The Coming of the King

Chapter Two

‘ If your enemy lies dead of an arrow wound,’ asked Iksahra sur Anmer, ‘what will you do for your vengeance?’ She stood in the shade of the royal mews on the eastern edge of the king’s beast garden in Caesarea, feeding shreds of meat to the oldest and wildest of her falcons.

Saulos stayed in the sun, leaning against the stables at a place that allowed him to look freely up through the gardens to the palace. As far as he could tell, they were alone, and could safely talk, if one ignored the cheetah, which lay at its ease less than three long paces away, watching him with the same pitiless, hot-cold eyes as its mistress.

Saulos did his best to ignore it. He plucked a small yellow flower from the tended line along the path and buried his nose in its fragrance. ‘If Pantera dies early, I will destroy the Hebrews as we planned. But he won’t have died; he’s better than that.’

‘So you spent a gold coin to tell your enemy-’

‘I told him what he already knows; that we are enemies, that he cannot hide from me any more than I can hide from him. This is not something you and I need discuss, particularly not now when, as you see’ — Saulos nodded in the direction of the palace — ‘we have company.’

A figure appeared in the distance, walking down through the gardens. That he might not appear to be watching, Saulos turned his face to the grey sea.

Behind him, Caesarea’s beast garden resounded with contentment, as the horses and hounds, the great cat in its cage, the elephant sent by a distant monarch, delved into their troughs, their mangers, their baskets, and fed.

The smell was of warm bread, laced through with murder. Like many things of this place, Saulos was learning not to hate it. He breathed in, and sighed out, and dispelled the unpretty image of Pantera too easily dead, lying at peace under the spring sun; in his heart, he did not believe it was so.

‘Hyrcanus is on his way,’ he said. ‘The king’s nephew. More important, son of the queen.’

‘I know. On the ship before we docked, you told me to cultivate him. I have done so.’

‘The whole palace knows what you’ve done.’ Saulos allowed himself a smile. ‘Still, with what you must do today, is it safe to take him with you?’

‘It’s safe. He sees what he wishes to see, which is, in turn, what I wish him to see.’ Iksahra set down the falcon in a soothing of bells and leather and took up her mate, the tiercel; smaller, softer, easier to handle. He fed fast, bobbing his head to tear at the nugget of goat’s meat she held between thumb and finger.

For all her brittle arrogance, Iksahra was better than Saulos had dared to hope. The beasts that they had brought with them, the two dozen matched horses, the four grey and white falcons, the pitiless cat that followed her everywhere, each and all thrived in her care. It flowed in the blood from father to daughter and beyond; along with ochre eyes and a clear, cold skill in the hunt, Iksahra sur Anmer had inherited a knowledge of the needs of her beasts as if they were her own, and knew how they might be met even here, far from the hot, flat sands of their homeland. Even the cheetah, which had pined on the ship, had recovered enough two days after landfall to take down an antelope in sight of the king and queen.

And while the beasts bloomed, while they hunted, while they came to accept the touch of foreign — royal — hands, so did Iksahra strike ever deeper into the bosom of the royal family, and nowhere deeper than into the heart of the young prince, Hyrcanus, who was so openly in love with the strange black-skinned woman that for his uncle, his mother or any of the other royal adults to have shown interest in her would have been crass impropriety.

And he was there now, a breathless, pink-cheeked fifteen-year-old, slightly built like all his kin, with the rich, dark hair of the Herods flooding from crown to shoulder. He ran lightly down the marble steps that led from the ornamental flower beds to the beast garden. He stopped some distance away and came forward slowly, careful of the feeding bird.

‘I’m sorry I’m late. My uncle sent me to look for Saulos. He needs him to- Oh! My lord… my uncle… that is, the king asked… he requested…’

‘I suspect,’ said Saulos mildly, ‘that your uncle, the king, ordered me to attend him immediately, to discuss matters of policy. Specifically to find a solution to the problem posed by the quite unimaginably large bribe the Hebrews are about to offer him in the hope that he might preserve their synagogue from the predations of the Greeks. Am I right?’

Saulos smiled easily, as one conspirator to another. Hyrcanus, who had just learned rather more of the latest state crisis than his uncle had told him, or was likely to tell him, grinned his relief.

‘You’re right. That’s exactly what he said. Will you go? Will you tell him that I found you and sent you? He’s in a foul temper. It would…’ Discretion came to him late. He ran out of words, and stood in the half-shade, shifting from one foot to the other.

‘It would mollify him. And therefore I will do it.’ Saulos was dressed for court, in costly silks the colour of sand. He took a moment to brush away the grit, giving Hyrcanus time to regain his composure. ‘Your uncle enjoys my company,’ Saulos said as he passed the boy by. ‘There’s no shame in that; you need not be afraid to say it. And you, meanwhile, will go to sea with Iksahra, there to hunt with her falcons. I am told the tiercel is flying well for you?’

‘He is! Yesterday, we caught one of the shore birds, the small fast ones that dodge between the waves. He was so fast, so perfect! It was wonderful!’ The boy’s eyes shone bright as the sun-struck sea.

Saulos laughed and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good! You’ll be a hunter by the day’s end.’

His eyes met Iksahra’s over the boy’s head. If he had not spent three months in her company, the hate in her gaze would have terrified him. He walked away, snapping his fingers in time to an inner rhythm. His day, however he looked at it, was perfect.

Hypatia dreamed of Saulos before she saw him and she saw him before she ever set foot on the harbour at Caesarea and those facts were, she thought, the reason her mouth was quite so dry and the usual stable rhythm of her heart unstable. Those, and that she hated the sea.

The dreams had begun long before she had left the imperial quarters in Rome and taken ship for the east.

In truth, they had begun before her eighth birthday, which was one of the reasons she was who she was; the future servants of Isis were chosen from among the children with the most vivid dreams and Hypatia’s had certainly been that.

All through her training, in the deserts south of Alexandria, in Greece, in the dreaming chambers of Mona, the same dream had come. Sometimes, she slept at peace for days at a time and thought herself free of it, then it would visit her three nights in succession, prodding her to wake, sweating, with her hands cramped and her back arched tight against an imagined — or remembered — pain.

On Mona, where the dreamers trained for twenty years before they considered themselves adept, they told her to return home and become the Oracle of the Temple of Truth in Alexandria, there to await the time when the source of terror in her dreams might visit her to ask a boon.

She had over two decades from her first dream before Saulos Herodion survived the labyrinth that led to the Temple and begged the Oracle’s help. There was a moment when Hypatia could have killed him, knowing what he could do, what he might do, what he wanted to do, but she was the Oracle, bound by laws stronger than her fears, and so she had spoken the words the god had sent in the moment of Saulos’ asking and, as in her dreams, Saulos had taken them and wrought fire, and death and havoc, and spilled his false god out into the world.

Now, though, in the mid-afternoon, with the sea air hot from the land, she let go of the dreams for a while, and stood at the foremast with Andros, the ship’s master, at her side and watched the wonder of organization that allowed him to talk to her as easily as he had in mid-ocean, while still controlling the hundred fine manoeuvres that let him slide his ship through Caesarea’s outer breakwater and into the clutter of barges, skiffs, day-fishers and deep-sea trading vessels that crowded the inner harbour.

From this distance, the royal party waiting on the steps of Augustus’ temple was little more than a blur of porphyry, azure blue, spring green and scarlet with a single seam of gold in the centre; too far to put a name to anyone, except that only the king might wear gold and so it must be his family who stood around him.

Beyond that, only the blistering white stone of Augustus’ temple was clear to the incoming traveller, set on a slope above the harbour, looking due west, to the setting sun and to Rome.

‘They build their temples in the Greek fashion here,’ Hypatia said. ‘I had not thought to see such a thing in this land of the Hebrews.’

‘But Caesarea is not in the land of the Hebrews.’ Andros, master of the sailing ship Krateis, was a big bear of a man. He smiled at Hypatia but did not embrace her, an act of self-control that took an obvious effort of will.

In Alexandria, whence they had come, Andros had been afraid of her, had barely allowed her on board; Hypatia was known throughout the city as a Sibyl, an Oracle, one given since birth to Isis, and he feared the wrath of the sea-gods if she set foot on his beloved ship.

Only sight of the emperor’s ring, and a letter marked with the seal of the late empress, had changed his mind, and that unwillingly. For a month, he had treated Hypatia as ill luck, so that it was a wonder she had not slipped on a dark night and gone overboard. Then a storm had truly come, black as the ravens of Zeus, full of thunder and the raging wrath of Poseidon, and, while the men hid and wept, Hypatia had lashed herself to the rails at the prow and faced down the storm, talking reason to waves tall as pyramids, singing to the lion-roaring sea.

In the morning, when the sun had broken through the cloud and the gods had sent a good tail wind, she had been greeted as a conquering hero, and every man among them would have thrown himself overboard to save her. Some of the younger ones had, in fact, offered to do exactly that in the three days after when she had lain abed with fever and could not be roused.

They had been restrained, and Hypatia had lived, and now Andros stood there, claiming her as his own, hoping he might persuade her to stay, knowing he could not.

He lifted his palm, shading his eyes against the high afternoon sun. ‘The thing to remember about Caesarea,’ he said, sagely, ‘is that she was built by Herod the Great, a king who was neither Greek nor Hebrew but tried to be both, and she has spent the hundred years of her life trying to merge two cultures which are as oil to wine or lions to mewling infants. She has failed and will do so for ever. The Greeks are good traders, but prone to violence. While the Hebrews… the Hebrews are crazy.’ Andros spat, throatily. ‘They love death in the name of their god more than they do life under the Romans. The rest of us are happy to pay our taxes, and hail every mad Caesar as a god, but they must resist and shout about it and to hang with the consequen- Ho there! Keep a clean line or we’ll crush you to tinder!’

He threw himself forward, leaning down, shouting in the gutter Greek of the sea that no one born on land could hope to understand.

Hypatia, too, leaned forward and saw a small white-sailed day-skiff cut in front of the Krateis, saw it sweep under the scythe of her bow and jink a dainty tack to bring it sweeping back again towards the berthing points at the wharf.

Andros was going land-crazy, working himself to a lather at a slight so small he would have barely noticed it at sea, but was blown big now because he could smell land as well as sea, incense as well as salt, meat and fruits and oils and flowers as well as fish and the sweat of unwashed men. He leaned over the bow rail, hurling ever more inventive curses at the ill-begotten sons of parasites who were piloting the skiff. They, for their part, shouted back neatly crafted threats of their own, that had to do with Andros’ virility and their ability to disarm it.

They were close enough now to see the faces on the dock, to pick out the likenesses of dress, of hair, of nose and eyebrow that knitted some together and set others apart. Hypatia left the master to his ravings and leaned back against the mast where she might seem to study the harbour, while studying instead the royal party.

She began at the outer reaches, where stood the men of the city Watch, Roman in all their mail and leather, but not Roman by birth; Syrians, she thought, the local men, who spoke Greek now, rather than their natural tongue, and had done so for three hundred years since the conqueror Alexander had taken their lands for his own. They were trained to Roman standards, though. She resolved to find the name of their commander.

Within the circle they made stood the royal party of Agrippa II, grandson to Herod the Great, whose sign of the wheat sheaves flew in gold pennants above the tower and the promontory palace.

A handful of royal children hemmed him in, nieces and nephews of this wifeless, childless king. Hypatia couldn’t see Hyrcanus, nephew to the king and nominated heir, but she did notice a dark-haired girl, taller than the rest, who pointed at their big two-masted ship with the emperor’s pennant and kept her stiff arm outstretched for a long time as they made way towards the harbour, as if throwing a curse, or drawing the ship in to dock, or both.

Andros was losing his verbal battle. The small day-skiff cut in front of the Krateis one last time, aiming for the same place at the wharf. Light and lively, it skipped ahead, hampering the bigger ship’s progress. Andros became truly manic in his fury, but there was nothing to be done but slow his own ship, to set the oars to backwater and turn in more tightly to the wharf.

‘Here! Dock here!’

The shout sliced the air. The king pushed to the fore of the huddle, waving his command. Agrippa was small, like all Herod’s kin, with the fine, dark hair and lean nose of the Idumaeans, whom the Hebrews called Edomites and despised. Still, they ruled over Caesarea, Jerusalem and all the rest of Judaea, albeit under sufferance of Rome.

Here in Caesarea, Agrippa showed no deference to anyone, excepting that he wore a toga in the Roman manner, with purple at the hem, and a filet of gold in his hair, and the women on either side of him wore stolas in azure blue and spring green and had their hair twisted high and cross-pinned at the crown in the style that had been favoured by the Empress Poppaea before her untimely death in childbed at the year’s turn. In Rome, nobody had dared yet call the style out of fashion.

Hypatia waited at the mast head. She was the Chosen of Isis; she was used to conversations with royalty and the inevitable dramas they wrought. If, to date, the kings, queens and emperors had always been the supplicants and she the one who delivered — or not — that which they sought, it was, she believed, not so different now, just less… controlled.

She made herself stand straighter, and set her arms by her sides as the Krateis turned broadside to the dock and one of the younger freemen leapt the oar’s-length gap to the shore, winding ropes on to bollards to hold the ship safely to land.

The king had commanded her presence. Holding her head high, feeling her neck unnaturally stiff, Hypatia plotted a safe course around the debris on the deck: the careful coils of rope, the taut rigging, the line that held the stone that marked the depth at which the ship might safely anchor, the ‘Do you see the falcon?’ a girl’s voice cried in lightly accented Greek. ‘See! The black woman still has it, but Hyrcanus has the male, so he must have made a kill. And look! She has the cheetah with her! I told you it followed her everywhere.’

Hypatia had gone another two carefully measured paces before the meaning of the words brought her to a halt.

She dragged her gaze from the dockside and looked at last where the girl was pointing now, not at the Krateis, but at the unruly day-skiff berthed so close that sandbags had been thrown between to keep the hull of the greater, ocean-going broad-ship from crushing the small, lighter, faster — and now plausibly royal — skiff.

Her ship’s greater height granted Hypatia a clear view on to the deck of the skiff and thus on to the tall, lean woman who stood on its gangplank with a leashed and hooded falcon on her wrist and a sleek, long-limbed great cat, neither leashed nor hooded, at her heel. The cheetah stood with its head high and its small round ears pricked and raked its yellow eyes across the company.

The woman who commanded it was not, in fact, the jet black of the Nubians as the girl had implied, but a shade lighter, a deep earthen brown, with a cap of short brown-black hair curled tight as a new-born lamb’s, eyes the colour of deepest ochre, and high, carved cheekbones that caught the sun as if she had painted them across with powder of gold. Looking closer, Hypatia saw that each cheekbone bore three small spirals tattooed in a line; and three more crossed the bridge of her nose, linking her fine, gull-wing brows.

The tattoos defined her origin: to Hypatia’s knowledge, the only tribes that marked themselves thus were those that bred horses, hunted gazelle and herded rough goat-sheep south and west of Mauretania where the desert stretched vast as an ocean and the men, it was said, could live without water for a week while the women gave birth on horseback, and perhaps conceived the same way. They called themselves the Berberai, and had sworn allegiance to no one, nor did they have any fear of Rome.

It was the Berber woman, then, whom the girl-child had seen and the Berber woman’s beasts the king had called forth. The cheetah was always going to be the first focus of attention, but the falcon was no less imposing in its way. It stood on her arm, a slate-grey she-bird with a pale flecked chest of the kind the Berberai used to hunt deer, and behind her, leashed to the arm of a green-faced seasick boy of about fifteen, was the smaller tiercel that was its mate.

Nobody watched the boy; the royal party’s attention rested instead on the Berber as she strode down the gangplank with the cheetah stepping loose-limbed and lethal at her side.

At the shore, the falcon roused, screaming a challenge to the land and the colour and the many staring eyes. The younger children shrieked in horrified delight. The royal women stepped back, covering their breasts with their hands. Agrippa, the king, stood his ground, white-knuckled, staring fixedly ahead.

The Berber woman made obeisance, of sorts, to the king, to the women at his side, and, in a deep, bell-toned voice that set the bars of Hypatia’s chest thrumming, said, ‘Iksahra sur Anmer thanks your majesties for their indulgence. Your royal nephew is a versatile hunter, if not yet quite suited to the sea. We caught a few gulls, but nothing else of worth. I beg leave to continue his training in the deserts, that he might, in time, reach the excellence of his ancestors.’

Hypatia bit her lip and made sure not to smile. She had given orders to emperors in her time, she knew the pitch of voice that acted as a command, whatever the nature of the words, and the Berber woman had just ordered King Agrippa II of Judaea to leave his nephew — his sole heir — in her care.

Agrippa showed no sign of having noticed. His gaze glanced unseeing over the assemblage before him — the men on the skiff, the boy, the falcon, even the cheetah — and came to rest, thoughtfully, on the Berber woman who, contrary to all propriety, wore a loose white robe that barely stretched to her knees and covered her arms not at all.

It was a man’s dress, and she was assuredly not a man. She was, in fact, as close as Hypatia had ever seen to one of the legendary Amazons, but for the fact that she bore no bow, and had plainly not amputated her own right breast, the better to fire her arrows.

The king thought the same. Hypatia watched him say as much behind his hand to a man dressed in silk the colour of sand who stood at his left shoulder, in the place of a counsellor.

The Oracles of Isis were well versed in reading words by the form of the speaker’s lips alone. From her place high up on the deck of the Krateis, Hypatia watched Agrippa say, ‘The Amazon will make a man of my nephew yet.’

The reply came swiftly, with amusement. ‘If you give her time to do so.’ The man at the king’s shoulder also let his eyes rest on the Berber woman, but it seemed to Hypatia that the shock of her touched him less than it had the king, and that he gazed instead into her soul, to the passions that burned in the glacial interior, and that he was pleased with what he saw.

And then he turned his head and smiled, and so she saw at last that the messages had been true: Saulos was in Caesarea.

Two month at sea, six months before in preparation, a year before in hunting, had wound her tighter than she knew. She felt the heat of his gaze pass over her and move on, and opened her fists and wiped away the sudden greasy sweat on the weather-fine wood of the mast.

In the temple, she had been cloaked and cowled. Her voice had not been her own; her body had been the hollow reed through which Truth spoke. She had said so to Pantera, to Mergus, to the ailing Empress Poppaea in her private apartments as they had planned all that might happen.

Saulos saw the Oracle, he did not see Hypatia. I will know him and will not be known. As the empress suggests, I will take ship to Caesarea and deliver her gifts while you travel overland. Whichever of us finds him first will alert the others.

Hypatia turned her gaze to the city, to the bright houses and brighter gardens, to the merchants and traders and slaves and housekeepers and ladies and courtiers and counsellors and men of the Watch who flooded the dock and the nearby streets.

It did not look like a city on the verge of riot and revolution, but Hypatia had spent half her life visiting cities and states on the verge of war; she knew the taste of the air and the sounds of men and women trying to pretend that life had not changed and would not change. A smear of black smoke somewhere in mid-city was darker and thicker than it should have been and somewhere distant, women wailed a death.

With a nod to Andros to let him know she was all right, she gathered her dignity and stepped down the plank on to the dockside and into the maelstrom that was Caesarea.