Rome 2: The Coming of the King (35 page)

Vilnius stood before the queen, and saluted. ‘Madam, you must disrobe.’

‘Here?’

Vilnius flushed. He may have been Roman, but he had been posted in Judaea for three decades. He must have known Berenice since she was a child; certainly he was old enough to be her father.

He said, ‘Only to your undershift. The emperor’s envoy requires that you walk barefoot in your shift to the palace. As a penance.’

The emperor’s envoy. Not a man of the Sanhedrin dared to murmur against the new, ungiven title.

Berenice turned her back on them and untied her robe. Her eyes were flat, unseeing, her fingers moved neatly. Her robe slipped free. Her undershift was of linen so fine it might have been silk and it hid nothing of her body. Men behind her shifted in silence; still they did not dare speak.

‘Penance?’ Berenice’s gaze was on Saulos and there was life in it; a challenge, and a question that Hypatia could not read.

He said, ‘A full penance. You will go with your hair shorn.’

‘Tell my people I do this for them, to prevent war,’ Berenice
said, and bent her head, and Vilnius, with shaking hands, lifted the first of her tresses across the upturned blade of his knife. Black sheaves of hair fell like blighted corn across the floor.

Hypatia removed her shoes. Nobody asked for her clothing. Nobody touched her hair. There were limits to what even Saulos dared to do.

THE ROAD WAS
hot and gritty and painful underfoot. Hypatia walked alongside Berenice, shoulder to shoulder, matching her pace for unflinching pace, providing solace and support and dignity.

Saulos did not come with them. They walked the first few dozen yards alone, with only stiff-backed Vilnius ahead and the retinue of his garrison guards about, but soon the city came alive as word spread of what was happening and men and women, young and old, War Party and Peace Party, gathered in their handfuls, in their hundreds, in their thousands, to line the route from the council hall past the old Hasmonean palace that was Saulos’ new headquarters to Herod’s new palace with its prison cells underground in the cellars.

They gathered by the same alchemy that drew iron to lode-stones and caused moths to die, dancing in the flames of a night-time fire. They came without care for their own safety, without understanding fully what it was they were watching, unsure even if they were there to support their queen, or harry her.

It was a Jerusalem crowd: inevitably, a stone was thrown, and then a few more. The guards moved closer and Hypatia welcomed them.

They reached the foot of the hill and turned a little south, down a long, broad road. The crowd filled the street now, leaving only a narrow channel along which they could walk. Chanting started, as it had in Caesarea, rising to a low, rolling boil, and within it the usual slanders of Herod and his lineage, cut with the War Party’s hatred of Rome.

Vilnius’ back was hard as stone. His guards loosened their swords in their sheaths. Hypatia began to wonder if they could run down some side street. Her feet might be cut to shreds but worse had happened in the past.

And then she felt a tug at her soul and the crowd parted a little and Kleopatra was there, and beside her, veiled and cowled that her black skin and ram’s-head hair might not stand out amongst the Hebrews, stood Iksahra, tight-lipped and tall. Her eyes promised murder and vengeance, all of it heaped on Saulos. Hypatia wanted to smile and could not. She nudged Berenice, and saw that she, too, had seen them.

Aloud, so that those nearest could hear, Hypatia said, ‘If your people knew that you chose this penance, to ask their god to keep the city safe from war, they would applaud you, not throw stones as they do.’

She did not have to shout; Iksahra had the best hearing of anyone she had met. She did not turn to look as they passed, but lifted her hand as if to smooth the hair from her face. On the edge of her vision, she saw the girl turn away. Iksahra had already gone.

The crowds did not part immediately, but within a hundred paces a sigh swept through them, carrying the rumour that the queen had taken a vow to walk barefoot in her shift, with her hair cropped close as a shorn sheep, to keep the city from war.

The stones stopped first, and then the shouting. There was silence then, because this was new to them: that the queen might be an object of veneration, not of loathing. Then, from nowhere, a young woman threw on to the road ahead a bunch of small, white, four-petalled flowers, of the kind that grew
along the coast near Caesarea, and in the cultivated gardens about the city.

The bouquet fell in the dust in front of Vilnius. Without breaking stride, he stepped long across it, and so did not crush the flowers. His men, too, veered away from them and so they were whole when Hypatia picked them up. She gave them to Berenice, who held them to her nose – there was little scent, but it was the gesture that mattered – and smiled her thanks into the crowd.

It all happened in a moment, but it tipped the mood of the crowd to a place they had never been. A hundred paces later, the road was littered with white flowers so thickly that Vilnius could no longer step over them. Hypatia found herself walking on crushed petals, balm to her feet.

Soon after, palm leaves came, thrown with care across their path. They smoothed the road and made their walking effortless.

Berenice was a woman transformed. Made light by the day’s dry heat, her face glowed with a life of its own, claiming the sun. Her pace lengthened and quickened, so that she was floating forward, ever faster.

Hypatia touched her arm. ‘Slow,’ she said. ‘They love you, and Saulos is not so confident in his power that he can stop them. Smile now for your people as they call your name.’

Slowing, Berenice smiled for her people, who screamed her name as if she alone had the power to save them. Hypatia looked at the sun’s searing orb and the sky around it, and became aware of the mass of people, the scents of garlic, pepper, lemon.

She smelled something else, more raw, like the breath of a hound, or a hunting cat, and turned her head a fraction, and saw Iksahra again, close by. Hypatia caught her eye, nodded thanks, and made a single gesture, and saw it acknowledged.

‘Vilnius. May you tell me where we are to be taken?’ She spoke loudly enough for him to hear, which meant that those closest in the close-pressing crowd might hear also.

‘I regret you must go to the prisons, my lady. The ones beneath King Herod’s palace where no man can gain entry except he tunnel through solid stone.’ His response was from the parade ground; it rang across the furthest reaches of the crowd.

‘And no sun can gain entry either?’

‘I regret, no light at all, lady, except by candles.’

‘Then we must make our own light, and hope that the queen’s family may be allowed to visit her.’

Vilnius said nothing, only stiffened his shoulders further. When Hypatia dared look again towards the crowd, Iksahra and Kleopatra had both disappeared once again.

She walked on beside Berenice, over palm leaves, and her feet felt them as silk.

‘
MENACHEM
!’

Pantera screamed the name above the havoc of combat while all around him other men screamed to their gods, to their brothers, to themselves, in agony, in victory, in the sheer exertion of striving to live, which meant striving to kill first, before a sword swung from nowhere, and one more name was lost in the maelstrom.

For an eternity after Pantera called out, Menachem did not move. Then he tilted his head as if his god had tapped him on the arm, and nodded and, turning, dropped his right shoulder, and the blade that would have split his skull instead sheared away the side of his tunic, taking a collop of flesh with it.

He bled. Therefore he was alive. Mergus was with him, shouting, holding a shield. Pantera saw that much before a body, perhaps living, perhaps foe, slammed into his back.

He took the power of the blow and let it catapult him forward, flying free of the carnage, suspended in the air, out of reach of the enemy behind, not yet within reach of the one in front.

The ground came at him fast; the hard, red rock of Masada, bounded by Herod’s double-skinned casement wall that had stopped him from falling over the edge at every other point
along the perimeter, except here, at the gateway to the snake path where it wound up from the ground: here was the opening, and no wall – and falling was not just possible, but probable. It was a very long way down.

He tucked his head in, curved his shoulder, arced the sweep of his arm as the ground rushed to smash him, so that he rolled forwards and came up on his feet, facing back the way he had come. It was a tumbler’s move, learned as a boy, and it was his only weapon, now that he had thrown both of his knives.

A sheet of shining mail blinded him as he rose, so dazzling was its polish, so bright the morning sun beating against it. The legionary whose shirt it was shouted an oath to Jupiter and ran at Pantera with his sword held straight forward, like a spear.

Pantera dropped sideways, and rolled in at the coming feet, tripping them. Thrusting up on one elbow, he pushed out with his hands and let momentum hammer the other man hard against the edge of the wall even as he ripped the sword from his hand.

Bones cracked under the impact. A scream was cut off halfway as Pantera sliced the man’s own blade across his windpipe and the great vessels that hemmed it on either side.

Blood made a splashing fountain behind him. He ran from it, fast; he had seen men die because they had lost their footing in the gore of the man they had just killed. In the barracks afterwards, those who lived named it dead man’s revenge.

Pantera had a blade now, but no shield. He came at a man from behind and speared his new weapon upwards, under the edge of his enemy’s mail. It was a coward’s move, but he had no shame; it gained him a shield and he used it as a weapon, smashing the boss into the face of the next man who came at him, as he bent and cut low, to slice his enemy’s tendons. That one fell, and died, and Pantera walked over him, stamping, as the legions were taught to do.

The new blade was sharp and well balanced and it was the last proof, had Pantera needed it, that these men were the best veterans of the Jerusalem garrison, sent to Masada as a reward,
not the lazy, the lame and the disobedient sent for punishment. They were, in fact, men exactly like his father, who had brought him here to show him its magnificence.

Pantera killed twice more, each time more difficult, each with increasing respect. The men that were left on both sides were tired, but they were alive because they were faster and better, and luckier, than the men who lay dead on the rock. Nobody was left who was slow or weak or deaf or part blind.

For a moment, nobody tried to kill him. He took a chance to look down the snake path, and saw no one sheltering there. He believed there might be bodies on the ground at the rock’s foot, but it was too far to see and he had no intention of stepping closer to look.

He pushed his shield against the casement wall and thrust himself back into the battle. The worst of the fighting was no longer here, near the gateway where Moshe had brought his men up to the plateau, but further north, near the Herodian storehouses.

Menachem, Mergus and Aaron were in the heart of it, fighting as a trio, back to back to back. Only Mergus had a shield and he was using it to cover Menachem. Five legionaries stood before them in an arc, pushing forward with their shields locked in classic tight formation. They had their backs to Pantera. Nobody stood between him and them.

He grabbed another sword from a dead man’s hand, and sprinted forward, wiping the hilt free of blood as he went. He jumped a body, and a shield, and chose not to take it up. Aaron faced towards him, Mergus and Menachem away. He shouted, ‘Aaron!’ and threw the sword as if it were a knife, sending it to turn, blade over hilt in the air.

Graceful, flashing in spinning rhythm, it curved over the heads of the five Romans. Aaron reached up and snatched it from the air and it must have seemed that the sky had opened and the gods sent a blade into their enemy’s hand, for the inexorable forward advance halted, and five legionaries stopped to gape up at the unbroken blue above.

Pantera hit them from behind with the shield held sideways across his body, so that it smashed into the kidneys of two men at once and caught a third under the ribs with one sharp edge hard enough to knock him off balance. That one stumbled under the fall of Aaron’s new blade, and died for his ill luck.

Four left, two of them down. Mergus and Menachem turned to fight the two still standing at either end as Pantera ruined his new blade by stabbing it down through the angle between the helmet and the mail of one of the two who had fallen before he could recover and rise. That one died nastily, but swiftly enough.

The second was not as winded. He rolled away, hunching himself against Pantera’s seeking blade, and writhed round, swinging his own sword out in a circle that hissed past Pantera, as close as any blade had ever come. He jerked back, cursing. The tip sliced on past and caught Aaron on the thigh, but it was at the end of its swing, when the power was gone, and Pantera did not have time to look.

He did not have time to do anything now but wrench himself sideways as yet another blade cut down past his head. His reflexes saved him, but sluggishly, slowed by exhaustion. He spun and parried and hacked and knew that each stroke was slower and later than it should have been and that he was only alive because the man he fought was as tired as he was.

This latest punched his shield into Pantera’s face. Pantera grabbed the top edge of it and thrust it down at his attacker’s foot, reeling sideways, to keep away from the stabbing, searching blade.

For a few frenzied moments, he fought for his life without thought of anyone else. He punched, he kicked, and, when a flash of flesh passed him by, he bared his teeth and bit.

He thought he was about to die and there, then, when it was not the slow death of Saulos’ pleasure, he discovered how much he wanted to live.