Rome 2: The Coming of the King (43 page)

Pantera had read of such things and knew them possible, but here, now, he found himself in a chaos of spooked horses and unseated men, of blades held cack-handed that failed to bite, of white, shocked faces and the sight of grown men weeping.

Ahead, the men of the garrison Guard set up a new shout and the rear ranks redoubled the thunderous drumming of their sword hilts on their shields. Hit broadside by the noise, horses reared and bucked in terror, unseating riders as unsuited to war as they were.

Pantera swore, viciously. Flinging his own mount round, he shouted above the throng. ‘Men of Israel: dismount!
Menachem!
Order the dismount!’

Menachem tried. For honour, for sanity, for the chance of winning his city, the new king of Israel filled his lungs and bawled the order to dismount in four different languages: in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in Greek and in Latin.

The garrison Guard laughed to hear the last two, and raised the volume of their clamour. Menachem’s mounted men either couldn’t hear or didn’t understand, or were simply incapable of leaving the saddle and delivering themselves whole, on their feet, to the safe, solid ground, ready to fight.

Pantera wheeled his horse. Menachem was a dozen feet away, slashing his own sword left and right. The raging milk-white mare did more damage than a man ever could, striking out with teeth and feet at anyone, of either side, who came within reach.

Pantera saw her kill one of the garrison Guard who made the mistake of running at her, as if to mount behind Menachem. She
wheeled, lashing out with both hind feet, and his face dissolved in a plash of blood and bone and white teeth. His body arced high into the air. At the apex of its arc, Iksahra passed him, running at a different, riderless horse. She was mounted before he hit the ground.

She spun the new mount without reins. Her face was spattered with dried blood, pale against her dark skin. Her arm was cut above the elbow; a clean wound, with sharp edges that had ceased to bleed.

‘Look out!’ Pantera killed the man who might have assaulted her. She swung her mount and let it kill another. He had not realized that this, too, was one of her horses. Perhaps it wasn’t, and simply all horses became trained to battle when she mounted; today, this morning, with the sun not yet on the hill beyond, anything was possible.

Feeling more confident, he swung back to face the mass of armed men ahead of them with Iksahra a white and black killing machine at one shoulder, Menachem fighting doggedly at the other and Mergus – blessed of Mithras, he heard his voice above the fray – martialling the foot soldiers somewhere beyond his left flank.

Even so, the garrison Guard was disciplined and well led; trumpeters sounded high, harsh notes and men moved to their command, pushing in, step by brutal step, crushing everything.

To his right and his left, Pantera shouted, ‘The captain! We need to kill the captain!’

He pointed ahead to where white plumes, tall as a man’s arm, waved like a beacon at the battlefield’s edge. Together, he, Menachem and Iksahra fought towards him, slashing, hacking, wounding more than killing, but staying alive, which was all that mattered.

The plumes danced ahead, always a little away from the fighting, always shouting out new orders to the trumpeters, who sent them to the men. As they approached, the Guard split into two groups and manoeuvred in perfect synchrony, so that
one part stepped out and round, in a long wheeling arc, while the other pushed inwards.

Pantera shouted, ‘Kill him now or we’re—’

He stopped because everybody else had stopped; each man’s shout cut off as if a god’s hand had hammered past, sucking away all the air. But it hadn’t been a god; a thousand men had drawn breath all at once, in surprise, in shock, in terror, in delight.

In the hair’s breadth of hush, Pantera hauled his mount left, to the city, and so saw what the others had already seen.

‘God of all gods,’ he whispered. ‘Gideon has come.’ Nobody heard him, for Gideon had not come alone, nor with only the two hundred men he had taken with him; he had come with the whole of Jerusalem and the moment’s silence was annihilated under the sound of their cry: ‘
Jerusalem!
’

Hundreds came, thousands, tens of thousands, too many to count, all the men of Jerusalem, and their wives, their sons, their daughters, their grandmothers, lame on their sticks; everyone and anyone who could run or walk was flooding now from the streets on either side of the Upper Market, here to free their city from the yoke of occupation.

They surged towards the garrison Guard, armed with kitchen knives and pestles, with sickles and smithing irons and rods with sharpened ends for poking at goats, with axes and hammers and lengths of wood ripped from their doorways.

Most of all, as the hordes of Jerusalem always did, they came armed with stones and they threw them now, hard, aiming for their enemies’ legs, for the soft skin behind their knees, for their shins, for their Achilles tendons, where, like the hero, they might be weak.

A dozen or more had slings, and used them with startling accuracy on the men who were executing the pincer movement. Within a dozen heartbeats, thirty men of the garrison Guard had fallen, and the rest were no longer concentrating on the enemy in front, but were turning, haphazardly, to face those behind.

And then Pantera saw their captain. A break opened in the lines, a flash of sun on a helmet that drew his eyes past a trumpeter … he saw him in profile: soft nose, a little upturned, curls of dark hair escaping the confines of his helmet, and an arrogance that no other man in Judaea had ever truly matched.

‘
Saulos!
’

Pantera’s roar outdid the trumpeter. The standing plumes flew aslant as Saulos turned his head, not towards him, but back to a tent-party of eight men who stood a dozen yards behind the others, separate from the fighting. At his shout, they turned away and ran for the palace. He sprinted to catch up and they opened to take him, a smooth move that drew him in and held him secure in their heart. He flung the helmet away as he ran; white plumes lay rocking in the dirt behind them.

Pantera spun his horse so hard that it reared. He caught Iksahra’s eye. They did not need words; a look was enough, and in it, one name:
Hypatia
.

Together they pushed their horses away from the conflict, following where Saulos had gone.

Hypatia sat alone in the dark and the abominable cold and listened to the stamp and clatter of the last guard change.

Light flared at the corner. The incoming and outgoing guards exchanged murmured Latin: ‘There’s war outside; we’re winning. How is it here? Are they well? Yes, all well. As well as can be on their last night. They’ll be lucky if it is their last night. I’ve seen crucified men live three days.’

She felt a shudder from both guards and then one left, relieved, banging the door shut behind him. The other locked it from within and then, alerted perhaps by the quality of the silence in the cellar, lifted his torch and brought it round the corner.

The light flooded the cell, blinding after the dark. Hypatia laid her hands over her eyes, but otherwise made no move to rise, to acknowledge his presence. She had shown she was alive, which was more than the others had done. They lay along the
side wall, in easy repose, with their hands by their sides as if for burial and a cloth across their brows. Beneath, each face was free of all care, liberated from the travails of life.

The new guard ran at the bars, trailing his light, bright as a comet. ‘What’s happened?’ Panic lit his voice. He banged his sword hilt on the bars. ‘Wake up!’

Nobody moved. He crashed his whole shoulder on the iron next to her head. ‘What have you done?’

‘I have given them peace.’ Hypatia took her hand from her eyes. ‘What would you have done? I, too, have known men live for three days on a cross.’

‘Gods alive!’ He was grey with terror. Throughout the empire, if a guard let his prisoners die, routinely, he took their place in whatever followed. His fingers grappled numbly for the keys at his belt. ‘You can’t do that!’

Hypatia regarded him with quiet curiosity. ‘I am the Chosen of Isis. I can do whatever I choose. Don’t come in. You can’t change anything.’

‘You can’t keep me out!’

Iron jangled. A key met a lock and turned, shakily. The door crashed back. A flutter of flame came in first, as the torch was thrust into Hypatia’s face.

Hypatia jerked back as he threw himself across the cell to the two bodies lying on its far side, then, without rising, she propped both hands on the floor and, stretching, swept her feet in a long arc that met his at its apex, tangling his ankles.

He fell, inelegantly, so that his chin made first contact with the far wall, and then his shoulder. He came to rest head down, in the nauseating pile of ordure at the furthest corner from the door. For a mercy, if only temporarily, he was unconscious. Hypatia struggled to turn him over and wrest his blade from the scabbard.

She turned, blade in hand, and found Estaph looking at her. ‘It worked,’ he said.

He was cold; the tips of his ears were blue-white and his face was haggard enough to be dead. She lifted the guttering torch
from the floor and nursed it to life, this once needing its heat more than its light. She brought it to him and to Berenice as she, too, rose from the frigid floor.

‘Is he dead?’ Estaph, ever practical, asked and then answered his own question. ‘No. And now yes.’

In between these two, a swift wrench of a head; exactly the mercy he had offered to Hypatia and she had refused, because the god did not allow death, but demanded life, and this was the only way she could think of to give it.

She said, ‘We’re not safe yet. There’s a palace full of guards outside.’

‘The palace isn’t as full as it was yesterday,’ Estaph said, and he held open the door to their cell for her to pass through. ‘You should lead. You have the best ears of us all. You can warn us if someone comes.’

And then what will we do? We are worn and cold and afraid and we have one sword between three of us, which is not enough
. Hypatia did not say it aloud, but met his gaze and found the same thoughts reflected in the same tight smile.

‘We have to try,’ Estaph said. ‘Your god did not want us dead too easily or too soon.’

THE BEAST GARDEN
was a stinking mess. The air was heavy with old urine and rotting faeces and alive with flies. Inside was a cacophony of hunger, of thirst, of bestial desperation that outdid the havoc of combat a bare few hundred paces away.

Seeing Iksahra stand in the gateway, the horses, hounds and hawks threw themselves in a frenzy at the bars of their compounds, howling or screaming or belling, as their nature demanded, for food, for water, for the blessing of release.

Iksahra spat on the ground, eyes ablaze. ‘The slaves fled to Damascus and left them untended. They should die for such a thing.’

‘They are slaves,’ Pantera said. ‘It is not given them to act without orders. They are often flayed for exactly that. We haven’t time—’

‘I know. But we are two against nine. But even two such as we will better prevail if we have—’

‘Three,’ said a clear voice behind. ‘With me, we are three. Or seven, if you prefer.’

Pantera turned, slowly. Kleopatra was wildly bruised; a long welt across her left cheek half closed her eye and promised spectacular colours later. Her forearms had cuts along their
lengths, one of them ragged, of the sort that responded better to clean air than to a dressing. None of it detracted from the light in her eyes.

Pride shone from her, and a new determination. ‘I’m coming with you to get Hypatia. You need me. I know the fastest way through the palace to the cellars where she’s held. And Mergus is on his way – is here.’ A shuffle of sandals and he was there, with three others. Kleopatra said, ‘He can’t go back: the Hebrews don’t know him well enough to remember he’s friend not foe and they’re winning now. He’ll be cut down simply for looking Roman.’

Mergus was breathing hard, but not greatly hurt, nor the three men with him. He saluted across the heads of the others, a gesture that promised stories later, when time allowed. He moved to the two women and there was a joining between them, as of men who have fought together in battle, who have saved each other’s lives and know the most precious of bonds, closer than many lovers. And now Kleopatra and Iksahra were a part of it.

Pantera bowed to them, for the brightness of their greeting. ‘Lead then,’ he said, and so it was that five men, two women and a cat walked down the slaves’ corridor to its end.

‘Left here,’ said Kleopatra as they poured out through the door, ‘and then left again at the junction at the end. There are stairs fifty paces further on. A guard will be at their head.’

Iksahra said, ‘Let me do this. Mergus, if you and the others could appear to form an honour guard? Let him see you as we round the corner, but don’t come closer unless I fail.’

As if ordered by an officer, the men fell into line behind Iksahra. She flicked her fingers to keep the cheetah close, and then they were at the junction in the corridor and there was no time to ask what she planned, only to watch as she stalked away, black and white, with her beast flowing gold at her side.

The guard saw the men first. His head went up, and he smiled, and was still smiling when his gaze fell on the cheetah and the
woman and his confusion then, of why she should have been thus honoured, slowed his blade.

In perfect Latin, Iksahra said, ‘I am the ghûl that assaulted the gate guards,’ and it seemed to Pantera that the guard had died of fright before the cheetah had ripped the life from his throat.

He died in a flurry of muffled beast noises, and not one single human sound. The smell of blood rinsed the corridor and Pantera found that, this once, he was not immune to such a thing, and that he was not alone; Mergus and Kleopatra were both paler than they had been.

Iksahra stepped round the mess. ‘We go down the steps behind this door,’ she said. ‘I believe there is a corridor to a similar door, and another set of steps and then a long corridor that winds the length of the palace and brings us to the head of the stairs where Hypatia is being kept. Am I right?’