The Coming of the King

Chapter Eighteen

Caesarea was behind them, a ribbon of tiny lights stitching the dark land to the darker sky. The roar of the riot was too far away to be heard; the desert rang instead to the soft pad of hoof on sand, steady, never stumbling, picking a route by starlight, striving always to keep to the path, which was no path, but was none the less obvious by daylight.

Ahead, torches showed the queen’s party had stopped for food, for water, and were mounting again, stringing out along that same not-quite-obvious route. Hypatia was there; Pantera could feel her in much the same way as he could feel Mergus and for much the same reason; these two were his true family. He had not thought of them as such before this, but after the night just gone, it was impossible not to.

Further ahead, if Pantera strained to look, the lights of the king’s group stretched across the horizon, heading always south. Saulos was there, and the Berber hunter with her beasts.

He had heard the cheetah was trained to hunt like a hound, and did not want to find out that it was true, here, in the dark desert, where a hound could take a man from his horse and break his neck before anyone even knew it was there.

And then he heard a change in the rhythmic footfall ahead. Pantera drew his horse to a hard halt and raised his hand. A scream cut the night.

‘It’s the girl,’ Pantera said. ‘The royal princess. Her horse has fallen.’

‘How do you know?’ Menachem pushed up alongside, his eyes dim in the starlight. ‘It could be anyone.’

‘Who else is reckless enough to throw her horse at a canter away from the lit path and the watchmen?’

‘The boy is. Particularly if the Berber woman has rebuffed him.’

‘No. Hyrcanus rides with the king’s group and they’re a mile in front. Watch the torches; the queen’s men are veering off the track now to find her. Hypatia’s ahead of them, I think. If the girl’s neck is broken, then they’ll have to… but it isn’t. See?’ Pantera pointed to the gather and squeeze of the moving lights, now together, now apart. ‘They’re carrying her back to the track now.’

He looked back, at his own party. Of the five horses gathered by, Yusaf and Moshe held the rear, while the other three kept to a row with Estaph and Aaron staying one on either side of Mergus, to keep him safe; an hour into the journey they had untied him so that he could ride freely, but he wasn’t secure enough to be left entirely alone.

Ahead, the torches of the royal train danced back to the trail. Pantera said, ‘They’ll have to carry her, which means they’ll move more slowly. If we want to reach Jerusalem before daylight, we’ll have to swing out round them and get back to the track well in front.’

‘And risk running into the back of the king’s group? You said they were only a mile ahead.’ That was Mergus, speaking from just beyond his horse’s left haunch. By a miracle, he kept the pain from his voice and was a centurion picking out a particular problem; nothing unsurmountable.

Pantera laughed softly. ‘If you’ve tracked Eceni warriors through the forests of Britain at night, you can track a group of minor Herodian royalty carrying torches along a desert pathway that’s been used by every passing merchant for the last hundred years. And you can do it without having to take the same path.’

He turned his horse off the track and eased it forward on to the shadowed sand beyond. ‘Follow me. Don’t speak. Keep your horses out of step with mine so we don’t set up a rhythm the guards can hear. And — ’ this last with hollow humour — ‘don’t scream if you fall.’

They moved uncertainly at first. The thumbnail of an old moon did not so much light the desert as sharpen the shadows, painting the treacherous dips and hillocks in stark relief. The horses baulked at imaginary traps and had to be nursed round lines in the sand that curved like snakes. They moved so slowly that there was a real danger dawn might come and see them still crossing the desert, visible to any who chanced to look.

In the dark, Pantera halted his horse. ‘Dismount.’

Yusaf caught his elbow and leaned down, bringing his face close. His nose was heavy, his lips thin, his beard a hedge about his face. His midnight silks swayed, thick with the scent of balsam, and the odour of money. ‘Are you suggesting we walk to Jerusalem?’ he asked.

‘No, I’m suggesting we run until we come back on to the track on the other side of the queen’s party. Then we ride.’

He saw them look, one to the other; Moshe to Aaron, who was smaller, wirier, older. Estaph to Menachem, and then to Pantera. ‘Run?’ Estaph asked. ‘Even Mergus?’

‘Even Mergus. It’ll help to ease his muscles, to stop them stiffening. It’s easier than you think. Trust me.’

They didn’t trust him at all, but he kicked off his shoes and gathered his reins and began to run, digging his toes into the cooling sand, feeling the grit and the balance and the slope. His horse, after the first reluctant steps, ran with him, increasing in confidence. This close to the ground, the moon became an ally, showing the way; the sand became a living thing that gripped his feet, the hillocks loomed larger and more clearly, and the pits were obvious and easily avoided.

After a while, he heard the others slide down from their horses and begin to run. Of them all, his concern was most for the city-bred Yusaf, the bearded counsellor in his ruinously expensive silks who had never seen war, but he proved fitter than he looked, and not given to complaint. Mergus, as Pantera had promised, became looser in his stride, and did not fall behind.

He led them in a long curving line past Hypatia’s part of the royal group and back to the track, where they paused a moment, to drink water, and to rest.

‘You’ve done that before.’ Mergus was leaning forward with his hands on his knees, panting, but he was breathing more easily than he had when they started. ‘One day, you can tell me the details.’

‘There are no details to tell,’ Pantera said. ‘I used to live here; my father made me do this when I was a child. The desert climbs up to the mountains. On the other side are the trees: pine, cedar, olives in groves. It’ll be easier going then.’

‘Your father is the man who taught you how to throw a knife?’ Mergus’ eyes gleamed in the dark. He was in pain still, but less than he had been, and he was a warrior; the challenge of a night run pushed him beyond his own exhaustion. ‘How old were you?’

‘Twelve.’

Shaking his head, Mergus accepted Estaph’s help to mount and rode on down the track. Pantera followed, and considered as he rode the vagaries of luck, or chance, or the push of the gods, that had brought him back to this road. His father had made him ride it a dozen times in his youth, each time pushing him further, testing him harder, making him run or ride faster, later into the night.

On the last occasion, Pantera had been given blunt arrows and a knife with the tip filed away and his father had set men along the route pretending to be brigands. The boy had hit four out of eight. None of them had hit him. His father had been quietly pleased. One of the men he had failed to hit had come to him later and told him how close the arrow had gone. All eight had taken him out and given him beer and sworn, drunkenly, with some weeping, to be as a brother to him evermore.

It had been a good night, seared from Pantera’s memory by rage at his father’s later treachery. He remembered them both now, the night and the anger, as if they had happened to somebody else, but they had laid the foundation of what he was. And what he was in that moment was

… alive.

They had walked knowingly into Saulos’ grasp in Caesarea and come out alive. He had not died and, more important, nor had Mergus. The realities of Saulos’ power were not diminished, but, somewhere in the dark, easing his horse forward over ground he could barely see, spreading his hearing like a net over the flat sand, tasting the air, alerting his skin to the felt-senses that had kept him alive through worse nights than this, Pantera realized he was breathing freely for the first time since the horror of Rome’s fire, and that he was glad to be alive.

He sent his thanks through the night and heard again the echo of another voice — Seneca’s — speaking to the youth he had been. You need to be pushed to the edges of your being. Your soul has always craved that kind of challenge. What you lacked was the knowledge of how to survive when you got there. I have taught you everything I can of survival at the edges of being. Now we shall find out if I was good enough.

Good enough to get him here. And good enough, presently, to know that he was no longer the only hunter in the desert.

‘She’s here,’ Pantera murmured quietly to Mergus.

Estaph, close by, said, ‘Who is?’

‘The Berber hunter. Iksahra.’

Nobody, this time, asked how he knew. Menachem said, ‘What do you want of us?’

‘Keep grouped close together so she can’t easily tell who we are, or how many. Mergus, if you can bring your scarf up over your head and keep close to Yusaf, it may be that she can be made to think you’re his wife. The longer Saulos thinks you dead, the better.’

‘Why let her live?’ Estaph asked, with blunt simplicity. ‘We are seven; she is only one.’

‘Because we’re caught between the two royal parties and I want to be in Jerusalem before Hypatia, which means we have to keep moving. If we have to split up, go in by the farmers’ gate down at the far edge of the wall and meet up again at the Inn of the Black Grapes — if the inn is still there?’

‘It’s still there,’ Menachem said, and then: ‘How did you know?’

Pantera smiled into the dark. ‘I lived most of my childhood in Jerusalem. Saulos has forgotten that. Here, we have a chance to defeat him.’