Hypatia herself stank of confinement and privation. Sharply aware, she tried to step back to a place where she might offend less.
She failed because Iksahra moved at last. Her lean black fingers caught Hypatia’s right hand and held her still; she could not have moved if she had wanted to. She did not try.
‘Estaph is there,’ she said. ‘And Berenice. In the corridor.’ Words fell haphazardly from the turmoil of her mind, none of them useful. ‘You’re wounded.’
‘Not badly. It will heal. I can still throw a blade.’ Iksahra took a long, uneven breath. ‘We are not safe here. We should leave.’
‘Yes.’
Iksahra’s hand was hot, damp, unsteady; all the things Hypatia had least imagined. She squeezed and felt the movement returned. Her own hand was not any steadier.
Silence held them both, broadening, stretching, becoming harder to fill. The air grew thin with hope and thick with things unspoken.
‘Kleopatra is waiting,’ Iksahra said, finally. ‘Pantera brought Menachem, newly anointed. His army is fighting the garrison. By the sound outside, I think he has won.’
‘And Saulos?’
‘Pantera has gone for him. Kleopatra says he’s dead, that she heard him take his leave of her. And Ananias the High Priest, also. They found him hiding in a sewer and killed him.’
Iksahra’s skin shone like polished horse hide, evenly damp with the sweat of a moment’s exertion. She said, ‘Kleopatra can hear the dead. She converses with them. She says death is a freedom, as if it were something we all should seek. You have to speak to her.’
‘I will,’ said Hypatia. ‘It’s good to see you care. It changes you.’ And then, because nothing was coming out as she meant it, ‘The god came while we were in the cells to show me the mistake I made in holding my heart closed. What I might lose.’ Her fingers were still, her skin too much alive. ‘I don’t want to lose you.’ At last, the right words.
Iksahra’s face was still one moment longer, and then bloomed in such a smile as might light the whole day.
‘It was my fear this whole day that I had lost you,’ she said. ‘I will not live with that fear again, nor let you live with it. I would take you to the desert, and the high places, and watch with you as the sun sets and rises and sets again, and we shall do that soon. But for now, we have a king to crown and a city to heal and a queen to make fit to greet her people.’
Epilogue
The pool of Siloam on the edge of David’s city was fed by an underground stream, so that when all about lay under dust, its surface shimmered under the sun.
On the morning of the king’s coronation, the early light tinted it green. A faint scum gathered on the limpid surface, studded with petals of small white flowers, shining as shreds of moonlight under the not-quite-present sun.
The air above it hung heavy with the smell of still water and frankincense and the gathered thousands; all gone now. Where they had been, palm branches lay thick on the ground, frond upon frond, woven by their falling into a mat thick as a man’s wrist.
Pantera stooped to lift one smaller than the others; a child’s frond, cut for a small fist to wave for the new king and cast before his humble donkey. It served now to distract the flies that fell frenzied on Pantera and his four companions, having no one else left to feast on.
Hypatia was with him, and Mergus, and Estaph, who had shown no sign of hastening to Syria and his family, and Kleopatra, who sometime since the night in Yusaf’s house had ceased to be a girl and become instead a young woman; and that young woman bonded to Hypatia. Iksahra was not there; she had gone hunting with her birds and her cat, loping off before dawn, to escape the gathering thousands.
Without her, Pantera stood now at the pool, famous in prophecy, in portent, which was the oldest part of David’s city, itself the oldest part of Jerusalem, and watched the ragged end of the crowds as they surged up past Herod’s hippodrome to the Temple.
Somewhere at their head, beneath the banners, surrounded by his armoured men, Menachem rode his donkey in fulfilment of every prophecy in the sacred texts.
His people had seen him anointed in the pool most sacred to their god, they had seen him bend his head before Gideon, newly named High Priest of Israel, had seen him declared as the true king, second only to God, who would lead his people to their peace, where no one was put before their god, neither Caesar nor an empire.
They had seen him mount the donkey that Iksahra and Hypatia had found: a colt, newly broken, as tall as any Pantera had ever seen, and piebald, with one black ear and one white, with its broad brow black as jet and its muzzle white as chalk and its flanks patterned in smooth asymmetry, like a map etched in black ink on perfect papyrus, so that Pantera’s eyes had been drawn to it through the ceremony.
His mind was still lost there, now, wandering in new lands, seeking out new coves among the headlands, new islands lost in the star-white ocean.
To Hypatia, thoughtfully, he said, ‘If he has time, Menachem will make of Jerusalem a city fit to match Alexandria.’
‘If he has time.’ Hypatia’s gaze was fixed on the hills outwith the city walls, on the grazed grasslands and the citrus groves, on the herds, and their herding boys; few of those today when most were in the city, greeting Menachem.
She said, ‘Iksahra is coming,’ and it sounded like a portent of doom.
He looked and saw nothing, but did not disbelieve. ‘We could go to meet her?’ he asked.
Hypatia’s face was closed. ‘I think we should.’
They walked together to the small gate through which Iksahra had left the city. Outside, the air was brighter, less clogged with breath and waiting, and the birds sang, when they had been too shocked to do so in the city, silenced by the voices of the crowd.
Presently, Iksahra was there, a shimmer in the morning’s haze, black limbs stark against her flowing white shift, with the cheetah lithe at her heels and the hunting birds flying freely above her, not tethered to her fist.
Even as they watched, the falcon swung up, gaining height until she was a fading scrawl against the harsh sky, and turned in her own length came down again, tight as an arrow, and flung out her wings to land lightly, and bent her head to feed on some small, dead thing on Iksahra’s glove. Plucked feathers danced around them, caught on the hillside wind.
‘It’s a dove,’ Mergus said; his distant vision was always better than anyone’s. ‘She’s caught a message-dove.’
They ran then, and met her at the place where the land flattened out towards the city.
Hypatia reached her first, and they stood apart, but close.
Pantera said, ‘Bad news?’ She couldn’t read; he had forgotten and remembered too late to take it back. He held out his hand.
She dropped the message cylinder into his palm. ‘The dove is red roan, with amber eyes. Seneca bred them; the Poet uses them still.’
A blob of wax sealed the cap shut, bright as blood. He cracked it open and took out the onion skin of paper, so thin they could see his fingers through it. The writing was fine and neat and familiar.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘This is from the Poet; a new code, never used in Seneca’s network… Wait a moment, this is not easy.’ Latin letters lay in lines across the page, but not in words. Pantera took the first three, and made them numbers, and used those numbers to transpose the letters to make sense of them.
The others waited. Iksahra moved closer to Hypatia. She smelled of horse-sweat and wild wind and wonder. Their hands brushed, back to back, sending lightning across Hypatia’s eyes.