Rome 2: The Coming of the King (20 page)

A slave, if one had been there at all, might have let these pass and gone after them, thinking the night empty, but Iksahra sur Anmer, hunter and daughter of hunters, had turned away from the track and pressed her ear to the ground and heard the men whom Saulos had said would follow the royal train.

He hadn’t said how he knew Pantera would be coming, nor had Iksahra asked, but she had set herself a new goal: to learn Saulos’ sources of information. When she had them, he could die without loss to her or the world.

Meanwhile, she had run out across the sands, following the new sounds, and, because she was the best of the best, she had found them, and cut in ahead of them, and lain still in the night until they passed her, riding now; seven shadows set against the starlit night. Then she had wrapped her robes around her in such a way that nothing flapped and set after them.

To track seven horses in the dark was a skill few possessed, even among her people. To track them when they were led by a man of infinite suspicion, who took care to hide the traces of his passing even in a desert at night, who stopped at random intervals and slid down from his horse to listen to the air and press his ear to the ground and then set his horse forward at a canter on the remount, who turned to face the rising sun, making his god-signs to the aching red blade as it cut open the night, and even then made use of the light to search the land behind … to track such a man was an act of genius and Iksahra alone could have achieved it.

She learned a lot about her quarry in the course of the chase; she always did, but she had never been as certain that her prey knew she was there. By the end, when they were among the trees, he made no secret of it, and kept his horse steady, waiting for her, looking east to the sun in such a way that she might come to know the contours of his face, might see the scar above his right eye, the weakness of his shoulder and the lame left ankle, where the foot would not bend as much as it should.

She saw his eyes and the way they scanned the earth, exactly as her father’s had. She saw his dry smile and the way he listened to the others who clustered around him before he spoke; always he listened more and spoke less, but always his words carried more weight. The men with him showed no sign that they knew Iksahra was there. If he told them, they had more discretion than anyone she had met.

Pantera, too, did not ride in through Herod’s Gate, but pulled his small cavalcade east towards one of the livestock gates where the wall bounded the lower city. Iksahra left them then, and slipped round the wall in the opposite direction, heading south and west and then south towards the slave gates at the junction of the upper and new parts of the city.

Saulos was waiting for her in a shadowed alley not far inside the gate. Breathless with urgency and the need for her news, he did not offer her water, or a melon, or any of the small courtesies that were her due as a returning hunter. He watched the cheetah as it came to press its head on her hand, and tried not to let his eyes grow wide.

Iksahra had her own water skin hidden in her robes with a mouthful of water left against just this eventuality. She took it out and drained it dry, watching Saulos wring his hands and sway from one foot to the other in his anxiety. If he knew the insult she offered by not sharing the drink, he showed no sign of it.

Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she took the time to settle the empty skin inside her robes, tight against her belt, then said succinctly, ‘Pantera is here. He will ride in through the lambs’ gate at the lower city soon. Maybe he has already done so.’

Saulos frowned. ‘You are sure of this?’

No man had ever questioned her tracking. Not one. Ever. Her father had killed the only man who had ever questioned his own abilities. His daughter had not needed even to do that.

Iksahra stared in silence and Saulos stared back a moment, expressionless, before a smile cracked his face. ‘Of course you’re
sure. How could you not be? The great Pantera, the Leopard himself, bested by a woman of the Berberai!’ He forgot himself and patted her arm. ‘I knew you were good. I didn’t know you were the best. I apologize.’

Iksahra nodded. Her eyes never left his face.

Saulos looked down, smoothing his palms over the sand-coloured silk of his topcoat. ‘Your hunting birds made the journey well,’ he said, as if it were his own gift to her. ‘I thought perhaps you might like to take them out to hunt?’ He moved to one side. Behind him, in the alley’s deepest shade, was a small basket of woven grasses with its lid tied down. A dove’s yellow eye peered out through the mesh, blinking placidly. An ivory message cylinder was bound to its left leg.

Iksahra said, ‘You mean you want me to ride out of the city under pretext of exercising my birds and release a messenger-bird so that it can return here as if it had flown from Rome. In doing so, I am to stop my birds from killing it, and am, instead, to ensure that it reaches its roost in safety.’

Saulos’ hands sketched an apology in the air. ‘You understand me well. The bird bears the message you took from the air nine days before Pantera arrived. I have cut off the last sentence, but it bears Nero’s mark at the head, which is hard to counterfeit. The governor will trust it, and whatever else he sees at the same time.’

He peered at her from under lowered lids, his eyes wide as a girl’s and full of flattery. ‘It would make our plans more difficult if the bird were to die as it flew to the palace. You have the best eye for a hunting falcon. If anyone can keep it alive, you can.’

‘Then I shall do so. Although I assume you wish me to hunt any other doves that are seen to be flying towards the city?’

‘That would be most useful. And later, if you are unoccupied on your return, it might be … instructive if you were to follow the woman who brought the two hounds from Rome’s empress?’

‘The Alexandrian witch,’ Iksahra said.

‘Is she a witch?’ Saulos’ brows snapped up. ‘I didn’t know.
Certainly, she’s Pantera’s creature, but the Sisters of Isis never do anything for men without another, better, reason of their own. She’s drawing closer to Queen Berenice and the Princess Kleopatra than I had thought she would. Such a thing may be either useful to us or dangerous. We can only turn it to our cause if we know what’s happening.’

‘Then I will follow the witch if she leaves the palace. I can’t promise to follow her within it. I am too obvious.’ A single gesture took in her skin, her hair, the great cat that shadowed her heels.

‘You could, perhaps, do without …’ He talked with his hands, this man; they waved now, vaguely, uncertainly, at the cheetah, and then withdrew. He shook his head. ‘Of course not. And in any case, you are, as you say, remarkable; someone to draw all eyes. In that case—’ His hands swept wide, taking in the whole of Jerusalem. ‘I can take care of all that needs to be done in the palace. You will have your own apartments, of course, and permission to make use of whatever help you need. Herod had the baths built to his own design. They are renowned across Judaea. We’re not in the desert of your home, but this place has its own attractions. Do what you need to make yourself at home.’

She watched him leave, and wondered that he had never thought to ask her who was with Pantera, whether the mountain-man was with him, or the Hebrews, or why the centurion had dressed as a woman.

Because he had not asked, she had not told him, but kept the information to herself, in case it might be useful later in the plan she was beginning to make, which was significantly different from the one she had nursed on the ship sailing in from her homeland.

JERUSALEM WAS OLD
: older than Alexandria, older than Rome, older possibly than Athens or Corinth.

Riding in at dawn with Kleopatra slack as a corpse before her saddle, Hypatia had caught the ripe scent of a dunghill and noted it – Caesarea had no dunghills – but she had not yet been struck by the differences between the city of David, scarred by war, built and rebuilt over and over by the pride and blood of the Hebrew nation, and Caesarea, youthful city of Herod, whose grandson sat on the throne, whose mason marks were still sharp on the buildings, whose carpenters still used the tools their grandfathers had held when they built it.

She saw it now with the morning sun hard on each detail. Where Caesarea was young, bright, shining, with wide streets of white stone, with cleansing sewers the height of a man that carried ordure and storm water equally into the ocean’s depths, Jerusalem was … wizened, wise, balanced on the shoulders of forested hills, with dry wadis all about and steep valleys cutting through her heart. Her crooked, arthritic streets crabbed along valley sides, up slopes, twisting, knotted; sore, yes, but with her history written in every angled stone, and such a history …

Where Herod’s city, named for a Roman emperor, claimed
to be the Roman capital of Judaea, and boasted a temple to the deified Augustus, Jerusalem, named for peace, was the Hebrew capital, sanctified by Solomon, by David, by the Hasmonean monarchs who had last held her free; here was the Temple sacred to the heart of every God-fearing Semite across the empire.

Here also was Herod’s palace, four storeys high, built in the Greek style and set on the westerly wall, where the king might enjoy the fruits of his labours and yet not overlook the Temple and the sacred works performed therein.

Hypatia stood now on its steps, and looked east across the city to the Temple and the fortress of the Antonia. She breathed in the scents of the Upper Market just below her; of saffron and garlic, of olives and oil and wine and fresh meat and dried fish, and began the slow process of knowing in the way she might, in other times and other places, have come to know a lover; slowly, over time, and fully.

In that coming-to-know, she had another task: the finding of herbs for Kleopatra’s head. She was not a healer of headaches in fourteen-year-old girls and had said so several times in the sleepless morning that followed their arrival. Nevertheless, she had trained to her vocation in the company of healers whose skills had cheated Anubis of far more certain souls than Kleopatra’s and she did have a reasonable grasp of what herbs and poultices might prove effective.

Sadly, Herod’s magnificent, many-storeyed palace, while being larger, more stately and possessed of far more intriguing layers and corridors than its counterpart at Caesarea, had proved to be shockingly poorly provisioned. Hypatia had lost half the morning searching through cold stone kitchens, cluttered, dustrimed storerooms and an unused infirmary on the fourth floor of the western side before one of the permanent under-stewards who staffed the lower levels thought to tell her that the High Priest preferred prayer to the use of herbs and she was unlikely to find what she sought anywhere in the palace.

Thus it was that in the worst heat of the day, when every other member of the royal household from servants to king
had retired to bed to sleep off the effects of the ride, Hypatia petitioned a drowsily amiable Polyphemos for a new, anonymous tunic to replace the green silk of the night’s ride and, minimally refreshed, left the palace for the undying heat of a Jerusalem afternoon.

She looked out across the Upper Market, which grew as a riotous, many-coloured fungus below the steps, almost to the palace walls. It sold silk, evidently: colours exploded from every stall; cerise, midnight blue, turquoise, searing yellow, spring-leaf greens. She thought she saw a herb-seller somewhere behind the flagrant colours and set off to find her.

‘Wait!’

Kleopatra stood, flushed, on the wide marbled porch. She, too, had abandoned her theatre silks for an undistinguished tunic, belted with rope. She was barefoot and her hair was caught up under a boy’s cap. From a distance – even close up – it was impossible to be sure of her gender. She ran down the steps, clumsily.

‘Kleopatra, go back. You’re not fit—’

‘I am your princess. It’s not for you to say whether I’m fit or not.’

‘Really?’ Hypatia turned fully round and arched one brow. ‘Tell me, when did you gain rule over Isis? I must have missed it in the night.’

Grown men – governors, princes, kings – had withered before that look and that tone. Kleopatra of Caesarea halted, balanced between one step and the next. She looked mildly discomfited; hot.

‘You’re barely conscious and the sun’s at its height. Even if you don’t still have a headache, it would give you a new one,’ Hypatia said reasonably. ‘I’m going to look for valerian and monkwort or whatever I can find in the market that will take away the pain in your head. I’ll bring it back as soon as I can. You’ll be far more comfortable if you stay here.’

Kleopatra shook her head. ‘You’ll need a guide to find what you need.’

‘I doubt it. I have travelled in other cities; I can find my way to—’

‘Jerusalem is different. The streets wind and bend up and down like a maze. You could be lost here and not even know it.’