Kleopatra brought herself past the carnage. ‘There will be a guard at each of the doors,’ she said. ‘We should have questioned this one before he died, to find if Saulos has already gone through.’
‘He has. And he knew we were coming,’ Pantera said. ‘The guard had his sword newly out.’ The others turned to stare at him. He shrugged. ‘The oil of the sheath still shone on the whetted edge. It dulls very quickly. Seneca taught me.’
‘And Seneca taught Saulos,’ Iksahra said. ‘We have to hope he has remembered less than you have or our passage will not be easy.’ She led the way at a jog-run.
Pantera followed, and wondered what he would do if he were Saulos, if he knew what he thought Saulos knew, and if he did not know the things he hoped Saulos would not know.
At the head of the next set of steps, with the gore of the next dead guard sticky underfoot, he held up his hand.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘When Menachem enters this place as its king, where will he go first?’
He saw Kleopatra tilt her head, bright as a dawn bird, thinking. ‘He’ll go straight to the king’s chambers,’ she said,
in time. ‘Three rooms in a suite at the far end of the top floor. The outer room has a fountain in the centre and windows set high in the north-easterly part of the wall. Two rooms lead off it. The bedroom is to the west, with a wide bed for the making of heirs or …’
She broke off and did not detail, as perhaps she might once have done, the things her uncle did there that would never lead to heirs. Her colour high, she said, ‘There’s a third room that was once a bathing room with sunken baths, but these are laid over with boards now, and it has two dining couches and perhaps a low trestle table, although the slaves may have taken it out. This and the bedchamber connect one to the other, so the three rooms make a ring. There are no weapons in any of them, unless you can use the table. The mosaics are considered the best in the kingdom.’
‘And no guard?’
‘My uncle’s guards fled with him to Antioch.’ Disdain made her more like her aunt than she had ever been.
Pantera clapped her shoulder. A man’s response to a man, or a boy; not a girl. ‘If you are ever in need of employment, I will train you as a spy. The work is half done.’
He faced Iksahra, eye to eye, and then Mergus. ‘There will be, at most, half a dozen guards at the entrance to the last corridor; you can deal with those easily, particularly if you use the same ruse to take you close. Go now, fast, and free Hypatia and Estaph, and Berenice.’
‘You’re not coming with us?’ Kleopatra asked.
‘No. You don’t need me. I have … other work.’
‘Saulos is upstairs.’
He laughed at her, at the speed of her reasoning. ‘I think so, yes.’
She chewed her lip, considering, and then nodded. ‘It has to be you, I suppose.’
Mergus, who knew him best, caught his eye for a moment, and held it. Whatever he read there was enough. He turned away, and signalled his men with him.
It was Iksahra who caught Pantera’s wrist and held him fast. ‘You’re going after Saulos? Alone?’
‘I have to. If he escapes now … Iksahra, I have to kill him. I must.’
‘You and you alone.’ Her gaze searched his face. ‘He will be expecting you.’
‘Even so, I must go.’
‘Of course.’ Her smile was something from the desert, sharp and savage and full of the promise of death. ‘Go then.’ Her fingers sprang open, releasing his arm. ‘Kleopatra says that the newly dead go joyful to their gods.’
‘Some of them do,’ he said. ‘I doubt if Saulos will be among them.’
THE DOOR TO
the king’s quarters in Herod’s palace at Jerusalem was not built to be knocked upon by human hand.
Cedar formed the frame for carob wood inlaid with ebony and ivory, with lapis lazuli and rubies set on its face in the same patterns as on the floor of the jewel house in the palace at Masada. The thinnest part of it was thicker than a man’s arm, and its scent, heady, aromatic, full of promises of wealth and power, filled the corridor for twenty feet in either direction.
It was a door that was built to be guarded, with a niche on either side to take a tall man and his helmet: here more than anywhere was visible Herod’s fondness for the Gauls. Nobody else was that tall, except of course Iksahra’s people, the Berberai, but nobody had ever yet enslaved a Berber.
No guards stood there now, slave or otherwise, but even so it felt improper to hammer on it with his fist.
Pantera took a moment to breathe, to be still, to remember who he was and why he had come, and what he had to do; he remembered fire and a man’s death, and a woman lost for ever, and then unthought each of these, because neither rage nor grief was useful to him here.
Filled with the clarity that comes sometimes in the midst of
battle, he reversed the gladius he had brought from Masada and rapped its hilt on the hard wood.
The sound rang down the corridors, echoes rolling in the dust. He called out into the hollow emptiness.
‘Saulos! You can circle round those three rooms, but there’s no way out besides this door. I can sit here and starve you out, or we can end this now, face to face, with what’s left of our honour.’
He thought he had made a mistake, that it wasn’t Saulos he had heard, that he had sent Iksahra and Kleopatra into a trap, that he had fallen into one himself, that he had failed Hypatia …
The door swung open under his hand. Pantera sprang back from the expected blow, or arrow, or spinning knife, but none of these came; Saulos, too, had taken a step back and so they met at last, alone, face to face, blade to longer blade, for Saulos had a cavalry sword, of the kind given to the guards at the chamber doors, with a blade twice as long as Pantera’s legionary gladius. It looked fearsome, but was too long to use in a tight space.
The room into which they stepped was not a tight space; Kleopatra had warned him of that, but it was quiet, a place where sounds of battle rumbled softly, as from a city far away, where men and horses fought and died for other reasons than theirs.
Then Saulos smiled, and all Pantera could see was that same smile flashing in the black dark of Augustus’ temple in Rome, with fire all around and the stench of bodies burning, and all he could feel was the touch of Hannah’s skin against his own in the morning, knowing she must go.
He said, ‘You look weary. Are you as tired of this hunt as I am?’
‘A trick of the light.’ Saulos stepped back into the first of nine perfect panes of sun cast on the floor by the windows set in the high wall. Mosaic spirals wound round his feet in a living river of colour, a hundred times sharper than those at Masada, and better set. ‘I never tire.’
It was possible to believe that. He had taken time to change his clothes from battle garb to his sand-coloured silk, uncreased except around the hem, where it looked as if he had lain down for some time, and only recently risen.
Encased in his subtle finery, he looked joyful, like a hound that hears a hunt, while Pantera … Pantera had no idea how he looked. He was striving for calm and supposed that it showed.
He stepped into the room and felt the door swing behind him. He took a wide step to his left and another and they began to circle, slowly, lazily, with a marble fountain playing between them and the reclining couch behind. It was carved of ebony, padded with silk dyed to deepest porphyry. It sang, siren-like, drawing Pantera closer to sit, to lie, to sleep and never wake.
Saulos asked, ‘How did you know I was here?’
‘I heard you when we were in the slaves’ corridors below, after Iksahra’s cheetah killed the second guard. Where else would you be but here, where the king will retire when he has taken his kingdom?’
‘He has to win the battle first,’ Saulos said. ‘Nothing is certain.’
The air smelled of cedar, and old incense, and wine and, near the bedroom, of balsam. They circled on. They were too evenly matched to take risks; each had too many memories of their last fight to be the first to step in.
Pantera said, ‘Does your god still require that Jerusalem be destroyed to bring about his eternal kingdom?’
‘Of course. The Kingdom of Heaven will rise from the ashes of two cities, Rome and Jerusalem.’
‘But you failed to burn Rome. Your prophecy required that first, before the destruction of Jerusalem. If you fail in the first part, what point in pursuing the second?’
‘I burned enough of it.’
‘And most of your men died as you did so.’
Saulos shrugged. ‘I have enough men. And they will glory in the kingdom God brings to them. You will see it from whichever rank of Hades you have entered.’
The room was exactly as Kleopatra had said: an antechamber, where visitors might be kept for long enough to reflect on the king’s wealth and their own insignificance. Windows opened along the heights of the wall opposite, nine oblongs of unblemished blue, casting their cool light in patterns on the floor.
Pantera passed them, and felt a draught of cool, fresh air, and yearned to sit and let it wash him. Not yet, though. Two doors lay behind him, one in the south, one in the west, both hanging ajar: the bedroom and the dining room that was once a bath room. He had an idea and set about testing it.
He leaned in and tapped Saulos’ sword with his own. The long blade swayed away and came back again, steady, firm, true.
Pantera stepped back. ‘You came here to kill Menachem, but you will fail. Everyone knows you are here; if I can’t kill you, others will, and then Israel will have peace.’
Saulos slashed at his face. Pantera felt the rasp of iron in the air, smelled the whet of its blade. He spun away out of reach.
Saulos said, ‘Not if the governor of Syria gets here in time with his legions. You know I have sent for him?’
‘Iksahra’s falcons took your dove from the sky. The governor isn’t coming.’
‘
Liar!
’ Saulos raged forward, through the haze of light from the windows. Their blades clashed and clashed again and they parted, each a little wiser. ‘I took the beastwoman prisoner before she could do harm. And Hypatia is dead. I had her throat cut before you could reach her.’
‘No. I would know.’
‘How?’
‘I would know.’ He was sure of that. Almost sure.
They came to a natural halt, facing each other across the fountain. The door was not locked. It swayed a little, caught by some unfelt current.
The air was thickening, braiding itself in ropes that drew taut between them, but they were further apart than they had been,
each so wary now of the other’s assault that they kept to the margins of the room.
Pantera had measured the distance; thirteen paces plus a half. He had planned the two moves it would take, one to pull his knife from his sleeve, the other to throw it, and how much closer Saulos could be by the time of the throw.
And then there was the door, which had moved again, slowly, soundlessly, and was lying open by a hand’s breadth.
Pantera moved a pace to his right, so that the high windows’ light was not blinding him. ‘Yusaf ben Matthias came with me out of the city last night. This morning at dawn, he bore witness when Gideon the Peacemaker anointed Menachem as the rightful king of Israel. I thought you should know; Yusaf is the one who sent us the scroll that proved Menachem’s right to the throne. He will be the new king’s foremost counsellor.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Saulos stopped and stared at him in frank disbelief.
Pantera did three things then, fast: he threw his sword high up over the fountain, so that it tumbled down in a dazzle of water-light and sunlight; he drew the knife from his left arm, and threw it; and, as it left his fingers, he hurled himself to the left.
The knife missed: he had known that it would. The falling blade sheared close to Saulos’ left shoulder, slicing away a collop of flesh in a mirror to the wound Menachem had sustained on Masada. Saulos grunted like a kicked horse, and swayed away from the threat, as any man would, but he ran forward, which was his undoing.
Pantera continued his roll, tumbling like an acrobat straight through the open door of the king’s dining room that had once been Herod’s private baths.
He saw the vertical shadow of the doorway pass him by and kicked the door shut as he cleared it, then thrust one hand down, pivoting on it until the bones of his elbow popped, and came round almost full circle, in time to drop the bar across, sending prayers to the old king, Herod the Great, and his
paranoia that said every private room must be readily barred against intruders.
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?’