by M C Scott
Mercifully, the papers were not secreted in a chamber beneath the cooking fire which was the first place a competent search team would have looked, but hidden in a concealed compartment within the water tank that sat atop the roof of the house.
Steps led up from the outer walled courtyard in which stood the dovecote, source of the household’s legitimate income. Pantera sat guard on the bottom step and watched half a hundred buff-rose doves coo and preen and flit in feathery leaps from cote to roof to wall and back again.
The birds were well handled, with no fear of men, so that he was able to stand among them and search out those of different colours; the six or seven whose feathers shimmered in an oily turtle green, the black pair with white flashes that looked like magpies, the pure white singleton with the pink eyes. None of them was the red roan and white of Seneca’s Roman carrier-birds, but it was clear that in this flock such a bird would readily be lost in the multitude of colours.
Ishmael came back presently, beaming his success. The family had a precise and efficient system of classifying the messages that passed through their hands, for the boy did not bring the entire year’s collection, but only two short, slim cylinders, carried with the awe of a novitiate bearing sacred writings.
‘For the Leopard,’ he said, leading Pantera back into the house. ‘You may sit?’
Pantera sat on one of the two bedding rolls pushed up against the wall. Unrolled from their containers, the messages were revealed on two square sheets of finest papyrus, no thicker than spring’s first leaves, no larger than them either; each side was half the length of his smallest finger. The writing in both was finer than gossamer, one achingly familiar, old, faded with age, one new in all senses, still alien to his eye.
But both used the same code, the first one that Pantera had ever learned; he could parse it now as if it were in the original Greek. He read the older first.
To the Leopard from his Teacher, greetings. Solomon is safe and sends you his thanks. I have sent gold which will reach you by other routes. I send also my congratulations; pushed to the edges of your being, you earned your name in all ways.
Scribbled at the bottom, unencoded, was a last sentence. I send also my earnest gratitude, as from a father to his son, that you are safe.
Pantera laid the paper leaf on his knee, where it shivered in the sway of his breath. In the morning’s half-light, it wasn’t hard to conjure an image of Seneca – the Seneca of his youth – sitting at his desk in Alexandria, condemned to exile by Claudius and lucky to be alive, yet still running the most comprehensive, efficient and broad-reaching spy network in the empire.
And into that network Seneca had drawn a runaway archer’s son found thieving on the streets of Alexandria. Throughout those early years, he had driven Pantera harder than even a boy who loathed himself might have done. He had asked for more and never settled for less. He had set tasks that made the threats and conspiracies of real life seem trivial by comparison. He gave praise rarely, and always salted it liberally with criticism. To a boy who had abandoned his father in disgust, he had never once in seven years suggested that he considered himself in that role.
Except that he had. As from a father to his son …
Pantera could have read that, if things had turned out differently. He had been travelling to Caesarea on his first mission. He had been given the pass code and the address of the pigeon loft, manned by an agent of Seneca’s named Isaac.
But he had never gone. He had, in fact, been prevented from going by the order to divert to Damascus, there to aid the escape of a man who had attracted the ire of Aretas, king of Syria. It had been his first true mission, and it had nearly cost him his life, but he had come out of it with a sense of his own skill that nothing else could have given him. On leaving that city, another message had come, ordering him north and east to Parthia, an empire on the brink of war against Rome.
After that, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Gaul, Britain. Never again near Caesarea, until now, when he knew all that Seneca felt for him.
As from a father to his son …
Seneca had named him son on the night of Rome’s fire, and loved him as such. Pantera had never said that he loved his old spymaster in return. If he let it, his regret for that could eat him away to nothing.
‘Is it bad news?’ Ishmael’s angelic face peered at him, creased with concern.
‘No.’ Pantera pulled himself back to the present. ‘I was thinking of who I used to be when this was written.’
‘You were the Leopard. You’re still the Leopard.’ The name was magical to the boy, a talisman against all harm.
Pantera offered half a smile. ‘I am not the Leopard I was,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
Only the young asked such direct questions. Why not? Because of a woman and child he had loved and then killed in Britain, to keep them from Roman harm? Because of a quite different woman of another race and another place he had loved in Gaul and Alexandria and Rome? Because of a boy-thief found and sent to Britain who had loved him?
All and none of these. Unexpectedly, he thought of Hypatia, who had warned him, once, to keep always to the truth.
He said, ‘I got what I most wanted in life, and found that I didn’t want it after all.’
‘Father says that is the ruin of us all.’
‘Your father is a wise man.’
‘You haven’t read the other message.’
He hadn’t. He did so. It was brief and said nothing unexpected; except that it was old and late and didn’t say what it should have said.
To the Leopard from the Poet: your prey remains in the pearl of the east. The emperor continues to support your cause, which is his cause. We await news of your success in Saba.
He read that last again, checking his decryption in his head. We await news of your success in Saba. The Poet was young, and frighteningly efficient; latest and greatest of Seneca’s many protégés. Such a one should not still be awaiting news of the negotiations in Saba, when Pantera had sent a bird with all the necessary details as soon as he had taken the contract with Ibrahim.
He said, ‘When did this message arrive?’
Frowning, Ishmael held the cylinder up to the light. ‘The date’s on the outside of the cylinder.’ The collation of dots was not in any number system that Pantera knew. He waited while the boy’s flying fingers added up time. ‘It came … fifty-three days ago.’
‘And there hasn’t been another? Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure. We know every bird. None have come from the spymaster’s loft.’
‘Nor from the emperor?’
‘No. Although Father thinks …’ Ishmael dropped his voice to a creaky whisper. ‘He thinks we may be losing some of the birds.’
‘Losing?’
‘To storms. Or disease.’
‘Or to men?’
Ishmael shook his head violently. ‘No man could take them. How would they do it? How would they know? We have told no one what we do, I swear it!’
‘But the men who bring the new carrier-birds from Jerusalem and Damascus and Rome, the other men who take the birds from your loft back to their own coops so that they may return with a message; each of these knows where you are.’
‘My father makes the trips to Jerusalem. He’s there now. The rest are all Seneca’s sworn men.’
‘Men can be bought. It happens, Ishmael, more often than you might think. Did your father take birds with him?’
‘Yes. He took a dozen to Jerusalem and will bring the same number back. He does it every fourth month in the travelling season. In between, the men come from Damascus, Antioch, Alexandria and Rome.’
‘When will he leave Jerusalem?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Then I have an idea. Send a bird to Jerusalem now, with a message to him from me. That way we’ll know if the birds are getting through.’
Ishmael chewed his thumbnail. ‘But we have only one bird left and Father never wants to send the last one before the new on
es are here.’
‘This time, I think, we must make an exception. Let me write the message. If your father’s there, he’ll understand.’
Pantera used a newer code than the one that had been the standard among Seneca’s men in the days of his youth. His message was short.
From the Leopard to the Messenger, greetings. I come hunting the enemy of Israel. It may be that he knows this. If this bird reaches you, bring word in person. I will be here until the month’s end.
Leaving, Pantera took a left turn and then followed the hill down towards the Temple of Isis, richly kept, aflame with flowers in all the colours of the sun.
In the temple courtyard was a stone water trough for the use of the more distant worshippers who must ride to their devotions, and on it, a neat, swiftly scratched graffito in the shape of a wild lily with a hound alongside. The hound had one ear.
Resting on the trough, he scratched his own sign of the bull alongside Hypatia’s mark of the lily, and gave the hound its second ear to show that he understood that she had seen Saulos, then turned back up the hill and made his way back to the inn to return the stolen tunic to a night-slave not yet risen and tell Mergus all he had found.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOMEWHERE, SOMEONE WEPT.
The noise hid in the sea-mist that rolled over the palace gardens, almost, but not quite, private. Hypatia caught the sound’s thread and followed it along a paved path past a series of three marble fountains, on each of which a weed-clad Oceanid cavorted in bronze, spilling water from hand or hair or heel.
Beyond them, at a corner where the cyclamens and orchids wove a pastel carpet, she turned left towards the sea and passed through avenues of scarlet tulips, dripping dew fat as blood. There, at the garden’s end, a set of stairs led down to a pair of iron gates and on the steps a dark-haired girl sat slumped with her head in her hands, sobbing just loudly enough to be audible throughout the gardens.
Hypatia crouched on the top step and waited a while, watching. When it was clear she was not going to be acknowledged, she said, ‘Kleopatra?’
The girl’s head snapped up. She had sharp features, honed by eyes that held exactly the same startling gaze as her aunt Berenice’s, but that these were greener and paler now than they had seemed in the lamplight, almost the colour of the deep ocean sea. A tear slid down one cheek, sharp as a diamond.
‘Is this because I caused the queen to send you out of the audience room the other night?’ Three of the five days had passed until Hypatia was due to attend the theatre. Slowly, she was learning where she could and could not go.
‘Oh, that.’ The girl tipped her head, considering. Plain on her face was the calculation of what she might gain by agreeing with Hypatia’s suggestion.
Honesty, or pragmatism, won. ‘No. It’s Iksahra, the black beastwoman. She promised she’d let me fly the falcon before we go to Jerusalem, and we might ride at any moment. But she’s taken Hyrcanus and his tiercel out instead. She loves him – Hyrcanus, not the bird. They hide in the horse stalls and fornicate.’ That last was said with all the boundless venom of a wounded girl-child.
Hypatia, who did not believe it, let her eyes grow wide. ‘Does your uncle, the king, know that?’
‘I’ve told him, so he must.’ Kleopatra stood up, dragging her fingers through her mist-sodden hair. She wore a plain, undyed linen tunic, belted with leather, not silver. If Hypatia had not known her already, it would have been altogether too easy to mistake her for a well-dressed slave. In this palace, the slaves were dressed in fabric of better weave than at least half the city’s population.
Kleopatra said, ‘You’re the Chosen of Isis.’
Hypatia had heard her title spoken in awe and hope, in fear and horror, in longing, in grief, in love. More rarely than any of these, she had heard it said in hate, by priests of other gods who fell in the shadow of her own.
She had never heard it spoken as an insult before; even Iksahra had managed to keep the inflection from her voice. She inclined her head. ‘I am.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why were you Chosen?’
No one in twenty-five years had asked that. Hypatia closed her eyes, the better to think. The better, in fact, to ask the god who sometimes gave answers.
Not today. Her mind was empty of all but the horror of the night’s dream. It was coming continually, now that Saulos was close.
Opening her eyes, she said, ‘I had dreams as a child.’
‘True ones?’
‘Dreams are rarely completely true. They show the essence of what might be; the skill is in the reading. But I had vivid dreams and they felt real to me, which was what mattered. And I acted on them, which mattered too. If you honour your dreams, they will honour you.’
‘My dreams frighten me.’
A wind blew, there in the garden, shifting the scents of wild and tame flowers. A high, fine note sounded in Hypatia’s ear, the warning whistle of the gods. ‘Do you act on them?’ she asked.
Abruptly, the girl stood, brushing her hands on her tunic. ‘Why are you here?’
‘I brought two hounds as a gift to Queen Berenice from the empress of Rome. I came to see they were being well cared for.’
‘The empress of Rome is dead.’
‘I know. But her majesty ordered me to bring them while she was still alive.’
‘From Rome?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it true the emperor has taken a boy to wife in place of the empress, and made him a woman?’
‘It wasn’t when I left.’
Strictly speaking, she spoke the truth: the boy in question had been gelded and was being groomed as Nero’s wife, but had not actually been married at the time the Krateis sailed. Hypatia was an Oracle and Oracles never lied. Never.
To avert another silence, she said, ‘I should go to the beast garden. I want to take the hounds out for a run along the shoreline. They were on board ship for a month; even now, after three days on land, they crave sea air and flat ground.’
Not only the hounds sought freedom and clean air. Hypatia thought perhaps her own craving was there to be read, had the child the necessary literacy. She made no particular effort to hide it.
Kleopatra’s smile was sharply fierce. ‘Can you ride a horse? A good horse?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you can come riding with me and bring your hounds for exercise!’ She smacked the stone step in triumph. ‘Nobody will see us leave if we go before the mist rises.’
Hypatia said, ‘The mist’s rising now. If you look down to the sea, it’s blue again.’
Kleopatra’s hair sank straight to her shoulders. When, as now, she shook her head, the morning’s faint sun spun around her. ‘We have an hour at least. The king doesn’t rise early any more. Not since Saulos came.’
She was a fountain of facts. ‘Are we going to look for Iksahra and her falcons?’ Hypatia asked.
‘What do you think?’
They were already walking through the iron gates. Beyond was the king’s beast garden, stocked with hound kennels and stables and mews for the hunting birds. To one side, in an iron cage bigger than the perfectly serviceable, well-fitted room in which Hypatia had spent the night, Iksahra’s cheetah lay on an elevated tree branch, left behind that the beastwoman might give the young prince, Hyrcanus, her full attention. It yawned as they approached, showing perfect, pearline teeth, long as eating knives. They walked close past it, to show they were not afraid.
At the stables, Kleopatra didn’t have to give orders. As she rounded the corner, stable hands ran to make her horse ready, and then did the same for Hypatia. Both mounts were red mares, both kindly, clean-limbed, built for speed but not stupidly so.
The kennel-men loosed the two hounds Hypatia had brought and they came joyous to heel, tails beating the air, muzzles wet with the need to hunt. Long-legged, rough-coated, their heads were high as her waist, and when they stood on their hind limbs in greeting their front feet reac
hed her shoulders. She had named them Night and Day; the bitch dark as winter wood, the dog the gold-fawn of desert sand.
Hypatia fed them the meat she had brought from the palace kitchens, not much, just a handful, to remind them that they loved her, not the Berber woman who was beastmaster.
Kleopatra had mounted lightly. On horseback, she grew in stature and fire, became a hunting cat in her own right with polished jewels for eyes. With a hound at either hand, Hypatia looked up at her.
‘We need to be clear. Is this an offer from a friend, a request for the Chosen of Isis, or an order from a princess of Caesarea?’
The princess turned her brightened gaze on Hypatia. ‘Just now, it’s an order. If that changes, you can be sure I will let you know. The gates are open. We shall walk the first quarter-mile to the shore’s edge, then we can let the horses run.’
The falcon screamed as she launched from Iksahra’s fist; a high, keening note that cut the cool morning from horizon to horizon, so that Hypatia would not have been surprised to see the sky split apart and the night leak back through.
Such power to behold, such fury. From launch to height, the bird’s spread wings became a bar of slate grey, lost for a moment as she streaked low across the brilliant sea, then found again as she leapt from the wavetops and spiralled upwards to become, in so short a time, a scribble, lost in the aching wilderness of the sky.
They were galloping now; Hypatia and the Princess Kleopatra, racing along the marginal land where sea met shore and harsh grasses kept the one from sweeping away the other. They were lying flat to their horses’ necks, letting the reins free, trying to keep up with the bird and the Berber woman who had loosed it.
Ahead, Iksahra sur Anmer was a mosaic of black limbs and white linen tunic set against pale grey sands and a paler horse. She had seen the woman and the girl who were following her, Hypatia thought, but she had not slowed her mount. Kleopatra’s cousin, the Prince Hyrcanus, had not seen them and was not likely to unless they placed themselves physically in front of him; he had eyes only for the Amazon who led their wild hunt along the shore.