She felt a shudder from both guards and then one left, relieved, banging the door shut behind him. The other locked it from within and then, alerted perhaps by the quality of the silence in the cellar, lifted his torch and brought it round the corner.
The light flooded the cell, blinding after the dark. Hypatia laid her hands over her eyes, but otherwise made no move to rise, to acknowledge his presence. She had shown she was alive, which was more than the others had done. They lay along the side wall, in easy repose, with their hands by their sides as if for burial and a cloth across their brows. Beneath, each face was free of all care, liberated from the travails of life.
The new guard ran at the bars, trailing his light, bright as a comet. ‘What’s happened?’ Panic lit his voice. He banged his sword hilt on the bars. ‘Wake up!’
Nobody moved. He crashed his whole shoulder on the iron next to her head. ‘What have you done?’
‘I have given them peace.’ Hypatia took her hand from her eyes. ‘What would you have done? I, too, have known men live for three days on a cross.’
‘Gods alive!’ He was grey with terror. Throughout the empire, if a guard let his prisoners die, routinely, he took their place in whatever followed. His fingers grappled numbly for the keys at his belt. ‘You can’t do that!’
Hypatia regarded him with quiet curiosity. ‘I am the Chosen of Isis. I can do whatever I choose. Don’t come in. You can’t change anything.’
‘You can’t keep me out!’
Iron jangled. A key met a lock and turned, shakily. The door crashed back. A flutter of flame came in first, as the torch was thrust into Hypatia’s face.
Hypatia jerked back as he threw himself across the cell to the two bodies lying on its far side, then, without rising, she propped both hands on the floor and, stretching, swept her feet in a long arc that met his at its apex, tangling his ankles.
He fell, inelegantly, so that his chin made first contact with the far wall, and then his shoulder. He came to rest head down, in the nauseating pile of ordure at the furthest corner from the door. For a mercy, if only temporarily, he was unconscious. Hypatia struggled to turn him over and wrest his blade from the scabbard.
She turned, blade in hand, and found Estaph looking at her. ‘It worked,’ he said.
He was cold; the tips of his ears were blue-white and his face was haggard enough to be dead. She lifted the guttering torch from the floor and nursed it to life, this once needing its heat more than its light. She brought it to him and to Berenice as she, too, rose from the frigid floor.
‘Is he dead?’ Estaph, ever practical, asked and then answered his own question. ‘No. And now yes.’
In between these two, a swift wrench of a head; exactly the mercy he had offered to Hypatia and she had refused, because the god did not allow death, but demanded life, and this was the only way she could think of to give it.
She said, ‘We’re not safe yet. There’s a palace full of guards outside.’
‘The palace isn’t as full as it was yesterday,’ Estaph said, and he held open the door to their cell for her to pass through. ‘You should lead. You have the best ears of us all. You can warn us if someone comes.’
And then what will we do? We are worn and cold and afraid and we have one sword between three of us, which is not enough. Hypatia did not say it aloud, but met his gaze and found the same thoughts reflected in the same tight smile.
‘We have to try,’ Estaph said. ‘Your god did not want us dead too easily or too soon.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
The beast garden was a stinking mess. The air was heavy with old urine and rotting faeces and alive with flies. Inside was a cacophony of hunger, of thirst, of bestial desperation that outdid the havoc of combat a bare few hundred paces away.
Seeing Iksahra stand in the gateway, the horses, hounds and hawks threw themselves in a frenzy at the bars of their compounds, howling or screaming or belling, as their nature demanded, for food, for water, for the blessing of release.
Iksahra spat on the ground, eyes ablaze. ‘The slaves fled to Damascus and left them untended. They should die for such a thing.’
‘They are slaves,’ Pantera said. ‘It is not given them to act without orders. They are often flayed for exactly that. We haven’t time-’
‘I know. But we are two against nine. But even two such as we will better prevail if we have-’
‘Three,’ said a clear voice behind. ‘With me, we are three. Or seven, if you prefer.’
Pantera turned, slowly. Kleopatra was wildly bruised; a long welt across her left cheek half closed her eye and promised spectacular colours later. Her forearms had cuts along their lengths, one of them ragged, of the sort that responded better to clean air than to a dressing. None of it detracted from the light in her eyes.
Pride shone from her, and a new determination. ‘I’m coming with you to get Hypatia. You need me. I know the fastest way through the palace to the cellars where she’s held. And Mergus is on his way — is here.’ A shuffle of sandals and he was there, with three others. Kleopatra said, ‘He can’t go back: the Hebrews don’t know him well enough to remember he’s friend not foe and they’re winning now. He’ll be cut down simply for looking Roman.’
Mergus was breathing hard, but not greatly hurt, nor the three men with him. He saluted across the heads of the others, a gesture that promised stories later, when time allowed. He moved to the two women and there was a joining between them, as of men who have fought together in battle, who have saved each other’s lives and know the most precious of bonds, closer than many lovers. And now Kleopatra and Iksahra were a part of it.
Pantera bowed to them, for the brightness of their greeting. ‘Lead then,’ he said, and so it was that five men, two women and a cat walked down the slaves’ corridor to its end.
‘Left here,’ said Kleopatra as they poured out through the door, ‘and then left again at the junction at the end. There are stairs fifty paces further on. A guard will be at their head.’
Iksahra said, ‘Let me do this. Mergus, if you and the others could appear to form an honour guard? Let him see you as we round the corner, but don’t come closer unless I fail.’
As if ordered by an officer, the men fell into line behind Iksahra. She flicked her fingers to keep the cheetah close, and then they were at the junction in the corridor and there was no time to ask what she planned, only to watch as she stalked away, black and white, with her beast flowing gold at her side.
The guard saw the men first. His head went up, and he smiled, and was still smiling when his gaze fell on the cheetah and the woman and his confusion then, of why she should have been thus honoured, slowed his blade.
In perfect Latin, Iksahra said, ‘I am the ghul that assaulted the gate guards,’ and it seemed to Pantera that the guard had died of fright before the cheetah had ripped the life from his throat.
He died in a flurry of muffled beast noises, and not one single human sound. The smell of blood rinsed the corridor and Pantera found that, this once, he was not immune to such a thing, and that he was not alone; Mergus and Kleopatra were both paler than they had been.
Iksahra stepped round the mess. ‘We go down the steps behind this door,’ she said. ‘I believe there is a corridor to a similar door, and another set of steps and then a long corridor that winds the length of the palace and brings us to the head of the stairs where Hypatia is being kept. Am I right?’
Kleopatra brought herself past the carnage. ‘There will be a guard at each of the doors,’ she said. ‘We should have questioned this one before he died, to find if Saulos has already gone through.’
‘He has. And he knew we were coming,’ Pantera said. ‘The guard had his sword newly out.’ The others turned to stare at him. He shrugged. ‘The oil of the sheath still shone on the whetted edge. It dulls very quickly. Seneca taught me.’