The Coming of the King

Chapter Nineteen

The torchlit ride from Caesarea to Herod’s palace at Jerusalem was a nightmare from the start. Hypatia hated every stride.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Jucundus of the Watch had been more than thorough in his preparations: the horses were of good, sane stock, well fed and rested, able to keep up the breakneck speed set by the leading riders. To prevent them from stumbling in the dark, the watchmen all held pitch-pine torches in their nearside hands and carried others unlit on slings over their shoulders, enough to last them three times the night’s duration.

Jucundus had arranged a stopping place where food and water were unloaded from pack mules and it was possible for the royal riders to relieve themselves, to rest, to talk a little with those around them without the relentless drumming noise of hooves on sand that made it necessary to shout and so easier to remain silent.

At the break, Hypatia found herself caught in the eye of an argument between Drusilla, whose smile was beginning to crack under the strain, and her daughter, who was bright-eyed with a fury that made no sense, until Hypatia found that Kleopatra had wanted to travel with the king’s group and had been forbidden to do so.

‘Are we so dull to ride with?’ Hypatia asked as they remounted.

The girl spun, blazing. ‘She has them all with her! The falcons, the cheetah, your hounds. How could you let her take them?’

Iksahra then: the early interest was fast becoming an infatuation. The girl had wrenched her horse away. Hypatia followed, laid a hand on her bridle. They were alone now, on the borders of the party. The watchmen had packed with quiet efficiency. Their leader was already on the path, torch bobbing in time with his steady horse.

Berenice was close by, with eight guards around her. The queen rode fast, with a sober determination that made Hypatia want to be with her, to talk, to consider what they might do in the morning. Instead, she was left with a petulant girl.

Taking a breath, she said, ‘The hounds had to come to Jerusalem. I wouldn’t leave them in Caesarea where men might stone them to death, or the slaves might fail to feed them. Iksahra had already loosed them when you came to get us. They are safe with her, and they’ll enjoy a night’s run. What did you want me to do, wrest them from her?’

‘If you had to. Don’t you dream at all? I thought you were the Chosen of Isis?’ At which the Princess Kleopatra kicked her horse to a violent run, leaving Hypatia in the dark, watching her fly over unseen desert, too far from the torches to see the ruts and hillocks, the holes made by small beasts, perfect to trap a horse’s foot and trip it.

She was turning back to fetch a watchman with a torch and a fast horse when she heard the girl scream.

Hypatia kicked her own mount forward into the dark. The watchmen came later, slower, spreading their slick light across the sand and rock and desert shrubs. Hypatia watched for snakes by habit — in Alexandria, they made riding at night close to impossible. Here she had seen none, and still saw none as she dismounted by the girl’s fallen body.

‘Kleopatra? Can you hear me?’

Hypatia could see no blood, nor smell any, and scent was the more reliable here in the uncertain light. The girl was breathing. A pulse beat at her neck in a solid, steady rhythm. Her limbs were intact and — harder to check without causing harm — her spine also.

To one side, her horse moaned and snorted and then, suddenly, shuddered and blew hot foaming blood across the sand and those upon it. A watchman had cut its throat.

‘The leg was broken,’ he said, standing. His knife was dull in the torchlight. Black blood soaked the sand around, and the air stank. He said, ‘It stood in a hole. You shouldn’t ride in the dark, that’s why we carry lights. The girl, did she break anything?’

He was Syrian, of twenty years’ service; they all were sworn to Jucundus first, the governor a distant second and their Hebrew king’s niece not at all, except that they were old enough to be fathers, to have had sisters, and so might have some compassion.

A horse padded over the cool grit: Drusilla was nearly upon them, and Berenice, coming more slowly, because her watchmen were more alert and were keeping her from riding hard once she was away from the path. ‘Is she hurt?’ the queen called.

Hypatia stood, lifting the princess. She was a dead weight, heavier than she looked. ‘She’s alive,’ she called back. ‘Nothing’s broken.’ And then, to the girl herself, ‘Kleopatra, can you lift your head?’

She could, evidently, though with effort. She opened one eye, screwing it against the torchlight.

‘You can ride with me,’ Hypatia said, without knowing why. The closest guard was the one who had cut her horse’s throat and had only now realized he might be required to give up his own horse and walk. To him, she said, ‘Hold her while I mount, then pass her up to me. Kleopatra, you have as long as it takes me to mount to decide if you’re well enough to ride behind me, holding on, or should go in front, where I can hold you.’

Infants and the chronically sick were held in front. Asking the question was a risk and possibly a stupid one, but it worked to the extent that Kleopatra tried to raise her head and declare loudly how very ready she was to ride entirely on her own, neither behind nor in front of anyone, and, in failing to do so, proved neatly enough to her watchman, her mother and her aunt, the queen, that she wasn’t fit to ride on her own at all.

Berenice was there by then, leaning over, with her hand on the girl’s brow. ‘We could send back for a litter.’

‘Caesarea is not safe, majesty. If we send anywhere, we would have to send ahead to Jerusalem and that would be too slow. If your majesties will permit, I will happily bring her.’

She spoke to both the queen and Drusilla, but it was Berenice who made the decision, who spoke first. She should have been commanding armies: her mind had the right speed to it, and grasp of broader strategies.

She said, ‘You’ll need men with you, to see you’re not taken by brigands. You-’ She singled out the officer, marked by a red badge on his shoulder. ‘Take a dozen men and form an escort for the Chosen of Isis and the princess. Their lives are as yours. If you return and they’re dead, your ghost will follow theirs to the afterlife. Is that clear?’

Thus it was that Hypatia of Alexandria, Chosen of Isis, rode through the second half of the night with a fourteen-year-old girl clasped in front of her saddle. Her watchmen took exceptional care of her. They rode at a wiser, safer speed which meant that they reached Jerusalem quite some time behind the others, and a long time after the seven who had been riding behind.

Hypatia had become aware that there had been seven men riding behind soon after she first knelt to help Kleopatra. She had sensed them walking their horses nearer, keeping their steps out of rhythm so that the watchmen might not pick up the sound of their approach.

They had passed by, wide to the east, going faster than she was, faster even than Berenice, who had slowed to keep Kleopatra in sight. Knowing they were there, Hypatia had listened hard, sifting through the night-sounds of beasts and stray winds, of ifrit and ghuls and scrabbling scorpions, and heard enough to have some idea, or perhaps hope, of who they were.

The watchmen were good, but they rode with the earpieces of their helmets down as protection against missiles, which made sense when they were the ones carrying the lights and so made the best targets for any arrows that might fly from the dark. It didn’t help them to hear a spy and his companions as they ran round in a wide arc that brought them back to the track a long way ahead of Hypatia and her guards, so that by the time dawn spilled its slow light across the land, they were gone.

Hypatia’s small group reached Jerusalem an hour after sunrise. As they wound down the side of the Mount of Olives towards the northern gate, Kleopatra raised her head and vomited over the side of Hypatia’s horse.

Thereafter, she slid back into unconsciousness, but she continued to grip Hypatia’s wrist with both hands as she had throughout the ride, so that her fingers left blue marks dented into the flesh, and, when they reached the palace without mishap, she let herself be lifted down by the watchman and carried up the palace steps to her mother and her aunt.

There, as she was set on her feet with all the care one might hope for, she turned back to where Hypatia waited at the stair foot. ‘My head hurts,’ she said, with crystal clarity. ‘The Chosen of Isis will know how to cure it.’

Iksahra sur Anmer did not enter Jerusalem at dawn on horseback through Herod’s vast, ornate gate with its images of the sun and the moon lighting her way and her falcons on the pommel of her saddle and the queen’s new hounds behind her.

She came on foot, the cheetah her distant companion, ghost-like in the dark. She came with a swathe of linen over her face, to keep the sand from her lungs and to cover her dark skin against the gaze of whoever might choose to spend time watching the uncelebrated routes by which slaves and servants entered the city.

She came dressed as a slave, an insult forced on her by Saulos at the start of the night’s ride, when he had said she must hang back, to see if Pantera followed, and, if he did, who was with him. He had said it smiling, thinking that she was his to instruct, that no station was too low, no insult too great. He had taken the falcons on his own horse, whistled the unwilling hounds to heel, and they, trained always to obey, had gone with him.

Iksahra had thought of killing him then; it would not have been hard in the milling chaos of horses and watchmen, slaves, servants and stewards that had marked the start of their escape from Caesarea. He had turned on his heel and walked away from her, leaving his throat unguarded, and her hands had drawn the silk cord from her waist before her mind had caught up with the thought. She had let him live, not because she was afraid of killing him, but because he was still her greatest — her only — chance of avenging her father. She did not expect to need him for ever, and the different ways he might die were daily occupying more of her thoughts.

This night, though, she chose to do as he asked, and so she had left her three fleet horses in Saulos’ care and had run on foot like a slave, save that slaves were not hunters, and a slave would not have known how to slide safely through the desert at night, keeping clear of the snakes, the insects, the undead evil that stalked the dark. A slave would not have kept the cheetah at a distance, always her shadow, always her first line of attack, her last line of defence.

A slave would not have heard Berenice approach from far enough away to find a hiding place in time, so that the queen’s train passed close enough for Iksahra to touch her horse’s oiled hooves, nor would a slave have lain prone on the cold sand with her lips closed against the grit, until the queen’s sister followed later, weeping, nor waited on until the Alexandrian witch came with the black-haired royal girl held in front of her saddle like an infant.

A slave, if one had been there at all, might have let these pass and gone after them, thinking the night empty, but Iksahra sur Anmer, hunter and daughter of hunters, had turned away from the track and pressed her ear to the ground and heard the men whom Saulos had said would follow the royal train.

He hadn’t said how he knew Pantera would be coming, nor had Iksahra asked, but she had set herself a new goal: to learn Saulos’ sources of information. When she had them, he could die without loss to her or the world.

Meanwhile, she had run out across the sands, following the new sounds, and, because she was the best of the best, she had found them, and cut in ahead of them, and lain still in the night until they passed her, riding now; seven shadows set against the starlit night. Then she had wrapped her robes around her in such a way that nothing flapped and set after them.

To track seven horses in the dark was a skill few possessed, even among her people. To track them when they were led by a man of infinite suspicion, who took care to hide the traces of his passing even in a desert at night, who stopped at random intervals and slid down from his horse to listen to the air and press his ear to the ground and then set his horse forward at a canter on the remount, who turned to face the rising sun, making his god-signs to the aching red blade as it cut open the night, and even then made use of the light to search the land behind… to track such a man was an act of genius and Iksahra alone could have achieved it.

She learned a lot about her quarry in the course of the chase; she always did, but she had never been as certain that her prey knew she was there. By the end, when they were among the trees, he made no secret of it, and kept his horse steady, waiting for her, looking east to the sun in such a way that she might come to know the contours of his face, might see the scar above his right eye, the weakness of his shoulder and the lame left ankle, where the foot would not bend as much as it should.

She saw his eyes and the way they scanned the earth, exactly as her father’s had. She saw his dry smile and the way he listened to the others who clustered around him before he spoke; always he listened more and spoke less, but always his words carried more weight. The men with him showed no sign that they knew Iksahra was there. If he told them, they had more discretion than anyone she had met.

Pantera, too, did not ride in through Herod’s Gate, but pulled his small cavalcade east towards one of the livestock gates where the wall bounded the lower city. Iksahra left them then, and slipped round the wall in the opposite direction, heading south and west and then south towards the slave gates at the junction of the upper and new parts of the city.

Saulos was waiting for her in a shadowed alley not far inside the gate. Breathless with urgency and the need for her news, he did not offer her water, or a melon, or any of the small courtesies that were her due as a returning hunter. He watched the cheetah as it came to press its head on her hand, and tried not to let his eyes grow wide.

Iksahra had her own water skin hidden in her robes with a mouthful of water left against just this eventuality. She took it out and drained it dry, watching Saulos wring his hands and sway from one foot to the other in his anxiety. If he knew the insult she offered by not sharing the drink, he showed no sign of it.

Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she took the time to settle the empty skin inside her robes, tight against her belt, then said succinctly, ‘Pantera is here. He will ride in through the lambs’ gate at the lower city soon. Maybe he has already done so.’

Saulos frowned. ‘You are sure of this?’

No man had ever questioned her tracking. Not one. Ever. Her father had killed the only man who had ever questioned his own abilities. His daughter had not needed even to do that.

Iksahra stared in silence and Saulos stared back a moment, expressionless, before a smile cracked his face. ‘Of course you’re sure. How could you not be? The great Pantera, the Leopard himself, bested by a woman of the Berberai!’ He forgot himself and patted her arm. ‘I knew you were good. I didn’t know you were the best. I apologize.’

Iksahra nodded. Her eyes never left his face.

Saulos looked down, smoothing his palms over the sand-coloured silk of his topcoat. ‘Your hunting birds made the journey well,’ he said, as if it were his own gift to her. ‘I thought perhaps you might like to take them out to hunt?’ He moved to one side. Behind him, in the alley’s deepest shade, was a small basket of woven grasses with its lid tied down. A dove’s yellow eye peered out through the mesh, blinking placidly. An ivory message cylinder was bound to its left leg.

Iksahra said, ‘You mean you want me to ride out of the city under pretext of exercising my birds and release a messenger-bird so that it can return here as if it had flown from Rome. In doing so, I am to stop my birds from killing it, and am, instead, to ensure that it reaches its roost in safety.’

Saulos’ hands sketched an apology in the air. ‘You understand me well. The bird bears the message you took from the air nine days before Pantera arrived. I have cut off the last sentence, but it bears Nero’s mark at the head, which is hard to counterfeit. The governor will trust it, and whatever else he sees at the same time.’

He peered at her from under lowered lids, his eyes wide as a girl’s and full of flattery. ‘It would make our plans more difficult if the bird were to die as it flew to the palace. You have the best eye for a hunting falcon. If anyone can keep it alive, you can.’

‘Then I shall do so. Although I assume you wish me to hunt any other doves that are seen to be flying towards the city?’

‘That would be most useful. And later, if you are unoccupied on your return, it might be… instructive if you were to follow the woman who brought the two hounds from Rome’s empress?’

‘The Alexandrian witch,’ Iksahra said.

‘Is she a witch?’ Saulos’ brows snapped up. ‘I didn’t know. Certainly, she’s Pantera’s creature, but the Sisters of Isis never do anything for men without another, better, reason of their own. She’s drawing closer to Queen Berenice and the Princess Kleopatra than I had thought she would. Such a thing may be either useful to us or dangerous. We can only turn it to our cause if we know what’s happening.’

‘Then I will follow the witch if she leaves the palace. I can’t promise to follow her within it. I am too obvious.’ A single gesture took in her skin, her hair, the great cat that shadowed her heels.

‘You could, perhaps, do without…’ He talked with his hands, this man; they waved now, vaguely, uncertainly, at the cheetah, and then withdrew. He shook his head. ‘Of course not. And in any case, you are, as you say, remarkable; someone to draw all eyes. In that case-’ His hands swept wide, taking in the whole of Jerusalem. ‘I can take care of all that needs to be done in the palace. You will have your own apartments, of course, and permission to make use of whatever help you need. Herod had the baths built to his own design. They are renowned across Judaea. We’re not in the desert of your home, but this place has its own attractions. Do what you need to make yourself at home.’

She watched him leave, and wondered that he had never thought to ask her who was with Pantera, whether the mountain-man was with him, or the Hebrews, or why the centurion had dressed as a woman.

Because he had not asked, she had not told him, but kept the information to herself, in case it might be useful later in the plan she was beginning to make, which was significantly different from the one she had nursed on the ship sailing in from her homeland.