed nearly to his waist. And it showed not the least sign of stopping.
Squatting on the rough stone, Marcus peered across through the black until he could make out the round shape of the outlet. From where he was, he judged it to be only a couple of feet from the top of the cistern. He’d hung from it by his hands and dropped. The water now stood at nearly four feet deep. Before it reached the opening, it had to rise to over twelve feet.
But at its present rate, it wasn’t going to take all that long to get that high. He breathed a great sigh of relief that he’d found the way out. Otherwise... Once the water reached the top, then anything—or anyone—in it would be whirled round and dashed from the opening by the pressure of the water, and hurled clean over the edge of the mountain.
Marcus whistled his relief, and began to carefully climb the stairs, squeezing himself against the wall to lessen the risk of slipping and toppling back into the bubbling depths. At the top, there was a massively heavy door made of metal-bound wood, and with hinges thicker than a man’s thigh. He realized it would take him all his strength to shift it, and he pressed his back to the task with all of his might.
Then found that it was locked.
There were two steps before the water got to the top. Marcus sat on the topmost step, staring moodily down at the frothing whirlpool below him. Outside, through the opening, the sun dazzled into the cistern, bursting in a mass of splintered diamonds of light as it hit the tumbling fall. It was ironic that it should be yet another sweltering day out there, while the rain from the night continued to gush along the complex system of aqueducts to fill the tanks of Masada. And there was no slowing of the rate.
The door was clearly designed to be waterproof, and keep the precious liquid safely contained. Marcus’s plight was simple. The water would rise until he was forced to swim. Very soon after that, it would spill over the brim of the hole through which he’d entered. Like milk through a holed bucket, it would gush out with increasing force, and it would carry him out with it, since there was no kind of handhold on the smooth sides of the safety-valve.
His father would have appreciated the irony of it. He’d always liked the way the Gods played their little jests with human ambition. That had been in the old days before he became bitter and withdrawn. Now here was his son, on a mission for Rome of great personal danger. To break into a fortress that a whole Legion had failed to take. And Marcus had done it. He was inside. In a room that would soon become the means of his own death.
Idly, Marcus picked at a loose piece of plaster on the wall, resting his head against the massive door. When he heard movement, and felt the wood vibrate slightly. Although it was immensely thick, it sounded almost as though someone was drawing great bolts back.
So. Perhaps it was to be life after all. But only until whoever was out there realized that he could only have got in from outside and raised the alarm. But it was a chance of life, and Marcus muttered his thanks to Mithras as he drew the knife from his sheath, and held it ready. Point uppermost, prepared for the stab and quick move out the moment the door opened.
Slowly, silently, on what must be greased hinges, the door inched open. The light from the sun now filled the chamber, and Marcus stood to the side of the small platform at the top of the steps so that he could take the first man through the opening. The water swilled round his feet, but he hardly noticed the cold, as the excitement fired through him. He wasn’t to die either the miserable death of a rat drowning in a trap, nor the appalling end of being sucked out and vomited from the top of the cliff as part of the waterfall. If he was to die, then it might be with his blade in his hand, and the blood of an enemy warm on his arms.
To his surprise, the door didn’t open the whole way, stopping once it was ajar enough for one person to slip through. Better and better, thought Marcus. Let them come at the one at a time and I will slay them the same way. An arm was in the doorway, and then one of the Jews stood there, gazing down at the turbulent water.
Dazzled momentarily by the light gleaming off some ornament the man wore, Marcus grabbed at him, throwing him down over his knee in a wrestler’s hold, the knife poised to slice open the Zealot’s throat. He was taken aback at the lightness of the figure. And even more surprised when he smelled the scent on the body, and felt long hair drift over his feet. And heard the strangled gasp of fear.
‘By Mithras!’ he exclaimed. ‘A sound, Jewess, and you are dead.’
But he had to kill her anyway. As quickly as he could. Ready for the next one who would be waiting outside. In the golden light of the sun, he could see that she was young, with hair as black as the wing of a raven, and eyes wide and brown like a frightened deer.
Her mouth hung open, and he noticed that there were crumbs of unleavened bread stuck to her lips. It was clearly time at Masada for the first meal of the day, breaking the night’s fast. Perhaps she was alone.
‘Are you alone? Answer me. Are you alone?’
She shook her head, and whispered something in a voice hoarse with shock. In what he thought must be the Jewish tongue. He still held her tightly, her back arched like a drawn bow over his knee, the point of his knife drawing a tiny bead of blood from her pulsing throat..
‘If you weren’t alone, then I would think your friends would have come to you by now. So.’ He paused for a moment, turning away from the doorway, so that she hung half over the water, which still thundered into the echoing cistern. It would help to get rid of the body.
‘I am sorry, girl. Your leaders should have surrendered to the might of Rome. I know not why they did not.’
The knife was poised, ready to slide through her neck, when he heard a voice from right behind him, speaking quietly in his ear.
They do not give in, brother Marcus, because they prefer beans and freedom to cakes and slavery.’
The edge of a sword lay cold across the side of Marcus’s throat, and he kept very still.