Rome 2: The Coming of the King (18 page)

‘No.’ Estaph smeared another man’s blood from his face. ‘I sent them to Damascus, to my wife’s father.’

‘Then why,’ asked Pantera, and he was already running, ‘is there torchlight coming from the back room of the house you were renting?’

Pantera ran with Estaph a bull-shadow at one shoulder and Menachem a black-eyed ghost at the other and, because they were all three hunters and ran in the dark, quietly, Kleitos neither heard nor saw them as he stepped out of the small, neat house at the end of the row, the one newly empty, that had been Estaph’s.

He bore a lamp with a small flame; they could not miss him. Pantera swerved across the street and felt Estaph move in behind him.

‘
Alive!
’ he called, as they met, bone to bone, forearm to jugular, with Kleitos crushed between. ‘We need him alive.’

And they had him alive, but not the two men who were with him, who died as they rushed forward. A third died to Menachem, who used his long, lean, narrow-pointed knife after the manner of the Sicari zealots, sliding it into the man’s chest and out again, leaving a small half-moon opening and no blood. It killed just as quickly as had Pantera’s.

‘And so answers,’ Pantera said, stepping back.

Estaph had Kleitos by the shoulders and was pulling outwards and backwards, as a man might to break a board of wood. Kleitos was a child in his hands, a puppet, jerking wildly with his feet not touching the ground. He shook his head wildly.

Pantera stood in front of him, face to face. He was shaking, not only with the aftermath of battle. ‘Where is he?’

‘You will die! You and all who fight with you: the centurion, the Alexandrian witch, the dove-boy and his father, these men here; all will die the slow, Roman death.’ Blue-faced and flecked with spittle, Kleitos spat. Estaph sighed and did something small with his hands that made the other man scream.

‘I said you would remain alive,’ Estaph said in his ear, ‘I did not say you would remain whole.’ He twisted again. Kleitos’ scream was hoarse this time and too high to hear clearly.

‘Where is Mergus?’ Pantera laid his knife on Kleitos’ face, pressing the tip close to his eye. ‘Tell me. Or I will tell Estaph to give you to me.’

‘There …’ Kleitos’ head gave a spasmodic jerk, back towards the house that had been Estaph’s.

‘In the back room?’

A nod.

‘Alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hold him.’

Menachem had gone away and come back. The channel of his blade was dark with blood. ‘Another two were in the house next door.’ By his tone, they were flowers, cut from a field, to be forgotten even before they fell. ‘Where’s your centurion?’

‘Through here.’

Wordless, Pantera pushed through a goatskin curtain to the windowless, airless, lightless place beyond. The stench of human faeces hit him as a physical blow, wrenching bile up his throat, to his nose, so that he had to bend over and thumb it out, choking.

‘Light!’ he called, back to where there was at least the glimmer of torchlight. ‘Get me light!”

Menachem brought a filthy, smoking torch, that called skeletal shadows leaping from the margins of a room so small that four paces in any direction might reach a wall. Most of it was filled with dried camel fodder, spiky with thistles. Broken beams of timber, hastily ripped from other places, had been cast on top with little care for how they settled, only that the resulting heap would burn. And among the florid odours of human ordure and sweet hay was the swell of lamp oil, poured liberally everywhere, over the hay, the timbers, and the pile of rags in the corner …

That was not a pile of rags, but a man, bound and gagged and … Pantera knelt, turned him over, felt at his throat for a long, desperate moment, and there,
there!
was a pulse, thready, fine, erratic, but leaping live under his fingers. He sat back on his heels and swept his hands over his face.

‘He’s alive?’ Menachem said, softly, from behind him. At Pantera’s nod, he shouted back to Estaph, ‘He’s alive. We need water.’

Pantera called, over him, ‘Estaph, kill Kleitos now, before I am tempted to roast him here. And keep the torches safe; a stray flame will burn us all.’

Moshe brought water and wool and Estaph came in, cleaning the head of his axe on a rag. The giant Parthian lifted Mergus like a child, carried him out past Kleitos’ pallid corpse and
laid him on the pallet in the front room, away from the risk of fire.

There, Pantera pulled the gag from his mouth and cut the cords at his wrists and ankles. With Estaph’s help, he stripped him, and washed away the filth about his body, and the matted blood from the wound on his head, and dressed him again in his own tunic, with the worst of the blood rinsed from the wool.

Then, with fire raging in the city outside, and the sounds of riot building, they began the unpleasant work of bringing him back to consciousness, with water poured on his face, and into his throat, so that he must choke or drown and then, after choking, swallow.

Mergus moaned and turned his head away. Pantera tilted the beaker over his face, and let another half-cup dribble on to his nose. He choked and cursed and struggled, and Pantera held him steady until he opened his eyes, and peered, and blinked and made himself focus, and stared.

Pantera smiled down at him. ‘Does your head hurt?’

Mergus shook his head and then stopped. In a moment, whiter, he said, ‘Not as much as my hands.’

‘The ropes bit tight. Your hands will hurt until the blood comes back to them. The first hour is the worst.’

Mergus closed his eyes. A while later, he opened them again. ‘Kleitos?’

‘Dead.’

‘He said I was the first; that Saulos planned to kill your friends one by one by one: Hypatia, Estaph, the dove-boy, the priest of Tyche – even Menachem and Yusaf whom you barely know, with you at the last, knowing them all gone.’

Mergus’ cold fingers struggled for grip. With care, Pantera held them, and chafed them between his palms. Quietly, he said, ‘I will not let it happen.’ And then, because it didn’t seem enough, ‘We have thwarted him twice tonight. He will become more desperate after this, and make mistakes. All we need is patience, and we have enough of that, between us.’

Outside was a small flurry of men arriving and leaving and
Menachem, who had gone to the door, came back again. He stood in the doorway, with the goatskin curtain pushed back on his arm. ‘The royal family has just departed for Jerusalem,’ he said. ‘Saulos is with them. He has lead place in the king’s retinue, behind only Agrippa himself.’

Pantera said, ‘Where’s Jucundus? He’ll need to know about this, to stem anything else that comes of it.’

‘Jucundus is leading the king’s train, riding at the head of five hundred horse,’ Menachem said. ‘His second, Acrabenus, has command of the Watch. He will contain the fires as readily as Jucundus might have done, which is to say not readily, but well enough to— No!’

Mergus was trying to rise. Pantera caught him as he toppled and lowered him back to the floor, sitting this time, not lying.

‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘not yet. We’ll tie you to a horse until you can hold the reins yourself.’ He looked up to where Menachem waited. ‘We ride for Jerusalem, now, in the king’s tracks. Will you come with us?’

‘We are four,’ Menachem said. ‘Myself, Moshe, Aaron, whom you have not yet met – and Yusaf, who was dismissed from the king’s side before they departed.’

‘The king turned down Yusaf’s petition?’

‘No, Saulos did that.’ Menachem smiled, tightly. Over the guttering light, his deep-set eyes sought Pantera’s and held them. ‘Thus does your enemy, indeed, become our enemy. And so we will ride together after him to Jerusalem. We have defeated him here when we did not know him as a common enemy. Knowing it, we may more readily defeat him there.’

CAESAREA WAS BEHIND
them, a ribbon of tiny lights stitching the dark land to the darker sky. The roar of the riot was too far away to be heard; the desert rang instead to the soft pad of hoof on sand, steady, never stumbling, picking a route by starlight, striving always to keep to the path, which was no path, but was none the less obvious by daylight.

Ahead, torches showed the queen’s party had stopped for food, for water, and were mounting again, stringing out along that same not-quite-obvious route. Hypatia was there; Pantera could feel her in much the same way as he could feel Mergus and for much the same reason; these two were his true family. He had not thought of them as such before this, but after the night just gone, it was impossible not to.

Further ahead, if Pantera strained to look, the lights of the king’s group stretched across the horizon, heading always south. Saulos was there, and the Berber hunter with her beasts.

He had heard the cheetah was trained to hunt like a hound, and did not want to find out that it was true, here, in the dark desert, where a hound could take a man from his horse and break his neck before anyone even knew it was there.

And then he heard a change in the rhythmic footfall ahead.
Pantera drew his horse to a hard halt and raised his hand. A scream cut the night.

‘It’s the girl,’ Pantera said. ‘The royal princess. Her horse has fallen.’

‘How do you know?’ Menachem pushed up alongside, his eyes dim in the starlight. ‘It could be anyone.’

‘Who else is reckless enough to throw her horse at a canter away from the lit path and the watchmen?’

‘The boy is. Particularly if the Berber woman has rebuffed him.’

‘No. Hyrcanus rides with the king’s group and they’re a mile in front. Watch the torches; the queen’s men are veering off the track now to find her. Hypatia’s ahead of them, I think. If the girl’s neck is broken, then they’ll have to … but it isn’t. See?’ Pantera pointed to the gather and squeeze of the moving lights, now together, now apart. ‘They’re carrying her back to the track now.’

He looked back, at his own party. Of the five horses gathered by, Yusaf and Moshe held the rear, while the other three kept to a row with Estaph and Aaron staying one on either side of Mergus, to keep him safe; an hour into the journey they had untied him so that he could ride freely, but he wasn’t secure enough to be left entirely alone.

Ahead, the torches of the royal train danced back to the trail. Pantera said, ‘They’ll have to carry her, which means they’ll move more slowly. If we want to reach Jerusalem before daylight, we’ll have to swing out round them and get back to the track well in front.’

‘And risk running into the back of the king’s group? You said they were only a mile ahead.’ That was Mergus, speaking from just beyond his horse’s left haunch. By a miracle, he kept the pain from his voice and was a centurion picking out a particular problem; nothing unsurmountable.

Pantera laughed softly. ‘If you’ve tracked Eceni warriors through the forests of Britain at night, you can track a group of minor Herodian royalty carrying torches along a desert
pathway that’s been used by every passing merchant for the last hundred years. And you can do it without having to take the same path.’

He turned his horse off the track and eased it forward on to the shadowed sand beyond. ‘Follow me. Don’t speak. Keep your horses out of step with mine so we don’t set up a rhythm the guards can hear. And –’ this last with hollow humour – ‘don’t scream if you fall.’

They moved uncertainly at first. The thumbnail of an old moon did not so much light the desert as sharpen the shadows, painting the treacherous dips and hillocks in stark relief. The horses baulked at imaginary traps and had to be nursed round lines in the sand that curved like snakes. They moved so slowly that there was a real danger dawn might come and see them still crossing the desert, visible to any who chanced to look.

In the dark, Pantera halted his horse. ‘Dismount.’

Yusaf caught his elbow and leaned down, bringing his face close. His nose was heavy, his lips thin, his beard a hedge about his face. His midnight silks swayed, thick with the scent of balsam, and the odour of money. ‘Are you suggesting we walk to Jerusalem?’ he asked.

‘No, I’m suggesting we run until we come back on to the track on the other side of the queen’s party. Then we ride.’

He saw them look, one to the other; Moshe to Aaron, who was smaller, wirier, older. Estaph to Menachem, and then to Pantera. ‘Run?’ Estaph asked. ‘Even Mergus?’

‘Even Mergus. It’ll help to ease his muscles, to stop them stiffening. It’s easier than you think. Trust me.’

They didn’t trust him at all, but he kicked off his shoes and gathered his reins and began to run, digging his toes into the cooling sand, feeling the grit and the balance and the slope. His horse, after the first reluctant steps, ran with him, increasing in confidence. This close to the ground, the moon became an ally, showing the way; the sand became a living thing that gripped his feet, the hillocks loomed larger and more clearly, and the pits were obvious and easily avoided.

After a while, he heard the others slide down from their horses and begin to run. Of them all, his concern was most for the city-bred Yusaf, the bearded counsellor in his ruinously expensive silks who had never seen war, but he proved fitter than he looked, and not given to complaint. Mergus, as Pantera had promised, became looser in his stride, and did not fall behind.

He led them in a long curving line past Hypatia’s part of the royal group and back to the track, where they paused a moment, to drink water, and to rest.

‘You’ve done that before.’ Mergus was leaning forward with his hands on his knees, panting, but he was breathing more easily than he had when they started. ‘One day, you can tell me the details.’

‘There are no details to tell,’ Pantera said. ‘I used to live here; my father made me do this when I was a child. The desert climbs up to the mountains. On the other side are the trees: pine, cedar, olives in groves. It’ll be easier going then.’

‘Your father is the man who taught you how to throw a knife?’ Mergus’ eyes gleamed in the dark. He was in pain still, but less than he had been, and he was a warrior; the challenge of a night run pushed him beyond his own exhaustion. ‘How old were you?’