The Coming of the King

Chapter Nine

‘ Our enemy holds… has… the ear of the king. The royal family thinks… expects to leave for Jerusalem in secret by his order. Soon. I go where they go. Beware Iksahra, the king’s falconer. She’s signed it with the lily and the hound.’

Mergus was proud of the speed of his decoding, done without slate or paper. ‘Hypatia’s gift was accepted,’ he said. ‘She’s in.’

He and Pantera sat in a pungent fisherman’s tavern three blocks inland from the harbour, far enough from the side door for the smell of newly gutted fish from the day’s catch not to reach them, but not so far that the sea breeze could not keep the air clean.

They ate unleavened bread and olives and watered wine and, in their shadowed corner, with no one close enough to overhear or oversee, they ate fragments of Hypatia’s papyrus softened in the wine and rolled into pellets and fitted into the hollow core of an olive.

It was a drover’s dream of a meal and it was as drovers they ate and drank and talked, loudly and at length of the horses they dreamed of owning, the camels they would like to buy, the likelihood of a new train’s leaving Caesarea and where it might go. Never once did they look over their shoulders at Kleitos, the bearded Cypriot whose efforts to follow them had grown less subtle over the days. He had at least two accomplices in the tavern. Both had finished their meals and were sitting alone, pretending to drink wine.

Presently, as the watchers dulled towards sleep, Mergus leaned towards Pantera and murmured, ‘What next, and where?’

Pantera drained his wine, tipping the last dribble on to the table, as an offering to the watching gods. ‘We need to contact Seneca’s agent at the Temple of Tyche. First, we have to lose Kleitos and his idiot friends.’ He belched and leaned forward, planting both palms on the table so his mouth was by Mergus’ ear. He grinned, loosely. ‘If you could pretend affection, we might slip upstairs. There’s a room with a window overlooking the stables. Saulos was always a prude. There’s a reasonable chance that the men who follow him are the same.’

In so many ways, Pantera was wise. In a few, he was completely blind. Against the sudden turmoil in his chest, Mergus leaned over and kissed Pantera on the cheek, and laughed and ruffled his hair and, standing, made a slurred observation just too loudly for privacy.

He left the room with Pantera’s hand on his shoulder, both of them swaying with the evident effects of drink. Nobody followed them up the stairs.

Tyche, protector-goddess to the city of Caesarea, was wealthy. Images of her in Greek and Roman form were set atop marbled plinths flanking the broad, paved pathway that led to her temple. On its porch, a flame burned in a shining bronze brazier tended by three white-clad priests who ranged in age from a sweating novice through a twitchy lay member of the city’s council to a white-haired sage who leaned over the fire as if nothing else in the world was deserving of his attention.

His face was a dull liverish red from the constant heat, and the skin pulled tight about the frame of his skull. His eyes were yellowed at the whites and clouded at the centres.

Leaving Mergus at the foot of the steps, Pantera mounted with due solemnity towards the brazier. He felt in his belt pouch and found the offerings he had brought from Rome. According to a code laid down when he was a child and long before he had been recruited to the service of his emperor, he laid dried thyme, mint and sage one at a time on the flames.

Three threads of smoke sweetened the afternoon air. The novice stared at him in vapid resentment of his intrusion and the added work it might bring. The lay councillor kept his eyes on the skyline, too preoccupied with the threads of riot-smoke rising there to acknowledge his existence. But the sage stepped away from the heat, motioning for Pantera to follow him across the porch to the temple’s inner cool.

A wash of pale afternoon light kept the place from true darkness. From round a corner, the brazier sent sweet smoke to freshen the air. Pantera sank to his heels with his back to the wall, closed his eyes and murmured the invocation to the god; his god, not Tyche.

‘The journey was long?’ The old priest’s voice was thin as his skin, a paper, sawed across a reed. Still, he spoke the words Pantera needed to hear, and waited for the right answer.

‘As long as my life.’

‘You will go longer still.’

‘I intend to.’

Seneca had always made his greeting-tests simple: in their brevity was their accuracy, and so their assurance of safety. The priest slid his arms into his sleeves. The lines on his face softened, like old leather laid in water. He said, ‘Your master is dead.’

Pantera nodded, wordless. Each man said it as if it must be news; perhaps to them it was.

‘I hear he was allowed to take his own life.’

‘Nero is merciful,’ Pantera said, which was true. The others had not been granted such mercy. It was said that the wife of Piso, the chief conspirator, killed herself on the second day of her questioning, when she was being carried from the cells to the place of torture in a litter, her leg bones having been broken in so many places on the first day that she could not walk.

She had used her own belt, tying it to the rails of the litter to throttle herself, which must have taken some considerable courage but meant she had not been forced to give the names of those who had conspired. Thus, fewer had died than might have done, and all by their own hand. Nero was merciful because he was not sure. Certainty would have made him a monster.

Pantera said none of this, but the priest waited anyway while his thoughts ran their length, so that he might as well have spoken them out loud.

At the end, Pantera said, ‘Seneca’s replacement is known as the Poet. Beyond the name, nothing has changed; we use the same codes, the same routes, the same principles.’

‘Is that safe?’

‘It has been thus far, and Seneca took a lifetime setting up his network. To change it now would take more time than we have got.’

‘So, then, I will wait until someone else comes who throws three herbs on the brazier. In the meantime, do you have a question?’

‘I do. And I have brought a gift.’

A particular gold coin had lived for the past two months in the hem of Pantera’s tunic. Standing now, he pressed it into the priest’s palm.

The old man tested its weight briefly, and then smoothed his thumb over the image on the surface where rested the golden head of the Emperor Caligula, as sharply defined as when the coin fell from the dies of the mint. ‘Your need for succour must be great,’ he said.

‘I ask for your help in delivering a message.’

‘So?’ Failing eyes came up to search his face. ‘It is many years since I earned gold for the god by running errands.’

‘Fifteen years, so I was told, and now once more, which may be the last. One needs to know that the bull calf went safely to market, sent by the leopard’s attention.’

‘That is the message? All of it?’

‘It is. Unless you have reason to believe that the ears for whom it is spoken are no longer loyal to their former master?’

‘I believe no such thing. That one has been loyal for life. He remains so still.’

Pantera let himself smile. ‘Then you have the weight of my gratitude already. If we succeed in our endeavour, there is another like it. You yourself may have no need of gold, being bathed in the love of the god, but Tyche herself will find a use for it, I’m sure.’

The priest’s gaze drifted down at the lively spark of gold in his hand. Its shine leapt between his fingers, a small fish hunting morning flies. He blinked, as if his weak eyes were dazzled. ‘Will Caesarea come to harm from this?’ he asked, at length.

‘It will come to harm if our quest here fails. We hunt a man who seeks nothing less than the total annihilation of Israel. With your help, we will… remove him before he can wreak his havoc on your city.’

‘Did he kill your Teacher? Did he betray him to death and torment?’

‘No. Of this one crime, he is innocent. Seneca tried his best and he failed: his death was his own creation. Saulos is rather a traitor to the Hebrew people. He claims the Galilean as the messiah, and turns people away from their faith.’

‘You seek the apostate? The spewer of falsehoods?’ Anger livened the priest’s voice. ‘We of Tyche know him well, and despise him. We may not follow the goatherd’s god of the burning bush, but we know that if their promised messiah is ever to come, it will be the Galilean’s grandson who holds the title, not a man long dead who failed to deliver his people from the yoke.’ He tilted his head again. ‘Unless your enemy wishes to wrest the kingship for himself?’

Pantera gave a small bow. ‘The priests of Tyche are ever wise: that is exactly what he wants. He would rule under Rome as a vassal, and call it freedom.’

‘Can you stop him?’

‘With your help, I think I can.’

‘Then your message will reach the ears of the one you seek: Yusaf ben Matthias, a merchant of some wealth, trained in the ways of Hebrew wisdom. He sits on the council of the Sanhedrin in both Caesarea and Jerusalem. Your Teacher picked his men wisely, all those years ago, when we were all young.’ The priest smiled, lost in a haze of better times. His old, fast hands gathered past, present and future in the fire smoke and braided them to a single rope. ‘Yusaf will respond tomorrow evening if he can. You know the place to meet?’

‘I do.’ Pantera bowed then, and took his leave. The reed-voice followed him out.

‘You don’t ask anything for yourself.’

‘I didn’t know that I could.’ The steps that led down from the temple were long, the voice inescapable.

‘Some men cannot. But you, who have been touched by your god, could ask of the Galilean’s daughter, who is mother to your child. Both she and the infant thrive and are content in their love for each other and the man who cares for them. The boy who is not your son, but thinks of himself as such, is bored and wishes to join you. He cannot yet, but when he meets manhood he will try. If you would have freedom to teach him, you must kill your enemy. If he does not kill you first.’

Pantera had reached the bottom of the steps. He did not turn, or speak again, but left the old man standing in the still afternoon with gold light leaking from between his fingers, and went to find Mergus, to take him to the harbour, where the agent Yusaf ben Matthias might choose to appear to them on the next day’s evening. If he was alive. If he chose to come. If he had not in the meantime sold news of them to Saulos.