Read Online Rome 2: The Coming of the King by M. C. Scott - Free Book Online

days, resting between. At home, she would have fed them on the previous day’s kill and she did that here when she could, except when the kill had been a message-bird with a cylinder tied to its leg and she had had to tie weights to the carcass and send it to the bottom of the ocean.
    The message had been from the new spymaster, the Poet, to the agent, Absolom, asking if he had yet met the Leopard. Saulos had been delighted in his muted, half-hidden fashion.
    He had taken the slip of paper as if it were a gift from his god, smoothing it over and over until it lay flat on his palm. Later, he had brought a message of his own to send and they had used one of their precious birds, stolen from the old spymaster’s pigeon loft, to take the message back.
    From Absolom to the Poet, greetings. The Leopard is safe in Caesarea. His enemy is in our sights. We have hopes for a swift resolution .
    If bird flight were an omen, the pigeon’s swift departure from her hands at dusk was the best they could have hoped for.
    The two falcons Iksahra had flown yesterday bent their heads to feed. Today’s pair ate only shreds of goat, thread-fine pieces designed to whet their appetite and give them the power to fly without leaving them sated. The falcon was her best: a three-year-old haggard caught in the wild and tamed at night with a stealth that would have surprised Anmer ber Ikshel, had he lived to see such patience in his so-impatient daughter.
    Iksahra stroked its breast with her forefinger, crooning. ‘Soon, soon, soon we will fly. Just give me time to ready the horses, and to pick up your little brother. See how ready he is? Not as strong as you, but he’s keen and together we’ll—’
    ‘Iksahra?’
    The call shattered her peace. A hound belled an answer, or a greeting, and in that was the hint of who came. Iksahra took time to settle her bird before deigning to turn to acknowledge the intruder who had dared risk the dangers of her company.
    ‘I am Hypatia of Alexandria. I came on the ship Krateis yesterday.’
    Iksahra tilted her hand and made the falcon step back on to the leather-covered hoop that was its day perch. The bird screamed its disappointment and struck at Iksahra’s gloved hand and had to be freed, claw by claw, before she was able to shed the glove and, finally, to turn and study her enemy.
    This close, Hypatia was more striking even than she had seemed on the ship, and then she had been a thing to catch all eyes; the king and his queen had both made a point of looking elsewhere, not to seem to gape.
    Her hair was the deep, dense blue-black of the true Egyptians but fine, so that it shone like watered silk and caught the colours of the sun. Her skin was pale as milk, her eyes were the colour of whetted iron, sharp to pare the souls of men and women.
    And she was beautiful; it was said of Cleopatra Ptolemy, queen of all Egypt, that her beauty stole the souls of all the men who saw her, but that queen had been dead for a hundred years. If she had ever had a successor, Hypatia of Alexandria was that one.
    In all that time, the woman did not speak. She had patience, too.
    ‘You are the Chosen of Isis,’ Iksahra said presently. ‘You come from the empress of Rome and have an appointment in the palace at dawn.’
    She knew these things because the slaves knew, and few others, but Hypatia nodded, pleasantly, as if her title and her appointment had always been common knowledge.
    ‘Polyphemos, the chief steward, is precise in his timing,’ she said. ‘I am told that I must go to the palace gates when a particular bell is struck in summons. I have long enough, apparently, to visit my hounds, to see that they are fed andwatered and have rested in the night, and return. He said it was feeding time. He didn’t tell me you would be here.’
    ‘An oversight,’ Iksahra said. Polyphemos was an arrogant, self-important, interfering fool. If he had sent the Greek woman here, now, it was so that she and Iksahra might meet with