M. Scott - The Coming of the King

‘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.