M. Scott: The Coming of the King

‘I don’t believe you.’ Saulos stopped and stared at him in frank disbelief.

Pantera did three things then, fast: he threw his sword high up over the fountain, so that it tumbled down in a dazzle of water-light and sunlight; he drew the knife from his left arm, and threw it; and, as it left his fingers, he hurled himself to the left.

The knife missed: he had known that it would. The falling blade sheared close to Saulos’ left shoulder, slicing away a collop of flesh in a mirror to the wound Menachem had sustained on Masada. Saulos grunted like a kicked horse, and swayed away from the threat, as any man would, but he ran forward, which was his undoing.

Pantera continued his roll, tumbling like an acrobat straight through the open door of the king’s dining room that had once been Herod’s private baths.

He saw the vertical shadow of the doorway pass him by and kicked the door shut as he cleared it, then thrust one hand down, pivoting on it until the bones of his elbow popped, and came round almost full circle, in time to drop the bar across, sending prayers to the old king, Herod the Great, and his paranoia that said every private room must be readily barred against intruders.

He ended near the dining couch, panting, and looked round at the only place in the world where Herod had absolute privacy.

The room was a paean to the hunt: mosaics livelier than anything in life showed antelope and lion, goat and cheetah, dove and falcon, all hunters and hunted, with figures of men, and some women, ordering the kills.

On other walls, naked men wrestled, in the Greek style, holding each other by the shoulders for the throw, while unclothed girls leapt over the horns of bellowing bulls. And in the centre of the ceiling, in the place where a king might look who lay back in his private bath, was an image of Helios, sun-god of the Greeks, picked out in all his daring, blazing beauty.

There was no trestle table covering the hole in the floor where the bath had been, only a rug of six sewn ibex skins, sleek and shining, and under those a board, which moved when Pantera pulled it, enough, he thought, to do what he needed. Perhaps enough. He risked his life on that one thing, having nothing else; his weapons were all gone.

He had not barred the door to the bedroom, only pushed it shut. Saulos kicked it open, abandoning his fabled composure.

‘ Ha! ’ He brandished two swords, Pantera’s short one in his left hand, the long cavalry blade in his right; a gladiator’s pose. Blood flowed freely down his arm from the wound on his shoulder, staining the sand-coloured silk.

Pantera stood with his back to the dining couch, unarmed. ‘Yusaf!’ He sent his voice beyond the walls. ‘You may as well show yourself. I am neither blind nor deaf nor stupid.’ To Saulos, who had stopped a pace inside the doorway, he offered a dry smile. ‘Did you think I didn’t know?’

‘You didn’t know when you first came to Jerusalem. You didn’t know on the night he sold you to me for a promise.’

‘Sold him?’ Yusaf’s voice came harsh from the outer room. ‘I gave him to you for the promise of peace under Rome, which is beyond price. I did not do it for the slaughter of innocents in Caesarea.’

Yusaf arrived at the threshold, a figure of ruined silk and conflict. His long face was pale beneath his beard, but he held a Roman short-sword in his hand, its point high, and steady.

Softly, Pantera said, ‘Did you not know he planned such bloodshed? Is it not obvious that he plans to do in Jerusalem what he did in Caesarea? That this has always been his plan?’

‘He said he would allow no more violence than was necessary.’ Yusaf’s attention flickered between them, settling on neither.

‘Oh, please!’ Pantera’s voice was a whip cast at his face. ‘You’ve known this man thirty years. Don’t tell me you still believe what he tells you?’

‘Ignore him!’ Saulos threw up a hand. ‘He’s goading you. Stay where you are while I finish this.’

‘Exactly, Yusaf, stay where you are. Be his puppet as you have been from the start while we-’

Pantera stepped smartly back, and sideways, using the dining couch as a shield against Yusaf’s charge. He threw up his hands And let them fall again, to the muffled sweep of an ibex hide and the crack of long bones on marble, and the silence of a blade, sailing high from nerveless fingers.

Pantera caught the hilt before it hit the ground and swept it down to rest against the bare neck that sprouted now from the floor: all but Yusaf’s head and one arm were lost in the pit that had once been a bath.

On the room’s far side, Saulos had not moved, but was breathing hard, as if he had done.

‘He’s been your puppet for a long time, hasn’t he?’ Pantera said. ‘He came to Rome, and before that to Alexandria, to Corinth, to Galatia. Did you let Seneca build him up at first and then seduce him, or was he yours from the start?’

‘I belong to no man!’ Yusaf twisted his head. Blood welled along the side of his throat where the blade lay hard along it. ‘Judaea needs peace and only Rome can bring that. I-’

‘Shut up.’ Saulos was moving; slashing, hacking, all civility gone.

Pantera stumbled back, caught off guard by the thunderous power of the attack. For a dozen strokes he parried and the shock hammered his arm each time, and each time he felt the wind of the strike slice closer as Saulos’ longer reach and extra weapon found the weak places in his defence.

He was being forced backwards round the room, ducking, swaying, spinning, using every trick Seneca’s tutors had taught him, and all those he had learned since, in the alleyways of the empire, in the forests of Britain, in Gaul, in Parthia, in the gutters of Rome.

He tried a counter-attack, and had it smashed down so hard he thought his stolen sword would break. It was clear then that Saulos had lost all control, and was more dangerous for it, not less.

He saw a second blow coming straight down to split his brains apart, and flung up his blade, and caught the worst of it on the guard, but not all, so that the tip tilted, and Saulos’ cavalry blade sheared down, catching a flat blow on the side of his shoulder.

He felt no pain, but a rush of light to his eyes, as if someone had hit him with a mallet, and it was only his reflexes that saved him as the back cut came slicing in straight across his neck with a strength that would have lifted his head from his shoulders and spun it full across the room.

Dropping his blade, Pantera threw himself down, pivoting on one flat palm, with his arm rigid, and swung his legs across, straight out and together.

His feet hit Saulos across the knees and pitched him forward, off balance, but not enough. Using the momentum of the stumble to take him over across the top of Pantera, Saulos spun round, and threw himself back with both hands on the hilt of his sword, stabbing down in the same killing stroke the master hunter made on the mosaic body of a tiger on the eastern wall.

Pantera rolled along his own length, and came to rest by Yusaf — who was no longer wedged in the sunken bath, but had wrested his trapped arm free and was halfway out.

‘Here,’ he said, and placed a throwing knife in Pantera’s palm. ‘Get up and finish it.’

By a trick of the air, he sounded like Seneca; a ghost made real. Pantera’s head snapped up. He rolled back and up and round and rose to his feet in time to meet Saulos coming in with a sword in each hand again, and for a pure, clear moment there was a gap between the tips, through which a man might not pass, but a thrown blade could.

He held his ground and drew back and threw, and in the slowing of time that came in death’s shadow he saw the knife fly true and sweet, past the two swords that came in for him, missing them by the thickness of a prayer, of a held breath, of a life.