The Coming of the King

Chapter Eight

The noise hid in the sea-mist that rolled over the palace gardens, almost, but not quite, private. Hypatia caught the sound’s thread and followed it along a paved path past a series of three marble fountains, on each of which a weed-clad Oceanid cavorted in bronze, spilling water from hand or hair or heel.

Beyond them, at a corner where the cyclamens and orchids wove a pastel carpet, she turned left towards the sea and passed through avenues of scarlet tulips, dripping dew fat as blood. There, at the garden’s end, a set of stairs led down to a pair of iron gates and on the steps a dark-haired girl sat slumped with her head in her hands, sobbing just loudly enough to be audible throughout the gardens.

Hypatia crouched on the top step and waited a while, watching. When it was clear she was not going to be acknowledged, she said, ‘Kleopatra?’

The girl’s head snapped up. She had sharp features, honed by eyes that held exactly the same startling gaze as her aunt Berenice’s, but that these were greener and paler now than they had seemed in the lamplight, almost the colour of the deep ocean sea. A tear slid down one cheek, sharp as a diamond.

‘Is this because I caused the queen to send you out of the audience room the other night?’ Three of the five days had passed until Hypatia was due to attend the theatre. Slowly, she was learning where she could and could not go.

‘Oh, that.’ The girl tipped her head, considering. Plain on her face was the calculation of what she might gain by agreeing with Hypatia’s suggestion.

Honesty, or pragmatism, won. ‘No. It’s Iksahra, the black beastwoman. She promised she’d let me fly the falcon before we go to Jerusalem, and we might ride at any moment. But she’s taken Hyrcanus and his tiercel out instead. She loves him — Hyrcanus, not the bird. They hide in the horse stalls and fornicate.’ That last was said with all the boundless venom of a wounded girl-child.

Hypatia, who did not believe it, let her eyes grow wide. ‘Does your uncle, the king, know that?’

‘I’ve told him, so he must.’ Kleopatra stood up, dragging her fingers through her mist-sodden hair. She wore a plain, undyed linen tunic, belted with leather, not silver. If Hypatia had not known her already, it would have been altogether too easy to mistake her for a well-dressed slave. In this palace, the slaves were dressed in fabric of better weave than at least half the city’s population.

Kleopatra said, ‘You’re the Chosen of Isis.’

Hypatia had heard her title spoken in awe and hope, in fear and horror, in longing, in grief, in love. More rarely than any of these, she had heard it said in hate, by priests of other gods who fell in the shadow of her own.

She had never heard it spoken as an insult before; even Iksahra had managed to keep the inflection from her voice. She inclined her head. ‘I am.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why were you Chosen?’

No one in twenty-five years had asked that. Hypatia closed her eyes, the better to think. The better, in fact, to ask the god who sometimes gave answers.

Not today. Her mind was empty of all but the horror of the night’s dream. It was coming continually, now that Saulos was close.

Opening her eyes, she said, ‘I had dreams as a child.’

‘True ones?’

‘Dreams are rarely completely true. They show the essence of what might be; the skill is in the reading. But I had vivid dreams and they felt real to me, which was what mattered. And I acted on them, which mattered too. If you honour your dreams, they will honour you.’

‘My dreams frighten me.’

A wind blew, there in the garden, shifting the scents of wild and tame flowers. A high, fine note sounded in Hypatia’s ear, the warning whistle of the gods. ‘Do you act on them?’ she asked.

Abruptly, the girl stood, brushing her hands on her tunic. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I brought two hounds as a gift to Queen Berenice from the empress of Rome. I came to see they were being well cared for.’

‘The empress of Rome is dead.’

‘I know. But her majesty ordered me to bring them while she was still alive.’

‘From Rome?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it true the emperor has taken a boy to wife in place of the empress, and made him a woman?’

‘It wasn’t when I left.’

Strictly speaking, she spoke the truth: the boy in question had been gelded and was being groomed as Nero’s wife, but had not actually been married at the time the Krateis sailed. Hypatia was an Oracle and Oracles never lied. Never.

To avert another silence, she said, ‘I should go to the beast garden. I want to take the hounds out for a run along the shoreline. They were on board ship for a month; even now, after three days on land, they crave sea air and flat ground.’

Not only the hounds sought freedom and clean air. Hypatia thought perhaps her own craving was there to be read, had the child the necessary literacy. She made no particular effort to hide it.

Kleopatra’s smile was sharply fierce. ‘Can you ride a horse? A good horse?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you can come riding with me and bring your hounds for exercise!’ She smacked the stone step in triumph. ‘Nobody will see us leave if we go before the mist rises.’

Hypatia said, ‘The mist’s rising now. If you look down to the sea, it’s blue again.’

Kleopatra’s hair sank straight to her shoulders. When, as now, she shook her head, the morning’s faint sun spun around her. ‘We have an hour at least. The king doesn’t rise early any more. Not since Saulos came.’

She was a fountain of facts. ‘Are we going to look for Iksahra and her falcons?’ Hypatia asked.

‘What do you think?’

They were already walking through the iron gates. Beyond was the king’s beast garden, stocked with hound kennels and stables and mews for the hunting birds. To one side, in an iron cage bigger than the perfectly serviceable, well-fitted room in which Hypatia had spent the night, Iksahra’s cheetah lay on an elevated tree branch, left behind that the beastwoman might give the young prince, Hyrcanus, her full attention. It yawned as they approached, showing perfect, pearline teeth, long as eating knives. They walked close past it, to show they were not afraid.

At the stables, Kleopatra didn’t have to give orders. As she rounded the corner, stable hands ran to make her horse ready, and then did the same for Hypatia. Both mounts were red mares, both kindly, clean-limbed, built for speed but not stupidly so.

The kennel-men loosed the two hounds Hypatia had brought and they came joyous to heel, tails beating the air, muzzles wet with the need to hunt. Long-legged, rough-coated, their heads were high as her waist, and when they stood on their hind limbs in greeting their front feet reached her shoulders. She had named them Night and Day; the bitch dark as winter wood, the dog the gold-fawn of desert sand.

Hypatia fed them the meat she had brought from the palace kitchens, not much, just a handful, to remind them that they loved her, not the Berber woman who was beastmaster.

Kleopatra had mounted lightly. On horseback, she grew in stature and fire, became a hunting cat in her own right with polished jewels for eyes. With a hound at either hand, Hypatia looked up at her.

‘We need to be clear. Is this an offer from a friend, a request for the Chosen of Isis, or an order from a princess of Caesarea?’

The princess turned her brightened gaze on Hypatia. ‘Just now, it’s an order. If that changes, you can be sure I will let you know. The gates are open. We shall walk the first quarter-mile to the shore’s edge, then we can let the horses run.’

The falcon screamed as she launched from Iksahra’s fist; a high, keening note that cut the cool morning from horizon to horizon, so that Hypatia would not have been surprised to see the sky split apart and the night leak back through.

Such power to behold, such fury. From launch to height, the bird’s spread wings became a bar of slate grey, lost for a moment as she streaked low across the brilliant sea, then found again as she leapt from the wavetops and spiralled upwards to become, in so short a time, a scribble, lost in the aching wilderness of the sky.

They were galloping now; Hypatia and the Princess Kleopatra, racing along the marginal land where sea met shore and harsh grasses kept the one from sweeping away the other. They were lying flat to their horses’ necks, letting the reins free, trying to keep up with the bird and the Berber woman who had loosed it.

Ahead, Iksahra sur Anmer was a mosaic of black limbs and white linen tunic set against pale grey sands and a paler horse. She had seen the woman and the girl who were following her, Hypatia thought, but she had not slowed her mount. Kleopatra’s cousin, the Prince Hyrcanus, had not seen them and was not likely to unless they placed themselves physically in front of him; he had eyes only for the Amazon who led their wild hunt along the shore.

He had good reason. Tall and lean, the woman sat her horse with the ease of a born rider, and hers was not a fair-limbed, kindly mare such as had been given Hypatia, but one of the fire-blooded horses the Berber tribes bred to keep their children safe from harm, that were kept in their tents and fed dates and asses’ milk and the last of the water in drought, that fought with teeth and feet against wild beasts and bandits with equal ferocity but could be led by a three-year-old child, that could carry a woman in the last hours of pregnancy so smoothly her waters would not break.

Iksahra wore man’s garb again, as she had at the docks — likely as she did all the time — and the fine linen weave of her robes wrapped around her in the wind of her gallop. From arrogance, or for necessity, she rode without reins, leaving her hands free for the hunting birds that rode with her, clinging on arched perches mounted on either side of the pommel.

She untied the tiercel as she rode, pulling the leash free with teeth that shone white against her skin. He raised his wings and lifted lightly, using the wind of their running to hold him a hand’s breadth above her gauntleted wrist.

‘Would you see him hunt along the ground, while his mate rides high in the sky?’

Even at a shout, her accent was light, dancing over the consonants, softening the vowels. Hypatia had drawn nearly level and found herself looking into a face of sculpted oak, with spirals tattooed across cheekbones and nose and ice-black eyes that threw her a challenge she did not fully understand. At least there was some humanity there, which was an improvement on the cold of their last meeting.

They drew their horses to a halt. The hounds flopped to lie on the sands, tongues a-loll.

Hypatia said, ‘I would see your bird do what he does best.’

‘What he does best is to fly high and kill.’ The dancing voice laughed, not kindly. ‘But he will hunt and return to me if I ask him. Or if Hyrcanus does. One day, the king’s heir will hunt these lands. We are teaching him the skills he needs.’

We. A woman and her hunting beasts, laying claim to royal pretensions. A horse halted level with theirs.

From Hypatia’s other side, Kleopatra said, ‘Perhaps my cousin could wait? The falcon is stooping to her kill. Such a thing deserves to be watched alone.’

She spoke with her aunt’s voice; if they had closed their eyes, they would have thought Berenice among them.

Iksahra did close her eyes, hooding them against the outer world. With a nod that was, by a hair, courteous rather than curt, she set the tiercel back on his perch again and turned her horse to the sea to watch her falcon at work.

They heard the bells first, the high whistle in the wind that was a prelude to a death. Faster than she had disappeared, the falcon grew in the sky, became a pinpoint and then a falling arrowhead, fixed in shape with the wings curved back, taut as a drawn bow, sleek slate grey.

Hypatia saw the prey-bird late, as a streak of sand-coloured movement flitting along the shore, piping reedily. Moments later, it died in a punch of talons on flesh and bone. Feathers danced high in the air, light as husks in a threshing yard.

Iksahra pursed her lips and whistled a single short note. The falcon made a tight turn, dragging the shore-bird in one yellowed foot, and brought it to hand, landing hard. Shore-webbed feet and a long, curled beak hung down, senseless in death. Three drops of blood smeared the pale doeskin glove.

A gasp came from Hypatia’s left, a small noise, drawn from the soul, such as one might make at the height of love, or in extremes of pain. And that high whine again in her ear, so that she turned her head only a fraction, too little to draw attention to herself, and so saw the Princess Kleopatra as few people could have seen her, laid raw to the world, open, unguarded and uncaring, moved to a joy beyond words.

It was gone in a breath, in a heartbeat. Kleopatra turned her horse neatly on its hocks. Her eyes were flat again, the granite-sea of her aunt’s.

‘Teach me,’ she said. ‘Now. We could ride for Jerusalem at any time. Saulos said so. You might not come.’

‘Kleo…!’ Hyrcanus stared at her in horror, flicking his eyes to Hypatia and back in exaggerated horror. Kleopatra gave a curt, scornful laugh. ‘She’s the Chosen of Isis. She knows everything.’

‘Does she?’ Iksahra asked.

‘I know that the royal family will go to Jerusalem some time soon,’ Hypatia said, truthfully. ‘I have no idea at all if you’ll go with them.’

She didn’t say that she had no idea yet as to why they might go, except that it must be an emergency: no royal family travelled at night unless they were in haste and in secret.

Iksahra favoured her with the same hooded gaze as before. ‘Where goes the king, so go I. The princess can learn as easily in the deserts outside Jerusalem as here.’

Kleopatra shook her head. ‘There are going to be riots, maybe war. And whatever starts here will spread to Jerusalem within days, my aunt, the queen, said. The hunting might stop. You have to teach me now.’

‘Kleo, you can’t learn in a day. I’ve been learning for nearly two months and I truly don’t know what I’m doing.’ Hyrcanus was kind; warmth laced his voice, his eyes, his hand as he leaned over to take his cousin’s arm.

She shook him off. Her fiery green gaze was locked now with the Berber woman’s; green on black, hot, fierce passion locked on a gaze that was cold as loss. There was hate in the core of Iksahra’s soul, but it was locked so tight that Hypatia doubted if even the woman herself could feel its fire.

Iksahra broke away first. She looked out across the sea. The falcon fed on her fist, throwing gobbets of feathered gore left and right, ripping at the flesh beneath. The tiercel tilted his hooded head, hearing, not moving.

‘The falcon is sated. If we flew her now, she would find a tree and not come down for three days. When we go to Jerusalem, we would lose her.’

‘The tiercel then.’

Hyrcanus said, ‘If she wants to fly it, I don’t mind.’ He was a prince and he still thought he was party to the decision.

The Berber woman stroked one dark forefinger down the rosy breast of her smaller hunting bird. ‘So,’ she said. ‘This is the tiercel. He is the male. He is smaller. He is weaker. But still he gives his heart to us. Is that what you want?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you do exactly as I say, in the moment I say it, without question?’

Kleopatra, who had been schooled in the etiquette of court, and in riding, and perhaps in the handling of falcons, but not at all in the nature of the worlds beyond the world and how they listened to an oath, said, clearly, ‘I will.’

Her voice carried across the desert, here in the place where ghuls and ifrit roamed, listening for a word that might be taken hostage; where Isis and Mithras heard the tones of truth and placed them in the balance, to be weighed later, against other actions; where a future could change on the balance of a word.

Triumph sparked briefly in Iksahra’s eyes, a flash of heat in the cold. ‘Then we shall start. Hyrcanus, give your glove to your cousin.’

The Berber woman was gentle as she set the falcon and placed her glove behind the tiercel, pressing lightly against the yellow skin of his leg so that he must step back and up on to her fist.

Bells shaped like hollow beans were tied to his legs in the place the message cylinders were tied on the courier-birds. They chimed musically as he stepped from the perch to her gloved fist. Iksahra stroked his breast with her forefinger, settling one rose-blushed feather back into place. For all his small size, the tiercel was richer in colour than his mate, tinted bronze around his breast and throat where she was slate grey, stark against white.

‘If you are to ask a bird to fly for you, you must give him a reason. He must trust you to hold him steady, to loose him cleanly, and always to feed him when he comes. If these three things apply, he will come back to you even when he has killed, trusting your hand as the safest place to eat. So to begin with, you shall feed him a piece of the bird his mate has caught and then you shall loose him…’

They were intimate as lovers, Iksahra and the girl, their two heads bent together, almost touching, startling in their contrast, white skin and black, straight hair and curled, tutor and pupil.

Hypatia felt a different gaze and looked up and caught Hyrcanus watching her. He gave a rueful smile and tilted his head a little and, seeing the grace of it, Hypatia moved her mare back a step and turned her away so that she and Hyrcanus might follow, but not be part of, the lesson that excluded them both.

When the bird flew and made its kill, she was not part of it, and did not see what it brought down, except that it had come from the city, and knew nothing of its death.

Later, in the afternoon, Hypatia excused herself from the palace, from the claustrophobia of attendants and guards and stewards and maids and slaves and minor royalty, away from the perfumed, incensed air, away from the flower garden and the fruit garden and the beast garden and the swimming pool with its views of the sea, and walked along the long, open streets to the city, to the fruit market she had passed through the previous day.

As she left, she found that Polyphemos wished her to have a guard, which was astonishing considering he had gone to such remarkable lengths to prevent her from seeing Queen Berenice when she had first arrived. Now that she had seen the queen, it seemed, he regarded her as his personal responsibility and pressed on her an escort from palace Watch.

Thus she went among the sellers of cherries and citrus, of plums and melons, dried dates and figs, of almonds and olives and oils thereof, and wove through the stalls in the suffocating company of Agathon and Amyntas, who attempted conversation in the first hour and abandoned it thereafter, growing ever more sullen as the heat baked their mail and their helms and their hands in their leather gloves.

They did not know Pantera, and so did not know to look closely as she dropped a purse of silver coins in front of a particular vendor, to buy a small glazed mug containing his speciality of roasted almonds done in honey and minted oil, with shredded marigolds sprinkled over. They did not see the pickpocket who removed her purse from the vendor’s open belt pouch and returned it again shortly thereafter, nor did they notice when the pickpocket’s accomplice nodded to her as she traversed the next aisle, eating the almonds, sharing them with her guards out of pity.

She returned to the stifling palace feeling elated and irritable together. There was a time when, had the god allowed, she would have hated Pantera. That time was gone; in Alexandria and then Rome, she had seen the valleys and height of his soul and had found in herself a measure of respect that was granted to few in her life. She was not yet sure if she counted Pantera a friend, but she had been genuinely glad to see him and Mergus, had met their eyes and smiled at them covertly across the sea of strangers’ faces, and their smiles, covertly returned, had felt like splashes of colour in a grey winter’s day.

She gave the remains of her almonds to Polyphemos, who flushed an unfetching crimson. Leaving him, Hypatia went to see to the two hounds, Night and Day, who greeted her with joy, and had never yet brought her grief.