by M C Scott
‘Your word, sworn on the slain bull of Mithras?’
‘If you request it, lord.’
‘Not yet. The offer is enough.’ With a wordless wave, Akakios was sent for weapons.
Summoning a slave to remove the diamonds from his hair, Nero began to walk towards the vestibule. The four Ubian guards jumped to present arms, two either side. What they lacked in legionary crispness, they made up for in their sheer bulk, and the ease with which they swung their long cavalry swords. They smiled for their emperor, showing corded necks, thick as bulls’.
‘Come,’ said Nero. ‘We would have you walk in our company.’
Pantera moved swiftly to catch up. Together he and his emperor passed over the black and white chequered mosaics, between the multicoloured visions of Apollo on his lyre. The god, he noticed now, had a thatch of thick black curls amongst which diamonds nestled.
The naked Nubian girl-slave came with a steaming cloth to wipe the paint from the emperor’s face. Standing for her in the vestibule, Nero said, ‘Akakios hates you. Why is that?’
‘I was trained by Seneca, lord, and he was not.’
‘That is reason enough?’
‘For a spy it is, yes. He trained with us for three years before he was turned away. Rejection makes a man bitter and such a thing can turn to hate if it festers long enough.’
‘Why was he rejected?’
Pantera shrugged. ‘He was impetuous. He didn’t listen. He thought he knew best one time too many. You, of all people, know exactly the standard Seneca requires of his pupils. Akakios had not the intellect or the self-restraint under pressure that was necessary. You will have seen that, I think, by now.’
‘But an impetuous man can kill as easily as one trained by Seneca. Watch him, he’s there now.’
Akakios was waiting for them at the entrance to the vestibule, bearing two knives and a sheathed blade. He was of Assyrian descent, which gave him the height and the angular hawk’s nose and the sharp-arrow eyebrows that pointed up in perpetual surprise. Always bitter, his face was scored now with a freshly kindled hatred.
‘Where were you last night?’ he asked, as Pantera and Nero emerged into the sunlit morning.
That he could speak so abruptly in the presence of his emperor spoke greatly of his power in the court. That the Ubians stepped away to give him privacy said even more.
With a further prayer of thanks to the half-starved urchin from the docks, Pantera said, ‘I spent the evening with my foster-father, Seneca, who once had the honour of serving his excellency. He has borrowed the lodgings of Fabius Africanus, legate to the Fourteenth legion. Afterwards, I took a room at the Striding Heron. It’s a rude place, but clean enough, and—’
‘At the docks?’ Nero said. ‘Full of fishermen and boys? We know it. Rude, as you say, but the fare is wholesome. Now you are here and I see Akakios has brought you a pair of throwing knives to use in our defence. You are expert in these, I believe?’
‘I have some small skill, lord.’
The knives were a matched pair, one balanced for a right-handed throw, one for left, with the weighting set subtly off centre for each. They had sanded beech handles, and plain iron blades. They were, in fact, the very image of the ones Pantera had left in his trunk in the inn, except that these did not have the mark of Mithras on the hilt. Pantera rubbed his thumb over the place, to see if it had been sanded away, and decided not.
‘They are perfect, lord. With these and the third at my belt, I believe I can keep you safe from any two or three men who may come against you. If there are more, we may have to fight together.’
‘Back to back, as the Gauls do?’
‘Exactly so.’
It had been a jest, offered as a foil on which the emperor could claim his battle skills.
Instead, smiling to show he had seen the joke, Nero said, ‘Then we had better hope our other defenders are prepared to give their lives in our defence, for we have not mastered the skills of battle. Our energies have all been on the chariots. You don’t race? A pity. We need someone of mettle who can … Wait!’
They were still within the line of the Ubian guards. Nero reached for a blade from the nearest. Without hesitation, it was given. The emperor was not deft, but he was not as clumsy as he allowed others to think. He swung round, setting the blade’s edge on Pantera’s bare skin at the place where his neck met his shoulder above his new court tunic. The scar was there, that had been made by a spear’s head and continued into a burn.
‘Kneel.’
Pantera knelt. The stone pathway was cold beneath his shins. Fragments of grit pressed into his knees. His left ankle ached suddenly. For a man who thought he wanted to die, he felt an uncommon desire not to do so now, with Akakios’ toxic shadow sliding between him and Aerthen’s presence. He licked his lips and found his mouth dry as a summer river, and sharply metallic, as if he had licked his own knife blade.
Nero moved the sword on to his collar bone and let it rest there. ‘You are not a citizen of Rome, is that correct?’
‘It is, lord.’
‘Which is why the legionaries in Britain were able to do to you what they did. If you had been a citizen, they could not have acted thus.’ The blade stroked across the scars on his shoulder. ‘We wish to rectify that. In any case, we cannot be seen to be guarded by a man who lacks the necessary status. What ever would the senate say?’
Nero laughed. Belatedly, the men around him laughed too, except Pantera, who studied the black eyes and saw no mirth in them. The blade drew a sliver of blood, much as his own had from Math in the alley’s dark.
‘What would you have of me, lord?’
‘That you swear to uphold the laws and honour of Rome. That you swear to defend my life and that of my family before all other lives, including your own. That you acknowledge the genius of your emperor as your guiding light. Do you so swear?’
Pantera swayed in the morning light. Voices from his childhood murmured in his head, bypassing the echoes of his more recent past; his mother was there, and his father, and Seneca. What do you live for but to earn your citizenship?
They were all wrong; Pantera had never lived for it, only used it as the mark by which he might have measured his own success. Britain had taken that from him. He had no concept of success since Aerthen’s death.
He said, ‘I do so swear.’
‘Rise,’ said Nero. ‘You are Roman, and so the fullest of humans. Now, Sebastos Julius Abdes Pantera, you will escort us to the chariot grounds and guard us as we inspect the teams. If you can pick for us the winner, we shall be well pleased.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was said of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus that he would often pass incognito through the slums of Rome at night, listening to the talk in the taverns and the baths to assure himself of his people’s care for him. It was further said that he knew chariots, horses and racing as if they were his profession, and could pick a good team by sight at a hundred paces.
Walking with him through the bright, blustery morning, beside the oval sawdust-lined training track, stopping among the great sea of traders’ booths before the four long barns that housed the race teams, watching the ease with which he caught an eye and drew a man to him, to talk of horses, of chariots, of the drivers, of the odds on one team or the other, of the training to win a race, Pantera could imagine both of these tales to be true.
Nero no longer wore gems in his hair or paint on his eyelids. Were it not for the unusually wide band of porphyry at the hem of his toga, and the fact that his face was on every coin in the empire, the crowd around them would not have known that their emperor passed among them, pausing here at a booth to examine the craftsmanship, or slowing there by the ropes at the head of the training track, wreathed in the rich, ripe fog of resin and horse manure, to watch the first of the quadrigas begin the slow warm-up before the race.
As it was, men, women and – belatedly – children bent their knees as soon as they realized who was among them, but it was all behi
nd, after he had passed, so that Nero’s progress was that of a scythe through corn, leaving untidy rows felled in his wake.
None of it made life easier for Pantera in his role as bodyguard. Unlike any of his immediate predecessors, Nero had not taken a full company of praetorians to protect him in this sortie among his people, but only a small retinue of four companions amongst whom were Akakios and a pair of nervously alert Ubians, who had instructions to keep their weapons sheathed except in extremity. Pantera therefore gave only as much attention to the horses as Nero required at any given moment, and kept watch in turn on the wide plain in front, the training track to his right, and the booths and wooden horse barns lined up to his left.
The promised storm from the day before had not yet come; the morning was set fair, with white goosedown clouds flying before a brisk wind. Ahead, the sky met the earth in a long, smooth arc that left Pantera slightly giddy. After the mountains of Britain, it was strange to be in a place with no hills to carve open the perfect spread of the horizon.
The grassy plain that stretched from the magistrate’s residence to the hippodrome was open and flat. If a man was intent on exposing himself to danger, it was not a bad place to choose. No hills broke the perfect hemisphere of the horizon, no spinneys hid the horses of a mounted ambush, no rocky outcrops served to hide a company of archers, or spearmen, or armoured infantry. But the traders’ stalls, healers’ booths and cooking fires that lay sprawled in a veritable village to the left of the sawdust pathway were a nightmare of open possibilities and the horse barns beyond were worse: four long, low buildings with shadowed doorways along their lengths and narrow grassed alleyways between.
At the nearest end, almost blocking the path between the barns, clusters of tents marked the professions that kept each team running: the wainwrights, the harness-makers, the loriners, the boys who boiled the axle grease, the weavers who made the banners. Above each flew the colours allocated for this race: Red at the front for the magistrate, then Blue, then White and finally the Green of the home team.
‘The Red team will win, of course,’ Nero said. ‘The horses were a gift to the magistrate from the king of Parthia, who wishes to buy our favour and does it by flattering our friends. That team we cannot buy, and so our task for today is to decide which of the other three teams is worthy of our attentions and our gold. They are the best in Gaul. One of them must be good enough.’
Following the emperor’s gaze, Pantera saw a team of four grey colts grazing at the side of the track further down near the hippodrome. As yet they bore no ribbons in their manes to identify them, but even at this distance, with the high walls of the wooden hippodrome behind, it was clear these four were of a different stamp to their thicker, heavier brethren who ran for the other teams.
Pantera had lived five years in Britain where the tribes prided themselves on breeding horses to beat the world. The women of those horse runs would have given an entire year’s crop of colts for even the least of these.
Pointing, he said, ‘That’ll be the Red team there? The four matched greys? They look fit to beat anything Gaul could produce. Are they the magistrate’s gift?’
‘They must be. Come.’ Nero’s cheeks dimpled with the pleasure of finally finding a man who understood his passion. Together, he and Pantera turned back towards the training track.
The magistrate’s team of gift-horses was momentarily blocked from sight by the passing of two other beribboned teams – chestnut colts sporting Blue and a team of blacks spectacular in White – already hitched and warming up ostentatiously before groups of watchful gamblers who changed the odds with each slow circuit. Knowing they were watched, the drivers trotted sunwise on the thick layer of sawdust, showing off their paces, but not tiring their horses. In the race, they travelled in the opposite direction; knowing this made the difference.
The colts in both teams were snappy and moody, snaking bites at their teammates and opponents. Their drivers called to them, cajoling and threatening in turn. Other men ran alongside, shouting instructions and encouragement, or calling for a stop to change the set of the harness. Only the local Coriallum team was not out yet, and still last in the betting.
The grey colts grazing at the track’s end had not even been harnessed, which said a lot for the confidence of their driver, but even as the emperor’s party turned to watch, two boys in the magistrate’s livery began to weave ribbons of brightest scarlet into their manes, leaving the ends hanging loose to fly back as banners with their speed.
Appreciatively, Nero said, ‘They’re built of the wind, with desert storms in their blood and stars lighting their feet. They’ll win today unless each of them breaks a leg; they outmatch the others by more than a track’s length without trying.’
‘If you wanted to buy a team to race in Rome, surely these are they?’ Pantera asked.
‘But Cornelius Proculus, the magistrate, has long been our friend, and these are his heart’s joy; it would be theft for us to buy them from him. In any case, they may be fast as the wind now, but they won’t stay that way for long.’
To Pantera’s frustration and the evident consternation of the Ubian guards, Nero turned away from the peeled hazel barrier at the edge of the training track and turned left towards a leather-worker’s stand set back amongst half a dozen others, where he fingered a tooled woman’s belt with images of storks and cranes set about it, the better to bring on a child.
To Pantera, he said, ‘Parthian horses are weak in the hocks and can’t manage the constant tight turns of a chariot track for more than half a season. We need horses that will last all year, if not longer. There will be another team here today that will be the one to take with us to Rome. We will buy it, and its driver, and all who come with it, and make it our own. In time, if the horses prove suitable, we will race them ourselves.’
A wave of a finger saw one of the Ubians reach into his purse to buy the belt.
The stall-tender, crimson with shock, or pleasure, or terror, fell to his knees, protesting in halting Latin that it must be a gift, that he could not possibly accept money from his emperor whom he adored and who was doing him the most exceptional honour of attending his unworthy stall.
He was given a gold coin in any case, which was a hundred times the worth of what he might have dared ask for the belt. The air rang with the emperor’s praises as they passed on.
Notoriously, Nero said of himself that he was the most popular emperor Rome had ever seen. In Coriallum in northern Gaul, if only on that day, it was true.
The imperial group moved deeper into the sprawl of booths and stalls. Pie-vendors bawled their wares. Bolts of woollen cloth, plain or dyed, lay in neat rows on wooden planks, to be untidied by a thousand feeling fingers by the day’s end. A healer’s booth was marked by a rag of torn white linen showing that the occupant was a woman and would undertake a childbirth. Closer to the horses, harness-makers plied their wares. Nero stopped at several to feel the quality of the leather, but, to the chagrin of the vendors, did not buy.
Keeping abreast of his emperor, watching ahead on both sides for signs of ill intent, Pantera said, ‘Talk in the tavern this morning was that the team of black colts from Gallia Lugdunensis running under the White banner might win the race if the magistrate’s horses all died in the traces. Blue and Green were not words on the lips of anyone sober enough to think.’
‘Truly?’ Nero raised a delicately plucked brow. ‘The magistrate seemed to think the local team was good. But they drew Green in the lottery for colour, and while it may be for Ceres and the vernal season, in our experience it is always unlucky. Perhaps we make it so by believing it; we are emperor and such things are not unknown, but it cannot be changed. Come, we shall go to the horse barns and view the second teams. Sometimes the ones that do not race are better than those that do.’
Pantera spun in alarm. ‘My lord, as your bodyguard, I must protest—’
He fell silent as Nero caught his arm. Men around them looked away, too quickly. The Ubians
raced forward, laying hands to their sword hilts, but not yet drawing. Akakios was already there. His knife blade glanced in the blustery sun. Its tip was dulled with a brown, waxy resin.
Nero dismissed them all with a wave of one finger, as an infant might wave away a wasp.
‘Walk with us alone, Leopard,’ he said. ‘We would speak to you in private.’
Given no option, Pantera followed where his emperor led, leaving Akakios and his poison behind. To their left and in front, stall-tenders fell silent and bowed. Word of their coming was spreading even as they walked.
Ahead were the four horse barns, with their thin oak-planked sides and roofs thatched with reed from the river’s edge. Grassy avenues the width of a chariot’s length kept them apart. Manure heaps smouldered at the end of each, ripening the air.
The colours flew above them, snapping in the wind: Red for Mars, battle and summer, which had been taken by the magistrate and not entered in the colour lottery the day before when the other three teams drew their ribbon. In that lottery, Lugdunum, capital of Gallia Lugdunensis to the south, had won White for winter. Blue was for autumn, the colour drawn by Noviomagus across the easterly border, who fielded the best team from Gallia Belgica. Green, as Nero had said, was for spring and Ajax had drawn it for Coriallum. Thus all three parts of Gaul were represented, plus the magistrate’s team, racing for him alone.
Nero and Pantera turned down the barn side, passing the Red-bannered barns of the magistrate on the way to the White of Lugdunensis. Here, boys were still mucking out, heaving straw on to the manure heaps with a demented speed, desperate to get their task done before the race began. At the barn itself, four black heads peered at the incomers from open-fronted stalls; the second-string horses, left behind and unhappy for it.
Nero walked up and fussed the first, looking behind to check that his retinue had not strayed too close. Satisfied, he planted himself near a barn and set both fists on his hips. It was a practised pose: old statues had shown his ancestor Julius Caesar thus.