Our people gathered to watch six thousand of the legion approach, accompanied by more than a thousand of their slaves and followers. We trembled in silence. What terrified us was not only their number but their sheer determination. They had come for us from Jerusalem, though we were but a few hundred. They had found us as the jackals find their prey, encircling the weakness of their victims, biding their time, ready to leap when the moment is right.
In the dust storm they raised, birds fell from the sky, unable to take flight in the bursts of swirling gravel. Soon the ground was littered with ravens, more in number than the soldiers. The flightless birds transformed the ground into a mournful stretch of black, and all at once it seemed the reaches of the World-to-Come had been laid down before us in a road of flesh and feathers.
“I have seen this before,” Revka murmured to me, her face ashen. “We cannot escape from harm.”
There was only one reason why Rome should come to try to defeat us when we were so few and their empire so great. They feared we rebels might serve as an ember to reignite the flame of freedom. Disgrace smolders, it burns when you least expect it to ignite. The Romans could not allow this. We were fish in a net, already drawn in upon the rocky shore; all they needed to do was cut us off from the water that sustained us. Already, coins had been printed in Rome to celebrate the fall of Judea. The image of a Roman legionnaire and a captive Jewish woman, humbled and enslaved beneath a palm tree, had been imprinted upon silver. As they had written it, so they wished it to be, as if they and not God alone could create matter out of words and will.
In a land where rebellion has been crushed, there cannot be a single warrior left.
*
IT WAS WINTER and the air was raw. We wore our cloaks drawn about us like armor, shivering in the wind, watching as our fate approached us. The rains had come, filling the valleys with torrents of water. Fish that had disappeared deep within the soil during the arid months appeared once again, magicked into life. Throughout the hills there were wildflowers and honeybees. The trunks of dead trees hummed as if they themselves had come alive. There were greens for the ibex, meat for the leopard. The desert had given the Tenth Legion the most favorable conditions for a crossing. Surely our enemies took this as an omen that they would be the victors. They were hungry, and they were fed. They were thirsty and needed look no farther than the streams that turned into waterfalls.
Perhaps those who were new to Judea wondered how it was that the desert had destroyed so many who had come before them, how the brutality of its fierce heat had changed those who had fought to stay alive in its arms. For this was the merciful time of the year, when birds began to return from Africa and Egypt, when there were herons rather than vultures and the land was plentiful. The army that came to our valley was made up of men from a dozen different lands, all speaking Latin, each one rewarded by Rome with provisions they had not dared to dream of in the poverty of their homelands, for they traveled with camels and donkeys loaded down with meat and dates and leather barrels with enough water to fill ten cisterns.
They approached our fortress with their strength intact, while we were eating grass and doves, sacrificing the sheep for which we no longer had grain, slitting the throats of the goats who no longer gave milk. We had water, what we always longed for, and the cisterns were full, yet we were poor and our hunger throbbed and reminded us of our poverty. So many of the doves had been taken for food and sacrifices, their waste no longer filled our baskets or fed the fields. The orchards failed us, the gardens were empty, the storerooms no longer sustained us. Now when we entered the dovecotes, there was a hush; in place of the song of the doves, there was only a faint cooing.
Our warriors were exhausted. They had been fighting for so long, without reprieve or rest, many of them young and untrained, mere boys, ten- and eleven-year-olds conscripted to stand in the place of the fallen. Yet they hid their fear. They shouted that the legion might bring all of Rome and still they could never scale the mountain to reach us.
But this was the army that had murdered twenty thousand of our people in Caesarea, so that not one had survived. They had dispatched the two other Jewish strongholds, Herodium and Machaerus, where they had slain those they had given a promise of reprieve. Having heard there were those who had managed to escape and were still in hiding, the Tenth Legion had cut down the Forest of Jardes, so there would not be a single tree for the escaped rebels to hide behind. There they killed three thousand more, their bodies left strewn on the field for the birds of prey without even a shred of cloth to cover their nakedness.
Flavius Silva then set his glance upon us. It was said that he was a man without regret, with violent moods and tempers, but with the gift of pure logic when he needed to advance on his enemy. I stood upon the wall with the rest of our people and watched our valley fill with columns of fighting men. Following were those who would bake the soldiers’ bread and cook their meals and mend their cloaks, along with the zonnoth, women who would be kept in tents for the soldiers’ pleasure, and the slaves who would build the camps, dragging enormous timbers from the north through the desert, along with the smiths with their carts of weaponry—spears and shields and thousands of arrows. But there was something more fearsome that arrived with the legion, the sign of our fate, for the Romans had brought a lion on a chain with them. We grew faint when we saw this beast. He, who had once been free in the desert and had ruled the wilderness from his cave, the symbol of the strength of the ancient tribe of Judea, now must do his keepers’ bidding. He gazed at us, and in his eyes we saw the Romans’ desire.