The Coming of the King

Chapter Forty-Four

In the night’s dark, a shadow stumbled where no shadow should have been. Pantera caught Gideon by the arm and dragged him off the path, one hand gripping his shoulder, the other covering his mouth.

‘Don’t speak.’

Gideon nodded, in so far as he could. Pantera let him go and eased down to a crouch.

The swiftest route back to Menachem saw them on a goatherd’s track running south-west from Jerusalem, through olive groves and sloping pastures. All around, forested hills made the land uneven. Stars scattered enough light to make out the rocks, the hills, the distant herd, tight-gathered in a fold — and the figure of a man walking up the path, fast, and frighteningly unquiet.

He passed them by, unseeing in his haste. Smooth as any hunting beast, Pantera rose from the shadows behind him. As he had with Gideon, he clamped his hand over the newcomer’s mouth, pulling him off balance. As he had not with Gideon, he laid the flat of his knife across the expanse of bearded throat. ‘Yusaf,’ he said, flatly. ‘You have news for us?’

Tight-voiced, Yusaf answered, ‘Estaph will be crucified when the sun first touches the hill behind the palace, that is at the third hour after dawn. Hypatia and Berenice will hang from ligatures beneath him.’

It wasn’t news, only confirmation of what they had feared. Pantera felt his heart clamp closed, and ignored it.

Stepping back, he slid his knife away. ‘Did Saulos send you to tell me this?’ he asked.

‘Not specifically.’ Yusaf gathered his dignity, smoothing his long-coat, his hair, his beard. In the grey starlight, his face was heavy with sorrow. ‘I was sent into the cellar dungeons to tell the prisoners. Afterwards… I didn’t consider it at the time, but Saulos let me go too easily. I think he knew I would try to find you.’

‘Which means in turn that he believed you knew where to look. Were you followed?’

‘No. That is, I don’t think so; you would know, would you not? But I should go back to the city. If Saulos doesn’t know that I have come

…’

‘He’ll know. If you go back, you will join Hypatia and the others in the cellars if you’re lucky. If not, his questioners will spend the night learning all that you know before you hang. Either way, you can be sure Saulos plans your death, only the time and the manner are uncertain.’

Yusaf chewed on his bottom lip. His nervous hands worked the silk of his sleeve-ends over and over through his fingers, gathering his courage. Just when it seemed he might never have enough, he raised his head. ‘May I join you and Menachem?’

‘It would seem you will have to.’

‘What will you do about Estaph and Hypatia?’

Pantera stared at the hard sky, at the unmoving stars, at the fast cloud sailing across. ‘It may be that we can be in the palace by dawn. If not, they will have to rescue themselves. If such a thing can be done.’

Two hours after Pantera had left it, Mergus arrived at Yusaf’s costly town house in Jerusalem, bringing five Romans who had sworn fealty to Menachem. They drank wine and ate Yusaf’s olives and bread and checked their weapons and stole away as softly as they had come.

When they left, Iksahra and Kleopatra went with them. Kleopatra wore a cloak over her mail shirt which, by happy chance, also covered the short stabbing sword at her belt. Mergus’ men took her in their midst and did not question her ability to keep up with them as they marched swiftly through the dark.

Iksahra led them and she was not like the others: she wore no armour, her knives were shorter than even the short gladii of Rome and her cat kept to her heels in a way that made the legionaries step away so that Iksahra had a bubble of ten feet about her into which only Kleopatra and Mergus dared step. She despised the others for that, and they knew it, and hated her the more. It was not a good start to the night.

Silently, Iksahra led her small group out to the city’s margins, towards the gate through which they and Pantera had entered. A new guard held it now, not the one who had seen them.

Within sight of the gate, but not within earshot, Iksahra moved sideways into an alley and had the group gather as close as they dared.

‘We need to remove the guards from the gates in such a way that they believe they have left of their own accord, so that they return to their barracks in fear, but not alert to danger. Such a thing requires stealth: Kleopatra and I will do this one. If it goes wrong, Mergus knows what to do.’

‘These are men of the Tenth,’ said one of the men. ‘They are small-minded and parochial, but they aren’t stupid. They won’t be frightened by two women. We will have to fight.’ His hair was white with age, his skin browned by sun and wind until he was as dark as Iksahra, nearly.

Iksahra gazed at him with liquid eyes. ‘Your name?’ she asked, mildly.

‘Gnaeus Galerius. My men call me Naso.’ His nose, Kleopatra thought, was big enough to warrant the name. His knuckles were pale as he held both hands tight, but he stood his ground. ‘The guards on the gates will fight; they won’t retreat. It is what they are trained for.’

Iksahra’s smile set them flinching. ‘They fight when they think they can win. I am here to prove to them that they cannot. Kleopatra will help me with the first one. Watch, and you will learn what must be done.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s me. Kleopatra, princess of Caesarea.’ Kleopatra walked openly down the road. The guards at the gate were not ones she knew, which made it easier to do what she had to do. She said, ‘Have you a flame? A torch, perhaps, so you can see that it’s truly me?’

They had a small soapstone lamp with a dirty wick. The taller of the two retrieved it from a niche in the wall and spilled light across the nearest part of the roadway, meanly, as if it was his own gold, and he might at any moment go on hands and knees to gather it back.

Kleopatra said, ‘I am supposed to go to Antioch with my family.’

The Romans hated her: their eyes were flat with loathing. The taller said, ‘You’re at the wrong side of the city. Go to the palace. They’ll leave from the west gate, behind the beast gardens at the palace, if they haven’t already left. You don’t have to- What in the name of all the gods is… that?’

‘What?’ Kleopatra spun. Iksahra was moving up the road, arms outstretched, white robes billowing behind. Even had the guards’ eyes not been dulled by the lighting of the lamp, it would have been impossible to see her arms and legs and head. Her robes, it seemed, came on of their own volition, rippling softly. The cheetah stalked at her side, taller than it seemed in daytime, its eyes aflame in the meagre lamplight.

As she moved, a line of Romans marched across the road, blindly, steadfastly forward, as if on a long, long route. She flowed through them, or they through her, or each through the other, as ghosts are wont to do.

‘What?’ Kleopatra peered down the road in evident confusion. ‘What is it? I can’t see-’

The smaller guard was already running. The taller dropped the lamp. The light guttered bravely on, leaving a glow in the air as he turned, feet scrabbling, and ran, high-kneed, up the road towards the palace.

Kleopatra picked up the lamp, shaking her head. Iksahra came to join her, bubbling with silent laughter. Mergus and his men gathered a short distance away, grinning in spite of themselves.

‘You could have killed them easily,’ Kleopatra said. ‘Why did you not?’

‘Because a terrified man spreading fear among his brethren is more useful tonight than that same man safely dead. We did what we needed to do. There are seven more gates to clear before dawn. Shall we go?’

The guard to the cellar dungeon changed in a clatter of lock and key and footsteps, with a new torch lit and the old one left to smoulder, to help fight back the dark. Nobody came to visit the prisoners, although the new guard paused a moment in the entrance to the tunnel and stared towards them, to be sure they were still alive.

Hypatia stood by the bars after he had gone. Her cheek felt cold metal, her feet cold stone. Her mind was a tumble of memories, of dreams, of a lifetime’s nightmares, all different in small, definable ways, all leading to this place, this time, this cold, this dark.

All her life she had thought that if she did things differently, if she turned a different way at each of the crossroads to which fate had brought her, she might be able to escape this. And she had failed. She took a bitter breath and looked ahead, down the pathways of the dream.

Only two paths stretched before her now, and one of them so rare, she had dreamed it just three times. The first, the common one, had haunted her life. She knew by heart each moment of this long, cold night and the messy death that followed.

But the path of the rare dream was not yet unravelled; she still walked its route, the point at which the two diverged yet to appear. Closing her eyes, she pressed her forehead harder against the bars and began to clear the fears that cluttered her mind, to leave space into which the god might choose to come.

She let out a breath and another and on the third she did not breathe in again, but stepped forward in the dark space of her mind, into the void that was deeper than water, wider than the oceans, emptier than the dungeons at night. And in that space, she asked of the listening silence the only question that had ever mattered: What would you have me do?

Nothing came, and less than nothing; no word, no sign. Resting on the cusp of a breath, as near to death as she might come and still live, she thought she was forsaken, lost, alone.

Then she felt the hot press of a living pelt against her calf, and smelled the meat-mellow breath of a hunting cat. She heard its breath rasp by her ear, recoiled at the sharp prick of whiskers against her cheek, and when she looked deep in the dark, there was the smudge of black against paler black in a patterning she almost recognized and two green-amber eyes, that grew stronger as she gave them her attention.

She thought it was a leopard, sign of Pantera, and said so. Somewhere, the god laughed. The beast drew back its lips and padded closer until its outline was clear, taller than a leopard, longer-legged, with a muzzle more square, and a head held higher.

From all of these, she knew it as Iksahra’s cheetah, a beast that had viewed her with nothing short of disdain since the day she had first seen it. Nevertheless, it was here, in the space of Hypatia’s unbreath. She touched her forehead, as she might have done to Isis, or Ma’at or Apis, bull-god of Memphis, and waited. And waited. The beast blinked at her; the only movement in the void.

Again she asked, What would you have of me? Again the beast blinked, and in that movement she saw through the patterned pelt to the black skin of a woman behind, saw through its eyes to gold-brown eyes, saw black hair, tight as a shearling ram, and the flash of white teeth.

Pain flooded her then, the twisting knife that leaves a heart in fragments; the pain she had thought set aside, safely, that it might not undo her this close to the end.

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again both woman and beast were gone and in their place was the whistle of wings and the far, high keening cry of a falcon, bird of Isis, hunting.

Somewhere far beyond it, the god said, I would have you taste the true cost of life. There is no escape from this.

Hypatia breathed in, a great gulping swallow of air, of life, of cold and the present moment. Her head ached, as if the god had struck it in passing.

She took another breath, and stilled it, and came back to herself, to all that she had lost and gained and might lose again. Aloud she said, ‘Thank you.’

From behind, she heard Estaph take breath to speak. Without turning, she said, ‘No.’

‘You don’t know what I was going to say.’ They both spoke quietly and directed the sound at the floor: already they had learned what would carry to the guards and what would not.

‘You were going to suggest that you could kill us both now, and leave only yourself alive for the morning.’

‘It’s the only way.’

‘It’s one way,’ Hypatia said. ‘But if we take it, you will spend two full days dying and Saulos will have won. I have dreamed this every night of my adult life. I will not let you do it.’ She stepped to the centre of their small circle, standing between them. ‘If anyone should stay alive, it should be me. There may be a limit to what even Saulos will dare do to the Chosen of Isis.’

‘There isn’t,’ Berenice said. ‘He does this for his god, and his god feeds on the blood of others. There is no limit at all to what he will do. If you have dreamed this, you know it is true.’

Whatever else she had dreamed, Hypatia had certainly dreamed this moment, these words; now. Perhaps a dozen times in her life, the many branching pathways of possibility had brought her to this, the last of the turning points. Two pathways lay ahead, each one distinct from the other: the first, the easiest, led to certain death. The other… she wasn’t sure where the other led, she had been along it only twice in her life, and each time was different. Still, she was the Chosen of Isis, and she was not given to procrastination. She made her decision swiftly, took a breath, and let it out again.

Berenice saw a moment’s indecision and gave a small, tight smile of triumph. ‘Shall we draw lots for it?’ she asked. ‘The loser is the last one to remain alive.’