Rome 2: The Coming of the King (4 page)

‘That, as they know, the ifrit will be stalking us now, and it’s ill luck to keep a name when men think you dead. That a distant sorcerer could use the name to attack me; that a new one will keep me safe.’

‘They love you,’ Mergus said, sourly. ‘You ate a double helping of their foul bakheer. They’ll do whatever you ask.’

‘They love their camels,’ Pantera said, and pulled his robes around his shoulder and lay on his saddle pack to sleep. ‘They’ll
do what it takes to keep them safe. I’ll need a new horse, too, before we ride on. Do you suppose they’ll let me ride one of the ones we captured? The little bay colt has a nice look to him. Nero would have bought him as a chariot horse. We might send him to Rome, as a gift from a dead spy.’

Mergus drew breath to speak the enjoinders to keep listening spirits from taking those words and making them real, but Pantera was asleep already, his face lined even in repose, his lashes dark on his cheeks, his breathing even and slow, so Mergus offered his prayer instead to Mithras, whose brand they both bore, that they might see their venture through to the end, that Saulos might die without destroying Jerusalem in fulfilment of a prophecy, and that both he, Mergus, and Pantera might live long enough to see it happen.

‘
IF YOUR ENEMY
lies dead of an arrow wound,’ asked Iksahra sur Anmer, ‘what will you do for your vengeance?’ She stood in the shade of the royal mews on the eastern edge of the king’s beast garden in Caesarea, feeding shreds of meat to the oldest and wildest of her falcons.

Saulos stayed in the sun, leaning against the stables at a place that allowed him to look freely up through the gardens to the palace. As far as he could tell, they were alone, and could safely talk, if one ignored the cheetah, which lay at its ease less than three long paces away, watching him with the same pitiless, hot-cold eyes as its mistress.

Saulos did his best to ignore it. He plucked a small yellow flower from the tended line along the path and buried his nose in its fragrance. ‘If Pantera dies early, I will destroy the Hebrews as we planned. But he won’t have died; he’s better than that.’

‘So you spent a gold coin to tell your enemy—’

‘I told him what he already knows; that we are enemies, that he cannot hide from me any more than I can hide from him. This is not something you and I need discuss, particularly not now when, as you see’ – Saulos nodded in the direction of the palace – ‘we have company.’

A figure appeared in the distance, walking down through the gardens. That he might not appear to be watching, Saulos turned his face to the grey sea.

Behind him, Caesarea’s beast garden resounded with contentment, as the horses and hounds, the great cat in its cage, the elephant sent by a distant monarch, delved into their troughs, their mangers, their baskets, and fed.

The smell was of warm bread, laced through with murder. Like many things of this place, Saulos was learning not to hate it. He breathed in, and sighed out, and dispelled the unpretty image of Pantera too easily dead, lying at peace under the spring sun; in his heart, he did not believe it was so.

‘Hyrcanus is on his way,’ he said. ‘The king’s nephew. More important, son of the queen.’

‘I know. On the ship before we docked, you told me to cultivate him. I have done so.’

‘The whole palace knows what you’ve done.’ Saulos allowed himself a smile. ‘Still, with what you must do today, is it safe to take him with you?’

‘It’s safe. He sees what he wishes to see, which is, in turn, what I wish him to see.’ Iksahra set down the falcon in a soothing of bells and leather and took up her mate, the tiercel; smaller, softer, easier to handle. He fed fast, bobbing his head to tear at the nugget of goat’s meat she held between thumb and finger.

For all her brittle arrogance, Iksahra was better than Saulos had dared to hope. The beasts that they had brought with them, the two dozen matched horses, the four grey and white falcons, the pitiless cat that followed her everywhere, each and all thrived in her care. It flowed in the blood from father to daughter and beyond; along with ochre eyes and a clear, cold skill in the hunt, Iksahra sur Anmer had inherited a knowledge of the needs of her beasts as if they were her own, and knew how they might be met even here, far from the hot, flat sands of their homeland. Even the cheetah, which had pined on the ship, had recovered enough two days after landfall to take down an antelope in sight of the king and queen.

And while the beasts bloomed, while they hunted, while they came to accept the touch of foreign – royal – hands, so did Iksahra strike ever deeper into the bosom of the royal family, and nowhere deeper than into the heart of the young prince, Hyrcanus, who was so openly in love with the strange black-skinned woman that for his uncle, his mother or any of the other royal adults to have shown interest in her would have been crass impropriety.

And he was there now, a breathless, pink-cheeked fifteen-year-old, slightly built like all his kin, with the rich, dark hair of the Herods flooding from crown to shoulder. He ran lightly down the marble steps that led from the ornamental flower beds to the beast garden. He stopped some distance away and came forward slowly, careful of the feeding bird.

‘I’m sorry I’m late. My uncle sent me to look for Saulos. He needs him to— Oh! My lord … my uncle … that is, the king asked … he requested …’

‘I suspect,’ said Saulos mildly, ‘that your uncle, the king, ordered me to attend him immediately, to discuss matters of policy. Specifically to find a solution to the problem posed by the quite unimaginably large bribe the Hebrews are about to offer him in the hope that he might preserve their synagogue from the predations of the Greeks. Am I right?’

Saulos smiled easily, as one conspirator to another. Hyrcanus, who had just learned rather more of the latest state crisis than his uncle had told him, or was likely to tell him, grinned his relief.

‘You’re right. That’s exactly what he said. Will you go? Will you tell him that I found you and sent you? He’s in a foul temper. It would …’ Discretion came to him late. He ran out of words, and stood in the half-shade, shifting from one foot to the other.

‘It would mollify him. And therefore I will do it.’ Saulos was dressed for court, in costly silks the colour of sand. He took a moment to brush away the grit, giving Hyrcanus time to regain his composure. ‘Your uncle enjoys my company,’ Saulos said as
he passed the boy by. ‘There’s no shame in that; you need not be afraid to say it. And you, meanwhile, will go to sea with Iksahra, there to hunt with her falcons. I am told the tiercel is flying well for you?’

‘He is! Yesterday, we caught one of the shore birds, the small fast ones that dodge between the waves. He was so fast, so perfect! It was wonderful!’ The boy’s eyes shone bright as the sun-struck sea.

Saulos laughed and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good! You’ll be a hunter by the day’s end.’

His eyes met Iksahra’s over the boy’s head. If he had not spent three months in her company, the hate in her gaze would have terrified him. He walked away, snapping his fingers in time to an inner rhythm. His day, however he looked at it, was perfect.

Hypatia dreamed of Saulos before she saw him and she saw him before she ever set foot on the harbour at Caesarea and those facts were, she thought, the reason her mouth was quite so dry and the usual stable rhythm of her heart unstable. Those, and that she hated the sea.

The dreams had begun long before she had left the imperial quarters in Rome and taken ship for the east.

In truth, they had begun before her eighth birthday, which was one of the reasons she was who she was; the future servants of Isis were chosen from among the children with the most vivid dreams and Hypatia’s had certainly been that.

All through her training, in the deserts south of Alexandria, in Greece, in the dreaming chambers of Mona, the same dream had come. Sometimes, she slept at peace for days at a time and thought herself free of it, then it would visit her three nights in succession, prodding her to wake, sweating, with her hands cramped and her back arched tight against an imagined – or remembered – pain.

On Mona, where the dreamers trained for twenty years before
they considered themselves adept, they told her to return home and become the Oracle of the Temple of Truth in Alexandria, there to await the time when the source of terror in her dreams might visit her to ask a boon.

She had over two decades from her first dream before Saulos Herodion survived the labyrinth that led to the Temple and begged the Oracle’s help. There was a moment when Hypatia could have killed him, knowing what he could do, what he might do, what he wanted to do, but she was the Oracle, bound by laws stronger than her fears, and so she had spoken the words the god had sent in the moment of Saulos’ asking and, as in her dreams, Saulos had taken them and wrought fire, and death and havoc, and spilled his false god out into the world.

Now, though, in the mid-afternoon, with the sea air hot from the land, she let go of the dreams for a while, and stood at the foremast with Andros, the ship’s master, at her side and watched the wonder of organization that allowed him to talk to her as easily as he had in mid-ocean, while still controlling the hundred fine manoeuvres that let him slide his ship through Caesarea’s outer breakwater and into the clutter of barges, skiffs, day-fishers and deep-sea trading vessels that crowded the inner harbour.

From this distance, the royal party waiting on the steps of Augustus’ temple was little more than a blur of porphyry, azure blue, spring green and scarlet with a single seam of gold in the centre; too far to put a name to anyone, except that only the king might wear gold and so it must be his family who stood around him.

Beyond that, only the blistering white stone of Augustus’ temple was clear to the incoming traveller, set on a slope above the harbour, looking due west, to the setting sun and to Rome.

‘They build their temples in the Greek fashion here,’ Hypatia said. ‘I had not thought to see such a thing in this land of the Hebrews.’

‘But Caesarea is not in the land of the Hebrews.’ Andros, master of the sailing ship
Krateis
, was a big bear of a man.
He smiled at Hypatia but did not embrace her, an act of self-control that took an obvious effort of will.

In Alexandria, whence they had come, Andros had been afraid of her, had barely allowed her on board; Hypatia was known throughout the city as a Sibyl, an Oracle, one given since birth to Isis, and he feared the wrath of the sea-gods if she set foot on his beloved ship.

Only sight of the emperor’s ring, and a letter marked with the seal of the late empress, had changed his mind, and that unwillingly. For a month, he had treated Hypatia as ill luck, so that it was a wonder she had not slipped on a dark night and gone overboard. Then a storm had truly come, black as the ravens of Zeus, full of thunder and the raging wrath of Poseidon, and, while the men hid and wept, Hypatia had lashed herself to the rails at the prow and faced down the storm, talking reason to waves tall as pyramids, singing to the lion-roaring sea.

In the morning, when the sun had broken through the cloud and the gods had sent a good tail wind, she had been greeted as a conquering hero, and every man among them would have thrown himself overboard to save her. Some of the younger ones had, in fact, offered to do exactly that in the three days after when she had lain abed with fever and could not be roused.

They had been restrained, and Hypatia had lived, and now Andros stood there, claiming her as his own, hoping he might persuade her to stay, knowing he could not.

He lifted his palm, shading his eyes against the high afternoon sun. ‘The thing to remember about Caesarea,’ he said, sagely, ‘is that she was built by Herod the Great, a king who was neither Greek nor Hebrew but tried to be both, and she has spent the hundred years of her life trying to merge two cultures which are as oil to wine or lions to mewling infants. She has failed and will do so for ever. The Greeks are good traders, but prone to violence. While the Hebrews … the Hebrews are crazy.’ Andros spat, throatily. ‘They love death in the name of their god more than they do life under the Romans. The rest of us are happy to pay our taxes, and hail every mad Caesar as a
god, but they must resist and shout about it and to hang with the consequen— Ho there! Keep a clean line or we’ll crush you to tinder!’

He threw himself forward, leaning down, shouting in the gutter Greek of the sea that no one born on land could hope to understand.

Hypatia, too, leaned forward and saw a small white-sailed day-skiff cut in front of the
Krateis
, saw it sweep under the scythe of her bow and jink a dainty tack to bring it sweeping back again towards the berthing points at the wharf.

Andros was going land-crazy, working himself to a lather at a slight so small he would have barely noticed it at sea, but was blown big now because he could smell land as well as sea, incense as well as salt, meat and fruits and oils and flowers as well as fish and the sweat of unwashed men. He leaned over the bow rail, hurling ever more inventive curses at the ill-begotten sons of parasites who were piloting the skiff. They, for their part, shouted back neatly crafted threats of their own, that had to do with Andros’ virility and their ability to disarm it.

They were close enough now to see the faces on the dock, to pick out the likenesses of dress, of hair, of nose and eyebrow that knitted some together and set others apart. Hypatia left the master to his ravings and leaned back against the mast where she might seem to study the harbour, while studying instead the royal party.

She began at the outer reaches, where stood the men of the city Watch, Roman in all their mail and leather, but not Roman by birth; Syrians, she thought, the local men, who spoke Greek now, rather than their natural tongue, and had done so for three hundred years since the conqueror Alexander had taken their lands for his own. They were trained to Roman standards, though. She resolved to find the name of their commander.