M. Scott: The Coming of the King

In keeping the second vow, she had kept the first: in having no great care, she had never known the incapacitating terror of her childhood.

Until now.

With Mergus’ men and her great cat left at the corridor’s head, keeping it safe, with the newly emboldened Kleopatra walking in the place of the honour guard close behind her left shoulder, Iksahra sur Anmer slid, ghost-footed, along the slaves’ corridors of the Herodian palace carrying a blade unsheathed in either hand — and those hands were wet with sweat.

She smelled that sweat and, because memory is made of scent, she smelled also the iron-ripeness of an angry stud horse, so that her terror multiplied until she had to stop and lean against a wall, and scold herself to calmness.

She did not fear death — she never had — but she feared failure now exactly as she had feared it in her childhood, and for the same reason: she cared too much.

Cursing aloud, she pushed away from the wall. A corner lay ahead. ‘Stay here.’ She felt Kleopatra take a breath to argue, and let it out, unspoken.

Alone, Iksahra turned the corner. A door lay ahead, blocking the corridor. The last of the garrison Guard stood outside, awake, if not alert. Iksahra slid her hands and the knives they held up her sleeves and flashed him a smile of pure relief.

‘You’re alive,’ she said weakly. ‘Thank the gods. They haven’t got here yet, then?’

‘Who hasn’t? What’s happening outside?’ Frantic, the guard’s gaze flew from the scratch wound on her arm, to the torn fabric of her clothes, to the many shades of drying blood.

‘The Hebrews have attacked. The men of the garrison Guard are…’ Iksahra looked away.

‘What are they? Tell me!’ He reached for her, to shake out more news. ‘In here, we hear nothing but the distant clash of arms.’

‘It’s as well you don’t. Outside is a massacre — not only outside.’

With something close to regret, she took her hands from her sleeves. One blade slid up under his diaphragm into his heart. She held it tight, against the sudden bucking twist of muscle on iron, then slid her other blade up into the tight gap between his neck bones and his skull, into the living vessel of his thoughts.

He died without a sound. She lowered him to the ground and wiped her blades clean on his tunic. The oak door was closed, as Kleopatra had said it would be. Iksahra pressed her ear against it and listened.

Back round the corner, she heard Kleopatra speak in her soft, certain Latin. ‘Go to where is lightest, to the sun. Your friends are waiting. Death is freedom, not loss.’

Shuddering, Iksahra turned, and listened again to the rustling beyond the oak.

Estaph said, ‘There’ll be a guard outside the door. There has to be.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Berenice said. ‘There’s a battle beyond the walls, you can hear it if you press your ear to the stone; the guards might all be out there, fighting.’

‘Hush.’ Hypatia waved them both quiet with a flap of her hand. She pressed her head to the wood. The door was oak, thick as her outstretched hand, designed to withstand any attack.

In the beginning, she heard only the echo of a king’s welcome that rang through the walls. With more attention, she found a presence that seemed most likely a guard; a man left edgy by the noises outside who stepped away from the wood with a challenge in his voice and And someone died on the door’s far side. Hypatia felt the soul slip free of its moorings, but it slipped past too fast for her to tell if it was male or female, guard or slave, friend or foe.

She swallowed on a dry throat. She hadn’t eaten since Kleopatra’s gift and the taste of garlic still furred her mouth. She was light-headed and weak and her stolen gladius hung leaden as a lump hammer from her fist, too heavy to use. In the still part of her mind, she sought the help of the god and found instead… the iron-sharp stench of an angry horse, and beneath it the scent of a woman’s fear.

She grabbed at the handle and hurled the door open, already rolling, down and sideways, away from whatever blades might come, that did come; that missed her wildly and clattered down the wall to the floor.

Still rolling, she heard only silence. She rose to her knees, with the stolen sword in both hands. She heard the lift of a breath taken and held.

‘Iksahra?’

The Berber woman was standing in the doorway, black on white, framed against the new light from behind. The only sunlight was a single shaft poured in through a high, lost window, but it was the first Hypatia had seen since yesterday’s morning and it encased Iksahra in its light, so that her white silks became as gossamer, folded about the fine — the exquisite — lines of her body.

With her heart unstable in her chest, Hypatia pushed herself upright. ‘I knew it was you,’ she said. ‘You must have known it was me, or I’d be dead.’

The Berber woman did not respond. Carved marble had more animation. She was shaking, fine as a leaf, all over.

Hypatia bent and retrieved the two thrown knives and laid them aside on the cool stone floor and walked on through the door to a place where the stench of blood was overwhelmed by the scent of woman-sweat, sweetened with new hay and old corn and the raw breath of the hunt. It was a smell of horses and a hunting cat, of wildness, of beauty.

Hypatia herself stank of confinement and privation. Sharply aware, she tried to step back to a place where she might offend less.

She failed because Iksahra moved at last. Her lean black fingers caught Hypatia’s right hand and held her still; she could not have moved if she had wanted to. She did not try.

‘Estaph is there,’ she said. ‘And Berenice. In the corridor.’ Words fell haphazardly from the turmoil of her mind, none of them useful. ‘You’re wounded.’

‘Not badly. It will heal. I can still throw a blade.’ Iksahra took a long, uneven breath. ‘We are not safe here. We should leave.’

‘Yes.’

Iksahra’s hand was hot, damp, unsteady; all the things Hypatia had least imagined. She squeezed and felt the movement returned. Her own hand was not any steadier.

Silence held them both, broadening, stretching, becoming harder to fill. The air grew thin with hope and thick with things unspoken.

‘Kleopatra is waiting,’ Iksahra said, finally. ‘Pantera brought Menachem, newly anointed. His army is fighting the garrison. By the sound outside, I think he has won.’

‘And Saulos?’

‘Pantera has gone for him. Kleopatra says he’s dead, that she heard him take his leave of her. And Ananias the High Priest, also. They found him hiding in a sewer and killed him.’

Iksahra’s skin shone like polished horse hide, evenly damp with the sweat of a moment’s exertion. She said, ‘Kleopatra can hear the dead. She converses with them. She says death is a freedom, as if it were something we all should seek. You have to speak to her.’

‘I will,’ said Hypatia. ‘It’s good to see you care. It changes you.’ And then, because nothing was coming out as she meant it, ‘The god came while we were in the cells to show me the mistake I made in holding my heart closed. What I might lose.’ Her fingers were still, her skin too much alive. ‘I don’t want to lose you.’ At last, the right words.

Iksahra’s face was still one moment longer, and then bloomed in such a smile as might light the whole day.

‘It was my fear this whole day that I had lost you,’ she said. ‘I will not live with that fear again, nor let you live with it. I would take you to the desert, and the high places, and watch with you as the sun sets and rises and sets again, and we shall do that soon. But for now, we have a king to crown and a city to heal and a queen to make fit to greet her people.’