The Coming of the King

Chapter Thirty-One

There was a point when Pantera’s pain ceased to be red, sooted with black, or black speared by a thousand dazzling points of crimson, and became simply white.

It was not less, only that the texture of it changed so that he was put in mind of silk bandages tied to trees and let fly in the wind; of gulls swooping over fishing boats in a harbour — any harbour; of hawthorn blossom in Britain in spring; of Hannah, so that his heart clenched tight and his soul wept.

Somewhere, a door opened and closed again and a new texture of white wove round his head. This was mist of the kind that hung over marshes, and caused men to see things that weren’t there. Within it, he smelled wild flowers, faintly, and they took him back to Alexandria, to a woman he had met there, who had once frightened him.

Drifting, he traced her thread through his life since then, to Rome, to Caesarea, to an image of her dressed in green silk, with silver at her ears and neck, sitting alongside Queen Berenice in the theatre, and then more recently, fighting with her hounds, fast as any warrior. He thought he could see her soul then, and that it shone. He struggled for her name, drew it slowly to his breast as a man draws a fish: Hypatia.

The effort exhausted him. He fell away from the mist, and when he came back, the bed was surrounded. He could feel the press of half a dozen hearts; their concern, their impatience and grief.

‘We need to move him.’ Yusaf’s voice rained down from an impossible height, worried and trying to hide it. ‘Saulos has the garrison Guard on house-to-house searches. He can’t stay here.’ A man’s breath touched his cheek; he felt the heat of a face. ‘Is he awake yet?’

‘Not yet.’ Hypatia dribbled cool liquid into his mouth, slowly. Her finger stroked his throat for the swallow.

‘How much longer?’

‘As long as it takes.’

He was struggling to reach through the layers of mist when an idle, malicious voice said, ‘If you don’t want war, you should give him to the Guard. They’ll pick up someone else, otherwise, to make an example. If they crucify an innocent man now, we’ll have war whether you like it or not.’

Yusaf drew himself up in a murmur of silks. From high over the bed, he said, ‘We will not give him to anyone. If the men of both parties remain indoors, the Guard will have no reason to pick anyone for reprisals. There will be no war. You are not ready.’

The slick, sliding voice said, ‘We are as ready as we are ever going to be. All we need is weaponry enough for those who would wield a sword or a spear. Our grandfather assaulted the armoury at Sepphoris and took arms for himself and his followers. I say we do the same now.’

‘No!’ Yusaf slammed his hand on the bed’s side, remembered himself, and drew it back with an oath. In the slightly startled silence, he said, ‘When the Galilean stole the swords of Sepphoris, the legions crucified every boy and man in the city in retaliation. They sold the women and children to slavery. Even now, the city has not recovered. I will not allow you to do that again.’

‘You think you can you stop it?’ said the stranger. ‘You are not the Peacemaker. You can never be.’

Someone new moved to the bed. Caught in the grey half-land between waking and sleep, Pantera felt a new quality to the silence and knew who had come and was grateful.

‘I will stop the war,’ Menachem said. His voice was quietly reasonable, as it had always been, but resonant now with a new authority. ‘Yusaf is right, we are not ready. I will give you to the guards myself before I will allow you to drag us to our destruction.’

‘Then what do you suggest, cousin? We will have war; even you cannot stop it. As Yusaf has rightly said, my death would bring it on faster, not delay it.’

‘ Masada,’ said a whisper of dry linen dragged on stone. Pantera’s throat hurt, hearing it, as if someone had just scrubbed his windpipe with a fistful of sand.

‘He’s awake!’

Three voices said it together. A single hand clutched his, then withdrew, swiftly, but it was enough to wrest his eyes open, to let him see that he was, indeed, the centre of a circle of heads bent over, looking down on him.

Hypatia was nearest, still with the feel of silk bandages about her although her hair was a black flag, caught behind her ears. He sought her hand, which lay still on the counterpane. ‘The hounds…’ he whispered. ‘Sorry.’

She pressed his hand again, shook her head. ‘They died in battle, a credit to their ancestors.’ He wanted to believe her.

His eyes roamed on. Mergus was next to her, grey-white and sleepless, his face pinched as a gull’s, and next to him stood Estaph, a ghost of a bear, watching with great, hurt eyes that smiled a little when Pantera’s gaze settled on them. Iksahra was there; he smelled her cat first, and his eyes found her second. He sent her thanks with his gaze.

Yusaf was next, then Menachem, who might yet become his friend, and then… he did not know who was next, except that it might have been Menachem’s paler brother, his hair one shade lighter than black, his eyes a shade towards grey, his soul… his soul very different from Menachem’s.

His identity was couched in his tone as much as his words. What do you suggest, cousin? Enlightenment came with the memory, and Pantera let his gaze rest on Eleazir ben Simeon, younger cousin to Menachem, who wished to lead the War Party, and was not fit.

Menachem lifted Pantera’s hand, brought his wandering attention back. ‘Did we hear you aright? Did you say Masada? That we might get our weapons from there?’

Eleazir hawked and spat, fluidly. ‘Masada’s a death trap. No one can get near it.’

Pantera closed his eyes. Darkness gave him solitude and allowed him strength to push the necessary words past the fire in his throat.

‘My father said… your grandfather, the Galilean… should have raided Masada. The armoury is bigger than the one at Sepphoris. It lies on a bare rock, guarded only by Romans. No Hebrews there to be slain in reprisal.’ He felt better, speaking, than he had when silent. He opened his eyes again.

Menachem was staring down at him thoughtfully. ‘Even so, my cousin is right,’ he said. ‘Since Herod built his first palace there, no one has assaulted the rock of Masada. There is one path in, and that is so narrow that two guards could hold off an army. There are five hundred legionaries on the rock. If there is a safe way in, or out, nobody knows of it.’

‘I do.’

They dared not believe him, except Hypatia, who closed her eyes and raised one brow, as if questioning a voice within, and at the end of it said, ‘Tell them.’

And so to her, to Mergus and Estaph, to Yusaf and to Menachem, he said, ‘My father took me to Masada. I have walked inside its walls. I know a way it can be assaulted so that no innocent life will be lost.’

‘Why would you do this?’ asked Menachem. ‘It does not prosper your battle against Saulos. He has taken control of the fortress of the Antonia, next to the Temple. He commands the garrison Guard and the cavalry from Caesarea. Only the auxiliary from Caesarea under Jucundus is still loyal to the royal family. If we take you, and wait until you heal… it will be nearly a month before we return. Saulos’ power will have risen by then like leavened bread under a morning sun.’

This close, Menachem’s eyes were not black, but a deep, deep brown, shaded in places with amber. They were the eyes of a man who has taken the harsh decisions of leadership, who bears the weight, and has not fallen under it, who can think clearly, and weigh risk against gain and keep his ardour for when it was needed.

To Menachem alone, therefore, Pantera gave his dwindling breath. ‘Saulos plans a war that will destroy Jerusalem. If we cannot stop him, then we will make war on our terms. A war we will win.’

He lay back, spent, and heard them argue as to his fitness and how he might be healed, and what must be done and could be done and might be done, here, or in the desert, where men lived as healers.

In the end, sleep claimed him, and so he was spared the pain of movement, as they loaded him on to a litter and carried him along narrow alleys to a gate used chiefly by the night soil collectors.

He woke at night in the desert, to the sounds of emptiness and the songs of the stars and a morning sun that spilled bright, prophetic blood across the sand.