M. Scott - The Coming of the King

Here, now, at sunrise, the silence around it was less striking than it had been in the bustling day. The houses on the street opposite were empty, their families gone in haste for fear of the violence that must surely follow the synagogue’s desecration.

With nobody to watch him, Pantera walked through the gate and picked his way quietly up the brick-littered path to the forecourt.

In design, the building followed the restrained Greek style of every other temple in the city; plain fluted columns surrounded a porch and the dark maw of the entrance. Only its unadorned facings set it apart: where Jupiter might have been, or Adonis, or Augustus the man-god, in the synagogue was nothing but bare stone. And the entrance faced south to Jerusalem, where all the others faced east, to the rising sun.

There was no door, only a hanging curtain of woven camel’s hair so dark it was almost black. Pantera could have pushed past it, but he had never yet desecrated the temple of another man’s god and this morning was no time to start.

He was leaving when he saw the thread of old blood in the far right corner, trailing down on to the broad steps. Crouching, he tested the blood with his finger, smelled it, tasted it, found it old, dried, cold. The smell of death hung around it, three days old and still fleshy in its decay.

He drew his knife and pushed one corner of the curtain away, or tried to. The tip became stuck on something solidly fleshy. He pushed harder. The obstruction rocked away and back again. Drawing a breath against the expected stink, he ripped up the curtain And found that the head was a pig’s, not a man’s as he had feared, and that the eyes had been put out and the tongue torn away and the ears cut off. A blind, deaf, speechless pig: as vile a desecration as any Hebrew could imagine.

He felt a ripple of relief that left as fast as it came. This was not a crucified cat, sent as a personal message, but an insult to a whole people, to the young men already stoked to volcanic anger, to their fathers who might restrain them, to their mothers who might caution safety. Here was the first step to a war, and he had dealt with war before.

Pantera looked around. The building plot was an anarchy of rubble and old wood with dark holes aplenty where a part-rotten pig’s head might conveniently be lost. It was the work of moments to find two planks to carry it with, a place to hide it and dry sand to scour away the blood.

The marks on the curtain were harder to remove, but also harder to see. Pantera rubbed at them with the heel of his hand, and then let it drop and stood back to examine his work.

Someone made a sound behind him; a brick was nudged out of place and skin slid on stone. He heard an indrawn breath, unmistakably human.

He spun, knife drawn back to throw, but saw no one until he dropped his gaze to the brick-littered path that led from the gates.

A naked girl-child sat there where she had fallen, wide-eyed with shock and pain. One foot had a scrape along its side where she had stumbled on a brick. Even as Pantera watched, her white face flushed to scarlet, her eyes brimmed with tears and she opened her mouth to yell.

‘No, small one. No. Hush now… hush. It doesn’t hurt. See? We’ll make it better…’ Without thinking, he dropped the knife and gathered her up in his arms, desperate for silence, for her not to draw in the Hebrews or Syrians or anyone else who might see him in this place.

He held her close, warm against his warm, and pressed his cheek to her fine gingery hair and stroked her arms and felt her grow a little less tense. He spoke in Greek at first, not thinking, and then, thinking less, began to speak in the language of Britain, in the coaxing rhymes he had crooned to his first child, his long-dead daughter, that told of oak and salmon and mountains and crashing waterfalls and the gods that bound them.

It was so long since he had held an infant like this. There had been children in Rome on the night of the fire and he had carried them across the open spaces ahead of the flames, had lifted them on to his horse, had ushered them in their pairs and dozens and half-hundreds up the hill to Caesar’s palace where they might be safe from the ravening flames.

Then, the children had not been soft as this child was soft; their hair had not smelled smokily of the evening’s cooking fires and salt-mustily of a night’s deep sleep; their cheeks had not felt like soft silk under his hand, wet with snot and tears; their chubby fists, just growing to hands, had not explored his face as he bent over her.

But his dead child had been and had done all of those things. She had been the love of his heart and he had killed her, drawing his knife across her throat at the battle’s end, when all was lost and the only gift he had left was to keep her from the legions. He had been British then: a tribesman, a spy gone so deeply into his new role that he had become that which he sought at first to betray.

‘She’ll not hurt you. And she’ll not scream now, either. For which you are as grateful as we are, I imagine.’

The voice was a man’s, speaking Aramaic, but not as a first language. Pantera turned slowly, unarmed. His throat hurt, from the old language, caught in mid-flow.

A bear-man stood at the synagogue’s gate, as naked as the child, and as easy with it. The grey morning light showed him thick of neck and broad of shoulder, with a fleece of reddish-brown hair matting his chest and upper arms and none at all on his head.

His face was round with almond eyes and had the look of one long used to battle: his nose had been broken so many times it was surprising he could breathe at all; his cheekbones, similarly, had been reshaped at some point in his past; his teeth were thick pegs that stood widely spaced in a wider mouth. Two were missing.

He stood in balance on the balls of his feet, lightly. He was a man at home in himself, for whom fighting came naturally and only the fast, the well armed or the insane might hope to beat him. He bore a short-shafted, two-headed axe in his left hand.

Pantera looked down to where his own knife lay at his feet. The second was strapped to his arm, high up in his sleeve, crushed by the child. He wondered how far the axe might be thrown and with what accuracy. And then he remembered seeing it done; an axe throw, neat and clean and perfect, into the head of a running horse.

‘Are you Parthian?’ he asked, in that language.

‘I am.’ The man’s easy smile broadened. He balanced the axe across both palms and bowed, then laid it on the ground and stepped forward over it, holding out one hand.

‘I am Estaph,’ he said, as they grasped, hand to calloused hand. He smelled of woodsmoke and recent coitus. ‘The child you hold is Eora, my daughter. She has taken to walking in the early mornings and we don’t always see where she goes.’

She was a fine-boned, fragile thing, light as a bird. It was hard to imagine her growing into a woman to match this man from the far eastern mountains.

Pantera gave her into the care of her father. ‘A fine and healthy child,’ he said. ‘Although her foot will need the salve of a mother’s kiss. Do you live here?’ A sweep of his head took in the whole area around the synagogue.

‘At the street’s end,’ Estaph said, and pointed to the endmost house. By the standards of the city, it was more of a cottage, a bare two floors high, with its roof garden more herbs than flowers. The other gardens in the street had long since withered for lack of water.

Pantera said, ‘You have no neighbours?’

‘We did have, but they left at the last month’s end,’ Estaph said. ‘Nobody has come to take their place. It’s not safe any more for either Hebrews or Syrians to live here. Only those of us who are neither, and trade in weapons that either side might wish to buy, are safe. Or we were before someone put a sow’s head in the temple.’