Read Rome 2: The Coming of the King for Free Online

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    Hypatia waited at the mast head. She was the Chosen of Isis; she was used to conversations with royalty and the inevitable dramas they wrought. If, to date, the kings, queens and emperors had always been the supplicants and she the one who delivered – or not – that which they sought, it was, she believed, not so different now, just less … controlled.
    She made herself stand straighter, and set her arms by hersides as the Krateis turned broadside to the dock and one of the younger freemen leapt the oar’s-length gap to the shore, winding ropes on to bollards to hold the ship safely to land.
    The king had commanded her presence. Holding her head high, feeling her neck unnaturally stiff, Hypatia plotted a safe course around the debris on the deck: the careful coils of rope, the taut rigging, the line that held the stone that marked the depth at which the ship might safely anchor, the—
    ‘Do you see the falcon?’ a girl’s voice cried in lightly accented Greek. ‘See! The black woman still has it, but Hyrcanus has the male, so he must have made a kill. And look! She has the cheetah with her! I told you it followed her everywhere.’
    Hypatia had gone another two carefully measured paces before the meaning of the words brought her to a halt.
    She dragged her gaze from the dockside and looked at last where the girl was pointing now, not at the Krateis , but at the unruly day-skiff berthed so close that sandbags had been thrown between to keep the hull of the greater, ocean-going broad-ship from crushing the small, lighter, faster – and now plausibly royal – skiff.
    Her ship’s greater height granted Hypatia a clear view on to the deck of the skiff and thus on to the tall, lean woman who stood on its gangplank with a leashed and hooded falcon on her wrist and a sleek, long-limbed great cat, neither leashed nor hooded, at her heel. The cheetah stood with its head high and its small round ears pricked and raked its yellow eyes across the company.
    The woman who commanded it was not, in fact, the jet black of the Nubians as the girl had implied, but a shade lighter, a deep earthen brown, with a cap of short brown-black hair curled tight as a new-born lamb’s, eyes the colour of deepest ochre, and high, carved cheekbones that caught the sun as if she had painted them across with powder of gold. Looking closer, Hypatia saw that each cheekbone bore three small spirals tattooed in a line; and three more crossed the bridge of her nose, linking her fine, gull-wing brows.
    The tattoos defined her origin: to Hypatia’s knowledge, the only tribes that marked themselves thus were those that bred horses, hunted gazelle and herded rough goat-sheep south and west of Mauretania where the desert stretched vast as an ocean and the men, it was said, could live without water for a week while the women gave birth on horseback, and perhaps conceived the same way. They called themselves the Berberai, and had sworn allegiance to no one, nor did they have any fear of Rome.
    It was the Berber woman, then, whom the girl-child had seen and the Berber woman’s beasts the king had called forth. The cheetah was always going to be the first focus of attention, but the falcon was no less imposing in its way. It stood on her arm, a slate-grey she-bird with a pale flecked chest of the kind the Berberai used to hunt deer, and behind her, leashed to the arm of a green-faced seasick boy of about fifteen, was the smaller tiercel that was its mate.
    Nobody watched the boy; the royal party’s attention rested instead on the Berber as she strode down the gangplank with the cheetah stepping loose-limbed and lethal at her side.
    At the shore, the falcon roused, screaming a challenge to the land and the colour and the many staring eyes. The younger children shrieked in horrified delight. The royal women stepped back, covering their breasts with their hands. Agrippa, the king, stood his ground, white-knuckled, staring fixedly ahead.
    The Berber