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

take the camels for their holy war. A part of Mergus thought that knowledge might be useful later, if he lived.
    The rock fissure offered Mergus temporary protection, but after the first few frantic heartbeats it made him a sitting target. Sweating, he slid to the ground, keeping the rock to his right and his mare to his left. From there, he fired twice more but hit no one. He had trained in the bow these past eighteen months and thought himself adequate, but no more than that; he was a blade-fighter by instinct and training.
    He slid the bow on to his shoulder and loosed from his belt the hooked knife that had been a gift from the three Saba tribesmen whose camels he guarded. It was longer than an eating knife and shorter than a cavalry sword, finely wrought, sharp on both edges and slightly curved along its length. He kissed the flat iron for luck and hissed again, ‘Sebastos?’
    ‘Here!’
    Another fissure stood parallel to his own, a dozen dangerous paces further along the gully. To reach it, Mergus climbed to the bluff’s flat top, sprinted forward and dropped down to where Pantera crouched in the sand behind the fallen body of his horse. Three arrows marked its throat and chest.
    Pantera was the son of an archer; he could shoot with his eyes shut, and kill. To cover Mergus’ arrival, he stood up, fired and crouched again. From a distance, he could have been one of the robed Saba tribesmen, dark of skin, hair and eyes. Then his questing, river-brown gaze turned on Mergus and he was no one but himself; a man broken and mended again, alive with the clarity of one who has been to the edge of death and not let it destroy him.
    It was the quality of Pantera’s gaze that had first caught Mergus’ attention two years before in Rome, at a livestock market, where the spy was hauling water, to all outward appearances a farm hand of limited intelligence – until he had asked a question and in it lay the answer to the greater question that had driven Mergus’ life.
    For two decades, Mergus had served his emperor, rising through the ranks of the legions. But the emperor was a distant, ever-changing name, to be honoured in the mornings alongwith Jupiter and the legion’s standards. What mattered, what Mergus had sought and never found, was a man whom he could follow without reservation, wholeheartedly, with honour and honesty and joy.
    And then he had come to Rome where he served the emperor directly and there, on the eve of the fire, he had met Pantera and had known at that first question, and in the impact of its answer, that in this man he had found everything he sought.
    From that moment on, he had followed him with honour and honesty and joy through the fire that nearly destroyed Rome and out again, and now into the desert, on the trail of the man who had lit it.
    They had survived this far together; Mergus did not intend to lose Pantera to bandits in a desert for the sake of a handful of camels. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said.
    ‘We need to cross the gully. There’s a deeper fissure on the other side. Right and then left. Go!’
    They sprinted up the gully, and across to a fissure where a dead man lay – one of their outriders. Pantera fired three arrows on the run, the last as he pressed himself in beside Mergus. Other men lay dead across the trail: one of the Saba brothers, two of the outriders and three strangers. Their desert robes flowered across the sand, bright with new blood.
    A second camel was dead, the remainder were careering across the sand in panic. Nobody followed them. Nobody tried to round them up.
    ‘They’re not after the train,’ Mergus said.
    Thirty-two pregnant camels were worth ten times that many horses or half a thousand head of sheep. No sane man would kill them; certainly they would not be allowed to stampede into the hyena-ridden hinterlands.
    Another camel died, bellowing. Mergus spat. ‘They’re man-hunting,’ he said. ‘They’ve come for someone. Us.’ This was arrogance: