Rome 2: The Coming of the King (5 page)

Within the circle they made stood the royal party of Agrippa II, grandson to Herod the Great, whose sign of the wheat sheaves flew in gold pennants above the tower and the promontory palace.

A handful of royal children hemmed him in, nieces and nephews of this wifeless, childless king. Hypatia couldn’t see Hyrcanus, nephew to the king and nominated heir, but she did notice a dark-haired girl, taller than the rest, who pointed at their big two-masted ship with the emperor’s pennant and kept her stiff arm outstretched for a long time as they made way towards the harbour, as if throwing a curse, or drawing the ship in to dock, or both.

Andros was losing his verbal battle. The small day-skiff cut in front of the
Krateis
one last time, aiming for the same place at the wharf. Light and lively, it skipped ahead, hampering the bigger ship’s progress. Andros became truly manic in his fury, but there was nothing to be done but slow his own ship, to set the oars to backwater and turn in more tightly to the wharf.

‘Here! Dock here!’

The shout sliced the air. The king pushed to the fore of the huddle, waving his command. Agrippa was small, like all Herod’s kin, with the fine, dark hair and lean nose of the Idumaeans, whom the Hebrews called Edomites and despised. Still, they ruled over Caesarea, Jerusalem and all the rest of Judaea, albeit under sufferance of Rome.

Here in Caesarea, Agrippa showed no deference to anyone, excepting that he wore a toga in the Roman manner, with purple at the hem, and a filet of gold in his hair, and the women on either side of him wore stolas in azure blue and spring green and had their hair twisted high and cross-pinned at the crown in the style that had been favoured by the Empress Poppaea before her untimely death in childbed at the year’s turn. In Rome, nobody had dared yet call the style out of fashion.

Hypatia waited at the mast head. She was the Chosen of Isis; she was used to conversations with royalty and the inevitable dramas they wrought. If, to date, the kings, queens and emperors had always been the supplicants and she the one who delivered – or not – that which they sought, it was, she believed, not so different now, just less … controlled.

She made herself stand straighter, and set her arms by her
sides as the
Krateis
turned broadside to the dock and one of the younger freemen leapt the oar’s-length gap to the shore, winding ropes on to bollards to hold the ship safely to land.

The king had commanded her presence. Holding her head high, feeling her neck unnaturally stiff, Hypatia plotted a safe course around the debris on the deck: the careful coils of rope, the taut rigging, the line that held the stone that marked the depth at which the ship might safely anchor, the—

‘Do you see the falcon?’ a girl’s voice cried in lightly accented Greek. ‘See! The black woman still has it, but Hyrcanus has the male, so he must have made a kill. And look! She has the cheetah with her! I told you it followed her everywhere.’

Hypatia had gone another two carefully measured paces before the meaning of the words brought her to a halt.

She dragged her gaze from the dockside and looked at last where the girl was pointing now, not at the
Krateis
, but at the unruly day-skiff berthed so close that sandbags had been thrown between to keep the hull of the greater, ocean-going broad-ship from crushing the small, lighter, faster – and now plausibly royal – skiff.

Her ship’s greater height granted Hypatia a clear view on to the deck of the skiff and thus on to the tall, lean woman who stood on its gangplank with a leashed and hooded falcon on her wrist and a sleek, long-limbed great cat, neither leashed nor hooded, at her heel. The cheetah stood with its head high and its small round ears pricked and raked its yellow eyes across the company.

The woman who commanded it was not, in fact, the jet black of the Nubians as the girl had implied, but a shade lighter, a deep earthen brown, with a cap of short brown-black hair curled tight as a new-born lamb’s, eyes the colour of deepest ochre, and high, carved cheekbones that caught the sun as if she had painted them across with powder of gold. Looking closer, Hypatia saw that each cheekbone bore three small spirals tattooed in a line; and three more crossed the bridge of her nose, linking her fine, gull-wing brows.

The tattoos defined her origin: to Hypatia’s knowledge, the only tribes that marked themselves thus were those that bred horses, hunted gazelle and herded rough goat-sheep south and west of Mauretania where the desert stretched vast as an ocean and the men, it was said, could live without water for a week while the women gave birth on horseback, and perhaps conceived the same way. They called themselves the Berberai, and had sworn allegiance to no one, nor did they have any fear of Rome.

It was the Berber woman, then, whom the girl-child had seen and the Berber woman’s beasts the king had called forth. The cheetah was always going to be the first focus of attention, but the falcon was no less imposing in its way. It stood on her arm, a slate-grey she-bird with a pale flecked chest of the kind the Berberai used to hunt deer, and behind her, leashed to the arm of a green-faced seasick boy of about fifteen, was the smaller tiercel that was its mate.

Nobody watched the boy; the royal party’s attention rested instead on the Berber as she strode down the gangplank with the cheetah stepping loose-limbed and lethal at her side.

At the shore, the falcon roused, screaming a challenge to the land and the colour and the many staring eyes. The younger children shrieked in horrified delight. The royal women stepped back, covering their breasts with their hands. Agrippa, the king, stood his ground, white-knuckled, staring fixedly ahead.

The Berber woman made obeisance, of sorts, to the king, to the women at his side, and, in a deep, bell-toned voice that set the bars of Hypatia’s chest thrumming, said, ‘Iksahra sur Anmer thanks your majesties for their indulgence. Your royal nephew is a versatile hunter, if not yet quite suited to the sea. We caught a few gulls, but nothing else of worth. I beg leave to continue his training in the deserts, that he might, in time, reach the excellence of his ancestors.’

Hypatia bit her lip and made sure not to smile. She had given orders to emperors in her time, she knew the pitch of voice that acted as a command, whatever the nature of the words, and the
Berber woman had just ordered King Agrippa II of Judaea to leave his nephew – his sole heir – in her care.

Agrippa showed no sign of having noticed. His gaze glanced unseeing over the assemblage before him – the men on the skiff, the boy, the falcon, even the cheetah – and came to rest, thoughtfully, on the Berber woman who, contrary to all propriety, wore a loose white robe that barely stretched to her knees and covered her arms not at all.

It was a man’s dress, and she was assuredly not a man. She was, in fact, as close as Hypatia had ever seen to one of the legendary Amazons, but for the fact that she bore no bow, and had plainly not amputated her own right breast, the better to fire her arrows.

The king thought the same. Hypatia watched him say as much behind his hand to a man dressed in silk the colour of sand who stood at his left shoulder, in the place of a counsellor.

The Oracles of Isis were well versed in reading words by the form of the speaker’s lips alone. From her place high up on the deck of the
Krateis
, Hypatia watched Agrippa say, ‘The Amazon will make a man of my nephew yet.’

The reply came swiftly, with amusement. ‘If you give her time to do so.’ The man at the king’s shoulder also let his eyes rest on the Berber woman, but it seemed to Hypatia that the shock of her touched him less than it had the king, and that he gazed instead into her soul, to the passions that burned in the glacial interior, and that he was pleased with what he saw.

And then he turned his head and smiled, and so she saw at last that the messages had been true: Saulos was in Caesarea.

Two month at sea, six months before in preparation, a year before in hunting, had wound her tighter than she knew. She felt the heat of his gaze pass over her and move on, and opened her fists and wiped away the sudden greasy sweat on the weather-fine wood of the mast.

In the temple, she had been cloaked and cowled. Her voice had not been her own; her body had been the hollow reed through which Truth spoke. She had said so to Pantera, to Mergus, to
the ailing Empress Poppaea in her private apartments as they had planned all that might happen.

Saulos saw the Oracle, he did not see Hypatia. I will know him and will not be known. As the empress suggests, I will take ship to Caesarea and deliver her gifts while you travel overland. Whichever of us finds him first will alert the others
.

Hypatia turned her gaze to the city, to the bright houses and brighter gardens, to the merchants and traders and slaves and housekeepers and ladies and courtiers and counsellors and men of the Watch who flooded the dock and the nearby streets.

It did not look like a city on the verge of riot and revolution, but Hypatia had spent half her life visiting cities and states on the verge of war; she knew the taste of the air and the sounds of men and women trying to pretend that life had not changed and would not change. A smear of black smoke somewhere in mid-city was darker and thicker than it should have been and somewhere distant, women wailed a death.

With a nod to Andros to let him know she was all right, she gathered her dignity and stepped down the plank on to the dockside and into the maelstrom that was Caesarea.

MERGUS COUNTED THIRTEEN
crosses marking the eastern entry to Caesarea; seven on the south side of the path that led to the closed gates, six to the north. Old bodies hung there, desiccated, scentless bones held together by tags of tendons, too dry now for the vultures.

Before the front riders reached them, the gates opened and a detachment of the city Watch rode out; fifteen armed and armoured men on fresh horses, who spread out in a row across the sand.

Ibrahim’s train halted, smoothly. Even the camels, who had smelled water, made no effort to forge through the line of polished iron.

At the rear of the column, Mergus and Pantera leaned forward on the pommels of their saddles showing every sign of weariness, hunger and thirst – all of which were genuine – and of boredom, which was not.

‘If Saulos knows we’re here …’ Mergus murmured.

‘He will clear one of the crosses for each of us,’ Pantera said. ‘Try to get one facing the sun. Death comes faster that way.’

Pantera kept his quiet gaze on the camels ahead; in this guise, he was a Nabatean archer of limited imagination and no
particular fear of Rome. Mergus, who had seen the scars on his body, and had spoken to some of the men who had made them, cursed and spat and hunched his back against the dead, and made sure he knew the fastest route to freedom.

Best to go left, he thought, south, towards Jerusalem where the Hebrew zealots, however mad, might take in a renegade centurion and his half-breed friend if they could prove themselves useful with weapons.

But no shout came, no hands fell on their shoulders, no blades were thrust in their faces with threats and menace. The camels, horses and men of Ibrahim’s train were inspected by a decurion, who introduced himself as Gaius Jucundus, commanding officer of the city Watch. He greeted Ibrahim affably enough and commiserated with the men for their wounds as he rode slowly down the line.

‘There’s still time to leave,’ Mergus said, as he came closer. Just. Maybe. If their horses were not too tired. If the Watch were slow to see them go.

‘Not yet,’ Pantera said. ‘Let your sleeve come up. See if they know who you are.’

Obediently, Mergus made as if to stifle a yawn and, in doing so, let his right sleeve rise a little. On his forearm above the centurion’s baton, the twinned XX of the Twentieth legion had recently been extended by new lines to form the double Vs of the name Valeria Victrix, given after the bloodbath of Britain’s rebellion. Above the legion-sign, older, a lion stood over a bull, and both were topped by a raven.

The inkwork of the god-mark was poor, blued almost to invisibility against Mergus’ olive skin, but a man did not rise to the rank of Watch captain without sharp eyes and a sharper mind and a working knowledge of the gods who held the legions close.

Jucundus spun his horse neatly, bringing it to stand just in front of Mergus. His men might have been Syrian, but he was a Roman of equestrian stock, with the hooked nose and prominent brow that marked such men, as if they were all cast
from the same mould. His eyes, when he raised them, held a frank, friendly curiosity.

‘If I tell the men what you are,’ he said, ‘they’ll drag you from your horse and ply you with wine and whores. Shall I?’

‘Later, maybe.’ Mergus shrugged a shyness that was only partly feigned. His past with the legions was the reason he had been taken on as outrider in the first place; he had no intention of hiding it. ‘I’ve given my oath to see Ibrahim’s camels safely sold and we’ve already lost the best to bandits. I’d hate to be carousing while the rest were stolen.’

‘Camels are hard to hide,’ Jucundus said. ‘In Caesarea, small men steal small things; the coins and gems that can be swallowed and retrieved two days later, or denied with plausibility. If anyone steals your camels, it’ll be the governor claiming them as tax.’

A brief pause held them a moment. ‘He’ll take a tax on the beasts before they’re sold?’ Mergus asked.

‘It’s his new way, started this spring. He’s a Greek, which means he’ll extort more of whatever you’re trading if you’re selling to the Hebrews rather than the Syrians, who count themselves almost wholly Greek. Take that as fair warning, and if you pass it to Ibrahim, don’t say it came from me. But for now, you have an escort. The Watch will keep you safe until you reach your inn.’

‘Are we in danger?’

Jucundus pulled a wry face. ‘Take it as a sensible precaution,’ he said. ‘The autumn riots have started early. Nobody’s safe.’

At which he raised his arm in signal and the detachment that had blocked the path split apart and rode down to join the train, half on either side so that Ibrahim and his camels passed through the city’s gates to the chime of chain mail and the tread of different horses, and the crowds gathered to view them with silent awe, as if they were royalty.