The Cistern

Thallos found the rope ladder still fixed to the siege ramp when the sun was two hands above the ridge, and he did not want to climb it. Nobody had ordered him first. The order had gone to the century as a whole, delivered by a signifer who kept clearing his throat between sentences as though something had lodged there on the way up the ramp himself. Silence for two days from the walls. No arrows. No shouted insults from the boy who had been calling down curses in bad Greek every morning for a month, the one the men had taken to answering, laughing, like it was a game with rules. Command wanted men inside before nightfall. Thallos was a Syrian archer with no reason to volunteer and every reason to be picked regardless, since archers went first when a wall might still hold someone behind it with a blade. He went up with four others. The ladder swayed under the weight of them and the ropes were still cool from the night, not yet taking the sun. At the top the wind came off the desert flat and dry, carrying nothing. That was the first thing he noticed and could not place until later — no smoke. A fortress that size should have smoke from a hundred hearths going. There was none. Ash, yes, in drifts against the base of the north wall where a fire had burned itself down to nothing days before and no one had fed it since. The gate stood open. Not broken open. Open, the way a door is left open by someone walking out of a house they do not intend to return to. Inside, the storerooms were full. Junius, walking beside him, said the food should have been the first thing looted by whoever won, and then stopped himself because there was no whoever, there was nothing here that had been won by anyone. Grain sacks stacked to the ceiling beams, oil jars in rows with their seals unbroken, more than a garrison twice this size could eat in a year. Thallos understood before Junius said it out loud what the food meant. It meant nobody inside had died of hunger. It meant somebody had wanted the Romans to know that, specifically, when the Romans finally came up. They found the first bodies in the courtyard past the storerooms. He had been at Jerusalem. He had seen the numbers there, the piles that stopped being countable and became instead a kind of terrain you walked over. This was not that. These were arranged. Families, or what looked like families by the way the smaller bodies lay against the larger ones, close, deliberate, no one dragged or fallen where a blow had put them. A man in his middle years with his arm still curved around a woman who might have been his wife, and beside them two children, and the wounds on all four were in the same place, the same angle, made by the same hand working down a line it had chosen in advance. Junius was sick against the wall. Nobody said anything about it. They went through the palace level by level because that was the order, and every level gave them more of the same. Nine hundred and sixty, someone would eventually count, though counting them exactly was not a thing anyone wanted to be the one doing, and the number that came back to camp that evening had probably been guessed at more than tallied. Thallos was sent alone into the lower terrace storerooms because a centurion wanted every room checked and there were not enough men left with the stomach to do it in pairs. He carried a torch he did not need yet, the terrace still catching daylight through a break in the wall, and he went from room to room finding nothing, which by then felt like its own kind of discovery. Empty rooms. Jars. A child's sandal, alone, no child near it. The cistern was in the last chamber, cut down into the rock, and he almost did not check it. He had checked eleven others that day, all dry, all empty of anything but the smell of stone that had held water a long time ago. He put the torch over the mouth of this one out of habit more than expectation. Something below him breathed. He heard it before he understood what he was hearing — a catch of air, held too long and then let go too fast, the sound a person makes trying not to make a sound. He lowered the torch further. Stone steps went down into the dark, worn smooth in the middle from centuries of feet, and at the bottom of them, pressed into the angle where the wall met the floor, a woman looked up at him with one hand flat against her own mouth. She did not scream. She did not move. Her eyes went from his face to the torch to the short sword at his belt and back to his face, and stayed there. He came down four steps and stopped. She was perhaps forty, though the dark and the dust on her made it hard to be certain, and behind her, half-hidden by the fold of her cloak, he made out the shape of a second person, smaller, a boy of maybe ten who had gone so still he might have been carved. The boy's eyes were open. He was watching Thallos with the specific attention of someone who has been told, very recently and very clearly, what happens if he is found. Thallos stood on the fourth step with the torch throwing their three shadows huge against the cistern wall, and did not know the word for what he was supposed to do next, in any of the languages he had. He knew what the order required. Every room checked. Anyone found, taken to the officers. He also knew, because he had walked through eleven other rooms that day and the courtyard before that, what being taken to the officers had meant for the nine hundred and sixty, though that was different, they had chosen it themselves, this was not the same thing, except that he could not make himself entirely believe the difference would matter to whoever gave the next order. A siege that ends with everyone dead by their own hand does not leave much room in the story for two who did not do it. He did not know what a live woman and a live boy would become, once they were reported. A trophy for a triumph. A curiosity someone senior wanted to interrogate. Proof, maybe, that the mass grave upstairs had not been entirely voluntary — that someone here had wanted, at the end, not to. The woman's hand was still over her mouth. She had not lowered it even though there was clearly no more use in it, since he had already heard her. He asked her, in the Aramaic he had picked up from six years posted along this coast, badly, whether there were others. She did not answer at first. Then she said no. Just the two of them. She said it the way a person says something they expect to be doubted and have decided in advance not to defend. The boy's hand had found a fold of her sleeve and was holding it the way small children hold things, not gripping, just keeping contact, as though letting go might be the thing that made him disappear. Thallos thought about the sandal in the empty room above them, small, alone, and did not ask whose it had been. He thought about the arrangement in the courtyard, the man's arm around the woman, the same angle of wound repeated down a line four people had agreed to in advance, and understood that whatever this woman had chosen at the very end, standing in this cistern with a boy's hand in her sleeve, it had been chosen against the current of everything happening two floors above her, not with it. That took a particular kind of nerve, refusing a thing everyone around you has decided is the only dignified way out. He did not know if it took more nerve than the choosing itself, upstairs, four hundred pairs at a time. He only knew it was not nothing. Somewhere above them a man's voice called a name that was not Thallos's, checking in with someone else, and the sound of it moved through the terrace and faded. Thallos lowered the torch a little, so the light did not sit so hard on the woman's face. He told her, in the same bad Aramaic, that she would need to be quiet, and that she would need to stay exactly where she was until he came back for her, and that when he came back she should do whatever he told her without arguing about it, however strange it seemed. He did not explain further because he did not yet know, standing there, what he was going to tell her to do. She looked at him for a long moment, weighing the offer the way a person weighs an offer from an enemy soldier standing four steps above her with a sword, which is to say with no faith in it at all and no better option either. She nodded. He went back up the stairs. At the top he stood a moment in the last of the daylight, working out, with the flat, practical part of his mind that had gotten him through six years of postings he had not chosen, what a search of eleven dry rooms and one wet one would sound like if he described it to the centurion waiting for his report. He could say the twelfth room, too, was dry. He could say it held nothing but a stopped-up channel and old dust, the same as the others. Nobody was going back down to check his work — there were a hundred other rooms still needing men, and the light was already going amber along the western wall, and no officer wanted to spend the last hour of that particular day counting cisterns. He thought about what would happen to him if it were discovered later, some other soldier finding the same stairs on some other errand. He thought about what would happen to her if it were not. He thought, standing at the top of the stairs with the torch guttering in the wind coming off the terrace, that he had climbed the ramp that morning not wanting to be the one who found anything, and now he had, and there was no version of the rest of the day that let him hand it back. He went to find the centurion. He gave his report standing at attention with the smoke smell of the burned storeroom fire still on his clothes from somewhere he had passed through, and when the centurion asked if the lower terrace was clear, Thallos said the lower terrace was clear. Eleven rooms, dry. The twelfth held an old cistern, also dry, nothing in it worth logging. The centurion made a mark on a wax tablet without looking up and moved him on to the next assignment, which was carrying water up from the base of the ramp for men who had been working since dawn and would be working past dark. Thallos carried water for three hours. On his sixth trip up the ramp, in the last grey light before full dark, he took a skin of it and a heel of the bread from his own ration and went back down into the terrace, alone, telling the man at the gate he had left a tool below and needed to retrieve it. The woman had not moved from where he had left her. The boy had fallen asleep against her side, the particular sleep of a child whose body has simply stopped being willing to stay awake regardless of what is happening around it, and she was sitting with her back very straight against the stone, watching the stairs. Thallos held out the bread and the water and did not say anything, because he did not have the words for what came next and was not certain, in truth, that he had decided what came next. She took the bread first, and broke off a piece, and did not eat it herself. She woke the boy gently, a hand on his shoulder, and put the bread in his hand instead, and only after watching him eat did she eat any herself. Thallos sat down on the third step, above them, below the mouth of the cistern where the last of the light still came through. He did not know yet whether he would move her before the men below packed camp for the night, or after, when the fires were lit and every eye in the legion would be turned toward its own bowl and its own blanket instead of toward a terrace nobody had orders to revisit. He did not know whether there was a road south from here that did not pass a checkpoint, or whether he would need to find her clothes that did not mark her as what she was, or whether any of it would work, or whether in a week he would be standing in front of the same centurion explaining something far worse than a mistaken report about a dry cistern. He knew only that he was going to try, and that trying began with not saying anything to anyone else tonight, and that the not saying had already started three hours ago, on a wax tablet, in a mark he could not take back. The boy finished the bread and looked up at him, not with fear now, just with the flat curiosity of a child assessing an unfamiliar adult who has, so far, done nothing wrong. Thallos looked back at him and said nothing, and outside, up on the terrace above them, someone called the watch change, and the light through the cistern mouth went from grey to nearly gone.