M. Scott - The Coming of the King

‘Yes.’

‘Will you do exactly as I say, in the moment I say it, without question?’

Kleopatra, who had been schooled in the etiquette of court, and in riding, and perhaps in the handling of falcons, but not at all in the nature of the worlds beyond the world and how they listened to an oath, said, clearly, ‘I will.’

Her voice carried across the desert, here in the place where ghuls and ifrit roamed, listening for a word that might be taken hostage; where Isis and Mithras heard the tones of truth and placed them in the balance, to be weighed later, against other actions; where a future could change on the balance of a word.

Triumph sparked briefly in Iksahra’s eyes, a flash of heat in the cold. ‘Then we shall start. Hyrcanus, give your glove to your cousin.’

The Berber woman was gentle as she set the falcon and placed her glove behind the tiercel, pressing lightly against the yellow skin of his leg so that he must step back and up on to her fist.

Bells shaped like hollow beans were tied to his legs in the place the message cylinders were tied on the courier-birds. They chimed musically as he stepped from the perch to her gloved fist. Iksahra stroked his breast with her forefinger, settling one rose-blushed feather back into place. For all his small size, the tiercel was richer in colour than his mate, tinted bronze around his breast and throat where she was slate grey, stark against white.

‘If you are to ask a bird to fly for you, you must give him a reason. He must trust you to hold him steady, to loose him cleanly, and always to feed him when he comes. If these three things apply, he will come back to you even when he has killed, trusting your hand as the safest place to eat. So to begin with, you shall feed him a piece of the bird his mate has caught and then you shall loose him…’

They were intimate as lovers, Iksahra and the girl, their two heads bent together, almost touching, startling in their contrast, white skin and black, straight hair and curled, tutor and pupil.

Hypatia felt a different gaze and looked up and caught Hyrcanus watching her. He gave a rueful smile and tilted his head a little and, seeing the grace of it, Hypatia moved her mare back a step and turned her away so that she and Hyrcanus might follow, but not be part of, the lesson that excluded them both.

When the bird flew and made its kill, she was not part of it, and did not see what it brought down, except that it had come from the city, and knew nothing of its death.

Later, in the afternoon, Hypatia excused herself from the palace, from the claustrophobia of attendants and guards and stewards and maids and slaves and minor royalty, away from the perfumed, incensed air, away from the flower garden and the fruit garden and the beast garden and the swimming pool with its views of the sea, and walked along the long, open streets to the city, to the fruit market she had passed through the previous day.

As she left, she found that Polyphemos wished her to have a guard, which was astonishing considering he had gone to such remarkable lengths to prevent her from seeing Queen Berenice when she had first arrived. Now that she had seen the queen, it seemed, he regarded her as his personal responsibility and pressed on her an escort from palace Watch.

Thus she went among the sellers of cherries and citrus, of plums and melons, dried dates and figs, of almonds and olives and oils thereof, and wove through the stalls in the suffocating company of Agathon and Amyntas, who attempted conversation in the first hour and abandoned it thereafter, growing ever more sullen as the heat baked their mail and their helms and their hands in their leather gloves.

They did not know Pantera, and so did not know to look closely as she dropped a purse of silver coins in front of a particular vendor, to buy a small glazed mug containing his speciality of roasted almonds done in honey and minted oil, with shredded marigolds sprinkled over. They did not see the pickpocket who removed her purse from the vendor’s open belt pouch and returned it again shortly thereafter, nor did they notice when the pickpocket’s accomplice nodded to her as she traversed the next aisle, eating the almonds, sharing them with her guards out of pity.

She returned to the stifling palace feeling elated and irritable together. There was a time when, had the god allowed, she would have hated Pantera. That time was gone; in Alexandria and then Rome, she had seen the valleys and height of his soul and had found in herself a measure of respect that was granted to few in her life. She was not yet sure if she counted Pantera a friend, but she had been genuinely glad to see him and Mergus, had met their eyes and smiled at them covertly across the sea of strangers’ faces, and their smiles, covertly returned, had felt like splashes of colour in a grey winter’s day.

She gave the remains of her almonds to Polyphemos, who flushed an unfetching crimson. Leaving him, Hypatia went to see to the two hounds, Night and Day, who greeted her with joy, and had never yet brought her grief.

‘ Our enemy holds… has… the ear of the king. The royal family thinks… expects to leave for Jerusalem in secret by his order. Soon. I go where they go. Beware Iksahra, the king’s falconer. She’s signed it with the lily and the hound.’

Mergus was proud of the speed of his decoding, done without slate or paper. ‘Hypatia’s gift was accepted,’ he said. ‘She’s in.’

He and Pantera sat in a pungent fisherman’s tavern three blocks inland from the harbour, far enough from the side door for the smell of newly gutted fish from the day’s catch not to reach them, but not so far that the sea breeze could not keep the air clean.

They ate unleavened bread and olives and watered wine and, in their shadowed corner, with no one close enough to overhear or oversee, they ate fragments of Hypatia’s papyrus softened in the wine and rolled into pellets and fitted into the hollow core of an olive.

It was a drover’s dream of a meal and it was as drovers they ate and drank and talked, loudly and at length of the horses they dreamed of owning, the camels they would like to buy, the likelihood of a new train’s leaving Caesarea and where it might go. Never once did they look over their shoulders at Kleitos, the bearded Cypriot whose efforts to follow them had grown less subtle over the days. He had at least two accomplices in the tavern. Both had finished their meals and were sitting alone, pretending to drink wine.

Presently, as the watchers dulled towards sleep, Mergus leaned towards Pantera and murmured, ‘What next, and where?’

Pantera drained his wine, tipping the last dribble on to the table, as an offering to the watching gods. ‘We need to contact Seneca’s agent at the Temple of Tyche. First, we have to lose Kleitos and his idiot friends.’ He belched and leaned forward, planting both palms on the table so his mouth was by Mergus’ ear. He grinned, loosely. ‘If you could pretend affection, we might slip upstairs. There’s a room with a window overlooking the stables. Saulos was always a prude. There’s a reasonable chance that the men who follow him are the same.’

In so many ways, Pantera was wise. In a few, he was completely blind. Against the sudden turmoil in his chest, Mergus leaned over and kissed Pantera on the cheek, and laughed and ruffled his hair and, standing, made a slurred observation just too loudly for privacy.

He left the room with Pantera’s hand on his shoulder, both of them swaying with the evident effects of drink. Nobody followed them up the stairs.

Tyche, protector-goddess to the city of Caesarea, was wealthy. Images of her in Greek and Roman form were set atop marbled plinths flanking the broad, paved pathway that led to her temple. On its porch, a flame burned in a shining bronze brazier tended by three white-clad priests who ranged in age from a sweating novice through a twitchy lay member of the city’s council to a white-haired sage who leaned over the fire as if nothing else in the world was deserving of his attention.