In the dark, Pantera halted his horse. ‘Dismount.’
Yusaf caught his elbow and leaned down, bringing his face close. His nose was heavy, his lips thin, his beard a hedge about his face. His midnight silks swayed, thick with the scent of balsam, and the odour of money. ‘Are you suggesting we walk to Jerusalem?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m suggesting we run until we come back on to the track on the other side of the queen’s party. Then we ride.’
He saw them look, one to the other; Moshe to Aaron, who was smaller, wirier, older. Estaph to Menachem, and then to Pantera. ‘Run?’ Estaph asked. ‘Even Mergus?’
‘Even Mergus. It’ll help to ease his muscles, to stop them stiffening. It’s easier than you think. Trust me.’
They didn’t trust him at all, but he kicked off his shoes and gathered his reins and began to run, digging his toes into the cooling sand, feeling the grit and the balance and the slope. His horse, after the first reluctant steps, ran with him, increasing in confidence. This close to the ground, the moon became an ally, showing the way; the sand became a living thing that gripped his feet, the hillocks loomed larger and more clearly, and the pits were obvious and easily avoided.
After a while, he heard the others slide down from their horses and begin to run. Of them all, his concern was most for the city-bred Yusaf, the bearded counsellor in his ruinously expensive silks who had never seen war, but he proved fitter than he looked, and not given to complaint. Mergus, as Pantera had promised, became looser in his stride, and did not fall behind.
He led them in a long curving line past Hypatia’s part of the royal group and back to the track, where they paused a moment, to drink water, and to rest.
‘You’ve done that before.’ Mergus was leaning forward with his hands on his knees, panting, but he was breathing more easily than he had when they started. ‘One day, you can tell me the details.’
‘There are no details to tell,’ Pantera said. ‘I used to live here; my father made me do this when I was a child. The desert climbs up to the mountains. On the other side are the trees: pine, cedar, olives in groves. It’ll be easier going then.’
‘Your father is the man who taught you how to throw a knife?’ Mergus’ eyes gleamed in the dark. He was in pain still, but less than he had been, and he was a warrior; the challenge of a night run pushed him beyond his own exhaustion. ‘How old were you?’
‘Twelve.’
Shaking his head, Mergus accepted Estaph’s help to mount and rode on down the track. Pantera followed, and considered as he rode the vagaries of luck, or chance, or the push of the gods, that had brought him back to this road. His father had made him ride it a dozen times in his youth, each time pushing him further, testing him harder, making him run or ride faster, later into the night.
On the last occasion, Pantera had been given blunt arrows and a knife with the tip filed away and his father had set men along the route pretending to be brigands. The boy had hit four out of eight. None of them had hit him. His father had been quietly pleased. One of the men he had failed to hit had come to him later and told him how close the arrow had gone. All eight had taken him out and given him beer and sworn, drunkenly, with some weeping, to be as a brother to him evermore.
It had been a good night, seared from Pantera’s memory by rage at his father’s later treachery. He remembered them both now, the night and the anger, as if they had happened to somebody else, but they had laid the foundation of what he was. And what he was in that moment was
… alive.
They had walked knowingly into Saulos’ grasp in Caesarea and come out alive. He had not died and, more important, nor had Mergus. The realities of Saulos’ power were not diminished, but, somewhere in the dark, easing his horse forward over ground he could barely see, spreading his hearing like a net over the flat sand, tasting the air, alerting his skin to the felt-senses that had kept him alive through worse nights than this, Pantera realized he was breathing freely for the first time since the horror of Rome’s fire, and that he was glad to be alive.
He sent his thanks through the night and heard again the echo of another voice — Seneca’s — speaking to the youth he had been. You need to be pushed to the edges of your being. Your soul has always craved that kind of challenge. What you lacked was the knowledge of how to survive when you got there. I have taught you everything I can of survival at the edges of being. Now we shall find out if I was good enough.
Good enough to get him here. And good enough, presently, to know that he was no longer the only hunter in the desert.
‘She’s here,’ Pantera murmured quietly to Mergus.
Estaph, close by, said, ‘Who is?’
‘The Berber hunter. Iksahra.’
Nobody, this time, asked how he knew. Menachem said, ‘What do you want of us?’
‘Keep grouped close together so she can’t easily tell who we are, or how many. Mergus, if you can bring your scarf up over your head and keep close to Yusaf, it may be that she can be made to think you’re his wife. The longer Saulos thinks you dead, the better.’
‘Why let her live?’ Estaph asked, with blunt simplicity. ‘We are seven; she is only one.’
‘Because we’re caught between the two royal parties and I want to be in Jerusalem before Hypatia, which means we have to keep moving. If we have to split up, go in by the farmers’ gate down at the far edge of the wall and meet up again at the Inn of the Black Grapes — if the inn is still there?’
‘It’s still there,’ Menachem said, and then: ‘How did you know?’
Pantera smiled into the dark. ‘I lived most of my childhood in Jerusalem. Saulos has forgotten that. Here, we have a chance to defeat him.’
Chapter Nineteen
The torchlit ride from Caesarea to Herod’s palace at Jerusalem was a nightmare from the start. Hypatia hated every stride.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Jucundus of the Watch had been more than thorough in his preparations: the horses were of good, sane stock, well fed and rested, able to keep up the breakneck speed set by the leading riders. To prevent them from stumbling in the dark, the watchmen all held pitch-pine torches in their nearside hands and carried others unlit on slings over their shoulders, enough to last them three times the night’s duration.
Jucundus had arranged a stopping place where food and water were unloaded from pack mules and it was possible for the royal riders to relieve themselves, to rest, to talk a little with those around them without the relentless drumming noise of hooves on sand that made it necessary to shout and so easier to remain silent.
At the break, Hypatia found herself caught in the eye of an argument between Drusilla, whose smile was beginning to crack under the strain, and her daughter, who was bright-eyed with a fury that made no sense, until Hypatia found that Kleopatra had wanted to travel with the king’s group and had been forbidden to do so.
‘Are we so dull to ride with?’ Hypatia asked as they remounted.
The girl spun, blazing. ‘She has them all with her! The falcons, the cheetah, your hounds. How could you let her take them?’
Iksahra then: the early interest was fast becoming an infatuation. The girl had wrenched her horse away. Hypatia followed, laid a hand on her bridle. They were alone now, on the borders of the party. The watchmen had packed with quiet efficiency. Their leader was already on the path, torch bobbing in time with his steady horse.
Berenice was close by, with eight guards around her. The queen rode fast, with a sober determination that made Hypatia want to be with her, to talk, to consider what they might do in the morning. Instead, she was left with a petulant girl.