by M C Scott
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, whe
n 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.’
CHAPTER FIFTY
ONE LAST CORRIDOR led to the cellars. Behind, eight men lay dead, of beast wounds, and sword cuts, and one of a throat crushed by the hammer-hilt of a blade. It had not been an easy battle, but it had not been notably hard; the incomers had lost no one, nor sustained any serious injuries, and, most important, they had achieved their victory in near silence; not one man had time to shout to the last guard left holding the cellar.
There was no obvious reason, therefore, why Iksahra sur Anmer should be walking down the corridor lost in a memory from her childhood that left her numb with fear.
In her mind, she was a child of no more than nine summers and her father had set her a task that was beyond her abilities. These many years later, she couldn’t remember exactly what was so frightening except that it had involved the stud horse of his best line, that all were born entirely black and then grew lighter with age to the colour of almond milk, with slate grey manes and tails.
They were the best horses that ever lived – she believed that as a child and believed it still – but the herd stallion was a fearsome beast and she had been sent to fetch him in from pasture, or to take him out to pasture, or perhaps to take him to one of the mares that was in season, ready for covering.
Whichever it was, for the first time in her life, the child Iksahra had been truly terrified. A strange clammy sweat sprang like dew all over her body and her heart tripped an unhappy rhythm that made her feel giddy, so that for ever after, she associated the smell of her own sweat with the iron-ripe odour of a hot and angry horse, and both with the sensation that her own heart and the stud horse were conspiring to defeat her.
And they had succeeded. When she reached for the beast, her sweaty hand had slipped on the rawhide thong that hung from its halter and it had jerked its head free of her grasp and run away.
She remembered little of the aftermath. Her father had hidden his disappointment, if he had any, and, in exactly the same way he did with his beasts, had set to teaching her the ways to handle the horse without fear, so that the event itself would have been lost, if it had not been for the horror of her own failure that had kept her awake through the night afterwards.
She remembered lying awake under the stars, counting each speck of light as a part of her fear. She had vowed then, before the gods that lived behind the black night sky, that she would never in her life let fear discommode her as it had done that day. It had come, she thought, because she had cared too much about succeeding, and therefore about the possibility of failure. And so, in the small hours of the morning, when the stars were fading and the sun was taking their place, she had made a second, more binding vow: never to care so deeply about anything that it might bring her down.
In keeping the second vow, she had kept the first: in having no great care, she had never known the incapacitating terror of her childhood.
Until now.
With Mergus’ men and her great cat left at the corridor’s head, keeping it safe, with the newly emboldened Kleopatra walking in the place of the honour guard close behind her left shoulder, Iksahra sur Anmer slid, ghost-footed, along the slaves’ corridors of the Herodian palace carrying a blade unsheathed in either hand – and those hands were wet with sweat.
She smelled that sweat and, because memory is made of scent, she smelled also the iron-ripeness of an angry stud horse, so that her terror multiplied until she had to stop and lean against a wall, and scold herself to calmness.
She did not fear death – she never had – but she feared failure now exactly as she had feared it in her childhood, and for the same reason: she cared too much.
Cursing aloud, she pushed away from the wall. A corner lay ahead. ‘Stay here.’ She felt Kleopatra take a breath to argue, and let it out, unspoken.
Alone, Iksahra turned the corner. A door lay ahead, blocking the corridor. The last of the garrison Guard stood outside, awake, if not alert. Iksahra slid her hands and the knives they held up her sleeves and flashed him a smile of pure relief.
‘You’re alive,’ she said weakly. ‘Thank the gods. They haven’t got here yet, then?’
‘Who hasn’t? What�
�s happening outside?’ Frantic, the guard’s gaze flew from the scratch wound on her arm, to the torn fabric of her clothes, to the many shades of drying blood.
‘The Hebrews have attacked. The men of the garrison Guard are …’ Iksahra looked away.
‘What are they? Tell me!’ He reached for her, to shake out more news. ‘In here, we hear nothing but the distant clash of arms.’
‘It’s as well you don’t. Outside is a massacre – not only outside.’
With something close to regret, she took her hands from her sleeves. One blade slid up under his diaphragm into his heart. She held it tight, against the sudden bucking twist of muscle on iron, then slid her other blade up into the tight gap between his neck bones and his skull, into the living vessel of his thoughts.
He died without a sound. She lowered him to the ground and wiped her blades clean on his tunic. The oak door was closed, as Kleopatra had said it would be. Iksahra pressed her ear against it and listened.
Back round the corner, she heard Kleopatra speak in her soft, certain Latin. ‘Go to where is lightest, to the sun. Your friends are waiting. Death is freedom, not loss.’
Shuddering, Iksahra turned, and listened again to the rustling beyond the oak.
Estaph said, ‘There’ll be a guard outside the door. There has to be.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Berenice said. ‘There’s a battle beyond the walls, you can hear it if you press your ear to the stone; the guards might all be out there, fighting.’
‘Hush.’ Hypatia waved them both quiet with a flap of her hand. She pressed her head to the wood. The door was oak, thick as her outstretched hand, designed to withstand any attack.
In the beginning, she heard only the echo of a king’s welcome that rang through the walls. With more attention, she found a presence that seemed most likely a guard; a man left edgy by the noises outside who stepped away from the wood with a challenge in his voice and—
