That was not a pile of rags, but a man, bound and gagged and… Pantera knelt, turned him over, felt at his throat for a long, desperate moment, and there, there! was a pulse, thready, fine, erratic, but leaping live under his fingers. He sat back on his heels and swept his hands over his face.
‘He’s alive?’ Menachem said, softly, from behind him. At Pantera’s nod, he shouted back to Estaph, ‘He’s alive. We need water.’
Pantera called, over him, ‘Estaph, kill Kleitos now, before I am tempted to roast him here. And keep the torches safe; a stray flame will burn us all.’
Moshe brought water and wool and Estaph came in, cleaning the head of his axe on a rag. The giant Parthian lifted Mergus like a child, carried him out past Kleitos’ pallid corpse and laid him on the pallet in the front room, away from the risk of fire.
There, Pantera pulled the gag from his mouth and cut the cords at his wrists and ankles. With Estaph’s help, he stripped him, and washed away the filth about his body, and the matted blood from the wound on his head, and dressed him again in his own tunic, with the worst of the blood rinsed from the wool.
Then, with fire raging in the city outside, and the sounds of riot building, they began the unpleasant work of bringing him back to consciousness, with water poured on his face, and into his throat, so that he must choke or drown and then, after choking, swallow.
Mergus moaned and turned his head away. Pantera tilted the beaker over his face, and let another half-cup dribble on to his nose. He choked and cursed and struggled, and Pantera held him steady until he opened his eyes, and peered, and blinked and made himself focus, and stared.
Pantera smiled down at him. ‘Does your head hurt?’
Mergus shook his head and then stopped. In a moment, whiter, he said, ‘Not as much as my hands.’
‘The ropes bit tight. Your hands will hurt until the blood comes back to them. The first hour is the worst.’
Mergus closed his eyes. A while later, he opened them again. ‘Kleitos?’
‘Dead.’
‘He said I was the first; that Saulos planned to kill your friends one by one by one: Hypatia, Estaph, the dove-boy, the priest of Tyche — even Menachem and Yusaf whom you barely know, with you at the last, knowing them all gone.’
Mergus’ cold fingers struggled for grip. With care, Pantera held them, and chafed them between his palms. Quietly, he said, ‘I will not let it happen.’ And then, because it didn’t seem enough, ‘We have thwarted him twice tonight. He will become more desperate after this, and make mistakes. All we need is patience, and we have enough of that, between us.’
Outside was a small flurry of men arriving and leaving and Menachem, who had gone to the door, came back again. He stood in the doorway, with the goatskin curtain pushed back on his arm. ‘The royal family has just departed for Jerusalem,’ he said. ‘Saulos is with them. He has lead place in the king’s retinue, behind only Agrippa himself.’
Pantera said, ‘Where’s Jucundus? He’ll need to know about this, to stem anything else that comes of it.’
‘Jucundus is leading the king’s train, riding at the head of five hundred horse,’ Menachem said. ‘His second, Acrabenus, has command of the Watch. He will contain the fires as readily as Jucundus might have done, which is to say not readily, but well enough to- No!’
Mergus was trying to rise. Pantera caught him as he toppled and lowered him back to the floor, sitting this time, not lying.
‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘not yet. We’ll tie you to a horse until you can hold the reins yourself.’ He looked up to where Menachem waited. ‘We ride for Jerusalem, now, in the king’s tracks. Will you come with us?’
‘We are four,’ Menachem said. ‘Myself, Moshe, Aaron, whom you have not yet met — and Yusaf, who was dismissed from the king’s side before they departed.’
‘The king turned down Yusaf’s petition?’
‘No, Saulos did that.’ Menachem smiled, tightly. Over the guttering light, his deep-set eyes sought Pantera’s and held them. ‘Thus does your enemy, indeed, become our enemy. And so we will ride together after him to Jerusalem. We have defeated him here when we did not know him as a common enemy. Knowing it, we may more readily defeat him there.’
Chapter Eighteen
Caesarea was behind them, a ribbon of tiny lights stitching the dark land to the darker sky. The roar of the riot was too far away to be heard; the desert rang instead to the soft pad of hoof on sand, steady, never stumbling, picking a route by starlight, striving always to keep to the path, which was no path, but was none the less obvious by daylight.
Ahead, torches showed the queen’s party had stopped for food, for water, and were mounting again, stringing out along that same not-quite-obvious route. Hypatia was there; Pantera could feel her in much the same way as he could feel Mergus and for much the same reason; these two were his true family. He had not thought of them as such before this, but after the night just gone, it was impossible not to.
Further ahead, if Pantera strained to look, the lights of the king’s group stretched across the horizon, heading always south. Saulos was there, and the Berber hunter with her beasts.
He had heard the cheetah was trained to hunt like a hound, and did not want to find out that it was true, here, in the dark desert, where a hound could take a man from his horse and break his neck before anyone even knew it was there.
And then he heard a change in the rhythmic footfall ahead. Pantera drew his horse to a hard halt and raised his hand. A scream cut the night.
‘It’s the girl,’ Pantera said. ‘The royal princess. Her horse has fallen.’
‘How do you know?’ Menachem pushed up alongside, his eyes dim in the starlight. ‘It could be anyone.’
‘Who else is reckless enough to throw her horse at a canter away from the lit path and the watchmen?’
‘The boy is. Particularly if the Berber woman has rebuffed him.’
‘No. Hyrcanus rides with the king’s group and they’re a mile in front. Watch the torches; the queen’s men are veering off the track now to find her. Hypatia’s ahead of them, I think. If the girl’s neck is broken, then they’ll have to… but it isn’t. See?’ Pantera pointed to the gather and squeeze of the moving lights, now together, now apart. ‘They’re carrying her back to the track now.’
He looked back, at his own party. Of the five horses gathered by, Yusaf and Moshe held the rear, while the other three kept to a row with Estaph and Aaron staying one on either side of Mergus, to keep him safe; an hour into the journey they had untied him so that he could ride freely, but he wasn’t secure enough to be left entirely alone.
Ahead, the torches of the royal train danced back to the trail. Pantera said, ‘They’ll have to carry her, which means they’ll move more slowly. If we want to reach Jerusalem before daylight, we’ll have to swing out round them and get back to the track well in front.’
‘And risk running into the back of the king’s group? You said they were only a mile ahead.’ That was Mergus, speaking from just beyond his horse’s left haunch. By a miracle, he kept the pain from his voice and was a centurion picking out a particular problem; nothing unsurmountable.
Pantera laughed softly. ‘If you’ve tracked Eceni warriors through the forests of Britain at night, you can track a group of minor Herodian royalty carrying torches along a desert pathway that’s been used by every passing merchant for the last hundred years. And you can do it without having to take the same path.’
He turned his horse off the track and eased it forward on to the shadowed sand beyond. ‘Follow me. Don’t speak. Keep your horses out of step with mine so we don’t set up a rhythm the guards can hear. And — ’ this last with hollow humour — ‘don’t scream if you fall.’
They moved uncertainly at first. The thumbnail of an old moon did not so much light the desert as sharpen the shadows, painting the treacherous dips and hillocks in stark relief. The horses baulked at imaginary traps and had to be nursed round lines in the sand that curved like snakes. They moved so slowly that there was a real danger dawn might come and see them still crossing the desert, visible to any who chanced to look.