The Coming of the King

Chapter Twenty-Six

On the morning of the sixth day of the month of Ab, high summer in Jerusalem, a bird sang to greet the dawn. A hot, dry wind blew from the east. High over the hills, a hawk soared in hunting spirals, scanning the early land.

On that morning, a night and a day and a night after the riots had begun at Caesarea, a single night after Hypatia had come to tell him that Saulos was planning to rob the Temple of its gold… at dawn on that day, under the high, shimmering call of the hawk, Pantera stood alone on the second to top step leading up to the Temple of Jerusalem and watched the High Priest of Israel step out through his breathtaking, jewel-studded gates and look down on the gathered people of his city.

Ananias ben Ananias was a man of average build and average features. His head was a fleshless skull, with eyes set too far up to his brow and a wattle neck like an ageing hen’s.

Beyond that, he would not have stood out in a market, or a hippodrome or a battlefield, but that he was robed in silk of porphyry that shimmered in the sun, and tiny gold bells sang on the lower fringes of his coat, so that he was a songbird in motion. Black onyx stood out from his shoulders with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel engraved thereon, and other gems in emerald, in aquamarine, in ruby, studded his cuirass, each bearing the name of a different tribe. A polished gold plate fixed to the turban of his headpiece proclaimed him holy in the eyes of his god.

Chiming in gold, splendid in purple, he paced forward to the edge of the heights on which his temple was built and looked down on the gathered people.

A sea of blue-marked men and youths and girls too young to marry, too old to be left at home, looked back up at him. Silence settled on them as a moth settles in the evening, softly, without their noticing.

These were the Peace Party, come out in their multitudes at the request of Gideon, the Peacemaker. At their back, around their edges, stood the War Party, brought by Menachem and his cousin Eleazir, distinguished by their flashes of sun-yellow. All around, in their unmarked but remarkable long-coats, stood the merchants summoned by Yusaf ben Matthias, who bore no affiliation to either party, but whose future turned on the morning as much as anyone else’s.

It is possible we might live.

Hypatia’s promise rang in Pantera’s ears as the last echoes of a thunderstorm. He felt as if his skin had been shed and grown back again, thinner. The world was sharper around him, with danger so clear he could taste it as iron on his tongue and feel it in the sweat on his back.

He watched the High Priest come forward and counted his own heartbeats by the soaring in his ears.

‘Your excellency-’ He clasped Nero’s ring in his hand; gold and turquoise, with a lyre engraved on it, and the chariot that was this emperor’s sign. He raised it up so that Ananias might see it, and the crowd might know that he carried gold.

‘Your excellency, I am Sebastos Abdes Pantera, known as the Leopard. I come in the name of the Emperor Nero, bearing this, his ring. I bring news of one who would rob your temple, taking the emperor’s name in vain.’

Pantera had fought on battlefields; he knew how to pitch his voice to carry. A sigh came from the crowd. They loathed Nero as the author of their woes, as the man who had thrust Governor Florus upon them, and held the legions in the palm of his hand, ready to crush them if they rose against the excesses of his greed. Even so, the sound of the imperial name carried the patina of royalty and the gold flashing in Pantera’s hand took on new meaning beyond simply wealth.

They drew a long inward breath and Pantera let it lift him that last step up to the platform on which the Temple stood. The walls faced him, white and brilliant in the sun, their glorious gem-studded gates hanging open only by a foot’s length, enough to let the colours catch the morning sun, but not so far that it was possible for Pantera to see inside to where the Hebrews worshipped their god.

The crowd’s sigh became a low hum, not yet angry, but not cheerful either.

Ananias, High Priest by appointment of the emperor, turned his head. His fat eyes rested on the etched lyre on the ring. When he raised them, they were hard as flint.

‘You do not come from the emperor,’ he said, and his voice, too, carried out and down to the sea of ears below. ‘You are a liar and a traitor to your emperor and to your god.’

The crowd drew another breath, harsher than before.

Pantera made himself smile. He scanned the horizon for signs of Mithras: a raven, a bull, a hound. He saw none of these, only the soaring hawk. ‘Your excellency, I am loyal to my emperor and to my god, who is not your god.’

The crowd was muttering now, so that it was harder to be heard. Beneath their rumblings, Ananias said, ‘And if I choose not to believe that?’

‘Then the emperor who commands both of us will wish to know why.’

‘I see.’

They might have said more, but a gong sounded from inside the walls and on that sound, drowning it in a crash of hooves on stone, Jucundus rounded the corner at the head of two hundred and forty cavalry, breasting the crowd like an ocean ship in a high swell.

In the chaos of their arrival, the fury of horses and mail, the screams of men, women, boys who had never faced cavalry, Pantera’s sense of danger sharpened. It came not from the armed men below, but from the flurry of quiet movement behind the temple walls, from the command given in a voice he knew too well, so that when, finally, the oak gates opened wide, flashing their jewels to the morning, and a figure walked out, sleek in sand-coloured silk, to stand beside the High Priest, Pantera was beyond surprise.

Two years evading capture had drawn a few new lines about Saulos’ eyes, but he was still the smooth-faced, smooth-voiced enemy Pantera had known, invisible unless he chose to show himself, but when he did, the power of his ambition could draw a thousand eyes. It was doing so now.

‘You are not the emperor’s man.’ He spoke crisply, but not loudly, so that the crowd must quiet themselves to hear. ‘I doubt even if you are the Leopard, for he is known to be loyal. We will find your true name in due course. The questioners are even now preparing the tools of their trade. The people of Jerusalem are diligent in their love for the emperor and will honour him by allowing the High Priest to donate fifteen talents of gold to Rome for the repairs after the fire. Your blood will seal the gift.’

Fifteen talents? Nobody in the crowd believed that. They made no sound.

‘I bear the emperor’s ring,’ Pantera said.

‘A forgery.’

‘Perhaps we should await the Governor Florus and ask for his opinion. He alone has seen it on the emperor’s hand.’ Pantera spoke to Ananias alone. ‘I bring also a letter from the emperor to the governor, commending me to his service in the search for the man who would destroy both Rome and Jerusalem in pursuit of a broken prophecy. His name is Saulos. He stands at your side.’

The message was rolled in his belt pouch. It was written on imperial paper and sealed with the imperial seal which was identical in all ways to the imperial ring. Pantera had written it himself, sitting alone in the night at the table in Yusaf’s room when sleep would not come, but Saulos had no sure way of proving that, short of asking Nero himself.

‘Truly? Let me see.’ Saulos stepped out of the High Priest’s shadow, and, by that single movement, made it clear who had command of whom.

Below, the crowd sucked in another, greater, breath: a hundred thousand breasts, affronted. A murmur became a rumble, became a torrent. With a single shouted signal, Jucundus deployed his men in a row along the bottom of the temple steps, forcing the people back.

In front of them all, Saulos took the message Pantera had written and tore it across and across. ‘This is not real.’

Pantera turned to Ananias and spread his hands wide. ‘Your excellency, we each speak and you cannot be expected to discern the truth. But the emperor knows. If you wish to send a message-bird now, I will compose for you a message which will confirm the truth of what I say.’

Ananias pursed his lips. A flicker of doubt burned in his eyes. He said, ‘It will take a handful of days to send a bird and get one back.’

‘Then we can wait. You cannot empty your treasury in less time than that. And in the meantime, I beg leave to commend to your lordship the words of our emperor when he sent me here: Say to Ananias the High Priest that we approve the quality of his leadership and wish that he may continue in his place until his nephew is fit to wear his robes.’

Pantera kept his gaze level. Very few men in Rome or Jerusalem knew that neither Ananias’ sons nor his grandsons featured in his plans for the future of the priesthood. The Emperor Nero was one of those who did.

Ananias’ eyes flickered back and forth, too fast to follow. He closed them, and when he opened them again, a small shake of his head was the only sign that he had come to a decision.

This time, when he raised his arm and the gong sounded, a troop of armed legionaries marched from the temple compound. These were not Jucundus’ Syrian auxiliaries, but legionaries of the Jerusalem garrison Guard; Roman citizens all, raised in perfect certainty of their superiority to every race on earth.

Two hundred men such as this in columns of fifty, four abreast, marched from the Hebrew temple, their very presence a defilement. Each man bore across his flat palms a single bar of solid gold, his muscles corded and sweat-rolled with the strain.

They came and they came and they filled the temple platform, their gold glittering in the sun like so many scattered grains of new corn on the threshing room floor.

Below, the crowd believed at last that which they had previously denied, and were struck to silent sorrow. The want of noise was as deafening as the night before battle when the ears ache for the song of the stars and there is nothing to hear but the sound of a thousand souls preparing themselves for death.

Into that silence, Ananias, High Priest of Israel, said, distinctly, ‘He is a traitor. Take him.’

He was pointing to Pantera.