There was no time to look at that: already an arm came up over the ledge, fingers stretching, seeking. Pantera lay flat on his belly and leaned over. Menachem’s scarf-huddled eyes came level with his.
‘We’re here.’ Pantera guided his hand to the hold. ‘Stay by me when you’re up. The others can move to the back, out of the wind. Tell them to drink and eat, but sparingly.’
Mergus came next and then, after him, the Hebrews. A hundred times, Pantera guided a hand. At the hundredth, there was room on the ledge for perhaps three more men. It was Pantera’s father who had made the estimate of how many it could hold. He sent thanks to his memory.
To Mergus and to Menachem, he said, ‘That was the easy part.’
Mergus grimaced. ‘I thought it might be.’
Masada stood below them, an elongated platter, stretched under the moonlight: they had climbed its height and half as much again. The aqueduct stretched down into the night, a single strand of spider’s web that swayed in the wind.
‘The aqueduct is bigger than it looks,’ Pantera said, ‘and it takes a weight of water when it’s full that is far more than the weight of unarmoured men. We crawl down it with two body lengths between each man, lying flat, and don’t bring our heads above the edges.’
‘Is it big enough to hide us?’ Menachem asked.
‘It was when I was twelve years old.’ From somewhere beyond the reach of memory, Pantera found a smile, and saw it repeated, nervously, through the massed men behind him. In the desert, they had not believed him; he had been a stranger, spinning fables. Now, they sucked in his words, and used them to bolster their courage.
‘You are all lean. Nobody will get stuck,’ he said to them now. ‘And at the bottom, we drop off the end into the lip of the cistern.
Menachem drew his scarf tighter around his head. ‘Which is the worst part, I assume?’
‘It is,’ Pantera said. ‘If you can do that, you can do anything at all. After that, all we have to do is swim across the cistern. If we’re lucky, the stars will shine in to guide us.’
‘And if we’re not lucky?’
‘Then it will seem like the edge of Hades, and we will have to hope that I can find the ladder that leads up out of it. If we don’t we’ll be climbing back along the aqueduct. And going back, it’s all uphill.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
Kleopatra had not wanted to go hunting with Iksahra. She had made it clear, in fact, that she considered Iksahra’s offer to be a bribe that dishonoured them both. But she pulled herself together enough to hold her tongue while the slaves presented the horses, and Iksahra lifted the tiercel that had been her cousin’s bird and set it on Kleopatra’s gloved fist; her temper had not spilled over into making a scene in front of the slaves.
In crisp, uncomfortable silence, they rode from the women’s gate below the palace, trotting north over sloping pastures where goats grazed in the perpetual shade of Jerusalem’s wall, and out past olive and lemon groves and pomegranate trees, along the ridge above the wadi, to the higher ground, where Iksahra released the falcon, sending her high on the morning’s warm air.
The bird climbed in slow, lazy spirals until she was a speck against the lightening blue of the sky. Iksahra had no sight of prey, but there was something in the bird’s attention that made her look where it looked, so that she saw the moment when it slewed round in its turn and gave the sharp, high cry that was the signal for oncoming prey.
Iksahra directed her gaze west, where the old night still held the sky. There, a blur sped along the hazed horizon, flying hard and straight in the way of a message-bird, bred for speed. The falcon reached the top of the sky and cried a second time. The tiercel heard its mate and bated from Kleopatra’s fist, hurling itself against the jesses, screaming.
‘Hold him,’ Iksahra said, without turning. ‘Talk to him. Tell him how proud he is, and how well he will hunt when his time comes. Keep him still or he’ll throw her off her kill.’
She spoke as she might have done to a skittish horse, not looking, not scolding, yet certain of the outcome, and was rewarded presently by the beginnings of a murmur and the sounds of the male bird rattling its wings, and the small chirruping whine that said his pride had been dented, but he was prepared to be mollified.
Iksahra felt a depth of satisfaction that surprised her. It seemed to her then, under the morning sun, with the dew still wet on the grass and the yellow-eyed goats stepping sideways from the cheetah, that the day shone, and her heart ached and she was not sure, yet, that she wanted to name the reason.
The falcon cried, high in the air. Iksahra raised her hand to shield her eyes.
‘See now?’ For Kleopatra’s benefit, she jutted her elbow out towards the soaring falcon. ‘She’s at the top of her rise, where the air thins and won’t hold her any more; she can’t go higher, but she can hang there, resting, as you rest in calm water when you swim in a river.’ She wasn’t sure that Kleopatra had ever swum in a river, but the point was made. ‘And if you look along the tree line, you’ll see the message-dove coming in, there — where the land meets the sky.’
‘Just above the lemon grove? Where the trees are taller than the olives?’ Kleopatra was engaged, in spite of herself.
‘Exactly there. The falcon will wait until it comes out across the lighter pasture, where the goats are grazing. We can move the horses down there and be close to the kill. Carefully now; there are stones among the grasses, it’s not safe to go fast.’
They went slowly, moving with the sway of the horses, stepping around the boulders that had been left, perhaps, for this reason: to stop men riding hard in a straight line towards the city.
From behind, without warning, Kleopatra said, ‘Is Saulos going to kill Hypatia? Is that why she’s sent us both away, so we’ll be free from harm?’
The warm and mellow morning became suddenly chill. Sweat grew in cold drops along the flat blades of Iksahra’s shoulders as she spun her horse. Flatly, she said, ‘Saulos is not going to kill Hypatia.’
‘Are you sure? She’s set herself against him and he’s the governor now in all but name. He could.’
‘He won’t.’
‘Saying it won’t make it true.’ Kleopatra brought her horse alongside. She was still white, but not now with rage. Her gaze flicked past Iksahra’s shoulder. ‘Look, your bird is coming down for the kill.’
The falcon was dropping from the sky, wings closed in the impeccable moon-curve beloved of the Berber people. It was as perfect a stoop as Iksahra had ever seen and it should have roused her to a fierce and savage passion where the glory of the kill was hers as much as the bird’s.
Today, now, she watched through fear so dense that it took an effort of will to reach through it, to lift the bird from its kill, and unwind the message cylinder from the leg of the stricken dove, to open the tiny capsule and lift out the paper therein and ‘What does it say?’ Kleopatra asked.
Shaking her head, Iksahra passed it over. Saulos had never imagined she could read. She did not know if Kleopatra’s easy assumption was a compliment, or its opposite.
‘It’s in code.’ Kleopatra was frowning at it, biting her lip. She looked younger than she had done moments before. Her mouth moved as she read, framing the words, then stopped. ‘Latin writing, but not Latin words.’ She looked up, her features brightening. ‘Pantera will be able to read it. He knows the emperor’s codes. If someone can get it to him in the desert, he’ll know what it means.’
‘It might not be one of the emperor’s codes.’
‘Even so, Pantera will be able to read it.’ Kleopatra levelled her gaze at Iksahra. Her eyes were the blue of a late-night sky. Her grandmother’s, it was said, had been the same. She was fourteen years old and could have been forty, or four hundred. ‘We should go back.’