Chapter Fifty
One last corridor led to the cellars. Behind, eight men lay dead, of beast wounds, and sword cuts, and one of a throat crushed by the hammer-hilt of a blade. It had not been an easy battle, but it had not been notably hard; the incomers had lost no one, nor sustained any serious injuries, and, most important, they had achieved their victory in near silence; not one man had time to shout to the last guard left holding the cellar.
There was no obvious reason, therefore, why Iksahra sur Anmer should be walking down the corridor lost in a memory from her childhood that left her numb with fear.
In her mind, she was a child of no more than nine summers and her father had set her a task that was beyond her abilities. These many years later, she couldn’t remember exactly what was so frightening except that it had involved the stud horse of his best line, that all were born entirely black and then grew lighter with age to the colour of almond milk, with slate grey manes and tails.
They were the best horses that ever lived — she believed that as a child and believed it still — but the herd stallion was a fearsome beast and she had been sent to fetch him in from pasture, or to take him out to pasture, or perhaps to take him to one of the mares that was in season, ready for covering.
Whichever it was, for the first time in her life, the child Iksahra had been truly terrified. A strange clammy sweat sprang like dew all over her body and her heart tripped an unhappy rhythm that made her feel giddy, so that for ever after, she associated the smell of her own sweat with the iron-ripe odour of a hot and angry horse, and both with the sensation that her own heart and the stud horse were conspiring to defeat her.
And they had succeeded. When she reached for the beast, her sweaty hand had slipped on the rawhide thong that hung from its halter and it had jerked its head free of her grasp and run away.
She remembered little of the aftermath. Her father had hidden his disappointment, if he had any, and, in exactly the same way he did with his beasts, had set to teaching her the ways to handle the horse without fear, so that the event itself would have been lost, if it had not been for the horror of her own failure that had kept her awake through the night afterwards.
She remembered lying awake under the stars, counting each speck of light as a part of her fear. She had vowed then, before the gods that lived behind the black night sky, that she would never in her life let fear discommode her as it had done that day. It had come, she thought, because she had cared too much about succeeding, and therefore about the possibility of failure. And so, in the small hours of the morning, when the stars were fading and the sun was taking their place, she had made a second, more binding vow: never to care so deeply about anything that it might bring her down.
In keeping the second vow, she had kept the first: in having no great care, she had never known the incapacitating terror of her childhood.
Until now.
With Mergus’ men and her great cat left at the corridor’s head, keeping it safe, with the newly emboldened Kleopatra walking in the place of the honour guard close behind her left shoulder, Iksahra sur Anmer slid, ghost-footed, along the slaves’ corridors of the Herodian palace carrying a blade unsheathed in either hand — and those hands were wet with sweat.
She smelled that sweat and, because memory is made of scent, she smelled also the iron-ripeness of an angry stud horse, so that her terror multiplied until she had to stop and lean against a wall, and scold herself to calmness.
She did not fear death — she never had — but she feared failure now exactly as she had feared it in her childhood, and for the same reason: she cared too much.
Cursing aloud, she pushed away from the wall. A corner lay ahead. ‘Stay here.’ She felt Kleopatra take a breath to argue, and let it out, unspoken.
Alone, Iksahra turned the corner. A door lay ahead, blocking the corridor. The last of the garrison Guard stood outside, awake, if not alert. Iksahra slid her hands and the knives they held up her sleeves and flashed him a smile of pure relief.
‘You’re alive,’ she said weakly. ‘Thank the gods. They haven’t got here yet, then?’
‘Who hasn’t? What’s happening outside?’ Frantic, the guard’s gaze flew from the scratch wound on her arm, to the torn fabric of her clothes, to the many shades of drying blood.
‘The Hebrews have attacked. The men of the garrison Guard are…’ Iksahra looked away.
‘What are they? Tell me!’ He reached for her, to shake out more news. ‘In here, we hear nothing but the distant clash of arms.’
‘It’s as well you don’t. Outside is a massacre — not only outside.’
With something close to regret, she took her hands from her sleeves. One blade slid up under his diaphragm into his heart. She held it tight, against the sudden bucking twist of muscle on iron, then slid her other blade up into the tight gap between his neck bones and his skull, into the living vessel of his thoughts.
He died without a sound. She lowered him to the ground and wiped her blades clean on his tunic. The oak door was closed, as Kleopatra had said it would be. Iksahra pressed her ear against it and listened.
Back round the corner, she heard Kleopatra speak in her soft, certain Latin. ‘Go to where is lightest, to the sun. Your friends are waiting. Death is freedom, not loss.’
Shuddering, Iksahra turned, and listened again to the rustling beyond the oak.
Estaph said, ‘There’ll be a guard outside the door. There has to be.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Berenice said. ‘There’s a battle beyond the walls, you can hear it if you press your ear to the stone; the guards might all be out there, fighting.’
‘Hush.’ Hypatia waved them both quiet with a flap of her hand. She pressed her head to the wood. The door was oak, thick as her outstretched hand, designed to withstand any attack.
In the beginning, she heard only the echo of a king’s welcome that rang through the walls. With more attention, she found a presence that seemed most likely a guard; a man left edgy by the noises outside who stepped away from the wood with a challenge in his voice and And someone died on the door’s far side. Hypatia felt the soul slip free of its moorings, but it slipped past too fast for her to tell if it was male or female, guard or slave, friend or foe.
She swallowed on a dry throat. She hadn’t eaten since Kleopatra’s gift and the taste of garlic still furred her mouth. She was light-headed and weak and her stolen gladius hung leaden as a lump hammer from her fist, too heavy to use. In the still part of her mind, she sought the help of the god and found instead… the iron-sharp stench of an angry horse, and beneath it the scent of a woman’s fear.
She grabbed at the handle and hurled the door open, already rolling, down and sideways, away from whatever blades might come, that did come; that missed her wildly and clattered down the wall to the floor.
Still rolling, she heard only silence. She rose to her knees, with the stolen sword in both hands. She heard the lift of a breath taken and held.
‘Iksahra?’
The Berber woman was standing in the doorway, black on white, framed against the new light from behind. The only sunlight was a single shaft poured in through a high, lost window, but it was the first Hypatia had seen since yesterday’s morning and it encased Iksahra in its light, so that her white silks became as gossamer, folded about the fine — the exquisite — lines of her body.
With her heart unstable in her chest, Hypatia pushed herself upright. ‘I knew it was you,’ she said. ‘You must have known it was me, or I’d be dead.’
The Berber woman did not respond. Carved marble had more animation. She was shaking, fine as a leaf, all over.
Hypatia bent and retrieved the two thrown knives and laid them aside on the cool stone floor and walked on through the door to a place where the stench of blood was overwhelmed by the scent of woman-sweat, sweetened with new hay and old corn and the raw breath of the hunt. It was a smell of horses and a hunting cat, of wildness, of beauty.