Thirty
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
