The Coming of the King

Chapter Seven

Morning had not yet coloured the day as Pantera passed north into the neighbouring quarter where the houses were but a single storey, and no temples graced the road ends.

There, at an unmarked junction, was a house notable chiefly for the lack of flowers in the forecourt, and the soft whirr of feathers above. A chalked sign hanging over the lintel proclaimed that the doves bred therein were the greatest delicacy to be found in Caesarea, fit to grace the tables of any king, and that thirty were ready for slaughter with some squabs also available at a good price per half-dozen. Standing beneath it, Pantera gave a precise knock on a wooden door.

The youth who came to answer was not yet grown into the man his father might wish him to be. His beardless skin bore the silken sheen of a woman and his brown eyes were big as gazelles’. His face was a long oval, alive with the naivete of youth. He frowned as he opened the door and saw a man there he did not know.

‘The grey horse I bought at market yesterday is lame.’ Pantera spoke in Greek, enunciating carefully.

The boy stared at him a moment, uncomprehending, then his eyes flew wide. ‘Father isn’t here,’ he said, which was not the right answer at all.

‘The grey horse-’ began Pantera again.

‘Yes, yes! I heard. Then you should… you will… you must have it seen to immediately. I know of a man. Please come in.’ The boy finished in a rush, blinking back his fear. He made no effort to step back and let Pantera in. ‘Father isn’t here,’ he said again.

‘It doesn’t matter. I wished only to use your services. What’s your name?’

‘Ishmael.’

Syrian then, and not Hellenized like the rest. It was useful to know. ‘Thank you, Ishmael. May I come in?’

The boy’s eyes grew larger by the moment, but still he showed no sign of letting his unexpected visitor cross the threshold until, losing patience, Pantera shouldered his way through the doorway.

Inside, the single room was small and everything in it was white, except for the wool rugs on the floor, which were striped in all the colours of the sheep from pale sand through to wet-oak brown. It smelled of a morning’s cooking layered on a night’s sleep.

The door closed, jarring the quiet. The draught pushed open a door at the room’s far side. Pantera walked through it, checked the small courtyard and, when he was sure there was nobody to witness, stepped back in, pulling the door shut.

‘I am the Leopard,’ he said. ‘I believe — I sincerely hope — you may have a message for me? From Rome.’

‘The Leopard!’ A shy smile bloomed across Ishmael’s face. Men and women, Pantera thought, would kill for that smile, one day. ‘Father said you might come. He’ll curse that he missed you. Two messages wait for you. The first has been here since before I was born. The second came this year.’ His smile faltered. ‘The Teacher sent the first, but he is dead now. The second came with one of his red roan doves and the message was in his code, but the hand that wrote it was different.’

‘The Poet has stepped into the Teacher’s shoes,’ Pantera said. ‘That is who will have sent it.’ And then, because the boy was still waiting, ‘We who served Seneca until his death are loyal to the emperor, and to the memory of our Teacher. It is possible to be both.’

‘Yes!’ All doubt dissolved, the boy’s white teeth shone. He tapped Pantera lightly on the arm. ‘Wait here and I will get the scrolls.’

Mercifully, the papers were not secreted in a chamber beneath the cooking fire which was the first place a competent search team would have looked, but hidden in a concealed compartment within the water tank that sat atop the roof of the house.

Steps led up from the outer walled courtyard in which stood the dovecote, source of the household’s legitimate income. Pantera sat guard on the bottom step and watched half a hundred buff-rose doves coo and preen and flit in feathery leaps from cote to roof to wall and back again.

The birds were well handled, with no fear of men, so that he was able to stand among them and search out those of different colours; the six or seven whose feathers shimmered in an oily turtle green, the black pair with white flashes that looked like magpies, the pure white singleton with the pink eyes. None of them was the red roan and white of Seneca’s Roman carrier-birds, but it was clear that in this flock such a bird would readily be lost in the multitude of colours.

Ishmael came back presently, beaming his success. The family had a precise and efficient system of classifying the messages that passed through their hands, for the boy did not bring the entire year’s collection, but only two short, slim cylinders, carried with the awe of a novitiate bearing sacred writings.

‘For the Leopard,’ he said, leading Pantera back into the house. ‘You may sit?’

Pantera sat on one of the two bedding rolls pushed up against the wall. Unrolled from their containers, the messages were revealed on two square sheets of finest papyrus, no thicker than spring’s first leaves, no larger than them either; each side was half the length of his smallest finger. The writing in both was finer than gossamer, one achingly familiar, old, faded with age, one new in all senses, still alien to his eye.

But both used the same code, the first one that Pantera had ever learned; he could parse it now as if it were in the original Greek. He read the older first.

To the Leopard from his Teacher, greetings. Solomon is safe and sends you his thanks. I have sent gold which will reach you by other routes. I send also my congratulations; pushed to the edges of your being, you earned your name in all ways.

Scribbled at the bottom, unencoded, was a last sentence. I send also my earnest gratitude, as from a father to his son, that you are safe.

Pantera laid the paper leaf on his knee, where it shivered in the sway of his breath. In the morning’s half-light, it wasn’t hard to conjure an image of Seneca — the Seneca of his youth — sitting at his desk in Alexandria, condemned to exile by Claudius and lucky to be alive, yet still running the most comprehensive, efficient and broad-reaching spy network in the empire.

And into that network Seneca had drawn a runaway archer’s son found thieving on the streets of Alexandria. Throughout those early years, he had driven Pantera harder than even a boy who loathed himself might have done. He had asked for more and never settled for less. He had set tasks that made the threats and conspiracies of real life seem trivial by comparison. He gave praise rarely, and always salted it liberally with criticism. To a boy who had abandoned his father in disgust, he had never once in seven years suggested that he considered himself in that role.

Except that he had. As from a father to his son…

Pantera could have read that, if things had turned out differently. He had been travelling to Caesarea on his first mission. He had been given the pass code and the address of the pigeon loft, manned by an agent of Seneca’s named Isaac.

But he had never gone. He had, in fact, been prevented from going by the order to divert to Damascus, there to aid the escape of a man who had attracted the ire of Aretas, king of Syria. It had been his first true mission, and it had nearly cost him his life, but he had come out of it with a sense of his own skill that nothing else could have given him. On leaving that city, another message had come, ordering him north and east to Parthia, an empire on the brink of war against Rome.

After that, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Gaul, Britain. Never again near Caesarea, until now, when he knew all that Seneca felt for him.

As from a father to his son…

Seneca had named him son on the night of Rome’s fire, and loved him as such. Pantera had never said that he loved his old spymaster in return. If he let it, his regret for that could eat him away to nothing.

‘Is it bad news?’ Ishmael’s angelic face peered at him, creased with concern.

‘No.’ Pantera pulled himself back to the present. ‘I was thinking of who I used to be when this was written.’

‘You were the Leopard. You’re still the Leopard.’ The name was magical to the boy, a talisman against all harm.

Pantera offered half a smile. ‘I am not the Leopard I was,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

Only the young asked such direct questions. Why not? Because of a woman and child he had loved and then killed in Britain, to keep them from Roman harm? Because of a quite different woman of another race and another place he had loved in Gaul and Alexandria and Rome? Because of a boy-thief found and sent to Britain who had loved him?

All and none of these. Unexpectedly, he thought of Hypatia, who had warned him, once, to keep always to the truth.

He said, ‘I got what I most wanted in life, and found that I didn’t want it after all.’

‘Father says that is the ruin of us all.’

‘Your father is a wise man.’

‘You haven’t read the other message.’

He hadn’t. He did so. It was brief and said nothing unexpected; except that it was old and late and didn’t say what it should have said.

To the Leopard from the Poet: your prey remains in the pearl of the east. The emperor continues to support your cause, which is his cause. We await news of your success in Saba.

He read that last again, checking his decryption in his head. We await news of your success in Saba. The Poet was young, and frighteningly efficient; latest and greatest of Seneca’s many proteges. Such a one should not still be awaiting news of the negotiations in Saba, when Pantera had sent a bird with all the necessary details as soon as he had taken the contract with Ibrahim.

He said, ‘When did this message arrive?’

Frowning, Ishmael held the cylinder up to the light. ‘The date’s on the outside of the cylinder.’ The collation of dots was not in any number system that Pantera knew. He waited while the boy’s flying fingers added up time. ‘It came… fifty-three days ago.’

‘And there hasn’t been another? Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure. We know every bird. None have come from the spymaster’s loft.’

‘Nor from the emperor?’

‘No. Although Father thinks…’ Ishmael dropped his voice to a creaky whisper. ‘He thinks we may be losing some of the birds.’

‘Losing?’

‘To storms. Or disease.’

‘Or to men?’

Ishmael shook his head violently. ‘No man could take them. How would they do it? How would they know? We have told no one what we do, I swear it!’

‘But the men who bring the new carrier-birds from Jerusalem and Damascus and Rome, the other men who take the birds from your loft back to their own coops so that they may return with a message; each of these knows where you are.’

‘My father makes the trips to Jerusalem. He’s there now. The rest are all Seneca’s sworn men.’

‘Men can be bought. It happens, Ishmael, more often than you might think. Did your father take birds with him?’

‘Yes. He took a dozen to Jerusalem and will bring the same number back. He does it every fourth month in the travelling season. In between, the men come from Damascus, Antioch, Alexandria and Rome.’

‘When will he leave Jerusalem?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Then I have an idea. Send a bird to Jerusalem now, with a message to him from me. That way we’ll know if the birds are getting through.’

Ishmael chewed his thumbnail. ‘But we have only one bird left and Father never wants to send the last one before the new ones are here.’

‘This time, I think, we must make an exception. Let me write the message. If your father’s there, he’ll understand.’

Pantera used a newer code than the one that had been the standard among Seneca’s men in the days of his youth. His message was short.

From the Leopard to the Messenger, greetings. I come hunting the enemy of Israel. It may be that he knows this. If this bird reaches you, bring word in person. I will be here until the month’s end.

Leaving, Pantera took a left turn and then followed the hill down towards the Temple of Isis, richly kept, aflame with flowers in all the colours of the sun.

In the temple courtyard was a stone water trough for the use of the more distant worshippers who must ride to their devotions, and on it, a neat, swiftly scratched graffito in the shape of a wild lily with a hound alongside. The hound had one ear.

Resting on the trough, he scratched his own sign of the bull alongside Hypatia’s mark of the lily, and gave the hound its second ear to show that he understood that she had seen Saulos, then turned back up the hill and made his way back to the inn to return the stolen tunic to a night-slave not yet risen and tell Mergus all he had found.