Rome 2: The Coming of the King

by M C Scott

  Leaving the inn for the second time, he felt his way forward slowly, as if the starlight were not enough to find his way along the wide, rule-straight streets.

  Out here, the air was tense, as of a city holding its breath. Small fires smouldered and there were fresh signs of violence, but the gangs of youths had gone to their beds and only slaves were up now, few and sleepy, running morning errands.

  To give his pursuer time to make his own way out of the sleeping room and down the stairs and out into the market square, he stubbed his toe and lost time hopping and swearing until he saw a shadow move on the lower stairs.

  Still somewhat lame, Pantera led his follower, or followers, across the square and into the streets beyond. For a while, he thought there might be two of them, but it became clear that there was only one, making more noise than he should have done. Not Rasul, then; Rasul was as quiet on his feet as any man you could wish to meet; it was what made him a likely spy.

  A foot scuffed on stone at the inn’s corner. Pantera cut through between two tall houses, past a garden of anemones, and turned south, towards the barracks. Twice, he passed men of the morning Watch come, yawning, to take their places on the tented podiums that filled each street corner. Some replaced night watchmen although they were fewer and stood only on the major intersections; the streets around them were clear of damage.

  The follower hung back when the Watch was near, and had to be induced closer, step by slow, seductive step. At a corner where a wine merchants’ row crossed with some money-lenders, Pantera let himself slide too close to the night Watch lanterns and jerked away again. His shadow sliced a wide arc across the greying ground. Dawn had come a shade closer; he and his pursuer no longer walked in the night.

  Some time later, he turned left, eastwards, towards the wall and, later still, the man following him made the same turn. And stopped. And turned in a slow circle on his heel and cursed aloud, in Greek.

  Pantera lay in one of the storm ditches less than fifty paces away with his face pressed to the cold stone, his chin on his balled fist. The man who was not a spy stood near the light-wash from a window nearby. The rays of a single tallow lamp bled out, muffled, through a thin muslin curtain; not a vast light, but in the grey pre-dawn it carved valleys across a creased forehead, brightened the line of cheek and chin and temple, made a scimitar of a hooked nose so that Pantera, who had spent a month in the desert riding at this man’s left flank, recognized Kleitos, the big, black-bearded Cypriot who had been the outriders’ second bowman.

  In the quiet of his mind, he apologized to Rasul, a man he liked and did not want to have to kill. He didn’t want to kill Kleitos, either; not because he liked him, but because a living spy was more useful than a dead one. He lay still in the culvert, breathing dust and old sea water and an occasional sharpness where someone had thrown a citrus rind.

  Kleitos stood longer than most men, proving that he had patience to make up for his clumsiness, but he left before the sun splashed colour on the day and Pantera eased his knife back into its sheath. Standing slowly, he dusted himself off and joined the handful of slaves padding swift-footed through the morning.

  Following instructions he had learned nearly thirty years before, Pantera worked his way back north through the Hebrew quarter. In due course, he passed the besieged synagogue, caught like an island in noble solitude with the heretic scaffolding cutting it off from the city on all sides.

  Here, now, at sunrise, the silence around it was less striking than it had been in the bustling day. The houses on the street opposite were empty, their families gone in haste for fear of the violence that must surely follow the synagogue’s desecration.

  With nobody to watch him, Pantera walked through the gate and picked his way quietly up the brick-littered path to the forecourt.

  In design, the building followed the restrained Greek style of every other temple in the city; plain fluted columns surrounded a porch and the dark maw of the entrance. Only its unadorned facings set it apart: where Jupiter might have been, or Adonis, or Augustus the man-god, in the synagogue was nothing but bare stone. And the entrance faced south to Jerusalem, where all the others faced east, to the rising sun.

  There was no door, only a hanging curtain of woven camel’s hair so dark it was almost black. Pantera could have pushed past it, but he had never yet desecrated the temple of another man’s god and this morning was no time to start.

  He was leaving when he saw the thread of old blood in the far right corner, trailing down on to the broad steps. Crouching, he tested the blood with his finger, smelled it, tasted it, found it old, dried, cold. The smell of death hung around it, three days old and still fleshy in its decay.

  He drew his knife and pushed one corner of the curtain away, or tried to. The tip became stuck on something solidly fleshy. He pushed harder. The obstruction rocked away and back again. Drawing a breath against the expected stink, he ripped up the curtain—

  And found that the head was a pig’s, not a man’s as he had feared, and that the eyes had been put out and the tongue torn away and the ears cut off. A blind, deaf, speechless pig: as vile a desecration as any Hebrew could imagine.

  He felt a ripple of relief that left as fast as it came. This was not a crucified cat, sent as a personal message, but an insult to a whole people, to the young men already stoked to volcanic anger, to their fathers who might restrain them, to their mothers who might caution safety. Here was the first step to a war, and he had dealt with war before.

  Pantera looked around. The building plot was an anarchy of rubble and old wood with dark holes aplenty where a part-rotten pig’s head might conveniently be lost. It was the work of moments to find two planks to carry it with, a place to hide it and dry sand to scour away the blood.

  The marks on the curtain were harder to remove, but also harder to see. Pantera rubbed at them with the heel of his hand, and then let it drop and stood back to examine his work.

  Someone made a sound behind him; a brick was nudged out of place and skin slid on stone. He heard an indrawn breath, unmistakably human.

  He spun, knife drawn back to throw, but saw no one until he dropped his gaze to the brick-littered path that led from the gates.

  A naked girl-child sat there where she had fallen, wide-eyed with shock and pain. One foot had a scrape along its side where she had stumbled on a brick. Even as Pantera watched, her white face flushed to scarlet, her eyes brimmed with tears and she opened her mouth to yell.

  ‘No, small one. No. Hush now … hush. It doesn’t hurt. See? We’ll make it better …’ Without thinking, he dropped the knife and gathered her up in his arms, desperate for silence, for her not to draw in the Hebrews or Syrians or anyone else who might see him in this place.

  He held her close, warm against his warm, and pressed his cheek to her fine gingery hair and stroked her arms and felt her grow a little less tense. He spoke in Greek at first, not thinking, and then, thinking less, began to speak in the language of Britain, in the coaxing rhymes he had crooned to his first child, his long-dead daughter, that told of oak and salmon and mountains and crashing waterfalls and the gods that bound them.

  It was so long since he had held an infant like this. There had been children in Rome on the night of the fire and he had carried them across the open spaces ahead of the flames, had lifted them on to his horse, had ushered them in their pairs and dozens and half-hundreds up the hill to Caesar’s palace where they might be safe from the ravening flames.

  Then, the children had not been soft as this child was soft; their hair had not smelled smokily of the evening’s cooking fires and salt-mustily of a night’s deep sleep; their cheeks had not felt like soft silk under his hand, wet with snot and tears; their chubby fists, just growing to hands, had not explored his face as he bent over her.

  But his dead child had been and had done all of those things. She had been the love of his heart and he had killed her, drawing his knife across her throat at the battle’s end, when all was lost and t
he only gift he had left was to keep her from the legions. He had been British then: a tribesman, a spy gone so deeply into his new role that he had become that which he sought at first to betray.

  ‘She’ll not hurt you. And she’ll not scream now, either. For which you are as grateful as we are, I imagine.’

  The voice was a man’s, speaking Aramaic, but not as a first language. Pantera turned slowly, unarmed. His throat hurt, from the old language, caught in mid-flow.

  A bear-man stood at the synagogue’s gate, as naked as the child, and as easy with it. The grey morning light showed him thick of neck and broad of shoulder, with a fleece of reddish-brown hair matting his chest and upper arms and none at all on his head.

  His face was round with almond eyes and had the look of one long used to battle: his nose had been broken so many times it was surprising he could breathe at all; his cheekbones, similarly, had been reshaped at some point in his past; his teeth were thick pegs that stood widely spaced in a wider mouth. Two were missing.

  He stood in balance on the balls of his feet, lightly. He was a man at home in himself, for whom fighting came naturally and only the fast, the well armed or the insane might hope to beat him. He bore a short-shafted, two-headed axe in his left hand.

  Pantera looked down to where his own knife lay at his feet. The second was strapped to his arm, high up in his sleeve, crushed by the child. He wondered how far the axe might be thrown and with what accuracy. And then he remembered seeing it done; an axe throw, neat and clean and perfect, into the head of a running horse.

  ‘Are you Parthian?’ he asked, in that language.

  ‘I am.’ The man’s easy smile broadened. He balanced the axe across both palms and bowed, then laid it on the ground and stepped forward over it, holding out one hand.

  ‘I am Estaph,’ he said, as they grasped, hand to calloused hand. He smelled of woodsmoke and recent coitus. ‘The child you hold is Eora, my daughter. She has taken to walking in the early mornings and we don’t always see where she goes.’

  She was a fine-boned, fragile thing, light as a bird. It was hard to imagine her growing into a woman to match this man from the far eastern mountains.

  Pantera gave her into the care of her father. ‘A fine and healthy child,’ he said. ‘Although her foot will need the salve of a mother’s kiss. Do you live here?’ A sweep of his head took in the whole area around the synagogue.

  ‘At the street’s end,’ Estaph said, and pointed to the endmost house. By the standards of the city, it was more of a cottage, a bare two floors high, with its roof garden more herbs than flowers. The other gardens in the street had long since withered for lack of water.

  Pantera said, ‘You have no neighbours?’

  ‘We did have, but they left at the last month’s end,’ Estaph said. ‘Nobody has come to take their place. It’s not safe any more for either Hebrews or Syrians to live here. Only those of us who are neither, and trade in weapons that either side might wish to buy, are safe. Or we were before someone put a sow’s head in the temple.’

  ‘You saw that?’

  ‘I saw you move it.’ Estaph made a cleansing motion with his hands. ‘It won’t stop them.’

  ‘Whom will it not stop?’

  There was a silence in which Estaph cradled his daughter in one massive arm, stroking her fine, reddish hair with the other hand.

  Presently, looking up, he met Pantera’s eyes. ‘Here in Caesarea, it used to be that the Syrian youths fought the Hebrews and the Hebrews fought the Syrians and neither side needed encouragement. But this year, there are men who meet in basements and quiet corners, who worship a dead Galilean rebel as if he were Israel’s messiah. They eat flesh and drink blood in his name and they hate the Hebrews more than any men I have met. They put the pig’s head in the synagogue. And it is they who are stoking the street fights so they are earlier, harder, more savage than before.’

  Pantera closed his eyes. There were times when Saulos was so close he could smell him, taste him, feel the air shudder where he had been. He said, ‘Rome was burned by such as these.’

  Estaph spat. His daughter watched him with round-eyed interest. ‘Sewer rats masquerading as men,’ he said. ‘But they will destroy Caesarea if no one stops them.’

  Pantera asked, ‘Will you leave?’

  ‘Soon. When my business is done. I’m going to Jerusalem next. There, the War Party is fighting the Peace Party but at least it’s all out in the open.’

  Pantera looked up at the sky, at the scribble of fine cloud, burning away in the advancing morning. ‘Hebrews fighting Hebrews.’ He shook his head. ‘If they stopped, if they came together, if they asked themselves who is the common enemy …’

  ‘Hebrews will fight each other over the price of a dried date, you know this.’ Estaph spread his spatulate fingers in a shrug that spoke more than any carrier-bird’s message, however well crafted. ‘In Jerusalem, they have a nation to fight over, its survival, the survival of their god and their people. Menachem’s War Party will go to war if necessary to rid their nation of the Roman oppressor. More, they want war, they desire it, they think their god is asking for it. Gideon’s Peace Party is set against violence of any kind, at least against Romans. They think the way to be rid of an emperor is through prayer and talk. And they know that if Nero sends in the legions, their people will be crushed for ever. They’re right, of course. It’s madness. Maybe if their messiah did come and was able to lead them all together it would be different, but Hebrews don’t like one leader, they like being set one tribe against the next. It’s what has kept them in slavery for a thousand years.’

  Delivered of this philosophy, Estaph spat gravely on the palm of his hand and held it out. ‘I’ll leave in five days’ time. If you are looking for employment then, I might be hiring.’

  ‘There are two of us,’ Pantera said.

  ‘I know. I watched you ride in yesterday. And I have heard Ibrahim’s tale of your battles in the desert. Your Roman brother is welcome also.’

  ‘Thank you. If you leave early, send word to Ibrahim at the Inn of the Five Vines. He’ll know where to find us.’ Turning to leave, Pantera delved into his waist pouch. ‘For Eora,’ he said, and laid a copper coin in the girl’s open palm as he left.

  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 naïveté 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 com
e 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.’