The Coming of the King

Chapter Ten

The same doubts haunted Mergus throughout the following day, magnified by the fragile beauty of this place, which had lain all day in silence, without a single riot.

Come evening, he and Pantera walked down to the harbour where an old sun lay at ease in the west, draping mellow light across the ocean. Fat gulls flopped after a fishing boat late to dock. Old men in tattered tunics sat on a line of steps, mending fishing nets with nimble fingers.

Mergus and Pantera passed the Temple of Augustus, its white marble washed to citrus in the evening light. The tide was out; a line of green showed where it reached, and all below was studded with limpets and strands of seaweed. The air hung soft with salt and ripe with ready violence.

Mergus said, ‘I was in Colchester, in Britain, just before the revolt broke out; it felt like this. I wish they’d fight and get it over.’

Pantera was just behind him. ‘It’ll happen before the night’s out. The king’s taking the petition at the theatre tonight. If anything’s going to spark a riot, that will.’

Mergus was about to say ‘What petition?’ but Pantera stumbled on a loose coil of rope and caught Mergus’ elbow as he fell, swearing vocally, and blaming Mergus for all the ills the world had ever seen.

Recoiling, Mergus pushed himself away. ‘Leave then, I don’t care!’ He dusted himself down with the exaggerated dignity of the drunkard and stormed on the last few paces to the quayside, praying that he had read aright the warning in Pantera’s eyes.

He turned the corner. The fishing boat had docked and emptied. The old men had all gone home. A gaggle of dock boys was leaving, no different from the dock boys who roamed the banks of the Tiber in Rome, or the quay at Ostia, or Alexandria or any other city Mergus had been to. They stared at him, whispering, and ran past.

He walked alone along the harbour’s edge, practising in his mind the pass phrase Pantera had taught him: The moon is fine and full tonight, perfect for fishing, and then the reply: You are right; if we leave at the moon’s height, we should have luck.

For courage, he said it aloud: ‘The moon is fine and full tonight-’

A flash of dark, where had been only white walls. A scrape of a heel on the harbour stone. A tingling in the air, as of past thunder and present lightning…

Mergus wrenched himself bodily away from where he had been, spun, rolled forward and over his shoulder and came up with his knife in his hand. He cursed that he had not brought a longer, legionary blade, something that might be of use against the black death in front of him, and the flashing iron that struck for his neck, his shin, his thigh, his ears — his ears? — one after the other in a set of moves so fast they left him breathless and bleeding and wanting to clutch at his head to see if the knife had severed the last so swiftly he had not yet felt their loss.

There was pain in his right thigh and his left shin and blood ran freely from a single wound on the top of his right wrist where the skin flapped forward every time he slashed out with his own blade, showing a shine of bone beneath the blood.

He was slicing, not making contact. He bled from a dozen points, and his opponent was whole, unblooded. Deep-set eyes studied him from under a tumble of long black hair brilliant as a raven’s wing that framed in its turn a lean face, not given to laughing.

It wasn’t laughing now. It was still, sober, thoughtful, assessing where next to make a cut so that Mergus feared for his ears again, that he might look like the bear-warriors of the Eceni, who lopped off their right ears and shaved their heads to show themselves wholly given to the she-bear. They were The blade passed by his neck. His body became elastic, sheering sideways. He slipped and fell and rolled, rug-wise, towards the harbour’s edge, flung out an arm and felt his palm scrape on grit, smelled salt and weed and the slop of swaying water at the tide’s turn.

A voice above him said, ‘If we leave at the moon’s height-’ and he felt the knife’s point on the inner edge of his shoulder blade, just to the left of his spine, felt his ribs part to receive it, his heart pause, ready to hug the iron, to draw it in, to cease its ceaseless beat for ever.

‘No!’ Mergus wrenched round, scrabbling for purchase on the stone and then the oak that bounded the harbour’s edge. He felt a fist crunch on the back of his head, twisted his face to save his nose, and And offered his soul to Mithras, for he was lying on his back at the water’s edge with one arm scraping the barnacles and the knife above him, held two-handed, was coming straight for his heart. In the slow pearl of time that held him, he heard his own blade splash into the harbour, and the rippling waves it set dancing against the edge.

And then, from nowhere, an arrow struck the oak a hand’s breadth from his head. It stood there, humming, while Mergus’ heart clenched and unclenched and he thought he might be sick from shock.

With frozen clarity, a voice said, ‘If he dies, you die. Choose.’

The knife held still. Mergus stared at it, blinking. Softly, not to him, his assailant said, ‘The moon is fine and full tonight, perfect for fishing.’

‘You are right,’ said the other voice. ‘If we leave at the moon’s height, we should have luck.’ Mergus thought it was Pantera. He prayed so, but he had never heard Pantera so bloodlessly calm.

‘Who are you?’ The knife had not moved. Mergus allowed his focus to slide sideways to the arrow. It was fletched in the Nabatean fashion, with goose and crow in white and black alternating bars. He had ridden through the desert with those arrows beside him.

‘I am father to your newborn cousin,’ Pantera said. ‘I am the last left alive who saw your grandfather, the Galilean, lifted living from his tomb and carried to safety under the care of Mariamne, who was his wife, who carried in her womb his unborn daughter. That daughter’s name is Hannah. She is your father’s sister, although in looks, she could be your twin.’

The knife vanished, gone as surely as the sun was gone. Mergus lay where he was, studying the killer who stood over him, giving him a woman’s eyes, and her healing soul, and found that with both of these, he did, indeed, look like the woman he had met in Rome.

‘You are Menachem ben Yehuda,’ he said, at last, when nobody else had spoken. ‘Eldest grandson of the Galilean. Leader of the War Party in Jerusalem.’ He tried to sit up, and lay back again, with the world swimming round him, sending scarlet streaks across the dove-grey dusk.

‘He is Menachem,’ agreed Pantera. ‘And I am Sebastos Abdes Pantera, son of Julius Tiberius Abdes Pantera. My father was an archer in the service of the Jerusalem Guard.’

‘The archer’s son, I heard, gave his life to the service of the late spymaster Seneca. Has he now a new master?’

They waited, Mergus and the man Menachem, who led the War Party in Jerusalem, who led, in that case, the zealot assassins, who killed men without care or compassion, so it was said.

‘I serve Seneca’s successor,’ Pantera said carefully, ‘who is known as the Poet. The line of succession is clear, and our allegiance to it.’ He did not say that the Poet was named Jocasta, nor that it was her younger brother, Publius Papinius Statius, who had the public fame for poetry he didn’t write. He never said that, nobody did; it was possible nobody else knew.

A shadow passed over Mergus’ face. Firm fingers wrapped his wrist, away from the skin wound. A hand slid under his shoulder. He was drawn up to sit, and then to rise. He stood, swim-headed, and looked for Pantera and found him standing in the shadows of the merchants’ booths barely ten yards away. He was holding a Nabatean war-bow at full draw as if it were a child’s toy.

‘We came to meet Yusaf ben Matthias. You are not he.’ Mergus spoke to Menachem, but his eyes were on Pantera, drawing him back to the world they shared. He saw the arrow’s tip taken down, heard the sigh of the string relaxing.

‘Ben Matthias has an appointment he could not avoid. He sent me in his stead, to see if you were truly sworn to Seneca, or had been sent instead by his enemy to destroy his agents now that the Teacher is dead.’

‘We are here to destroy his enemy,’ Pantera said, warily. ‘And in doing so, to save your people. If you will help us, we will be grateful. If you would hinder us…’

‘Then we would find out which is the faster, my knife or your arrow.’ Menachem smiled now and Mergus saw that he was a decade younger than Pantera, that his smile came more readily, that his face was less lined from the sun. But his eyes held the same distant appraisal, his voice the same irony, his shoulders the same set, as of a war-hound, ready to hunt.

Menachem said, ‘Yusaf ben Matthias is at the theatre, where it is illegal for anyone to bear a weapon of war. If you leave your bow where the Watch will not find it, I will take you to him.’