Seven long months the Roman Legions had beaten with their huge engines of war against the three impregnable walls of the Holy City. Beleaguered and assailants were both exhausted and had appointed this day a truce; for it was the Jewish Sabbath. The besieged citizens would long since have surrendered to Rome; for Rome had given them peace and prosperity and security in their own Hebrew laws for a hundred years; but the mad Zealot Robber Bands and Short Sword Ruffians, known as the Sicarii, who had seized the city twenty-thousand strong Passover Week to plunder in the name of Liberty from Roman yoke, when all the Temple Chests were filled with gold tribute from Jews the world over, knew that surrender meant death, and holding all the arms of the city, kept the gates of the three unscalable walls locked against Roman entry or citizens’ escape. Escape was possible only by leaping or dropping ropes from the high walls. Women were held prisoners in the houses, as cattle for slaughter are hemmed in shambles, to force the obedience of the men to the mad Zealot Robber Bands. He who threw himself from the broad parapet of the upper walls and missed death in the frantic leap, saw all his kin flung forcibly over after him by the Zealots, into the bloody moat beneath the southern precipice, where the slow burning fires of Gehenna had already consumed more than six hundred thousand Jews.
But all was peace of parley this calm Sabbath morning.
Not a watcher appeared on the broad top of the walls from the Temple on the east to the three Towers of Herod on the higher Zion to the west. The world of fighters slept in the dead exhaustion of men who had lived in armor day and night for seven months. The footmen of the Roman Legions sprawled on the ground, helmets and face pieces still fastened, metal armor still buckled to breast and thigh. The horsemen lay with heads pillowed on saddles, their beasts stretched on the ground beside them, bridle rein crooked in their elbows, shields thrown for protection across their lower limbs. The huge battering rams, which the Romans had hauled up to the walls and mounted on hurdles of trees and rocks and sod, rested suspended in mid-air, the giant beams hanging over the wall for first blow the next day, with rams’ heads of solid iron twisted and torted from the smash of seven months’ ceaseless work. Where the cable, that hauled back the beam coiled round a horizontal windlass, had been tied to a stake driven in the ground, a hundred ropemen lay in a sleep dead as death. The great catapaults, with jaws of a giant leviathan gripping rocks for the toss over the walls, also hung silent and still against the calm sky, with more cables fast to ground stages and more fighters asleep with hands not a finger length from the ropes for the call to fresh fight, when the trumpets should sound.
North of Jerusalem, far as eye could see on mountain and plain, was a yellow tent city of Roman Legions grouped round one large marquee on the central ridge, above which gleamed the ensigns of the Emperor’s son, Titus, the gleaming eagle in brass on a lofty pole in front of the commander’s quarters.
The woman and the soldier stood facing each other with blazing eyes before the commander’s tent. The man did not speak. If Rome won, he would not risk his head by letting her pass. If Rome failed, neither would he risk his neck by offence to an imperious mistress, who was not wont to be stopped in her will.
Their eyes blazed. Both breathed hard.
“Down with that lance.” The woman’s order was emphasized with a stamp. She had tossed aside her black cloak, revealing royal purple below and her right hand sought the pearl-handled dagger in the gold cord round her waist.
“The Emperor sleeps, Princess,” the soldier gasped back. “One to win favor, had best not disturb the tired conqueror unannounced.”
“Liar,” she said with the quick gleam of an angry comet, “drop your spear.”
The tent curtain lifted. An unarmed man in royal vesture like her own emerged as if dazed from sleep.