The Sacred Sword. Scott Mariani

Forty

       Chapter Forty-One

       Chapter Forty-Two

       Chapter Forty-Three

       Chapter Forty-Four

       Chapter Forty-Five

       Chapter Forty-Six

       Chapter Forty-Seven

       Chapter Forty-Eight

       Chapter Forty-Nine

       Chapter Fifty

       Chapter Fifty-One

       Chapter Fifty-Two

       Chapter Fifty-Three

       Chapter Fifty-Four

       Chapter Fifty-Five

       Chapter Fifty-Six

       Chapter Fifty-Seven

       Chapter Fifty-Eight

       Chapter Fifty-Nine

       Chapter Sixty

       Chapter Sixty-One

       Chapter Sixty-Two

       Chapter Sixty-Three

       Chapter Sixty-Four

       Chapter Sixty-Five

       Chapter Sixty-Six

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       By the same author

       About the Publisher

      Prologue

       The Fortress of Masada

      Roman Province of Judea, The Holy Land 73 a.d.

      ‘They will soon be upon us,’ said the young man called John, turning around from the battlements with fear in his eyes.

      His commander, Eleazar ben Yair, made no reply. Leaning out over the craggy, sandy fortress wall he shielded his eyes from the blazing sun and scanned the scene below. Far beneath them, swarming like a gigantic colony of ants around the foot of the mountain as they laboured in the dust and the choking desert heat, the teeming masses of the Roman Tenth Legion were close to finishing the construction of the enormous stone siege ramp.

      Eleazar knew in his heart that John was right. The siege would soon be over. Within a matter of hours, there’d be nothing to do except watch helplessly as column after column of soldiers marched up the ramp and stormed the battlements, the sun glinting off their armour and massed spear heads. Nothing to do but wait for the slaughter to begin.

      Had they really thought that a rag-tag handful of defenders, many of them women and young children, could hold out indefinitely against the crushing might of Rome? Had they really believed that the fortress of Masada would prove impregnable?

      Eleazar himself had seen what his sworn enemies were capable of. Three years earlier, he’d been one of the few Jewish rebels who’d managed to escape from the carnage that the Roman army had inflicted on his home city of Jerusalem, razing it to the ground and claiming a million innocent lives in retaliation against the Jews who dared to defy Caesar’s rule. The army now encamped around the mountaintop fortress of Masada, commanded by Lucius Flavius Silva, the Governor of Judea himself, had been sent to destroy the final pocket of resistance. Silva’s forces had built an impassable siege wall that stretched for seven miles around the base of the mountain, ensuring that no rebel could escape and nobody could come to their aid. Along the wall’s perimeter stood the Romans’ siege towers and giant catapults. They were terrifying, but nothing struck fear into the rebels’ hearts like the assault ramp and the promise of what was to come.

      ‘Nobody can resist such an army,’ John quavered. ‘The Romans will rape our women, slaughter our children in front of us and make slaves of us all.’

      Eleazar closed his eyes in sadness. He already knew what had to be done. Over nine hundred people. As their leader, he had no choice but to make the fateful decision himself. He turned away from the battlements to face the young man. ‘I would rather die a free man than submit to that,’ he said softly.

      ‘Then what shall we do?’

      ‘We shall deliver our souls to God,’ Eleazar replied. ‘All of us. The Romans will find none alive.’

      But before addressing the grim task that lay before him, he had to ensure that one special duty was taken care of.

      He reached down to his belt and drew out the glittering sword that he’d carried with him from Jerusalem. Reverently clutching the bronze hilt with both hands, he raised the blade to his mouth and kissed the cool steel.

      ‘The sword must be hidden,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, it cannot fall into the hands of the Romans.’

      They prayed.

      And then the final plans were begun.

      Chapter One

       Near Millau, Midi-Pyrénées, Southern France

       December 2nd

       The present day

      It was as Father Fabrice Lalique was driving home through the dark, misty night that he saw the car behind him again.

      Up until then, the fifty-three-year-old priest had been reflecting on the hours he’d just spent with his parishioners Pierre and Madeleine Robichon in the nearby village of Briande, trying to quell the latest bitter dispute between the couple. It was his duty to minister to the social and family problems of his diocese; and God knew that the turbulent Robichons had more than their fair share of those. He’d eventually left them settled and in peace, hands clasped across the kitchen table, but the reconciliation had had to be painfully, exhaustingly coaxed out of them and he’d been at it far longer than intended.

      The Volkswagen Passat’s dashboard clock read almost eleven. A heavy blanket of fog hung over the whole Tarn valley,