The Coming of the King

Chapter Four

The inn of the Five Vines was a tavern in the Greek style in the thriving mercantile district of the Roman-occupied capital of Judaea; a place of contradictions entirely at home with itself, alive with the scent of garlic and goat stew and journey-sweat, babbling in eight or nine different languages. A dozen different gods graced the niches at the stairwell, on the landing, in the main bar and dining area beneath, in the rooms. And in those rooms…

‘Mattresses!’ Mergus threw himself down, patting the straw beneath him as if it were goose down. ‘Mattresses with no lice in and a roof over our heads and a room with just two of us, not the entire bloody train. We could forget what else we came for, and just sleep here untouched for a month!’

Pantera sat on the edge of his bed and shook his head by way of answer. The scar over his right eye was white in the evening’s old light and when he was tired, as now, it drew his eye up archly, so that he looked as if he was ever on the verge of a question.

A jug of cool water had been set at the head of his bed. He poured some and drank, and Mergus saw him begin to relax, not wholly — he had never seen that — but enough.

‘What do we do first?’ Sobering, Mergus sat up. He, too, drank the water; after a month in the desert, it was better than any wine.

‘We make contact with Hypatia.’

‘If she’s here yet.’

‘She is. Her mark was on the water trough by the Temple of Isis. She’s here and she’s paid a visit to the local priests.’

Mergus closed his eyes and tried to think when he had missed that; he failed. He said, ‘Whoever sold us to Saulos is quite possibly still in the train. He’ll follow us wherever we go.’

‘Then we’ll lose him.’ Pantera glanced up sharply. ‘You have an idea who it is?’

‘Rasul of the nine fingers,’ Mergus said. ‘He never would look either of us in the eye. If there’s a traitor in Ibrahim’s train, it’ll be him.’

‘Or perhaps he was just too shy. We’ll find out in the morning. Tonight, we sleep here with the men. Tomorrow, we’ll leave a mark so that Hypatia knows we’re here, then set up a meeting with Seneca’s agent in Caesarea; the Teacher may be dead, but his network was always designed to live on beyond him.

The agent takes the name Absolom; I know nothing else about him, but there’s a priest at the Temple of Tyche who’ll get him a message on our behalf. When that’s done, we’ll find Seneca’s dove-keeper and send a bird back to Rome with news that we’re safely here. The more the emperor knows of what we’re doing, the more chance we have of asking his help if we need it. After that, we’ll see where we’re sent. It might be that-’

A dozen trumpets blared. Pantera spun from the bed in a smooth rush of movement that took him out of the room and down the stairs and out towards the main square and the camels.

At some point in that progress, he ceased to be Pantera, Roman citizen, veteran of Britain — for all his quiet asking, Mergus had not yet discovered in precise detail what it was that Pantera had done there, except that it had resulted in his being mistaken for a native and crucified to the point of death — and became a Nabatean fighting man with a horse to protect and two pieces of silver not yet earned and a fondness for the bow that set him in a realm apart from mortal men. Ibrahim’s men had not seen him throw knives yet; that skill remained secret.

Mergus was still Mergus when he met the commotion in the square, although he slumped more than he might otherwise have done, particularly in the presence of the governor of a province.

The governor, Gessius Florus, stood on top of a small wall to give himself height. He needed to; in a land of small men, Florus was smaller than most; in a land of plenty where waistlines expanded with age, his had always been weightier than his peers’; in a land where bald men were considered repositories of wisdom on the grounds of age, he, plentifully bald, was widely known to have won his current position on the sole strength of his wife’s having shared private bath time with the late empress. Less than two years in the post, he was notorious already throughout the east for the improbable feat of being more corrupt than either of his immediate predecessors.

Governor Florus ordered silence from his trumpets. The milling camels settled and returned to their hay. The crowd that ringed the market place fell to an uneasy silence in which both the Greek-speakers and the Hebrews waited to hear the governor’s reasons for disrupting their afternoon.

‘Who owns these camels?’ A steward called the question, not Florus himself.

‘I do.’

Ibrahim stepped forward to stand before the governor, who looked past his right shoulder, pressing his lips together.

The steward said, ‘Who is the buyer?’

‘I am contracted to sell to Demokritos of Rhodes, who trades here in the city.’

Mergus knew this not to be true. All through the desert, the Saba brothers had spoken with reverence the name of their contractor: Yusaf ben Matthias, Hebrew counsellor and merchant. Unless that man had taken a Greek name, then Ibrahim was lying.

The crowd was made of youths, and many of them, from both factions. They murmured their surprise, not yet moved to action.

Under that sound, barely moving his lips, Mergus said to Pantera, ‘You told Ibrahim of the governor’s new taxes?’

‘When we watered the horses, yes. Demokritos owes him two talents of gold. If anyone asks, he’ll swear before any god that he’s buying the entire train.’

‘Even so, Florus doesn’t believe him.’

‘No. So there is definitely a spy among us.’

‘Rasul.’ Mergus spat. To Pantera, he said, ‘If Ibrahim fights…?’

‘No risk of that. He won’t decorate a cross for the price of a dozen camels. Watch now, Florus has decided on a figure.’

The steward shifted on his feet. He met no man’s eye. ‘The governor believes you speak untruly, that the true purchaser of these beasts is a Hebrew. He therefore levies twenty of the beasts as his tax. You will cede their ownership to him.’

‘ Twenty? ’ The gasp rolled around the crowd. Ibrahim was the rock on which it broke. Set man on man, Mergus would have laid all his life’s wealth on Ibrahim to win; he could have torn Florus’ ears off and used them to choke him. But the governor owned the Watch and suddenly there were a great many watchmen around the square, sweating in their mail and helmets. Half bore javelins. The other half had drawn their swords.

Ibrahim said, ‘My lord, of the twenty-six beasts who survived our journey, five are not in calf.’

‘Then we shall leave you those five, plus one.’ Florus’ voice had the unfortunate timbre of a eunuch. Which, given that he had a wife, was impossible, or at least unlikely.

Ibrahim said, ‘If my lord wishes that the Saba take their future trade to Damascus, he has only to say so. We would not have come at all had we known we were so unwelcome.’

Mergus eased his blade in his belt. He was sworn to this man, who had just threatened a Roman governor. The Saba were the best — at times the only — camel traders east of Alexandria. Caesarea needed them more than they needed it.

Florus smiled as a toad smiles, his eyes lost in his fat face. ‘You may trade where you will,’ he said. ‘But now we shall take all twenty-one in-calf camels as our tariff.’

‘One denarius each, as we agreed.’

It was evening, and they had eaten in the inn’s hall down below, feasting on fish, because they could, and bakheer because they must show how honoured they were to have been offered it. It had been made by Ibrahim’s wife in her tent, and she was the most beauteous woman of the entire Saba tribe.

While the Hebrew and Syrian youths began their nightly riots outside, they had stayed in relative safety by the fire and had toasted Ibrahim’s beautiful wife and each other and their horses, living and dead, and the horses they had once owned and would own in the future and the dead men whose spirits lay quiet under the sand of the desert. They had not mentioned the camels or their losses or whether any of them would make any money for the trip.

But there was money. Ibrahim doled out the small silver coins; a subdued, thoughtful Ibrahim, whose brown eyes had become hooded, that his soul might not show to his enemies, or the spirits they could have sent to hunt him.

Mergus said, ‘I’m sorry. We would have killed the governor, but…’

‘But then we would all die long deaths, and what would our wives say to that?’ Ibrahim’s smile was sad and slow, but neither as slow nor as sad as it might have been. ‘Take the money in peace and keep away from the unrest here as you spend it. If you find yourselves in need of employment at the moon’s turn, come back here. I may have some horses — and five barren camels — to take to Damascus. Your beds are paid for this night and the next. After that, our hospitality ends and you will have to find your own. I’m told the area around the harbour is the safest: nobody yet dares to throw stones near the palace.’

Pantera’s smile matched Ibrahim’s. ‘We will find an inn there then that serves good food, and can supply also, perhaps, a woman for Mergus?’ His eyes, scanning the room, were childlike in their innocence. Mergus flushed and looked away out of the stables towards the evening’s lemon light.

Ibrahim laughed and clapped Pantera on the shoulder and kissed him on both cheeks, and told him to take the bay colt as payment for the horse that had been killed in good service.

They liked Pantera for his bow skills, he had said, which was true. Mergus thought they had come to love him for all the things they could not see, but could feel in the quiet of their souls.

Men who come to love Saulos will give their lives for him. Pantera had said that in the desert. What he had not said was that he and Saulos had much in common, and the fact that men would give their lives for love of either was only the first part of it.

Mergus was thinking that later in the evening, as he settled down to sleep. For a while, he lay listening to the growing rumble of youths hurling abuse at other youths outside. He thought no stones had been thrown yet, nor sticks pounded on flesh. Inside, the few men left downstairs slurred their toasts to the remembered dead while upstairs, men on either side of their room mumbled their way towards sleep.

Mergus murmured his own prayers to the god and lay quietly, letting the night’s patterns weave across the roof, patching with starlight the places the sun had left.

Inevitably, his thoughts gravitated to the man in the other bed. There was a time, in the summer after the fire, when he had desired Pantera so much his heart had ached, when he would have given all the gold sewn into his saddle pack — none of which was his to give — for a night with him in a small room such as this.

Time hadn’t dulled the ache, but had instead refined it until he came to understand that his passion for Pantera was of the mind, not of the body; that he had reached the age, perhaps, where lust gave way to something more pure. More likely, he remembered too clearly the look on the face of the woman Hannah as she took ship on the day after the fire, with Pantera’s child newly made within her.

He had seen women in grief before; he had caused it often enough. There was no reason why he should remember this one so clearly, except that it had been mirrored in the lines about Pantera’s eyes as he had turned away from the ship, and then again, even more finely, in the face of the woman Hypatia, Sibylline Oracle and Chosen of Isis.

And there was a question Mergus did not wish to ask, or to hear answered. He was content with what he had, or believed himself so. He lay listening to the slow peace of Pantera’s breath as he crossed the Lethe into sleep and if he emerged later sweating, grasping blindly at his mattress, then Mergus planned to be at his side, speaking words of comfort in the language that worked, which was neither Greek nor Latin, nor Aramaic nor Saban, but the old, wild, ensorcelled words of the Britons that the dreamers used to sing the warriors to war, and that in a land where the women were warriors as often as the men.

Mergus slept and dreamed of Britain, and when he woke in the grey ghost-light before dawn, Pantera was gone, leaving his desert robes behind him. He had taken his two slim throwing knives.