M. Scott: The Coming of the King

‘Was it Saulos who sent them?’ He spoke into the flames and no one was near enough to hear. He did not ask if Pantera had downed one of the galloping men with a bowshot, nor if the shot man had hit the ground alive and had soon wished himself dead: these things were to be presumed.

Pantera finished the tail end of a poor bandage on his arm. Flickering firelight cast his gaze more green than brown. His skin was darker than when Mergus had first met him in Rome, his hair a shade lighter, more like old straw than oak leaves; both were the product of a month under the vicious desert sun. The darkening of his skin showed the scars on his face more clearly, giving him an asymmetry that was a source of endless fascination.

The scars on the rest of his body remained hidden, which was as well, given the present company; it would have been hard to explain why he had the signifier of a legion wrought in burn marks across his torso, and the pit of a burned-out brand of Mithras on his chest.

His lame leg, where the tendons had torn, seemed not to ache so much tonight; the desert was good to him. All these things and more Mergus studied, even as Pantera spoke.

‘A man with a beard paid a gold aureus to have a dozen men attack the entire train,’ Pantera said. ‘They were to kill all if they could, but to be certain they had slain a man named for the Leopard, who might be calling himself Sebastos.’

‘Gold?’ Mergus took out his knife and his scouring cloth and began to smooth the blade. A man could risk his life as an outrider for a camel train for a month and earn one silver denarius for his trouble. If he took twenty-five such journeys, and spent nothing at any point on the way, he could convert his silver to one gold aureus.

Pantera said, ‘Pay to be collected on completion. Given today’s thinning of their ranks, four men have just collected a quarter of a gold coin each.’

‘They might think it almost worth the risk.’ Mergus tilted his knife. His own reflection gazed back at him, bearded now, as he had never been when he fought for the legions. ‘Who betrayed us?’

‘Perhaps no one.’ Pantera found a piece of camel fat on the ground near his heel and threw it on to the fire. It blazed with blue light and sent hot, greasy smoke to the evening sky. ‘Saulos knows that where he goes, we will follow. He’s two months ahead of us; he’s had plenty of time to set a watch on every possible route into the city.’

‘But he knew you were coming now, in this train.’ Mergus’ gaze roamed the group that sat round the fire. ‘Someone told him that.’

‘Maybe.’ Pantera pulled his cloak up round his shoulders. ‘We can find that out when we get to Caesarea. If we get there. What matters now is that he believes I’m dead. If he doesn’t, we’ll be arrested as we ride through the city gates.’

‘We could leave the train before morning.’ Mergus looked around him. The land stretched clear for a month’s ride in every direction except east, where the sea caught it, and Caesarea was the button that held it fast.

Pantera was shaking his head. ‘We can’t leave without advertising exactly who we are, and anyway Hypatia’s ship will dock soon; we can’t abandon her now.’

‘Then you’ll need a new name; the raiders knew your old one.’

‘I thought ‘Afeef’ might do. It means chaste in the Arab tongue, which would fit, don’t you think?’

It did fit, in all ways: since the night of the fire in Rome, when he had conceived a daughter by the woman Hannah, Mergus had not known Pantera to bed anyone, and that was not for want of watching.

He leaned forward and poked the flames and said, ‘You can’t tell the brothers we were attacked because of you. What reason will you give for wanting to change?’

‘That, as they know, the ifrit will be stalking us now, and it’s ill luck to keep a name when men think you dead. That a distant sorcerer could use the name to attack me; that a new one will keep me safe.’

‘They love you,’ Mergus said, sourly. ‘You ate a double helping of their foul bakheer. They’ll do whatever you ask.’

‘They love their camels,’ Pantera said, and pulled his robes around his shoulder and lay on his saddle pack to sleep. ‘They’ll do what it takes to keep them safe. I’ll need a new horse, too, before we ride on. Do you suppose they’ll let me ride one of the ones we captured? The little bay colt has a nice look to him. Nero would have bought him as a chariot horse. We might send him to Rome, as a gift from a dead spy.’

Mergus drew breath to speak the enjoinders to keep listening spirits from taking those words and making them real, but Pantera was asleep already, his face lined even in repose, his lashes dark on his cheeks, his breathing even and slow, so Mergus offered his prayer instead to Mithras, whose brand they both bore, that they might see their venture through to the end, that Saulos might die without destroying Jerusalem in fulfilment of a prophecy, and that both he, Mergus, and Pantera might live long enough to see it happen.

‘ If your enemy lies dead of an arrow wound,’ asked Iksahra sur Anmer, ‘what will you do for your vengeance?’ She stood in the shade of the royal mews on the eastern edge of the king’s beast garden in Caesarea, feeding shreds of meat to the oldest and wildest of her falcons.

Saulos stayed in the sun, leaning against the stables at a place that allowed him to look freely up through the gardens to the palace. As far as he could tell, they were alone, and could safely talk, if one ignored the cheetah, which lay at its ease less than three long paces away, watching him with the same pitiless, hot-cold eyes as its mistress.

Saulos did his best to ignore it. He plucked a small yellow flower from the tended line along the path and buried his nose in its fragrance. ‘If Pantera dies early, I will destroy the Hebrews as we planned. But he won’t have died; he’s better than that.’

‘So you spent a gold coin to tell your enemy-’

‘I told him what he already knows; that we are enemies, that he cannot hide from me any more than I can hide from him. This is not something you and I need discuss, particularly not now when, as you see’ — Saulos nodded in the direction of the palace — ‘we have company.’

A figure appeared in the distance, walking down through the gardens. That he might not appear to be watching, Saulos turned his face to the grey sea.

Behind him, Caesarea’s beast garden resounded with contentment, as the horses and hounds, the great cat in its cage, the elephant sent by a distant monarch, delved into their troughs, their mangers, their baskets, and fed.

The smell was of warm bread, laced through with murder. Like many things of this place, Saulos was learning not to hate it. He breathed in, and sighed out, and dispelled the unpretty image of Pantera too easily dead, lying at peace under the spring sun; in his heart, he did not believe it was so.

‘Hyrcanus is on his way,’ he said. ‘The king’s nephew. More important, son of the queen.’

‘I know. On the ship before we docked, you told me to cultivate him. I have done so.’

‘The whole palace knows what you’ve done.’ Saulos allowed himself a smile. ‘Still, with what you must do today, is it safe to take him with you?’

‘It’s safe. He sees what he wishes to see, which is, in turn, what I wish him to see.’ Iksahra set down the falcon in a soothing of bells and leather and took up her mate, the tiercel; smaller, softer, easier to handle. He fed fast, bobbing his head to tear at the nugget of goat’s meat she held between thumb and finger.

For all her brittle arrogance, Iksahra was better than Saulos had dared to hope. The beasts that they had brought with them, the two dozen matched horses, the four grey and white falcons, the pitiless cat that followed her everywhere, each and all thrived in her care. It flowed in the blood from father to daughter and beyond; along with ochre eyes and a clear, cold skill in the hunt, Iksahra sur Anmer had inherited a knowledge of the needs of her beasts as if they were her own, and knew how they might be met even here, far from the hot, flat sands of their homeland. Even the cheetah, which had pined on the ship, had recovered enough two days after landfall to take down an antelope in sight of the king and queen.