M. Scott: The Coming of the King

He threw himself forward, leaning down, shouting in the gutter Greek of the sea that no one born on land could hope to understand.

Hypatia, too, leaned forward and saw a small white-sailed day-skiff cut in front of the Krateis, saw it sweep under the scythe of her bow and jink a dainty tack to bring it sweeping back again towards the berthing points at the wharf.

Andros was going land-crazy, working himself to a lather at a slight so small he would have barely noticed it at sea, but was blown big now because he could smell land as well as sea, incense as well as salt, meat and fruits and oils and flowers as well as fish and the sweat of unwashed men. He leaned over the bow rail, hurling ever more inventive curses at the ill-begotten sons of parasites who were piloting the skiff. They, for their part, shouted back neatly crafted threats of their own, that had to do with Andros’ virility and their ability to disarm it.

They were close enough now to see the faces on the dock, to pick out the likenesses of dress, of hair, of nose and eyebrow that knitted some together and set others apart. Hypatia left the master to his ravings and leaned back against the mast where she might seem to study the harbour, while studying instead the royal party.

She began at the outer reaches, where stood the men of the city Watch, Roman in all their mail and leather, but not Roman by birth; Syrians, she thought, the local men, who spoke Greek now, rather than their natural tongue, and had done so for three hundred years since the conqueror Alexander had taken their lands for his own. They were trained to Roman standards, though. She resolved to find the name of their commander.

Within the circle they made stood the royal party of Agrippa II, grandson to Herod the Great, whose sign of the wheat sheaves flew in gold pennants above the tower and the promontory palace.

A handful of royal children hemmed him in, nieces and nephews of this wifeless, childless king. Hypatia couldn’t see Hyrcanus, nephew to the king and nominated heir, but she did notice a dark-haired girl, taller than the rest, who pointed at their big two-masted ship with the emperor’s pennant and kept her stiff arm outstretched for a long time as they made way towards the harbour, as if throwing a curse, or drawing the ship in to dock, or both.

Andros was losing his verbal battle. The small day-skiff cut in front of the Krateis one last time, aiming for the same place at the wharf. Light and lively, it skipped ahead, hampering the bigger ship’s progress. Andros became truly manic in his fury, but there was nothing to be done but slow his own ship, to set the oars to backwater and turn in more tightly to the wharf.

‘Here! Dock here!’

The shout sliced the air. The king pushed to the fore of the huddle, waving his command. Agrippa was small, like all Herod’s kin, with the fine, dark hair and lean nose of the Idumaeans, whom the Hebrews called Edomites and despised. Still, they ruled over Caesarea, Jerusalem and all the rest of Judaea, albeit under sufferance of Rome.

Here in Caesarea, Agrippa showed no deference to anyone, excepting that he wore a toga in the Roman manner, with purple at the hem, and a filet of gold in his hair, and the women on either side of him wore stolas in azure blue and spring green and had their hair twisted high and cross-pinned at the crown in the style that had been favoured by the Empress Poppaea before her untimely death in childbed at the year’s turn. In Rome, nobody had dared yet call the style out of fashion.

Hypatia waited at the mast head. She was the Chosen of Isis; she was used to conversations with royalty and the inevitable dramas they wrought. If, to date, the kings, queens and emperors had always been the supplicants and she the one who delivered — or not — that which they sought, it was, she believed, not so different now, just less… controlled.

She made herself stand straighter, and set her arms by her sides as the Krateis turned broadside to the dock and one of the younger freemen leapt the oar’s-length gap to the shore, winding ropes on to bollards to hold the ship safely to land.

The king had commanded her presence. Holding her head high, feeling her neck unnaturally stiff, Hypatia plotted a safe course around the debris on the deck: the careful coils of rope, the taut rigging, the line that held the stone that marked the depth at which the ship might safely anchor, the ‘Do you see the falcon?’ a girl’s voice cried in lightly accented Greek. ‘See! The black woman still has it, but Hyrcanus has the male, so he must have made a kill. And look! She has the cheetah with her! I told you it followed her everywhere.’

Hypatia had gone another two carefully measured paces before the meaning of the words brought her to a halt.

She dragged her gaze from the dockside and looked at last where the girl was pointing now, not at the Krateis, but at the unruly day-skiff berthed so close that sandbags had been thrown between to keep the hull of the greater, ocean-going broad-ship from crushing the small, lighter, faster — and now plausibly royal — skiff.

Her ship’s greater height granted Hypatia a clear view on to the deck of the skiff and thus on to the tall, lean woman who stood on its gangplank with a leashed and hooded falcon on her wrist and a sleek, long-limbed great cat, neither leashed nor hooded, at her heel. The cheetah stood with its head high and its small round ears pricked and raked its yellow eyes across the company.

The woman who commanded it was not, in fact, the jet black of the Nubians as the girl had implied, but a shade lighter, a deep earthen brown, with a cap of short brown-black hair curled tight as a new-born lamb’s, eyes the colour of deepest ochre, and high, carved cheekbones that caught the sun as if she had painted them across with powder of gold. Looking closer, Hypatia saw that each cheekbone bore three small spirals tattooed in a line; and three more crossed the bridge of her nose, linking her fine, gull-wing brows.

The tattoos defined her origin: to Hypatia’s knowledge, the only tribes that marked themselves thus were those that bred horses, hunted gazelle and herded rough goat-sheep south and west of Mauretania where the desert stretched vast as an ocean and the men, it was said, could live without water for a week while the women gave birth on horseback, and perhaps conceived the same way. They called themselves the Berberai, and had sworn allegiance to no one, nor did they have any fear of Rome.

It was the Berber woman, then, whom the girl-child had seen and the Berber woman’s beasts the king had called forth. The cheetah was always going to be the first focus of attention, but the falcon was no less imposing in its way. It stood on her arm, a slate-grey she-bird with a pale flecked chest of the kind the Berberai used to hunt deer, and behind her, leashed to the arm of a green-faced seasick boy of about fifteen, was the smaller tiercel that was its mate.

Nobody watched the boy; the royal party’s attention rested instead on the Berber as she strode down the gangplank with the cheetah stepping loose-limbed and lethal at her side.

At the shore, the falcon roused, screaming a challenge to the land and the colour and the many staring eyes. The younger children shrieked in horrified delight. The royal women stepped back, covering their breasts with their hands. Agrippa, the king, stood his ground, white-knuckled, staring fixedly ahead.

The Berber woman made obeisance, of sorts, to the king, to the women at his side, and, in a deep, bell-toned voice that set the bars of Hypatia’s chest thrumming, said, ‘Iksahra sur Anmer thanks your majesties for their indulgence. Your royal nephew is a versatile hunter, if not yet quite suited to the sea. We caught a few gulls, but nothing else of worth. I beg leave to continue his training in the deserts, that he might, in time, reach the excellence of his ancestors.’