CHAPTER II — WHAT THE HAND KEEPS
Menon had to take the knife from him.
He did not ask. He caught Cidius by the wrist and bent the fingers loose one at a time. The Roman lay under the cart boards. Damaris’s bent arrow still stood below his ribs, the shaft trembling when Menon dragged Cidius clear.
Menon worked the hilt free. The knife came away with a wet pull.
Cidius made no sound. He could not straighten his fingers after Menon took it.
Menon looked once at the blade and threw it aside. Damaris’s knife struck stone and vanished under moving feet.
“Up.”
Cidius stepped, and the ground shifted beneath him. Blood and water slid under his sandal. Someone shoved a spear into his right hand. He could not remember who. Blood had dried into the grain; fresh blood had made parts of it slick again. When the butt struck uneven paving, the shaft twisted in his grasp.
He clenched until the split skin across his knuckles opened under Elara’s linen.
Pain remained in his right shoulder where Philon’s weight and the cart had driven into him.
First there was the pressure of the knot. It had gone tight and crooked, dragged dark by smoke and blood. He closed around the spear, but the binding was what he felt. The wood came after. The blood after that.
Near the cart, wood cracked under a heel. Cidius flinched towards the sound, and the press took it away.
The shield still hung twisted from his left arm. Its rim caught against the cart as Philon tore him sideways. The strap ripped loose, and the crowd carried him on without it.
Another man drove him down. A shoulder hit Cidius’s jaw. He tasted blood and smoke together. Philon disappeared behind two men carrying a shield between them.
The bodies carried him away from the cart, away from Damaris.
Behind him, a voice called for a woman who would not answer. The name changed each time it came, a shout, then a question, then something smaller than speech.
Doors stood open. Pots lay underfoot. Laundry sagged above the lane. A stair ended in smoke.
“Keep left. Stay off the open ground. Put the wounded behind shields.”
A man shouted that the left lane was burning.
A shove from Menon turned him.
“Then take the right edge and keep moving.”
The man stopped because a woman had caught Menon by the front of his cuirass. Sweat had darkened the cloth beneath his arms. Dust stuck where blood had dried along one seam.
“My daughter,” she said.
Menon tried to pass her.
She struck him with both fists, not hard enough to hurt him, hard enough to keep herself standing.
“My daughter is there.”
Menon glanced towards the lane: fire, bodies, nowhere through.
Menon gripped her shoulder and turned her towards the lower lane, but she hit him again, and this time there was no strength in it. Her hands slid down the armour. She looked past him into the smoke.
She screamed at him then, an ugly sound, all throat. He let her scream for one breath and pushed her into the hold of another woman.
“If she won’t walk, carry her.”
The other woman nodded, though her own face had gone empty.
Cidius watched too long, and Menon’s knuckles struck his shoulder.
“Eyes forward.”
Cidius did not move quickly enough.
Menon leaned close enough that Cidius smelled old sweat under the blood.
“Move now, or I drag you.”
Then he was gone, shoving another man into line.
In the lanes towards the landward gate, the fighting narrowed.
Iron struck stone and came back from every wall. Men screamed too close, then stopped too close. Sandals slipped in blood, water, kitchen filth, and ash washed down from broken roofs. Somewhere vinegar had spilled, sharp enough to cut through the stink of pitch. A gutter along the wall ran black where soot and wash water had mixed. Ahead, a man fell, and feet filled the space before his knees could.
Past the bend, Cidius saw faded blue for one breath and turned too quickly.
A pack strap. A shoulder. Smoke.
The crowd took him before he could look again.
Above them, a scream came before the thrown jar. It missed and broke on the stones behind the Syracusans, spilling oil under their feet.
A Syracusan boy tried to lift a fallen shield, but a dead man’s arm had gone through the strap. He pulled once, twice, sobbing through his teeth.
Menon struck him behind the head.
“Leave it.”
The boy stared at him, still holding the strap.
“It’s his,” the boy said.
“He’s dead.”
The boy looked at the shield then, not at the body.
Menon kicked it loose. The boy ran, and Cidius followed before he chose to.
Philon had said nothing, and that began to frighten Cidius more than the shouting.
The lane opened into a small yard beneath a fallen beam.
Menon looked once at the yard, the fallen beam, and the passage beyond it.
“Hold until I call.”
They held for less time than Menon needed.
Menon’s eyes went from the beam to the passage beyond it.
Philon had already crossed towards the far wall.
At the yard’s mouth, a shield jammed sideways and turned the first Roman with it. The man’s shoulder drove backward into the crush, and the forming line broke apart.
Philon caught him by the arm and threw him into the mouth of the yard. The fallen beam gave no space for a clean entry. The Roman entered straight and struck wood hard enough that his knees buckled and he folded backward into the men behind him.
Cidius thrust before there was an opening. His spear hit shield instead of flesh. The impact jarred through his arms and into his injured shoulder. He opened his grip and had to close it hard around the shaft.
Behind him, a child slipped from a woman’s arms. She dropped to her knees, clawing through feet, sandals, and blood. Beside her, a man kept saying he was sorry to the ground, palms upward.
A veteran with a scar along his cheek shoved past, saw them, and stopped with one hand against the wall. Then he lifted his spear.
Cidius crossed the yard badly, shoulder turned too late, spear dragging against stone. By the time he reached the gap, it had closed.
Philon planted near the far wall, one foot sure and the other already lying to him.
“Set your feet here,” Philon said. “Shields high. Fall back when I say.”
He did not turn to see if they obeyed. Men crowded the yard’s edge, and he gave the next order without turning.
“Menon takes them through the passage. Stay out of the street.”
An old man tried to answer, but a shoulder struck him sideways and broke the word in his mouth. Two boys were carried past without looking back.
Cidius moved with the others.
Philon turned once and found him.
“Stay on Menon. When he moves, you go.”
Cidius said nothing.
The linen had dried hard across his knuckles. Where it cracked, Cidius felt the knot pull at his skin.
Iron struck iron while shield edges ground against stone, and sandals came down where another body already lay.
From behind the first Roman shields, a single pilum came over the line into the yard. Not a volley, only one throw, close enough that Cidius heard the wood flex. It struck the shield beside Philon and dragged the shield downward while the man holding it cursed and tried to lift the weight.
The Romans reached them before the shieldman freed himself.
Philon planted before the first shield showed. Two older men lowered spearheads beside him.
“Go,” Philon said.
Cidius moved too early as shield faces shifted behind the smoke. He stepped with the ground still wrong beneath him, and his spear struck shield again. The shaft caught shallow, snapped back, and pain opened hard through his shoulder.
Philon drove through the opening and caught the first Roman high beneath the jaw. He tore the spear free. A shield boss struck his shoulder and drove him into the wall.
Stone took the breath from him, and his bad ankle folded beneath him. Blades vanished into the crush. Philon’s foot twisted under a body that still refused to fall.
Philon’s spear came up again, too low for killing, high enough to keep the next shield from closing.
“Go,” he said.
Menon caught the back of Cidius’s tunic and pulled him away from Philon.
Menon’s arm was around Cidius before he understood they were falling back. The yard slid away behind them.
Philon nodded once, his face the colour of old ash.
After that, Cidius kept turning for him.
He was shoved forward. He looked back through every gap. Menon pulled him left; Cidius looked right. When the lane bent, he looked back before the bend took the yard. When a shoulder knocked his cheek, he thought it was Philon’s hand and turned, stupidly, hopefully, into someone else’s blood.
The lane behind them had already begun to fold.
When the rear guard finally broke from the beam, Philon came last, limping after them.
They entered another passage full of running men. One dropped his spear, turned back for it, and went down beneath feet. Another tried to lift a fallen man and lost him halfway up.
Cidius looked for Philon.
He saw Menon first, bent slightly at the waist, one hand against the wall. The other hung near his thigh, opening and closing once before he noticed Cidius watching.
“Move.”
Stone dropped somewhere behind them.
The pause broke.
Men who had shouted minutes before now made smaller sounds: wet breathing, swallowed blood, words broken before they became names.
A broken pulley lay near the wall, rope still threaded through it and dragged flat beneath sandals. Men cursed it when it caught their feet.
Around the next turn, the struck bronze thinned. Fire answered where bronze had been. A goat cried inside a house where no goat should have been.
At one crossing, men knelt beside weapons laid against a wall. One kept saying he had opened nothing. No one answered him.
Menon did not slow.
“Can we reach the landward gate?” someone asked.
“They have it. Lower lanes.”
At the next bend, a voice broke from the right.
“Left,” Menon said.
The turn took them into lower lanes where smoke sat close to the walls.
The lane broke open into a yard built around a cracked cistern still holding water. The cistern stood near the centre, with a blackened fig tree on Cidius’s left, a side lane beyond the far rim, and another mouth opening behind them where Roman voices were already rising.
A child sat beneath the fig tree with both hands over one ear.
Bodies cut Philon from sight again.
Romans entered from the rear mouth.
Men formed near the cistern and broke apart too quickly for Cidius to put names to them.
Philon emerged through the smoke bleeding into his sandal.
There was Philon. The rest would not stay still.
Something struck the cistern wall. Dust hit Cidius’s mouth.
Philon set himself near the cistern, his spear low, his wounded leg refusing the shape he asked of it.
Nobody shouted his name when his leg buckled.
The first shield hit him high and pinned his shoulder to the wall. A sword came beneath the shield and entered the side of his neck.
Through the crush, Philon’s mouth opened towards him.
Cidius thought another correction was coming.
No order came.
Blood slid over his lower teeth. He swallowed against it.
When Philon fell, the shields closed over him before anyone could reach.
A Roman sandal came down where Cidius needed ground. Another shield drove across the gap: wall, iron, knees, dust.
The spear knocked against stone beside Philon and bounced. Another man shoved into Cidius’s shoulder and forced him back half a step.
Stand up. Keep your feet.
The words came from nowhere. They arrived in Philon’s voice and had no breath behind them.
One of Philon’s sandals was gone.
Dust settled on his bare heel. The foot looked ordinary, almost bare from sleep. Cidius had seen that heel on hot afternoons when Philon sat near the doorway and cut leather straps with his knife.
Now it lay in dust where shields passed over it.
A wounded Roman crawled backward under the shields, one arm hanging wrong. Someone behind the line hooked the back of his belt and pulled until his heels left streaks in the dirt.
Dust lifted and settled as Cidius stepped where the blood-slick clay offered no footing. The spear pitched sideways. A rim struck his ribs, and he stumbled towards the bodies covering Philon.
A hand caught his collar before the fall became complete.
Cidius turned on Menon and bit into the wrist holding his collar.
Skin broke. Blood touched his tongue, hot and salty, and he bit harder for half a heartbeat before the taste sickened him.
Menon hit him across the mouth.
Cidius’s teeth cut his cheek. The yard flashed white, then red, then came back crooked.
When sight returned, Menon had both of Cidius’s arms pinned, twisting the spear off-line, holding him hard against the wall while men ran past them into whatever space remained.
“Back.”
Philon would be angry about the bite.
Philon was under bodies.
He fought Menon without sound, straining towards the bare heel because the rest of Philon had become wall, shield, knees, and men stepping where his father had been.
Menon kept Cidius by the collar, but the pressure faltered twice before returning. His next command came late. Only a heartbeat. Enough for one man to look at him.
Then Menon dragged Cidius backward by the collar.
Water leaked through the crack into the dust. Men went through it without seeing it.
A Roman shield struck the cistern rim and rang there. The shield scraped, rose, and passed out of sight.
Cidius tore once against Menon.
Behind the first crush, other Romans waited, long shafts angled upright against the wall.
Cidius saw them and lost them again.
Menon was still holding him. Near the side-yard doors, a Roman shouted with one hand raised, but the words came apart before Cidius could make them useful.
Menon knocked the spear across his body. Cidius caught it badly in his right hand. Then Menon forced a shield onto his left arm.
He took the shield and held it wrong until Menon struck the rim with his fist.
After that, he held whatever Menon pushed into his hands.
A rope dragged across his ankle.
Water ran beneath his sandal.
A voice said his name from somewhere in the crush.
He waited for the tap against his shoulder, the familiar correction that would make him set his feet, but it never came.
The passage to the left cleared for a heartbeat. Menon was shouting somewhere behind him, but Cidius went where the bodies went.
A man stumbled into him, and Cidius struck him with the butt of the spear before he saw the face.
Syracusan.
The man fell sideways, blood already on his mouth, one arm rising in confusion.
Cidius kept going.
The fallen man disappeared behind legs. No one stopped for him.
Passage, heat, breath. Menon beside him. The spear changed weight as the crowd moved.
At the narrow mouth beyond the cracked cistern, a stool and broken amphorae bought them a few breaths. The yard had turned them back on itself, around the water and the fig tree. A roof tile broke on a Roman shield.
The Romans stopped unevenly. A man in the second rank shouted and was not heard. Another pushed into a doorway beside the file and had to be dragged back by the rim of his shield. A soldier’s pick came forward beneath the lifted shields only after the file settled again.
Before the pick struck wood, a shove from Menon sent Cidius forward.
The rear guard ran, and Cidius ran because others ran.
A Roman turned at the passage before the shields closed, younger than Cidius expected. Red leather showed at his wrist, and Cidius saw only the colour.
Menon came for him, but three fleeing men shoved between them and drove Cidius back against the cistern rim.
The passage behind the cistern emptied into the far side of the yard, and civilians were still coming through it.
A hand seized the darkened linen around his knuckles.
The hold was smaller than Menon’s. Fiercer. It found the knot.
Cidius did not turn at first.
He knew the pull before he turned.
Elara stood on the far side of the water cistern, pulling a child around the rim as Roman shields crowded the yard mouth beyond her. Her hair had come half-loose from the faded blue strip. Dust had turned to mud on one side of her face.
She kept hold of him.
A Roman shield came around the cistern rim.
The rim hid the hand that struck her.
She remained upright for one impossible moment.
His injured shoulder failed when he reached.
Her mouth moved once.
“Cid—”
Then her fingers slipped from the cloth.
The man who had thrust withdrew behind the next shield before Cidius found his face.
Menon hit Cidius from the side and drove him down behind the cistern rim. The spear scraped stone. Water splashed cold against his jaw.
Elara went down badly, knee first, then shoulder against the cistern, then mouth against stone.
Her hand dragged across his knuckles as she fell. Then it was gone.
The linen had twisted across the split in his knuckles. One end had come loose and stuck to his palm. He tried to tuck it back and missed.
Cidius tore loose.
Where Elara had stood, there was only stone, shoulders, and spilled water. The Roman had already passed behind the shields.
Cidius drove into the place she had left.
He drove too soon, and the point skidded off the shield. He shoved again before his feet were set.
Another Roman pushed through beside it, mouth open beneath the rim, shouting or breathing or both.
The shield slipped from Cidius’s left arm as he caught the spear in both hands and rammed it forward.
The point went under the shield and into the man.
The Roman made a wet sound. Cidius shoved again.
The man’s knees struck stone. His hands caught at the shaft.
The knot dragged wrong across Cidius’s hand.
He leaned his weight into it and screamed into the man’s face.
The press shifted hard enough to tear him loose.
A shield drove him sideways as a short sword came under the rim. The blade missed him and took the man behind.
That man made a sound and folded.
Bodies carried Cidius sideways. The shaft slid wet through his palms and came loose from the Roman’s body.
He came clear into Menon’s reach. Menon was swearing at someone else, blood on his wrist and cheek.
The passage opened. A man ran. Another fell.
Menon wiped his wrist against his tunic once, then again, then stopped.
Cidius turned once more towards Elara.
The cistern hid most of her; only part of one hand remained visible beside the spilled water.
A dropped shaft rolled under Cidius’s sandal. His foot caught it, and he stumbled clear.
He tightened his grip on the spear.
The passage opened with the crowd. Cidius went with it. His first step landed wrong. He did not correct it.
At the passage mouth he stepped over broken iron half-buried beneath shields and legs.
Behind them the city kept making noise. After a while he stopped knowing which part of it was burning.
A man stumbled into Cidius at the turn. Menon pushed them both onward.
The loose end struck his palm once. His fingers closed over it.