Rome 2: The Coming of the King

by M C Scott

  He had good reason. Tall and lean, the woman sat her horse with the ease of a born rider, and hers was not a fair-limbed, kindly mare such as had been given Hypatia, but one of the fire-blooded horses the Berber tribes bred to keep their children safe from harm, that were kept in their tents and fed dates and asses’ milk and the last of the water in drought, that fought with teeth and feet against wild beasts and bandits with equal ferocity but could be led by a three-year-old child, that could carry a woman in the last hours of pregnancy so smoothly her waters would not break.

  Iksahra wore man’s garb again, as she had at the docks – likely as she did all the time – and the fine linen weave of her robes wrapped around her in the wind of her gallop. From arrogance, or for necessity, she rode without reins, leaving her hands free for the hunting birds that rode with her, clinging on arched perches mounted on either side of the pommel.

  She untied the tiercel as she rode, pulling the leash free with teeth that shone white against her skin. He raised his wings and lifted lightly, using the wind of their running to hold him a hand’s breadth above her gauntleted wrist.

  ‘Would you see him hunt along the ground, while his mate rides high in the sky?’

  Even at a shout, her accent was light, dancing over the consonants, softening the vowels. Hypatia had drawn nearly level and found herself looking into a face of sculpted oak, with spirals tattooed across cheekbones and nose and ice-black eyes that threw her a challenge she did not fully understand. At least there was some humanity there, which was an improvement on the cold of their last meeting.

  They drew their horses to a halt. The hounds flopped to lie on the sands, tongues a-loll.

  Hypatia said, ‘I would see your bird do what he does best.’

  ‘What he does best is to fly high and kill.’ The dancing voice laughed, not kindly. ‘But he will hunt and return to me if I ask him. Or if Hyrcanus does. One day, the king’s heir will hunt these lands. We are teaching him the skills he needs.’

  We. A woman and her hunting beasts, laying claim to royal pretensions. A horse halted level with theirs.

  From Hypatia’s other side, Kleopatra said, ‘Perhaps my cousin could wait? The falcon is stooping to her kill. Such a thing deserves to be watched alone.’

  She spoke with her aunt’s voice; if they had closed their eyes, they would have thought Berenice among them.

  Iksahra did close her eyes, hooding them against the outer world. With a nod that was, by a hair, courteous rather than curt, she set the tiercel back on his perch again and turned her horse to the sea to watch her falcon at work.

  They heard the bells first, the high whistle in the wind that was a prelude to a death. Faster than she had disappeared, the falcon grew in the sky, became a pinpoint and then a falling arrowhead, fixed in shape with the wings curved back, taut as a drawn bow, sleek slate grey.

  Hypatia saw the prey-bird late, as a streak of sand-coloured movement flitting along the shore, piping reedily. Moments later, it died in a punch of talons on flesh and bone. Feathers danced high in the air, light as husks in a threshing yard.

  Iksahra pursed her lips and whistled a single short note. The falcon made a tight turn, dragging the shore-bird in one yellowed foot, and brought it to hand, landing hard. Shore-webbed feet and a long, curled beak hung down, senseless in death. Three drops of blood smeared the pale doeskin glove.

  A gasp came from Hypatia’s left, a small noise, drawn from the soul, such as one might make at the height of love, or in extremes of pain. And that high whine again in her ear, so that she turned her head only a fraction, too little to draw attention to herself, and so saw the Princess Kleopatra as few people could have seen her, laid raw to the world, open, unguarded and uncaring, moved to a joy beyond words.

  It was gone in a breath, in a heartbeat. Kleopatra turned her horse neatly on its hocks. Her eyes were flat again, the granite-sea of her aunt’s.

  ‘Teach me,’ she said. ‘Now. We could ride for Jerusalem at any time. Saulos said so. You might not come.’

  ‘Kleo …!’ Hyrcanus stared at her in horror, flicking his eyes to Hypatia and back in exaggerated horror. Kleopatra gave a curt, scornful laugh. ‘She’s the Chosen of Isis. She knows everything.’

  ‘Does she?’ Iksahra asked.

  ‘I know that the royal family will go to Jerusalem some time soon,’ Hypatia said, truthfully. ‘I have no idea at all if you’ll go with them.’

  She didn’t say that she had no idea yet as to why they might go, except that it must be an emergency: no royal family travelled at night unless they were in haste and in secret.

  Iksahra favoured her with the same hooded gaze as before. ‘Where goes the king, so go I. The princess can learn as easily in the deserts outside Jerusalem as here.’

  Kleopatra shook her head. ‘There are going to be riots, maybe war. And whatever starts here will spread to Jerusalem within days, my aunt, the queen, said. The hunting might stop. You have to teach me now.’

  ‘Kleo, you can’t learn in a day. I’ve been learning for nearly two months and I truly don’t know what I’m doing.’ Hyrcanus was kind; warmth laced his voice, his eyes, his hand as he leaned over to take his cousin’s arm.

  She shook him off. Her fiery green gaze was locked now with the Berber woman’s; green on black, hot, fierce passion locked on a gaze that was cold as loss. There was hate in the core of Iksahra’s soul, but it was locked so tight that Hypatia doubted if even the woman herself could feel its fire.

  Iksahra broke away first. She looked out across the sea. The falcon fed on her fist, throwing gobbets of feathered gore left and right, ripping at the flesh beneath. The tiercel tilted his hooded head, hearing, not moving.

  ‘The falcon is sated. If we flew her now, she would find a tree and not come down for three days. When we go to Jerusalem, we would lose her.’

  ‘The tiercel then.’

  Hyrcanus said, ‘If she wants to fly it, I don’t mind.’ He was a prince and he still thought he was party to the decision.

  The Berber woman stroked one dark forefinger down the rosy breast of her smaller hunting bird. ‘So,’ she said. ‘This is the tiercel. He is the male. He is smaller. He is weaker. But still he gives his heart to us. Is that what you want?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you do exactly as I say, in the moment I say it, without question?’

  Kleopatra, who had been schooled in the etiquette of court, and in riding, and perhaps in the handling of falcons, but not at all in the nature of the worlds beyond the world and how they listened to an oath, said, clearly, ‘I will.’

  Her voice carried across the desert, here in the place where ghûls and ifrit roamed, listening for a word that might be taken hostage; where Isis and Mithras heard the tones of truth and placed them in the balance, to be weighed later, against other actions; where a future could change on the balance of a word.

  Triumph sparked briefly in Iksahra’s eyes, a flash of heat in the cold. ‘Then we shall start. Hyrcanus, give your glove to your cousin.’

  The Berber woman was gentle as she set the falcon and placed her glove behind the tiercel, pressing lightly against the yellow skin of his leg so that he must step back and up on to her fist.

  Bells shaped like hollow beans were tied to his legs in the place the message cylinders were tied on the courier-birds. They chimed musically as he stepped from the perch to her gloved fist. Iksahra stroked his breast with her forefinger, settling one rose-blushed feather back into place. For all his small size, the tiercel was richer in colour than his mate, tinted bronze around his breast and throat where she was slate grey, stark against white.

  ‘If you are to ask a bird to fly for you, you must give him a reason. He must trust you to hold him steady, to loose him cleanly, and always to feed him when he comes. If these three things apply, he will come back to you even when he has killed, trusting your hand as the safest place to eat. So to begin with, you shall feed him a piece of the bird his mate has caught and then you s
hall loose him …’

  They were intimate as lovers, Iksahra and the girl, their two heads bent together, almost touching, startling in their contrast, white skin and black, straight hair and curled, tutor and pupil.

  Hypatia felt a different gaze and looked up and caught Hyrcanus watching her. He gave a rueful smile and tilted his head a little and, seeing the grace of it, Hypatia moved her mare back a step and turned her away so that she and Hyrcanus might follow, but not be part of, the lesson that excluded them both.

  When the bird flew and made its kill, she was not part of it, and did not see what it brought down, except that it had come from the city, and knew nothing of its death.

  Later, in the afternoon, Hypatia excused herself from the palace, from the claustrophobia of attendants and guards and stewards and maids and slaves and minor royalty, away from the perfumed, incensed air, away from the flower garden and the fruit garden and the beast garden and the swimming pool with its views of the sea, and walked along the long, open streets to the city, to the fruit market she had passed through the previous day.

  As she left, she found that Polyphemos wished her to have a guard, which was astonishing considering he had gone to such remarkable lengths to prevent her from seeing Queen Berenice when she had first arrived. Now that she had seen the queen, it seemed, he regarded her as his personal responsibility and pressed on her an escort from palace Watch.

  Thus she went among the sellers of cherries and citrus, of plums and melons, dried dates and figs, of almonds and olives and oils thereof, and wove through the stalls in the suffocating company of Agathon and Amyntas, who attempted conversation in the first hour and abandoned it thereafter, growing ever more sullen as the heat baked their mail and their helms and their hands in their leather gloves.

  They did not know Pantera, and so did not know to look closely as she dropped a purse of silver coins in front of a particular vendor, to buy a small glazed mug containing his speciality of roasted almonds done in honey and minted oil, with shredded marigolds sprinkled over. They did not see the pickpocket who removed her purse from the vendor’s open belt pouch and returned it again shortly thereafter, nor did they notice when the pickpocket’s accomplice nodded to her as she traversed the next aisle, eating the almonds, sharing them with her guards out of pity.

  She returned to the stifling palace feeling elated and irritable together. There was a time when, had the god allowed, she would have hated Pantera. That time was gone; in Alexandria and then Rome, she had seen the valleys and height of his soul and had found in herself a measure of respect that was granted to few in her life. She was not yet sure if she counted Pantera a friend, but she had been genuinely glad to see him and Mergus, had met their eyes and smiled at them covertly across the sea of strangers’ faces, and their smiles, covertly returned, had felt like splashes of colour in a grey winter’s day.

  She gave the remains of her almonds to Polyphemos, who flushed an unfetching crimson. Leaving him, Hypatia went to see to the two hounds, Night and Day, who greeted her with joy, and had never yet brought her grief.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘OUR ENEMY HOLDS … has … the ear of the king. The royal family thinks … expects to leave for Jerusalem in secret by his order. Soon. I go where they go. Beware Iksahra, the king’s falconer. She’s signed it with the lily and the hound.’

  Mergus was proud of the speed of his decoding, done without slate or paper. ‘Hypatia’s gift was accepted,’ he said. ‘She’s in.’

  He and Pantera sat in a pungent fisherman’s tavern three blocks inland from the harbour, far enough from the side door for the smell of newly gutted fish from the day’s catch not to reach them, but not so far that the sea breeze could not keep the air clean.

  They ate unleavened bread and olives and watered wine and, in their shadowed corner, with no one close enough to overhear or oversee, they ate fragments of Hypatia’s papyrus softened in the wine and rolled into pellets and fitted into the hollow core of an olive.

  It was a drover’s dream of a meal and it was as drovers they ate and drank and talked, loudly and at length of the horses they dreamed of owning, the camels they would like to buy, the likelihood of a new train’s leaving Caesarea and where it might go. Never once did they look over their shoulders at Kleitos, the bearded Cypriot whose efforts to follow them had grown less subtle over the days. He had at least two accomplices in the tavern. Both had finished their meals and were sitting alone, pretending to drink wine.

  Presently, as the watchers dulled towards sleep, Mergus leaned towards Pantera and murmured, ‘What next, and where?’

  Pantera drained his wine, tipping the last dribble on to the table, as an offering to the watching gods. ‘We need to contact Seneca’s agent at the Temple of Tyche. First, we have to lose Kleitos and his idiot friends.’ He belched and leaned forward, planting both palms on the table so his mouth was by Mergus’ ear. He grinned, loosely. ‘If you could pretend affection, we might slip upstairs. There’s a room with a window overlooking the stables. Saulos was always a prude. There’s a reasonable chance that the men who follow him are the same.’

  In so many ways, Pantera was wise. In a few, he was completely blind. Against the sudden turmoil in his chest, Mergus leaned over and kissed Pantera on the cheek, and laughed and ruffled his hair and, standing, made a slurred observation just too loudly for privacy.

  He left the room with Pantera’s hand on his shoulder, both of them swaying with the evident effects of drink. Nobody followed them up the stairs.

  Tyche, protector-goddess to the city of Caesarea, was wealthy. Images of her in Greek and Roman form were set atop marbled plinths flanking the broad, paved pathway that led to her temple. On its porch, a flame burned in a shining bronze brazier tended by three white-clad priests who ranged in age from a sweating novice through a twitchy lay member of the city’s council to a white-haired sage who leaned over the fire as if nothing else in the world was deserving of his attention.

  His face was a dull liverish red from the constant heat, and the skin pulled tight about the frame of his skull. His eyes were yellowed at the whites and clouded at the centres.

  Leaving Mergus at the foot of the steps, Pantera mounted with due solemnity towards the brazier. He felt in his belt pouch and found the offerings he had brought from Rome. According to a code laid down when he was a child and long before he had been recruited to the service of his emperor, he laid dried thyme, mint and sage one at a time on the flames.

  Three threads of smoke sweetened the afternoon air. The novice stared at him in vapid resentment of his intrusion and the added work it might bring. The lay councillor kept his eyes on the skyline, too preoccupied with the threads of riot-smoke rising there to acknowledge his existence. But the sage stepped away from the heat, motioning for Pantera to follow him across the porch to the temple’s inner cool.

  A wash of pale afternoon light kept the place from true darkness. From round a corner, the brazier sent sweet smoke to freshen the air. Pantera sank to his heels with his back to the wall, closed his eyes and murmured the invocation to the god; his god, not Tyche.

  ‘The journey was long?’ The old priest’s voice was thin as his skin, a paper, sawed across a reed. Still, he spoke the words Pantera needed to hear, and waited for the right answer.

  ‘As long as my life.’

  ‘You will go longer still.’

  ‘I intend to.’

  Seneca had always made his greeting-tests simple: in their brevity was their accuracy, and so their assurance of safety. The priest slid his arms into his sleeves. The lines on his face softened, like old leather laid in water. He said, ‘Your master is dead.’

  Pantera nodded, wordless. Each man said it as if it must be news; perhaps to them it was.

  ‘I hear he was allowed to take his own life.’

  ‘Nero is merciful,’ Pantera said, which was true. The others had not been granted such mercy. It was said that the wife of Piso, the chief conspirator, killed herself on
the second day of her questioning, when she was being carried from the cells to the place of torture in a litter, her leg bones having been broken in so many places on the first day that she could not walk.

  She had used her own belt, tying it to the rails of the litter to throttle herself, which must have taken some considerable courage but meant she had not been forced to give the names of those who had conspired. Thus, fewer had died than might have done, and all by their own hand. Nero was merciful because he was not sure. Certainty would have made him a monster.

  Pantera said none of this, but the priest waited anyway while his thoughts ran their length, so that he might as well have spoken them out loud.

  At the end, Pantera said, ‘Seneca’s replacement is known as the Poet. Beyond the name, nothing has changed; we use the same codes, the same routes, the same principles.’

  ‘Is that safe?’

  ‘It has been thus far, and Seneca took a lifetime setting up his network. To change it now would take more time than we have got.’

  ‘So, then, I will wait until someone else comes who throws three herbs on the brazier. In the meantime, do you have a question?’

  ‘I do. And I have brought a gift.’

  A particular gold coin had lived for the past two months in the hem of Pantera’s tunic. Standing now, he pressed it into the priest’s palm.

  The old man tested its weight briefly, and then smoothed his thumb over the image on the surface where rested the golden head of the Emperor Caligula, as sharply defined as when the coin fell from the dies of the mint. ‘Your need for succour must be great,’ he said.

  ‘I ask for your help in delivering a message.’

  ‘So?’ Failing eyes came up to search his face. ‘It is many years since I earned gold for the god by running errands.’

  ‘Fifteen years, so I was told, and now once more, which may be the last. One needs to know that the bull calf went safely to market, sent by the leopard’s attention.’