Rome 2: The Coming of the King

by M C Scott

  IN HASTE, BUT with Jucundus’ impeccable planning, the royal family of Judaea had abandoned Caesarea. In greater haste, with less planning, they packed to flee Jerusalem.

  Kleopatra left Iksahra tending her great cat and the falcons in the beast gardens and pushed her way into the palace where slaves, servants, guards, attendants, secretaries, grooms, cooks, vintners, chambermaids and collectors of firewood for the royal family seemed bent on creating for themselves a unique kind of hell in which no one person could speak coherently to any other, or hear what was being said, but where each vied to increase his or her own volume, the better to be heard, and thus, manifestly, reduced the chances of anybody’s hearing him. Or her.

  ‘Where’s Jucundus? I said Jucundus. Have you seen Juc—’ Kleopatra let go the slave she had caught and ploughed down the corridor to a half-open door beyond which danced a helmet plume in black and white.

  ‘Jucundus?’ She caught him by the elbow. ‘They say you’re not going to Syria? Why not?’

  His eyes were brown and sad, like an aged hound left behind in the kennels when the hunt bays on a fresh trail. ‘I am sent back to Caesarea, lady.’

  There was a shadow in his voice that was worse than the pain in his eyes. She knew him, as he knew her: after Agamemnon, he had taken the rough skills of a wild rider and given them a stately polish. He had taught her to fire a bow and to use a sword in the way of the legions, which was more disciplined than Agamemnon’s wild warrior swings.

  He had taught her history and Latin and the ways of men in the world. If she had a father, it was not the distant king in a foreign land, who had died too soon and sent her mother back to the court of her childhood, it was this man, who stared at her now, shaking his head, with his lips pressed in a string of silence that warned her – begged her – to ask no more.

  He said, ‘I heard what befell you. I am sorry. I …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m well. But my aunt and Hypatia …’ She was more afraid than she had let herself know. She dashed away new tears with the back of her hand and scowled at Jucundus.

  He said, ‘Your lady aunt, the queen, is held below, in the cellars. It might be wise to take her food and water.’

  ‘She has none?’

  Jucundus took her shoulder and turned her in the direction of the kitchens. ‘The guards are from the garrison, but some are men who know you. You would be permitted entry, I think, when we are not. You could take what she needs.’

  ‘Where’s Saulos?’

  ‘On the fourth floor with Vilnius, discussing plans for Estaph’s crucifixion. They want it to be public, but not to cause a riot.’

  Kleopatra gaped. ‘Anything will cause a riot. They could crucify a dead sheep just now and it would cause chaos, you know that.’ She caught at Jucundus again, suddenly young. ‘Don’t go. Please.’

  ‘I would stay if I could, but my orders are unambiguous. I am to return to Caesarea and take control of my men. They have … not acted as I would have wished. Go now.’ He pushed her again, more firmly. ‘Think of your aunt, not me or yourself. She needs you.’

  *

  The slaves’ corridors were blocked with a panic of near-naked men and women, rancid with the stench of fear, unbearably hot. Kleopatra barged and bullied her way through until she came to the door to the cellars. The guard who stood before it was one she knew by sight, although she could not remember his name.

  As an alternative, she produced her most blinding smile. The guard flushed, which was a good sign. She made her eyes wide. ‘Have you seen my cousin?’

  ‘Lady, he was in his chambers, making ready for the off.’

  ‘It’s true, then, we are leaving? Where to?’

  He eyed her with genuine concern. ‘Were you not told? You’re leaving for Antioch in Syria at tomorrow’s dawn at the latest. Lord Saulos had his men searching for you all morning.’

  ‘They found us. I had gone hunting, with the beastwoman. We caught a quail. See? I cooked it for my aunt.’

  He had already looked at the basket she had brought from the kitchens and had smelled the stolen meat beneath the warming cloth. She grinned at him, as if that simple act made him a co-conspirator.

  The guard became flustered and picked at his mail. She saw him dead with a knife through his throat, and closed her eyes that he might not see it too.

  She said, ‘Are you going to Damascus with us?’

  He was older than she’d thought; lines etched his eyes, his mouth, the prickles of beard beginning on his chin, where white mixed with black, to the detriment of both. He said, ‘Lord Saulos has ordered that one company is to go, the rest to stay. The centurions will draw lots to choose those who will leave. If they have done so, I haven’t heard the result yet.’

  ‘Which do you want? To go, or to stay?’

  He drew himself tall. ‘A courageous man does not fly in the face of battle.’

  ‘Of course.’ Kleopatra looked up at him. ‘I am told I must go with my uncle, but I would take food and wine to my aunt first.’

  Her basket was full: a flagon of wine, dates, almond cakes, a roast quail stuffed with garlic from the previous night, a bundle of the hard, unleavened bread that the hunters took on long days and swore kept them happy from dawn until dusk. She held it up a second time. ‘With your permission?’

  His orders were to let no one through; they both knew that. Behind them, chaos held the corridors, but within it were only slaves. He winked. ‘Be quick.’

  She stood on her toes and kissed his cheek. He was smiling as the door shut behind her.

  Three more guards blocked her way. The first was at the top of the stairs and the second stood by the lit torch in its wall bracket, at the place where the corridor branched, right to the wine cellars, left to the dungeons. Both of these let her past on the grounds that if she had got through the door at the top, it must be with permission.

  The last was less easy, but he was at least a man she knew by name as well as by sight. Surinus of the second century of the garrison Guard stood round the corner from the cells themselves, out of the line of view of the prisoners, lest he be bewitched by the two women within. He kept his sword permanently drawn and had on enough armour to face down a squadron of Parthian heavy cavalry.

  This deep underground, this close to the prisoners, he was a lot more unsettled than his brethren, less willing to allow a relative of the queen’s to pass. His blade blocked her path, un-yielding.

  She held up her basket, as she had three times before, so that he could see the innocence of its contents. His blade did not move. ‘Lady, I can’t let you pass. I’ll be flogged and you’ll be taken to Damascus in chains. Go back. I’ll let them know you tried.’

  ‘They know already,’ Kleopatra said. ‘They can hear every word. It’s like a grave in here, there’s so little sound.’

  He shivered, and tried to hide it. She raised her basket. ‘They need food,’ she said, ‘or they’ll die and then how will Saulos treat you?’

  His blade wavered.

  ‘You’ll hear what we say and I can’t possibly enter the cages. What harm can it do?’ Surinus had been her friend, one of those who had turned a blind eye when she left the palace by the slaves’ door. She laid her hand on his blade, pushing, pushing, said, ‘Nobody will know. You’ll be on the road to Syria by tomorrow.’

  ‘Only one company leaves. My centurion might not win the ballot.’

  ‘So leaving would be winning?’ She tilted her head. ‘When did I ever lose at dice?’

  A smile grew round his eyes. ‘I didn’t know you had a hand in the drawing of lots.’

  She grinned. ‘Nor does Vilnius, but can you see him denying me the chance if I ask him right?’

  Surinus laughed then, roughly. At last, his blade swung away from her resisting hand. He jerked his head to the cells. To her retreating back, he called, ‘Don’t let her bewitch you. Not your lady aunt; the other one.’

  Swiftly, Kleopatra turned the corner, away from the torchligh
t and hazy warmth into a place so cold, so dank, it made her gasp, and clutch her tunic closer.

  Light leaking from the corridor lit three pale faces turned to her. One of them was a man; the giant Parthian. She had time to take that in, to understand the enormity of it – a man and two women in the same small room, without privacy, without decency – before one of the women stood, and took a tentative step to bars set in the immovable stone of floor and ceiling.

  ‘Hypatia!’ Kleopatra ran the last strides, thrust her hands forward. They met, palm to palm, through the bars. ‘You’re so cold.’

  She said it loudly, to give the Chosen of Isis time to gather herself, to look at and read the scrap of paper that had passed between them, that had come from the message-dove and was, if she were truthful, her reason for being there.

  She looked past the exhaustion on Hypatia’s features to Berenice, who stood just behind.

  ‘Your majesty …’

  Her aunt was filthy, exhausted, cold beyond imagining. Her eyes were twin pits burrowing in below her high patrician brow. Kleopatra read despair in their darkness, and chose not to believe it.

  She said, ‘Let me get a torch. I can’t see you properly.’

  Surinus flushed full of shame when she stormed back, and did not stand in her way, but gave her his spare torch, and let her light it from the one propped in the wall bracket. Pitch and tight-bound wool fizzed and spat. Bright light hurt her eyes, already widened by the dark.

  ‘Majesty, Hypatia, Estaph …’ She tipped the light to flow over each one as she spoke. Estaph was more bruised than the others, but whole. He had taken the opposite side of the cell, eschewing the warmth of proximity for the probity of distance, as if anybody cared how they sat, here in the dark and the cold.

  ‘I brought food. Not very much, but …’ She emptied her basket a piece at a time and pushed it through the bars. Estaph turned to her at last, showing bloody bruises on every angle of his face. Someone had wiped him clean in the dark, with no water, smearing the blood so that he stared at her through a mask of red and blue and black. He was so still, she thought he might be undead, a ghûl with lost eyes to steal her soul, until he took a breath and levered himself upright.

  He smiled, showing broken teeth, and bowed, stiffly. ‘My lady, I thought you a vision, conjured from thirst and hunger and cold,’ he said. ‘And you have brought food and water and warmth. Thank you.’

  She thought, You won’t thank me if you’re stronger for it when they crucify you, but she had not the will to say it. He knew it anyway; it was in his eyes. After a comfortless pause, she said, ‘I could bring herbs if it would help. They might let me back in again.’

  ‘They won’t.’ Hypatia was still at the bars. Her eyes said, I have read the note. I cannot speak of it aloud. ‘We heard sounds upstairs, as if the whole garrison were there. Have they taken control of the palace?’

  ‘Saulos is in the king’s chamber now. My uncle is making ready to leave.’

  ‘You’ll go with them,’ Hypatia said. Her voice was cold, distinct, set to carry to the corridor’s end, where waited a man afraid of witchcraft.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kleopatra and shook her head.

  Hypatia signalled to Berenice, who bent and dragged the pile of food across the floor. The sound echoed off the ceiling.

  ‘You and Estaph need to eat first,’ Hypatia said. ‘I ate this morning, before I came to you.’

  They did, with alacrity, and, beneath the sounds of their feeding, Hypatia murmured, ‘This message must get to Pantera and Menachem. Yusaf can arrange that – he has contacts among the War Party and some of them must still be left in the city. You must leave here as soon as you may. Tell Iksahra that if she were to take you to Alexandria, I would consider it a personal favour. She should find a woman named Athanasia who tends the shrine of Isis in the road of the Golden Scorpion, near the Temple of Serapis. Iksahra is to tell Athanasia that the Chosen of Isis has named her successor. She will be able to choose her reward. Tell her that. And tell her … tell her she knows the shape of my heart. She will know what that means.’

  ‘Iksahra is the new Chosen?’ Kleopatra asked. It did not seem likely, but then a great many unlikely things had happened in the past days.

  Hypatia said, ‘No,’ and waited.

  Kleopatra gaped. Her blood surfed in her ears. ‘I am not … I can’t be … I don’t …’ She gathered herself. ‘I don’t see the dead. The Chosen always does. I heard so.’

  ‘I didn’t at your age,’ Hypatia said. ‘There are twelve years of training in the temples of Egypt before you step out and take the name for yourself. And I must be dead, of course, for that to happen.’

  ‘I don’t want you to be dead.’

  ‘Hypatia …’ Berenice came to the bars, bearing the almond cakes. She said the name aloud, for the guard, and then, more quietly, ‘Are you sure? You said it earlier, but I thought—’

  ‘That it was an excuse to join you in the council chamber?’ Hypatia pulled a wry smile. ‘It was, but it was also true. Unless you forbid it?’

  Berenice shook her head. ‘Kleopatra will be safer there than here and Damascus would not suit her; without my word against it, my brother and sister would try to find her a husband. Isis will treat her better.’

  Kleopatra had to stuff her fist in her mouth not to speak, not to let spill the noises crowding her throat. Those given to Isis did not squeal; she was sure of that, and she was too close to squealing.

  When she could find the right breath, she said, ‘But you will be freed. We won’t leave until you are.’

  ‘No. You have to leave.’ Hypatia reached through the bars to catch her hand and held it.

  ‘Iksahra won’t leave you,’ Kleopatra said. She did not know how she knew that, but she was certain it was true and Hypatia showed every sign of believing it. She had closed her eyes and turned her face to the floor.

  ‘Tell her it’s my wish,’ she said, presently, and looked up. ‘Tell her that if she thinks we can’t get out of here without her, she does no honour to my reputation.’

  ‘But this is the dream.’ Kleopatra’s eyes held Hypatia’s, not letting her go. ‘This is the cold, black part of it. Where the pain starts. I have seen it. So have you.’

  ‘I know.’ Hypatia broke the lock of their gaze and twisted free of Kleopatra’s grip. Stepping back, she placed a kiss on the heel of her hand, and stretched through the bars to touch it on Kleopatra’s wrist. ‘But the dream has many endings, and not all of them are bad. Trust me. I do not intend to let your aunt die, or Estaph. We have work yet to do before the gods weigh our hearts against Ma’at’s feather. Go now. Take the message to Yusaf. Tell him to find whoever he trusts most to take it safely across the desert to Pantera. Then go to Alexandria with Iksahra. We will find you there when we can.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  IKSAHRA RODE SOUTH under the high sun.

  Her mare was the pride of her father’s breeding. Her hide was the colour of almond blossom, her mane and tail unblemished charcoal, her feet black as onyx, and as hard. She was fleet as the hot south wind and could go all day at a canter without need for rest or water. Her one colt foal was a yearling now, the hope and pride of Iksahra’s own breeding herd, left behind in her homelands under the care of a woman who had seemed competent and interested and useful; at least that had been the case in last year’s summer, before a man had dangled the sweet meat of vengeance within Iksahra’s grasp, before she had discovered that vengeance did not feed her heart’s hunger.

  The ghost of her father joined her as she passed the palms, the olives, the green pastures south of Jerusalem. He complimented her on the mare, on the cheetah that ran ever at her heels, a living ghost, a shadow in gold and black.

  He sat cross-legged on the horizon at the level of her shoulder and tilted his head and asked, Why do you do this? Why are you riding from one man to another with a message you cannot read, the contents of which they will not share with you?

  ‘Because
Hypatia asked it of me.’ It was not entirely true; Hypatia had asked that Yusaf send the one deemed most reliable and Iksahra had named herself that, leaving Kleopatra in Yusaf’s care. It had seemed the same thing at the time, but sounded different now, when she spoke it aloud in the echoes of her own head.

  The ghost that might not have been her father gazed at her askance. And you always do her bidding, this woman?

  ‘She may die.’ She may die, and my heart will die with her. She did not say so, even in the echoes of her head, but the ghost heard her anyway, and his laugh was a long stuttering titter, which disrupted the smooth rhythm of her horse. That was how she knew it was not really her father; he had never laughed at the things she cared about.

  Under the hot sun, Iksahra spoke the words Anmer ber Ikshel had taught her for the dissipation of ghûls and kicked her mount faster along the route Yusaf had drawn for her in the dust on his floor.

  Noon came and went. The sun devoured them, spat them out, ate them again. The olive groves and date palms became scrubbier and less frequent and gave way finally to rocks and sand and waterless desert wadis.

  Soon, rocks grew on either side, as scorching ovens. Heat became pain, and burned away the memories of a night when nothing had really happened, but which, even so, had left her feeling torn from her past without sight of a clear future.

  Near the end now, Iksahra urged the mare on. The cheetah ran nearby, never tiring. They raced faster. The world was blinding light and hot earth and ropes of saliva frothing back from the bridle and the cat’s hot breath at her heel.

  Sometime later, the mare pricked her ears and the cat grunted a warning. Ahead, a spark of light flickered where an ignorant man let his sword blade catch the sun, not knowing that the ifrit used such things to discover where men camped, that they might trap them in the night.

  With a curse at his idiocy, Iksahra lay low on her mare’s neck and urged her into a full, flat-bellied gallop across the last miles of rugged plain to the foothills north of Masada.