‘Menachem!’ Pantera shouted, and was not heard. He turned at a sharp angle and wove, ducking, past a Syrian fishwife and her three grown sons, who were shouting useless advice at the unheeding fire-fighters. He came up to the zealot from behind and shouted again, and saw a stocky figure beside him turn, and had time to call again ‘Menachem-’ before he must twist sideways and round and thrust his arm up and block the blade that came for his throat.
‘Moshe, no!’ Menachem, too, had gripped the same arm. The man they held between them was more wiry than stocky closer up, with hair wild as a bush and a beard to match. He set his lips in a hard line and shook himself free.
Menachem said, ‘Tonight, he is a friend,’ and his tone suggested he was speaking of both, to each. He carried a charge with him of simmering excitement, not unlike that of the rioters. Even as he dropped Moshe’s arm he was pushing through the crowds again, so that Pantera must follow, or be left behind.
Pantera said, ‘I’m looking for Mergus.’
‘I know. We have found him.’ Half turning, Menachem said, ‘On my orders, Moshe followed Mergus away from the theatre while we were inside. Mergus, in turn, followed the man Kleitos who has just sacrificed a dove on an upturned urn in the porch of the synagogue. If the rest of Caesarea finds out, the city will be ash and rubble by morning.’
‘Kleitos wouldn’t do that alone,’ Pantera said. ‘He hasn’t the courage.’ And then, ‘How many with him?’
Moshe turned, scowling darkly. ‘Five to begin with, but others were coming as I came away. At least a dozen.’
‘And we are three,’ Pantera said. ‘If we can go past the Temple of Mithras, my bow is there. It will even the odds.’
‘You can shoot in the dark?’ Menachem asked, with interest.
‘I can try.’
In the dark and flying shadows around the synagogue’s porch, the war-bow sang three times. Three men died with arrows in their throats before the rest realized they were under fire and dropped out of sight.
In the clot of heaving bodies at the back, only Estaph was clearly visible, a mountain of muscle, flanked on either side by shimmering iron as his axes spun and spun and now and then impacted with a skull, breaking it open with a noise that was audible far down the street in a fight that was otherwise marked by its lack of noise.
Even close to, Pantera heard little beyond the contained grunts of the battling men, none of whom wanted to attract the wrong attention and the majority of whom wanted to escape as soon as they realized whose side the bow was on. Hunting men as they fled was a sordid task at the best of times, made harder now by the necessity to be sure that each shape seen in the dark was not Mergus.
Pantera shot three more times, and then dropped the bow and drew his Saba blade and sliced it forward and outward, fast and fast and fast, and a man was dead and another had lost half the skin of his scalp and was blinded by his own blood so that Menachem, fighting with a ruthless efficiency at Pantera’s left side, was able to kill him without fuss and then the one that came after. Somewhere on Menachem’s other side, Moshe acquitted himself well, which is to say, he killed and did not die.
And then came the moment when no man was left standing except the three of them and Estaph, facing each other over a slippery mass of man-flesh with a smashed urn between them that might once have held the corpse of a sacrificed dove.
Seeing it, Pantera came to realize he had light enough to see by, that the flames from the burning theatre had wrought night to day, dispelling shadows. He turned on his heel, counting, in growing dread. Kleitos was not among the dead. Mergus was not among the living.
He came full circle, facing Estaph. ‘Where is he?’
‘Kleitos has him.’ Estaph stepped over the bodies, sheathing his axe handles in his belt. The battle-light was dying from his eyes, replaced by concern. ‘He was fighting Kleitos and three others away from me, and then… not. I couldn’t get to him. I’m sorry.’
‘We must find them swiftly.’ Pantera looked across the road. ‘Is your family still here, when there are flames fit to roast the city?’
‘No.’ Estaph smeared another man’s blood from his face. ‘I sent them to Damascus, to my wife’s father.’
‘Then why,’ asked Pantera, and he was already running, ‘is there torchlight coming from the back room of the house you were renting?’
Pantera ran with Estaph a bull-shadow at one shoulder and Menachem a black-eyed ghost at the other and, because they were all three hunters and ran in the dark, quietly, Kleitos neither heard nor saw them as he stepped out of the small, neat house at the end of the row, the one newly empty, that had been Estaph’s.
He bore a lamp with a small flame; they could not miss him. Pantera swerved across the street and felt Estaph move in behind him.
‘ Alive! ’ he called, as they met, bone to bone, forearm to jugular, with Kleitos crushed between. ‘We need him alive.’
And they had him alive, but not the two men who were with him, who died as they rushed forward. A third died to Menachem, who used his long, lean, narrow-pointed knife after the manner of the Sicari zealots, sliding it into the man’s chest and out again, leaving a small half-moon opening and no blood. It killed just as quickly as had Pantera’s.
‘And so answers,’ Pantera said, stepping back.
Estaph had Kleitos by the shoulders and was pulling outwards and backwards, as a man might to break a board of wood. Kleitos was a child in his hands, a puppet, jerking wildly with his feet not touching the ground. He shook his head wildly.
Pantera stood in front of him, face to face. He was shaking, not only with the aftermath of battle. ‘Where is he?’
‘You will die! You and all who fight with you: the centurion, the Alexandrian witch, the dove-boy and his father, these men here; all will die the slow, Roman death.’ Blue-faced and flecked with spittle, Kleitos spat. Estaph sighed and did something small with his hands that made the other man scream.
‘I said you would remain alive,’ Estaph said in his ear, ‘I did not say you would remain whole.’ He twisted again. Kleitos’ scream was hoarse this time and too high to hear clearly.
‘Where is Mergus?’ Pantera laid his knife on Kleitos’ face, pressing the tip close to his eye. ‘Tell me. Or I will tell Estaph to give you to me.’
‘There…’ Kleitos’ head gave a spasmodic jerk, back towards the house that had been Estaph’s.
‘In the back room?’
A nod.
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hold him.’
Menachem had gone away and come back. The channel of his blade was dark with blood. ‘Another two were in the house next door.’ By his tone, they were flowers, cut from a field, to be forgotten even before they fell. ‘Where’s your centurion?’
‘Through here.’
Wordless, Pantera pushed through a goatskin curtain to the windowless, airless, lightless place beyond. The stench of human faeces hit him as a physical blow, wrenching bile up his throat, to his nose, so that he had to bend over and thumb it out, choking.
‘Light!’ he called, back to where there was at least the glimmer of torchlight. ‘Get me light!”
Menachem brought a filthy, smoking torch, that called skeletal shadows leaping from the margins of a room so small that four paces in any direction might reach a wall. Most of it was filled with dried camel fodder, spiky with thistles. Broken beams of timber, hastily ripped from other places, had been cast on top with little care for how they settled, only that the resulting heap would burn. And among the florid odours of human ordure and sweet hay was the swell of lamp oil, poured liberally everywhere, over the hay, the timbers, and the pile of rags in the corner…