The Last Man Read online

  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 pas
sageway, 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.