M. Scott - The Coming of the King

Iksahra rode south under the high sun.

Her mare was the pride of her father’s breeding. Her hide was the colour of almond blossom, her mane and tail unblemished charcoal, her feet black as onyx, and as hard. She was fleet as the hot south wind and could go all day at a canter without need for rest or water. Her one colt foal was a yearling now, the hope and pride of Iksahra’s own breeding herd, left behind in her homelands under the care of a woman who had seemed competent and interested and useful; at least that had been the case in last year’s summer, before a man had dangled the sweet meat of vengeance within Iksahra’s grasp, before she had discovered that vengeance did not feed her heart’s hunger.

The ghost of her father joined her as she passed the palms, the olives, the green pastures south of Jerusalem. He complimented her on the mare, on the cheetah that ran ever at her heels, a living ghost, a shadow in gold and black.

He sat cross-legged on the horizon at the level of her shoulder and tilted his head and asked, Why do you do this? Why are you riding from one man to another with a message you cannot read, the contents of which they will not share with you?

‘Because Hypatia asked it of me.’ It was not entirely true; Hypatia had asked that Yusaf send the one deemed most reliable and Iksahra had named herself that, leaving Kleopatra in Yusaf’s care. It had seemed the same thing at the time, but sounded different now, when she spoke it aloud in the echoes of her own head.

The ghost that might not have been her father gazed at her askance. And you always do her bidding, this woman?

‘She may die.’ She may die, and my heart will die with her. She did not say so, even in the echoes of her head, but the ghost heard her anyway, and his laugh was a long stuttering titter, which disrupted the smooth rhythm of her horse. That was how she knew it was not really her father; he had never laughed at the things she cared about.

Under the hot sun, Iksahra spoke the words Anmer ber Ikshel had taught her for the dissipation of ghuls and kicked her mount faster along the route Yusaf had drawn for her in the dust on his floor.

Noon came and went. The sun devoured them, spat them out, ate them again. The olive groves and date palms became scrubbier and less frequent and gave way finally to rocks and sand and waterless desert wadis.

Soon, rocks grew on either side, as scorching ovens. Heat became pain, and burned away the memories of a night when nothing had really happened, but which, even so, had left her feeling torn from her past without sight of a clear future.

Near the end now, Iksahra urged the mare on. The cheetah ran nearby, never tiring. They raced faster. The world was blinding light and hot earth and ropes of saliva frothing back from the bridle and the cat’s hot breath at her heel.

Sometime later, the mare pricked her ears and the cat grunted a warning. Ahead, a spark of light flickered where an ignorant man let his sword blade catch the sun, not knowing that the ifrit used such things to discover where men camped, that they might trap them in the night.

With a curse at his idiocy, Iksahra lay low on her mare’s neck and urged her into a full, flat-bellied gallop across the last miles of rugged plain to the foothills north of Masada.

She came fast from the north, from Jerusalem, a black woman dressed all in white riding a mare the colour of starlight with black points and black feet, and with a cat running in her shadow.

It was the black-and-whiteness that spooked the lookouts who stood at the northern edges of the heights, more than the fact that she knew where they were. They may have been God-fearing Hebrews, but they had grown to adulthood hearing daily the tales of what lived in the desert at night; in the darker corners of their mind, the things that might hurt them most looked just like this.

Eleazir of the long sight saw her first, and called Mergus who had the authority to stop the lookouts from using her for target practice with their slings.

Pantera waited on the heights until she had reached the mouth of the cleft through which any rider must pass to reach the hidden camp.

‘Iksahra!’

He ran down, leaping from rock to rock. Behind him, men who had been afraid to look earlier came to the edge of the heights now, jostling for a better view. Closer, she was no less exotic: a black woman on a milk-white mare with a cat at her heels that was more like a hound.

Pantera reached the last rock and stood above her, looking down. Her mouth was set in a straight line. Tightness held her, where before had been only supple fluidity.

He said, ‘Who’s dead?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t read the message. Estaph is alive, but taken prisoner. So too are the Chosen of Isis and the Queen Berenice. They are imprisoned. Read this. I will tell you of them after.’

Her palm was held flat and, on it, a message cylinder for him to take. Dried blood on one end flaked off as he uncapped it and tipped out the contents. The fragile paper was in an old code; one of the first, and so the easiest, that Seneca had taught his spies. He read aloud as if it were plain Latin, but quietly, privately, not for the men above.

From Ishmael, keeper of doves, to Gideon, greetings. Blood flows in the streets of Caesarea. Orders came from Jerusalem: let all the Hebrew men and women die. The men of the city Watch came last night in the darkness and by morning all were dead. All. Six thousand men, their wives, mothers, sons and daughters, even the newborn, hurled naked on the streets. Twenty thousand souls in all. My father died trying to save a friend. I write to warn you, lest death comes also to Jerusalem.

He thought of a boy with eyes like gazelle’s and a father he had never met. His vision blurred. Iksahra was staring at him with something close to pity, which was so unlikely as to startle him to steadiness. She was speaking. He cuffed away the tears and made himself listen.

‘Yusaf read the message. He knew what it said, although he didn’t tell me, but he did give me this second scroll for Menachem. He said… he said you would understand it, if he did not.’

Between thumb and finger, she held a scroll tied with linen thread sealed by a blob of beeswax that bore the imprint of a man’s thumb as its only seal.

Pantera said, ‘Menachem is-’

‘Behind you. I heard what you read. Caesarea is a graveyard.’ The words came from a sword’s length behind, to his left, deeper into the cleft that led to the hidden valley in which they camped. Menachem extended his hand to Iksahra. ‘Horses cannot come into the valley. Will you let Moshe care for your mare?’

It was a decision made without forethought, but it was good, evidently, for as soon as Iksahra nodded, Menachem’s chief captain skipped down the cluttered rock as if they were steps and came to hold the mare’s bridle. Even before he reached her, the look on his face was that of a man besotted.

Menachem’s patience was a finite thing these days, measured in grains of sand that grew fewer with each passing day. The pressure of his waiting was tangible by the time Pantera, Iksahra and the cheetah reached the neck of the gully, where it gave way to the hidden valley.

Ahead, all about the valley’s floor, two thousand men, less a few dozen lookouts, sat cleaning their new weapons, or trying on new mail. At one end, a tailor with three fingers missing on his right hand sat in the shade of the high walls and assessed men by sight as they approached him, and allocated them a mail shirt from the numbered piles about him.

At the valley’s other end, Mergus and his handful of Romans held classes to teach men to use Roman weapons in ways that would kill more of the enemy than their brethren. Between classes, men flaunted their new armour, vain as girls in coloured silks.