by M C Scott
And someone died on the door’s far side. Hypatia felt the soul slip free of its moorings, but it slipped past too fast for her to tell if it was male or female, guard or slave, friend or foe.
She swallowed on a dry throat. She hadn’t eaten since Kleopatra’s gift and the taste of garlic still furred her mouth. She was light-headed and weak and her stolen gladius hung leaden as a lump hammer from her fist, too heavy to use. In the still part of her mind, she sought the help of the god and found instead … the iron-sharp stench of an angry horse, and beneath it the scent of a woman’s fear.
She grabbed at the handle and hurled the door open, already rolling, down and sideways, away from whatever blades might come, that did come; that missed her wildly and clattered down the wall to the floor.
Still rolling, she heard only silence. She rose to her knees, with the stolen sword in both hands. She heard the lift of a breath taken and held.
‘Iksahra?’
The Berber woman was standing in the doorway, black on white, framed against the new light from behind. The only sunlight was a single shaft poured in through a high, lost window, but it was the first Hypatia had seen since yesterday’s morning and it encased Iksahra in its light, so that her white silks became as gossamer, folded about the fine – the exquisite – lines of her body.
With her heart unstable in her chest, Hypatia pushed herself upright. ‘I knew it was you,’ she said. ‘You must have known it was me, or I’d be dead.’
The Berber woman did not respond. Carved marble had more animation. She was shaking, fine as a leaf, all over.
Hypatia bent and retrieved the two thrown knives and laid them aside on the cool stone floor and walked on through the door to a place where the stench of blood was overwhelmed by the scent of woman-sweat, sweetened with new hay and old corn and the raw breath of the hunt. It was a smell of horses and a hunting cat, of wildness, of beauty.
Hypatia herself stank of confinement and privation. Sharply aware, she tried to step back to a place where she might offend less.
She failed because Iksahra moved at last. Her lean black fingers caught Hypatia’s right hand and held her still; she could not have moved if she had wanted to. She did not try.
‘Estaph is there,’ she said. ‘And Berenice. In the corridor.’ Words fell haphazardly from the turmoil of her mind, none of them useful. ‘You’re wounded.’
‘Not badly. It will heal. I can still throw a blade.’ Iksahra took a long, uneven breath. ‘We are not safe here. We should leave.’
‘Yes.’
Iksahra’s hand was hot, damp, unsteady; all the things Hypatia had least imagined. She squeezed and felt the movement returned. Her own hand was not any steadier.
Silence held them both, broadening, stretching, becoming harder to fill. The air grew thin with hope and thick with things unspoken.
‘Kleopatra is waiting,’ Iksahra said, finally. ‘Pantera brought Menachem, newly anointed. His army is fighting the garrison. By the sound outside, I think he has won.’
‘And Saulos?’
‘Pantera has gone for him. Kleopatra says he’s dead, that she heard him take his leave of her. And Ananias the High Priest, also. They found him hiding in a sewer and killed him.’
Iksahra’s skin shone like polished horse hide, evenly damp with the sweat of a moment’s exertion. She said, ‘Kleopatra can hear the dead. She converses with them. She says death is a freedom, as if it were something we all should seek. You have to speak to her.’
‘I will,’ said Hypatia. ‘It’s good to see you care. It changes you.’ And then, because nothing was coming out as she meant it, ‘The god came while we were in the cells to show me the mistake I made in holding my heart closed. What I might lose.’ Her fingers were still, her skin too much alive. ‘I don’t want to lose you.’ At last, the right words.
Iksahra’s face was still one moment longer, and then bloomed in such a smile as might light the whole day.
‘It was my fear this whole day that I had lost you,’ she said. ‘I will not live with that fear again, nor let you live with it. I would take you to the desert, and the high places, and watch with you as the sun sets and rises and sets again, and we shall do that soon. But for now, we have a king to crown and a city to heal and a queen to make fit to greet her people.’
EPILOGUE
THE POOL OF Siloam on the edge of David’s city was fed by an underground stream, so that when all about lay under dust, its surface shimmered under the sun.
On the morning of the king’s coronation, the early light tinted it green. A faint scum gathered on the limpid surface, studded with petals of small white flowers, shining as shreds of moonlight under the not-quite-present sun.
The air above it hung heavy with the smell of still water and frankincense and the gathered thousands; all gone now. Where they had been, palm branches lay thick on the ground, frond upon frond, woven by their falling into a mat thick as a man’s wrist.
Pantera stooped to lift one smaller than the others; a child’s frond, cut for a small fist to wave for the new king and cast before his humble donkey. It served now to distract the flies that fell frenzied on Pantera and his four companions, having no one else left to feast on.
Hypatia was with him, and Mergus, and Estaph, who had shown no sign of hastening to Syria and his family, and Kleopatra, who sometime since the night in Yusaf’s house had ceased to be a girl and become instead a young woman; and that young woman bonded to Hypatia. Iksahra was not there; she had gone hunting with her birds and her cat, loping off before dawn, to escape the gathering thousands.
Without her, Pantera stood now at the pool, famous in prophecy, in portent, which was the oldest part of David’s city, itself the oldest part of Jerusalem, and watched the ragged end of the crowds as they surged up past Herod’s hippodrome to the Temple.
Somewhere at their head, beneath the banners, surrounded by his armoured men, Menachem rode his donkey in fulfilment of every prophecy in the sacred texts.
His people had seen him anointed in the pool most sacred to their god, they had seen him bend his head before Gideon, newly named High Priest of Israel, had seen him declared as the true king, second only to God, who would lead his people to their peace, where no one was put before their god, neither Caesar nor an empire.
They had seen him mount the donkey that Iksahra and Hypatia had found: a colt, newly broken, as tall as any Pantera had ever seen, and piebald, with one black ear and one white, with its broad brow black as jet and its muzzle white as chalk and its flanks patterned in smooth asymmetry, like a map etched in black ink on perfect papyrus, so that Pantera’s eyes had been drawn to it through the ceremony.
His mind was still lost there, now, wandering in new lands, seeking out new coves among the headlands, new islands lost in the star-white ocean.
To Hypatia, thoughtfully, he said, ‘If he has time, Menachem will make of Jerusalem a city fit to match Alexandria.’
‘If he has time.’ Hypatia’s gaze was fixed on the hills outwith the city walls, on the grazed grasslands and the citrus groves, on the herds, and their herding boys; few of those today when most were in the city, greeting Menachem.
She said, ‘Iksahra is coming,’ and it sounded like a portent of doom.
He looked and saw nothing, but did not disbelieve. ‘We could go to meet her?’ he asked.
Hypatia’s face was closed. ‘I think we should.’
They walked together to the small gate through which Iksahra had left the city. Outside, the air was brighter, less clogged with breath and waiting, and the birds sang, when they had been too shocked to do so in the city, silenced by the voices of the crowd.
Presently, Iksahra was there, a shimmer in the morning’s haze, black limbs stark against her flowing white shift, with the cheetah lithe at her heels and the hunting birds flying freely above her, not tethered to her fist.
Even as they watched, the falcon swung up, gaining height until she was a fading scrawl against the harsh sky, a
nd turned in her own length came down again, tight as an arrow, and flung out her wings to land lightly, and bent her head to feed on some small, dead thing on Iksahra’s glove. Plucked feathers danced around them, caught on the hillside wind.
‘It’s a dove,’ Mergus said; his distant vision was always better than anyone’s. ‘She’s caught a message-dove.’
They ran then, and met her at the place where the land flattened out towards the city.
Hypatia reached her first, and they stood apart, but close.
Pantera said, ‘Bad news?’ She couldn’t read; he had forgotten and remembered too late to take it back. He held out his hand.
She dropped the message cylinder into his palm. ‘The dove is red roan, with amber eyes. Seneca bred them; the Poet uses them still.’
A blob of wax sealed the cap shut, bright as blood. He cracked it open and took out the onion skin of paper, so thin they could see his fingers through it. The writing was fine and neat and familiar.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘This is from the Poet; a new code, never used in Seneca’s network … Wait a moment, this is not easy.’ Latin letters lay in lines across the page, but not in words. Pantera took the first three, and made them numbers, and used those numbers to transpose the letters to make sense of them.
The others waited. Iksahra moved closer to Hypatia. She smelled of horse-sweat and wild wind and wonder. Their hands brushed, back to back, sending lightning across Hypatia’s eyes.
Pantera completed his translation. ‘My dove has reached the Poet, who in turn sends this to me and to Menachem. Listen, I will read it.’ His voice was strained. It echoed in his own ears.
From the Poet to the Leopard and to Israel’s new king, greetings. You must know that the Twelfth legion marched yesterday from Antioch under command of Cestius Gallus, governor of Syria, with orders to retake the city of Jerusalem, and the nation of Israel. Those who have the emperor’s ear have tried and failed to divert them: Nero will not call them back. Defend yourselves immediately, lest your peace and prosperity wither on the vine.
He felt the press of their waiting. The light was gone from Hypatia’s eyes. She was gathering herself, becoming sober again, taking on a weight that was not yet hers.
She said, ‘Menachem must be told.’
‘I’ll do it.’ As his gift, Pantera took the weight from her. It settled about his shoulders like chain mail, and was not unbearable. ‘He will have reached the heights by now and have formally named Gideon as his High Priest and Yusaf as his counsellor. When he comes down, I will tell him and we will plan the defence of Jerusalem. We have arms and men who listen. All is not lost and we may yet negotiate with Nero. You …’ His gaze held first Hypatia, then Iksahra, and after them the others. ‘You have a day and a night to do whatever you choose. Use it, and then come back to me in the palace and we will see what needs to be done.’
He waited to see them go before he moved. Mergus, Estaph, Kleopatra; those three turned back towards the city, to the baths, and the markets and the clamour of celebration.
Hypatia turned away from the city and Iksahra with her in a swirl of white linen, her cat a smear of gold-black pelt and muscle at her heels; they three, two women and their beast, with the hunting birds soaring above, walked back across the grasslands towards the hills.
Pantera stayed a while, watching them go, before he turned back to the city, to a man who must be both king and commander, and lead his army onward into war.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While any historical novel must be broadly fictional in terms of character and motivation, the key events of this book – the sacrifice of the dove in Caesarea, the offer of eight talents to save the synagogue, the taking of Masada – are based around those outlined by Flavius Josephus in his War of the Jews, in which he relates the events leading up to the Hebrew rebellion that took place in AD 66, towards the end of Nero’s reign.
Josephus was writing after the fact as a favoured historian in the house of the Emperor Vespasian, and later of his son Titus, but at the time he was Yusaf ben Matthias, by his own account, a man venerated for his wisdom, courage and foresight throughout Judaea and Galilee: certainly he was intimately involved in the Hebrew defences during the ensuing hostilities and he was a contemporary to most of the events in our time scale.
This notwithstanding, his recounting of the history is inevitably designed to show the Romans in their best light and he skips over some of the most momentous achievements of his people.
Most notable of these, in my opinion, was the taking of Masada by Menachem (or Menahem, or Menaheim), grandson of Judas the Galilean, the insurgent who had taunted Rome’s power with his Sicari assassins for the first third of the century.
Those who wish to know the detail can do no better than to read Wars of the Jews, Book 2, chapters 14–18. For those of you who would rather not, there follows a list of the characters in this book who have a historical basis, bearing in mind that while Josephus was my primary source for the action, a multitude of other sources, both contemporary and modern, have informed the narrative.
In particular, I am indebted, as is any writer of this period, to Suetonius, Tacitus and Philo. In the modern period, I am indebted to Hyam Maccoby for The Mythmaker, his outline of Saul (Saulos), to Martin Goodman for his Rome and Jerusalem, to Daniel T. Unterbrink for his new synopsis of the possible historical versions of Christ, The Three Messiahs: The Historical Judas the Galilean, the Revelatory Christ Jesus, and the Mythical Jesus of Nazareth and to various authors for their insight into the archaeology of Masada.
Characters with a basis in historical fact
The Emperor Nero (AD 37–68) Although he is never centre stage in this novel, Nero’s presence underpins the narrative. In AD 66, he was nearing the end of his reign – and his life – and becoming increasingly paranoid. In addition to the Pisoan conspiracy of which Seneca was a part, a number of other attempts had been made on his life and a great deal of his energy was spent in removing opponents. The intelligent, resourceful and highly popular general, Corbulo, who was in control of most of the eastern legions and had led a successful campaign against the Parthian empire, was summoned to Greece and then ordered to commit suicide around the time of the events related here. Had he not been, he would undoubtedly have had command of the legions which in AD 70 eventually razed Jerusalem to the ground. Nero, meanwhile, clung on only until AD 68, when the infamous ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ wrought havoc on Rome and the empire.
All that said, Nero was not quite the maniac that later history has made out. The early years of his reign, when he allowed Seneca to rule through him, were considered by many to be a golden period of the empire and even as late as the fire of AD 64 he was beloved of the proletariat, if not, by then, of the Senate. On the night of the fire, he was in Antium, a good eleven miles from Rome. He could have remained there in safety, but, according to Tacitus, chose instead to ride back into the flames, and threw open his palace to the people. The architectural changes he made later were sane and went a long way to preventing a future fire. The fact that he bankrupted the treasury in doing so is not entirely his fault: it had been strained to destitution by wars in Britain and Corbulo’s venture against Vologases of Parthia, neither of which was entirely of Nero’s making: war is ever a powerful eater of money. His attempts to gain gold from the provinces, while appalling in our eyes, were hardly so to the ancient mind-set: from Rome’s perspective, provinces existed in order that Rome might drain their wealth; it was the reason they had been conquered in the first place.
It remains to be said that his wife, Poppaea, died in suspicious circumstances in AD 65. Later sources claim that Nero killed her, either accidentally or deliberately, but the fact that she was carrying his only child makes this seem immensely unlikely.
Yusaf ben Matthias, later Titus Flavius Josephus (AD 37–100) Josephus, known in our narrative as Yusaf, was the ultimate survivor. If his date of birth is accurate – we only have his word for it and he
wouldn’t be the last to pretend to be younger than his years – he was appointed young to the defence of Galilee when Vespasian’s assault began. Later, as the city fell, he arranged for his co-defendants to commit mass suicide and, as the one man left alive, threw himself on the mercy of Vespasian, the commander of the Roman forces who had just successfully raised the siege of Jopata.
The fact that he got as far as Vespasian, and wasn’t decorating a cross within hours of his surrender, suggests to me that he was already a Roman agent. But even if he were not, he threw himself on his face and publicly declared Vespasian to be the inheritor of the Star Prophecy, which had long ago declared that a king would come out of the east who would rule the whole world. This may not have pushed Vespasian to become emperor, but it certainly did his cause no harm.
In later years, having been adopted into Vespasian’s family, Josephus wrote the books which are our only true history of Palestine under the Roman republic and early empires. Without them, the Christian gospels would be very much the poorer and there is a strong argument (see Caesar’s Messiah by Joseph Atwill) that they are all written by the same man, or group of men, at the behest of the then-emperor Titus Vespasian, son of the Vespasian who took the Star Prophecy for himself. Josephus was a self-serving misogynist, but probably no worse than many men of his time, and his work is still well worth reading.
Governor Gessius Florus was governor of Judaea from AD 64 to 66 (his death in the beast garden is my fiction). Josephus is scathing in his account of this man, who achieved the rare notoriety of being more corrupt than his predecessor. It was common for men to use their rank as a means of enriching themselves – indeed, that was often the point – but some went about their assault on their unfortunate subject territories with more delicacy than others. What stands out about Florus is his singular insensitivity to the Hebrews. If he was not deliberately endeavouring to spark a rebellion in Jerusalem, then he was inordinately stupid. Apart from robbing the Temple, he taunted the people, publicly humiliated them when they became restive, and crucified individuals picked up at random, including, according to Josephus, Roman citizens. This latter was explicitly illegal. It’s hard to put any other explanation on his behaviour than that he wished to spark a revolt.
