The Coming of the King

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The place to which they took Pantera was a vast, open-fronted cage in the back of the beast gardens, caught in full sun, dazzling, hot and disturbingly open.

Always before, he had been questioned in the dark, in low, cold places where a man’s agony could not reach the sunlight, where the intimacy of pain and humiliation was shared only with his inquisitors. Here was big enough to host a banquet and open to the watching beasts, to the flies that gathered waiting for an open wound, to the slaves who dallied, staring, as six vast men of the Jerusalem garrison Guard stripped Pantera of his tunic and tied him to the central stake, with his hands above his head, hauled up, so that his feet held barely half of his weight.

Around his feet was beaten earth, polished black with old blood. There was, however, no fire lit yet, no brazier with which to heat the irons that might burn out his eyes, or draw lines of pain on his body. Pantera fastened on that fact and held it close.

They settled him in his new position and tied off the ropes. Already, his hands began to burn. He drew a surreptitious breath through his mouth and held it and tried to measure how hard it was to lift his ribs and make the air slide into his lungs, how much extra weight it put on his arms. He thought he could speak, at least in short bursts.

The giants who had tied him stepped back to study their handiwork. None of the six was fully dressed; a loin cloth and belt, both easily replaced, was their only covering, but on his belt each wore the corn sheaf of the Jerusalem garrison Guard which labelled them as Roman citizens.

By their size, by the red-gold hair, he put them as the sons of the sons of Caesar’s famous Batavian guard, the men of myth and legend, great Germanic tribesmen, twice the bulk of any other man, and loyal to the point of idiocy. None of them was an officer; they were bred and trained to the taking of orders.

With his nurtured breath, Pantera said, ‘Like you, I am a Roman citizen. It is not lawful to do this.’ He spoke Latin, in the accent of the Senate, which gave orders to men such as these.

They hesitated. He met each troubled gaze in turn, said, ‘If you were to fetch Governor Florus and explain to him the circumstances, the emperor will look kindly on it when this is brought to his notice. It does not, I believe, contradict your orders.’

None of them hit him, to keep him from speaking; it was a start. Pantera glanced down at the neat pile of folded linen that was his tunic. The turquoise ring lay within the folds, for these were honest men, who did not steal from prisoners.

He tried again. ‘You see that I bear the emperor’s ring. You must know that it is real. What harm in bringing the governor to hear my case?’

One was smaller than the others, although still vast by Roman standards. He nodded, checked with a sideways glance that none of his fellows was going to stop him, and stepped backwards out of the door.

He was gone — perhaps he was gone — before Saulos came, for Saulos came very quickly on the heels of his leaving. The remaining five men stepped away, and stood in a line; a human barrier that made a wall in front of the cage, and gave a degree of intimacy to those inside.

Saulos had changed his clothing. Fastidious to a fault, he had stopped somewhere to exchange his sand-coloured silks for a slave’s tunic of plain linen with the old stains washed out, so that only a man who had seen inquisitors’ work from beginning to end might recognize the uniform of his trade. He wore a belt with two knives in it, and a small lead weight, rounded to fit a man’s palm. Pantera’s stomach rolled over, remembering.

Smiling, Saulos lifted the weight and tossed it from hand to hand. ‘Are you comfortable?’

‘No.’

‘But you will remember, I’m sure, how comfortable this is, compared to later. You can look forward to your death. It will happen long after you want it, but it will still happen.’

Saulos moved as he spoke, lazily, swinging round in an arc, like a dancer pretending to practise. At the move’s end his fist, made heavy by the lead, hammered into Pantera’s solar plexus.

There had been warning of a sort in that inelegant swoop, and Pantera did not let his feet come off the ground. In the puking, retching, black-blue star-spattered agony, as he fought to breathe, and heard the raucous noises of his own pain soak into the dirt beneath his feet, that was his victory.

The pain in his diaphragm became less. He caught a breath and treasured it, nurtured it into his lungs, even when sanity said he should have abandoned breathing and let himself go into the blackness.

He lifted his head. Saulos was smiling, white-toothed in the dazzling sun.

‘Very good. You were questioned in Britain, I understand, so none of this is new. Such a pleasure to work with someone who understands what’s happening. In the old days, sometimes, when we released men to be informers and they refused to inform and we had to arrest them again, then they were like you. But there were few of them, and we stopped it soon enough when it was obvious they were lying. After that, men only came once, and left as food for the big cats.’

‘You worked here? In this place?’

‘I was here in the time of Caligula and then Claudius. Seneca sent me to suppress the Hebrew insurrections led by the Galilean’s lieutenants. They made me the lead inquisitor under High Priest Ananias; the elder, not the current craven idiot. We thought that pain and executions would do it.’

‘And when you found they didn’t, you took the Galilean’s death and made it the cornerstone of your new religion, speaking of a god that needed only faith, not deeds?’

It was not necessary to say that, or even useful; nobody knew Saulos’ history better than the man himself, but there had been a change in the padding noises of the beasts in the sun beyond the cage and it mattered that Saulos not hear it.

Pantera let his voice run on: ‘You freed the Hebrews from the twin burdens of circumcision and the table laws so that they might love Rome and the Romans. Yet when you last came to Jerusalem, the zealots bound themselves with oaths not to eat or drink before they had killed you. How much did you hate them for that?’

‘No more than I hated them already, with their petty, pusillanimous carping.’ Saulos smiled. ‘The governor is coming,’ he said. ‘Did you think I had not heard?’

He began his graceless, looping dance again, slower this time, so that when Florus appeared in the gap between the standing guards, the only sound was Pantera’s flailing breath.