‘Your excellency, I am Sebastos Abdes Pantera, known as the Leopard. I come in the name of the Emperor Nero, bearing this, his ring. I bring news of one who would rob your temple, taking the emperor’s name in vain.’
Pantera had fought on battlefields; he knew how to pitch his voice to carry. A sigh came from the crowd. They loathed Nero as the author of their woes, as the man who had thrust Governor Florus upon them, and held the legions in the palm of his hand, ready to crush them if they rose against the excesses of his greed. Even so, the sound of the imperial name carried the patina of royalty and the gold flashing in Pantera’s hand took on new meaning beyond simply wealth.
They drew a long inward breath and Pantera let it lift him that last step up to the platform on which the Temple stood. The walls faced him, white and brilliant in the sun, their glorious gem-studded gates hanging open only by a foot’s length, enough to let the colours catch the morning sun, but not so far that it was possible for Pantera to see inside to where the Hebrews worshipped their god.
The crowd’s sigh became a low hum, not yet angry, but not cheerful either.
Ananias, High Priest by appointment of the emperor, turned his head. His fat eyes rested on the etched lyre on the ring. When he raised them, they were hard as flint.
‘You do not come from the emperor,’ he said, and his voice, too, carried out and down to the sea of ears below. ‘You are a liar and a traitor to your emperor and to your god.’
The crowd drew another breath, harsher than before.
Pantera made himself smile. He scanned the horizon for signs of Mithras: a raven, a bull, a hound. He saw none of these, only the soaring hawk. ‘Your excellency, I am loyal to my emperor and to my god, who is not your god.’
The crowd was muttering now, so that it was harder to be heard. Beneath their rumblings, Ananias said, ‘And if I choose not to believe that?’
‘Then the emperor who commands both of us will wish to know why.’
‘I see.’
They might have said more, but a gong sounded from inside the walls and on that sound, drowning it in a crash of hooves on stone, Jucundus rounded the corner at the head of two hundred and forty cavalry, breasting the crowd like an ocean ship in a high swell.
In the chaos of their arrival, the fury of horses and mail, the screams of men, women, boys who had never faced cavalry, Pantera’s sense of danger sharpened. It came not from the armed men below, but from the flurry of quiet movement behind the temple walls, from the command given in a voice he knew too well, so that when, finally, the oak gates opened wide, flashing their jewels to the morning, and a figure walked out, sleek in sand-coloured silk, to stand beside the High Priest, Pantera was beyond surprise.
Two years evading capture had drawn a few new lines about Saulos’ eyes, but he was still the smooth-faced, smooth-voiced enemy Pantera had known, invisible unless he chose to show himself, but when he did, the power of his ambition could draw a thousand eyes. It was doing so now.
‘You are not the emperor’s man.’ He spoke crisply, but not loudly, so that the crowd must quiet themselves to hear. ‘I doubt even if you are the Leopard, for he is known to be loyal. We will find your true name in due course. The questioners are even now preparing the tools of their trade. The people of Jerusalem are diligent in their love for the emperor and will honour him by allowing the High Priest to donate fifteen talents of gold to Rome for the repairs after the fire. Your blood will seal the gift.’
Fifteen talents? Nobody in the crowd believed that. They made no sound.
‘I bear the emperor’s ring,’ Pantera said.
‘A forgery.’
‘Perhaps we should await the Governor Florus and ask for his opinion. He alone has seen it on the emperor’s hand.’ Pantera spoke to Ananias alone. ‘I bring also a letter from the emperor to the governor, commending me to his service in the search for the man who would destroy both Rome and Jerusalem in pursuit of a broken prophecy. His name is Saulos. He stands at your side.’
The message was rolled in his belt pouch. It was written on imperial paper and sealed with the imperial seal which was identical in all ways to the imperial ring. Pantera had written it himself, sitting alone in the night at the table in Yusaf’s room when sleep would not come, but Saulos had no sure way of proving that, short of asking Nero himself.
‘Truly? Let me see.’ Saulos stepped out of the High Priest’s shadow, and, by that single movement, made it clear who had command of whom.
Below, the crowd sucked in another, greater, breath: a hundred thousand breasts, affronted. A murmur became a rumble, became a torrent. With a single shouted signal, Jucundus deployed his men in a row along the bottom of the temple steps, forcing the people back.
In front of them all, Saulos took the message Pantera had written and tore it across and across. ‘This is not real.’
Pantera turned to Ananias and spread his hands wide. ‘Your excellency, we each speak and you cannot be expected to discern the truth. But the emperor knows. If you wish to send a message-bird now, I will compose for you a message which will confirm the truth of what I say.’
Ananias pursed his lips. A flicker of doubt burned in his eyes. He said, ‘It will take a handful of days to send a bird and get one back.’
‘Then we can wait. You cannot empty your treasury in less time than that. And in the meantime, I beg leave to commend to your lordship the words of our emperor when he sent me here: Say to Ananias the High Priest that we approve the quality of his leadership and wish that he may continue in his place until his nephew is fit to wear his robes.’
Pantera kept his gaze level. Very few men in Rome or Jerusalem knew that neither Ananias’ sons nor his grandsons featured in his plans for the future of the priesthood. The Emperor Nero was one of those who did.
Ananias’ eyes flickered back and forth, too fast to follow. He closed them, and when he opened them again, a small shake of his head was the only sign that he had come to a decision.
This time, when he raised his arm and the gong sounded, a troop of armed legionaries marched from the temple compound. These were not Jucundus’ Syrian auxiliaries, but legionaries of the Jerusalem garrison Guard; Roman citizens all, raised in perfect certainty of their superiority to every race on earth.
Two hundred men such as this in columns of fifty, four abreast, marched from the Hebrew temple, their very presence a defilement. Each man bore across his flat palms a single bar of solid gold, his muscles corded and sweat-rolled with the strain.
They came and they came and they filled the temple platform, their gold glittering in the sun like so many scattered grains of new corn on the threshing room floor.
Below, the crowd believed at last that which they had previously denied, and were struck to silent sorrow. The want of noise was as deafening as the night before battle when the ears ache for the song of the stars and there is nothing to hear but the sound of a thousand souls preparing themselves for death.
Into that silence, Ananias, High Priest of Israel, said, distinctly, ‘He is a traitor. Take him.’
He was pointing to Pantera.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘ What’s happening? Is it war? It sounds like war.’
Caught too far from the tall, narrow window, Kleopatra tugged at Hypatia’s elbow, trying to see past her to the shouting men, the clashing weapons, the screaming, stamping horses that were causing such mayhem around the Temple below.
She was used to people who stepped out of her way. She was used to a lot of things that Hypatia, Chosen of Isis, did not do, and just now, Kleopatra wanted to see what Hypatia was seeing, and could not.
‘It sounds like war,’ she said again, in frustration.