‘ Saulos! ’
She heard Hypatia’s high song-voice and heard a hound’s curdling yell and turned again, with dream-stilled slowness, and saw Hypatia… Hypatia running through the last of the guards to stand over the body of her second dead hound and face Florus, the governor, who had lifted a blade that he clearly did not know how to use.
He stood waving it as if the breeze of its passing might cool him, might cool the battle, might stop the woman with the ice-cold eyes from walking straight up to him and slicing her knife, back-handed, across his throat.
He died, folding up, hissing like a punctured bladder.
And then there was stillness. Stillness and blood and gold; the emperor’s ring lay on the floor by the brazier, which was cool now, unbellowed, a deep cherry-red, darkening by the moment.
Kleopatra turned a full circle. Hypatia: safe. Her hounds, Night and Day: both dead. Kleopatra could feel the pain of that, like an icicle sawing at her heart, but Iksahra was safe, and her cheetah too. It stood, head high, scanning, just as she was doing, looking among the dead, to the living, to the four remaining guards, who stood aside, kept still at last by Berenice’s command, with sullen faces and murder in their eyes, to the king, whose eyes held loss of a different kind, to the dead who cluttered the earth, to the cage, where a man hung…
Hypatia reached him first, but Iksahra was there with a knife to cut the cords high above his head, so that he fell forward into Hypatia’s arms, and that was so exactly like the dream that Kleopatra dared not look into his mouth, dared not ask, dared not listen for the first bubbling, tongueless mumble.
Instead, she stepped behind him, away from the red-white marks burned across his chest, and struggled with the cords that bit into his wrists. Her fingers, which had been so nimble with the knife, were wooden sticks; uselessly haphazard.
‘Let me.’
With care, as if she were fragile, Iksahra took Kleopatra’s hands and folded them away and slid her own knife under and cut the cord with only a small split of skin, and even then no blood welled up, because no blood was in his hands; they were green-grey and cold.
‘If you can rub them?’ Iksahra was gentle, her black eyes questing, not hating. Kleopatra found she might weep. ‘Have you killed before?’ Iksahra asked, holding Kleopatra’s two hands in her own.
‘Not men. Not anything, actually.’ She had thought about it, but never done it. ‘I think… I think I can hear them. After they’re dead.’
Iksahra’s black gaze pinned her still, banished the whispering. She nodded, said, ‘Later, you can ask Hypatia. For now, be still. Wait for us. We will attend him and then there will be peace and time to attend you.’
‘Has he…?’ Kleopatra craned her neck, trying to see, still not wanting to.
‘He is whole, see?’ Iksahra slid aside so that Kleopatra could see all of him, naked, bruised, lying flat on the bloody earth with his head cradled in Hypatia’s hands and Hypatia’s tears hot on his face. She saw him shift his head a hair’s breadth and look at her, meet her eyes, and then he looked at Iksahra, and then the cheetah — a small smile at that — and then last to Hypatia. She saw him take in a breath, saw how much it hurt, saw him focus his will, the effort of it, saw his mouth form the single name before it came out
She heard Hypatia say, ‘Saulos is gone. I’m sorry. We couldn’t get through the wall of guards in time. Florus was his scapegoat. He is dead.’
She did not say, I sent the last of my beloved hounds after him, or he would have plunged into your heart a white hot poker, and you would be beyond anyone’s reach.
Neither did she say, The hound took your death for you. She didn’t say it, because there was no need; Day’s body lay still beside them, warm, with a poker, dulled to black now, standing proud of his chest.
Pantera drew in another breath, and asked his second question.
‘War?’ A whisper.
‘Yes. We will prepare for that. But first we have to make you safe. There’s a gate where the beast ordure is taken away. It leads into the Upper Market. Iksahra says Mergus and Estaph are waiting there. If we go quickly, before Saulos gathers his men, we can lose ourselves in the city and then, later, find Menachem. If anyone can keep you alive in what Jerusalem will become, he can.’
Chapter Thirty-One
There was a point when Pantera’s pain ceased to be red, sooted with black, or black speared by a thousand dazzling points of crimson, and became simply white.
It was not less, only that the texture of it changed so that he was put in mind of silk bandages tied to trees and let fly in the wind; of gulls swooping over fishing boats in a harbour — any harbour; of hawthorn blossom in Britain in spring; of Hannah, so that his heart clenched tight and his soul wept.
Somewhere, a door opened and closed again and a new texture of white wove round his head. This was mist of the kind that hung over marshes, and caused men to see things that weren’t there. Within it, he smelled wild flowers, faintly, and they took him back to Alexandria, to a woman he had met there, who had once frightened him.
Drifting, he traced her thread through his life since then, to Rome, to Caesarea, to an image of her dressed in green silk, with silver at her ears and neck, sitting alongside Queen Berenice in the theatre, and then more recently, fighting with her hounds, fast as any warrior. He thought he could see her soul then, and that it shone. He struggled for her name, drew it slowly to his breast as a man draws a fish: Hypatia.
The effort exhausted him. He fell away from the mist, and when he came back, the bed was surrounded. He could feel the press of half a dozen hearts; their concern, their impatience and grief.
‘We need to move him.’ Yusaf’s voice rained down from an impossible height, worried and trying to hide it. ‘Saulos has the garrison Guard on house-to-house searches. He can’t stay here.’ A man’s breath touched his cheek; he felt the heat of a face. ‘Is he awake yet?’
‘Not yet.’ Hypatia dribbled cool liquid into his mouth, slowly. Her finger stroked his throat for the swallow.
‘How much longer?’
‘As long as it takes.’
He was struggling to reach through the layers of mist when an idle, malicious voice said, ‘If you don’t want war, you should give him to the Guard. They’ll pick up someone else, otherwise, to make an example. If they crucify an innocent man now, we’ll have war whether you like it or not.’
Yusaf drew himself up in a murmur of silks. From high over the bed, he said, ‘We will not give him to anyone. If the men of both parties remain indoors, the Guard will have no reason to pick anyone for reprisals. There will be no war. You are not ready.’
The slick, sliding voice said, ‘We are as ready as we are ever going to be. All we need is weaponry enough for those who would wield a sword or a spear. Our grandfather assaulted the armoury at Sepphoris and took arms for himself and his followers. I say we do the same now.’
‘No!’ Yusaf slammed his hand on the bed’s side, remembered himself, and drew it back with an oath. In the slightly startled silence, he said, ‘When the Galilean stole the swords of Sepphoris, the legions crucified every boy and man in the city in retaliation. They sold the women and children to slavery. Even now, the city has not recovered. I will not allow you to do that again.’
‘You think you can you stop it?’ said the stranger. ‘You are not the Peacemaker. You can never be.’
Someone new moved to the bed. Caught in the grey half-land between waking and sleep, Pantera felt a new quality to the silence and knew who had come and was grateful.