'Go in peace, my friend,' he said, his voice choking slightly, and then with a single strong blow he drove the blade of his sword straight into the other man's heart. The victim grunted with the sudden impact, but no cry of pain escaped his lips.
Gently, with reverence, the two men laid his lifeless body on the ground.
In the small clusters of men around the square, the same sequence of actions was repeated, until ten of the defenders lay dead on the ground.
Elazar Ben Ya'ir issued the order again, and once more the swords hit home, this time one of them felling Ben Ya'ir himself.
About half an hour later, all but two of the Sicarii lay dead on the ground. Solemnly, the last two men drew lots, and again a short, powerful thrust of a sword ended another life. The remaining warrior, tears streaming down his face, walked around the fortress, checking every motionless body to ensure that none of his companions still lived.
He took one last look around the citadel, now deserted by the living. He muttered a final prayer to his god asking for forgiveness for what he was about to do, reversed his sword and placed the point against his chest, then threw himself forwards onto the blade.
The following morning, the battering ram began its work on the wall at the western side of Masada, and quickly broke through. The Romans were immediately confronted with another bulwark, clearly raised by the Sicarii as a desperate last-ditch defence, but smashed their way through that as well in a matter of minutes. Moments later the soldiers began pouring into the fortress.
An hour after the wall was finally breached, Lucius Flavius Silva walked up the approach ramp, past lines of legionaries, and through the gaping hole in the wall. Once inside, he looked around in disbelief.
Bodies lay everywhere, men, women and children, the blood that caked their chests already blackened and solid. Flies swarmed, feeding greedily in the afternoon sun. Carrion birds pecked at the soft tissues of the corpses and rats ran over the bodies.
'All dead?' Silva demanded of a centurion.
'This is how we found them, sir. But there were seven survivors – two women and five children. We found them hiding in a cistern at the southern end of the plateau.'
'What do they say happened here? Did these men kill themselves?'
'Not exactly, sir, because their religion prohibits it. They drew lots and killed each other. The last man' – the centurion pointed at one of the bodies lying face down, the tip of a sword-blade sticking out of the man's back – 'threw himself on his blade, so he was the only one who actually committed suicide.'
'But why?' Silva asked, almost a rhetorical question.
'According to the women, their leader – Elazar Ben Ya'ir – told them that if they took their own lives, at a time and in a manner that they chose for themselves, they would deny us victory.' The centurion pointed to the northern end of the citadel. 'They could have fought on. The storerooms – those that they deliberately didn't set on fire – are full of food, and the cisterns have plenty of fresh water.'
'If they've won, it's a very strange kind of victory,' Silva grunted, still looking at the hundreds of bodies that surrounded him. 'We have possession of Masada, the filthy Sicarii are all dead, at last, and we haven't lost a single legionary in the assault. I could do with a lot more defeats like this!'
The centurion smiled politely. 'The women and children, General. What are your orders?'
'Have the children taken to the nearest slave market, and give the women to the troops. If they're still alive when the men have finished with them, let them go.'
Just outside Masada, the four Sicarii waited, hidden behind a rocky outcrop a few hundred feet above the desert floor. Once the Roman troops breached the wall and entered the citadel, orders were sent down to the other sentries to leave their posts. But even after the legionaries had moved away, the four men still waited for darkness to fall before they completed their descent.
Three days later they reached Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca, the hilltop community that two millennia later would become famous as Qumran. The four Sicarii remained on the plateau for a day, then resumed their journey.
They followed the west shore of the Dead Sea for about five miles before striking north. They passed through the towns of