‘Not yet,’ said Iksahra. ‘It’s too soon.’
‘By whose accounting?’
‘My own.’
‘No, it’s not!’ The girl wrenched her horse round, sawing at its mouth. ‘Hypatia made you do this! She wants me kept away from the palace, so I can’t sway the king, or my aunt or mother or any of the others and make them stay. They’re going to flee again and leave Jerusalem in the hands of that filth, to…’ Kleopatra straggled to a halt, and put her hand to her throat, and then her face. ‘To those men who are coming for us,’ she said, flatly.
Ahead, a company of men trotted four abreast along the path that led from the city. Iron glinted in the sun, and polished brass on their helmets.
‘We must run.’
Iksahra caught her reins. ‘No. It’s too late.’
‘Those are Saulos’ men. Our horses are better than theirs. We could-’
‘They have archers. I will not risk your life.’ Iksahra took her hand from the girl’s bridle. The day was young, and bright, and she wanted to hunt, and to kill, and, for the sake of a child, could not. ‘We will be civil to them, and expect they will extend the same courtesy to us. I will command the cat not to hurt them, and you will hold the tiercel.’
‘But the message cylinder… the one you took from the bird — they’ll find it!’
‘What cylinder?’ Iksahra spread her arms and both the naked hand and the gloved one that had borne the falcon on its wrist were empty. She fixed Kleopatra with a stare of the kind that calmed horses. ‘Don’t speak of it. We will not be harmed.’
Iksahra spoke to the cat, and when the men came, it did not fight, but settled behind her horse. Iksahra addressed them civilly, and Kleopatra archly, in the tones of royalty, so that both were allowed to direct their horses into the midst of the company as it turned back to the city.
They were even left with their hunting birds, and thus did Iksahra return with the falcon feeding on her fist, each twist of its head throwing out evidence of what they had caught.
It fed to fullness before they reached the city and she had time to drop the dove beneath the feet of the trotting horses, and hood the falcon, so that when Saulos met them at the city gates, all that remained was a spot of blood on her hunting glove.
‘Your majesty!’ He was dressed in his sand-coloured silks, fulsome in his greeting of Kleopatra, smiling his victory. ‘If you would be so kind, the full council of the Sanhedrin has convened in the heart of the city to address certain matters pertaining to the recent… disturbances. We will honour them with our attendance.’
He nodded to Iksahra, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Your beasts will be treated with utmost respect, I guarantee it.’
Polyphemos brought the message, written on papyrus, rolled and sealed. It came to Berenice, in her private apartments, not to the king. Hypatia alone was present.
Hypatia watched the queen break the seal, and read, and sit suddenly, pale to the point of death. She saw her wave Polyphemos from the door; he did not want to go, so it took a swifter motion than it used to.
‘What?’ Hypatia asked, when he was gone. Dread lay on her like a morning fog, draining her as surely as any ghul.
Berenice spoke in a voice devoid of inflection. ‘They have Kleopatra. And Iksahra.’
‘Where?’
‘They stand before the Sanhedrin. They will be charged with killing Governor Florus. The penalty is death by stoning.’
Hypatia said, ‘I killed the governor.’
‘I know that. Saulos knows it; he saw you. This is a trap. You will not walk into it.’
‘I must,’ Hypatia said, and heard her own voice as if from a distance, with a tunnel’s echo between. ‘Kleopatra is the next Chosen of Isis.’
Berenice turned her head. Her eyes were blank channels that led straight to her soul. In their depths, Hypatia saw a name form, and saw it taken away again, out of tact, or kindness, and was grateful. If Iksahra had been named aloud, she might well have lost what remained of her composure.
Berenice, queen in Caesarea, rose. ‘Then I will come too,’ she said. ‘No — do not argue. You are my gift, given by the empress. Saulos cannot touch you while I am present.’
She rang a bell for her personal maid. ‘We must change our clothing. The men of the Sanhedrin have… certain ways of viewing women. I am a widow before I am a queen and must be seen as both. You are my handmaid, and must be appropriate. We will do this alone, you and I. We have too much to lose to leave it to anyone else.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
The aqueduct was a black thread in the night’s weaving, but it was behind him, and Pantera had not vomited, nor lost control of his bladder, nor screamed aloud his terror as he crawled down the long concrete trough held up on stalks of stone that looked barely strong enough to withstand the scrub of a mangy goat should it choose to scratch its back along them.
In that regard, he was a man, not a child. In all other ways of measuring, he had returned to his childhood, so great was the hold of the past in this place, where he had come to manhood, with his father pushing him on.
A slight lip rose under his fingers, which was how he knew he had reached the end of the line. The only light was from the stars which rendered everything a faint grey; his fingers, the concrete, the rock wall ahead of him that stretched, it seemed, for eternity in all directions — and the gap that was left between the aqueduct’s end and the lip of the cistern. When he was twelve years old, that gap had been big enough to fall through. For years after he had been here, his dreams had seemed all to lead to this place, where he looked over a lip of fragile stone and found himself staring down on to the backs of the circling vultures, and then down, and down, and down to the antelopes that ran, small as ants, across the desert below.
The gap was still big enough, but the vultures had gone, and with them had gone some of the certainty that the earth must suck him from this place and drag him down to become another ant lying dead on the valley floor.
His heart tripped at the memory, his stomach lurched. He made himself remember that the gaping mouth in the side of the rock was more than big enough to take a grown man, as long as he got the angle right when he jumped.
He rolled over on to his stomach, turned in his own length, and wriggled backwards, holding on to the concrete edges of the aqueduct, gradually taking more weight on his hands until his whole body hung straight. Menachem was above him, his eyes wide as the moon. ‘We do this backwards? On our bellies?’
‘It’s the only way. Tell each man to tell the one behind him as he comes to it, but no sooner: there’s no point in letting them worry all the way up the line. Wait for me to call. In case there’s no water…’
‘You said there would be water.’
Pantera had already let go. Falling, the ghost of his youth came with him, sucking in the damp, cold air in a great breath just before he hit the water — the deep, cold, marrow-chilling water.
He bobbed to the surface, choking. Menachem’s voice echoed down, drily amused. ‘I hear that you were right.’
‘Come quickly. I’ll move out of the way.’ Pantera paddled backwards, watching the spout cut in the rock. There was more light above than he had thought, but only in contrast to the utter darkness that was the cistern. Here, it was impossible to tell the water from the walls.
Menachem arrived in a ghostly splash, vanished, and came to the surface. ‘ Cold! ’ he said.
Pantera’s teeth were already chattering. ‘We need to be fast. When we have ten men, we’ll make a chain and I’ll find the steps up.’
‘It seems to me that a ladder would rot or rust in the time since Herod,’ Menachem said.
‘It’s made of rock. There are holes cut in the wall that let a man climb up to the surface. I used them once; we have to hope they’re still intact. We don’t want to have to climb back along the aqueduct. Uphill, the swaying is worse.’