Taking a breath, she said, ‘The hounds had to come to Jerusalem. I wouldn’t leave them in Caesarea where men might stone them to death, or the slaves might fail to feed them. Iksahra had already loosed them when you came to get us. They are safe with her, and they’ll enjoy a night’s run. What did you want me to do, wrest them from her?’
‘If you had to. Don’t you dream at all? I thought you were the Chosen of Isis?’ At which the Princess Kleopatra kicked her horse to a violent run, leaving Hypatia in the dark, watching her fly over unseen desert, too far from the torches to see the ruts and hillocks, the holes made by small beasts, perfect to trap a horse’s foot and trip it.
She was turning back to fetch a watchman with a torch and a fast horse when she heard the girl scream.
Hypatia kicked her own mount forward into the dark. The watchmen came later, slower, spreading their slick light across the sand and rock and desert shrubs. Hypatia watched for snakes by habit — in Alexandria, they made riding at night close to impossible. Here she had seen none, and still saw none as she dismounted by the girl’s fallen body.
‘Kleopatra? Can you hear me?’
Hypatia could see no blood, nor smell any, and scent was the more reliable here in the uncertain light. The girl was breathing. A pulse beat at her neck in a solid, steady rhythm. Her limbs were intact and — harder to check without causing harm — her spine also.
To one side, her horse moaned and snorted and then, suddenly, shuddered and blew hot foaming blood across the sand and those upon it. A watchman had cut its throat.
‘The leg was broken,’ he said, standing. His knife was dull in the torchlight. Black blood soaked the sand around, and the air stank. He said, ‘It stood in a hole. You shouldn’t ride in the dark, that’s why we carry lights. The girl, did she break anything?’
He was Syrian, of twenty years’ service; they all were sworn to Jucundus first, the governor a distant second and their Hebrew king’s niece not at all, except that they were old enough to be fathers, to have had sisters, and so might have some compassion.
A horse padded over the cool grit: Drusilla was nearly upon them, and Berenice, coming more slowly, because her watchmen were more alert and were keeping her from riding hard once she was away from the path. ‘Is she hurt?’ the queen called.
Hypatia stood, lifting the princess. She was a dead weight, heavier than she looked. ‘She’s alive,’ she called back. ‘Nothing’s broken.’ And then, to the girl herself, ‘Kleopatra, can you lift your head?’
She could, evidently, though with effort. She opened one eye, screwing it against the torchlight.
‘You can ride with me,’ Hypatia said, without knowing why. The closest guard was the one who had cut her horse’s throat and had only now realized he might be required to give up his own horse and walk. To him, she said, ‘Hold her while I mount, then pass her up to me. Kleopatra, you have as long as it takes me to mount to decide if you’re well enough to ride behind me, holding on, or should go in front, where I can hold you.’
Infants and the chronically sick were held in front. Asking the question was a risk and possibly a stupid one, but it worked to the extent that Kleopatra tried to raise her head and declare loudly how very ready she was to ride entirely on her own, neither behind nor in front of anyone, and, in failing to do so, proved neatly enough to her watchman, her mother and her aunt, the queen, that she wasn’t fit to ride on her own at all.
Berenice was there by then, leaning over, with her hand on the girl’s brow. ‘We could send back for a litter.’
‘Caesarea is not safe, majesty. If we send anywhere, we would have to send ahead to Jerusalem and that would be too slow. If your majesties will permit, I will happily bring her.’
She spoke to both the queen and Drusilla, but it was Berenice who made the decision, who spoke first. She should have been commanding armies: her mind had the right speed to it, and grasp of broader strategies.
She said, ‘You’ll need men with you, to see you’re not taken by brigands. You-’ She singled out the officer, marked by a red badge on his shoulder. ‘Take a dozen men and form an escort for the Chosen of Isis and the princess. Their lives are as yours. If you return and they’re dead, your ghost will follow theirs to the afterlife. Is that clear?’
Thus it was that Hypatia of Alexandria, Chosen of Isis, rode through the second half of the night with a fourteen-year-old girl clasped in front of her saddle. Her watchmen took exceptional care of her. They rode at a wiser, safer speed which meant that they reached Jerusalem quite some time behind the others, and a long time after the seven who had been riding behind.
Hypatia had become aware that there had been seven men riding behind soon after she first knelt to help Kleopatra. She had sensed them walking their horses nearer, keeping their steps out of rhythm so that the watchmen might not pick up the sound of their approach.
They had passed by, wide to the east, going faster than she was, faster even than Berenice, who had slowed to keep Kleopatra in sight. Knowing they were there, Hypatia had listened hard, sifting through the night-sounds of beasts and stray winds, of ifrit and ghuls and scrabbling scorpions, and heard enough to have some idea, or perhaps hope, of who they were.
The watchmen were good, but they rode with the earpieces of their helmets down as protection against missiles, which made sense when they were the ones carrying the lights and so made the best targets for any arrows that might fly from the dark. It didn’t help them to hear a spy and his companions as they ran round in a wide arc that brought them back to the track a long way ahead of Hypatia and her guards, so that by the time dawn spilled its slow light across the land, they were gone.
Hypatia’s small group reached Jerusalem an hour after sunrise. As they wound down the side of the Mount of Olives towards the northern gate, Kleopatra raised her head and vomited over the side of Hypatia’s horse.
Thereafter, she slid back into unconsciousness, but she continued to grip Hypatia’s wrist with both hands as she had throughout the ride, so that her fingers left blue marks dented into the flesh, and, when they reached the palace without mishap, she let herself be lifted down by the watchman and carried up the palace steps to her mother and her aunt.
There, as she was set on her feet with all the care one might hope for, she turned back to where Hypatia waited at the stair foot. ‘My head hurts,’ she said, with crystal clarity. ‘The Chosen of Isis will know how to cure it.’
Iksahra sur Anmer did not enter Jerusalem at dawn on horseback through Herod’s vast, ornate gate with its images of the sun and the moon lighting her way and her falcons on the pommel of her saddle and the queen’s new hounds behind her.
She came on foot, the cheetah her distant companion, ghost-like in the dark. She came with a swathe of linen over her face, to keep the sand from her lungs and to cover her dark skin against the gaze of whoever might choose to spend time watching the uncelebrated routes by which slaves and servants entered the city.
She came dressed as a slave, an insult forced on her by Saulos at the start of the night’s ride, when he had said she must hang back, to see if Pantera followed, and, if he did, who was with him. He had said it smiling, thinking that she was his to instruct, that no station was too low, no insult too great. He had taken the falcons on his own horse, whistled the unwilling hounds to heel, and they, trained always to obey, had gone with him.
Iksahra had thought of killing him then; it would not have been hard in the milling chaos of horses and watchmen, slaves, servants and stewards that had marked the start of their escape from Caesarea. He had turned on his heel and walked away from her, leaving his throat unguarded, and her hands had drawn the silk cord from her waist before her mind had caught up with the thought. She had let him live, not because she was afraid of killing him, but because he was still her greatest — her only — chance of avenging her father. She did not expect to need him for ever, and the different ways he might die were daily occupying more of her thoughts.