Rome 2: The Coming of the King by M C Scott

Author:M C Scott [Scott, M C]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Historical
ISBN: 0552161799
Google: CzfAmS4wH5sC
Amazon: B004ZLS2X2
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-05-11T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

SAULOS’ VISITOR CAME so deep in the night that the stars barely gave him light to find his way.

Iksahra was asleep in the stables when she heard a shoulder brush along the oak fence that separated the beast garden from the city. She was there to care for a sick horse, or so she had told Polyphemos. In truth, she was tired of the old air in Herod’s palace and of the scurry of nervous slaves that filled it night and day. Sleep came more easily among the beasts, who welcomed her presence and didn’t make signs behind their backs to ward off evil every time she passed them by.

And so she slept in the straw, lightly, as a hunter sleeps, with the cheetah at her side, and when she heard footsteps outside the big cat rose with her and together they tracked the maybe-intruder by sound as he scuffed along the dust on the far side of the fence towards the palace.

She couldn’t unlock the gate without being seen and the fence was too high to climb, but the gods smiled and the interloper stopped at the end of the fence where flamelight from the palace torches spilled bright across the ground, sending a solitary shadow sliding under the fence.

The stranger had picked his time well; by Iksahra’s estimate, he had a quarter-hour to do what he needed before the guards who made their circuits of the palace were likely to return. She watched his shadow shift and shift and then stop beneath Saulos’ chamber.

It took a cool mind and a careful arm to throw a pebble up four storeys and hit the shutters that covered Saulos’ window. Iksahra was impressed by the stranger’s accuracy. Time after time after time – five in all – he threw his pebbles and hit the centre of his target.

On the fifth stone, the shutters opened and Saulos’ round, white face showed moon-like in the dark window. He looked out and down, waved a white kerchief three times and withdrew. His visitor gave a grunt of satisfaction and began to make his way back along the fence.

Iksahra followed until she reached the cheetah’s empty cage and slid in behind it, keeping her head low.

Saulos passed the hound kennels; they caught his scent and stirred restlessly. The horses shifted in their stalls and a mongoose chattered alone in its pit. Unheeding, Saulos walked on through the garden, towards the dungheap at the back.

With half a hundred different animals emptying their bowels through the day and all of it dumped in that pit, the stench was ripe, and the rats sleek. Saulos did not go all the way up to the barriers that bounded the pit, but stepped to one side at the last moment and pressed his head sideways to the oak fence.

A knot hole pierced the wood there, wide as a man’s bent thumb. When she first came, Iksahra had seen the faint shimmer of grease around it from faces pressed to the oak and had thought it a trysting place for lovers.

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