M. Scott - The Coming of the King

They had, indeed. Eleven lay dead; ten Romans of the garrison Guard to one of theirs, a junior officer whose name Kleopatra did not know. His soul spoke Aramaic, while all around him the Roman dead hailed one another in cheerful Latin.

From somewhere closer, Iksahra said, ‘Kleopatra, what is it?’

‘When you see how death frees them, it is no hardship to kill.’

Iksahra stood, staring. In the growing dawn, the whites of her eyes grew narrow and then broad again. Kleopatra said, ‘You can’t hear them, can you?’

‘Nor see them, no. Hypatia can, though, I am sure.’

Iksahra drew closer, laid a hand on Kleopatra’s arm. Her fingers were stiff with dried blood, and cool. ‘My mother told me death was a release. I thought she meant only when the life was lived in pain, or the threat of it, as Estaph is threatened with the cross.’

‘These men were not like that. And yet I swear to you, they were not unhappy to be dead.’ She shook herself free. ‘We have to find Hypatia.’

‘Not now,’ Mergus said urgently, from her side. ‘Now you will turn round and put your back to the wall. Quickly! We are not alone.’

Kleopatra turned and slapped her shoulders against the wall by the guard post. Mergus came in at her left side, and Iksahra at her right with the bloodied cheetah beside her. The other men joined them in ones and twos. And so they stood, seven alone in the still morning, listening to the cockerels take command of the dunghills.

‘Hush!’ Kleopatra held up her hand. ‘I can hear men, marching. And horses. Is it Menachem’s army?’

‘The horses are Menachem’s,’ agreed Mergus bluntly, ‘and his men are behind them, heading for the gate. But if you listen to the noise from the other side, you’ll hear the garrison Guard, and they are faster and closer. We will face them alone.’

Even as he spoke, the peace of the morning was torn apart by the sudden roar of armed men singing, and the ear-breaking clash of a thousand sword hilts beaten on shields, in perfect unison, as the garrison Guard marched up from the Temple.

The King of Israel’s army marched towards the sleeping city with the new sun sending long, raking shadows streaming behind them.

Small groups peeled off through the minor gates: a hundred men under Moshe; a hundred and fifty led by Eleazir, whose men believed he should have been king, although he had not said it aloud himself — Pantera thought them safer away from the main fighting and Eleazir had not argued — and two hundred of the Peace Party under Gideon, who was given, now, heart and soul to the coming battle.

The rest advanced on the west gate, the biggest, that was set behind the palace and still in the shade.

Helmetless, his black hair aflame to his shoulders, Menachem rode Iksahra’s almond-milk mare at the van. The sound of her feet was the clash of cymbals on the hard road.

Pantera rode at his left hand, to be his living shield. He rode with his eyes on the road, but his attention was fixed on the sun, his mind a sand-timer that drained grain by too-fast grain towards the moment when the light might strike the hill of execution behind the wall.

Aloud in the hollows of his mind he said, We’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming. Don’t lose hope. He had no idea if Hypatia could hear him.

And then the dawn peace was broken, smashed against the wall of a legionary marching song drummed to the beat of sword hilts clashing on iron shield bosses. They sounded like thunder on an iron roof, marching to bring death; even as their enemy, Pantera felt it stir his blood.

‘The garrison Guard!’ Pantera shouted, and raised himself up and gave the battle cry of the new king’s army. ‘ Jerusalem! For the glory of Israel!’

He kept level with Menachem for the first few yards, but the milk-white mare was turned to lightning by the sounds of war, so that Menachem was through the gates, on a mount who screamed her own battle cries over the havoc.

They turned the last corner. Two hundred yards away, the garrison Guard marched towards them four deep across the road, held in tight formation by a captain in a white plumed helmet who shouted orders from the farthest, safest edge.

With the skill of a dance master, he kept them shoulder to shoulder, shield locked to shield, blades of the front lines naked to the fore. They held absolute order, even as Menachem’s front rank of horsemen charged them.

And there, caught between the two hordes, was a clutter of figures at the side of the road. Pantera caught a glimpse of white linen and black limbs and, beside them, long black hair and a single sword held high…

‘ Kleopatra! Iksahra! Move back! Keep out of the way!’

He saw them skip back into the shadows of the Upper Market, far enough not to be run down, and then he was past, bearing down on the garrison. He wrenched round in the saddle, torn, unable to slow, or break free. From three ranks back, he heard Yusaf shout, ‘I’ll see to them!’ and saw him peel his mount away from the margins of the group just ahead of the first clash.

In so far as there had been time to think at all, Pantera had hoped that sheer mass of numbers and the weight of their momentum might break the guards’ shieldwall early and fast. It did not do so.

The initial impact rocked the garrison back on their heels, but the men of Menachem’s army were largely untrained and their horses unused to war; they had no knowledge of how to form a wedge, how to split open the shieldwall and force apart the legionaries into ever smaller packs of encircled men.

Pantera had read of such things and knew them possible, but here, now, he found himself in a chaos of spooked horses and unseated men, of blades held cack-handed that failed to bite, of white, shocked faces and the sight of grown men weeping.

Ahead, the men of the garrison Guard set up a new shout and the rear ranks redoubled the thunderous drumming of their sword hilts on their shields. Hit broadside by the noise, horses reared and bucked in terror, unseating riders as unsuited to war as they were.

Pantera swore, viciously. Flinging his own mount round, he shouted above the throng. ‘Men of Israel: dismount! Menachem! Order the dismount!’

Menachem tried. For honour, for sanity, for the chance of winning his city, the new king of Israel filled his lungs and bawled the order to dismount in four different languages: in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in Greek and in Latin.

The garrison Guard laughed to hear the last two, and raised the volume of their clamour. Menachem’s mounted men either couldn’t hear or didn’t understand, or were simply incapable of leaving the saddle and delivering themselves whole, on their feet, to the safe, solid ground, ready to fight.

Pantera wheeled his horse. Menachem was a dozen feet away, slashing his own sword left and right. The raging milk-white mare did more damage than a man ever could, striking out with teeth and feet at anyone, of either side, who came within reach.

Pantera saw her kill one of the garrison Guard who made the mistake of running at her, as if to mount behind Menachem. She wheeled, lashing out with both hind feet, and his face dissolved in a plash of blood and bone and white teeth. His body arced high into the air. At the apex of its arc, Iksahra passed him, running at a different, riderless horse. She was mounted before he hit the ground.

She spun the new mount without reins. Her face was spattered with dried blood, pale against her dark skin. Her arm was cut above the elbow; a clean wound, with sharp edges that had ceased to bleed.

‘Look out!’ Pantera killed the man who might have assaulted her. She swung her mount and let it kill another. He had not realized that this, too, was one of her horses. Perhaps it wasn’t, and simply all horses became trained to battle when she mounted; today, this morning, with the sun not yet on the hill beyond, anything was possible.