A jug of cool water had been set at the head of his bed. He poured some and drank, and Mergus saw him begin to relax, not wholly — he had never seen that — but enough.
‘What do we do first?’ Sobering, Mergus sat up. He, too, drank the water; after a month in the desert, it was better than any wine.
‘We make contact with Hypatia.’
‘If she’s here yet.’
‘She is. Her mark was on the water trough by the Temple of Isis. She’s here and she’s paid a visit to the local priests.’
Mergus closed his eyes and tried to think when he had missed that; he failed. He said, ‘Whoever sold us to Saulos is quite possibly still in the train. He’ll follow us wherever we go.’
‘Then we’ll lose him.’ Pantera glanced up sharply. ‘You have an idea who it is?’
‘Rasul of the nine fingers,’ Mergus said. ‘He never would look either of us in the eye. If there’s a traitor in Ibrahim’s train, it’ll be him.’
‘Or perhaps he was just too shy. We’ll find out in the morning. Tonight, we sleep here with the men. Tomorrow, we’ll leave a mark so that Hypatia knows we’re here, then set up a meeting with Seneca’s agent in Caesarea; the Teacher may be dead, but his network was always designed to live on beyond him.
The agent takes the name Absolom; I know nothing else about him, but there’s a priest at the Temple of Tyche who’ll get him a message on our behalf. When that’s done, we’ll find Seneca’s dove-keeper and send a bird back to Rome with news that we’re safely here. The more the emperor knows of what we’re doing, the more chance we have of asking his help if we need it. After that, we’ll see where we’re sent. It might be that-’
A dozen trumpets blared. Pantera spun from the bed in a smooth rush of movement that took him out of the room and down the stairs and out towards the main square and the camels.
At some point in that progress, he ceased to be Pantera, Roman citizen, veteran of Britain — for all his quiet asking, Mergus had not yet discovered in precise detail what it was that Pantera had done there, except that it had resulted in his being mistaken for a native and crucified to the point of death — and became a Nabatean fighting man with a horse to protect and two pieces of silver not yet earned and a fondness for the bow that set him in a realm apart from mortal men. Ibrahim’s men had not seen him throw knives yet; that skill remained secret.
Mergus was still Mergus when he met the commotion in the square, although he slumped more than he might otherwise have done, particularly in the presence of the governor of a province.
The governor, Gessius Florus, stood on top of a small wall to give himself height. He needed to; in a land of small men, Florus was smaller than most; in a land of plenty where waistlines expanded with age, his had always been weightier than his peers’; in a land where bald men were considered repositories of wisdom on the grounds of age, he, plentifully bald, was widely known to have won his current position on the sole strength of his wife’s having shared private bath time with the late empress. Less than two years in the post, he was notorious already throughout the east for the improbable feat of being more corrupt than either of his immediate predecessors.
Governor Florus ordered silence from his trumpets. The milling camels settled and returned to their hay. The crowd that ringed the market place fell to an uneasy silence in which both the Greek-speakers and the Hebrews waited to hear the governor’s reasons for disrupting their afternoon.
‘Who owns these camels?’ A steward called the question, not Florus himself.
‘I do.’
Ibrahim stepped forward to stand before the governor, who looked past his right shoulder, pressing his lips together.
The steward said, ‘Who is the buyer?’
‘I am contracted to sell to Demokritos of Rhodes, who trades here in the city.’
Mergus knew this not to be true. All through the desert, the Saba brothers had spoken with reverence the name of their contractor: Yusaf ben Matthias, Hebrew counsellor and merchant. Unless that man had taken a Greek name, then Ibrahim was lying.
The crowd was made of youths, and many of them, from both factions. They murmured their surprise, not yet moved to action.
Under that sound, barely moving his lips, Mergus said to Pantera, ‘You told Ibrahim of the governor’s new taxes?’
‘When we watered the horses, yes. Demokritos owes him two talents of gold. If anyone asks, he’ll swear before any god that he’s buying the entire train.’
‘Even so, Florus doesn’t believe him.’
‘No. So there is definitely a spy among us.’
‘Rasul.’ Mergus spat. To Pantera, he said, ‘If Ibrahim fights…?’
‘No risk of that. He won’t decorate a cross for the price of a dozen camels. Watch now, Florus has decided on a figure.’
The steward shifted on his feet. He met no man’s eye. ‘The governor believes you speak untruly, that the true purchaser of these beasts is a Hebrew. He therefore levies twenty of the beasts as his tax. You will cede their ownership to him.’
‘ Twenty? ’ The gasp rolled around the crowd. Ibrahim was the rock on which it broke. Set man on man, Mergus would have laid all his life’s wealth on Ibrahim to win; he could have torn Florus’ ears off and used them to choke him. But the governor owned the Watch and suddenly there were a great many watchmen around the square, sweating in their mail and helmets. Half bore javelins. The other half had drawn their swords.
Ibrahim said, ‘My lord, of the twenty-six beasts who survived our journey, five are not in calf.’
‘Then we shall leave you those five, plus one.’ Florus’ voice had the unfortunate timbre of a eunuch. Which, given that he had a wife, was impossible, or at least unlikely.
Ibrahim said, ‘If my lord wishes that the Saba take their future trade to Damascus, he has only to say so. We would not have come at all had we known we were so unwelcome.’
Mergus eased his blade in his belt. He was sworn to this man, who had just threatened a Roman governor. The Saba were the best — at times the only — camel traders east of Alexandria. Caesarea needed them more than they needed it.
Florus smiled as a toad smiles, his eyes lost in his fat face. ‘You may trade where you will,’ he said. ‘But now we shall take all twenty-one in-calf camels as our tariff.’
‘One denarius each, as we agreed.’
It was evening, and they had eaten in the inn’s hall down below, feasting on fish, because they could, and bakheer because they must show how honoured they were to have been offered it. It had been made by Ibrahim’s wife in her tent, and she was the most beauteous woman of the entire Saba tribe.
While the Hebrew and Syrian youths began their nightly riots outside, they had stayed in relative safety by the fire and had toasted Ibrahim’s beautiful wife and each other and their horses, living and dead, and the horses they had once owned and would own in the future and the dead men whose spirits lay quiet under the sand of the desert. They had not mentioned the camels or their losses or whether any of them would make any money for the trip.
But there was money. Ibrahim doled out the small silver coins; a subdued, thoughtful Ibrahim, whose brown eyes had become hooded, that his soul might not show to his enemies, or the spirits they could have sent to hunt him.
Mergus said, ‘I’m sorry. We would have killed the governor, but…’
‘But then we would all die long deaths, and what would our wives say to that?’ Ibrahim’s smile was sad and slow, but neither as slow nor as sad as it might have been. ‘Take the money in peace and keep away from the unrest here as you spend it. If you find yourselves in need of employment at the moon’s turn, come back here. I may have some horses — and five barren camels — to take to Damascus. Your beds are paid for this night and the next. After that, our hospitality ends and you will have to find your own. I’m told the area around the harbour is the safest: nobody yet dares to throw stones near the palace.’