Rome 2: The Coming of the King Read Online Free PDF Page A

Even the cheetah, which had pined on the ship, had recovered enough two days after landfall to take down an antelope in sight of the king and queen.
    And while the beasts bloomed, while they hunted, while they came to accept the touch of foreign – royal – hands, so did Iksahra strike ever deeper into the bosom of the royal family, and nowhere deeper than into the heart of the young prince, Hyrcanus, who was so openly in love with the strange black-skinned woman that for his uncle, his mother or any of the other royal adults to have shown interest in her would have been crass impropriety.
    And he was there now, a breathless, pink-cheeked fifteen-year-old, slightly built like all his kin, with the rich, dark hair of the Herods flooding from crown to shoulder. He ran lightly down the marble steps that led from the ornamental flower beds to the beast garden. He stopped some distance away and came forward slowly, careful of the feeding bird.
    ‘I’m sorry I’m late. My uncle sent me to look for Saulos. He needs him to— Oh! My lord … my uncle … that is, the king asked … he requested …’
    ‘I suspect,’ said Saulos mildly, ‘that your uncle, the king, ordered me to attend him immediately, to discuss matters of policy. Specifically to find a solution to the problem posed by the quite unimaginably large bribe the Hebrews are about to offer him in the hope that he might preserve their synagogue from the predations of the Greeks. Am I right?’
    Saulos smiled easily, as one conspirator to another. Hyrcanus, who had just learned rather more of the latest state crisis than his uncle had told him, or was likely to tell him, grinned his relief.
    ‘You’re right. That’s exactly what he said. Will you go? Will you tell him that I found you and sent you? He’s in a foul temper. It would …’ Discretion came to him late. He ran out of words, and stood in the half-shade, shifting from one foot to the other.
    ‘It would mollify him. And therefore I will do it.’ Saulos was dressed for court, in costly silks the colour of sand. He took a moment to brush away the grit, giving Hyrcanus time to regain his composure. ‘Your uncle enjoys my company,’ Saulos said ashe passed the boy by. ‘There’s no shame in that; you need not be afraid to say it. And you, meanwhile, will go to sea with Iksahra, there to hunt with her falcons. I am told the tiercel is flying well for you?’
    ‘He is! Yesterday, we caught one of the shore birds, the small fast ones that dodge between the waves. He was so fast, so perfect! It was wonderful!’ The boy’s eyes shone bright as the sun-struck sea.
    Saulos laughed and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good! You’ll be a hunter by the day’s end.’
    His eyes met Iksahra’s over the boy’s head. If he had not spent three months in her company, the hate in her gaze would have terrified him. He walked away, snapping his fingers in time to an inner rhythm. His day, however he looked at it, was perfect.
* * *
    Hypatia dreamed of Saulos before she saw him and she saw him before she ever set foot on the harbour at Caesarea and those facts were, she thought, the reason her mouth was quite so dry and the usual stable rhythm of her heart unstable. Those, and that she hated the sea.
    The dreams had begun long before she had left the imperial quarters in Rome and taken ship for the east.
    In truth, they had begun before her eighth birthday, which was one of the reasons she was who she was; the future servants of Isis were chosen from among the children with the most vivid dreams and Hypatia’s had certainly been that.
    All through her training, in the deserts south of Alexandria, in Greece, in the dreaming chambers of Mona, the same dream had come. Sometimes, she slept at peace for days at a time and thought herself free of it, then it would visit her three nights in succession, prodding her to wake, sweating, with her hands cramped and her back arched tight against an imagined – or remembered