The Coming of the King

Chapter Forty-One

Iksahra rode south under the high sun.

Her mare was the pride of her father’s breeding. Her hide was the colour of almond blossom, her mane and tail unblemished charcoal, her feet black as onyx, and as hard. She was fleet as the hot south wind and could go all day at a canter without need for rest or water. Her one colt foal was a yearling now, the hope and pride of Iksahra’s own breeding herd, left behind in her homelands under the care of a woman who had seemed competent and interested and useful; at least that had been the case in last year’s summer, before a man had dangled the sweet meat of vengeance within Iksahra’s grasp, before she had discovered that vengeance did not feed her heart’s hunger.

The ghost of her father joined her as she passed the palms, the olives, the green pastures south of Jerusalem. He complimented her on the mare, on the cheetah that ran ever at her heels, a living ghost, a shadow in gold and black.

He sat cross-legged on the horizon at the level of her shoulder and tilted his head and asked, Why do you do this? Why are you riding from one man to another with a message you cannot read, the contents of which they will not share with you?

‘Because Hypatia asked it of me.’ It was not entirely true; Hypatia had asked that Yusaf send the one deemed most reliable and Iksahra had named herself that, leaving Kleopatra in Yusaf’s care. It had seemed the same thing at the time, but sounded different now, when she spoke it aloud in the echoes of her own head.

The ghost that might not have been her father gazed at her askance. And you always do her bidding, this woman?

‘She may die.’ She may die, and my heart will die with her. She did not say so, even in the echoes of her head, but the ghost heard her anyway, and his laugh was a long stuttering titter, which disrupted the smooth rhythm of her horse. That was how she knew it was not really her father; he had never laughed at the things she cared about.

Under the hot sun, Iksahra spoke the words Anmer ber Ikshel had taught her for the dissipation of ghuls and kicked her mount faster along the route Yusaf had drawn for her in the dust on his floor.

Noon came and went. The sun devoured them, spat them out, ate them again. The olive groves and date palms became scrubbier and less frequent and gave way finally to rocks and sand and waterless desert wadis.

Soon, rocks grew on either side, as scorching ovens. Heat became pain, and burned away the memories of a night when nothing had really happened, but which, even so, had left her feeling torn from her past without sight of a clear future.

Near the end now, Iksahra urged the mare on. The cheetah ran nearby, never tiring. They raced faster. The world was blinding light and hot earth and ropes of saliva frothing back from the bridle and the cat’s hot breath at her heel.

Sometime later, the mare pricked her ears and the cat grunted a warning. Ahead, a spark of light flickered where an ignorant man let his sword blade catch the sun, not knowing that the ifrit used such things to discover where men camped, that they might trap them in the night.

With a curse at his idiocy, Iksahra lay low on her mare’s neck and urged her into a full, flat-bellied gallop across the last miles of rugged plain to the foothills north of Masada.

She came fast from the north, from Jerusalem, a black woman dressed all in white riding a mare the colour of starlight with black points and black feet, and with a cat running in her shadow.

It was the black-and-whiteness that spooked the lookouts who stood at the northern edges of the heights, more than the fact that she knew where they were. They may have been God-fearing Hebrews, but they had grown to adulthood hearing daily the tales of what lived in the desert at night; in the darker corners of their mind, the things that might hurt them most looked just like this.

Eleazir of the long sight saw her first, and called Mergus who had the authority to stop the lookouts from using her for target practice with their slings.

Pantera waited on the heights until she had reached the mouth of the cleft through which any rider must pass to reach the hidden camp.

‘Iksahra!’

He ran down, leaping from rock to rock. Behind him, men who had been afraid to look earlier came to the edge of the heights now, jostling for a better view. Closer, she was no less exotic: a black woman on a milk-white mare with a cat at her heels that was more like a hound.

Pantera reached the last rock and stood above her, looking down. Her mouth was set in a straight line. Tightness held her, where before had been only supple fluidity.

He said, ‘Who’s dead?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t read the message. Estaph is alive, but taken prisoner. So too are the Chosen of Isis and the Queen Berenice. They are imprisoned. Read this. I will tell you of them after.’

Her palm was held flat and, on it, a message cylinder for him to take. Dried blood on one end flaked off as he uncapped it and tipped out the contents. The fragile paper was in an old code; one of the first, and so the easiest, that Seneca had taught his spies. He read aloud as if it were plain Latin, but quietly, privately, not for the men above.

From Ishmael, keeper of doves, to Gideon, greetings. Blood flows in the streets of Caesarea. Orders came from Jerusalem: let all the Hebrew men and women die. The men of the city Watch came last night in the darkness and by morning all were dead. All. Six thousand men, their wives, mothers, sons and daughters, even the newborn, hurled naked on the streets. Twenty thousand souls in all. My father died trying to save a friend. I write to warn you, lest death comes also to Jerusalem.

He thought of a boy with eyes like gazelle’s and a father he had never met. His vision blurred. Iksahra was staring at him with something close to pity, which was so unlikely as to startle him to steadiness. She was speaking. He cuffed away the tears and made himself listen.

‘Yusaf read the message. He knew what it said, although he didn’t tell me, but he did give me this second scroll for Menachem. He said… he said you would understand it, if he did not.’

Between thumb and finger, she held a scroll tied with linen thread sealed by a blob of beeswax that bore the imprint of a man’s thumb as its only seal.

Pantera said, ‘Menachem is-’

‘Behind you. I heard what you read. Caesarea is a graveyard.’ The words came from a sword’s length behind, to his left, deeper into the cleft that led to the hidden valley in which they camped. Menachem extended his hand to Iksahra. ‘Horses cannot come into the valley. Will you let Moshe care for your mare?’

It was a decision made without forethought, but it was good, evidently, for as soon as Iksahra nodded, Menachem’s chief captain skipped down the cluttered rock as if they were steps and came to hold the mare’s bridle. Even before he reached her, the look on his face was that of a man besotted.

Menachem’s patience was a finite thing these days, measured in grains of sand that grew fewer with each passing day. The pressure of his waiting was tangible by the time Pantera, Iksahra and the cheetah reached the neck of the gully, where it gave way to the hidden valley.

Ahead, all about the valley’s floor, two thousand men, less a few dozen lookouts, sat cleaning their new weapons, or trying on new mail. At one end, a tailor with three fingers missing on his right hand sat in the shade of the high walls and assessed men by sight as they approached him, and allocated them a mail shirt from the numbered piles about him.

At the valley’s other end, Mergus and his handful of Romans held classes to teach men to use Roman weapons in ways that would kill more of the enemy than their brethren. Between classes, men flaunted their new armour, vain as girls in coloured silks.

All this halted when Menachem began to walk to the centre of the valley. A hundred men, more, laid down their weapons and clustered around, keeping a respectful distance, but still close enough to hear and be heard.

Pantera’s look sent them back. Catching up with Menachem, he walked with him towards the uninhabited centre, although even at this distance, he spoke softly. ‘You heard Ishmael’s message? The city Watch in Caesarea has slaughtered the Hebrew community. Twenty thousand dead.’

‘I heard,’ Menachem said. ‘Jerusalem will be next if we don’t act soon.’

‘Saulos has less than three thousand men,’ Pantera said. ‘One hundred thousand Hebrews live in the city, even when it is not crowded for a feast day.’

‘He has sent for help,’ Iksahra said. ‘I went out this morning to hunt his doves. I caught one with a message coming in, not going out. If he hadn’t sent one already, he will have done so today.’

Menachem walked ahead of them awhile. When he turned, his face was tight, his lips made a fine, hard line. ‘They’ll send the Twelfth to assault us,’ he said. ‘It’s a ten-day march, maybe more if they bring the local infantry with them.’

‘If we march now, and set camp overnight, we can be at Jerusalem by tomorrow’s dawn.’ Pantera turned to Iksahra. ‘How is the Guard arranged?’

‘They are in the fortress of the Antonia, next to the Temple, all but one century that will have left by now, escorting the king and his family to Damascus. Except Berenice. She and Hypatia are imprisoned. Estaph’s death will begin on tomorrow’s dawn if Saulos has his way. The women will follow him.’

‘What of Kleopatra?’

‘She is safe with Yusaf. Hypatia wants me to take her to Alexandria.’

‘Will you?’

‘Not while the Chosen of Isis remains alive and imprisoned.’

Iksahra had turned away from him so it was impossible to see her face, to read more beyond the changing textures of her voice.

They came to the valley’s end and climbed steps cut in the rock to a high, hidden place from where it was possible to see Masada to the south and, almost, if one stared hard at the horizon, Jerusalem to the north. The sun stood overhead, shrinking their shadows.

Pantera said, ‘You said Yusaf had sent you with a second message?’

‘Here.’ Iksahra withdrew the scroll of papyrus from her belt pouch a second time. It was blotted with ink, creased, torn at the corners as if many men had held it. Menachem cracked the seal between his thumbs and unrolled it with reverence, as if it were sacred scripture; which it was, almost.

Over Menachem’s shoulder, Pantera read a litany of names written in Hebrew, beginning with Menachem’s own and rising back through his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfathers and others and others strung up the page in ever widening lines. At one side, a column of signatures had been added, a little apart from the rest. Yusaf’s name was first, then Gideon’s, then all of the Sanhedrin, one after the other.

At the end, Menachem let it spring closed. He raised his eyes, found Iksahra, and then Pantera. ‘Tell me what you have just read.’

‘Nothing that you don’t already know. You are of the line of David. You fulfil the promise of the psalm that the fruit of his body shall sit upon the throne of Israel. What is new in this, what changes everything, is that every man of consequence in Jerusalem has signed the proof of your lineage. The whole Sanhedrin is here. They are saying that they will acknowledge you as the rightful king of Judaea. You only have to take the throne.’

‘If Saulos saw this…’

‘He would crucify every man who had signed it. They take a risk, in order to support your risk.’

Pantera gazed out across the open plain. Here, this close to Masada, it was empty desert, home to the antelopes and hyenas, but the haze in the distance was many shades of green, where cedars grew thick as fleece across the hills, and date palms and olive groves wrought patchwork patterns on the fertile slopes around Jerusalem.

Thoughtfully, he said, ‘We must anoint you king in a river, as it says in the scriptures. Gideon can do that, with witnesses who will swear to it. Everything must be done as it was written.’

‘And if I am not that king? How does your god punish hubris?’

‘My god punishes no one. Men do that to each other, or to themselves when they think they have reached too high. You are not reaching too high.’

When he heard no reply, Pantera turned back, away from the plain. ‘Your city needs a ruler. The whole of your nation waits for someone who can bear the weight of sovereignty with wisdom and fortitude. Did you think the chance to rule was a gift? You could have asked Nero, or Claudius, or the poor mad fool Caligula. They could tell you that ruling is a curse. It takes a strong man to withstand its pressures. You are that man.’

Menachem’s gaze seared his face. ‘What would you have me do?’

‘Enter Jerusalem as Israel’s anointed king. Fight anyone who stands against you. Do whatever it takes to secure your nation’s future as a strong and stable state. You can do this.’

‘You can do this,’ Iksahra said in echo, from his other side. ‘You must. It is why I was sent.’