While the Hebrew and Syrian youths began their nightly riots outside, they had stayed in relative safety by the fire and had toasted Ibrahim’s beautiful wife and each other and their horses, living and dead, and the horses they had once owned and would own in the future and the dead men whose spirits lay quiet under the sand of the desert. They had not mentioned the camels or their losses or whether any of them would make any money for the trip.
But there was money. Ibrahim doled out the small silver coins; a subdued, thoughtful Ibrahim, whose brown eyes had become hooded, that his soul might not show to his enemies, or the spirits they could have sent to hunt him.
Mergus said, ‘I’m sorry. We would have killed the governor, but …’
‘But then we would all die long deaths, and what would our wives say to that?’ Ibrahim’s smile was sad and slow, but neither as slow nor as sad as it might have been. ‘Take the money in peace and keep away from the unrest here as you spend it. If you find yourselves in need of employment at the moon’s turn, come back here. I may have some horses – and five barren camels – to take to Damascus. Your beds are paid for this night and the next. After that, our hospitality ends and you will have to find
your own. I’m told the area around the harbour is the safest: nobody yet dares to throw stones near the palace.’
Pantera’s smile matched Ibrahim’s. ‘We will find an inn there then that serves good food, and can supply also, perhaps, a woman for Mergus?’ His eyes, scanning the room, were childlike in their innocence. Mergus flushed and looked away out of the stables towards the evening’s lemon light.
Ibrahim laughed and clapped Pantera on the shoulder and kissed him on both cheeks, and told him to take the bay colt as payment for the horse that had been killed in good service.
They liked Pantera for his bow skills, he had said, which was true. Mergus thought they had come to love him for all the things they could not see, but could feel in the quiet of their souls.
Men who come to love Saulos will give their lives for him
. Pantera had said that in the desert. What he had not said was that he and Saulos had much in common, and the fact that men would give their lives for love of either was only the first part of it.
Mergus was thinking that later in the evening, as he settled down to sleep. For a while, he lay listening to the growing rumble of youths hurling abuse at other youths outside. He thought no stones had been thrown yet, nor sticks pounded on flesh. Inside, the few men left downstairs slurred their toasts to the remembered dead while upstairs, men on either side of their room mumbled their way towards sleep.
Mergus murmured his own prayers to the god and lay quietly, letting the night’s patterns weave across the roof, patching with starlight the places the sun had left.
Inevitably, his thoughts gravitated to the man in the other bed. There was a time, in the summer after the fire, when he had desired Pantera so much his heart had ached, when he would have given all the gold sewn into his saddle pack – none of which was his to give – for a night with him in a small room such as this.
Time hadn’t dulled the ache, but had instead refined it until
he came to understand that his passion for Pantera was of the mind, not of the body; that he had reached the age, perhaps, where lust gave way to something more pure. More likely, he remembered too clearly the look on the face of the woman Hannah as she took ship on the day after the fire, with Pantera’s child newly made within her.
He had seen women in grief before; he had caused it often enough. There was no reason why he should remember this one so clearly, except that it had been mirrored in the lines about Pantera’s eyes as he had turned away from the ship, and then again, even more finely, in the face of the woman Hypatia, Sibylline Oracle and Chosen of Isis.
And there was a question Mergus did not wish to ask, or to hear answered. He was content with what he had, or believed himself so. He lay listening to the slow peace of Pantera’s breath as he crossed the Lethe into sleep and if he emerged later sweating, grasping blindly at his mattress, then Mergus planned to be at his side, speaking words of comfort in the language that worked, which was neither Greek nor Latin, nor Aramaic nor Saban, but the old, wild, ensorcelled words of the Britons that the dreamers used to sing the warriors to war, and that in a land where the women were warriors as often as the men.
Mergus slept and dreamed of Britain, and when he woke in the grey ghost-light before dawn, Pantera was gone, leaving his desert robes behind him. He had taken his two slim throwing knives.
A BRISK SOUTH-WESTERLY
wind ushered in the dawn, delivering the ocean’s salt-spray scent to the beast gardens. The falcons smelled it and screamed for freedom.
Iksahra sang back the song her father had taught her, that calmed them and brought them to hunting sharpness at the same time. Her tones were deep and resonant, made at the back of her throat, and they threaded through the high, piercing shrieks, weaving a harmony that filled the garden and woke the other beasts.
Presently, they joined in: the cheetah, the horses, the three old hounds, no longer fit for hunting; the two new ones, brought by the tall Alexandrian woman with the striking blue-black hair and the all-seeing eyes. Each added its voice one by one to make a melody that Iksahra had heard first in childhood, and not at all in adulthood, until she had come here.
Her heart soared on the sound, always. There were mornings when she came close to weeping for the sheer heart of it and today had almost the feel of that, but not yet. For now, it was enough to revel in the luxury of solitude; her gift to herself, that made the days bearable.
Loosing the cheetah from its night-time pen, she unlocked
the feed store and measured out the corn and hay for the horses, with a palm’s lick of salt for those that might be ridden in the day. She lifted the trapdoor to the cold cellar and brought out a goat carcass, three days dead but not yet rotting, and cut strips off the hind leg for the birds before she gave the rest to the cheetah. It took it from her with care, that its teeth might not crush her fingers.
Iksahra crouched down, buttocks to heels so that her head was level with the cat’s and it could meet her gaze with its fire-amber eyes. She reached out a hand, palm down, and the beast, more hound than cat, pressed its great, high forehead up against her in greeting and rumbled low in its throat a sound that might have been a threat and was not. She stayed with it while it fed, breathing in the scents of raw meat and wildness, running her lean fingers through the heavy silk of its pelt.
They thought she loved her falcon, the men and women of the palace, and they were right, but she loved this cat more than any bird. On the nights when they hunted together, she thought it carried the spirit of her father, sent to watch over and teach her. It had never yet showed any sign that she was wrong.
Later, up in the feed room, she weighed the meat for the birds on a small balance, measuring each portion against bronze nuggets marked with the size of bird that they should feed. The scales had been her father’s, locked in a store cupboard by men who didn’t understand their use. Iksahra had discovered them on her third day and Saulos had found her standing with them, unmoving, hours later.
That was the day the slaves had stopped coming to the gardens for the early morning feeding time. The memory caused her to smile. Saulos, too, had walked round her more carefully since then, which was not a bad thing.
She had not killed anybody for having hidden her father’s tools; before they had left the desert, she had given Saulos her word that she would stay her hand until his plans had run their course and Iksahra had never in her life broken her word. But standing there in the feed room, she had laid her hands on her
father’s scales and made promises that were more precise and more sure than the ones she had made by a fire in a desert in the early spring before she and her hunting beasts had left their homeland to follow a stranger overseas.
Four birds had made the journey with her from the deserts; two falcons and two tiercels, all adults, all hunting fit. She flew them on alternate days, resting between. At home, she would have fed them on the previous day’s kill and she did that here when she could, except when the kill had been a message-bird with a cylinder tied to its leg and she had had to tie weights to the carcass and send it to the bottom of the ocean.
The message had been from the new spymaster, the Poet, to the agent, Absolom, asking if he had yet met the Leopard. Saulos had been delighted in his muted, half-hidden fashion.
He had taken the slip of paper as if it were a gift from his god, smoothing it over and over until it lay flat on his palm. Later, he had brought a message of his own to send and they had used one of their precious birds, stolen from the old spymaster’s pigeon loft, to take the message back.
From Absolom to the Poet, greetings. The Leopard is safe in Caesarea. His enemy is in our sights. We have hopes for a swift resolution
.
If bird flight were an omen, the pigeon’s swift departure from her hands at dusk was the best they could have hoped for.
The two falcons Iksahra had flown yesterday bent their heads to feed. Today’s pair ate only shreds of goat, thread-fine pieces designed to whet their appetite and give them the power to fly without leaving them sated. The falcon was her best: a three-year-old haggard caught in the wild and tamed at night with a stealth that would have surprised Anmer ber Ikshel, had he lived to see such patience in his so-impatient daughter.
Iksahra stroked its breast with her forefinger, crooning. ‘Soon, soon, soon we will fly. Just give me time to ready the horses, and to pick up your little brother. See how ready he is? Not as strong as you, but he’s keen and together we’ll—’
‘Iksahra?’
The call shattered her peace. A hound belled an answer, or a greeting, and in that was the hint of who came. Iksahra took time to settle her bird before deigning to turn to acknowledge the intruder who had dared risk the dangers of her company.
‘I am Hypatia of Alexandria. I came on the ship
Krateis
yesterday.’
Iksahra tilted her hand and made the falcon step back on to the leather-covered hoop that was its day perch. The bird screamed its disappointment and struck at Iksahra’s gloved hand and had to be freed, claw by claw, before she was able to shed the glove and, finally, to turn and study her enemy.
This close, Hypatia was more striking even than she had seemed on the ship, and then she had been a thing to catch all eyes; the king and his queen had both made a point of looking elsewhere, not to seem to gape.
Her hair was the deep, dense blue-black of the true Egyptians but fine, so that it shone like watered silk and caught the colours of the sun. Her skin was pale as milk, her eyes were the colour of whetted iron, sharp to pare the souls of men and women.
And she was beautiful; it was said of Cleopatra Ptolemy, queen of all Egypt, that her beauty stole the souls of all the men who saw her, but that queen had been dead for a hundred years. If she had ever had a successor, Hypatia of Alexandria was that one.
In all that time, the woman did not speak. She had patience, too.
‘You are the Chosen of Isis,’ Iksahra said presently. ‘You come from the empress of Rome and have an appointment in the palace at dawn.’
She knew these things because the slaves knew, and few others, but Hypatia nodded, pleasantly, as if her title and her appointment had always been common knowledge.
‘Polyphemos, the chief steward, is precise in his timing,’ she said. ‘I am told that I must go to the palace gates when a particular bell is struck in summons. I have long enough, apparently, to visit my hounds, to see that they are fed and
watered and have rested in the night, and return. He said it was feeding time. He didn’t tell me you would be here.’
‘An oversight,’ Iksahra said. Polyphemos was an arrogant, self-important, interfering fool. If he had sent the Greek woman here, now, it was so that she and Iksahra might meet with no one to oversee them.
‘An oversight,’ agreed Hypatia. ‘Unless he hopes that you might turn me to stone. Can you do that?’
Iksahra stared at her. ‘The slaves talk nonsense.’
‘Good. It would be hard to present myself to her majesty if I were already petrified. May I visit my hounds? They travelled well, but the first days on land can be— Ah.’ A bell sounded, a silver note that hovered over the gardens and faded, slowly. Hypatia frowned in regret. ‘It would appear that I don’t have as long as I was led to believe. My apologies. I’m sure the hounds are thriving in your care. If time and the queen permit, I may take them out later. Will you be here?’
‘No.’
‘A pity.’ Hypatia bowed a little, in the desert fashion, hand on heart. ‘We shall meet again later, I’m sure.’
‘Perhaps.’ Iksahra didn’t smile, then or later. The day was broken and neither the falcon, the hounds nor the horses could mend it. When Hyrcanus came shortly afterwards, she let him talk her into taking the horses and the birds to hunt along the shore.
A thousand colours of silk rustled in harmony as Hypatia entered the audience room of the royal palace at Caesarea. Many-branched candles flared. Torches blazed on the marble walls. A multitude of flowers perfumed the air. Not since her second meeting with the emperor in Rome had Hypatia seen so much finery, and there it had all been displayed by men.
Here, there were only women. Queen Berenice, sister to the king, sat on a high dais at the room’s far side surrounded by her court. As Hypatia stood in the doorway, she heard in her mind
the voice of Poppaea, Rome’s dead empress, her dead friend. ‘Berenice has the heart and soul of a king. She is our hope of peace in Judaea. We do hope for that …’
With that hope as her guide, Hypatia stepped through the vast oak doors, took three steps forward, and paused as she awaited the steward’s announcement.
‘May I present Hypatia of Alexandria, who bears with her the gift of Poppaea, late empress of Rome.’