Iksahra wore man’s garb again, as she had at the docks — likely as she did all the time — and the fine linen weave of her robes wrapped around her in the wind of her gallop. From arrogance, or for necessity, she rode without reins, leaving her hands free for the hunting birds that rode with her, clinging on arched perches mounted on either side of the pommel.
She untied the tiercel as she rode, pulling the leash free with teeth that shone white against her skin. He raised his wings and lifted lightly, using the wind of their running to hold him a hand’s breadth above her gauntleted wrist.
‘Would you see him hunt along the ground, while his mate rides high in the sky?’
Even at a shout, her accent was light, dancing over the consonants, softening the vowels. Hypatia had drawn nearly level and found herself looking into a face of sculpted oak, with spirals tattooed across cheekbones and nose and ice-black eyes that threw her a challenge she did not fully understand. At least there was some humanity there, which was an improvement on the cold of their last meeting.
They drew their horses to a halt. The hounds flopped to lie on the sands, tongues a-loll.
Hypatia said, ‘I would see your bird do what he does best.’
‘What he does best is to fly high and kill.’ The dancing voice laughed, not kindly. ‘But he will hunt and return to me if I ask him. Or if Hyrcanus does. One day, the king’s heir will hunt these lands. We are teaching him the skills he needs.’
We. A woman and her hunting beasts, laying claim to royal pretensions. A horse halted level with theirs.
From Hypatia’s other side, Kleopatra said, ‘Perhaps my cousin could wait? The falcon is stooping to her kill. Such a thing deserves to be watched alone.’
She spoke with her aunt’s voice; if they had closed their eyes, they would have thought Berenice among them.
Iksahra did close her eyes, hooding them against the outer world. With a nod that was, by a hair, courteous rather than curt, she set the tiercel back on his perch again and turned her horse to the sea to watch her falcon at work.
They heard the bells first, the high whistle in the wind that was a prelude to a death. Faster than she had disappeared, the falcon grew in the sky, became a pinpoint and then a falling arrowhead, fixed in shape with the wings curved back, taut as a drawn bow, sleek slate grey.
Hypatia saw the prey-bird late, as a streak of sand-coloured movement flitting along the shore, piping reedily. Moments later, it died in a punch of talons on flesh and bone. Feathers danced high in the air, light as husks in a threshing yard.
Iksahra pursed her lips and whistled a single short note. The falcon made a tight turn, dragging the shore-bird in one yellowed foot, and brought it to hand, landing hard. Shore-webbed feet and a long, curled beak hung down, senseless in death. Three drops of blood smeared the pale doeskin glove.
A gasp came from Hypatia’s left, a small noise, drawn from the soul, such as one might make at the height of love, or in extremes of pain. And that high whine again in her ear, so that she turned her head only a fraction, too little to draw attention to herself, and so saw the Princess Kleopatra as few people could have seen her, laid raw to the world, open, unguarded and uncaring, moved to a joy beyond words.
It was gone in a breath, in a heartbeat. Kleopatra turned her horse neatly on its hocks. Her eyes were flat again, the granite-sea of her aunt’s.
‘Teach me,’ she said. ‘Now. We could ride for Jerusalem at any time. Saulos said so. You might not come.’
‘Kleo…!’ Hyrcanus stared at her in horror, flicking his eyes to Hypatia and back in exaggerated horror. Kleopatra gave a curt, scornful laugh. ‘She’s the Chosen of Isis. She knows everything.’
‘Does she?’ Iksahra asked.
‘I know that the royal family will go to Jerusalem some time soon,’ Hypatia said, truthfully. ‘I have no idea at all if you’ll go with them.’
She didn’t say that she had no idea yet as to why they might go, except that it must be an emergency: no royal family travelled at night unless they were in haste and in secret.
Iksahra favoured her with the same hooded gaze as before. ‘Where goes the king, so go I. The princess can learn as easily in the deserts outside Jerusalem as here.’
Kleopatra shook her head. ‘There are going to be riots, maybe war. And whatever starts here will spread to Jerusalem within days, my aunt, the queen, said. The hunting might stop. You have to teach me now.’
‘Kleo, you can’t learn in a day. I’ve been learning for nearly two months and I truly don’t know what I’m doing.’ Hyrcanus was kind; warmth laced his voice, his eyes, his hand as he leaned over to take his cousin’s arm.
She shook him off. Her fiery green gaze was locked now with the Berber woman’s; green on black, hot, fierce passion locked on a gaze that was cold as loss. There was hate in the core of Iksahra’s soul, but it was locked so tight that Hypatia doubted if even the woman herself could feel its fire.
Iksahra broke away first. She looked out across the sea. The falcon fed on her fist, throwing gobbets of feathered gore left and right, ripping at the flesh beneath. The tiercel tilted his hooded head, hearing, not moving.
‘The falcon is sated. If we flew her now, she would find a tree and not come down for three days. When we go to Jerusalem, we would lose her.’
‘The tiercel then.’
Hyrcanus said, ‘If she wants to fly it, I don’t mind.’ He was a prince and he still thought he was party to the decision.
The Berber woman stroked one dark forefinger down the rosy breast of her smaller hunting bird. ‘So,’ she said. ‘This is the tiercel. He is the male. He is smaller. He is weaker. But still he gives his heart to us. Is that what you want?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you do exactly as I say, in the moment I say it, without question?’
Kleopatra, who had been schooled in the etiquette of court, and in riding, and perhaps in the handling of falcons, but not at all in the nature of the worlds beyond the world and how they listened to an oath, said, clearly, ‘I will.’
Her voice carried across the desert, here in the place where ghuls and ifrit roamed, listening for a word that might be taken hostage; where Isis and Mithras heard the tones of truth and placed them in the balance, to be weighed later, against other actions; where a future could change on the balance of a word.
Triumph sparked briefly in Iksahra’s eyes, a flash of heat in the cold. ‘Then we shall start. Hyrcanus, give your glove to your cousin.’
The Berber woman was gentle as she set the falcon and placed her glove behind the tiercel, pressing lightly against the yellow skin of his leg so that he must step back and up on to her fist.
Bells shaped like hollow beans were tied to his legs in the place the message cylinders were tied on the courier-birds. They chimed musically as he stepped from the perch to her gloved fist. Iksahra stroked his breast with her forefinger, settling one rose-blushed feather back into place. For all his small size, the tiercel was richer in colour than his mate, tinted bronze around his breast and throat where she was slate grey, stark against white.
‘If you are to ask a bird to fly for you, you must give him a reason. He must trust you to hold him steady, to loose him cleanly, and always to feed him when he comes. If these three things apply, he will come back to you even when he has killed, trusting your hand as the safest place to eat. So to begin with, you shall feed him a piece of the bird his mate has caught and then you shall loose him…’
They were intimate as lovers, Iksahra and the girl, their two heads bent together, almost touching, startling in their contrast, white skin and black, straight hair and curled, tutor and pupil.
Hypatia felt a different gaze and looked up and caught Hyrcanus watching her. He gave a rueful smile and tilted his head a little and, seeing the grace of it, Hypatia moved her mare back a step and turned her away so that she and Hyrcanus might follow, but not be part of, the lesson that excluded them both.