Rome 2: The Coming of the King (42 page)

‘We can,’ Pantera said. ‘We must. This is battle, not a coronation. He will ride Iksahra’s mare. Nothing less will keep him alive.’

‘The ass is to signify peace.’

‘And righteousness, I heard. But to get to peace, he must live through war, and this mare is battle trained. Lay your hand here, on her hide, and feel the shiver of her sinews. She knows there’s a fight coming and she’s desperate to take part. You won’t find a donkey that’ll fight for you.’

‘But—’

‘But nothing. He’ll look better mounted on that mare than
on anything else, trust me, and there are prophecies enough to go round: one of them probably mentions a white horse with black feet if you look hard enough. Put your effort into seeking that out if you find yourself with time on your hands through the morning.’

SIX OF JERUSALEM’S
seven gates cleared smoothly through the remaining hours of darkness. Six more pairs of legionaries fled to their barracks, carrying stories of a ghûl abroad in the night, of ghostly legionaries marching to nowhere, of monsters greater than any they had seen.

Iksahra gained in stature with Naso and his legionaries with each gate, so that by the time they approached the last, set in the western wall behind the beast gardens, they were no longer drawing wards against evil when she passed them by, but were sketching instead the sign for good luck.

The process was not fast, though; the city’s cockerels were clearing their throats and the small coloured birds of the gardens and groves were already courting by the time they reached that last gate, tucked away behind the palace. The morning was lighter than it should have been; the perimeter of the beast garden was etched clearly across a grey sky.

Kleopatra caught Iksahra’s arm. ‘It’s too late; dawn’s nearly on us. They’ll see you’re not a ghûl.’

‘I know. This time we have to fight. They are ten and we are seven, but we have the cheetah, and Mergus’ men have the advantage of surprise: the Guard will not expect to be attacked
by men they know. Still, we need to get closer. Will you go forward now and ask them if your family has already left? Keep them talking until we get near.’

It was easier, this time, for Kleopatra to walk up the road, and, this close to the palace, the guards were civil.

‘The king left before dusk, lady, and all his family with him. You’ve missed them, but you can’t leave now. The zealot army is already outside the walls. They’ve armed themselves and moved north of the city in the night. There’ll be a battle before noon. You should be indoors.’

It was the captain who spoke, first of ten men, stationed five on each side of the locked and barred gate. Each of them held his sword out, his shield off his shoulder, ready against ghûls and zealots equally.

‘I have to join them.’ Kleopatra bit her lip and stared at her feet and found that the morning had progressed so far that she could easily see the detail of her toes. She looked back up at the guard. ‘Would it be possible to—’

His raised hand stopped her. To his men, not to her, he said, ‘Here she comes. See? It’s the king’s Berber beastwoman. I told Antonius it wasn’t a ghûl. Make a line on me and advance on my word. My lady, if you could step behind us, you’ll be safer there.’

They made a line of iron and bull’s hide; men who had fought and killed all their adult lives. They guarded the gate nearest the palace, likely first focus of any assault from the north and west.

Kleopatra was pushed behind, so that she saw Iksahra through the gaps between their shields. She was walking down the road with the cheetah at her heels, making no effort at all to stretch her arms, or to appear as an apparition. She came to a halt ten feet away from the line of guards.

There followed a moment’s hush in which ten men braced themselves, waiting for an order. In her bones, Kleopatra felt the thrill of preparation run through them. She saw the captain take a breath to shout and slid her own hand into her sleeve
where her knife was hidden: better to die trying to cut his throat than to see them crucify Iksahra alongside Estaph.

Iksahra lifted her arm. The captain said, ‘Steady, steady …’

Iksahra dropped her arm. The cheetah sprang forward as commanded and its fluid gold-black flight merged with Iksahra’s battle shout, for as her arm came down her thrown knife caught the first edge of the dawn and carried it forward, lancing the throat of the captain as he, in his turn, launched himself at Iksahra.

The captain tumbled forward, retching, his own blade spinning and clattering to the ground. Iksahra stooped to gather it and so ducked under the swing from the rush of incoming guards: five against one. Their blades hacked out and down – and missed.

Iksahra was as fluid as her own hunting cat, dodging, sliding, skipping back, and laughing in their faces, so that at first they did not see Mergus and his five legionaries who came out of the shadows on either side of the road, advancing fast and silent.

‘Look out!’ Kleopatra shouted, when she was sure they’d been seen. ‘Enemies to both sides!’

The men of the garrison thought her a friend and shouted thanks even as they turned, five on four, back to back in a single snatched step. Their captain would have been proud of them. He was not yet fully dead; his blood still pulsed in a dark sheet across the road, but the waves were less with each ripple and his eyes had already turned up to show the whites.

Men and iron blurred in the paltry light. One fell from each side, but no more; they were too evenly matched, trained in the same vein by the same men in the same tactics.

Iksahra was there, ahead of anyone else, still singing, with her knife blood-wet in her hand, flashing – it was light enough now for more than a glimmer – as she slashed right and left at the guards on either side. They fell back from her as they had not from their fellow Romans, but not far; the men behind them acted as a wall that held their backs and kept them firm and, with the instinct of men who have trained and fought together
for decades, they stepped away together, giving each man more space to move, and then attacked in perfect synchrony, their blades swinging in, hard, at the height of Iksahra’s heart.

‘Iksahra!’

Kleopatra had stood still for less than three breaths and she was not breathing slowly. Now, with terrible clarity, she saw the blades coming in, set to cut Iksahra in half, and, in the passing of a single heartbeat, she saw the place where she could act, considered it, found it good and, stooping, picked up a blade from the clutter that lay on the ground at her feet.

Lifting became a swing, became a slice up, under the legionary’s half-mailed skirt. The blow was the same she had used to kill the guard in the beast garden not ten days before, but this time she held on, and drove it deeper and on until blood spilled from between his lips. Only then did she twist as Jucundus had taught her, and pull out again.

Her enemy choked on his own blood, and sank to the road. Kleopatra stood back, struck to sudden stillness.

It was said that the Chosen of Isis could see the shades of the dead and speak to them. In the beast garden, she had not known she was Chosen, had not looked for the signs of death or tried to see anything. Here, harried by new knowledge and new doubts, with bile stripping the lining of her throat, Kleopatra stared at the dense air about the dead man’s head for some sign of life. Or death.

Nothing was there, but in the echo of her mind she heard him say, with some surprise, and no hurry,
Am I free?

Always before, she had conducted her conversations with the dead in her head, and had thought them hers alone. Now, she answered aloud, ‘You are. Go to your god soon, before the gods and spirits of the desert find you.’

She felt, but did not see, him bow to her and turn and march east, to the rising sun.

‘Kleopatra?’

Her own name came at her oddly, as if through other ears. She looked up and saw the cheetah first, and wondered how it
could speak; then she looked again and saw Iksahra, not ten feet away. The beastwoman had killed another guard and had caught his falling body. She stood, cradling it across her chest like a lover. That one’s voice was more distant, softer, but he, too, was glad to be free. Iksahra let him down to lie on the ground. Her eyes were fixed on Kleopatra’s face. ‘Are you ill?’ she asked.

‘No.’ Kleopatra held herself tight, arms wrapped across her chest, hugging ever tighter. Time was returning to its own speed, leaving her feeling seasick. She said, ‘It was too easy. That was my third kill. Each time was the same.’

‘It wasn’t the same and I don’t believe it was easy. You are a credit to your teachers. Look now, we are done: Mergus’ men have taken heart from your action and finished the enemy.’

They had, indeed. Eleven lay dead; ten Romans of the garrison Guard to one of theirs, a junior officer whose name Kleopatra did not know. His soul spoke Aramaic, while all around him the Roman dead hailed one another in cheerful Latin.

From somewhere closer, Iksahra said, ‘Kleopatra, what is it?’

‘When you see how death frees them, it is no hardship to kill.’

Iksahra stood, staring. In the growing dawn, the whites of her eyes grew narrow and then broad again. Kleopatra said, ‘You can’t hear them, can you?’

‘Nor see them, no. Hypatia can, though, I am sure.’

Iksahra drew closer, laid a hand on Kleopatra’s arm. Her fingers were stiff with dried blood, and cool. ‘My mother told me death was a release. I thought she meant only when the life was lived in pain, or the threat of it, as Estaph is threatened with the cross.’

‘These men were not like that. And yet I swear to you, they were not unhappy to be dead.’ She shook herself free. ‘We have to find Hypatia.’

‘Not now,’ Mergus said urgently, from her side. ‘Now you will turn round and put your back to the wall. Quickly! We are not alone.’

Kleopatra turned and slapped her shoulders against the wall by the guard post. Mergus came in at her left side, and Iksahra at her right with the bloodied cheetah beside her. The other men joined them in ones and twos. And so they stood, seven alone in the still morning, listening to the cockerels take command of the dunghills.

‘Hush!’ Kleopatra held up her hand. ‘I can hear men, marching. And horses. Is it Menachem’s army?’

‘The horses are Menachem’s,’ agreed Mergus bluntly, ‘and his men are behind them, heading for the gate. But if you listen to the noise from the other side, you’ll hear the garrison Guard, and they are faster and closer. We will face them alone.’

Even as he spoke, the peace of the morning was torn apart by the sudden roar of armed men singing, and the ear-breaking clash of a thousand sword hilts beaten on shields, in perfect unison, as the garrison Guard marched up from the Temple.

THE KING OF
Israel’s army marched towards the sleeping city with the new sun sending long, raking shadows streaming behind them.

Small groups peeled off through the minor gates: a hundred men under Moshe; a hundred and fifty led by Eleazir, whose men believed he should have been king, although he had not said it aloud himself – Pantera thought them safer away from the main fighting and Eleazir had not argued – and two hundred of the Peace Party under Gideon, who was given, now, heart and soul to the coming battle.

The rest advanced on the west gate, the biggest, that was set behind the palace and still in the shade.

Helmetless, his black hair aflame to his shoulders, Menachem rode Iksahra’s almond-milk mare at the van. The sound of her feet was the clash of cymbals on the hard road.

Pantera rode at his left hand, to be his living shield. He rode with his eyes on the road, but his attention was fixed on the sun, his mind a sand-timer that drained grain by too-fast grain towards the moment when the light might strike the hill of execution behind the wall.

Aloud in the hollows of his mind he said,
We’re coming
,
we’re coming, we’re coming. Don’t lose hope
. He had no idea if Hypatia could hear him.

And then the dawn peace was broken, smashed against the wall of a legionary marching song drummed to the beat of sword hilts clashing on iron shield bosses. They sounded like thunder on an iron roof, marching to bring death; even as their enemy, Pantera felt it stir his blood.

‘The garrison Guard!’ Pantera shouted, and raised himself up and gave the battle cry of the new king’s army. ‘
Jerusalem!
For the glory of Israel!’

He kept level with Menachem for the first few yards, but the milk-white mare was turned to lightning by the sounds of war, so that Menachem was through the gates, on a mount who screamed her own battle cries over the havoc.

They turned the last corner. Two hundred yards away, the garrison Guard marched towards them four deep across the road, held in tight formation by a captain in a white plumed helmet who shouted orders from the farthest, safest edge.

With the skill of a dance master, he kept them shoulder to shoulder, shield locked to shield, blades of the front lines naked to the fore. They held absolute order, even as Menachem’s front rank of horsemen charged them.

And there, caught between the two hordes, was a clutter of figures at the side of the road. Pantera caught a glimpse of white linen and black limbs and, beside them, long black hair and a single sword held high …

‘
Kleopatra! Iksahra!
Move back! Keep out of the way!’

He saw them skip back into the shadows of the Upper Market, far enough not to be run down, and then he was past, bearing down on the garrison. He wrenched round in the saddle, torn, unable to slow, or break free. From three ranks back, he heard Yusaf shout, ‘I’ll see to them!’ and saw him peel his mount away from the margins of the group just ahead of the first clash.

In so far as there had been time to think at all, Pantera had hoped that sheer mass of numbers and the weight of their
momentum might break the guards’ shieldwall early and fast. It did not do so.

The initial impact rocked the garrison back on their heels, but the men of Menachem’s army were largely untrained and their horses unused to war; they had no knowledge of how to form a wedge, how to split open the shieldwall and force apart the legionaries into ever smaller packs of encircled men.