Rome 2: The Coming of the King

by M C Scott

  The captain tumbled forward, retching, his own blade spinning and clattering to the ground. Iksahra stooped to gather it and so ducked under the swing from the rush of incoming guards: five against one. Their blades hacked out and down – and missed.

  Iksahra was as fluid as her own hunting cat, dodging, sliding, skipping back, and laughing in their faces, so that at first they did not see Mergus and his five legionaries who came out of the shadows on either side of the road, advancing fast and silent.

  ‘Look out!’ Kleopatra shouted, when she was sure they’d been seen. ‘Enemies to both sides!’

  The men of the garrison thought her a friend and shouted thanks even as they turned, five on four, back to back in a single snatched step. Their captain would have been proud of them. He was not yet fully dead; his blood still pulsed in a dark sheet across the road, but the waves were less with each ripple and his eyes had already turned up to show the whites.

  Men and iron blurred in the paltry light. One fell from each side, but no more; they were too evenly matched, trained in the same vein by the same men in the same tactics.

  Iksahra was there, ahead of anyone else, still singing, with her knife blood-wet in her hand, flashing – it was light enough now for more than a glimmer – as she slashed right and left at the guards on either side. They fell back from her as they had not from their fellow Romans, but not far; the men behind them acted as a wall that held their backs and kept them firm and, with the instinct of men who have trained and fought together for decades, they stepped away together, giving each man more space to move, and then attacked in perfect synchrony, their blades swinging in, hard, at the height of Iksahra’s heart.

  ‘Iksahra!’

  Kleopatra had stood still for less than three breaths and she was not breathing slowly. Now, with terrible clarity, she saw the blades coming in, set to cut Iksahra in half, and, in the passing of a single heartbeat, she saw the place where she could act, considered it, found it good and, stooping, picked up a blade from the clutter that lay on the ground at her feet.

  Lifting became a swing, became a slice up, under the legionary’s half-mailed skirt. The blow was the same she had used to kill the guard in the beast garden not ten days before, but this time she held on, and drove it deeper and on until blood spilled from between his lips. Only then did she twist as Jucundus had taught her, and pull out again.

  Her enemy choked on his own blood, and sank to the road. Kleopatra stood back, struck to sudden stillness.

  It was said that the Chosen of Isis could see the shades of the dead and speak to them. In the beast garden, she had not known she was Chosen, had not looked for the signs of death or tried to see anything. Here, harried by new knowledge and new doubts, with bile stripping the lining of her throat, Kleopatra stared at the dense air about the dead man’s head for some sign of life. Or death.

  Nothing was there, but in the echo of her mind she heard him say, with some surprise, and no hurry, Am I free?

  Always before, she had conducted her conversations with the dead in her head, and had thought them hers alone. Now, she answered aloud, ‘You are. Go to your god soon, before the gods and spirits of the desert find you.’

  She felt, but did not see, him bow to her and turn and march east, to the rising sun.

  ‘Kleopatra?’

  Her own name came at her oddly, as if through other ears. She looked up and saw the cheetah first, and wondered how it could speak; then she looked again and saw Iksahra, not ten feet away. The beastwoman had killed another guard and had caught his falling body. She stood, cradling it across her chest like a lover. That one’s voice was more distant, softer, but he, too, was glad to be free. Iksahra let him down to lie on the ground. Her eyes were fixed on Kleopatra’s face. ‘Are you ill?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’ Kleopatra held herself tight, arms wrapped across her chest, hugging ever tighter. Time was returning to its own speed, leaving her feeling seasick. She said, ‘It was too easy. That was my third kill. Each time was the same.’

  ‘It wasn’t the same and I don’t believe it was easy. You are a credit to your teachers. Look now, we are done: Mergus’ men have taken heart from your action and finished the enemy.’

  They had, indeed. Eleven lay dead; ten Romans of the garrison Guard to one of theirs, a junior officer whose name Kleopatra did not know. His soul spoke Aramaic, while all around him the Roman dead hailed one another in cheerful Latin.

  From somewhere closer, Iksahra said, ‘Kleopatra, what is it?’

  ‘When you see how death frees them, it is no hardship to kill.’

  Iksahra stood, staring. In the growing dawn, the whites of her eyes grew narrow and then broad again. Kleopatra said, ‘You can’t hear them, can you?’

  ‘Nor see them, no. Hypatia can, though, I am sure.’

  Iksahra drew closer, laid a hand on Kleopatra’s arm. Her fingers were stiff with dried blood, and cool. ‘My mother told me death was a release. I thought she meant only when the life was lived in pain, or the threat of it, as Estaph is threatened with the cross.’

  ‘These men were not like that. And yet I swear to you, they were not unhappy to be dead.’ She shook herself free. ‘We have to find Hypatia.’

  ‘Not now,’ Mergus said urgently, from her side. ‘Now you will turn round and put your back to the wall. Quickly! We are not alone.’

  Kleopatra turned and slapped her shoulders against the wall by the guard post. Mergus came in at her left side, and Iksahra at her right with the bloodied cheetah beside her. The other men joined them in ones and twos. And so they stood, seven alone in the still morning, listening to the cockerels take command of the dunghills.

  ‘Hush!’ Kleopatra held up her hand. ‘I can hear men, marching. And horses. Is it Menachem’s army?’

  ‘The horses are Menachem’s,’ agreed Mergus bluntly, ‘and his men are behind them, heading for the gate. But if you listen to the noise from the other side, you’ll hear the garrison Guard, and they are faster and closer. We will face them alone.’

  Even as he spoke, the peace of the morning was torn apart by the sudden roar of armed men singing, and the ear-breaking clash of a thousand sword hilts beaten on shields, in perfect unison, as the garrison Guard marched up from the Temple.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  THE KING OF Israel’s army marched towards the sleeping city with the new sun sending long, raking shadows streaming behind them.

  Small groups peeled off through the minor gates: a hundred men under Moshe; a hundred and fifty led by Eleazir, whose men believed he should have been king, although he had not said it aloud himself – Pantera thought them safer away from the main fighting and Eleazir had not argued – and two hundred of the Peace Party under Gideon, who was given, now, heart and soul to the coming battle.

  The rest advanced on the west gate, the biggest, that was set behind the palace and still in the shade.

  Helmetless, his black hair aflame to his shoulders, Menachem rode Iksahra’s almond-milk mare at the van. The sound of her feet was the clash of cymbals on the hard road.

  Pantera rode at his left hand, to be his living shield. He rode with his eyes on the road, but his attention was fixed on the sun, his mind a sand-timer that drained grain by too-fast grain towards the moment when the light might strike the hill of execution behind the wall.

  Aloud in the hollows of his mind he said, We’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming. Don’t lose hope. He had no idea if Hypatia could hear him.

  And then the dawn peace was broken, smashed against the wall of a legionary marching song drummed to the beat of sword hilts clashing on iron shield bosses. They sounded like thunder on an iron roof, marching to bring death; even as their enemy, Pantera felt it stir his blood.

  ‘The garrison Guard!’ Pantera shouted, and raised himself up and gave the battle cry of the new king’s army. ‘Jerusalem! For the glory of Israel!’

  He kept level with Menachem for the first few yards, but the milk-white mare was turne
d to lightning by the sounds of war, so that Menachem was through the gates, on a mount who screamed her own battle cries over the havoc.

  They turned the last corner. Two hundred yards away, the garrison Guard marched towards them four deep across the road, held in tight formation by a captain in a white plumed helmet who shouted orders from the farthest, safest edge.

  With the skill of a dance master, he kept them shoulder to shoulder, shield locked to shield, blades of the front lines naked to the fore. They held absolute order, even as Menachem’s front rank of horsemen charged them.

  And there, caught between the two hordes, was a clutter of figures at the side of the road. Pantera caught a glimpse of white linen and black limbs and, beside them, long black hair and a single sword held high …

  ‘Kleopatra! Iksahra! Move back! Keep out of the way!’

  He saw them skip back into the shadows of the Upper Market, far enough not to be run down, and then he was past, bearing down on the garrison. He wrenched round in the saddle, torn, unable to slow, or break free. From three ranks back, he heard Yusaf shout, ‘I’ll see to them!’ and saw him peel his mount away from the margins of the group just ahead of the first clash.

  In so far as there had been time to think at all, Pantera had hoped that sheer mass of numbers and the weight of their momentum might break the guards’ shieldwall early and fast. It did not do so.

  The initial impact rocked the garrison back on their heels, but the men of Menachem’s army were largely untrained and their horses unused to war; they had no knowledge of how to form a wedge, how to split open the shieldwall and force apart the legionaries into ever smaller packs of encircled men.

  Pantera had read of such things and knew them possible, but here, now, he found himself in a chaos of spooked horses and unseated men, of blades held cack-handed that failed to bite, of white, shocked faces and the sight of grown men weeping.

  Ahead, the men of the garrison Guard set up a new shout and the rear ranks redoubled the thunderous drumming of their sword hilts on their shields. Hit broadside by the noise, horses reared and bucked in terror, unseating riders as unsuited to war as they were.

  Pantera swore, viciously. Flinging his own mount round, he shouted above the throng. ‘Men of Israel: dismount! Menachem! Order the dismount!’

  Menachem tried. For honour, for sanity, for the chance of winning his city, the new king of Israel filled his lungs and bawled the order to dismount in four different languages: in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in Greek and in Latin.

  The garrison Guard laughed to hear the last two, and raised the volume of their clamour. Menachem’s mounted men either couldn’t hear or didn’t understand, or were simply incapable of leaving the saddle and delivering themselves whole, on their feet, to the safe, solid ground, ready to fight.

  Pantera wheeled his horse. Menachem was a dozen feet away, slashing his own sword left and right. The raging milk-white mare did more damage than a man ever could, striking out with teeth and feet at anyone, of either side, who came within reach.

  Pantera saw her kill one of the garrison Guard who made the mistake of running at her, as if to mount behind Menachem. She wheeled, lashing out with both hind feet, and his face dissolved in a plash of blood and bone and white teeth. His body arced high into the air. At the apex of its arc, Iksahra passed him, running at a different, riderless horse. She was mounted before he hit the ground.

  She spun the new mount without reins. Her face was spattered with dried blood, pale against her dark skin. Her arm was cut above the elbow; a clean wound, with sharp edges that had ceased to bleed.

  ‘Look out!’ Pantera killed the man who might have assaulted her. She swung her mount and let it kill another. He had not realized that this, too, was one of her horses. Perhaps it wasn’t, and simply all horses became trained to battle when she mounted; today, this morning, with the sun not yet on the hill beyond, anything was possible.

  Feeling more confident, he swung back to face the mass of armed men ahead of them with Iksahra a white and black killing machine at one shoulder, Menachem fighting doggedly at the other and Mergus – blessed of Mithras, he heard his voice above the fray – martialling the foot soldiers somewhere beyond his left flank.

  Even so, the garrison Guard was disciplined and well led; trumpeters sounded high, harsh notes and men moved to their command, pushing in, step by brutal step, crushing everything.

  To his right and his left, Pantera shouted, ‘The captain! We need to kill the captain!’

  He pointed ahead to where white plumes, tall as a man’s arm, waved like a beacon at the battlefield’s edge. Together, he, Menachem and Iksahra fought towards him, slashing, hacking, wounding more than killing, but staying alive, which was all that mattered.

  The plumes danced ahead, always a little away from the fighting, always shouting out new orders to the trumpeters, who sent them to the men. As they approached, the Guard split into two groups and manoeuvred in perfect synchrony, so that one part stepped out and round, in a long wheeling arc, while the other pushed inwards.

  Pantera shouted, ‘Kill him now or we’re—’

  He stopped because everybody else had stopped; each man’s shout cut off as if a god’s hand had hammered past, sucking away all the air. But it hadn’t been a god; a thousand men had drawn breath all at once, in surprise, in shock, in terror, in delight.

  In the hair’s breadth of hush, Pantera hauled his mount left, to the city, and so saw what the others had already seen.

  ‘God of all gods,’ he whispered. ‘Gideon has come.’ Nobody heard him, for Gideon had not come alone, nor with only the two hundred men he had taken with him; he had come with the whole of Jerusalem and the moment’s silence was annihilated under the sound of their cry: ‘Jerusalem!’

  Hundreds came, thousands, tens of thousands, too many to count, all the men of Jerusalem, and their wives, their sons, their daughters, their grandmothers, lame on their sticks; everyone and anyone who could run or walk was flooding now from the streets on either side of the Upper Market, here to free their city from the yoke of occupation.

  They surged towards the garrison Guard, armed with kitchen knives and pestles, with sickles and smithing irons and rods with sharpened ends for poking at goats, with axes and hammers and lengths of wood ripped from their doorways.

  Most of all, as the hordes of Jerusalem always did, they came armed with stones and they threw them now, hard, aiming for their enemies’ legs, for the soft skin behind their knees, for their shins, for their Achilles tendons, where, like the hero, they might be weak.

  A dozen or more had slings, and used them with startling accuracy on the men who were executing the pincer movement. Within a dozen heartbeats, thirty men of the garrison Guard had fallen, and the rest were no longer concentrating on the enemy in front, but were turning, haphazardly, to face those behind.

  And then Pantera saw their captain. A break opened in the lines, a flash of sun on a helmet that drew his eyes past a trumpeter … he saw him in profile: soft nose, a little upturned, curls of dark hair escaping the confines of his helmet, and an arrogance that no other man in Judaea had ever truly matched.

  ‘Saulos!’

  Pantera’s roar outdid the trumpeter. The standing plumes flew aslant as Saulos turned his head, not towards him, but back to a tent-party of eight men who stood a dozen yards behind the others, separate from the fighting. At his shout, they turned away and ran for the palace. He sprinted to catch up and they opened to take him, a smooth move that drew him in and held him secure in their heart. He flung the helmet away as he ran; white plumes lay rocking in the dirt behind them.

  Pantera spun his horse so hard that it reared. He caught Iksahra’s eye. They did not need words; a look was enough, and in it, one name: Hypatia.

  Together they pushed their horses away from the conflict, following where Saulos had gone.

  Hypatia sat alone in the dark and the abominable cold and listened to the stamp and clatter of the last guard change.
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br />   Light flared at the corner. The incoming and outgoing guards exchanged murmured Latin: ‘There’s war outside; we’re winning. How is it here? Are they well? Yes, all well. As well as can be on their last night. They’ll be lucky if it is their last night. I’ve seen crucified men live three days.’

  She felt a shudder from both guards and then one left, relieved, banging the door shut behind him. The other locked it from within and then, alerted perhaps by the quality of the silence in the cellar, lifted his torch and brought it round the corner.

  The light flooded the cell, blinding after the dark. Hypatia laid her hands over her eyes, but otherwise made no move to rise, to acknowledge his presence. She had shown she was alive, which was more than the others had done. They lay along the side wall, in easy repose, with their hands by their sides as if for burial and a cloth across their brows. Beneath, each face was free of all care, liberated from the travails of life.

  The new guard ran at the bars, trailing his light, bright as a comet. ‘What’s happened?’ Panic lit his voice. He banged his sword hilt on the bars. ‘Wake up!’

  Nobody moved. He crashed his whole shoulder on the iron next to her head. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I have given them peace.’ Hypatia took her hand from her eyes. ‘What would you have done? I, too, have known men live for three days on a cross.’

  ‘Gods alive!’ He was grey with terror. Throughout the empire, if a guard let his prisoners die, routinely, he took their place in whatever followed. His fingers grappled numbly for the keys at his belt. ‘You can’t do that!’

  Hypatia regarded him with quiet curiosity. ‘I am the Chosen of Isis. I can do whatever I choose. Don’t come in. You can’t change anything.’

  ‘You can’t keep me out!’

  Iron jangled. A key met a lock and turned, shakily. The door crashed back. A flutter of flame came in first, as the torch was thrust into Hypatia’s face.

  Hypatia jerked back as he threw himself across the cell to the two bodies lying on its far side, then, without rising, she propped both hands on the floor and, stretching, swept her feet in a long arc that met his at its apex, tangling his ankles.