M. Scott: The Coming of the King

It was Pantera who had said that they should wait, that they must watch, that there were things left to learn. ‘He must know we’re hunting him. He’ll lead us a dance if he thinks we’re following too close behind. Wait until he goes to ground. When he stops, we’ll hear of it.’

And so they had watched the pigeon lofts at dawn each day and waited, as children for a gift, for each new cryptic line. Your quarry has entered Mauretania. And left again. He is in Alexandria, buying gifts fit for a king.

‘Where did he get his money?’ Mergus had asked.

‘He has followers still,’ Pantera had answered. ‘Not many, but enough; men who have denied him and his god and kept hidden, so they can do this for him now. He won’t stop in Alexandria. He’s heading east.’

And then the messages began again. He’s taken ship, bound for Judaea, or perhaps Syria. He is in Caesarea, pearl of the east.

And then they had ceased. No more messages, perhaps no more movement. ‘He is cousin to the king of Caesarea,’ Pantera had said. ‘If he’s going to lie up anywhere, it’ll be there.’

‘It’s a trap,’ Mergus had said. ‘We can’t go.’

‘It’s a trap,’ Pantera had agreed. ‘We have to go.’ Hypatia had come away from the dying empress’s side to support him, and Hypatia was, in Mergus’ estimation, the world’s most beautiful woman, and its least available. He was not terrified of her, but he had a degree of respect that bordered on the same thing.

Even so, Mergus had argued with both of them until the point when the emperor had insisted they go and thereby put an end to all debate. In times past, perhaps, men might have reasoned with Nero, but since Seneca’s failed coup, and the bloodbath that had followed it, none had dared do so.

And so they were here, in the desert, riding towards the pearl of the east, outriders to a nondescript, if well-armed, camel train and Pantera had said he could smell Saulos on the wind, which was almost certainly untrue.

‘Here, I would smell him only if he stank of burned sand, horse sweat and camel piss.’ Mergus guided his mare with his knees, to keep both hands free for his bow. As part of his guise, he was paid to guard thirty-two pregnant camels; a fortune on the hoof and food for a desert’s load of jackals. They were presently riding through a gully that ran between two rocky bluffs and was, in Mergus’ estimation, too easy to attack.

He kept his eyes sharp and his arrow nocked, and gave only a part of his mind to the vision ahead, where Caesarea shimmered as a spark of textured sunlight on the line where sand met sky and both met the ocean.

It had been there since soon after dawn, but Pantera was right; here, on a nameless track through an unnamed gully half a day’s ride from the city, was something different, some fold in the air where the desert’s still heat met the first breeze from the sea, and it was not the balm it should have been, but a presage of danger and death.

Mergus’ mare whickered and pricked her ears, and stepped out with a new eagerness. He breathed in the altered air, in and in and ‘Bandits!’

He and Pantera called the word together. Mergus’ mare knew the threat of an ambush as well as he did; she had come with him from Rome, and before that from the hell-forests of Britain where painted warriors hid behind every second tree. Even as he shouted, she was plunging sideways out of the unsafe gully towards a fissure in the rocky bluff to its northern side.

An arrow sliced the dirt where he had been. A second shattered on the rock that sheltered him and splinters of ash wood skittered across his face. Ahead, a man died, screaming. The stench of fresh blood flooded the noon-dry air. Shadows moved. Mergus shot at one of them. He heard a body fall, then another, and had no idea who had died except that it wasn’t him.

‘Sebastos?’

Mergus called the Greek name Pantera used among the men of the camel train. He heard no answer. Five more arrows fell in the ten square feet he could see. A cow camel bellowed and toppled to the sand, hard as a felled tree. The three brothers who led the train began to whistle orders in the language only their train knew. Men began to shout: outriders and their enemies alike. The enemy called in Greek, not Aramaic, so they were not Hebrew zealots from Jerusalem come to take the camels for their holy war. A part of Mergus thought that knowledge might be useful later, if he lived.

The rock fissure offered Mergus temporary protection, but after the first few frantic heartbeats it made him a sitting target. Sweating, he slid to the ground, keeping the rock to his right and his mare to his left. From there, he fired twice more but hit no one. He had trained in the bow these past eighteen months and thought himself adequate, but no more than that; he was a blade-fighter by instinct and training.

He slid the bow on to his shoulder and loosed from his belt the hooked knife that had been a gift from the three Saba tribesmen whose camels he guarded. It was longer than an eating knife and shorter than a cavalry sword, finely wrought, sharp on both edges and slightly curved along its length. He kissed the flat iron for luck and hissed again, ‘Sebastos?’

‘Here!’

Another fissure stood parallel to his own, a dozen dangerous paces further along the gully. To reach it, Mergus climbed to the bluff’s flat top, sprinted forward and dropped down to where Pantera crouched in the sand behind the fallen body of his horse. Three arrows marked its throat and chest.

Pantera was the son of an archer; he could shoot with his eyes shut, and kill. To cover Mergus’ arrival, he stood up, fired and crouched again. From a distance, he could have been one of the robed Saba tribesmen, dark of skin, hair and eyes. Then his questing, river-brown gaze turned on Mergus and he was no one but himself; a man broken and mended again, alive with the clarity of one who has been to the edge of death and not let it destroy him.

It was the quality of Pantera’s gaze that had first caught Mergus’ attention two years before in Rome, at a livestock market, where the spy was hauling water, to all outward appearances a farm hand of limited intelligence — until he had asked a question and in it lay the answer to the greater question that had driven Mergus’ life.

For two decades, Mergus had served his emperor, rising through the ranks of the legions. But the emperor was a distant, ever-changing name, to be honoured in the mornings along with Jupiter and the legion’s standards. What mattered, what Mergus had sought and never found, was a man whom he could follow without reservation, wholeheartedly, with honour and honesty and joy.

And then he had come to Rome where he served the emperor directly and there, on the eve of the fire, he had met Pantera and had known at that first question, and in the impact of its answer, that in this man he had found everything he sought.

From that moment on, he had followed him with honour and honesty and joy through the fire that nearly destroyed Rome and out again, and now into the desert, on the trail of the man who had lit it.

They had survived this far together; Mergus did not intend to lose Pantera to bandits in a desert for the sake of a handful of camels. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said.

‘We need to cross the gully. There’s a deeper fissure on the other side. Right and then left. Go!’

They sprinted up the gully, and across to a fissure where a dead man lay — one of their outriders. Pantera fired three arrows on the run, the last as he pressed himself in beside Mergus. Other men lay dead across the trail: one of the Saba brothers, two of the outriders and three strangers. Their desert robes flowered across the sand, bright with new blood.

A second camel was dead, the remainder were careering across the sand in panic. Nobody followed them. Nobody tried to round them up.