Rome 2: The Coming of the King (46 page)

Alone, Iksahra turned the corner. A door lay ahead, blocking the corridor. The last of the garrison Guard stood outside, awake, if not alert. Iksahra slid her hands and the knives they held up her sleeves and flashed him a smile of pure relief.

‘You’re alive,’ she said weakly. ‘Thank the gods. They haven’t got here yet, then?’

‘Who hasn’t? What’s happening outside?’ Frantic, the guard’s gaze flew from the scratch wound on her arm, to the torn fabric of her clothes, to the many shades of drying blood.

‘The Hebrews have attacked. The men of the garrison Guard are …’ Iksahra looked away.

‘What are they? Tell me!’ He reached for her, to shake out more news. ‘In here, we hear nothing but the distant clash of arms.’

‘It’s as well you don’t. Outside is a massacre – not only outside.’

With something close to regret, she took her hands from her sleeves. One blade slid up under his diaphragm into his heart. She held it tight, against the sudden bucking twist of muscle on iron, then slid her other blade up into the tight gap between his neck bones and his skull, into the living vessel of his thoughts.

He died without a sound. She lowered him to the ground and wiped her blades clean on his tunic. The oak door was closed, as Kleopatra had said it would be. Iksahra pressed her ear against it and listened.

Back round the corner, she heard Kleopatra speak in her soft, certain Latin. ‘Go to where is lightest, to the sun. Your friends are waiting. Death is freedom, not loss.’

Shuddering, Iksahra turned, and listened again to the rustling beyond the oak.

Estaph said, ‘There’ll be a guard outside the door. There has to be.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Berenice said. ‘There’s a battle beyond the walls, you can hear it if you press your ear to the stone; the guards might all be out there, fighting.’

‘Hush.’ Hypatia waved them both quiet with a flap of her hand. She pressed her head to the wood. The door was oak, thick as her outstretched hand, designed to withstand any attack.

In the beginning, she heard only the echo of a king’s welcome that rang through the walls. With more attention, she found a presence that seemed most likely a guard; a man left edgy by the noises outside who stepped away from the wood with a challenge in his voice and—

And someone died on the door’s far side. Hypatia felt the soul slip free of its moorings, but it slipped past too fast for her to tell if it was male or female, guard or slave, friend or foe.

She swallowed on a dry throat. She hadn’t eaten since Kleopatra’s gift and the taste of garlic still furred her mouth. She was light-headed and weak and her stolen gladius hung leaden as a lump hammer from her fist, too heavy to use. In the still part of her mind, she sought the help of the god and found instead … the iron-sharp stench of an angry horse, and beneath it the scent of a woman’s fear.

She grabbed at the handle and hurled the door open, already rolling, down and sideways, away from whatever blades might
come, that did come; that missed her wildly and clattered down the wall to the floor.

Still rolling, she heard only silence. She rose to her knees, with the stolen sword in both hands. She heard the lift of a breath taken and held.

‘Iksahra?’

The Berber woman was standing in the doorway, black on white, framed against the new light from behind. The only sunlight was a single shaft poured in through a high, lost window, but it was the first Hypatia had seen since yesterday’s morning and it encased Iksahra in its light, so that her white silks became as gossamer, folded about the fine – the exquisite – lines of her body.

With her heart unstable in her chest, Hypatia pushed herself upright. ‘I knew it was you,’ she said. ‘You must have known it was me, or I’d be dead.’

The Berber woman did not respond. Carved marble had more animation. She was shaking, fine as a leaf, all over.

Hypatia bent and retrieved the two thrown knives and laid them aside on the cool stone floor and walked on through the door to a place where the stench of blood was overwhelmed by the scent of woman-sweat, sweetened with new hay and old corn and the raw breath of the hunt. It was a smell of horses and a hunting cat, of wildness, of beauty.

Hypatia herself stank of confinement and privation. Sharply aware, she tried to step back to a place where she might offend less.

She failed because Iksahra moved at last. Her lean black fingers caught Hypatia’s right hand and held her still; she could not have moved if she had wanted to. She did not try.

‘Estaph is there,’ she said. ‘And Berenice. In the corridor.’ Words fell haphazardly from the turmoil of her mind, none of them useful. ‘You’re wounded.’

‘Not badly. It will heal. I can still throw a blade.’ Iksahra took a long, uneven breath. ‘We are not safe here. We should leave.’

‘Yes.’

Iksahra’s hand was hot, damp, unsteady; all the things Hypatia had least imagined. She squeezed and felt the movement returned. Her own hand was not any steadier.

Silence held them both, broadening, stretching, becoming harder to fill. The air grew thin with hope and thick with things unspoken.

‘Kleopatra is waiting,’ Iksahra said, finally. ‘Pantera brought Menachem, newly anointed. His army is fighting the garrison. By the sound outside, I think he has won.’

‘And Saulos?’

‘Pantera has gone for him. Kleopatra says he’s dead, that she heard him take his leave of her. And Ananias the High Priest, also. They found him hiding in a sewer and killed him.’

Iksahra’s skin shone like polished horse hide, evenly damp with the sweat of a moment’s exertion. She said, ‘Kleopatra can hear the dead. She converses with them. She says death is a freedom, as if it were something we all should seek. You have to speak to her.’

‘I will,’ said Hypatia. ‘It’s good to see you care. It changes you.’ And then, because nothing was coming out as she meant it, ‘The god came while we were in the cells to show me the mistake I made in holding my heart closed. What I might lose.’ Her fingers were still, her skin too much alive. ‘I don’t want to lose you.’ At last, the right words.

Iksahra’s face was still one moment longer, and then bloomed in such a smile as might light the whole day.

‘It was my fear this whole day that I had lost you,’ she said. ‘I will not live with that fear again, nor let you live with it. I would take you to the desert, and the high places, and watch with you as the sun sets and rises and sets again, and we shall do that soon. But for now, we have a king to crown and a city to heal and a queen to make fit to greet her people.’

THE POOL OF
Siloam on the edge of David’s city was fed by an underground stream, so that when all about lay under dust, its surface shimmered under the sun.

On the morning of the king’s coronation, the early light tinted it green. A faint scum gathered on the limpid surface, studded with petals of small white flowers, shining as shreds of moonlight under the not-quite-present sun.

The air above it hung heavy with the smell of still water and frankincense and the gathered thousands; all gone now. Where they had been, palm branches lay thick on the ground, frond upon frond, woven by their falling into a mat thick as a man’s wrist.

Pantera stooped to lift one smaller than the others; a child’s frond, cut for a small fist to wave for the new king and cast before his humble donkey. It served now to distract the flies that fell frenzied on Pantera and his four companions, having no one else left to feast on.

Hypatia was with him, and Mergus, and Estaph, who had shown no sign of hastening to Syria and his family, and Kleopatra, who sometime since the night in Yusaf’s house had
ceased to be a girl and become instead a young woman; and that young woman bonded to Hypatia. Iksahra was not there; she had gone hunting with her birds and her cat, loping off before dawn, to escape the gathering thousands.

Without her, Pantera stood now at the pool, famous in prophecy, in portent, which was the oldest part of David’s city, itself the oldest part of Jerusalem, and watched the ragged end of the crowds as they surged up past Herod’s hippodrome to the Temple.

Somewhere at their head, beneath the banners, surrounded by his armoured men, Menachem rode his donkey in fulfilment of every prophecy in the sacred texts.

His people had seen him anointed in the pool most sacred to their god, they had seen him bend his head before Gideon, newly named High Priest of Israel, had seen him declared as the true king, second only to God, who would lead his people to their peace, where no one was put before their god, neither Caesar nor an empire.

They had seen him mount the donkey that Iksahra and Hypatia had found: a colt, newly broken, as tall as any Pantera had ever seen, and piebald, with one black ear and one white, with its broad brow black as jet and its muzzle white as chalk and its flanks patterned in smooth asymmetry, like a map etched in black ink on perfect papyrus, so that Pantera’s eyes had been drawn to it through the ceremony.

His mind was still lost there, now, wandering in new lands, seeking out new coves among the headlands, new islands lost in the star-white ocean.

To Hypatia, thoughtfully, he said, ‘If he has time, Menachem will make of Jerusalem a city fit to match Alexandria.’

‘If he has time.’ Hypatia’s gaze was fixed on the hills outwith the city walls, on the grazed grasslands and the citrus groves, on the herds, and their herding boys; few of those today when most were in the city, greeting Menachem.

She said, ‘Iksahra is coming,’ and it sounded like a portent of doom.

He looked and saw nothing, but did not disbelieve. ‘We could go to meet her?’ he asked.

Hypatia’s face was closed. ‘I think we should.’

They walked together to the small gate through which Iksahra had left the city. Outside, the air was brighter, less clogged with breath and waiting, and the birds sang, when they had been too shocked to do so in the city, silenced by the voices of the crowd.

Presently, Iksahra was there, a shimmer in the morning’s haze, black limbs stark against her flowing white shift, with the cheetah lithe at her heels and the hunting birds flying freely above her, not tethered to her fist.

Even as they watched, the falcon swung up, gaining height until she was a fading scrawl against the harsh sky, and turned in her own length came down again, tight as an arrow, and flung out her wings to land lightly, and bent her head to feed on some small, dead thing on Iksahra’s glove. Plucked feathers danced around them, caught on the hillside wind.

‘It’s a dove,’ Mergus said; his distant vision was always better than anyone’s. ‘She’s caught a message-dove.’

They ran then, and met her at the place where the land flattened out towards the city.

Hypatia reached her first, and they stood apart, but close.

Pantera said, ‘Bad news?’ She couldn’t read; he had forgotten and remembered too late to take it back. He held out his hand.

She dropped the message cylinder into his palm. ‘The dove is red roan, with amber eyes. Seneca bred them; the Poet uses them still.’

A blob of wax sealed the cap shut, bright as blood. He cracked it open and took out the onion skin of paper, so thin they could see his fingers through it. The writing was fine and neat and familiar.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘This is from the Poet; a new code, never used in Seneca’s network … Wait a moment, this is not easy.’ Latin letters lay in lines across the page, but not in words. Pantera took the first three, and made them numbers,
and used those numbers to transpose the letters to make sense of them.

The others waited. Iksahra moved closer to Hypatia. She smelled of horse-sweat and wild wind and wonder. Their hands brushed, back to back, sending lightning across Hypatia’s eyes.

Pantera completed his translation. ‘My dove has reached the Poet, who in turn sends this to me and to Menachem. Listen, I will read it.’ His voice was strained. It echoed in his own ears.

From the Poet to the Leopard and to Israel’s new king, greetings. You must know that the Twelfth legion marched yesterday from Antioch under command of Cestius Gallus, governor of Syria, with orders to retake the city of Jerusalem, and the nation of Israel. Those who have the emperor’s ear have tried and failed to divert them: Nero will not call them back. Defend yourselves immediately, lest your peace and prosperity wither on the vine
.

He felt the press of their waiting. The light was gone from Hypatia’s eyes. She was gathering herself, becoming sober again, taking on a weight that was not yet hers.

She said, ‘Menachem must be told.’

‘I’ll do it.’ As his gift, Pantera took the weight from her. It settled about his shoulders like chain mail, and was not unbearable. ‘He will have reached the heights by now and have formally named Gideon as his High Priest and Yusaf as his counsellor. When he comes down, I will tell him and we will plan the defence of Jerusalem. We have arms and men who listen. All is not lost and we may yet negotiate with Nero. You …’ His gaze held first Hypatia, then Iksahra, and after them the others. ‘You have a day and a night to do whatever you choose. Use it, and then come back to me in the palace and we will see what needs to be done.’

He waited to see them go before he moved. Mergus, Estaph, Kleopatra; those three turned back towards the city, to the baths, and the markets and the clamour of celebration.

Hypatia turned away from the city and Iksahra with her in
a swirl of white linen, her cat a smear of gold-black pelt and muscle at her heels; they three, two women and their beast, with the hunting birds soaring above, walked back across the grasslands towards the hills.

Pantera stayed a while, watching them go, before he turned back to the city, to a man who must be both king and commander, and lead his army onward into war.

While any historical novel must be broadly fictional in terms of character and motivation, the key events of this book – the sacrifice of the dove in Caesarea, the offer of eight talents to save the synagogue, the taking of Masada – are based around those outlined by Flavius Josephus in his
War of the Jews
, in which he relates the events leading up to the Hebrew rebellion that took place in
AD
66, towards the end of Nero’s reign.