M. Scott: The Coming of the King

And while the beasts bloomed, while they hunted, while they came to accept the touch of foreign — royal — hands, so did Iksahra strike ever deeper into the bosom of the royal family, and nowhere deeper than into the heart of the young prince, Hyrcanus, who was so openly in love with the strange black-skinned woman that for his uncle, his mother or any of the other royal adults to have shown interest in her would have been crass impropriety.

And he was there now, a breathless, pink-cheeked fifteen-year-old, slightly built like all his kin, with the rich, dark hair of the Herods flooding from crown to shoulder. He ran lightly down the marble steps that led from the ornamental flower beds to the beast garden. He stopped some distance away and came forward slowly, careful of the feeding bird.

‘I’m sorry I’m late. My uncle sent me to look for Saulos. He needs him to- Oh! My lord… my uncle… that is, the king asked… he requested…’

‘I suspect,’ said Saulos mildly, ‘that your uncle, the king, ordered me to attend him immediately, to discuss matters of policy. Specifically to find a solution to the problem posed by the quite unimaginably large bribe the Hebrews are about to offer him in the hope that he might preserve their synagogue from the predations of the Greeks. Am I right?’

Saulos smiled easily, as one conspirator to another. Hyrcanus, who had just learned rather more of the latest state crisis than his uncle had told him, or was likely to tell him, grinned his relief.

‘You’re right. That’s exactly what he said. Will you go? Will you tell him that I found you and sent you? He’s in a foul temper. It would…’ Discretion came to him late. He ran out of words, and stood in the half-shade, shifting from one foot to the other.

‘It would mollify him. And therefore I will do it.’ Saulos was dressed for court, in costly silks the colour of sand. He took a moment to brush away the grit, giving Hyrcanus time to regain his composure. ‘Your uncle enjoys my company,’ Saulos said as he passed the boy by. ‘There’s no shame in that; you need not be afraid to say it. And you, meanwhile, will go to sea with Iksahra, there to hunt with her falcons. I am told the tiercel is flying well for you?’

‘He is! Yesterday, we caught one of the shore birds, the small fast ones that dodge between the waves. He was so fast, so perfect! It was wonderful!’ The boy’s eyes shone bright as the sun-struck sea.

Saulos laughed and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good! You’ll be a hunter by the day’s end.’

His eyes met Iksahra’s over the boy’s head. If he had not spent three months in her company, the hate in her gaze would have terrified him. He walked away, snapping his fingers in time to an inner rhythm. His day, however he looked at it, was perfect.

Hypatia dreamed of Saulos before she saw him and she saw him before she ever set foot on the harbour at Caesarea and those facts were, she thought, the reason her mouth was quite so dry and the usual stable rhythm of her heart unstable. Those, and that she hated the sea.

The dreams had begun long before she had left the imperial quarters in Rome and taken ship for the east.

In truth, they had begun before her eighth birthday, which was one of the reasons she was who she was; the future servants of Isis were chosen from among the children with the most vivid dreams and Hypatia’s had certainly been that.

All through her training, in the deserts south of Alexandria, in Greece, in the dreaming chambers of Mona, the same dream had come. Sometimes, she slept at peace for days at a time and thought herself free of it, then it would visit her three nights in succession, prodding her to wake, sweating, with her hands cramped and her back arched tight against an imagined — or remembered — pain.

On Mona, where the dreamers trained for twenty years before they considered themselves adept, they told her to return home and become the Oracle of the Temple of Truth in Alexandria, there to await the time when the source of terror in her dreams might visit her to ask a boon.

She had over two decades from her first dream before Saulos Herodion survived the labyrinth that led to the Temple and begged the Oracle’s help. There was a moment when Hypatia could have killed him, knowing what he could do, what he might do, what he wanted to do, but she was the Oracle, bound by laws stronger than her fears, and so she had spoken the words the god had sent in the moment of Saulos’ asking and, as in her dreams, Saulos had taken them and wrought fire, and death and havoc, and spilled his false god out into the world.

Now, though, in the mid-afternoon, with the sea air hot from the land, she let go of the dreams for a while, and stood at the foremast with Andros, the ship’s master, at her side and watched the wonder of organization that allowed him to talk to her as easily as he had in mid-ocean, while still controlling the hundred fine manoeuvres that let him slide his ship through Caesarea’s outer breakwater and into the clutter of barges, skiffs, day-fishers and deep-sea trading vessels that crowded the inner harbour.

From this distance, the royal party waiting on the steps of Augustus’ temple was little more than a blur of porphyry, azure blue, spring green and scarlet with a single seam of gold in the centre; too far to put a name to anyone, except that only the king might wear gold and so it must be his family who stood around him.

Beyond that, only the blistering white stone of Augustus’ temple was clear to the incoming traveller, set on a slope above the harbour, looking due west, to the setting sun and to Rome.

‘They build their temples in the Greek fashion here,’ Hypatia said. ‘I had not thought to see such a thing in this land of the Hebrews.’

‘But Caesarea is not in the land of the Hebrews.’ Andros, master of the sailing ship Krateis, was a big bear of a man. He smiled at Hypatia but did not embrace her, an act of self-control that took an obvious effort of will.

In Alexandria, whence they had come, Andros had been afraid of her, had barely allowed her on board; Hypatia was known throughout the city as a Sibyl, an Oracle, one given since birth to Isis, and he feared the wrath of the sea-gods if she set foot on his beloved ship.

Only sight of the emperor’s ring, and a letter marked with the seal of the late empress, had changed his mind, and that unwillingly. For a month, he had treated Hypatia as ill luck, so that it was a wonder she had not slipped on a dark night and gone overboard. Then a storm had truly come, black as the ravens of Zeus, full of thunder and the raging wrath of Poseidon, and, while the men hid and wept, Hypatia had lashed herself to the rails at the prow and faced down the storm, talking reason to waves tall as pyramids, singing to the lion-roaring sea.

In the morning, when the sun had broken through the cloud and the gods had sent a good tail wind, she had been greeted as a conquering hero, and every man among them would have thrown himself overboard to save her. Some of the younger ones had, in fact, offered to do exactly that in the three days after when she had lain abed with fever and could not be roused.

They had been restrained, and Hypatia had lived, and now Andros stood there, claiming her as his own, hoping he might persuade her to stay, knowing he could not.

He lifted his palm, shading his eyes against the high afternoon sun. ‘The thing to remember about Caesarea,’ he said, sagely, ‘is that she was built by Herod the Great, a king who was neither Greek nor Hebrew but tried to be both, and she has spent the hundred years of her life trying to merge two cultures which are as oil to wine or lions to mewling infants. She has failed and will do so for ever. The Greeks are good traders, but prone to violence. While the Hebrews… the Hebrews are crazy.’ Andros spat, throatily. ‘They love death in the name of their god more than they do life under the Romans. The rest of us are happy to pay our taxes, and hail every mad Caesar as a god, but they must resist and shout about it and to hang with the consequen- Ho there! Keep a clean line or we’ll crush you to tinder!’