Rome 2: The Coming of the King

by M C Scott

  ‘This is true,’ said Gideon. ‘Every Sabbath, I preach this. I teach what the scriptures say, that—’

  ‘We know it without hearing you preach.’ To Pantera, Menachem said, ‘This spy, is he sent by Nero?’

  ‘No, although he will pretend that he is.’

  ‘What will he do to provoke us?’

  ‘That I don’t know, only that it is his stated intent and that he has already—’ A knock came at the door, a new rhythm; they had thought themselves secret. Menachem spun, his knife out. Pantera leapt the pond; they reached the door together.

  Pantera flung it open, stepping back, wide, his knife ready … and then not ready.

  On the far side stood Hypatia, simple in a slave’s garb. ‘You said you would be at Yusaf’s house.’ Her startling gaze shifted to Menachem. She held up her hands, palms out. ‘I bring words, not weapons and certainly not guards. May I come in?’

  At Menachem’s half-nod, they stepped back, together. Pantera sketched a bow. ‘Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Hypatia of Alexandria, Chosen of Isis. She is a guest under his majesty’s roof. She comes, I think, with news of our enemy, Saulos.’

  ‘I do.’ She was tired, she was dirty, she smelled of rosewater and dust and the smoke of the evening cooking fires, but she was still Hypatia; beautiful, brittle, bright-spun, terrifying in her self-assurance, in the unhidden shine of her intellect. As she stepped fully into the room, it was impossible for any man to look elsewhere.

  Wordless, Yusaf brought her a beaker and poured for her. She came to stand under the largest of the lamps and tilted the beaker a little, until the flickering lights of the candlestick met and merged on the wine’s velvet surface.

  Pantera joined her in the light. ‘What is it that Saulos plans?’

  ‘He has a message he claims came from Nero that orders Florus to seize the temple gold: fifteen talents of wealth which is kept in gold bullion in the temple precinct. They are to ship it to Rome to pay for the rebuilding works after the fire.’

  Silence met that, broken, at length, by Mergus, who had remained on guard by the door. ‘No one will believe that Nero would command such a thing.’

  ‘Of course they will.’ Menachem was caustic. ‘We are two months’ journey from Rome. All anyone here knows of Nero is that he kicked his wife to death and has taken a gelded boy to bed in her place. They’ll believe anything they’re told unless someone with credibility can name it a lie.’

  ‘In which case,’ said Gideon, ‘there will be riots the like of which Jerusalem has never seen. I can preach calm and restraint against some things, but against a defilement of the Temple …’ He ran out of words. His eyes closed against the horror of it.

  Hypatia said, ‘Florus has been told to deal with any insurrection using all necessary force. According to Saulos, the Hebrews are used to crucifixion.’

  ‘Saulos actually said that?’ Gideon was solid now, a thick-set trunk in the midst of the courtyard. It was easier than it had been to imagine him preaching restraint to the fiery people of Jerusalem. ‘When does he plan this defilement?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  They fell silent, each man staring at the others, waiting.

  ‘It would seem,’ said Yusaf, at last, ‘that the only escape from calamity is for someone to denounce Saulos as the traitor he is. Someone with credible proof that he is lying. Someone, perhaps, who bears the emperor’s ring.’ He was looking at Pantera.

  ‘Does he?’ asked Menachem. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pantera.

  ‘No!’ Mergus exploded forward. ‘Saulos knows him. Sebastos, you can’t do this. He’ll have you crucified before you open your mouth.’

  ‘He can’t do that if I’ve gone to him as the emperor’s emissary,’ Pantera said. ‘It’s not legal to crucify a Roman citizen.’ He turned to Hypatia. ‘Is Yusaf right?’

  Hypatia had been watching the pond; now she lifted her head. The dark light in her eyes was deep as the Nile, wide as the night sky. The last time Pantera had seen her like that, she was the Oracle in the Temple of Truth, and barely human.

  ‘He might be,’ she said. ‘But you risk death if you do as he says.’

  Pantera shivered. Everyone saw it. ‘Have you seen this?’

  ‘I have dreamed it. As has Kleopatra. This is the start of an unknown time. Our dreams have many different endings, but in very few of them are you entirely safe.’

  ‘Is anyone safe?’

  ‘Not if you fail, no.’

  She was holding something back, he could feel it sliding through the air between them. He caught her arm. ‘Tell me what you know.’

  ‘There’s nothing else I can say. Nothing is clear, except that there are times when the world turns on a single act and this is one of them. If you succeed, if you expose Saulos as a traitor, and have him arrested, it is possible we might live. If you fail, then those of us with you will die. Everyone in this room and most of those in the city outside will die with us. There are no half-measures.’

  ‘And Jerusalem?’ Gideon asked, soft-voiced. ‘If we are all dead, where stands Jerusalem?’

  Hypatia made a short, hard gesture. ‘Jerusalem will be lost, no two stones left one atop the other. It will cease to exist and Saulos will rebuild it in his own image.’ She turned her gaze on Pantera. ‘When you were in Alexandria, what did the Oracle tell you to do?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Truly, I don’t. It speaks through me, not to me. But what was said then matters now.’

  Pantera closed his eyes, remembering. ‘I was told to find the truth, always.’

  ‘Then do so. Think. Is it right to do this? If it is, how may it be done safely? On your answer hang all of our lives.’

  He did not close his eyes this time; he did not have to. The glassy water of the pond became his window and through it he saw Mergus, bound, surrounded by living fire, and in his ears rang his own voice: I will not let it happen.

  Out of nowhere, he remembered his father as he had last seen him, pacing the length of a garden, guarding the tomb therein, and the corpse that lay in it. Except there had been no corpse, and he had not guarded against those who came to take away the living man, brought down early from his cross.

  His father had lived for honour and dignity and obedience to his superiors and yet he had thrown all of those away that night to help a zealot and a pregnant woman steal the Galilean to safety. The Galilean, who was known in Jerusalem as Yehuda, and was loved for all he had done. Yehuda, who was grandfather to Menachem, and father to Hannah. Yehuda, whom, against all reason, Saulos had named the Messiah.

  Nothing simple. Nothing ever as it seemed. From deep in the fish-stirred pool, his father said, Some things matter more than the smallness of our lives.

  ‘What must I do?’ Pantera asked.

  What can you do? his father said, and was not his father alone, but a young god, beautiful in his youth and vigour, with a Phrygian cap and a great bull’s blood on his hands, who demanded truth from those who chose to follow him.

  Pantera opened his eyes. Hypatia stood between him and the pool with her hands on top of his and her gaze level.

  She said, ‘What?’

  He took a steadying breath. ‘At dawn, I will meet the High Priest on the temple steps in front of all the people of Jerusalem. I will dress as befits my station and I will show him the royal ring that I bear. With him as my witness, I will tell the city of Jerusalem what Saulos plans to do, how he plans war with Rome, which will destroy them. Governor Florus will come; he will have to if the multitudes are there. When he hears the truth, he will side with us and Saulos will fall. This is not certain, but it is possible. I have to try.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SAULOS’ VISITOR CAME so deep in the night that the stars barely gave him light to find his way.

  Iksahra was asleep in the stables when she heard a shoulder brush along the oak fence that separated the beast garden from the city. She was there to care for a sick
horse, or so she had told Polyphemos. In truth, she was tired of the old air in Herod’s palace and of the scurry of nervous slaves that filled it night and day. Sleep came more easily among the beasts, who welcomed her presence and didn’t make signs behind their backs to ward off evil every time she passed them by.

  And so she slept in the straw, lightly, as a hunter sleeps, with the cheetah at her side, and when she heard footsteps outside the big cat rose with her and together they tracked the maybe-intruder by sound as he scuffed along the dust on the far side of the fence towards the palace.

  She couldn’t unlock the gate without being seen and the fence was too high to climb, but the gods smiled and the interloper stopped at the end of the fence where flamelight from the palace torches spilled bright across the ground, sending a solitary shadow sliding under the fence.

  The stranger had picked his time well; by Iksahra’s estimate, he had a quarter-hour to do what he needed before the guards who made their circuits of the palace were likely to return. She watched his shadow shift and shift and then stop beneath Saulos’ chamber.

  It took a cool mind and a careful arm to throw a pebble up four storeys and hit the shutters that covered Saulos’ window. Iksahra was impressed by the stranger’s accuracy. Time after time after time – five in all – he threw his pebbles and hit the centre of his target.

  On the fifth stone, the shutters opened and Saulos’ round, white face showed moon-like in the dark window. He looked out and down, waved a white kerchief three times and withdrew. His visitor gave a grunt of satisfaction and began to make his way back along the fence.

  Iksahra followed until she reached the cheetah’s empty cage and slid in behind it, keeping her head low.

  Saulos passed the hound kennels; they caught his scent and stirred restlessly. The horses shifted in their stalls and a mongoose chattered alone in its pit. Unheeding, Saulos walked on through the garden, towards the dungheap at the back.

  With half a hundred different animals emptying their bowels through the day and all of it dumped in that pit, the stench was ripe, and the rats sleek. Saulos did not go all the way up to the barriers that bounded the pit, but stepped to one side at the last moment and pressed his head sideways to the oak fence.

  A knot hole pierced the wood there, wide as a man’s bent thumb. When she first came, Iksahra had seen the faint shimmer of grease around it from faces pressed to the oak and had thought it a trysting place for lovers. Perhaps it was; certainly Saulos and his visitor had used it before.

  Saulos knocked on the wood three times in simple rhythm. A knock came back, and a hoarse whisper. ‘Who is the third son of David?’

  ‘Absolom is third son of David. Are you he? Or his emissary?’

  ‘It’s me. No one else is to be trusted this close to the end. I bring news that the Egyptian witch is in Pantera’s pay.’

  ‘Is she? And young Kleopatra so smitten with her. How immensely unfortunate. Thank you.’

  It was not a secret: Saulos had told Iksahra the same before they left her people. Which meant that he kept his spies in the dark and let them tell him what he already knew; it fitted with the kind of man she had seen him to be.

  On the other side of the fence, the voice said, ‘There’s more. Tonight, the War Party and the Peace Party met together under one roof for the first time. Pantera was there. He plans your death.’

  ‘Of course he does.’ Saulos sounded amused, in so far as a whisper could impart feeling. ‘He is, after all, a worthy adversary. Remember that, my friend; if you are going to fight a mortal battle, fight it with someone you respect, however much you hate them. Victory is sweeter that way. What does he plan?’

  ‘He personally will denounce you tomorrow in front of all Jerusalem as an enemy of Judaea.’

  ‘And you think he’ll succeed?’

  ‘I am afraid of it. More than that, I am afraid he is right. Are you an enemy of Judaea?’

  ‘I am an enemy of those who would destroy her with their petty squabbles. I will restore her to glory.’

  ‘Under Rome?’

  ‘Of course under Rome. But as an equal partner in the Kingdom of God. You know this. My friend …’ Saulos placed his flat palm against the fence and leaned his cheek on it. His voice was warm with care and reason. ‘We have talked of this so many times, over so many years. How can you doubt me now, when we are so close?’

  ‘How can I not? They say you will destroy Jerusalem.’

  ‘And so you come here in person to find the truth, as is fitting. I taught you to doubt even the hand in front of your face, did God not show it you first.’ Saulos pressed his cheek to the fence.

  ‘Jerusalem will fall, but she will rise again by God’s hand. The Kingdom cannot be built but out of the rubble of what has been. When the time comes, tell that to those you command.’

  ‘And what do I tell them of the women? They speak already of the witch, and the beastwoman who is more demon than witch, and they know that you consort openly with both of these.’

  ‘But not for long. You know – who better? – that in pursuit of our goals we must pretend to be that which we are not. Trust me in this, neither the witch nor Iksahra has turned the course of my heart. They serve their purpose, which is my purpose, but when their use is done they will join Pantera in Hades. We can do this, except only if you doubt me; faith is everything and without yours I am nothing.’

  A silence came from the far side of the fence, a waiting, and then, ‘My faith is as it has always been. And my trust in you.’

  ‘And mine in you. Go back whence you came, my friend. Sleep and know your warning fell on fruitful ground. Tomorrow, Jerusalem will begin to die, that you and I may raise it living from its own ashes.’

  The visitor left then, his footsteps fading into the black night. Iksahra laid a hand on the cheetah’s broad brow and another under its chin and held its mouth still until Saulos had walked past and let himself out of the garden, back into the palace.

  Then she breathed in the scent of the cat, of the horses, of the hounds, of the night, and considered her hatred of Judaea and her contempt for Rome and how, exactly, these were outweighed by her utter loathing of Saulos the Herodian, snake in the night, who must pretend to be what he was not, yet was blind to those around him who did the same.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ON THE MORNING of the sixth day of the month of Ab, high summer in Jerusalem, a bird sang to greet the dawn. A hot, dry wind blew from the east. High over the hills, a hawk soared in hunting spirals, scanning the early land.

  On that morning, a night and a day and a night after the riots had begun at Caesarea, a single night after Hypatia had come to tell him that Saulos was planning to rob the Temple of its gold … at dawn on that day, under the high, shimmering call of the hawk, Pantera stood alone on the second to top step leading up to the Temple of Jerusalem and watched the High Priest of Israel step out through his breathtaking, jewel-studded gates and look down on the gathered people of his city.

  Ananias ben Ananias was a man of average build and average features. His head was a fleshless skull, with eyes set too far up to his brow and a wattle neck like an ageing hen’s.

  Beyond that, he would not have stood out in a market, or a hippodrome or a battlefield, but that he was robed in silk of porphyry that shimmered in the sun, and tiny gold bells sang on the lower fringes of his coat, so that he was a songbird in motion. Black onyx stood out from his shoulders with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel engraved thereon, and other gems in emerald, in aquamarine, in ruby, studded his cuirass, each bearing the name of a different tribe. A polished gold plate fixed to the turban of his headpiece proclaimed him holy in the eyes of his god.

  Chiming in gold, splendid in purple, he paced forward to the edge of the heights on which his temple was built and looked down on the gathered people.

  A sea of blue-marked men and youths and girls too young to marry, too old to be left at home, looked back up at him. Silence settled on them as a moth
settles in the evening, softly, without their noticing.

  These were the Peace Party, come out in their multitudes at the request of Gideon, the Peacemaker. At their back, around their edges, stood the War Party, brought by Menachem and his cousin Eleazir, distinguished by their flashes of sun-yellow. All around, in their unmarked but remarkable long-coats, stood the merchants summoned by Yusaf ben Matthias, who bore no affiliation to either party, but whose future turned on the morning as much as anyone else’s.

  It is possible we might live.

  Hypatia’s promise rang in Pantera’s ears as the last echoes of a thunderstorm. He felt as if his skin had been shed and grown back again, thinner. The world was sharper around him, with danger so clear he could taste it as iron on his tongue and feel it in the sweat on his back.

  He watched the High Priest come forward and counted his own heartbeats by the soaring in his ears.

  ‘Your excellency—’ He clasped Nero’s ring in his hand; gold and turquoise, with a lyre engraved on it, and the chariot that was this emperor’s sign. He raised it up so that Ananias might see it, and the crowd might know that he carried gold.

  ‘Your excellency, I am Sebastos Abdes Pantera, known as the Leopard. I come in the name of the Emperor Nero, bearing this, his ring. I bring news of one who would rob your temple, taking the emperor’s name in vain.’

  Pantera had fought on battlefields; he knew how to pitch his voice to carry. A sigh came from the crowd. They loathed Nero as the author of their woes, as the man who had thrust Governor Florus upon them, and held the legions in the palm of his hand, ready to crush them if they rose against the excesses of his greed. Even so, the sound of the imperial name carried the patina of royalty and the gold flashing in Pantera’s hand took on new meaning beyond simply wealth.

  They drew a long inward breath and Pantera let it lift him that last step up to the platform on which the Temple stood. The walls faced him, white and brilliant in the sun, their glorious gem-studded gates hanging open only by a foot’s length, enough to let the colours catch the morning sun, but not so far that it was possible for Pantera to see inside to where the Hebrews worshipped their god.