Caesarea was whiter than a pearl. It gleamed bright as a diamond in the sun, with the sea a mirror of aquamarine behind, and the sky only two shades quieter above.
Pantera was mounted on the bay colt he had set his eyes on after the battle. It was a pleasure to ride, answering easily to heel and hand with a forward, fluid gait in the open desert and a solid one in the city. He set it now to follow the mare in front and, in the guise of Afeef, Nabatean archer, observed what he could of the city.
First, he studied the gangs of sullen, brooding youths who gathered on the street corners to watch their passing and decided that the Syrians were more numerous than the Hebrews, but that the latter looked more desperate and therefore more dangerous.
After, he looked about in apparent awe at the bright white polished stone from which the whole city was fashioned; at the width and regularity of the streets – none of the haphazard twists and turns of Rome here; at the tented podiums set at each street corner for the benefit of the Watch, living testament to the fact that Caesarea had been designed to remain under constant occupation; at the rows of houses built all the same, in the Greek style with their stairs inside, but with many-coloured flower gardens on the rooftops and in vessels by the front doors.
The flowers were a riot in their own right, with scarlet vying against cerise and saffron, magenta and violet, rust, lime and midnight blue, each trying to outdo the other with the sheer violence of its hue.
Elsewhere were signs of human violence: of smoke stains and broken doors, of blood swept into gutters and the moans of the newly injured from behind shuttered windows. And one sign of fresher violence, not far in front of the train.
Pantera leaned a little towards Mergus. ‘Ahead,’ he murmured in Greek. ‘Three streets forward on the right. Fresh blood on the road. Wait a moment before you appear to see it.’
He watched as Mergus counted nine paces then, as if seeing
the gore for the first time, lifted himself high in the saddle and, swearing, threw up his hand.
‘Jucundus! Ahead! The street with the green dolphin! Fresh blood!’
Jucundus had seen action in battle, Pantera would have bet his life on that. The officer swung his horse even as the first word reached him. His orders spilled out in Greek, too fast to follow, but they brought Ibrahim’s camel train to a ragged halt. A dozen men of the Watch cantered up the line in tight formation, three men across, four deep, unslinging their shields as they rode, drawing their cavalry blades.
In a block, they came to the street marked by a soaring dolphin painted on the white gable end. In itself, that marked it as a Syrian district: the god of the Hebrews did not allow images of men or animals in his domain.
They didn’t dismount. After a brief flurry of horses dragged to a hard halt, of heads thrown and hooves belling on the hard stone, the leader dragged a spear from his second and, leaning down, brought something up on its tip. After a moment, on Jucundus’ command, he turned, holding it high, so that the men behind could see.
‘Gods alive!’ Mergus sank down in his saddle. ‘It’s a crucified cat.’
‘Of course.’ Pantera glanced at the dangling mass of bloodied fur as if it were a minor novelty. ‘Don’t show any interest,’ he said. ‘We have no reason to care.’
Mergus converted his choked oath into a curse at his horse. Under his breath, he said, ‘It’s a spotted cat. One of those from the temples in Alexandria. It looks like a miniature leopard.’
‘And I’ll wager the cost of tonight’s meal that the arrow pinning its chest to the upright post bears the same tip and fletchings as those of the men who hunted us in the desert.’
Mergus said, ‘Were you expecting this?’
‘Something like it.’ Pantera let his gaze slide past the cat for a second time. The fletchings were, indeed, the same as those of
their attackers. ‘Saulos wishes us to know that he can do what he wants.’
‘What do we do?’
‘What we were going to do anyway: watch, listen, learn. Do our best not to die. You might spit against bad luck as we pass. I can’t, it’s not a thing a Nabatean would do.’
The train moved on at a brisk pace. They passed the cat and found that, for a mercy, it was dead, and had been before it had been nailed to the wood. More men than Mergus spat for luck as they reached it and the train was uncharacteristically quiet as they rode on.
Presently, Ibrahim took a right turn and led his men into a Hebrew part of the city where the flowers were planted in other patterns and the decorations painted on the gables were of olives and vine leaves, not animals or men. Amidst the lines of quiet order, one street was in disarray: scaffolding rose along half its length and a builder’s mayhem of bricks and sand and wood and iron cluttered the empty lots.
In the centre of the chaos stood a synagogue, tall, brilliant, clad in white stone, with yellow flowers all along the paved path that led to it. The scaffolding pressed it on all sides.
Jucundus had disposed of the cat and was riding up along the side of the train. Mergus caught his attention as he passed. ‘Are they building the synagogue bigger?’ he asked. ‘It’s already larger than anything in Alexandria or Rome.’
‘I think you’ll find it’s not the synagogue that’s being built,’ Pantera murmured. In Jucundus’ presence, he spoke Greek with a sluggish eastern accent and professed to know no Latin. ‘Ask him who’s building other properties so close to the house of the Hebrew god. And why. And ask him where are the worshippers. It’s the Sabbath tomorrow; they should be preparing the house of god.’
Mergus asked. And nearly asked a second time when Jucundus kept his face forward and did not seem to have heard. When the decurion spoke, it was not an answer, but a question spoken in a low voice, with his eyes fixed ahead.
‘How long are you planning to stay in Caesarea?’
Mergus stifled a glance towards Pantera. ‘We’ll leave when we next find work.’
‘Make it soon.’
‘You wish us to leave because of the synagogue?’ Mergus asked. ‘Or the gangs of youths?’
‘Because of the havoc the Hebrews of all ages will wreak at the synagogue if the building work around it doesn’t stop. Or what the Syrians will do if they are made to stop. Both are unsafe.’
Jucundus kicked his horse hard. He reached the front of the train as they turned a final corner and Ibrahim called a halt before a large, well-appointed inn, built in the city’s white stone with a symbol of five vine rods laid side to side hanging above its door.
THE INN OF
the Five Vines was a tavern in the Greek style in the thriving mercantile district of the Roman-occupied capital of Judaea; a place of contradictions entirely at home with itself, alive with the scent of garlic and goat stew and journey-sweat, babbling in eight or nine different languages. A dozen different gods graced the niches at the stairwell, on the landing, in the main bar and dining area beneath, in the rooms. And in those rooms …
‘Mattresses!’ Mergus threw himself down, patting the straw beneath him as if it were goose down. ‘Mattresses with no lice in and a roof over our heads and a room with just two of us, not the entire bloody train. We could forget what else we came for, and just sleep here untouched for a month!’
Pantera sat on the edge of his bed and shook his head by way of answer. The scar over his right eye was white in the evening’s old light and when he was tired, as now, it drew his eye up archly, so that he looked as if he was ever on the verge of a question.
A jug of cool water had been set at the head of his bed. He poured some and drank, and Mergus saw him begin to relax, not wholly – he had never seen that – but enough.
‘What do we do first?’ Sobering, Mergus sat up. He, too, drank the water; after a month in the desert, it was better than any wine.
‘We make contact with Hypatia.’
‘If she’s here yet.’
‘She is. Her mark was on the water trough by the Temple of Isis. She’s here and she’s paid a visit to the local priests.’
Mergus closed his eyes and tried to think when he had missed that; he failed. He said, ‘Whoever sold us to Saulos is quite possibly still in the train. He’ll follow us wherever we go.’
‘Then we’ll lose him.’ Pantera glanced up sharply. ‘You have an idea who it is?’
‘Rasul of the nine fingers,’ Mergus said. ‘He never would look either of us in the eye. If there’s a traitor in Ibrahim’s train, it’ll be him.’
‘Or perhaps he was just too shy. We’ll find out in the morning. Tonight, we sleep here with the men. Tomorrow, we’ll leave a mark so that Hypatia knows we’re here, then set up a meeting with Seneca’s agent in Caesarea; the Teacher may be dead, but his network was always designed to live on beyond him.
The agent takes the name Absolom; I know nothing else about him, but there’s a priest at the Temple of Tyche who’ll get him a message on our behalf. When that’s done, we’ll find Seneca’s dove-keeper and send a bird back to Rome with news that we’re safely here. The more the emperor knows of what we’re doing, the more chance we have of asking his help if we need it. After that, we’ll see where we’re sent. It might be that—’
A dozen trumpets blared. Pantera spun from the bed in a smooth rush of movement that took him out of the room and down the stairs and out towards the main square and the camels.
At some point in that progress, he ceased to be Pantera, Roman citizen, veteran of Britain – for all his quiet asking, Mergus had not yet discovered in precise detail what it was that Pantera had done there, except that it had resulted in his being mistaken for a native and crucified to the point of death
– and became a Nabatean fighting man with a horse to protect and two pieces of silver not yet earned and a fondness for the bow that set him in a realm apart from mortal men. Ibrahim’s men had not seen him throw knives yet; that skill remained secret.
Mergus was still Mergus when he met the commotion in the square, although he slumped more than he might otherwise have done, particularly in the presence of the governor of a province.
The governor, Gessius Florus, stood on top of a small wall to give himself height. He needed to; in a land of small men, Florus was smaller than most; in a land of plenty where waistlines expanded with age, his had always been weightier than his peers’; in a land where bald men were considered repositories of wisdom on the grounds of age, he, plentifully bald, was widely known to have won his current position on the sole strength of his wife’s having shared private bath time with the late empress. Less than two years in the post, he was notorious already throughout the east for the improbable feat of being more corrupt than either of his immediate predecessors.
Governor Florus ordered silence from his trumpets. The milling camels settled and returned to their hay. The crowd that ringed the market place fell to an uneasy silence in which both the Greek-speakers and the Hebrews waited to hear the governor’s reasons for disrupting their afternoon.
‘Who owns these camels?’ A steward called the question, not Florus himself.
‘I do.’
Ibrahim stepped forward to stand before the governor, who looked past his right shoulder, pressing his lips together.
The steward said, ‘Who is the buyer?’
‘I am contracted to sell to Demokritos of Rhodes, who trades here in the city.’
Mergus knew this not to be true. All through the desert, the Saba brothers had spoken with reverence the name of their contractor: Yusaf ben Matthias, Hebrew counsellor and
merchant. Unless that man had taken a Greek name, then Ibrahim was lying.
The crowd was made of youths, and many of them, from both factions. They murmured their surprise, not yet moved to action.
Under that sound, barely moving his lips, Mergus said to Pantera, ‘You told Ibrahim of the governor’s new taxes?’
‘When we watered the horses, yes. Demokritos owes him two talents of gold. If anyone asks, he’ll swear before any god that he’s buying the entire train.’
‘Even so, Florus doesn’t believe him.’
‘No. So there is definitely a spy among us.’
‘Rasul.’ Mergus spat. To Pantera, he said, ‘If Ibrahim fights …?’
‘No risk of that. He won’t decorate a cross for the price of a dozen camels. Watch now, Florus has decided on a figure.’
The steward shifted on his feet. He met no man’s eye. ‘The governor believes you speak untruly, that the true purchaser of these beasts is a Hebrew. He therefore levies twenty of the beasts as his tax. You will cede their ownership to him.’
‘
Twenty?
’ The gasp rolled around the crowd. Ibrahim was the rock on which it broke. Set man on man, Mergus would have laid all his life’s wealth on Ibrahim to win; he could have torn Florus’ ears off and used them to choke him. But the governor owned the Watch and suddenly there were a great many watchmen around the square, sweating in their mail and helmets. Half bore javelins. The other half had drawn their swords.
Ibrahim said, ‘My lord, of the twenty-six beasts who survived our journey, five are not in calf.’
‘Then we shall leave you those five, plus one.’ Florus’ voice had the unfortunate timbre of a eunuch. Which, given that he had a wife, was impossible, or at least unlikely.
Ibrahim said, ‘If my lord wishes that the Saba take their future trade to Damascus, he has only to say so. We would not have come at all had we known we were so unwelcome.’
Mergus eased his blade in his belt. He was sworn to this man, who had just threatened a Roman governor. The Saba were the best – at times the only – camel traders east of Alexandria. Caesarea needed them more than they needed it.
Florus smiled as a toad smiles, his eyes lost in his fat face. ‘You may trade where you will,’ he said. ‘But now we shall take all twenty-one in-calf camels as our tariff.’
‘One denarius each, as we agreed.’
It was evening, and they had eaten in the inn’s hall down below, feasting on fish, because they could, and bakheer because they must show how honoured they were to have been offered it. It had been made by Ibrahim’s wife in her tent, and she was the most beauteous woman of the entire Saba tribe.