Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [111]
The old Pharisee shrugged. ‘Once, such a threat would have chilled me to the marrow,’ he noted. ‘But no longer. For I was once like you, Matthew, hot-headed and full of piss and hatred.’ He paused and was amused by the scowl on the Zealot’s face. ‘But I learned to follow the scriptures, and follow them diligently.’
‘You can only go so far in life on the Torah alone, Pharisee,’ Basellas told him. ‘The Torah does not teach us how to fight the Roman occupiers. It does not reveal how the Christians shall be slain in their great multitude.’
Hieronymous shook his mane of greying hair. ‘I no longer see a threat in the followers of the Nazarene,’ he told Basellas. ‘Their ways are not our ways, but they are good ways. Maybe He was the Christ, after all?’
‘Blasphemies from you, old man?’ asked Basellas. ‘This truly is a day for signs and wonders.’
‘Indeed it is,’ said Marcus Lanilla as he and Fabius Actium stepped through the opened doorway. Basellas turned, but he was dead before he could properly face his Roman adversaries. Marcus thrust forward, expertly, with his sword which sank into Basellas’s chest just below the breastbone. A quick and brutal twist of the gladius finished him off.
‘Not like this,’ Basellas cried – his final words as he slumped to the floor, bleeding his life away.
‘That was murder,’ said Hieronymous, angrily, standing.
‘He was unarmed.’
‘So is this,’ replied. Fabius, with a savage slash of his own sword that killed Hieronymous instantly. ‘But who shall be witness to such capital crimes?’
Marcus stood cleaning his sword with patience and care.
‘And so, in one fell swoop, we have solved the Jews’ internal disagreements for them.’
‘Truly, we should be honoured by them,’ replied Fabius, laughing. ‘But we shall not he, for they are ungrateful swine, ready for slaughter.’
As the two centurions loudly celebrated their achievement, Calaphilus and his men arrived.
For a moment there was a strange and silent stand-off as the general looked at the bodies of Basellas and the old Pharisee. This, he had to admit, was an unexpected turn of events. He had to act quickly to wrestle the initiative back from his dangerous opponents.
‘See here, Gaius,’ Marcus Lanilla said, proudly displaying the dead body of their hated enemy, Basellas. ‘This has been a great day for Rome. A great day.’
‘It shall only be so when all of the treasons of the night are exposed,’ said Calaphilus dryly, and he removed his sword.
The column of twenty men behind him did likewise. ‘Your treachery shall not go unpunished, snake.’
For the first time, there was genuine doubt in Marcus Lanilla’s mind. He gave Fabius a glance and saw that his friend was also nervous. Marcus wasn’t entirely sure what he had expected when the general arrived to find them standing over the body of the most wanted man in all Thrace, but having a sword drawn on him certainly wasn’t at the top of the list.
‘You dare not insult or injure us, Calaphilus,’ Marcus said angrily.
Fabius put down his own sword, quickly. ‘We are unarmed,’ he continued, in a nervous, high-pitched voice.
‘We make no threats and state no grievances against the empire.’
You dare not execute us, either, you mad old fool,’ Marcus noted. ‘We shall be popular heroes in Rome for having ended the rebellion of the Byzantine Zealots. Something neither you nor that thing we call a praefectus, with his buttocks clenched on the fence of indolence, were able to do.’
It was true. They had ended, in a single blow, the rebellion that Calaphilus had struggled for five years to put down. If such evidence was presented in Rome then Marcus’s friends in the senate would use this to whip up the support of the people and charges of treason would be lost amidst the deafening sound of triumph.
‘I appeal to you men,’ Marcus said, suddenly, looking past the general to the soldiers behind. To captain Marinus Topignius and his men. ‘Who would you prefer to follow? A weak leader like Calaphilus, or younger,