The Coming of the King

Chapter Forty-Nine

The door to the king’s quarters in Herod’s palace at Jerusalem was not built to be knocked upon by human hand.

Cedar formed the frame for carob wood inlaid with ebony and ivory, with lapis lazuli and rubies set on its face in the same patterns as on the floor of the jewel house in the palace at Masada. The thinnest part of it was thicker than a man’s arm, and its scent, heady, aromatic, full of promises of wealth and power, filled the corridor for twenty feet in either direction.

It was a door that was built to be guarded, with a niche on either side to take a tall man and his helmet: here more than anywhere was visible Herod’s fondness for the Gauls. Nobody else was that tall, except of course Iksahra’s people, the Berberai, but nobody had ever yet enslaved a Berber.

No guards stood there now, slave or otherwise, but even so it felt improper to hammer on it with his fist.

Pantera took a moment to breathe, to be still, to remember who he was and why he had come, and what he had to do; he remembered fire and a man’s death, and a woman lost for ever, and then unthought each of these, because neither rage nor grief was useful to him here.

Filled with the clarity that comes sometimes in the midst of battle, he reversed the gladius he had brought from Masada and rapped its hilt on the hard wood.

The sound rang down the corridors, echoes rolling in the dust. He called out into the hollow emptiness.

‘Saulos! You can circle round those three rooms, but there’s no way out besides this door. I can sit here and starve you out, or we can end this now, face to face, with what’s left of our honour.’

He thought he had made a mistake, that it wasn’t Saulos he had heard, that he had sent Iksahra and Kleopatra into a trap, that he had fallen into one himself, that he had failed Hypatia…

The door swung open under his hand. Pantera sprang back from the expected blow, or arrow, or spinning knife, but none of these came; Saulos, too, had taken a step back and so they met at last, alone, face to face, blade to longer blade, for Saulos had a cavalry sword, of the kind given to the guards at the chamber doors, with a blade twice as long as Pantera’s legionary gladius. It looked fearsome, but was too long to use in a tight space.

The room into which they stepped was not a tight space; Kleopatra had warned him of that, but it was quiet, a place where sounds of battle rumbled softly, as from a city far away, where men and horses fought and died for other reasons than theirs.

Then Saulos smiled, and all Pantera could see was that same smile flashing in the black dark of Augustus’ temple in Rome, with fire all around and the stench of bodies burning, and all he could feel was the touch of Hannah’s skin against his own in the morning, knowing she must go.

He said, ‘You look weary. Are you as tired of this hunt as I am?’

‘A trick of the light.’ Saulos stepped back into the first of nine perfect panes of sun cast on the floor by the windows set in the high wall. Mosaic spirals wound round his feet in a living river of colour, a hundred times sharper than those at Masada, and better set. ‘I never tire.’

It was possible to believe that. He had taken time to change his clothes from battle garb to his sand-coloured silk, uncreased except around the hem, where it looked as if he had lain down for some time, and only recently risen.

Encased in his subtle finery, he looked joyful, like a hound that hears a hunt, while Pantera… Pantera had no idea how he looked. He was striving for calm and supposed that it showed.

He stepped into the room and felt the door swing behind him. He took a wide step to his left and another and they began to circle, slowly, lazily, with a marble fountain playing between them and the reclining couch behind. It was carved of ebony, padded with silk dyed to deepest porphyry. It sang, siren-like, drawing Pantera closer to sit, to lie, to sleep and never wake.

Saulos asked, ‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I heard you when we were in the slaves’ corridors below, after Iksahra’s cheetah killed the second guard. Where else would you be but here, where the king will retire when he has taken his kingdom?’

‘He has to win the battle first,’ Saulos said. ‘Nothing is certain.’

The air smelled of cedar, and old incense, and wine and, near the bedroom, of balsam. They circled on. They were too evenly matched to take risks; each had too many memories of their last fight to be the first to step in.

Pantera said, ‘Does your god still require that Jerusalem be destroyed to bring about his eternal kingdom?’

‘Of course. The Kingdom of Heaven will rise from the ashes of two cities, Rome and Jerusalem.’

‘But you failed to burn Rome. Your prophecy required that first, before the destruction of Jerusalem. If you fail in the first part, what point in pursuing the second?’

‘I burned enough of it.’

‘And most of your men died as you did so.’

Saulos shrugged. ‘I have enough men. And they will glory in the kingdom God brings to them. You will see it from whichever rank of Hades you have entered.’

The room was exactly as Kleopatra had said: an antechamber, where visitors might be kept for long enough to reflect on the king’s wealth and their own insignificance. Windows opened along the heights of the wall opposite, nine oblongs of unblemished blue, casting their cool light in patterns on the floor.

Pantera passed them, and felt a draught of cool, fresh air, and yearned to sit and let it wash him. Not yet, though. Two doors lay behind him, one in the south, one in the west, both hanging ajar: the bedroom and the dining room that was once a bath room. He had an idea and set about testing it.

He leaned in and tapped Saulos’ sword with his own. The long blade swayed away and came back again, steady, firm, true.

Pantera stepped back. ‘You came here to kill Menachem, but you will fail. Everyone knows you are here; if I can’t kill you, others will, and then Israel will have peace.’

Saulos slashed at his face. Pantera felt the rasp of iron in the air, smelled the whet of its blade. He spun away out of reach.

Saulos said, ‘Not if the governor of Syria gets here in time with his legions. You know I have sent for him?’

‘Iksahra’s falcons took your dove from the sky. The governor isn’t coming.’

‘ Liar! ’ Saulos raged forward, through the haze of light from the windows. Their blades clashed and clashed again and they parted, each a little wiser. ‘I took the beastwoman prisoner before she could do harm. And Hypatia is dead. I had her throat cut before you could reach her.’

‘No. I would know.’

‘How?’

‘I would know.’ He was sure of that. Almost sure.

They came to a natural halt, facing each other across the fountain. The door was not locked. It swayed a little, caught by some unfelt current.

The air was thickening, braiding itself in ropes that drew taut between them, but they were further apart than they had been, each so wary now of the other’s assault that they kept to the margins of the room.

Pantera had measured the distance; thirteen paces plus a half. He had planned the two moves it would take, one to pull his knife from his sleeve, the other to throw it, and how much closer Saulos could be by the time of the throw.

And then there was the door, which had moved again, slowly, soundlessly, and was lying open by a hand’s breadth.

Pantera moved a pace to his right, so that the high windows’ light was not blinding him. ‘Yusaf ben Matthias came with me out of the city last night. This morning at dawn, he bore witness when Gideon the Peacemaker anointed Menachem as the rightful king of Israel. I thought you should know; Yusaf is the one who sent us the scroll that proved Menachem’s right to the throne. He will be the new king’s foremost counsellor.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Saulos stopped and stared at him in frank disbelief.

Pantera did three things then, fast: he threw his sword high up over the fountain, so that it tumbled down in a dazzle of water-light and sunlight; he drew the knife from his left arm, and threw it; and, as it left his fingers, he hurled himself to the left.

The knife missed: he had known that it would. The falling blade sheared close to Saulos’ left shoulder, slicing away a collop of flesh in a mirror to the wound Menachem had sustained on Masada. Saulos grunted like a kicked horse, and swayed away from the threat, as any man would, but he ran forward, which was his undoing.

Pantera continued his roll, tumbling like an acrobat straight through the open door of the king’s dining room that had once been Herod’s private baths.

He saw the vertical shadow of the doorway pass him by and kicked the door shut as he cleared it, then thrust one hand down, pivoting on it until the bones of his elbow popped, and came round almost full circle, in time to drop the bar across, sending prayers to the old king, Herod the Great, and his paranoia that said every private room must be readily barred against intruders.

He ended near the dining couch, panting, and looked round at the only place in the world where Herod had absolute privacy.

The room was a paean to the hunt: mosaics livelier than anything in life showed antelope and lion, goat and cheetah, dove and falcon, all hunters and hunted, with figures of men, and some women, ordering the kills.

On other walls, naked men wrestled, in the Greek style, holding each other by the shoulders for the throw, while unclothed girls leapt over the horns of bellowing bulls. And in the centre of the ceiling, in the place where a king might look who lay back in his private bath, was an image of Helios, sun-god of the Greeks, picked out in all his daring, blazing beauty.

There was no trestle table covering the hole in the floor where the bath had been, only a rug of six sewn ibex skins, sleek and shining, and under those a board, which moved when Pantera pulled it, enough, he thought, to do what he needed. Perhaps enough. He risked his life on that one thing, having nothing else; his weapons were all gone.

He had not barred the door to the bedroom, only pushed it shut. Saulos kicked it open, abandoning his fabled composure.

‘ Ha! ’ He brandished two swords, Pantera’s short one in his left hand, the long cavalry blade in his right; a gladiator’s pose. Blood flowed freely down his arm from the wound on his shoulder, staining the sand-coloured silk.

Pantera stood with his back to the dining couch, unarmed. ‘Yusaf!’ He sent his voice beyond the walls. ‘You may as well show yourself. I am neither blind nor deaf nor stupid.’ To Saulos, who had stopped a pace inside the doorway, he offered a dry smile. ‘Did you think I didn’t know?’

‘You didn’t know when you first came to Jerusalem. You didn’t know on the night he sold you to me for a promise.’

‘Sold him?’ Yusaf’s voice came harsh from the outer room. ‘I gave him to you for the promise of peace under Rome, which is beyond price. I did not do it for the slaughter of innocents in Caesarea.’

Yusaf arrived at the threshold, a figure of ruined silk and conflict. His long face was pale beneath his beard, but he held a Roman short-sword in his hand, its point high, and steady.

Softly, Pantera said, ‘Did you not know he planned such bloodshed? Is it not obvious that he plans to do in Jerusalem what he did in Caesarea? That this has always been his plan?’

‘He said he would allow no more violence than was necessary.’ Yusaf’s attention flickered between them, settling on neither.

‘Oh, please!’ Pantera’s voice was a whip cast at his face. ‘You’ve known this man thirty years. Don’t tell me you still believe what he tells you?’

‘Ignore him!’ Saulos threw up a hand. ‘He’s goading you. Stay where you are while I finish this.’

‘Exactly, Yusaf, stay where you are. Be his puppet as you have been from the start while we-’

Pantera stepped smartly back, and sideways, using the dining couch as a shield against Yusaf’s charge. He threw up his hands And let them fall again, to the muffled sweep of an ibex hide and the crack of long bones on marble, and the silence of a blade, sailing high from nerveless fingers.

Pantera caught the hilt before it hit the ground and swept it down to rest against the bare neck that sprouted now from the floor: all but Yusaf’s head and one arm were lost in the pit that had once been a bath.

On the room’s far side, Saulos had not moved, but was breathing hard, as if he had done.

‘He’s been your puppet for a long time, hasn’t he?’ Pantera said. ‘He came to Rome, and before that to Alexandria, to Corinth, to Galatia. Did you let Seneca build him up at first and then seduce him, or was he yours from the start?’

‘I belong to no man!’ Yusaf twisted his head. Blood welled along the side of his throat where the blade lay hard along it. ‘Judaea needs peace and only Rome can bring that. I-’

‘Shut up.’ Saulos was moving; slashing, hacking, all civility gone.

Pantera stumbled back, caught off guard by the thunderous power of the attack. For a dozen strokes he parried and the shock hammered his arm each time, and each time he felt the wind of the strike slice closer as Saulos’ longer reach and extra weapon found the weak places in his defence.

He was being forced backwards round the room, ducking, swaying, spinning, using every trick Seneca’s tutors had taught him, and all those he had learned since, in the alleyways of the empire, in the forests of Britain, in Gaul, in Parthia, in the gutters of Rome.

He tried a counter-attack, and had it smashed down so hard he thought his stolen sword would break. It was clear then that Saulos had lost all control, and was more dangerous for it, not less.

He saw a second blow coming straight down to split his brains apart, and flung up his blade, and caught the worst of it on the guard, but not all, so that the tip tilted, and Saulos’ cavalry blade sheared down, catching a flat blow on the side of his shoulder.

He felt no pain, but a rush of light to his eyes, as if someone had hit him with a mallet, and it was only his reflexes that saved him as the back cut came slicing in straight across his neck with a strength that would have lifted his head from his shoulders and spun it full across the room.

Dropping his blade, Pantera threw himself down, pivoting on one flat palm, with his arm rigid, and swung his legs across, straight out and together.

His feet hit Saulos across the knees and pitched him forward, off balance, but not enough. Using the momentum of the stumble to take him over across the top of Pantera, Saulos spun round, and threw himself back with both hands on the hilt of his sword, stabbing down in the same killing stroke the master hunter made on the mosaic body of a tiger on the eastern wall.

Pantera rolled along his own length, and came to rest by Yusaf — who was no longer wedged in the sunken bath, but had wrested his trapped arm free and was halfway out.

‘Here,’ he said, and placed a throwing knife in Pantera’s palm. ‘Get up and finish it.’

By a trick of the air, he sounded like Seneca; a ghost made real. Pantera’s head snapped up. He rolled back and up and round and rose to his feet in time to meet Saulos coming in with a sword in each hand again, and for a pure, clear moment there was a gap between the tips, through which a man might not pass, but a thrown blade could.

He held his ground and drew back and threw, and in the slowing of time that came in death’s shadow he saw the knife fly true and sweet, past the two swords that came in for him, missing them by the thickness of a prayer, of a held breath, of a life.

He dropped to the ground, flat… and Saulos dropped to meet him, face to face, gaze to gaze, mouth wide, startled, with a hand’s length of iron lodged in the hard bone between his brows.

Pantera lay still and watched the life leak from his enemy’s eyes, and said, almost too quietly to hear, ‘If Kleopatra is right, you go willing to a god that demands blood-price for his kingdom.’

He waited for a response. He wanted one, suddenly, wanted there to be an answer — something, anything to fill the aching, empty space…

‘Pantera?’

The world was blurred, the air too dense to breathe. Careful fingers gripped his shoulder and rolled him backwards. He looked up, and blinked, and Yusaf’s long face grew into focus.

Yusaf’s voice was a buzz in the background that moved gradually to the front of his awareness. ‘It’s over. He’s dead. You killed him… Pantera, it is over.’

His mind was mist, and less than mist; it was an empty field, drenched by winter rain, with a scattering of last season’s straw. He sat up, helped by Yusaf, and wondered at the ache in his chest that was so much greater than the one in his head, where the sword had glanced by.

He pushed himself to standing, using Yusaf’s arm as a lever, and looked around the room, until the scenes of carnage all about resolved themselves to simple pictures of men at the hunt, and one image in particular, of a king, mounted on a horse the colour of starlight, with black feet.

Pantera looked at that a long time and, when he turned at last, Yusaf was waiting for him, white, and completely still, as a man at his own execution.

‘You and I have a reckoning,’ he said. ‘I betrayed you. For that, Saulos would-’

‘ No! ’ Pantera caught his arm. With barely held violence, he said, ‘I am not Saulos. I kill where I must, not for vengeance.’

‘But-’

‘I knew who you were and what you had done before I came back to Jerusalem last night. If I were going to kill you, I would have done it in the desert with Gideon as my witness.’

Yusaf’s eyes were too wide, still awaiting death. Pantera made himself look away, set his mind to something else. Without warning he thought of Hannah, and then Hypatia. In quite a different voice, he said, ‘Saulos is dead; let that be an end to it. Today, we have a king to crown and he will need good counsel in the months to come, if you would be willing to offer it?’

Yusaf clipped a laugh. ‘I would give my hope of heaven to be asked for counsel by that man. Menachem is the promised of God, who can unite us all. My only wish is that I had seen it sooner. I might not have made the mistakes that I did.’ He swept both hands across his face, and was older when he looked up. ‘I am grateful, truly, more than I can say, and will repay you somehow, if a way can be found. But before we set this behind us, I have to ask — how did you know it was me who betrayed you?’

‘You are Absolom. Iksahra heard you speak to Saulos. But I knew before she told me. On the temple steps, the High Priest gave way too easily. He wouldn’t have done it had he not the backing of someone trusted by all twelve tribes of Israel. Who else knew what was planned, and yet had the authority to sway Ananias?’

As he spoke, Pantera knelt and tugged the knife from Saulos’ brow. It took two hands, and some force, to wrest it free and bright blood welled where it had been. It was becoming easier, now, to think of Saulos as gone, to see a future that was not blighted by his presence; easier, too, to be generous in his mercy.

He wiped the blade on the dead man’s sleeve and rose again, holding it across the flat of both hands. ‘This is yours.’

When, wordless, Yusaf took it, Pantera said, ‘We are different, he and I, whatever he may have told you.’

‘I knew that when you came back. Saulos would not have had that courage.’

‘And you sent the scroll to Menachem, with the signatures of the entire Sanhedrin beneath your own. That also took great courage.’

‘I had just heard of the massacre at Caesarea. I could have done no less.’

Yusaf lowered his gaze; they both did. Saulos’ eyes had shut, his face fallen slack, a dribble of saliva slid down to the swirling mosaic floor. The sun had moved on; they were in perpetual shadow now. A few cautious flies began to dine.

‘I thought he was the one man who understood the ways of Rome,’ Yusaf said. ‘That he loved Israel above all else, and would usher in a peace to last a thousand generations.’

‘He loved only himself, and the god he had made in his own image.’

Yusaf raised his head, sought Pantera’s gaze and held it. ‘You could have killed him without my help, you do know that?’

‘But you gave me the knife when I needed it.’

‘Would I be alive had I not?’

‘I hope so.’ Pantera stepped back, setting a clear distance between them, him and Saulos, breaking the last tie, so that he could step again, back, out of the door that led from Herod’s private sanctum, away from the reek of blood and betrayal, from the still, closed face of a man who had been neither of those things.

He turned away and set his mind to the living… he hoped to the living.

He said, ‘Hypatia should be safe by now, but we must make sure of it. And after, we will find Israel’s new king and crown him before the multitudes, and maybe then you will have your peace to last a thousand generations.’