Rome 2: The Coming of the King

by M C Scott

She came fast from the north, from Jerusalem, a black woman dressed all in white riding a mare the colour of starlight with black points and black feet, and with a cat running in her shadow.

  It was the black-and-whiteness that spooked the lookouts who stood at the northern edges of the heights, more than the fact that she knew where they were. They may have been God-fearing Hebrews, but they had grown to adulthood hearing daily the tales of what lived in the desert at night; in the darker corners of their mind, the things that might hurt them most looked just like this.

  Eleazir of the long sight saw her first, and called Mergus who had the authority to stop the lookouts from using her for target practice with their slings.

  Pantera waited on the heights until she had reached the mouth of the cleft through which any rider must pass to reach the hidden camp.

  ‘Iksahra!’

  He ran down, leaping from rock to rock. Behind him, men who had been afraid to look earlier came to the edge of the heights now, jostling for a better view. Closer, she was no less exotic: a black woman on a milk-white mare with a cat at her heels that was more like a hound.

  Pantera reached the last rock and stood above her, looking down. Her mouth was set in a straight line. Tightness held her, where before had been only supple fluidity.

  He said, ‘Who’s dead?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t read the message. Estaph is alive, but taken prisoner. So too are the Chosen of Isis and the Queen Berenice. They are imprisoned. Read this. I will tell you of them after.’

  Her palm was held flat and, on it, a message cylinder for him to take. Dried blood on one end flaked off as he uncapped it and tipped out the contents. The fragile paper was in an old code; one of the first, and so the easiest, that Seneca had taught his spies. He read aloud as if it were plain Latin, but quietly, privately, not for the men above.

  From Ishmael, keeper of doves, to Gideon, greetings. Blood flows in the streets of Caesarea. Orders came from Jerusalem: let all the Hebrew men and women die. The men of the city Watch came last night in the darkness and by morning all were dead. All. Six thousand men, their wives, mothers, sons and daughters, even the newborn, hurled naked on the streets. Twenty thousand souls in all. My father died trying to save a friend. I write to warn you, lest death comes also to Jerusalem.

  He thought of a boy with eyes like gazelle’s and a father he had never met. His vision blurred. Iksahra was staring at him with something close to pity, which was so unlikely as to startle him to steadiness. She was speaking. He cuffed away the tears and made himself listen.

  ‘Yusaf read the message. He knew what it said, although he didn’t tell me, but he did give me this second scroll for Menachem. He said … he said you would understand it, if he did not.’

  Between thumb and finger, she held a scroll tied with linen thread sealed by a blob of beeswax that bore the imprint of a man’s thumb as its only seal.

  Pantera said, ‘Menachem is—’

  ‘Behind you. I heard what you read. Caesarea is a graveyard.’ The words came from a sword’s length behind, to his left, deeper into the cleft that led to the hidden valley in which they camped. Menachem extended his hand to Iksahra. ‘Horses cannot come into the valley. Will you let Moshe care for your mare?’

  It was a decision made without forethought, but it was good, evidently, for as soon as Iksahra nodded, Menachem’s chief captain skipped down the cluttered rock as if they were steps and came to hold the mare’s bridle. Even before he reached her, the look on his face was that of a man besotted.

  Menachem’s patience was a finite thing these days, measured in grains of sand that grew fewer with each passing day. The pressure of his waiting was tangible by the time Pantera, Iksahra and the cheetah reached the neck of the gully, where it gave way to the hidden valley.

  Ahead, all about the valley’s floor, two thousand men, less a few dozen lookouts, sat cleaning their new weapons, or trying on new mail. At one end, a tailor with three fingers missing on his right hand sat in the shade of the high walls and assessed men by sight as they approached him, and allocated them a mail shirt from the numbered piles about him.

  At the valley’s other end, Mergus and his handful of Romans held classes to teach men to use Roman weapons in ways that would kill more of the enemy than their brethren. Between classes, men flaunted their new armour, vain as girls in coloured silks.

  All this halted when Menachem began to walk to the centre of the valley. A hundred men, more, laid down their weapons and clustered around, keeping a respectful distance, but still close enough to hear and be heard.

  Pantera’s look sent them back. Catching up with Menachem, he walked with him towards the uninhabited centre, although even at this distance, he spoke softly. ‘You heard Ishmael’s message? The city Watch in Caesarea has slaughtered the Hebrew community. Twenty thousand dead.’

  ‘I heard,’ Menachem said. ‘Jerusalem will be next if we don’t act soon.’

  ‘Saulos has less than three thousand men,’ Pantera said. ‘One hundred thousand Hebrews live in the city, even when it is not crowded for a feast day.’

  ‘He has sent for help,’ Iksahra said. ‘I went out this morning to hunt his doves. I caught one with a message coming in, not going out. If he hadn’t sent one already, he will have done so today.’

  Menachem walked ahead of them awhile. When he turned, his face was tight, his lips made a fine, hard line. ‘They’ll send the Twelfth to assault us,’ he said. ‘It’s a ten-day march, maybe more if they bring the local infantry with them.’

  ‘If we march now, and set camp overnight, we can be at Jerusalem by tomorrow’s dawn.’ Pantera turned to Iksahra. ‘How is the Guard arranged?’

  ‘They are in the fortress of the Antonia, next to the Temple, all but one century that will have left by now, escorting the king and his family to Damascus. Except Berenice. She and Hypatia are imprisoned. Estaph’s death will begin on tomorrow’s dawn if Saulos has his way. The women will follow him.’

  ‘What of Kleopatra?’

  ‘She is safe with Yusaf. Hypatia wants me to take her to Alexandria.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Not while the Chosen of Isis remains alive and imprisoned.’

  Iksahra had turned away from him so it was impossible to see her face, to read more beyond the changing textures of her voice.

  They came to the valley’s end and climbed steps cut in the rock to a high, hidden place from where it was possible to see Masada to the south and, almost, if one stared hard at the horizon, Jerusalem to the north. The sun stood overhead, shrinking their shadows.

  Pantera said, ‘You said Yusaf had sent you with a second message?’

  ‘Here.’ Iksahra withdrew the scroll of papyrus from her belt pouch a second time. It was blotted with ink, creased, torn at the corners as if many men had held it. Menachem cracked the seal between his thumbs and unrolled it with reverence, as if it were sacred scripture; which it was, almost.

  Over Menachem’s shoulder, Pantera read a litany of names written in Hebrew, beginning with Menachem’s own and rising back through his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfathers and others and others strung up the page in ever widening lines. At one side, a column of signatures had been added, a little apart from the rest. Yusaf’s name was first, then Gideon’s, then all of the Sanhedrin, one after the other.

  At the end, Menachem let it spring closed. He raised his eyes, found Iksahra, and then Pantera. ‘Tell me what you have just read.’

  ‘Nothing that you don’t already know. You are of the line of David. You fulfil the promise of the psalm that the fruit of his body shall sit upon the throne of Israel. What is new in this, what changes everything, is that every man of consequence in Jerusalem has signed the proof of your lineage. The whole Sanhedrin is here. They are saying that they will acknowledge you as the rightful king of Judaea. You only have to take the throne.’

  ‘If Saulos saw this …’

  ‘He would crucify every man who had
signed it. They take a risk, in order to support your risk.’

  Pantera gazed out across the open plain. Here, this close to Masada, it was empty desert, home to the antelopes and hyenas, but the haze in the distance was many shades of green, where cedars grew thick as fleece across the hills, and date palms and olive groves wrought patchwork patterns on the fertile slopes around Jerusalem.

  Thoughtfully, he said, ‘We must anoint you king in a river, as it says in the scriptures. Gideon can do that, with witnesses who will swear to it. Everything must be done as it was written.’

  ‘And if I am not that king? How does your god punish hubris?’

  ‘My god punishes no one. Men do that to each other, or to themselves when they think they have reached too high. You are not reaching too high.’

  When he heard no reply, Pantera turned back, away from the plain. ‘Your city needs a ruler. The whole of your nation waits for someone who can bear the weight of sovereignty with wisdom and fortitude. Did you think the chance to rule was a gift? You could have asked Nero, or Claudius, or the poor mad fool Caligula. They could tell you that ruling is a curse. It takes a strong man to withstand its pressures. You are that man.’

  Menachem’s gaze seared his face. ‘What would you have me do?’

  ‘Enter Jerusalem as Israel’s anointed king. Fight anyone who stands against you. Do whatever it takes to secure your nation’s future as a strong and stable state. You can do this.’

  ‘You can do this,’ Iksahra said in echo, from his other side. ‘You must. It is why I was sent.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  THE MULE WAS not only lame, but massively overburdened, or such was the assessment of Laelius, the harassed garrison guard on duty that Sabbath dusk at the small southernmost gate leading into Jerusalem. He and his gate partner, Bibulus, had watched for half an hour now as the unfortunate beast grew from an ant on the horizon to a full-grown gelding, plodding forward, ears flopping down to its muzzle.

  A skinny Syrian trotted along behind, cursing and thrashing the beast with unnerving monotony: thump, thump, thump, once every third stride, just out of rhythm with the lameness. He didn’t even have the sense to beat the mule, but struck the left-hand pannier, giving forth with each stroke a pungency of garlic so thick and so strong he could have carved up the very air and sold it at market.

  The Syrian did not consider that; he was as foolish as his mule, while the veiled and hooded woman who slumped astride it humming discordant Syrian lullabies was … vast. Overwhelming. Too huge to contemplate and certainly too big for the unfortunate beast that was forced to support her.

  With awe in his voice, or disgust, Bibulus said, ‘She’s pregnant.’

  Laelius felt his gorge rise as his mind supplied unwanted images of a skinny gap-toothed Syrian and his vast wife locked in the throes of coitus. They passed uncomfortably close. The Syrian smiled at him; his wife crooned her ditties. Among the garlic, Laelius caught an eye-watering stink of civet. The mule was definitely lame.

  Neither guard made an effort to stop the pair; there had been no specific edict against men walking into the city at night, only about their leaving it.

  Laelius held his breath until they had gone, then leaned in relief against the wall and took a long drink from the wine jug that was better company than Bibulus. He ached for the sound of Roman voices speaking Roman thoughts. He offered a prayer to Jupiter Dolichenos that the rumours were true and his legion might evacuate this godforsaken city before the full moon.

  In Yusaf’s elegant house in the city, Kleopatra woke from dreams of death and cold and the awe of being Chosen when she had no idea what that meant or what to do. She lay muzzily on a pallet nursing the panic that had begun when Hypatia had named her, and only when her heart had stilled did she hear voices in the air around her, and her name, spoken twice in fast succession, once by a woman.

  She opened her eyes and found that there was a mule in Yusaf’s beautiful dining room, which had become, perforce, her bedchamber, and a figure with black teeth who stank of garlic leaning back against the wall with his eyes shut, plainly too exhausted to stand much longer, and certainly beyond the care it might take to wash.

  From the gloom of too few candles someone handed him a beaker and he drank as if it were the first water he had seen in months. Someone else tugged on the mule’s bridle and pulled it sideways. Something shimmered in the erratic light and there echoed about the small room a slither of metal on metal.

  Kleopatra rubbed the back of her neck and rolled sideways, hunting for the few remnants of clothing that she doffed for sleep. She found her sandals first, functional as legionary caligae, then a leather belt with the shape of a horse at each of the tie-ends, and a comb for her hair.

  She was sitting when the gap-toothed man noticed her, and he only did that because he had lifted a rag of wool with which to clean his face, and in dipping it in his water – or perhaps his wine – he happened to turn.

  ‘Kleopatra,’ he said, and bared his lips, the better to rub the candle-soot from his front teeth. ‘We were trying not to wake you.’

  ‘Pantera? Pantera!’ She threw herself to her feet and might have hugged him, had he not been so filthy.

  Instead, she stood close in the hazy light, taking in his presence, noting the weariness on his left side that was worse than it had been, the new lines about his eyes, carved by wind and sun, and the newly sharpened angles of his cheeks that spoke of long days without food and a pain that might haunt him still.

  But all these were small things when he was manifestly alive, whole, healed, all the things Kleopatra had believed impossible when she had last seen him.

  She dragged her eyes from him and looked around at piles of iron links that stole light from the candle to make a thousand flaming points, and lean, long swords, bare-bladed on the floor, and helmets, enough for a tent-party of eight … And Iksahra, sitting on the floor, with the cheetah draped about her ankles.

  She was no longer dreaming, but reality was stranger than she had imagined. Stooping, Kleopatra ran a hand over the armour on the floor; shining, serpentine links, enough to equip half a dozen men.

  ‘You took Masada?’ Hypatia had told her they planned it, in the days when Hypatia was still free to speak to her.

  From behind, Pantera said, ‘Two days ago. We will take Jerusalem in the morning.’

  Kleopatra spun back to face him. ‘What was the message? The one that Iksahra’s falcon caught. Could you read it?’

  ‘I could.’

  ‘What then? What did it say?’

  ‘Gideon will tell you.’ Pantera caught her eye and directed her attention towards the uncandled shadows on the room’s far side where a shape detached itself from the dark and Gideon the Peacemaker stood before her, looking older than he had in the council chamber, as if the night had stolen years from him.

  He answered her question in a voice in which grief and rage measured every word. ‘The message was from Ishmael, the dove-keeper in Caesarea. It came with news that his city is a bloodbath. Twenty thousand are dead; every Hebrew in the city, down to the last child, has been killed by the city Watch. Saulos ordered it.’

  Kleopatra covered her mouth with her hands. ‘Jucundus,’ she said, faintly. ‘He wouldn’t …’

  Pantera said, ‘He wasn’t there.’

  ‘He tried to tell me what had happened. I didn’t listen.’ Kleopatra closed her eyes and then opened them again; against all probability, the bloody gallery of her mind was worse than the horror etched across Gideon’s face, the pain, as if he had seen the acts himself.

  Quietly, Pantera said, ‘We will not sue for peace now. We must fight and win, else Jerusalem will wade thigh-deep in the blood of innocence. And we must do it soon, before the legions march from Syria.’

  Kleopatra could not look at either man. Instead, she looked down again at Iksahra, and at the piles of chain mail shirts that surrounded her. ‘How did you get these in?’ she asked. ‘All the gates are watched.’
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br />   ‘On the mule.’ Pantera shrugged, as if it was an easy thing. ‘The blades and helms were in one of the panniers. Iksahra wore the shirts bunched about her body. The guard thought …’

  With a wry grin, he glanced at Iksahra, who ghosted a shadow of Pantera’s smile and said, ‘We choose not to imagine what he thought. But he did not search us.’

  ‘And the cat?’

  ‘The cat was in the other pannier, on the right-hand side. It will forgive me eventually, particularly if we fight in the night.’

  The cat had come to tolerate Kleopatra, if not to like her; she could come near it now and it did not harden its eyes.

  She reached past its head and lifted a mail shirt from the nearest pile. She had seen them often worn by the guards in Caesarea and Jerusalem, but never held one. It rippled across her hands like sharkskin.

  ‘How many did you bring?’ she asked.

  Iksahra said, ‘Nine. Mergus is coming later with some men, but he won’t need all of them. We think that one will fit you.’

  ‘Me?’ She spread it out, looking at the width between the shoulders, at the length. ‘It could—’

  Pantera was ahead of her. ‘Iksahra, no! We spoke of this.’ He caught Kleopatra’s arm, drawing her towards him. ‘You should come with me to the encampment, or at the very worst stay here until the fighting is over. Nothing else is safe.’

  ‘So you say, and yet Kleopatra of Caesarea has killed once already in my sight. She has, I think, practised with the sword more than any other member of her family.’ Iksahra stooped, scooping a blade from the floor, and passed it, hilt first, to Kleopatra. ‘Is he right? Must you be kept safe with men about you for protection while we open the city’s gates from the inside to let in Menachem’s army?’

  In a clear invitation, Iksahra lifted a blade of similar length and held it out, as men will who offer a fight to another.

  Kleopatra took a step away from Pantera. The blade she had been given was fine, well balanced, a little shorter than the cavalry blades Jucundus had given her to practise with, but she swung it once, twice, and found that point of harmony where the end of her elbow became the true end of the blade, so that its killing edges were a part of her arm, and she could defend without thinking. Or attack.