Rome 2: The Coming of the King (19 page)

‘Twelve.’

Shaking his head, Mergus accepted Estaph’s help to mount and rode on down the track. Pantera followed, and considered as he rode the vagaries of luck, or chance, or the push of the gods, that had brought him back to this road. His father had made him ride it a dozen times in his youth, each time pushing him further, testing him harder, making him run or ride faster, later into the night.

On the last occasion, Pantera had been given blunt arrows and a knife with the tip filed away and his father had set men along the route pretending to be brigands. The boy had hit four out of eight. None of them had hit him. His father had been quietly pleased. One of the men he had failed to hit had come to him later and told him how close the arrow had gone. All eight
had taken him out and given him beer and sworn, drunkenly, with some weeping, to be as a brother to him evermore.

It had been a good night, seared from Pantera’s memory by rage at his father’s later treachery. He remembered them both now, the night and the anger, as if they had happened to somebody else, but they had laid the foundation of what he was. And what he was in that moment was … alive.

They had walked knowingly into Saulos’ grasp in Caesarea and come out alive. He had not died and, more important, nor had Mergus. The realities of Saulos’ power were not diminished, but, somewhere in the dark, easing his horse forward over ground he could barely see, spreading his hearing like a net over the flat sand, tasting the air, alerting his skin to the felt-senses that had kept him alive through worse nights than this, Pantera realized he was breathing freely for the first time since the horror of Rome’s fire, and that he was glad to be alive.

He sent his thanks through the night and heard again the echo of another voice – Seneca’s – speaking to the youth he had been.
You need to be pushed to the edges of your being. Your soul has always craved that kind of challenge. What you lacked was the knowledge of how to survive when you got there. I have taught you everything I can of survival at the edges of being. Now we shall find out if I was good enough
.

Good enough to get him here. And good enough, presently, to know that he was no longer the only hunter in the desert.

‘She’s here,’ Pantera murmured quietly to Mergus.

Estaph, close by, said, ‘Who is?’

‘The Berber hunter. Iksahra.’

Nobody, this time, asked how he knew. Menachem said, ‘What do you want of us?’

‘Keep grouped close together so she can’t easily tell who we are, or how many. Mergus, if you can bring your scarf up over your head and keep close to Yusaf, it may be that she can be made to think you’re his wife. The longer Saulos thinks you dead, the better.’

‘Why let her live?’ Estaph asked, with blunt simplicity. ‘We are seven; she is only one.’

‘Because we’re caught between the two royal parties and I want to be in Jerusalem before Hypatia, which means we have to keep moving. If we have to split up, go in by the farmers’ gate down at the far edge of the wall and meet up again at the Inn of the Black Grapes – if the inn is still there?’

‘It’s still there,’ Menachem said, and then: ‘How did you know?’

Pantera smiled into the dark. ‘I lived most of my childhood in Jerusalem. Saulos has forgotten that. Here, we have a chance to defeat him.’

THE TORCHLIT RIDE
from Caesarea to Herod’s palace at Jerusalem was a nightmare from the start. Hypatia hated every stride.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Jucundus of the Watch had been more than thorough in his preparations: the horses were of good, sane stock, well fed and rested, able to keep up the breakneck speed set by the leading riders. To prevent them from stumbling in the dark, the watchmen all held pitch-pine torches in their nearside hands and carried others unlit on slings over their shoulders, enough to last them three times the night’s duration.

Jucundus had arranged a stopping place where food and water were unloaded from pack mules and it was possible for the royal riders to relieve themselves, to rest, to talk a little with those around them without the relentless drumming noise of hooves on sand that made it necessary to shout and so easier to remain silent.

At the break, Hypatia found herself caught in the eye of an argument between Drusilla, whose smile was beginning to crack under the strain, and her daughter, who was bright-eyed with a fury that made no sense, until Hypatia found that
Kleopatra had wanted to travel with the king’s group and had been forbidden to do so.

‘Are we so dull to ride with?’ Hypatia asked as they remounted.

The girl spun, blazing. ‘She has them all with her! The falcons, the cheetah, your hounds. How could you let her take them?’

Iksahra then: the early interest was fast becoming an infatuation. The girl had wrenched her horse away. Hypatia followed, laid a hand on her bridle. They were alone now, on the borders of the party. The watchmen had packed with quiet efficiency. Their leader was already on the path, torch bobbing in time with his steady horse.

Berenice was close by, with eight guards around her. The queen rode fast, with a sober determination that made Hypatia want to be with her, to talk, to consider what they might do in the morning. Instead, she was left with a petulant girl.

Taking a breath, she said, ‘The hounds had to come to Jerusalem. I wouldn’t leave them in Caesarea where men might stone them to death, or the slaves might fail to feed them. Iksahra had already loosed them when you came to get us. They are safe with her, and they’ll enjoy a night’s run. What did you want me to do, wrest them from her?’

‘If you had to. Don’t you dream at all? I thought you were the Chosen of Isis?’ At which the Princess Kleopatra kicked her horse to a violent run, leaving Hypatia in the dark, watching her fly over unseen desert, too far from the torches to see the ruts and hillocks, the holes made by small beasts, perfect to trap a horse’s foot and trip it.

She was turning back to fetch a watchman with a torch and a fast horse when she heard the girl scream.

Hypatia kicked her own mount forward into the dark. The watchmen came later, slower, spreading their slick light across the sand and rock and desert shrubs. Hypatia watched for snakes by habit – in Alexandria, they made riding at night close
to impossible. Here she had seen none, and still saw none as she dismounted by the girl’s fallen body.

‘Kleopatra? Can you hear me?’

Hypatia could see no blood, nor smell any, and scent was the more reliable here in the uncertain light. The girl was breathing. A pulse beat at her neck in a solid, steady rhythm. Her limbs were intact and – harder to check without causing harm – her spine also.

To one side, her horse moaned and snorted and then, suddenly, shuddered and blew hot foaming blood across the sand and those upon it. A watchman had cut its throat.

‘The leg was broken,’ he said, standing. His knife was dull in the torchlight. Black blood soaked the sand around, and the air stank. He said, ‘It stood in a hole. You shouldn’t ride in the dark, that’s why we carry lights. The girl, did she break anything?’

He was Syrian, of twenty years’ service; they all were sworn to Jucundus first, the governor a distant second and their Hebrew king’s niece not at all, except that they were old enough to be fathers, to have had sisters, and so might have some compassion.

A horse padded over the cool grit: Drusilla was nearly upon them, and Berenice, coming more slowly, because her watchmen were more alert and were keeping her from riding hard once she was away from the path. ‘Is she hurt?’ the queen called.

Hypatia stood, lifting the princess. She was a dead weight, heavier than she looked. ‘She’s alive,’ she called back. ‘Nothing’s broken.’ And then, to the girl herself, ‘Kleopatra, can you lift your head?’

She could, evidently, though with effort. She opened one eye, screwing it against the torchlight.

‘You can ride with me,’ Hypatia said, without knowing why. The closest guard was the one who had cut her horse’s throat and had only now realized he might be required to give up his own horse and walk. To him, she said, ‘Hold her while I mount, then pass her up to me. Kleopatra, you have as long as it takes
me to mount to decide if you’re well enough to ride behind me, holding on, or should go in front, where I can hold you.’

Infants and the chronically sick were held in front. Asking the question was a risk and possibly a stupid one, but it worked to the extent that Kleopatra tried to raise her head and declare loudly how very ready she was to ride entirely on her own, neither behind nor in front of anyone, and, in failing to do so, proved neatly enough to her watchman, her mother and her aunt, the queen, that she wasn’t fit to ride on her own at all.

Berenice was there by then, leaning over, with her hand on the girl’s brow. ‘We could send back for a litter.’

‘Caesarea is not safe, majesty. If we send anywhere, we would have to send ahead to Jerusalem and that would be too slow. If your majesties will permit, I will happily bring her.’

She spoke to both the queen and Drusilla, but it was Berenice who made the decision, who spoke first. She should have been commanding armies: her mind had the right speed to it, and grasp of broader strategies.

She said, ‘You’ll need men with you, to see you’re not taken by brigands. You—’ She singled out the officer, marked by a red badge on his shoulder. ‘Take a dozen men and form an escort for the Chosen of Isis and the princess. Their lives are as yours. If you return and they’re dead, your ghost will follow theirs to the afterlife. Is that clear?’

Thus it was that Hypatia of Alexandria, Chosen of Isis, rode through the second half of the night with a fourteen-year-old girl clasped in front of her saddle. Her watchmen took exceptional care of her. They rode at a wiser, safer speed which meant that they reached Jerusalem quite some time behind the others, and a long time after the seven who had been riding behind.

Hypatia had become aware that there had been seven men riding behind soon after she first knelt to help Kleopatra. She had sensed them walking their horses nearer, keeping their steps out of rhythm so that the watchmen might not pick up the sound of their approach.

They had passed by, wide to the east, going faster than she was,
faster even than Berenice, who had slowed to keep Kleopatra in sight. Knowing they were there, Hypatia had listened hard, sifting through the night-sounds of beasts and stray winds, of ifrit and ghûls and scrabbling scorpions, and heard enough to have some idea, or perhaps hope, of who they were.

The watchmen were good, but they rode with the earpieces of their helmets down as protection against missiles, which made sense when they were the ones carrying the lights and so made the best targets for any arrows that might fly from the dark. It didn’t help them to hear a spy and his companions as they ran round in a wide arc that brought them back to the track a long way ahead of Hypatia and her guards, so that by the time dawn spilled its slow light across the land, they were gone.

Hypatia’s small group reached Jerusalem an hour after sunrise. As they wound down the side of the Mount of Olives towards the northern gate, Kleopatra raised her head and vomited over the side of Hypatia’s horse.

Thereafter, she slid back into unconsciousness, but she continued to grip Hypatia’s wrist with both hands as she had throughout the ride, so that her fingers left blue marks dented into the flesh, and, when they reached the palace without mishap, she let herself be lifted down by the watchman and carried up the palace steps to her mother and her aunt.

There, as she was set on her feet with all the care one might hope for, she turned back to where Hypatia waited at the stair foot. ‘My head hurts,’ she said, with crystal clarity. ‘The Chosen of Isis will know how to cure it.’

Iksahra sur Anmer did not enter Jerusalem at dawn on horseback through Herod’s vast, ornate gate with its images of the sun and the moon lighting her way and her falcons on the pommel of her saddle and the queen’s new hounds behind her.

She came on foot, the cheetah her distant companion, ghost-like in the dark. She came with a swathe of linen over her face,
to keep the sand from her lungs and to cover her dark skin against the gaze of whoever might choose to spend time watching the uncelebrated routes by which slaves and servants entered the city.

She came dressed as a slave, an insult forced on her by Saulos at the start of the night’s ride, when he had said she must hang back, to see if Pantera followed, and, if he did, who was with him. He had said it smiling, thinking that she was his to instruct, that no station was too low, no insult too great. He had taken the falcons on his own horse, whistled the unwilling hounds to heel, and they, trained always to obey, had gone with him.

Iksahra had thought of killing him then; it would not have been hard in the milling chaos of horses and watchmen, slaves, servants and stewards that had marked the start of their escape from Caesarea. He had turned on his heel and walked away from her, leaving his throat unguarded, and her hands had drawn the silk cord from her waist before her mind had caught up with the thought. She had let him live, not because she was afraid of killing him, but because he was still her greatest – her only – chance of avenging her father. She did not expect to need him for ever, and the different ways he might die were daily occupying more of her thoughts.

This night, though, she chose to do as he asked, and so she had left her three fleet horses in Saulos’ care and had run on foot like a slave, save that slaves were not hunters, and a slave would not have known how to slide safely through the desert at night, keeping clear of the snakes, the insects, the undead evil that stalked the dark. A slave would not have kept the cheetah at a distance, always her shadow, always her first line of attack, her last line of defence.

A slave would not have heard Berenice approach from far enough away to find a hiding place in time, so that the queen’s train passed close enough for Iksahra to touch her horse’s oiled hooves, nor would a slave have lain prone on the cold sand with her lips closed against the grit, until the queen’s sister followed later, weeping, nor waited on until the Alexandrian witch came
with the black-haired royal girl held in front of her saddle like an infant.