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

small silver coins; a subdued, thoughtful Ibrahim, whose brown eyes had become hooded, that his soul might not show to his enemies, or the spirits they could have sent to hunt him.
    Mergus said, ‘I’m sorry. We would have killed the governor, but …’
    ‘But then we would all die long deaths, and what would our wives say to that?’ Ibrahim’s smile was sad and slow, but neither as slow nor as sad as it might have been. ‘Take the money in peace and keep away from the unrest here as you spend it. If you find yourselves in need of employment at the moon’s turn, come back here. I may have some horses – and five barren camels – to take to Damascus. Your beds are paid for this night and the next. After that, our hospitality ends and you will have to findyour own. I’m told the area around the harbour is the safest: nobody yet dares to throw stones near the palace.’
    Pantera’s smile matched Ibrahim’s. ‘We will find an inn there then that serves good food, and can supply also, perhaps, a woman for Mergus?’ His eyes, scanning the room, were childlike in their innocence. Mergus flushed and looked away out of the stables towards the evening’s lemon light.
    Ibrahim laughed and clapped Pantera on the shoulder and kissed him on both cheeks, and told him to take the bay colt as payment for the horse that had been killed in good service.
    They liked Pantera for his bow skills, he had said, which was true. Mergus thought they had come to love him for all the things they could not see, but could feel in the quiet of their souls.
    Men who come to love Saulos will give their lives for him . Pantera had said that in the desert. What he had not said was that he and Saulos had much in common, and the fact that men would give their lives for love of either was only the first part of it.
    Mergus was thinking that later in the evening, as he settled down to sleep. For a while, he lay listening to the growing rumble of youths hurling abuse at other youths outside. He thought no stones had been thrown yet, nor sticks pounded on flesh. Inside, the few men left downstairs slurred their toasts to the remembered dead while upstairs, men on either side of their room mumbled their way towards sleep.
    Mergus murmured his own prayers to the god and lay quietly, letting the night’s patterns weave across the roof, patching with starlight the places the sun had left.
    Inevitably, his thoughts gravitated to the man in the other bed. There was a time, in the summer after the fire, when he had desired Pantera so much his heart had ached, when he would have given all the gold sewn into his saddle pack – none of which was his to give – for a night with him in a small room such as this.
    Time hadn’t dulled the ache, but had instead refined it untilhe came to understand that his passion for Pantera was of the mind, not of the body; that he had reached the age, perhaps, where lust gave way to something more pure. More likely, he remembered too clearly the look on the face of the woman Hannah as she took ship on the day after the fire, with Pantera’s child newly made within her.
    He had seen women in grief before; he had caused it often enough. There was no reason why he should remember this one so clearly, except that it had been mirrored in the lines about Pantera’s eyes as he had turned away from the ship, and then again, even more finely, in the face of the woman Hypatia, Sibylline Oracle and Chosen of Isis.
    And there was a question Mergus did not wish to ask, or to hear answered. He was content with what he had, or believed himself so. He lay listening to the slow peace of Pantera’s breath as he crossed the Lethe into sleep and if he emerged later sweating, grasping blindly at his mattress, then Mergus planned to be at his side, speaking words of comfort in the language that worked, which was neither Greek nor Latin, nor Aramaic nor Saban, but the old, wild, ensorcelled words of the Britons that the dreamers used to sing the