Rome 2: The Coming of the King

by M C Scott

  He fell, inelegantly, so that his chin made first contact with the far wall, and then his shoulder. He came to rest head down, in the nauseating pile of ordure at the furthest corner from the door. For a mercy, if only temporarily, he was unconscious. Hypatia struggled to turn him over and wrest his blade from the scabbard.

  She turned, blade in hand, and found Estaph looking at her. ‘It worked,’ he said.

  He was cold; the tips of his ears were blue-white and his face was haggard enough to be dead. She lifted the guttering torch from the floor and nursed it to life, this once needing its heat more than its light. She brought it to him and to Berenice as she, too, rose from the frigid floor.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Estaph, ever practical, asked and then answered his own question. ‘No. And now yes.’

  In between these two, a swift wrench of a head; exactly the mercy he had offered to Hypatia and she had refused, because the god did not allow death, but demanded life, and this was the only way she could think of to give it.

  She said, ‘We’re not safe yet. There’s a palace full of guards outside.’

  ‘The palace isn’t as full as it was yesterday,’ Estaph said, and he held open the door to their cell for her to pass through. ‘You should lead. You have the best ears of us all. You can warn us if someone comes.’

  And then what will we do? We are worn and cold and afraid and we have one sword between three of us, which is not enough. Hypatia did not say it aloud, but met his gaze and found the same thoughts reflected in the same tight smile.

  ‘We have to try,’ Estaph said. ‘Your god did not want us dead too easily or too soon.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  THE BEAST GARDEN was a stinking mess. The air was heavy with old urine and rotting faeces and alive with flies. Inside was a cacophony of hunger, of thirst, of bestial desperation that outdid the havoc of combat a bare few hundred paces away.

  Seeing Iksahra stand in the gateway, the horses, hounds and hawks threw themselves in a frenzy at the bars of their compounds, howling or screaming or belling, as their nature demanded, for food, for water, for the blessing of release.

  Iksahra spat on the ground, eyes ablaze. ‘The slaves fled to Damascus and left them untended. They should die for such a thing.’

  ‘They are slaves,’ Pantera said. ‘It is not given them to act without orders. They are often flayed for exactly that. We haven’t time—’

  ‘I know. But we are two against nine. But even two such as we will better prevail if we have—’

  ‘Three,’ said a clear voice behind. ‘With me, we are three. Or seven, if you prefer.’

  Pantera turned, slowly. Kleopatra was wildly bruised; a long welt across her left cheek half closed her eye and promised spectacular colours later. Her forearms had cuts along their lengths, one of them ragged, of the sort that responded better to clean air than to a dressing. None of it detracted from the light in her eyes.

  Pride shone from her, and a new determination. ‘I’m coming with you to get Hypatia. You need me. I know the fastest way through the palace to the cellars where she’s held. And Mergus is on his way – is here.’ A shuffle of sandals and he was there, with three others. Kleopatra said, ‘He can’t go back: the Hebrews don’t know him well enough to remember he’s friend not foe and they’re winning now. He’ll be cut down simply for looking Roman.’

  Mergus was breathing hard, but not greatly hurt, nor the three men with him. He saluted across the heads of the others, a gesture that promised stories later, when time allowed. He moved to the two women and there was a joining between them, as of men who have fought together in battle, who have saved each other’s lives and know the most precious of bonds, closer than many lovers. And now Kleopatra and Iksahra were a part of it.

  Pantera bowed to them, for the brightness of their greeting. ‘Lead then,’ he said, and so it was that five men, two women and a cat walked down the slaves’ corridor to its end.

  ‘Left here,’ said Kleopatra as they poured out through the door, ‘and then left again at the junction at the end. There are stairs fifty paces further on. A guard will be at their head.’

  Iksahra said, ‘Let me do this. Mergus, if you and the others could appear to form an honour guard? Let him see you as we round the corner, but don’t come closer unless I fail.’

  As if ordered by an officer, the men fell into line behind Iksahra. She flicked her fingers to keep the cheetah close, and then they were at the junction in the corridor and there was no time to ask what she planned, only to watch as she stalked away, black and white, with her beast flowing gold at her side.

  The guard saw the men first. His head went up, and he smiled, and was still smiling when his gaze fell on the cheetah and the woman and his confusion then, of why she should have been thus honoured, slowed his blade.

  In perfect Latin, Iksahra said, ‘I am the ghûl that assaulted the gate guards,’ and it seemed to Pantera that the guard had died of fright before the cheetah had ripped the life from his throat.

  He died in a flurry of muffled beast noises, and not one single human sound. The smell of blood rinsed the corridor and Pantera found that, this once, he was not immune to such a thing, and that he was not alone; Mergus and Kleopatra were both paler than they had been.

  Iksahra stepped round the mess. ‘We go down the steps behind this door,’ she said. ‘I believe there is a corridor to a similar door, and another set of steps and then a long corridor that winds the length of the palace and brings us to the head of the stairs where Hypatia is being kept. Am I right?’

  Kleopatra brought herself past the carnage. ‘There will be a guard at each of the doors,’ she said. ‘We should have questioned this one before he died, to find if Saulos has already gone through.’

  ‘He has. And he knew we were coming,’ Pantera said. ‘The guard had his sword newly out.’ The others turned to stare at him. He shrugged. ‘The oil of the sheath still shone on the whetted edge. It dulls very quickly. Seneca taught me.’

  ‘And Seneca taught Saulos,’ Iksahra said. ‘We have to hope he has remembered less than you have or our passage will not be easy.’ She led the way at a jog-run.

  Pantera followed, and wondered what he would do if he were Saulos, if he knew what he thought Saulos knew, and if he did not know the things he hoped Saulos would not know.

  At the head of the next set of steps, with the gore of the next dead guard sticky underfoot, he held up his hand.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘When Menachem enters this place as its king, where will he go first?’

  He saw Kleopatra tilt her head, bright as a dawn bird, thinking. ‘He’ll go straight to the king’s chambers,’ she said, in time. ‘Three rooms in a suite at the far end of the top floor. The outer room has a fountain in the centre and windows set high in the north-easterly part of the wall. Two rooms lead off it. The bedroom is to the west, with a wide bed for the making of heirs or …’

  She broke off and did not detail, as perhaps she might once have done, the things her uncle did there that would never lead to heirs. Her colour high, she said, ‘There’s a third room that was once a bathing room with sunken baths, but these are laid over with boards now, and it has two dining couches and perhaps a low trestle table, although the slaves may have taken it out. This and the bedchamber connect one to the other, so the three rooms make a ring. There are no weapons in any of them, unless you can use the table. The mosaics are considered the best in the kingdom.’

  ‘And no guard?’

  ‘My uncle’s guards fled with him to Antioch.’ Disdain made her more like her aunt than she had ever been.

  Pantera clapped her shoulder. A man’s response to a man, or a boy; not a girl. ‘If you are ever in need of employment, I will train you as a spy. The work is half done.’

  He faced Iksahra, eye to eye, and then Mergus. ‘There will be, at most, half a dozen guards at the entrance to the last corridor; you can deal with those easily, particularly if you use the same ruse to take you close. Go
now, fast, and free Hypatia and Estaph, and Berenice.’

  ‘You’re not coming with us?’ Kleopatra asked.

  ‘No. You don’t need me. I have … other work.’

  ‘Saulos is upstairs.’

  He laughed at her, at the speed of her reasoning. ‘I think so, yes.’

  She chewed her lip, considering, and then nodded. ‘It has to be you, I suppose.’

  Mergus, who knew him best, caught his eye for a moment, and held it. Whatever he read there was enough. He turned away, and signalled his men with him.

  It was Iksahra who caught Pantera’s wrist and held him fast. ‘You’re going after Saulos? Alone?’

  ‘I have to. If he escapes now … Iksahra, I have to kill him. I must.’

  ‘You and you alone.’ Her gaze searched his face. ‘He will be expecting you.’

  ‘Even so, I must go.’

  ‘Of course.’ Her smile was something from the desert, sharp and savage and full of the promise of death. ‘Go then.’ Her fingers sprang open, releasing his arm. ‘Kleopatra says that the newly dead go joyful to their gods.’

  ‘Some of them do,’ he said. ‘I doubt if Saulos will be among them.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  THE DOOR TO the king’s quarters in Herod’s palace at Jerusalem was not built to be knocked upon by human hand.

  Cedar formed the frame for carob wood inlaid with ebony and ivory, with lapis lazuli and rubies set on its face in the same patterns as on the floor of the jewel house in the palace at Masada. The thinnest part of it was thicker than a man’s arm, and its scent, heady, aromatic, full of promises of wealth and power, filled the corridor for twenty feet in either direction.

  It was a door that was built to be guarded, with a niche on either side to take a tall man and his helmet: here more than anywhere was visible Herod’s fondness for the Gauls. Nobody else was that tall, except of course Iksahra’s people, the Berberai, but nobody had ever yet enslaved a Berber.

  No guards stood there now, slave or otherwise, but even so it felt improper to hammer on it with his fist.

  Pantera took a moment to breathe, to be still, to remember who he was and why he had come, and what he had to do; he remembered fire and a man’s death, and a woman lost for ever, and then unthought each of these, because neither rage nor grief was useful to him here.

  Filled with the clarity that comes sometimes in the midst of battle, he reversed the gladius he had brought from Masada and rapped its hilt on the hard wood.

  The sound rang down the corridors, echoes rolling in the dust. He called out into the hollow emptiness.

  ‘Saulos! You can circle round those three rooms, but there’s no way out besides this door. I can sit here and starve you out, or we can end this now, face to face, with what’s left of our honour.’

  He thought he had made a mistake, that it wasn’t Saulos he had heard, that he had sent Iksahra and Kleopatra into a trap, that he had fallen into one himself, that he had failed Hypatia …

  The door swung open under his hand. Pantera sprang back from the expected blow, or arrow, or spinning knife, but none of these came; Saulos, too, had taken a step back and so they met at last, alone, face to face, blade to longer blade, for Saulos had a cavalry sword, of the kind given to the guards at the chamber doors, with a blade twice as long as Pantera’s legionary gladius. It looked fearsome, but was too long to use in a tight space.

  The room into which they stepped was not a tight space; Kleopatra had warned him of that, but it was quiet, a place where sounds of battle rumbled softly, as from a city far away, where men and horses fought and died for other reasons than theirs.

  Then Saulos smiled, and all Pantera could see was that same smile flashing in the black dark of Augustus’ temple in Rome, with fire all around and the stench of bodies burning, and all he could feel was the touch of Hannah’s skin against his own in the morning, knowing she must go.

  He said, ‘You look weary. Are you as tired of this hunt as I am?’

  ‘A trick of the light.’ Saulos stepped back into the first of nine perfect panes of sun cast on the floor by the windows set in the high wall. Mosaic spirals wound round his feet in a living river of colour, a hundred times sharper than those at Masada, and better set. ‘I never tire.’

  It was possible to believe that. He had taken time to change his clothes from battle garb to his sand-coloured silk, uncreased except around the hem, where it looked as if he had lain down for some time, and only recently risen.

  Encased in his subtle finery, he looked joyful, like a hound that hears a hunt, while Pantera … Pantera had no idea how he looked. He was striving for calm and supposed that it showed.

  He stepped into the room and felt the door swing behind him. He took a wide step to his left and another and they began to circle, slowly, lazily, with a marble fountain playing between them and the reclining couch behind. It was carved of ebony, padded with silk dyed to deepest porphyry. It sang, siren-like, drawing Pantera closer to sit, to lie, to sleep and never wake.

  Saulos asked, ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘I heard you when we were in the slaves’ corridors below, after Iksahra’s cheetah killed the second guard. Where else would you be but here, where the king will retire when he has taken his kingdom?’

  ‘He has to win the battle first,’ Saulos said. ‘Nothing is certain.’

  The air smelled of cedar, and old incense, and wine and, near the bedroom, of balsam. They circled on. They were too evenly matched to take risks; each had too many memories of their last fight to be the first to step in.

  Pantera said, ‘Does your god still require that Jerusalem be destroyed to bring about his eternal kingdom?’

  ‘Of course. The Kingdom of Heaven will rise from the ashes of two cities, Rome and Jerusalem.’

  ‘But you failed to burn Rome. Your prophecy required that first, before the destruction of Jerusalem. If you fail in the first part, what point in pursuing the second?’

  ‘I burned enough of it.’

  ‘And most of your men died as you did so.’

  Saulos shrugged. ‘I have enough men. And they will glory in the kingdom God brings to them. You will see it from whichever rank of Hades you have entered.’

  The room was exactly as Kleopatra had said: an antechamber, where visitors might be kept for long enough to reflect on the king’s wealth and their own insignificance. Windows opened along the heights of the wall opposite, nine oblongs of unblemished blue, casting their cool light in patterns on the floor.

  Pantera passed them, and felt a draught of cool, fresh air, and yearned to sit and let it wash him. Not yet, though. Two doors lay behind him, one in the south, one in the west, both hanging ajar: the bedroom and the dining room that was once a bath room. He had an idea and set about testing it.

  He leaned in and tapped Saulos’ sword with his own. The long blade swayed away and came back again, steady, firm, true.

  Pantera stepped back. ‘You came here to kill Menachem, but you will fail. Everyone knows you are here; if I can’t kill you, others will, and then Israel will have peace.’

  Saulos slashed at his face. Pantera felt the rasp of iron in the air, smelled the whet of its blade. He spun away out of reach.

  Saulos said, ‘Not if the governor of Syria gets here in time with his legions. You know I have sent for him?’

  ‘Iksahra’s falcons took your dove from the sky. The governor isn’t coming.’

  ‘Liar!’ Saulos raged forward, through the haze of light from the windows. Their blades clashed and clashed again and they parted, each a little wiser. ‘I took the beastwoman prisoner before she could do harm. And Hypatia is dead. I had her throat cut before you could reach her.’

  ‘No. I would know.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I would know.’ He was sure of that. Almost sure.

  They came to a natural halt, facing each other across the fountain. The door was not locked. It swayed a little, caught by some unfelt current. />
  The air was thickening, braiding itself in ropes that drew taut between them, but they were further apart than they had been, each so wary now of the other’s assault that they kept to the margins of the room.

  Pantera had measured the distance; thirteen paces plus a half. He had planned the two moves it would take, one to pull his knife from his sleeve, the other to throw it, and how much closer Saulos could be by the time of the throw.

  And then there was the door, which had moved again, slowly, soundlessly, and was lying open by a hand’s breadth.

  Pantera moved a pace to his right, so that the high windows’ light was not blinding him. ‘Yusaf ben Matthias came with me out of the city last night. This morning at dawn, he bore witness when Gideon the Peacemaker anointed Menachem as the rightful king of Israel. I thought you should know; Yusaf is the one who sent us the scroll that proved Menachem’s right to the throne. He will be the new king’s foremost counsellor.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Saulos stopped and stared at him in frank disbelief.

  Pantera did three things then, fast: he threw his sword high up over the fountain, so that it tumbled down in a dazzle of water-light and sunlight; he drew the knife from his left arm, and threw it; and, as it left his fingers, he hurled himself to the left.

  The knife missed: he had known that it would. The falling blade sheared close to Saulos’ left shoulder, slicing away a collop of flesh in a mirror to the wound Menachem had sustained on Masada. Saulos grunted like a kicked horse, and swayed away from the threat, as any man would, but he ran forward, which was his undoing.

  Pantera continued his roll, tumbling like an acrobat straight through the open door of the king’s dining room that had once been Herod’s private baths.

  He saw the vertical shadow of the doorway pass him by and kicked the door shut as he cleared it, then thrust one hand down, pivoting on it until the bones of his elbow popped, and came round almost full circle, in time to drop the bar across, sending prayers to the old king, Herod the Great, and his paranoia that said every private room must be readily barred against intruders.