Rome 2: The Coming of the King (2 page)

‘As your whore?’ Her voice dripped contempt. The spiral marks on her face stood proud a little; he kept his eyes on them and was sure not to smile at the image of that.

‘Assuredly not. You would be the king’s favoured falconer. Also his beastmaster, the keeper of his hunting hounds, his big cats, his hounds, his horses.’
As was your father to his father
. He did not say that, but the understanding twisted in the hot air between them.

‘The new king does not hunt,’ said the woman, slowly. ‘The whole world knows that he prefers to keep to his bed and his … playthings, while his sister rules the land. It is the queen who hunts.’

‘But any gift must be given to the king, even if Queen Berenice is its true recipient. In any case, it matters not which of them takes you, only that you are there, with your falcons.’ He hesitated, delicately. ‘Would I be correct if I were to surmise that your birds could hunt and kill a message-dove, one of those that flies fast and low across the sands and carries the written word from one side of the empire to the other?’

She did not answer that, only looked at him as if even the question were an insult.

‘Good.’ He gave a shallow nod. ‘So then, your part in this will be to intercept the message-doves that are sent to the king’s loft from across the world. They come from Rome, from Damascus, from Antioch, from Athens, Corinth, Alexandria and further abroad. They come mostly at dawn and dusk, and, while the king is at Caesarea, they fly always over a particular isthmus on the sea coast, which is out of sight of the palace, but surrounded by flat, open land, so that you cannot be watched without your knowing.

‘You will take these birds from the sky and bring their messages to me so that I may know what they say. Further,
as the king’s beastmaster, you will be tasked with the care of some message-birds in the beast compound so that they may be sent out with the journeymen who take them to far-flung cities. Therefore, once in a while, we may use them ourselves to convey messages of our own to the king – as if they came from far abroad. Then, when we know who our enemies are, and how they are ranged against us, we will act.’

‘What will we do?’

‘We will foment war with Rome. King Agrippa resides at Caesarea, the city founded by his grandfather, Herod the Great. That place has its own tensions and we will use them to force the entire royal family to Jerusalem. There, if the zealots of the War Party can be made to declare war against Rome, Nero will send the legions to crush them and once that happens, the whole of Judaea will rise against the armies of occupation.’

‘Then they will die,’ said Iksahra, with certainty. ‘No one can withstand Rome’s legions.’

‘Exactly so; and Jerusalem will be razed to the ground, brick by ancient brick, until nothing is left and the people who live therein are dead or enslaved in foreign lands. Then you, who hate Agrippa, and I, who hate the Hebrews, will know that our vengeance is complete.’

Saulos rose smoothly; that, too, was a skill he had learned. ‘I leave with the evening’s cool. If you wish to join me, I would welcome your company, and that of your beasts.’

Saulos did not ride alone from the encampment; three guides came with him, but Iksahra sur Anmer, the best hunter among the Berber tribes, was not one of them.

He concealed his disappointment, and rode with the men, letting them entertain him with stories of horses and hunts and the inexplicable deeds of women. At nightfall, when they made camp in the lee of a dune, he took himself a little away from the firelight to urinate.

He was turning back when her hand caught his wrist. She
was remarkably tall. The cheetah’s yellow eyes regarded him from a place that had been entirely dark.

He said, ‘I had hoped you might come.’

Her face was close to his. ‘You know why I seek vengeance. Why do you?’

‘Will you come with me to sit at the fire? The night is cold and I am still not used to the changes in temperature. We will be given privacy, I think.’

He was right; the men saw Iksahra and left, not for privacy, but out of fear. One made the sign against evil as she passed. Another hissed something, of which Saulos only heard the word ifrit and wished he had not.

Seated, fed, with a bladder of water in his hand – these people drank neither wine nor ale – Saulos felt safer. He stared into the fire and found it easier to believe she was a woman who hunted with matchless skill, not a winged demon who might feed on his soul.

He said, ‘My tale is a long one, but at its shortest … In my youth, I was trained as a Roman agent by the late spymaster Seneca, known as the Teacher, and sent to Judaea to bring the Hebrews under Roman rule.’

‘You did not succeed in that.’ Her wild eyes laughed at him.

He bit his lip. It was a long time since he had been the butt of anyone’s ridicule. He said, ‘No. But I did burn Rome.’ Flames leapt between them. ‘I lit the blaze that nearly consumed it.’

‘Why?’

He studied the small fire that lay between them. None of this was as he had planned. ‘For a prophecy,’ he said, which was true. ‘The Sibyls said that if Rome burned under the eye of the dog star, then Jerusalem might be sundered and in its place …’ With an effort, he held her gaze. ‘In its place, the god they have denied will enslave them all, and rule in glory. But Judaea must fall for that to happen.’

‘And if Jerusalem falls—’

‘Then all of Judaea will fall with it; yes. The loss of Rome seemed a small price to pay.’

‘And your own life? Was it an accident that the fire nearly killed you?’

‘No. That was my enemy’s doing. He is the second reason we are going to Judaea.’

‘Is he there?’

‘Not yet. But I will draw him there and when I have done so, I will undermine his allies until he no longer knows whom he can trust. I will remove his friends from him, one at a time, until he is alone, and friendless and lost. I will let him see what we are doing, slowly, a piece at a time, and when Jerusalem’s fall is certain, I – I alone, I will kill him, slowly, by inches, by heartbeats, and he will know, each moment, why he dies and by whose hand.’

He stopped, because the crimson haze around him was real, and the flames were licking his face as his passion brought him lower and closer to the fire.

His cheeks were scorched. Iksahra had sparks on her clothing, where his hands, smashing the sand, had disturbed the fire. Thin tendrils of smoke rose to the night air and vanished.

She gazed at him, unreadable. ‘What is his name, this man you hate so much?’

Saulos closed his eyes against the sweep of her stare. ‘My enemy’s name,’ he said, evenly, ‘is Sebastos Abdes Pantera. He rides with a former centurion named Appius Mergus, and with Hypatia of Alexandria, the Chosen of Isis.’

‘I will remember their names.’ Iksahra sur Anmer rose and stretched out a hand. He took it and she lifted him to his feet, effortlessly. ‘We have things in common,’ she said, and her white teeth flashed. ‘I will join you. I will hunt the message-birds. But when the time comes, I will kill King Agrippa and you will not stop me.’

‘
CAESAREA, PEARL OF
the east. A tinderbox, waiting for the spark.’

Pantera had not spoken in half a day. His voice was dry as the desert. ‘Saulos is there,’ he said. ‘Can you smell him? The danger that hangs around him?’

Mergus edged his horse in closer to where they could talk and the sound not carry on the desert air. He still marvelled that they were there at all, in the desert, half a day’s ride east of Caesarea: when the message-birds had come to the emperor’s loft in Rome, saying that their quarry was moving, that Saulos had finally left the fastness of the Berber lands, Mergus had wanted to take ship then, that night, and be after him.

It was Pantera who had said that they should wait, that they must watch, that there were things left to learn. ‘He must know we’re hunting him. He’ll lead us a dance if he thinks we’re following too close behind. Wait until he goes to ground. When he stops, we’ll hear of it.’

And so they had watched the pigeon lofts at dawn each day and waited, as children for a gift, for each new cryptic line.
Your quarry has entered Mauretania. And left again. He is in Alexandria, buying gifts fit for a king
.

‘Where did he get his money?’ Mergus had asked.

‘He has followers still,’ Pantera had answered. ‘Not many, but enough; men who have denied him and his god and kept hidden, so they can do this for him now. He won’t stop in Alexandria. He’s heading east.’

And then the messages began again.
He’s taken ship, bound for Judaea, or perhaps Syria. He is in Caesarea, pearl of the east
.

And then they had ceased. No more messages, perhaps no more movement. ‘He is cousin to the king of Caesarea,’ Pantera had said. ‘If he’s going to lie up anywhere, it’ll be there.’

‘It’s a trap,’ Mergus had said. ‘We can’t go.’

‘It’s a trap,’ Pantera had agreed. ‘We have to go.’ Hypatia had come away from the dying empress’s side to support him, and Hypatia was, in Mergus’ estimation, the world’s most beautiful woman, and its least available. He was not terrified of her, but he had a degree of respect that bordered on the same thing.

Even so, Mergus had argued with both of them until the point when the emperor had insisted they go and thereby put an end to all debate. In times past, perhaps, men might have reasoned with Nero, but since Seneca’s failed coup, and the bloodbath that had followed it, none had dared do so.

And so they were here, in the desert, riding towards the pearl of the east, outriders to a nondescript, if well-armed, camel train and Pantera had said he could smell Saulos on the wind, which was almost certainly untrue.

‘Here, I would smell him only if he stank of burned sand, horse sweat and camel piss.’ Mergus guided his mare with his knees, to keep both hands free for his bow. As part of his guise, he was paid to guard thirty-two pregnant camels; a fortune on the hoof and food for a desert’s load of jackals. They were presently riding through a gully that ran between two rocky bluffs and was, in Mergus’ estimation, too easy to attack.

He kept his eyes sharp and his arrow nocked, and gave only a part of his mind to the vision ahead, where Caesarea shimmered
as a spark of textured sunlight on the line where sand met sky and both met the ocean.

It had been there since soon after dawn, but Pantera was right; here, on a nameless track through an unnamed gully half a day’s ride from the city, was something different, some fold in the air where the desert’s still heat met the first breeze from the sea, and it was not the balm it should have been, but a presage of danger and death.

Mergus’ mare whickered and pricked her ears, and stepped out with a new eagerness. He breathed in the altered air, in and in and—

‘Bandits!’

He and Pantera called the word together. Mergus’ mare knew the threat of an ambush as well as he did; she had come with him from Rome, and before that from the hell-forests of Britain where painted warriors hid behind every second tree. Even as he shouted, she was plunging sideways out of the unsafe gully towards a fissure in the rocky bluff to its northern side.

An arrow sliced the dirt where he had been. A second shattered on the rock that sheltered him and splinters of ash wood skittered across his face. Ahead, a man died, screaming. The stench of fresh blood flooded the noon-dry air. Shadows moved. Mergus shot at one of them. He heard a body fall, then another, and had no idea who had died except that it wasn’t him.

‘Sebastos?’

Mergus called the Greek name Pantera used among the men of the camel train. He heard no answer. Five more arrows fell in the ten square feet he could see. A cow camel bellowed and toppled to the sand, hard as a felled tree. The three brothers who led the train began to whistle orders in the language only their train knew. Men began to shout: outriders and their enemies alike. The enemy called in Greek, not Aramaic, so they were not Hebrew zealots from Jerusalem come to take the camels for their holy war. A part of Mergus thought that knowledge might be useful later, if he lived.

The rock fissure offered Mergus temporary protection, but after the first few frantic heartbeats it made him a sitting target. Sweating, he slid to the ground, keeping the rock to his right and his mare to his left. From there, he fired twice more but hit no one. He had trained in the bow these past eighteen months and thought himself adequate, but no more than that; he was a blade-fighter by instinct and training.

He slid the bow on to his shoulder and loosed from his belt the hooked knife that had been a gift from the three Saba tribesmen whose camels he guarded. It was longer than an eating knife and shorter than a cavalry sword, finely wrought, sharp on both edges and slightly curved along its length. He kissed the flat iron for luck and hissed again, ‘Sebastos?’