Rome 2: The Coming of the King (15 page)

‘The one walking away from the theatre, towards the city centre?’

‘Yes. His name is Kleitos. He has already tried to kill us once.’

‘Then we should kill him?’ said the big Parthian hopefully, and laughed at the look on Mergus’ face.

Mergus drew his fine-honed eating knife. ‘I had heard the Parthians were the most skilled men in the empire in the use of a hand axe at close quarters. It would cheer my night immensely to see you prove that true.’

In the theatre, Pantera watched Yusaf kneel before his king. The Hebrew’s voice was hurled out to the audience by the beaten copper wall. Even so, four thousand men and women held their breaths, straining to hear him. For effect, the reed pipe
sweetened the air. Menachem did not strain. He sat with his head in his hands, as if wishing himself elsewhere.

‘We would hear your petition,’ Agrippa said.

A steward in long, gilded sleeves unrolled a scroll at Yusaf’s side. The merchant glanced at it, but gave no sign of reading directly. To Pantera, it looked as if he knew his words by rote. His words rang brazen through the air.

‘We, the Hebrews of Caesarea, cognizant as we are of the honour done to us by our late king, Herod the Great, and all his kin in the creation of this city, wish publicly to proclaim our precedence above those of other tribes and other gods. Our city is a Hebrew city, founded by a Hebrew king and ruled by his grandson. But in this, our city, foul men despoil our worship. We will not soil our king’s ears with the detail, but what has been done is known in every street and avenue from the harbour to the outer walls. We are reasonable men and do not wish strife with our neighbours. Therefore we bring now to the king eight talents of gold, and respectfully request that he give us leave to buy the lands around the house of God that has been so ruinously defiled.’

Eight talents.
Eight talents?

It was not given to speak in the presence of the king without express invitation, but the intake of breath sucked at the theatre walls with its gale.

Eight talents was a room’s worth of gold. A river. An ocean. For the worth of eight talents, a man could buy every camel in the east and its progeny and its progeny’s progeny for the next ten generations. If Ibrahim and his brothers had earned so much as a single talent of gold, they would have retired to their Saba villages and bought themselves as many Saba wives as they wanted, each one preparing pickled calves’ intestines for the rest of their idle lives.

Even in Caesarea, where men could spin money out of straw, Pantera doubted whether they made that much. Yusaf probably didn’t make a talent’s clear profit in a decade, although the balsam might have tipped the scales in that direction. Eight,
though … eight would have bled the entire Hebrew population dry of every ounce of profit.

Yusaf rose stiffly to his feet and handed to his king a small scroll, the promissory note.

Agrippa took it, slowly, as he might have taken sacred texts for safe keeping. ‘Did I understand correctly: you wish to buy the land around the synagogue that you might hold it free of other buildings?’

‘We do.’

‘And if it is not for sale?’

‘We feel that any man will sell to his majesty, if he is offered a reasonable price.’

‘And with this, we could be reasonable.’

‘Immensely so.’

There were stirrings in the crowd, the first warnings of shouts to come, whatever the protocol of speaking in the royal presence, the first clenched muscles of beatings and stabbings, the first wave of the violence that threatened to crest the bulwarks of civility and break into bloodshed.

A voice murmured across the stage, too quiet for those in the seating to hear, even with the copper curtain. The king cocked his head and asked a soft question, equally inaudible to those beyond him. A woman’s voice rode over the answer, tuneful as a mountain spring. Its tone ended in dismissal. Bowing, Yusaf withdrew from the stage leaving the king alone on his pedestal.

Tension hung taut across the theatre. Nobody shouted yet, but the air was thick with waiting.

As if in answer, the king flung both his arms high. A cascade of high-toned silver bells rang from behind the bronze wall. On their signal, scarlet and saffron silks rained from its height to hang halfway down, casting the braziers in blood red.

Agrippa, set ablaze by the new light, brought both arms crashing down.

At which, every light within the theatre was doused; every torch, every lamp, every candle, snuffed before the king’s hands
reached his sides. The radiant, many-coloured theatre was struck to utter darkness as surely as if the sun had been extinguished.

The men and women of Caesarea were seasoned theatregoers, not readily impressed by pyrotechnics or displays of
deus ex machina
, but they gasped aloud then, and again when a single man’s voice boomed from the stage out across the auditorium.

‘A king lives for ever in the eyes of God. Mere mortals rise and die, taking four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three in the evening to stagger to their graves. Keep to your seats now, men of Caesarea, and witness such wonders as have never before been seen in the civilized world!’

‘Should we stay to watch the play?’ Pantera asked quietly.

‘We should,’ Menachem said. ‘Whether we wish to is another question. The riots will start now. This is not a safe place to be.’ He glanced sideways, past Pantera. ‘By happy chance, it would seem that we are near the end of a row which is near the door. If we were to depart now – a call of nature, perhaps, that must urgently be answered – it might be that we will not cause great offence.’

Outside, vast man-high torches shed good light all around the theatre. Pantera and Menachem walked together to the place where the light ended and the dark began. And with that dark, a crowd; the two thousand men – more – who had not gained entry to the theatre stood outside it, waiting to glean what news they could from inside. They were not happy, but none of them was young.

‘The youths aren’t here,’ Pantera said. ‘But these men are angry enough to wreak havoc on their own.’

‘Whatever we do now,’ Menachem said, ‘the fighting will start. Yusaf’s efforts were laudable, but we have to acknowledge that he has failed. Perhaps if Agrippa had taken the bribe at the moment of its offering … But we shall never know, now, what might have been.’ He held out his hand, the beginnings of a cautious friendship. ‘I leave for Jerusalem tonight. If you travel there, send me word. It can be a difficult place to enter if you are not known.’

‘I will remember.’ Pantera had been born in Jerusalem, but now did not seem the time to say so. He shook hands with the dangerous young man who faced him. ‘May your night pass in peace.’

Behind them, the theatre simmered to a boil. Noise leaked out like a great rushing tide, and the Watch stood back to let men and women flee from the coming violence.

KEEPING AHEAD OF
the growing riot, Kleitos walked swiftly north along the wide avenue that led from the palace to the Temple of Augustus and thence to the harbour. Mergus and Estaph followed him at a distance, keeping his bulk always in view in the growing dusk. Estaph held a double-headed throwing axe in either giant hand with an ease that left Mergus feeling uncommonly cheerful.

Kleitos turned east after a tall villa with a verdigrised roof and trotted easily down progressively narrower residential streets and across a small square, past a nine-pillared fountain, whose music sang in measured tones as the water landed, past a small temple to Jupiter Dolichenos and along a wall, blind for three storeys without a single window.

Kleitos turned the corner at the wall’s end. Mergus and Estaph stopped just short of it, and listened.

Inside, men spoke in Greek, with the true accent of Athens and Corinth. A torch had been lit, perhaps several torches; the air was alive with the light, peppery smoke of good pitch, thickened by heavier strands of burning straw.

‘A carpenter’s workshop is there,’ Estaph said, in Mergus’ ear. ‘They make furniture for half the city. The wood is aged
for ten years in their sheds. Does your enemy like fire?’

‘Always.’

Already the orange glow of the fire had turned to lemon and the shadow play of the men was faster and easier to watch.

‘Six,’ Mergus said, after a moment’s counting. ‘Three each. Let’s go.’

Flames smothered him as he rounded the corner. Momentarily, he was lost in scorching heat and light and a dark, dense smoke that sucked the air from his lungs and brought tears to his eyes so that he faltered as he ran and the knife in his hand struck awry and the first of the arsonists did not die cleanly, but fell, choking, with blood jetting from a torn artery in his neck, and his hands scrabbling at his throat.

He heard the smack of iron on bone and a body toppled next to him, hard as a felled tree, then Estaph was at his side, tears streaming down his wide cheeks. Through smoke and fire, he croaked, ‘It’s a trap.’

A blurred shape moved beyond them. Mergus’ knife flashed out and back, wetly dripping. A man fell, yowling like a cat. ‘Three more,’ Mergus said, and held up his fingers in case the big man couldn’t hear clearly. ‘Kill them.’

Easy to say. Not easy to do when the three were warned and Estaph had breathed in too much of the poisonous black smoke and was blundering, bear-like, swiping at random with the two-headed axe that was as dangerous to the friend who might be standing too close behind him as it was to the enemy in front.

Mergus dodged one blow that came near to breaking his skull and ducked down, and found that the air was clearer below waist height. He could see a pair of legs and knew Kleitos by the shape of his knees, having spent a month in the desert sitting opposite him at the fires.

He had one knife and he didn’t need to see a whole man to know where his throat was, to feel in his bones that place just above the larynx, where a knife might pass through and the tip slide into the spinal column, bringing instant, silent death.

He crouched, pulling himself tight, ready to leap—

And rolled sideways, away from the spear that smashed the pavings where he had been. His knife clattered to the ground. He thrust down on his palms and came up into the sea of smoke, and peered forward through new tears and saw Estaph grappling the spear-bearer, holding the haft of the weapon, thrusting it back and back, keeping the point away from his own massive abdomen. Two others came at him from either side, as men at a bated bear. One of them held the Parthian’s own axe.

‘Estaph! Left!’ Mergus grabbed a burning plank and swung it, flat, and hit no one, but forced one of the three back, and gave Estaph time to spin away from the axe and reach out and grab it with his left hand, even as his right hand held the spear, so that he was drawn out tight and wide, with the haft of a weapon in each hand, unable to let go of either in case it killed him.

Mergus tucked his head down below the smoke, bunched his fists at his side, and ran. As a human ram, he battered the side of the spear-holder. Ribs broke on the crown of his skull. He felt the jerk and rip as Estaph wrenched the spear free of the hands that gripped it, and drew it back, and smashed the hilt into the face in front of him, breaking bones and teeth and the soft tissues of the mind.

Mergus was still moving, turning, swinging himself free of the spear-bearer’s corpse. He dropped down, pivoting all his weight on one palm, slid his legs out wide, and scissored them together to trap the ankles of the axe-holder. He spun on his own axis, and kept spinning away as the man fell. He rose at last, gasping, in time to see Estaph strike down into the smoke with his axe, and come up again, smiling.

‘Kleitos,’ said Mergus.

‘That way.’ Estaph doubled over, coughing, but his free hand pointed south, towards the theatre, from whence came the distant sounds of riot, like an evening’s thunder.

AGRIPPA’S TREASURY IN
Caesarea was a room within a room, locked and barred and windowless and altogether too much like a prison for Berenice’s comfort.

With a riot brewing outside, she hadn’t wanted to go there, but basic decency required that the entire royal family take a detour to examine the Hebrews’ gift, and make the right noises to Polyphemos, who was blotched white and scarlet with the shock and kept hopping from one leg to the other, exclaiming that the gods – or god, he was unclear as to which – were positively beaming benevolences on the king and his family.

Polyphemos was given to displays of high emotion, but tonight even stolid Koriantos, the royal treasurer, was speechless, and that was not a thing Berenice had ever expected to see. Sometime in the recent past, he had bitten his knuckles so hard they bled and now he was walking round and round the gold like a hen who has hatched her first egg and found she has given birth to a harpy.

He had ordered extra torches brought in, and extra guards to hold them, and so the cramped room smelled of avarice and panic and the air glittered with polished iron from the guards’ mail and the bright, terrifying glamour of gold.

Berenice was a queen of the royal line; she was able, therefore, to smile, and nod, and smile again and ignore at all times the noise of the riot that was reaching its climax in the streets outside the palace.

It was no surprise, the riot. She had felt the pressure growing for days; sometimes she could taste it, rusty and sharp, like fetid iron, tinged with blood and bile. But now it was crushing her temples in a headache of fantastic proportions and the possibility that she might vomit was becoming increasingly real.

Such a thing could not be allowed to happen. Breathing the night air, she stepped out into the corridor that led to the throne room and, closing her eyes, counted down the line of the women who stood waiting in the corridor behind her. Drusilla was first, placid and compliant as ever, then Kleopatra, who was neither of these, but had bled for the first time a month ago and by rights should be found a husband.