The Coming of the King

Chapter Seventeen

News of the governor’s departure reached the crowd around the theatre at almost the same time as did news that the king had taken eight talents of Hebrew gold to use against the Syrians.

It didn’t matter that Agrippa hadn’t taken it, and wouldn’t have used it against the Syrians if he had: facts had reached that malleable state where they fitted the prejudice of any individual and, when enough people held the same prejudice, the result was incendiary.

News that the royal family were also planning to leave the city was the spark that lit the combustible mass, that pushed the simmering crowd into screaming hysteria, into rolling chants that called for Hebrew blood, for Syrian blood, for Herodian blood, for Roman blood… and soon, inevitably, just for blood.

Pantera thrust through the mass, seeking Mergus. If anyone thought him a Nabatean archer trying to flee the violence they were welcome. If they thought him an agent of the emperor, trying to undo the damage, they were equally welcome. As long as nobody thought him either Hebrew or Syrian and tried to slide a knife between his ribs, he was happy.

He shouted, ‘Make way, make way,’ alternately in Latin and in the desert tongue of the Saba brothers and cared not if nobody understood either; at least he wasn’t speaking Greek or Aramaic.

He came to a small square with a nine-pillared fountain whose pipes had been wrenched out of line, spilling water darkly, like free-flowing blood, across the pavings and none at all into the fountain. Beyond it stood a temple to Jupiter Dolichenos that had not yet been sacked and then a long blind wall. Beyond that, men fought to put out a fire. Others stood and watched, as they had in Rome, as if fire were an entertainment, not a danger.

There was no obvious route through and yet every time Pantera turned west towards the palace, where Saulos must be, the prickle in his spine drew him east again, towards the synagogue, like iron to a lodestone. He turned left, therefore, and pushed his way through the thinning crowd. At its margin, a tall, dark figure was forging a straight line through its thinnest edge.

‘Menachem!’ Pantera shouted, and was not heard. He turned at a sharp angle and wove, ducking, past a Syrian fishwife and her three grown sons, who were shouting useless advice at the unheeding fire-fighters. He came up to the zealot from behind and shouted again, and saw a stocky figure beside him turn, and had time to call again ‘Menachem-’ before he must twist sideways and round and thrust his arm up and block the blade that came for his throat.

‘Moshe, no!’ Menachem, too, had gripped the same arm. The man they held between them was more wiry than stocky closer up, with hair wild as a bush and a beard to match. He set his lips in a hard line and shook himself free.

Menachem said, ‘Tonight, he is a friend,’ and his tone suggested he was speaking of both, to each. He carried a charge with him of simmering excitement, not unlike that of the rioters. Even as he dropped Moshe’s arm he was pushing through the crowds again, so that Pantera must follow, or be left behind.

Pantera said, ‘I’m looking for Mergus.’

‘I know. We have found him.’ Half turning, Menachem said, ‘On my orders, Moshe followed Mergus away from the theatre while we were inside. Mergus, in turn, followed the man Kleitos who has just sacrificed a dove on an upturned urn in the porch of the synagogue. If the rest of Caesarea finds out, the city will be ash and rubble by morning.’

‘Kleitos wouldn’t do that alone,’ Pantera said. ‘He hasn’t the courage.’ And then, ‘How many with him?’

Moshe turned, scowling darkly. ‘Five to begin with, but others were coming as I came away. At least a dozen.’

‘And we are three,’ Pantera said. ‘If we can go past the Temple of Mithras, my bow is there. It will even the odds.’

‘You can shoot in the dark?’ Menachem asked, with interest.

‘I can try.’

In the dark and flying shadows around the synagogue’s porch, the war-bow sang three times. Three men died with arrows in their throats before the rest realized they were under fire and dropped out of sight.

In the clot of heaving bodies at the back, only Estaph was clearly visible, a mountain of muscle, flanked on either side by shimmering iron as his axes spun and spun and now and then impacted with a skull, breaking it open with a noise that was audible far down the street in a fight that was otherwise marked by its lack of noise.

Even close to, Pantera heard little beyond the contained grunts of the battling men, none of whom wanted to attract the wrong attention and the majority of whom wanted to escape as soon as they realized whose side the bow was on. Hunting men as they fled was a sordid task at the best of times, made harder now by the necessity to be sure that each shape seen in the dark was not Mergus.

Pantera shot three more times, and then dropped the bow and drew his Saba blade and sliced it forward and outward, fast and fast and fast, and a man was dead and another had lost half the skin of his scalp and was blinded by his own blood so that Menachem, fighting with a ruthless efficiency at Pantera’s left side, was able to kill him without fuss and then the one that came after. Somewhere on Menachem’s other side, Moshe acquitted himself well, which is to say, he killed and did not die.

And then came the moment when no man was left standing except the three of them and Estaph, facing each other over a slippery mass of man-flesh with a smashed urn between them that might once have held the corpse of a sacrificed dove.

Seeing it, Pantera came to realize he had light enough to see by, that the flames from the burning theatre had wrought night to day, dispelling shadows. He turned on his heel, counting, in growing dread. Kleitos was not among the dead. Mergus was not among the living.

He came full circle, facing Estaph. ‘Where is he?’

‘Kleitos has him.’ Estaph stepped over the bodies, sheathing his axe handles in his belt. The battle-light was dying from his eyes, replaced by concern. ‘He was fighting Kleitos and three others away from me, and then… not. I couldn’t get to him. I’m sorry.’

‘We must find them swiftly.’ Pantera looked across the road. ‘Is your family still here, when there are flames fit to roast the city?’

‘No.’ Estaph smeared another man’s blood from his face. ‘I sent them to Damascus, to my wife’s father.’

‘Then why,’ asked Pantera, and he was already running, ‘is there torchlight coming from the back room of the house you were renting?’

Pantera ran with Estaph a bull-shadow at one shoulder and Menachem a black-eyed ghost at the other and, because they were all three hunters and ran in the dark, quietly, Kleitos neither heard nor saw them as he stepped out of the small, neat house at the end of the row, the one newly empty, that had been Estaph’s.

He bore a lamp with a small flame; they could not miss him. Pantera swerved across the street and felt Estaph move in behind him.

‘ Alive! ’ he called, as they met, bone to bone, forearm to jugular, with Kleitos crushed between. ‘We need him alive.’

And they had him alive, but not the two men who were with him, who died as they rushed forward. A third died to Menachem, who used his long, lean, narrow-pointed knife after the manner of the Sicari zealots, sliding it into the man’s chest and out again, leaving a small half-moon opening and no blood. It killed just as quickly as had Pantera’s.

‘And so answers,’ Pantera said, stepping back.

Estaph had Kleitos by the shoulders and was pulling outwards and backwards, as a man might to break a board of wood. Kleitos was a child in his hands, a puppet, jerking wildly with his feet not touching the ground. He shook his head wildly.

Pantera stood in front of him, face to face. He was shaking, not only with the aftermath of battle. ‘Where is he?’

‘You will die! You and all who fight with you: the centurion, the Alexandrian witch, the dove-boy and his father, these men here; all will die the slow, Roman death.’ Blue-faced and flecked with spittle, Kleitos spat. Estaph sighed and did something small with his hands that made the other man scream.

‘I said you would remain alive,’ Estaph said in his ear, ‘I did not say you would remain whole.’ He twisted again. Kleitos’ scream was hoarse this time and too high to hear clearly.

‘Where is Mergus?’ Pantera laid his knife on Kleitos’ face, pressing the tip close to his eye. ‘Tell me. Or I will tell Estaph to give you to me.’

‘There…’ Kleitos’ head gave a spasmodic jerk, back towards the house that had been Estaph’s.

‘In the back room?’

A nod.

‘Alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hold him.’

Menachem had gone away and come back. The channel of his blade was dark with blood. ‘Another two were in the house next door.’ By his tone, they were flowers, cut from a field, to be forgotten even before they fell. ‘Where’s your centurion?’

‘Through here.’

Wordless, Pantera pushed through a goatskin curtain to the windowless, airless, lightless place beyond. The stench of human faeces hit him as a physical blow, wrenching bile up his throat, to his nose, so that he had to bend over and thumb it out, choking.

‘Light!’ he called, back to where there was at least the glimmer of torchlight. ‘Get me light!”

Menachem brought a filthy, smoking torch, that called skeletal shadows leaping from the margins of a room so small that four paces in any direction might reach a wall. Most of it was filled with dried camel fodder, spiky with thistles. Broken beams of timber, hastily ripped from other places, had been cast on top with little care for how they settled, only that the resulting heap would burn. And among the florid odours of human ordure and sweet hay was the swell of lamp oil, poured liberally everywhere, over the hay, the timbers, and the pile of rags in the corner…

That was not a pile of rags, but a man, bound and gagged and… Pantera knelt, turned him over, felt at his throat for a long, desperate moment, and there, there! was a pulse, thready, fine, erratic, but leaping live under his fingers. He sat back on his heels and swept his hands over his face.

‘He’s alive?’ Menachem said, softly, from behind him. At Pantera’s nod, he shouted back to Estaph, ‘He’s alive. We need water.’

Pantera called, over him, ‘Estaph, kill Kleitos now, before I am tempted to roast him here. And keep the torches safe; a stray flame will burn us all.’

Moshe brought water and wool and Estaph came in, cleaning the head of his axe on a rag. The giant Parthian lifted Mergus like a child, carried him out past Kleitos’ pallid corpse and laid him on the pallet in the front room, away from the risk of fire.

There, Pantera pulled the gag from his mouth and cut the cords at his wrists and ankles. With Estaph’s help, he stripped him, and washed away the filth about his body, and the matted blood from the wound on his head, and dressed him again in his own tunic, with the worst of the blood rinsed from the wool.

Then, with fire raging in the city outside, and the sounds of riot building, they began the unpleasant work of bringing him back to consciousness, with water poured on his face, and into his throat, so that he must choke or drown and then, after choking, swallow.

Mergus moaned and turned his head away. Pantera tilted the beaker over his face, and let another half-cup dribble on to his nose. He choked and cursed and struggled, and Pantera held him steady until he opened his eyes, and peered, and blinked and made himself focus, and stared.

Pantera smiled down at him. ‘Does your head hurt?’

Mergus shook his head and then stopped. In a moment, whiter, he said, ‘Not as much as my hands.’

‘The ropes bit tight. Your hands will hurt until the blood comes back to them. The first hour is the worst.’

Mergus closed his eyes. A while later, he opened them again. ‘Kleitos?’

‘Dead.’

‘He said I was the first; that Saulos planned to kill your friends one by one by one: Hypatia, Estaph, the dove-boy, the priest of Tyche — even Menachem and Yusaf whom you barely know, with you at the last, knowing them all gone.’

Mergus’ cold fingers struggled for grip. With care, Pantera held them, and chafed them between his palms. Quietly, he said, ‘I will not let it happen.’ And then, because it didn’t seem enough, ‘We have thwarted him twice tonight. He will become more desperate after this, and make mistakes. All we need is patience, and we have enough of that, between us.’

Outside was a small flurry of men arriving and leaving and Menachem, who had gone to the door, came back again. He stood in the doorway, with the goatskin curtain pushed back on his arm. ‘The royal family has just departed for Jerusalem,’ he said. ‘Saulos is with them. He has lead place in the king’s retinue, behind only Agrippa himself.’

Pantera said, ‘Where’s Jucundus? He’ll need to know about this, to stem anything else that comes of it.’

‘Jucundus is leading the king’s train, riding at the head of five hundred horse,’ Menachem said. ‘His second, Acrabenus, has command of the Watch. He will contain the fires as readily as Jucundus might have done, which is to say not readily, but well enough to- No!’

Mergus was trying to rise. Pantera caught him as he toppled and lowered him back to the floor, sitting this time, not lying.

‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘not yet. We’ll tie you to a horse until you can hold the reins yourself.’ He looked up to where Menachem waited. ‘We ride for Jerusalem, now, in the king’s tracks. Will you come with us?’

‘We are four,’ Menachem said. ‘Myself, Moshe, Aaron, whom you have not yet met — and Yusaf, who was dismissed from the king’s side before they departed.’

‘The king turned down Yusaf’s petition?’

‘No, Saulos did that.’ Menachem smiled, tightly. Over the guttering light, his deep-set eyes sought Pantera’s and held them. ‘Thus does your enemy, indeed, become our enemy. And so we will ride together after him to Jerusalem. We have defeated him here when we did not know him as a common enemy. Knowing it, we may more readily defeat him there.’