The girl’s eyes flew wide, but she nodded, and stepped back under an awning and crouched down. Fast as a mouse, and as delicate, she swept up a dozen small stones and balanced them on the back of one hand. Transformed, she was a street child playing knucklebones.
Hypatia plunged back through the blue-clad throng towards the alley on the square’s western edge, following a flutter of linen that might not have been there, and a half-sensed feeling that was old and yet new.
The alley ran from east to west and was dark along its length. Halfway along, on the north side, was a house of only a single storey nested between two others far taller. A set of stairs sloped down from its flat roof. A bundle of rags twitched in the tight angle of the stairs’ foot. As she reached it, the rags unfolded in a single fluid movement. A knife gleamed once in the shadows and was still.
She said, ‘Pantera?’
Pantera grew from the dark. There was barely light enough to show the lines of exhaustion on his face, but Hypatia was trained to see beyond the outer skin, and what she saw was the man she had met in Alexandria, a man whose will shone like polished iron, and was as hard. He had lost that polish on the day after Rome’s fire. It was back now, just as bright and sharp and hard as when she had first met him.
He was studying her with a disconcerting frankness, one brow raised. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘I am. You, on the other hand, look exhausted. Have you slept at all since you left Caesarea?’
‘No.’ His gaze still fed on her face. ‘Am I alone in that?’
She gave a wry smile. ‘Not at all. But I’m on my way back to the palace where I have a safe bed, while you will need to find somewhere-’
‘We have somewhere. Yusaf has a house here. He is giving us refuge.’
‘Yusaf ben Matthias? The counsellor who petitioned the king?’ A memory flashed between them of absurdly weighty silk, of a weightier beard and eyes sunk so deep they were hard to read. ‘The petitioner whose failure tipped Caesarea into riots last night?’
‘He’s safe company for now.’ Pantera looked both ways down the alley’s length. ‘We don’t have much time,’ he said. ‘Iksahra is following you. We can’t be seen together.’
‘I thought we’d lost her in the markets round the Hasmonean palace,’ Hypatia said.
‘You did. But she’ll find you again soon enough: she knows you’re looking for herbs for the princess. There aren’t many places to look.’
‘So tell me what I need to know.’
He gave his report with military precision, listing points on his fingers. ‘Saulos knows that you and I are linked. He tried to burn Mergus last night and his man named you in the list of those whom he intended to destroy. I will do what I can to prevent it, but his resources are many. We think he has blocked the message-birds so we can’t send or receive messages from Rome. I sent one to Jerusalem from Caesarea, but it hasn’t arrived. The dovecote is at Yusaf’s house; he knows all that comes and goes.’
‘Iksahra will have caught the message-bird,’ Hypatia said. ‘She hunts them with her falcons. At Caesarea, the birds fly along the water’s edge, where the air lifts over the waves. They are barely sport.’
‘Does she take the ones coming in or just the ones leaving?’
‘Both, I think.’
‘Which means they will have read the messages we sent. Everything that went to the Poet in Rome, and all the orders she sent back.’ Pantera took in a long breath and let it out slowly through his teeth.
He had about him the sense of a drawn bow, tense, but alive, waiting for the loose; of a falcon at the moment before the stoop; of a man, hunting, and near his quarry.
She said. ‘Is Mergus…?’
‘Sore, but whole. He knows he’s a target now. As are you.’
‘You warned us of that before we left Rome,’ Hypatia said.
‘I said I would not let it happen.’
‘But if he knows you at all, Saulos will know the depth of your care for us and he will use that as his weapon against you. There may come a time when you have to choose between saving a people or your friends. If it comes to that, remember that death is a release; the dead do not grieve their loss of life, only the living.’
Pantera closed his eyes. Across his face, briefly, passed the stain of an old grief; of a woman slain, and a daughter dead in his arms.
Hypatia said, ‘We should part now, before Iksahra finds us.’
‘We should.’ Stooping, Pantera pressed a dry, unexpected kiss to her cheek. ‘Stay safe,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens.’
And he was gone, leaving her in empty silence.
At the alley’s opposite end, Pantera stopped and drew a strip of torn blue linen from his tunic, and wound it round his arm. Blue for the Peace Party which today, by some alchemy he wished never to learn, had control of this side of the lower city. Jerusalem wasn’t like Caesarea, there were no riots yet, but the pressure of inaction was worse; here, gangs roamed the streets with no greater purpose than that they must keep the other faction away.
Mergus came up softly behind him. He, too, had a blue flash wrapped about his wrist. He gave a brief nod, barely there, and they moved out into the street together, to merge with a pack of Peace Party youths.
‘How many?’ Pantera asked.
‘Three,’ Mergus said. ‘The Berber woman followed Hypatia and two Iberians followed her.’
‘Good. We go this way…’ Pantera turned sharply left down a smaller alley, leaving the youths behind. ‘When did Iksahra catch sight of Hypatia?’
‘Not until she went into the herb market. She’ll follow her back to the palace and the Iberians will follow her. Menachem’s trackers are following the Iberians and Estaph is following them; he won’t lose them, even if the trackers do.’
Menachem’s ‘trackers’ were beardless youths — boys, really, who refused to wear the Peace Party’s blue markers, even here, in the wrong quarter of the city where to be caught was to die.
‘Menachem’s followers are well disciplined, at least,’ Pantera said. ‘His grandfather would be proud of him.’
Mergus said, ‘His grandfather, from what I’ve heard, came near to driving Rome out of Judaea. Menachem isn’t close to completing the job. Do you trust him yet?’
‘No, but I still have no reason to distrust him. If anyone is going to sell us to Saulos, it won’t be Menachem; he is a man driven by ideals, not by money.’
‘Yusaf is driven by money.’
‘Yes, but Yusaf has been loyal to Seneca for decades and seems as loyal to his memory as he was to him in life. We have to trust him, too, as far as we may without being overtly stupid about it.’ They came to a junction where the narrow alley divided into two smaller ones that parted at right angles. Pantera closed his eyes and drew for himself the streets he remembered from his childhood; nothing here had changed in all that time, except that paint was older, and the colours of the parties were new. Sure now of his bearings, he turned right, away from the palace, deeper into the lower city.
‘Where are we going?’ Mergus asked.
‘To see if we can persuade Gideon ben Hiliel, leader of the Peace Party, to meet Menachem. Don’t look at me like that; nothing is impossible. Yusaf may look like a merchant, but he trained with their priests in all aspects of their law and he’s one of the few men respected by both of Jerusalem’s factions. He thinks there’s a chance of bringing Menachem and Gideon together under one roof. He’s offered his house as the meeting place.’
‘And if they both come,’ Mergus asked, ‘what then?’
‘Then we’ll see if we can persuade them to stop trying to kill each other and instead, for the sake of Jerusalem, join together in common cause against Saulos. Or at the very least not let him provoke them into a civil war designed to destroy their nation.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘ Do you love him?’ Kleopatra asked, from the pool’s far side.
The palace was, to all intents and purposes, asleep. In the bathing pools on the lowest floor, slaves pattered on soft feet, bringing towels and bowls, pouring flavoured salts into the water. Hypatia lay in a vault of rose-scented steam, turning slowly pink under the lupine eyes of a mosaic left by Herod the Great, who counted Romulus and Remus amongst his ancestors. The wolf-mother had milk enough for a nation. Her twin boys hung back, afraid of her teeth.