Rome 2: The Coming of the King

by M C Scott

  Ten uncertain men huddled round him. Each led nine others. To reach the hundred, then, he must reach these ten. Pantera turned a slow circle and squarely met the gaze of each one.

  ‘Nobody will force you to come. If your ten wish to stay here to greet us as we come down, no one will think less of you for it. Speak to your lieutenants and let them know what we plan. Those who wish to come with me should wind their tunics tight about their loins and have no scarf hanging free. You must be as if you were naked, while still clothed. It will be best to leave your sandals behind.’

  He did not look at them as he took the hem of his own tunic and pulled it up between his legs to fasten in his belt. He did not listen to the murmurings in fast, accented Aramaic as he took the scarf that had protected his eyes against the withering wind and wound it so tight about his head that it became a second skin. But when he was done, and looked round, ten men stood likewise ready, and the ninety behind them were finishing what must be done.

  Not a man of the hundred remained unprepared, and when he and Mergus led them, not towards the giant bluff of Masada, but up the rock face that rose from the desert behind them, they followed without protest.

  *

  Pantera had been twelve years old when he climbed to the aqueduct. Then, the places chiselled into the rock where feet and hands might find purchase had seemed impossibly far apart. Now, if anything, they were too close together so that he must hinge his body about his waist, or risk pushing his weight too far back.

  But they were there, precious handholds, even more precious toeholds, that made of the sheer rock if not a ladder, then at least something that could be climbed in the dark, nursed on by the spare light of the rising moon, while the vagrant wind, that blew from the north as easily as the south, flung grit in his eyes, up his nose and through his teeth to his throat.

  He spat away a mouthful, and reached up into a shadowed cleft. He stroked the rock; he had come to love it, to care for it as he cared for a good horse, or a well-balanced blade. Sliding his fingertips over roughness and projections and cracks … there, he found the ledge, a finger’s length long, where he could brush away the accumulated dust and rubble of three decades and fasten his hand on the flat ledge beneath, and hold himself steady while he crooked his leg up a foot’s length and his bare toes sought a counterpart ledge below; and found it, and it took his weight and let him ease on up and up again, with the rising moon at his back and a hundred men below, testing the selfsame handholds and finding them, silently.

  The climb did not go on for ever, only seemed to. The moon was not at its full height when Pantera’s searching hand felt over the next small ledge and did not stub his fingertips at the back, but slid on a full arm’s length to find a small fissure angled down and back, so that he could fix his fingers in it and haul himself bodily on to a wide platform with a water channel cut through the centre, and a half-pipe aqueduct stretching away on a small incline towards Masada.

  There was no time to look at that: already an arm came up over the ledge, fingers stretching, seeking. Pantera lay flat on his belly and leaned over. Menachem’s scarf-huddled eyes came level with his.

  ‘We’re here.’ Pantera guided his hand to the hold. ‘Stay by me when you’re up. The others can move to the back, out of the wind. Tell them to drink and eat, but sparingly.’

  Mergus came next and then, after him, the Hebrews. A hundred times, Pantera guided a hand. At the hundredth, there was room on the ledge for perhaps three more men. It was Pantera’s father who had made the estimate of how many it could hold. He sent thanks to his memory.

  To Mergus and to Menachem, he said, ‘That was the easy part.’

  Mergus grimaced. ‘I thought it might be.’

  Masada stood below them, an elongated platter, stretched under the moonlight: they had climbed its height and half as much again. The aqueduct stretched down into the night, a single strand of spider’s web that swayed in the wind.

  ‘The aqueduct is bigger than it looks,’ Pantera said, ‘and it takes a weight of water when it’s full that is far more than the weight of unarmoured men. We crawl down it with two body lengths between each man, lying flat, and don’t bring our heads above the edges.’

  ‘Is it big enough to hide us?’ Menachem asked.

  ‘It was when I was twelve years old.’ From somewhere beyond the reach of memory, Pantera found a smile, and saw it repeated, nervously, through the massed men behind him. In the desert, they had not believed him; he had been a stranger, spinning fables. Now, they sucked in his words, and used them to bolster their courage.

  ‘You are all lean. Nobody will get stuck,’ he said to them now. ‘And at the bottom, we drop off the end into the lip of the cistern.

  Menachem drew his scarf tighter around his head. ‘Which is the worst part, I assume?’

  ‘It is,’ Pantera said. ‘If you can do that, you can do anything at all. After that, all we have to do is swim across the cistern. If we’re lucky, the stars will shine in to guide us.’

  ‘And if we’re not lucky?’

  ‘Then it will seem like the edge of Hades, and we will have to hope that I can find the ladder that leads up out of it. If we don’t we’ll be climbing back along the aqueduct. And going back, it’s all uphill.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  KLEOPATRA HAD NOT wanted to go hunting with Iksahra. She had made it clear, in fact, that she considered Iksahra’s offer to be a bribe that dishonoured them both. But she pulled herself together enough to hold her tongue while the slaves presented the horses, and Iksahra lifted the tiercel that had been her cousin’s bird and set it on Kleopatra’s gloved fist; her temper had not spilled over into making a scene in front of the slaves.

  In crisp, uncomfortable silence, they rode from the women’s gate below the palace, trotting north over sloping pastures where goats grazed in the perpetual shade of Jerusalem’s wall, and out past olive and lemon groves and pomegranate trees, along the ridge above the wadi, to the higher ground, where Iksahra released the falcon, sending her high on the morning’s warm air.

  The bird climbed in slow, lazy spirals until she was a speck against the lightening blue of the sky. Iksahra had no sight of prey, but there was something in the bird’s attention that made her look where it looked, so that she saw the moment when it slewed round in its turn and gave the sharp, high cry that was the signal for oncoming prey.

  Iksahra directed her gaze west, where the old night still held the sky. There, a blur sped along the hazed horizon, flying hard and straight in the way of a message-bird, bred for speed. The falcon reached the top of the sky and cried a second time. The tiercel heard its mate and bated from Kleopatra’s fist, hurling itself against the jesses, screaming.

  ‘Hold him,’ Iksahra said, without turning. ‘Talk to him. Tell him how proud he is, and how well he will hunt when his time comes. Keep him still or he’ll throw her off her kill.’

  She spoke as she might have done to a skittish horse, not looking, not scolding, yet certain of the outcome, and was rewarded presently by the beginnings of a murmur and the sounds of the male bird rattling its wings, and the small chirruping whine that said his pride had been dented, but he was prepared to be mollified.

  Iksahra felt a depth of satisfaction that surprised her. It seemed to her then, under the morning sun, with the dew still wet on the grass and the yellow-eyed goats stepping sideways from the cheetah, that the day shone, and her heart ached and she was not sure, yet, that she wanted to name the reason.

  The falcon cried, high in the air. Iksahra raised her hand to shield her eyes.

  ‘See now?’ For Kleopatra’s benefit, she jutted her elbow out towards the soaring falcon. ‘She’s at the top of her rise, where the air thins and won’t hold her any more; she can’t go higher, but she can hang there, resting, as you rest in calm water when you swim in a river.’ She wasn’t sure that Kleopatra had ever swum in a river, but the point was made. ‘And if you look along the tree line, you’ll see the messag
e-dove coming in, there – where the land meets the sky.’

  ‘Just above the lemon grove? Where the trees are taller than the olives?’ Kleopatra was engaged, in spite of herself.

  ‘Exactly there. The falcon will wait until it comes out across the lighter pasture, where the goats are grazing. We can move the horses down there and be close to the kill. Carefully now; there are stones among the grasses, it’s not safe to go fast.’

  They went slowly, moving with the sway of the horses, stepping around the boulders that had been left, perhaps, for this reason: to stop men riding hard in a straight line towards the city.

  From behind, without warning, Kleopatra said, ‘Is Saulos going to kill Hypatia? Is that why she’s sent us both away, so we’ll be free from harm?’

  The warm and mellow morning became suddenly chill. Sweat grew in cold drops along the flat blades of Iksahra’s shoulders as she spun her horse. Flatly, she said, ‘Saulos is not going to kill Hypatia.’

  ‘Are you sure? She’s set herself against him and he’s the governor now in all but name. He could.’

  ‘He won’t.’

  ‘Saying it won’t make it true.’ Kleopatra brought her horse alongside. She was still white, but not now with rage. Her gaze flicked past Iksahra’s shoulder. ‘Look, your bird is coming down for the kill.’

  The falcon was dropping from the sky, wings closed in the impeccable moon-curve beloved of the Berber people. It was as perfect a stoop as Iksahra had ever seen and it should have roused her to a fierce and savage passion where the glory of the kill was hers as much as the bird’s.

  Today, now, she watched through fear so dense that it took an effort of will to reach through it, to lift the bird from its kill, and unwind the message cylinder from the leg of the stricken dove, to open the tiny capsule and lift out the paper therein and—

  ‘What does it say?’ Kleopatra asked.

  Shaking her head, Iksahra passed it over. Saulos had never imagined she could read. She did not know if Kleopatra’s easy assumption was a compliment, or its opposite.

  ‘It’s in code.’ Kleopatra was frowning at it, biting her lip. She looked younger than she had done moments before. Her mouth moved as she read, framing the words, then stopped. ‘Latin writing, but not Latin words.’ She looked up, her features brightening. ‘Pantera will be able to read it. He knows the emperor’s codes. If someone can get it to him in the desert, he’ll know what it means.’

  ‘It might not be one of the emperor’s codes.’

  ‘Even so, Pantera will be able to read it.’ Kleopatra levelled her gaze at Iksahra. Her eyes were the blue of a late-night sky. Her grandmother’s, it was said, had been the same. She was fourteen years old and could have been forty, or four hundred. ‘We should go back.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Iksahra. ‘It’s too soon.’

  ‘By whose accounting?’

  ‘My own.’

  ‘No, it’s not!’ The girl wrenched her horse round, sawing at its mouth. ‘Hypatia made you do this! She wants me kept away from the palace, so I can’t sway the king, or my aunt or mother or any of the others and make them stay. They’re going to flee again and leave Jerusalem in the hands of that filth, to …’ Kleopatra straggled to a halt, and put her hand to her throat, and then her face. ‘To those men who are coming for us,’ she said, flatly.

  Ahead, a company of men trotted four abreast along the path that led from the city. Iron glinted in the sun, and polished brass on their helmets.

  ‘We must run.’

  Iksahra caught her reins. ‘No. It’s too late.’

  ‘Those are Saulos’ men. Our horses are better than theirs. We could—’

  ‘They have archers. I will not risk your life.’ Iksahra took her hand from the girl’s bridle. The day was young, and bright, and she wanted to hunt, and to kill, and, for the sake of a child, could not. ‘We will be civil to them, and expect they will extend the same courtesy to us. I will command the cat not to hurt them, and you will hold the tiercel.’

  ‘But the message cylinder … the one you took from the bird – they’ll find it!’

  ‘What cylinder?’ Iksahra spread her arms and both the naked hand and the gloved one that had borne the falcon on its wrist were empty. She fixed Kleopatra with a stare of the kind that calmed horses. ‘Don’t speak of it. We will not be harmed.’

  Iksahra spoke to the cat, and when the men came, it did not fight, but settled behind her horse. Iksahra addressed them civilly, and Kleopatra archly, in the tones of royalty, so that both were allowed to direct their horses into the midst of the company as it turned back to the city.

  They were even left with their hunting birds, and thus did Iksahra return with the falcon feeding on her fist, each twist of its head throwing out evidence of what they had caught.

  It fed to fullness before they reached the city and she had time to drop the dove beneath the feet of the trotting horses, and hood the falcon, so that when Saulos met them at the city gates, all that remained was a spot of blood on her hunting glove.

  ‘Your majesty!’ He was dressed in his sand-coloured silks, fulsome in his greeting of Kleopatra, smiling his victory. ‘If you would be so kind, the full council of the Sanhedrin has convened in the heart of the city to address certain matters pertaining to the recent … disturbances. We will honour them with our attendance.’

  He nodded to Iksahra, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Your beasts will be treated with utmost respect, I guarantee it.’

  Polyphemos brought the message, written on papyrus, rolled and sealed. It came to Berenice, in her private apartments, not to the king. Hypatia alone was present.

  Hypatia watched the queen break the seal, and read, and sit suddenly, pale to the point of death. She saw her wave Polyphemos from the door; he did not want to go, so it took a swifter motion than it used to.

  ‘What?’ Hypatia asked, when he was gone. Dread lay on her like a morning fog, draining her as surely as any ghûl.

  Berenice spoke in a voice devoid of inflection. ‘They have Kleopatra. And Iksahra.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘They stand before the Sanhedrin. They will be charged with killing Governor Florus. The penalty is death by stoning.’

  Hypatia said, ‘I killed the governor.’

  ‘I know that. Saulos knows it; he saw you. This is a trap. You will not walk into it.’

  ‘I must,’ Hypatia said, and heard her own voice as if from a distance, with a tunnel’s echo between. ‘Kleopatra is the next Chosen of Isis.’

  Berenice turned her head. Her eyes were blank channels that led straight to her soul. In their depths, Hypatia saw a name form, and saw it taken away again, out of tact, or kindness, and was grateful. If Iksahra had been named aloud, she might well have lost what remained of her composure.

  Berenice, queen in Caesarea, rose. ‘Then I will come too,’ she said. ‘No – do not argue. You are my gift, given by the empress. Saulos cannot touch you while I am present.’

  She rang a bell for her personal maid. ‘We must change our clothing. The men of the Sanhedrin have … certain ways of viewing women. I am a widow before I am a queen and must be seen as both. You are my handmaid, and must be appropriate. We will do this alone, you and I. We have too much to lose to leave it to anyone else.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THE AQUEDUCT WAS a black thread in the night’s weaving, but it was behind him, and Pantera had not vomited, nor lost control of his bladder, nor screamed aloud his terror as he crawled down the long concrete trough held up on stalks of stone that looked barely strong enough to withstand the scrub of a mangy goat should it choose to scratch its back along them.

  In that regard, he was a man, not a child. In all other ways of measuring, he had returned to his childhood, so great was the hold of the past in this place, where he had come to manhood, with his father pushing him on.

  A slight lip rose under his fingers, which was how he knew he had reached the end of the line. The only light was from t
he stars which rendered everything a faint grey; his fingers, the concrete, the rock wall ahead of him that stretched, it seemed, for eternity in all directions – and the gap that was left between the aqueduct’s end and the lip of the cistern. When he was twelve years old, that gap had been big enough to fall through. For years after he had been here, his dreams had seemed all to lead to this place, where he looked over a lip of fragile stone and found himself staring down on to the backs of the circling vultures, and then down, and down, and down to the antelopes that ran, small as ants, across the desert below.

  The gap was still big enough, but the vultures had gone, and with them had gone some of the certainty that the earth must suck him from this place and drag him down to become another ant lying dead on the valley floor.

  His heart tripped at the memory, his stomach lurched. He made himself remember that the gaping mouth in the side of the rock was more than big enough to take a grown man, as long as he got the angle right when he jumped.

  He rolled over on to his stomach, turned in his own length, and wriggled backwards, holding on to the concrete edges of the aqueduct, gradually taking more weight on his hands until his whole body hung straight. Menachem was above him, his eyes wide as the moon. ‘We do this backwards? On our bellies?’

  ‘It’s the only way. Tell each man to tell the one behind him as he comes to it, but no sooner: there’s no point in letting them worry all the way up the line. Wait for me to call. In case there’s no water …’

  ‘You said there would be water.’

  Pantera had already let go. Falling, the ghost of his youth came with him, sucking in the damp, cold air in a great breath just before he hit the water – the deep, cold, marrow-chilling water.