The Coming of the King

Chapter Twenty-Two

‘ Do you love him?’ Kleopatra asked, from the pool’s far side.

The palace was, to all intents and purposes, asleep. In the bathing pools on the lowest floor, slaves pattered on soft feet, bringing towels and bowls, pouring flavoured salts into the water. Hypatia lay in a vault of rose-scented steam, turning slowly pink under the lupine eyes of a mosaic left by Herod the Great, who counted Romulus and Remus amongst his ancestors. The wolf-mother had milk enough for a nation. Her twin boys hung back, afraid of her teeth.

Hypatia lowered her gaze and stared across the pool. ‘Do I love whom?’

Kleopatra lay with her elbows on blue-veined marble on the pool’s far side. Her black hair was plastered around her face. Her eyes reflected the colour of the water; green, tinged in places with blue. She said, ‘The man you met in the alley this afternoon. The one with the scar over his right eye. Do you love him?’

The man Kleopatra was not supposed to have seen. Hypatia opened her mouth to answer, considered, and changed what she had been about to say. ‘I love him as if he were a brother,’ she said. ‘Not in any other way.’

‘Does he love you?’

‘I hardly think so.’ Hypatia ducked her face under the surface and came up, streaming water. Her ears popped. She shook her head and felt her hair make wet ropes about her shoulders. ‘He loves an Alexandrian healer called Hannah. She conceived his child on the night Rome burned. He put her on a ship the next day, bound for Mona, the dreamers’ island that lies to the west of Britain. He grieves for her still. We all do.’

‘You knew her, too?’

‘I’ve known her since I was your age.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘So am I.’

A brittle silence fell, in which Hypatia stared fixedly at the shimmering ripples on the water where sunlight from the high windows met its own reflection and cast the surface gold.

It was a technique designed to keep her mind from straying. She had learned it when she was fourteen years old, sitting in front of a branching candlestick in the Temple of Isis, counting the wavering lights. It worked after a fashion; in nine breaths or ten, she was able to give most of her attention to the changing textures of the water, and no more than usual to the memory of the woman who had gone to safety on Mona.

Across the pool, Kleopatra let go an unsteady breath.

Hypatia said, ‘What?’ It came out more sharply than she had intended.

‘This is my dream.’

‘Lying in a pool of hot water with a woman who still grieves for her past is your dream?’ That, too, was more cutting than Hypatia had meant it. She sluiced water on her face; found it too hot, suddenly, cloying.

Looking through the steam, she found that Kleopatra was biting her lip, staring down at the water. She may have been weeping.

Small-voiced, the girl said, ‘No. The dream is being with you… like this.’

‘Like what?’

‘Angry. You’re angry with me and I haven’t done anything. I just asked a question. And that man is here; the one you think doesn’t love you. The shadow who draws danger to him. He’s what starts it all.’

The shadow who draws danger to him. Hypatia’s throat closed and it had nothing to do with the steam or the flavour of roses. A bubble of silence settled on her, so that the only sound was the rush of her own pulse in her ears and the drift of her own voice, decades before, sitting in the half-dark of a temple before a woman who terrified her, saying, It all starts with the shadow that sings to danger. He’s the beginning.

She had forgotten the terror of that; the first dream, first speaking of it, the sandalwood and frankincense, the sticks of dried thyme, smouldering. Lying amidst other scents, a lifetime’s dreams came into sharp, devastating focus.

Hypatia forged her way across the sluggish water. She pushed past the floating sponge-bowls, the lilies on leaves, the pumice stones, carved to fit a hand. She came to stand in front of Kleopatra, close enough to smell the salt of her tears over the rosewater and rosemary, to see the red rims of her eyes through the steam.

Hypatia pushed aside her own terrors. Carefully now, she said, ‘Is this the dream you told me about? The one that frightens you?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the dream, are you afraid because I’m angry?’

‘Yes… No. Not only that. People are angry with me all the time, it’s not that. It’s that I don’t want you to die. You, or Pantera, or me, or my aunt, or the other men whose faces I haven’t seen yet.’

Kleopatra was hugging her knees to her flat chest, breathing in short, sharp jerks. Hypatia took her hand and rubbed the palm with her thumb, absently. ‘Do I die in the dream?’ she asked. ‘Does Pantera?’

‘I don’t know. It changes. Each time it changes…’ Kleopatra stared at the water as if it might part and reveal the past, or the future. ‘I’m so frightened when I wake up that I never remember exactly what’s happened; the order of it, or who died, or where, or how. I just lie in bed trying not to scream. But Pantera — is that his name? The Leopard — it suits him. He’s always there, and then Saulos comes and Iksahra and you and there’s gold and blood and pain and death… so much death; sometimes you die, sometimes he does, sometimes me and Aunt Berenice, and other men I don’t know yet, and the worst thing is, I don’t know any of it for certain; it’s hazy and confused and I don’t want it to be real.

‘But this, here, now… this is real and it’s always the start. The smell’s the same and you’re…’ Kleopatra’s eyes were wide, full of tangled passions. ‘You’re different from anyone else here. When everyone else is hazy, I always know who you are, where you are. I saw you when you first came into the palace, to Aunt Berenice. I knew then that it was you.’ She was looking down into the water, at the place where her fingers were knotted together. She ran out of words, or did not want to remember more of that first meeting at the palace.

In the silence, Hypatia had time to speak. ‘Gold and blood?’ She fought to keep her voice level. ‘You said, “gold and blood”. Are both in your dream?’

‘Yes. The blood comes from a hanged man. Pantera, I think, but the gold comes first; lots of it, like the eight talents Yusaf ben Matthias gave to the king last night, only more of it. And then later there are crowds, screaming, and then cold and black, the opposite of the gold, but still full of death.’ Kleopatra’s eyes grew slowly wide. ‘Can you see my dream?’

‘I have… had one like it.’ Hypatia let go of the girl’s hand and edged away to where the beating of her heart might not cause waves in the water. ‘If any more of the dream comes back to you, will you tell me?’

Kleopatra nodded. ‘I will.’

Hypatia stepped up out of the pool, and sat on the side, rubbing herself dry. Presently, Kleopatra leaned across to Hypatia and touched her arm. ‘If Saulos is in both of our dreams, shouldn’t we try to find out what he’s doing?’

‘Saulos is too dangerous for the likes of you and me to spy on.’

‘Even if I know of a way we can do it without being seen?’

‘Kleopatra…’ Hypatia turned to her. ‘Is spying on Saulos part of your dream?’

‘No, but he’s just ordered Governor Florus to admit him to his suite. The slaves were saying so to each other, but they were speaking Syrian and it’s taken me till now to work it out. Florus is asleep. They’ve sent a man to wake him and help him dress. Saulos won’t be there yet so we have time to get ready.’

Hypatia lifted the girl’s hands in her own. Her fingers were in the half stage, midway between childhood chubbiness and the lean strength of a woman. Their ends were wrinkled with water and steam. She turned one over. Two lines crossed on the palm, below the fourth finger.

She studied it a moment, closed the fingers over on themselves, hiding the futures. ‘Listen to me now, because this matters. If Saulos caught you spying on him, he would kill you. Not openly, but you would have the kind of accident you nearly had in the desert last night, only that it would be you who died, not only your horse.’

‘I know.’ Kleopatra’s hair hung down in thick, damp ropes. Her face was scarlet with heat, and quite serious. ‘I’ve watched Saulos since he came here, two months before you; I know the risks. But I’ve also lived half my life in this palace. My great-grandfather built it, and he had tunnels put in the spaces between the walls and listening passages made so that his agents could listen to the conversations in every room. I know them all. He won’t know we’re there, I swear it.’

‘Show me the tunnel. I’ll go alone.’

‘No.’ Kleopatra reached for another towel from the pile the slaves had left. ‘I’ll show you where the listening place is,’ she said. ‘It’s safe. You’ll see when we get there.’