‘Shut up.’ Saulos was moving; slashing, hacking, all civility gone.
Pantera stumbled back, caught off guard by the thunderous power of the attack. For a dozen strokes he parried and the shock hammered his arm each time, and each time he felt the wind of the strike slice closer as Saulos’ longer reach and extra weapon found the weak places in his defence.
He was being forced backwards round the room, ducking, swaying, spinning, using every trick Seneca’s tutors had taught him, and all those he had learned since, in the alleyways of the empire, in the forests of Britain, in Gaul, in Parthia, in the gutters of Rome.
He tried a counter-attack, and had it smashed down so hard he thought his stolen sword would break. It was clear then that Saulos had lost all control, and was more dangerous for it, not less.
He saw a second blow coming straight down to split his brains apart, and flung up his blade, and caught the worst of it on the guard, but not all, so that the tip tilted, and Saulos’ cavalry blade sheared down, catching a flat blow on the side of his shoulder.
He felt no pain, but a rush of light to his eyes, as if someone had hit him with a mallet, and it was only his reflexes that saved him as the back cut came slicing in straight across his neck with a strength that would have lifted his head from his shoulders and spun it full across the room.
Dropping his blade, Pantera threw himself down, pivoting on one flat palm, with his arm rigid, and swung his legs across, straight out and together.
His feet hit Saulos across the knees and pitched him forward, off balance, but not enough. Using the momentum of the stumble to take him over across the top of Pantera, Saulos spun round, and threw himself back with both hands on the hilt of his sword, stabbing down in the same killing stroke the master hunter made on the mosaic body of a tiger on the eastern wall.
Pantera rolled along his own length, and came to rest by Yusaf — who was no longer wedged in the sunken bath, but had wrested his trapped arm free and was halfway out.
‘Here,’ he said, and placed a throwing knife in Pantera’s palm. ‘Get up and finish it.’
By a trick of the air, he sounded like Seneca; a ghost made real. Pantera’s head snapped up. He rolled back and up and round and rose to his feet in time to meet Saulos coming in with a sword in each hand again, and for a pure, clear moment there was a gap between the tips, through which a man might not pass, but a thrown blade could.
He held his ground and drew back and threw, and in the slowing of time that came in death’s shadow he saw the knife fly true and sweet, past the two swords that came in for him, missing them by the thickness of a prayer, of a held breath, of a life.
He dropped to the ground, flat… and Saulos dropped to meet him, face to face, gaze to gaze, mouth wide, startled, with a hand’s length of iron lodged in the hard bone between his brows.
Pantera lay still and watched the life leak from his enemy’s eyes, and said, almost too quietly to hear, ‘If Kleopatra is right, you go willing to a god that demands blood-price for his kingdom.’
He waited for a response. He wanted one, suddenly, wanted there to be an answer — something, anything to fill the aching, empty space…
‘Pantera?’
The world was blurred, the air too dense to breathe. Careful fingers gripped his shoulder and rolled him backwards. He looked up, and blinked, and Yusaf’s long face grew into focus.
Yusaf’s voice was a buzz in the background that moved gradually to the front of his awareness. ‘It’s over. He’s dead. You killed him… Pantera, it is over.’
His mind was mist, and less than mist; it was an empty field, drenched by winter rain, with a scattering of last season’s straw. He sat up, helped by Yusaf, and wondered at the ache in his chest that was so much greater than the one in his head, where the sword had glanced by.
He pushed himself to standing, using Yusaf’s arm as a lever, and looked around the room, until the scenes of carnage all about resolved themselves to simple pictures of men at the hunt, and one image in particular, of a king, mounted on a horse the colour of starlight, with black feet.
Pantera looked at that a long time and, when he turned at last, Yusaf was waiting for him, white, and completely still, as a man at his own execution.
‘You and I have a reckoning,’ he said. ‘I betrayed you. For that, Saulos would-’
‘ No! ’ Pantera caught his arm. With barely held violence, he said, ‘I am not Saulos. I kill where I must, not for vengeance.’
‘But-’
‘I knew who you were and what you had done before I came back to Jerusalem last night. If I were going to kill you, I would have done it in the desert with Gideon as my witness.’
Yusaf’s eyes were too wide, still awaiting death. Pantera made himself look away, set his mind to something else. Without warning he thought of Hannah, and then Hypatia. In quite a different voice, he said, ‘Saulos is dead; let that be an end to it. Today, we have a king to crown and he will need good counsel in the months to come, if you would be willing to offer it?’
Yusaf clipped a laugh. ‘I would give my hope of heaven to be asked for counsel by that man. Menachem is the promised of God, who can unite us all. My only wish is that I had seen it sooner. I might not have made the mistakes that I did.’ He swept both hands across his face, and was older when he looked up. ‘I am grateful, truly, more than I can say, and will repay you somehow, if a way can be found. But before we set this behind us, I have to ask — how did you know it was me who betrayed you?’
‘You are Absolom. Iksahra heard you speak to Saulos. But I knew before she told me. On the temple steps, the High Priest gave way too easily. He wouldn’t have done it had he not the backing of someone trusted by all twelve tribes of Israel. Who else knew what was planned, and yet had the authority to sway Ananias?’
As he spoke, Pantera knelt and tugged the knife from Saulos’ brow. It took two hands, and some force, to wrest it free and bright blood welled where it had been. It was becoming easier, now, to think of Saulos as gone, to see a future that was not blighted by his presence; easier, too, to be generous in his mercy.
He wiped the blade on the dead man’s sleeve and rose again, holding it across the flat of both hands. ‘This is yours.’
When, wordless, Yusaf took it, Pantera said, ‘We are different, he and I, whatever he may have told you.’
‘I knew that when you came back. Saulos would not have had that courage.’
‘And you sent the scroll to Menachem, with the signatures of the entire Sanhedrin beneath your own. That also took great courage.’
‘I had just heard of the massacre at Caesarea. I could have done no less.’
Yusaf lowered his gaze; they both did. Saulos’ eyes had shut, his face fallen slack, a dribble of saliva slid down to the swirling mosaic floor. The sun had moved on; they were in perpetual shadow now. A few cautious flies began to dine.
‘I thought he was the one man who understood the ways of Rome,’ Yusaf said. ‘That he loved Israel above all else, and would usher in a peace to last a thousand generations.’
‘He loved only himself, and the god he had made in his own image.’
Yusaf raised his head, sought Pantera’s gaze and held it. ‘You could have killed him without my help, you do know that?’
‘But you gave me the knife when I needed it.’
‘Would I be alive had I not?’
‘I hope so.’ Pantera stepped back, setting a clear distance between them, him and Saulos, breaking the last tie, so that he could step again, back, out of the door that led from Herod’s private sanctum, away from the reek of blood and betrayal, from the still, closed face of a man who had been neither of those things.
He turned away and set his mind to the living… he hoped to the living.
He said, ‘Hypatia should be safe by now, but we must make sure of it. And after, we will find Israel’s new king and crown him before the multitudes, and maybe then you will have your peace to last a thousand generations.’