The Coming of the King

Prologue
I: Caesarea, Judaea, Early Summer, AD 66 In the Reign of the Emperor Nero

North Africa, Early Spring AD 66

The sun was a scorching ball of fire, roasting the desert and everything in it, even now, barely two hours after dawn. The harsh, grey sand took wings, ready to clog a man’s lungs within a dozen breaths if he didn’t keep his face covered. Underfoot, it was hot as live coals, fit to burn even the healthiest of feet.

Saulos Herodion, cousin to the king of Judaea, did not have the healthiest of feet. He had lost all the skin of his right sole and half the meat of the heel in Rome’s fire and for the first full year of his time in the desert, he had not been able to place his foot to the sand without screaming.

Then, sometime in the winter of the second year — such winters as they had here — news of Seneca’s death had reached him. He had few details; half a sentence passed on with no more value than a handful of dried dates, but even so, what should have heartened him had instead made plain the extent to which his world was passing him by, and he not at the heart of it.

Within a month, he had learned to walk again. Now, in this second spring, he believed he could run if he had to; certainly he was fit to return to the swift-moving world beyond the sands.

There was sorrow in his parting. The slender, black-skinned women who had tended him were the same who raised the horses on which they and their menfolk hunted. They had given him a mare as a gift and offered, with many gestures to fill the gaps in his understanding of their language, to have one of their stallions cover it for him before he left, that he might carry with him a foal of worth into the worthless lands beyond the desert.

With as many gestures, he had turned down their offer: the mare was not yet in season and he could not wait until the moon did its work and made her ready for the stallion. Because he must leave soon: today; the world could perhaps be persuaded to slow in its turning while a man grew a new skin and rested his soul, but he could not expect it to tarry for ever.

It was with genuine regret that Saulos rose on his last day among the Berber tribes, broke his fast on the fermented mare’s milk and rock-hard dates he had once hated and had come to love, wrapped the loose wonder of his burnous around his head and face and walked across the roasted, roasting sand to the edge of the encampment.

Everything was ready. He had no real reason to linger, except that he had a question to ask, and his plans for the future hinged on its answer.

He found whom he sought in the shade of the oasis, tending a pair of iron-grey falcons. Without speaking, he sank to his heels, rested his forearms across his knees and let his vision grow soft, so that he looked at everything and nothing. He had thought himself a patient man until he came among these people. Fifteen months in their company had taught him the truth; he was not remotely patient, but could seem so for a very long time, which was perhaps the same thing.

Presently, the tall, lean woman he had come to see deigned to notice him. Her hair was dark, curled tight as new ram’s wool, her eyes were the deep amber-ochre of her tribe and she bore the spiralled tattoos across her cheeks and over the bridge of her nose that marked her as a hunter, not one of those women whose care had kept him alive, who had bathed the burns that had stripped the skin from his back, his legs, his feet, who had applied salves against the force of his screams and held him afterwards as he wept himself to sleep.

She had not visited him, nor lent him her horse, nor taught him how to fly the falcons at living quarry. She had, in fact, ignored him entirely from the moment Philotus had carried him on camel-back to their camp and paid his king’s ransom in gold to have him tended, with half of it for his care and the other half for a promise that his presence would not be revealed to the Romans who were hunting him.

He believed without question that the promise had been kept, but he had been a spy before another, greater calling had claimed his life, and he knew the calibre of the man who hunted him, the brother spy, trained by the same teacher, to the same standards: not better — never that — but good enough to be dangerous. After nearly two years, it was inconceivable that this man might not know where Saulos was, or that he was not watching, waiting for his prey to move.

Knowing this, Saulos had lain through two winters and a summer, sending out questions, drawing in the answers as they came by dove, by horse, by foot, clasping them close and using them to shape his first hazed, hate-filled dreams into a plan so well crafted, so seamlessly wrought, that it could not possibly fail. Except in this moment.

He felt cold eyes touch him and kept his gaze turned towards the ground. It was how they were here; the women had the ascendancy. He had despised the menfolk for that when he first came.

‘You have come to take your leave?’ In the desert’s mid-morning heat, her voice had all the cold resonance of a flute made of ice. Hate informed every breath, but it was so contained, so controlled, that it sucked the warmth from the day.

Saulos said, ‘I have come to ask you a question, Iksahra sur Anmer.’

He thought he had lost her, just naming her and her father in the same breath; that she would call her falcons to fist, whistle to heel the cheetah that was her familiar, and ride away. He watched her consider it and heard the halted breath when she changed her mind.

‘What question?’ she asked.

‘How is it that you plan to avenge the deaths of your father and mother, whom you loved?’

For that, he thought she might kill him. She carried the curved long-knife at her belt, which could lift his head from his shoulders in a single strike. The cheetah that sat at her heels like a trained hound could crush a man’s skull in its jaws. He had seen it done, once, or thought he had: it might have been a delirium dream. He kept his soft eyes on the harsh sand and wondered what it would be to die here, away from all that he planned.

Iksahra sur Anmer, whose father had been torn apart by four of his own horses on the orders of a foreign king, took her hand away from her knife’s hilt. A single lifted finger sent the cheetah to lie loll-tongued in the shade of a date palm. She loosed the falcons to sit in the branches above and came to sit opposite him, with her forearms folded across her bent knees. Her burnous was identical to his own. It flowed around her, as the folds of a breeze. Her face was black within it, and shadowed, so that her deep-ochre eyes seemed more black than brown, set off only by their whites.

‘Tell me,’ she said, and Saulos let out the breath he had been holding.

It was not a simple plan, but her part in it was relatively so and he had spent six months preparing for this moment.

He said, ‘I am going to travel to Judaea, to the court of King Agrippa II. Wait-’ He held up his hand although in truth she had not moved, only that her eyes were drilling holes in his skull. ‘His father killed your father. I know this. I, too, go to obtain vengeance. But my vengeance will be slow, a thing to be savoured over months, not swallowed whole in the time it takes for a knife to still a man’s heart. My vengeance will fall not on one man alone, but on the heads of the entire Hebrew people. If I succeed in my endeavour, within a handspan of years the twelve tribes of Abraham will no longer exist. I would crave your aid in this.’

‘As your whore?’ Her voice dripped contempt. The spiral marks on her face stood proud a little; he kept his eyes on them and was sure not to smile at the image of that.

‘Assuredly not. You would be the king’s favoured falconer. Also his beastmaster, the keeper of his hunting hounds, his big cats, his hounds, his horses.’ As was your father to his father. He did not say that, but the understanding twisted in the hot air between them.

‘The new king does not hunt,’ said the woman, slowly. ‘The whole world knows that he prefers to keep to his bed and his… playthings, while his sister rules the land. It is the queen who hunts.’

‘But any gift must be given to the king, even if Queen Berenice is its true recipient. In any case, it matters not which of them takes you, only that you are there, with your falcons.’ He hesitated, delicately. ‘Would I be correct if I were to surmise that your birds could hunt and kill a message-dove, one of those that flies fast and low across the sands and carries the written word from one side of the empire to the other?’

She did not answer that, only looked at him as if even the question were an insult.

‘Good.’ He gave a shallow nod. ‘So then, your part in this will be to intercept the message-doves that are sent to the king’s loft from across the world. They come from Rome, from Damascus, from Antioch, from Athens, Corinth, Alexandria and further abroad. They come mostly at dawn and dusk, and, while the king is at Caesarea, they fly always over a particular isthmus on the sea coast, which is out of sight of the palace, but surrounded by flat, open land, so that you cannot be watched without your knowing.

‘You will take these birds from the sky and bring their messages to me so that I may know what they say. Further, as the king’s beastmaster, you will be tasked with the care of some message-birds in the beast compound so that they may be sent out with the journeymen who take them to far-flung cities. Therefore, once in a while, we may use them ourselves to convey messages of our own to the king — as if they came from far abroad. Then, when we know who our enemies are, and how they are ranged against us, we will act.’

‘What will we do?’

‘We will foment war with Rome. King Agrippa resides at Caesarea, the city founded by his grandfather, Herod the Great. That place has its own tensions and we will use them to force the entire royal family to Jerusalem. There, if the zealots of the War Party can be made to declare war against Rome, Nero will send the legions to crush them and once that happens, the whole of Judaea will rise against the armies of occupation.’

‘Then they will die,’ said Iksahra, with certainty. ‘No one can withstand Rome’s legions.’

‘Exactly so; and Jerusalem will be razed to the ground, brick by ancient brick, until nothing is left and the people who live therein are dead or enslaved in foreign lands. Then you, who hate Agrippa, and I, who hate the Hebrews, will know that our vengeance is complete.’

Saulos rose smoothly; that, too, was a skill he had learned. ‘I leave with the evening’s cool. If you wish to join me, I would welcome your company, and that of your beasts.’

Saulos did not ride alone from the encampment; three guides came with him, but Iksahra sur Anmer, the best hunter among the Berber tribes, was not one of them.

He concealed his disappointment, and rode with the men, letting them entertain him with stories of horses and hunts and the inexplicable deeds of women. At nightfall, when they made camp in the lee of a dune, he took himself a little away from the firelight to urinate.

He was turning back when her hand caught his wrist. She was remarkably tall. The cheetah’s yellow eyes regarded him from a place that had been entirely dark.

He said, ‘I had hoped you might come.’

Her face was close to his. ‘You know why I seek vengeance. Why do you?’

‘Will you come with me to sit at the fire? The night is cold and I am still not used to the changes in temperature. We will be given privacy, I think.’

He was right; the men saw Iksahra and left, not for privacy, but out of fear. One made the sign against evil as she passed. Another hissed something, of which Saulos only heard the word ifrit and wished he had not.

Seated, fed, with a bladder of water in his hand — these people drank neither wine nor ale — Saulos felt safer. He stared into the fire and found it easier to believe she was a woman who hunted with matchless skill, not a winged demon who might feed on his soul.

He said, ‘My tale is a long one, but at its shortest… In my youth, I was trained as a Roman agent by the late spymaster Seneca, known as the Teacher, and sent to Judaea to bring the Hebrews under Roman rule.’

‘You did not succeed in that.’ Her wild eyes laughed at him.

He bit his lip. It was a long time since he had been the butt of anyone’s ridicule. He said, ‘No. But I did burn Rome.’ Flames leapt between them. ‘I lit the blaze that nearly consumed it.’

‘Why?’

He studied the small fire that lay between them. None of this was as he had planned. ‘For a prophecy,’ he said, which was true. ‘The Sibyls said that if Rome burned under the eye of the dog star, then Jerusalem might be sundered and in its place…’ With an effort, he held her gaze. ‘In its place, the god they have denied will enslave them all, and rule in glory. But Judaea must fall for that to happen.’

‘And if Jerusalem falls-’

‘Then all of Judaea will fall with it; yes. The loss of Rome seemed a small price to pay.’

‘And your own life? Was it an accident that the fire nearly killed you?’

‘No. That was my enemy’s doing. He is the second reason we are going to Judaea.’

‘Is he there?’

‘Not yet. But I will draw him there and when I have done so, I will undermine his allies until he no longer knows whom he can trust. I will remove his friends from him, one at a time, until he is alone, and friendless and lost. I will let him see what we are doing, slowly, a piece at a time, and when Jerusalem’s fall is certain, I–I alone, I will kill him, slowly, by inches, by heartbeats, and he will know, each moment, why he dies and by whose hand.’

He stopped, because the crimson haze around him was real, and the flames were licking his face as his passion brought him lower and closer to the fire.

His cheeks were scorched. Iksahra had sparks on her clothing, where his hands, smashing the sand, had disturbed the fire. Thin tendrils of smoke rose to the night air and vanished.

She gazed at him, unreadable. ‘What is his name, this man you hate so much?’

Saulos closed his eyes against the sweep of her stare. ‘My enemy’s name,’ he said, evenly, ‘is Sebastos Abdes Pantera. He rides with a former centurion named Appius Mergus, and with Hypatia of Alexandria, the Chosen of Isis.’

‘I will remember their names.’ Iksahra sur Anmer rose and stretched out a hand. He took it and she lifted him to his feet, effortlessly. ‘We have things in common,’ she said, and her white teeth flashed. ‘I will join you. I will hunt the message-birds. But when the time comes, I will kill King Agrippa and you will not stop me.’