Pantera slid both hands into his sleeves and straightened the lie of his knives, slid each one out of its sheath and back in again. They moved smoothly, stayed pleasingly secure.
He said, ‘No. But I don’t mistrust him enough yet to be sure he’s lying. Can you stay outside, near the doors? I wouldn’t put it past Saulos to try to burn this place: he has an unhealthy fondness for fire.’
‘How will I warn you?’
‘Do you remember the bark of the hunting vixen that the legions used in Britain to warn of a possible ambush? And can you do it? Good.’
He clasped Mergus’ shoulder, and knew that it didn’t touch the depth of his care, that there should be more if he could think how to frame it. I care more deeply than you know, but not as deeply as you would wish. Don’t die for me. Please. He didn’t say it. He smiled, and saw Mergus smile back, worry still sharp in his eyes.
‘If you can’t get hold of me, call the Watch and get Jucundus; he cares for the welfare of his city.’ Pantera lifted his hand and watched Mergus turn back, away from the entrance. ‘Stay safe,’ he said.
‘I think not.’
Pantera caught the thin wrist that slid under his cloak, and twisted until he heard the elbow joint creak on the edge of breaking. The youth who had brushed against him gave a strangled grunt, but had the sense not to call aloud.
They were in the theatre, in the humid crush of men and women caught between the doors and the tiered seating, patiently waiting to take their places. Men on either side eyed them and decided not to intervene; they had been seen, though, and both knew it.
Pantera smiled amiably. ‘You will leave now. I will return to the gentleman in the woollen coat the coins he has unaccountably mislaid. Do you understand?’
The youth nodded, green-faced. His breathing rasped in short, harsh cycles. His eyes flitted in widening orbits, never looking Pantera in the face. In Caesarea, men or boys — the council made no distinction in terms of age — had their right hands removed if they were caught thieving in a public place. ‘I am not the Watch,’ Pantera said. ‘But I’ll call them if I see you here again. Go now.’
He let go. The youth — too old to be a boy, not yet old enough to be a man — had the presence of mind to ease slowly into the oncoming crush, rather than bolting like a flushed deer, which would surely have brought the Watch on his heels. The crowd parted and came together again like the maw of some giant sea-monster and the boy was gone.
‘You dropped these.’ Pantera tapped on a nearby shoulder. The man’s head turned, slowly. Raven hair shone with a new lustre in the lamplight. Dark, deep-set eyes stared flatly at Pantera, and Pantera gazed as flatly back.
‘I dropped them?’ said Menachem, leader of the War Party. He looked down, puzzled. On Pantera’s palm lay five brass sestertii and a silver denarius bearing the image of Caligula, a year’s wages for a boy gutting fish, or an apprentice weaver.
‘If you didn’t, then your pockets have just been picked.’ Pantera flicked his eyes towards the door, where the youth was leaving, not looking back. ‘I would think on a night with tensions such as this one, perhaps you dropped them?’
‘Thank you.’ Menachem bowed a little, from the waist. His gaze took in Pantera as if anew; his build, his height, his serviceable tunic, perhaps the two knives under his sleeves: they were not so hidden that a trained man might not see them. ‘Our people are not wealthy, however much gold they might choose to throw away tonight. I owe you thanks. Would you care to join me?’
Pantera inclined his head. He sat. Menachem sat. Below the hum of the crowd, he murmured, ‘Nicely done, but whose coins are they?’
‘If you look three rows down, you’ll see a Greek with a broken nose. He will find his purse has been cut. Not by me. The boy was almost good enough.’
And thus did Pantera take the place he had marked as he came in, the only seat left at the end of a row, which might afford a quick exit if one became necessary and yet still give him a clear view of the stage.
The stage… which was lit by a profusion of flame so startlingly bright that those coming in covered their eyes, and had to look away.
Looking at it now, Pantera counted no more than a dozen lit braziers on the platform, but behind them a bank of beaten copper took up the whole back wall of the theatre, curved to catch the pinpoints of torchlight and stir into them a thunder of scarlet and sun-fire and high-toned ambers, then multiply them a hundredfold before hurling them out across the auditorium.
Pantera sat, saturated in colour, until, presently, a priest from the Temple of Augustus emerged from behind the black-curtained wings and walked with meditative slowness across the stage, swinging a bowl of sandalwood to sweeten the sweaty air.
He was barefoot, and walked with a dancer’s grace, and yet it sounded as if he stamped past in the nailed sandals of the legions, so cleanly was the sound picked up and sent out to the listening thousands. It was, Pantera thought, a product of the copper wall and the vellum roof and a particular resonance of the raised stage. Such things were known in Corinth and Athens, but Pantera had not expected it here.
From his right, softly, Menachem said, ‘The stage upsets you? The light is, I agree, particularly penetrating this time.’
‘I was in Rome during the fire,’ Pantera said. ‘To see flame this intense touches memories I would rather leave behind.’
‘And the camel train? I understand there were aspects of your journey you might also like to leave behind you?’
‘Nothing we didn’t expect. Ibrahim had the worst of it, with the governor taking all his good camels in tax as soon as we arrived. Yusaf ben Matthias paid for the whole shipment in advance. Was he happy with the results? I have a silver coin resting on the answer.’
‘A silver coin is your pay for the entire journey,’ Menachem said. ‘You would rest it on a gamble?’
‘Not a gamble. I only bet on certainties.’
Menachem turned to look fully at Pantera. His face was perfectly bland. ‘Will you name for me those certainties and the nature of the wager?’
‘Ibrahim brought five barren camels on a month’s journey, knowing from the start they were not in calf. All through the month, they were the ones that we protected first, from jackals or bandits, from thirst or hunger. We considered what might be inserted into the womb of a camel to be retrieved later and decided it might be something that was worth more than its own weight in gold. Gemstones, therefore, or balsam. I bet that it was balsam. Mergus thought diamonds. Perhaps you could settle that for us?’
Menachem considered a moment. ‘You win,’ he said. ‘The camels brought balsam, equal in value to three talents of gold. Yusaf paid half a talent to the camel drover for the journey, and he will send him back with the same and horses this time, of Berber breeding, which will fetch almost as much in the markets of the desert.’ He looked up. Something close to a smile played on his lips. ‘Does Ibrahim know of your wager?’
‘Would we be alive if he did?’
‘Probably not.’ Menachem did smile then, and it lit his face, shedding years. ‘Watch now,’ he said. ‘It’s starting.’
A cymbal clashed at the stage-side. At its command, the entire theatre fell silent. To the high notes of a reed pipe, five well-muscled slaves drew on to the stage a set of thrones and benches, enough to seat a dozen, and set them so that the central thrones, adrape with silks, entwined with carvings of vines and olives, faced the very apex of the auditorium.
As promptly as the slaves departed, so did the royal retinue enter. King Agrippa led, clothed in tissue of gold, long-striding across the stage to stand in front of his throne. Berenice, his queen, if not his wife, followed a pace behind, then eleven men and women followed, draped in silks of alternating colours; the queen in blue, her women in green and the men in varying shades of amber, citrus and pale copper-gold.
Hypatia was among the women. Pantera saw her first as he would in any room she entered, as any man would, who had eyes to see. They had robed her in a shade of dark emerald green that brought out the faint tint in her eyes, and pinned up her blue-black hair so that her neck was exposed, smooth as alabaster, slim as a swan’s, thin enough to wrap his one hand round, almost.