Rome 2: The Coming of the King

by M C Scott

  ‘That is the message? All of it?’

  ‘It is. Unless you have reason to believe that the ears for whom it is spoken are no longer loyal to their former master?’

  ‘I believe no such thing. That one has been loyal for life. He remains so still.’

  Pantera let himself smile. ‘Then you have the weight of my gratitude already. If we succeed in our endeavour, there is another like it. You yourself may have no need of gold, being bathed in the love of the god, but Tyche herself will find a use for it, I’m sure.’

  The priest’s gaze drifted down at the lively spark of gold in his hand. Its shine leapt between his fingers, a small fish hunting morning flies. He blinked, as if his weak eyes were dazzled. ‘Will Caesarea come to harm from this?’ he asked, at length.

  ‘It will come to harm if our quest here fails. We hunt a man who seeks nothing less than the total annihilation of Israel. With your help, we will … remove him before he can wreak his havoc on your city.’

  ‘Did he kill your Teacher? Did he betray him to death and torment?’

  ‘No. Of this one crime, he is innocent. Seneca tried his best and he failed: his death was his own creation. Saulos is rather a traitor to the Hebrew people. He claims the Galilean as the messiah, and turns people away from their faith.’

  ‘You seek the apostate? The spewer of falsehoods?’ Anger livened the priest’s voice. ‘We of Tyche know him well, and despise him. We may not follow the goatherd’s god of the burning bush, but we know that if their promised messiah is ever to come, it will be the Galilean’s grandson who holds the title, not a man long dead who failed to deliver his people from the yoke.’ He tilted his head again. ‘Unless your enemy wishes to wrest the kingship for himself?’

  Pantera gave a small bow. ‘The priests of Tyche are ever wise: that is exactly what he wants. He would rule under Rome as a vassal, and call it freedom.’

  ‘Can you stop him?’

  ‘With your help, I think I can.’

  ‘Then your message will reach the ears of the one you seek: Yusaf ben Matthias, a merchant of some wealth, trained in the ways of Hebrew wisdom. He sits on the council of the Sanhedrin in both Caesarea and Jerusalem. Your Teacher picked his men wisely, all those years ago, when we were all young.’ The priest smiled, lost in a haze of better times. His old, fast hands gathered past, present and future in the fire smoke and braided them to a single rope. ‘Yusaf will respond tomorrow evening if he can. You know the place to meet?’

  ‘I do.’ Pantera bowed then, and took his leave. The reed-voice followed him out.

  ‘You don’t ask anything for yourself.’

  ‘I didn’t know that I could.’ The steps that led down from the temple were long, the voice inescapable.

  ‘Some men cannot. But you, who have been touched by your god, could ask of the Galilean’s daughter, who is mother to your child. Both she and the infant thrive and are content in their love for each other and the man who cares for them. The boy who is not your son, but thinks of himself as such, is bored and wishes to join you. He cannot yet, but when he meets manhood he will try. If you would have freedom to teach him, you must kill your enemy. If he does not kill you first.’

  Pantera had reached the bottom of the steps. He did not turn, or speak again, but left the old man standing in the still afternoon with gold light leaking from between his fingers, and went to find Mergus, to take him to the harbour, where the agent Yusaf ben Matthias might choose to appear to them on the next day’s evening. If he was alive. If he chose to come. If he had not in the meantime sold news of them to Saulos.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE SAME DOUBTS haunted Mergus throughout the following day, magnified by the fragile beauty of this place, which had lain all day in silence, without a single riot.

  Come evening, he and Pantera walked down to the harbour where an old sun lay at ease in the west, draping mellow light across the ocean. Fat gulls flopped after a fishing boat late to dock. Old men in tattered tunics sat on a line of steps, mending fishing nets with nimble fingers.

  Mergus and Pantera passed the Temple of Augustus, its white marble washed to citrus in the evening light. The tide was out; a line of green showed where it reached, and all below was studded with limpets and strands of seaweed. The air hung soft with salt and ripe with ready violence.

  Mergus said, ‘I was in Colchester, in Britain, just before the revolt broke out; it felt like this. I wish they’d fight and get it over.’

  Pantera was just behind him. ‘It’ll happen before the night’s out. The king’s taking the petition at the theatre tonight. If anything’s going to spark a riot, that will.’

  Mergus was about to say ‘What petition?’ but Pantera stumbled on a loose coil of rope and caught Mergus’ elbow as he fell, swearing vocally, and blaming Mergus for all the ills the world had ever seen.

  Recoiling, Mergus pushed himself away. ‘Leave then, I don’t care!’ He dusted himself down with the exaggerated dignity of the drunkard and stormed on the last few paces to the quayside, praying that he had read aright the warning in Pantera’s eyes.

  He turned the corner. The fishing boat had docked and emptied. The old men had all gone home. A gaggle of dock boys was leaving, no different from the dock boys who roamed the banks of the Tiber in Rome, or the quay at Ostia, or Alexandria or any other city Mergus had been to. They stared at him, whispering, and ran past.

  He walked alone along the harbour’s edge, practising in his mind the pass phrase Pantera had taught him: The moon is fine and full tonight, perfect for fishing, and then the reply: You are right; if we leave at the moon’s height, we should have luck.

  For courage, he said it aloud: ‘The moon is fine and full tonight—’

  A flash of dark, where had been only white walls. A scrape of a heel on the harbour stone. A tingling in the air, as of past thunder and present lightning …

  Mergus wrenched himself bodily away from where he had been, spun, rolled forward and over his shoulder and came up with his knife in his hand. He cursed that he had not brought a longer, legionary blade, something that might be of use against the black death in front of him, and the flashing iron that struck for his neck, his shin, his thigh, his ears – his ears? – one after the other in a set of moves so fast they left him breathless and bleeding and wanting to clutch at his head to see if the knife had severed the last so swiftly he had not yet felt their loss.

  There was pain in his right thigh and his left shin and blood ran freely from a single wound on the top of his right wrist where the skin flapped forward every time he slashed out with his own blade, showing a shine of bone beneath the blood.

  He was slicing, not making contact. He bled from a dozen points, and his opponent was whole, unblooded. Deep-set eyes studied him from under a tumble of long black hair brilliant as a raven’s wing that framed in its turn a lean face, not given to laughing.

  It wasn’t laughing now. It was still, sober, thoughtful, assessing where next to make a cut so that Mergus feared for his ears again, that he might look like the bear-warriors of the Eceni, who lopped off their right ears and shaved their heads to show themselves wholly given to the she-bear. They were—

  The blade passed by his neck. His body became elastic, sheering sideways. He slipped and fell and rolled, rug-wise, towards the harbour’s edge, flung out an arm and felt his palm scrape on grit, smelled salt and weed and the slop of swaying water at the tide’s turn.

  A voice above him said, ‘If we leave at the moon’s height—’ and he felt the knife’s point on the inner edge of his shoulder blade, just to the left of his spine, felt his ribs part to receive it, his heart pause, ready to hug the iron, to draw it in, to cease its ceaseless beat for ever.

  ‘No!’ Mergus wrenched round, scrabbling for purchase on the stone and then the oak that bounded the harbour’s edge. He felt a fist crunch on the back of his head, twisted his face to save his nose, and—

  And offered his soul to Mithras, for he was lying on his back
at the water’s edge with one arm scraping the barnacles and the knife above him, held two-handed, was coming straight for his heart. In the slow pearl of time that held him, he heard his own blade splash into the harbour, and the rippling waves it set dancing against the edge.

  And then, from nowhere, an arrow struck the oak a hand’s breadth from his head. It stood there, humming, while Mergus’ heart clenched and unclenched and he thought he might be sick from shock.

  With frozen clarity, a voice said, ‘If he dies, you die. Choose.’

  The knife held still. Mergus stared at it, blinking. Softly, not to him, his assailant said, ‘The moon is fine and full tonight, perfect for fishing.’

  ‘You are right,’ said the other voice. ‘If we leave at the moon’s height, we should have luck.’ Mergus thought it was Pantera. He prayed so, but he had never heard Pantera so bloodlessly calm.

  ‘Who are you?’ The knife had not moved. Mergus allowed his focus to slide sideways to the arrow. It was fletched in the Nabatean fashion, with goose and crow in white and black alternating bars. He had ridden through the desert with those arrows beside him.

  ‘I am father to your newborn cousin,’ Pantera said. ‘I am the last left alive who saw your grandfather, the Galilean, lifted living from his tomb and carried to safety under the care of Mariamne, who was his wife, who carried in her womb his unborn daughter. That daughter’s name is Hannah. She is your father’s sister, although in looks, she could be your twin.’

  The knife vanished, gone as surely as the sun was gone. Mergus lay where he was, studying the killer who stood over him, giving him a woman’s eyes, and her healing soul, and found that with both of these, he did, indeed, look like the woman he had met in Rome.

  ‘You are Menachem ben Yehuda,’ he said, at last, when nobody else had spoken. ‘Eldest grandson of the Galilean. Leader of the War Party in Jerusalem.’ He tried to sit up, and lay back again, with the world swimming round him, sending scarlet streaks across the dove-grey dusk.

  ‘He is Menachem,’ agreed Pantera. ‘And I am Sebastos Abdes Pantera, son of Julius Tiberius Abdes Pantera. My father was an archer in the service of the Jerusalem Guard.’

  ‘The archer’s son, I heard, gave his life to the service of the late spymaster Seneca. Has he now a new master?’

  They waited, Mergus and the man Menachem, who led the War Party in Jerusalem, who led, in that case, the zealot assassins, who killed men without care or compassion, so it was said.

  ‘I serve Seneca’s successor,’ Pantera said carefully, ‘who is known as the Poet. The line of succession is clear, and our allegiance to it.’ He did not say that the Poet was named Jocasta, nor that it was her younger brother, Publius Papinius Statius, who had the public fame for poetry he didn’t write. He never said that, nobody did; it was possible nobody else knew.

  A shadow passed over Mergus’ face. Firm fingers wrapped his wrist, away from the skin wound. A hand slid under his shoulder. He was drawn up to sit, and then to rise. He stood, swim-headed, and looked for Pantera and found him standing in the shadows of the merchants’ booths barely ten yards away. He was holding a Nabatean war-bow at full draw as if it were a child’s toy.

  ‘We came to meet Yusaf ben Matthias. You are not he.’ Mergus spoke to Menachem, but his eyes were on Pantera, drawing him back to the world they shared. He saw the arrow’s tip taken down, heard the sigh of the string relaxing.

  ‘Ben Matthias has an appointment he could not avoid. He sent me in his stead, to see if you were truly sworn to Seneca, or had been sent instead by his enemy to destroy his agents now that the Teacher is dead.’

  ‘We are here to destroy his enemy,’ Pantera said, warily. ‘And in doing so, to save your people. If you will help us, we will be grateful. If you would hinder us …’

  ‘Then we would find out which is the faster, my knife or your arrow.’ Menachem smiled now and Mergus saw that he was a decade younger than Pantera, that his smile came more readily, that his face was less lined from the sun. But his eyes held the same distant appraisal, his voice the same irony, his shoulders the same set, as of a war-hound, ready to hunt.

  Menachem said, ‘Yusaf ben Matthias is at the theatre, where it is illegal for anyone to bear a weapon of war. If you leave your bow where the Watch will not find it, I will take you to him.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FROM A DISTANCE, the theatre at Caesarea was a swarm of dancing fireflies, caught in the blue bowl of dusk.

  Closer, the gyrating sparks resolved to torches, held by taut, wary watchmen, always in pairs, never more than a short spear’s throw from the next nearest pair; between them was a festering soup of Syrians and Hebrews, of men, women and boys just old enough to carry clubs and stones and perhaps put them to good use.

  Pantera reckoned their numbers in the thousands: the theatre was said to have seats for five thousand while the entire adult population of Caesarea was in excess of thirty thousand, and it seemed likely that most of them were trying to gain access. The arithmetic of that alone was explosive.

  ‘We should enter separately,’ Menachem said, when they were still on the outer fringes of the crowd. ‘Once inside, it would be useful if you sat next to me, but for both our sakes you should appear not to know me: a dozen different men have agents in there, and it will serve neither of us if we are thought to be in collusion.’

  He was gone, ghosting through the crowds, with his head down and his shoulders hunched, as if that way he might hide the shining raven’s wing of his hair, or the zealot’s light in his eyes.

  Pantera watched him until he was truly impossible to see any more. Nobody seemed to be following him through the throng.

  ‘Do you trust him?’ Mergus asked.

  Pantera slid both hands into his sleeves and straightened the lie of his knives, slid each one out of its sheath and back in again. They moved smoothly, stayed pleasingly secure.

  He said, ‘No. But I don’t mistrust him enough yet to be sure he’s lying. Can you stay outside, near the doors? I wouldn’t put it past Saulos to try to burn this place: he has an unhealthy fondness for fire.’

  ‘How will I warn you?’

  ‘Do you remember the bark of the hunting vixen that the legions used in Britain to warn of a possible ambush? And can you do it? Good.’

  He clasped Mergus’ shoulder, and knew that it didn’t touch the depth of his care, that there should be more if he could think how to frame it. I care more deeply than you know, but not as deeply as you would wish. Don’t die for me. Please. He didn’t say it. He smiled, and saw Mergus smile back, worry still sharp in his eyes.

  ‘If you can’t get hold of me, call the Watch and get Jucundus; he cares for the welfare of his city.’ Pantera lifted his hand and watched Mergus turn back, away from the entrance. ‘Stay safe,’ he said.

  ‘I think not.’

  Pantera caught the thin wrist that slid under his cloak, and twisted until he heard the elbow joint creak on the edge of breaking. The youth who had brushed against him gave a strangled grunt, but had the sense not to call aloud.

  They were in the theatre, in the humid crush of men and women caught between the doors and the tiered seating, patiently waiting to take their places. Men on either side eyed them and decided not to intervene; they had been seen, though, and both knew it.

  Pantera smiled amiably. ‘You will leave now. I will return to the gentleman in the woollen coat the coins he has unaccountably mislaid. Do you understand?’

  The youth nodded, green-faced. His breathing rasped in short, harsh cycles. His eyes flitted in widening orbits, never looking Pantera in the face. In Caesarea, men or boys – the council made no distinction in terms of age – had their right hands removed if they were caught thieving in a public place. ‘I am not the Watch,’ Pantera said. ‘But I’ll call them if I see you here again. Go now.’

  He let go. The youth – too old to be a boy, not yet old enough to be a man – had the presence of mind to ease slowly into the oncoming crush, rather t
han bolting like a flushed deer, which would surely have brought the Watch on his heels. The crowd parted and came together again like the maw of some giant sea-monster and the boy was gone.

  ‘You dropped these.’ Pantera tapped on a nearby shoulder. The man’s head turned, slowly. Raven hair shone with a new lustre in the lamplight. Dark, deep-set eyes stared flatly at Pantera, and Pantera gazed as flatly back.

  ‘I dropped them?’ said Menachem, leader of the War Party. He looked down, puzzled. On Pantera’s palm lay five brass sestertii and a silver denarius bearing the image of Caligula, a year’s wages for a boy gutting fish, or an apprentice weaver.

  ‘If you didn’t, then your pockets have just been picked.’ Pantera flicked his eyes towards the door, where the youth was leaving, not looking back. ‘I would think on a night with tensions such as this one, perhaps you dropped them?’

  ‘Thank you.’ Menachem bowed a little, from the waist. His gaze took in Pantera as if anew; his build, his height, his serviceable tunic, perhaps the two knives under his sleeves: they were not so hidden that a trained man might not see them. ‘Our people are not wealthy, however much gold they might choose to throw away tonight. I owe you thanks. Would you care to join me?’

  Pantera inclined his head. He sat. Menachem sat. Below the hum of the crowd, he murmured, ‘Nicely done, but whose coins are they?’

  ‘If you look three rows down, you’ll see a Greek with a broken nose. He will find his purse has been cut. Not by me. The boy was almost good enough.’

  And thus did Pantera take the place he had marked as he came in, the only seat left at the end of a row, which might afford a quick exit if one became necessary and yet still give him a clear view of the stage.

  The stage … which was lit by a profusion of flame so startlingly bright that those coming in covered their eyes, and had to look away.

  Looking at it now, Pantera counted no more than a dozen lit braziers on the platform, but behind them a bank of beaten copper took up the whole back wall of the theatre, curved to catch the pinpoints of torchlight and stir into them a thunder of scarlet and sun-fire and high-toned ambers, then multiply them a hundredfold before hurling them out across the auditorium.