M. Scott: The Coming of the King

Feeling more confident, he swung back to face the mass of armed men ahead of them with Iksahra a white and black killing machine at one shoulder, Menachem fighting doggedly at the other and Mergus — blessed of Mithras, he heard his voice above the fray — martialling the foot soldiers somewhere beyond his left flank.

Even so, the garrison Guard was disciplined and well led; trumpeters sounded high, harsh notes and men moved to their command, pushing in, step by brutal step, crushing everything.

To his right and his left, Pantera shouted, ‘The captain! We need to kill the captain!’

He pointed ahead to where white plumes, tall as a man’s arm, waved like a beacon at the battlefield’s edge. Together, he, Menachem and Iksahra fought towards him, slashing, hacking, wounding more than killing, but staying alive, which was all that mattered.

The plumes danced ahead, always a little away from the fighting, always shouting out new orders to the trumpeters, who sent them to the men. As they approached, the Guard split into two groups and manoeuvred in perfect synchrony, so that one part stepped out and round, in a long wheeling arc, while the other pushed inwards.

Pantera shouted, ‘Kill him now or we’re-’

He stopped because everybody else had stopped; each man’s shout cut off as if a god’s hand had hammered past, sucking away all the air. But it hadn’t been a god; a thousand men had drawn breath all at once, in surprise, in shock, in terror, in delight.

In the hair’s breadth of hush, Pantera hauled his mount left, to the city, and so saw what the others had already seen.

‘God of all gods,’ he whispered. ‘Gideon has come.’ Nobody heard him, for Gideon had not come alone, nor with only the two hundred men he had taken with him; he had come with the whole of Jerusalem and the moment’s silence was annihilated under the sound of their cry: ‘ Jerusalem! ’

Hundreds came, thousands, tens of thousands, too many to count, all the men of Jerusalem, and their wives, their sons, their daughters, their grandmothers, lame on their sticks; everyone and anyone who could run or walk was flooding now from the streets on either side of the Upper Market, here to free their city from the yoke of occupation.

They surged towards the garrison Guard, armed with kitchen knives and pestles, with sickles and smithing irons and rods with sharpened ends for poking at goats, with axes and hammers and lengths of wood ripped from their doorways.

Most of all, as the hordes of Jerusalem always did, they came armed with stones and they threw them now, hard, aiming for their enemies’ legs, for the soft skin behind their knees, for their shins, for their Achilles tendons, where, like the hero, they might be weak.

A dozen or more had slings, and used them with startling accuracy on the men who were executing the pincer movement. Within a dozen heartbeats, thirty men of the garrison Guard had fallen, and the rest were no longer concentrating on the enemy in front, but were turning, haphazardly, to face those behind.

And then Pantera saw their captain. A break opened in the lines, a flash of sun on a helmet that drew his eyes past a trumpeter… he saw him in profile: soft nose, a little upturned, curls of dark hair escaping the confines of his helmet, and an arrogance that no other man in Judaea had ever truly matched.

‘ Saulos! ’

Pantera’s roar outdid the trumpeter. The standing plumes flew aslant as Saulos turned his head, not towards him, but back to a tent-party of eight men who stood a dozen yards behind the others, separate from the fighting. At his shout, they turned away and ran for the palace. He sprinted to catch up and they opened to take him, a smooth move that drew him in and held him secure in their heart. He flung the helmet away as he ran; white plumes lay rocking in the dirt behind them.

Pantera spun his horse so hard that it reared. He caught Iksahra’s eye. They did not need words; a look was enough, and in it, one name: Hypatia.

Together they pushed their horses away from the conflict, following where Saulos had gone.

Hypatia sat alone in the dark and the abominable cold and listened to the stamp and clatter of the last guard change.

Light flared at the corner. The incoming and outgoing guards exchanged murmured Latin: ‘There’s war outside; we’re winning. How is it here? Are they well? Yes, all well. As well as can be on their last night. They’ll be lucky if it is their last night. I’ve seen crucified men live three days.’

She felt a shudder from both guards and then one left, relieved, banging the door shut behind him. The other locked it from within and then, alerted perhaps by the quality of the silence in the cellar, lifted his torch and brought it round the corner.

The light flooded the cell, blinding after the dark. Hypatia laid her hands over her eyes, but otherwise made no move to rise, to acknowledge his presence. She had shown she was alive, which was more than the others had done. They lay along the side wall, in easy repose, with their hands by their sides as if for burial and a cloth across their brows. Beneath, each face was free of all care, liberated from the travails of life.

The new guard ran at the bars, trailing his light, bright as a comet. ‘What’s happened?’ Panic lit his voice. He banged his sword hilt on the bars. ‘Wake up!’

Nobody moved. He crashed his whole shoulder on the iron next to her head. ‘What have you done?’

‘I have given them peace.’ Hypatia took her hand from her eyes. ‘What would you have done? I, too, have known men live for three days on a cross.’

‘Gods alive!’ He was grey with terror. Throughout the empire, if a guard let his prisoners die, routinely, he took their place in whatever followed. His fingers grappled numbly for the keys at his belt. ‘You can’t do that!’

Hypatia regarded him with quiet curiosity. ‘I am the Chosen of Isis. I can do whatever I choose. Don’t come in. You can’t change anything.’

‘You can’t keep me out!’

Iron jangled. A key met a lock and turned, shakily. The door crashed back. A flutter of flame came in first, as the torch was thrust into Hypatia’s face.

Hypatia jerked back as he threw himself across the cell to the two bodies lying on its far side, then, without rising, she propped both hands on the floor and, stretching, swept her feet in a long arc that met his at its apex, tangling his ankles.

He fell, inelegantly, so that his chin made first contact with the far wall, and then his shoulder. He came to rest head down, in the nauseating pile of ordure at the furthest corner from the door. For a mercy, if only temporarily, he was unconscious. Hypatia struggled to turn him over and wrest his blade from the scabbard.

She turned, blade in hand, and found Estaph looking at her. ‘It worked,’ he said.

He was cold; the tips of his ears were blue-white and his face was haggard enough to be dead. She lifted the guttering torch from the floor and nursed it to life, this once needing its heat more than its light. She brought it to him and to Berenice as she, too, rose from the frigid floor.

‘Is he dead?’ Estaph, ever practical, asked and then answered his own question. ‘No. And now yes.’

In between these two, a swift wrench of a head; exactly the mercy he had offered to Hypatia and she had refused, because the god did not allow death, but demanded life, and this was the only way she could think of to give it.

She said, ‘We’re not safe yet. There’s a palace full of guards outside.’

‘The palace isn’t as full as it was yesterday,’ Estaph said, and he held open the door to their cell for her to pass through. ‘You should lead. You have the best ears of us all. You can warn us if someone comes.’