The giants who had tied him stepped back to study their handiwork. None of the six was fully dressed; a loin cloth and belt, both easily replaced, was their only covering, but on his belt each wore the corn sheaf of the Jerusalem garrison Guard which labelled them as Roman citizens.
By their size, by the red-gold hair, he put them as the sons of the sons of Caesar’s famous Batavian guard, the men of myth and legend, great Germanic tribesmen, twice the bulk of any other man, and loyal to the point of idiocy. None of them was an officer; they were bred and trained to the taking of orders.
With his nurtured breath, Pantera said, ‘Like you, I am a Roman citizen. It is not lawful to do this.’ He spoke Latin, in the accent of the Senate, which gave orders to men such as these.
They hesitated. He met each troubled gaze in turn, said, ‘If you were to fetch Governor Florus and explain to him the circumstances, the emperor will look kindly on it when this is brought to his notice. It does not, I believe, contradict your orders.’
None of them hit him, to keep him from speaking; it was a start. Pantera glanced down at the neat pile of folded linen that was his tunic. The turquoise ring lay within the folds, for these were honest men, who did not steal from prisoners.
He tried again. ‘You see that I bear the emperor’s ring. You must know that it is real. What harm in bringing the governor to hear my case?’
One was smaller than the others, although still vast by Roman standards. He nodded, checked with a sideways glance that none of his fellows was going to stop him, and stepped backwards out of the door.
He was gone — perhaps he was gone — before Saulos came, for Saulos came very quickly on the heels of his leaving. The remaining five men stepped away, and stood in a line; a human barrier that made a wall in front of the cage, and gave a degree of intimacy to those inside.
Saulos had changed his clothing. Fastidious to a fault, he had stopped somewhere to exchange his sand-coloured silks for a slave’s tunic of plain linen with the old stains washed out, so that only a man who had seen inquisitors’ work from beginning to end might recognize the uniform of his trade. He wore a belt with two knives in it, and a small lead weight, rounded to fit a man’s palm. Pantera’s stomach rolled over, remembering.
Smiling, Saulos lifted the weight and tossed it from hand to hand. ‘Are you comfortable?’
‘No.’
‘But you will remember, I’m sure, how comfortable this is, compared to later. You can look forward to your death. It will happen long after you want it, but it will still happen.’
Saulos moved as he spoke, lazily, swinging round in an arc, like a dancer pretending to practise. At the move’s end his fist, made heavy by the lead, hammered into Pantera’s solar plexus.
There had been warning of a sort in that inelegant swoop, and Pantera did not let his feet come off the ground. In the puking, retching, black-blue star-spattered agony, as he fought to breathe, and heard the raucous noises of his own pain soak into the dirt beneath his feet, that was his victory.
The pain in his diaphragm became less. He caught a breath and treasured it, nurtured it into his lungs, even when sanity said he should have abandoned breathing and let himself go into the blackness.
He lifted his head. Saulos was smiling, white-toothed in the dazzling sun.
‘Very good. You were questioned in Britain, I understand, so none of this is new. Such a pleasure to work with someone who understands what’s happening. In the old days, sometimes, when we released men to be informers and they refused to inform and we had to arrest them again, then they were like you. But there were few of them, and we stopped it soon enough when it was obvious they were lying. After that, men only came once, and left as food for the big cats.’
‘You worked here? In this place?’
‘I was here in the time of Caligula and then Claudius. Seneca sent me to suppress the Hebrew insurrections led by the Galilean’s lieutenants. They made me the lead inquisitor under High Priest Ananias; the elder, not the current craven idiot. We thought that pain and executions would do it.’
‘And when you found they didn’t, you took the Galilean’s death and made it the cornerstone of your new religion, speaking of a god that needed only faith, not deeds?’
It was not necessary to say that, or even useful; nobody knew Saulos’ history better than the man himself, but there had been a change in the padding noises of the beasts in the sun beyond the cage and it mattered that Saulos not hear it.
Pantera let his voice run on: ‘You freed the Hebrews from the twin burdens of circumcision and the table laws so that they might love Rome and the Romans. Yet when you last came to Jerusalem, the zealots bound themselves with oaths not to eat or drink before they had killed you. How much did you hate them for that?’
‘No more than I hated them already, with their petty, pusillanimous carping.’ Saulos smiled. ‘The governor is coming,’ he said. ‘Did you think I had not heard?’
He began his graceless, looping dance again, slower this time, so that when Florus appeared in the gap between the standing guards, the only sound was Pantera’s flailing breath.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
‘ We are not yet ready. Pass it on. Tell everyone, of any party; Menachem says we are not ready for war.’
Menachem was a man transformed. His eyes were alight with a blackening fire that scorched the men on whom it fell. His voice rang with authority, his smile was bright and sharp and his men lived for the touch of his words, so that when he had said for the tenth, the thirtieth time, Not yet. We are not ready for war, they let go their stones and their staves, and paused in their screaming of insults long enough for his message to pass unchanged down the lines of command, dimming the mob’s hysteria, bringing order in the chaos, not only among his own men, but among the Peace Party, too.
Nobody spoke for peace now, not even Gideon, just that they were not yet ready for war. Even the men of Eleazir’s faction of the War Party, those who lived for war yesterday, or war today, or war tomorrow at the latest, accepted Menachem’s edict and were subdued.
Trapped in the midst of the chaos, Mergus saw the men around him pause for breath, but not shout again. He caught Estaph’s arm.
‘They’ve taken Pantera to the beast garden at the back. There’s a wooden palisade around it. There must be a way in.’
‘If not, we will make one.’ Estaph’s axes hung at his belt. He was not smiling now, had not smiled since the night when Pantera had said what he planned. His big, broad face was pinched below the cheekbones, thumbed in below the eyes. ‘What once we’re in?’
Mergus said, ‘We create a distraction: start a fire, kill some men, do whatever we need to get the attention of the Guard and then we hope that Hyp-’
‘Mergus, you can’t.’
Menachem’s voice came from behind him, still ripe with the power of leadership. Mergus turned. ‘I didn’t ask your permission. We will do what it takes to get him out. You have no right to hinder us.’
‘I know. And I know what he is to you, and what he has done for us. But do you not think we have lost men we loved as deeply to that cage? From the time of my grandfather’s father, men have died in there whom we loved, and I swear to you, we have done everything we could think of to free them, and when they could not be freed, we have done everything we could think of to end their agony. We have failed. If you try to do the same now for Pantera, you will die with him. As you said, I cannot stop you, but I can ask if your deaths will help him. I don’t believe they will.’
‘But we have an advantage,’ Mergus said. ‘Hypatia is in the palace and she does not want him dead. Is there a way she might get them both out?’