by M C Scott
He said, ‘Pantera, the Leopard, we wish you to work for us. Akakios’ loyalty is beyond question, but he has shown himself to be reckless in his execution of orders. And as you have confirmed, he was not of the status that Seneca required. We believe you are his superior in the field of espionage.’
Pantera let a horse nudge his elbow, and teased a tangle from its mane. He kept his face studiously still. ‘I am flattered, lord, and what you say might once have been true, but I am not the man I was. As you have been told, I am damaged, possibly beyond repair. Akakios is whole, which is worth more than it may seem. He is reckless because he feels it necessary. Like an unruly race colt, it may be that he could be calmed by a judicious hand on the reins.’
Crowds were growing at the far end of the barn. Pantera began to walk away from the horses, leading the dance for the first time. Nero followed, twining together three strands of black mane hair that he had pulled loose.
‘We could compel you,’ he said.
‘Undoubtedly. But a man does not spy well who has been broken to another’s will. I believe we touched on that this morning in the magistrate’s garden.’
They passed beyond the boys mucking out and came away with the mellow ripeness of manure scenting their clothes.
Feeling his way to the truth, Pantera said, ‘To be a good spy, a man must immerse himself in the identity of another, and I have done that for too long in Britain to be able to do it again successfully now. I must be myself again, and find what that is, before I can ever take another’s place. I can’t believe there is such peril to Rome that it would not be better served by Akakios, however much it pains me to say so.’
‘Gods alive, why are we ever surrounded by arrogance!’ Nero bounced his balled fist off the oak plank of the barn. White-lipped, he said, ‘There is such peril. Would we ask you else?’
It was necessary to resist a matching anger. With fragile calm, Pantera said, ‘What nature of peril, lord?’
‘The Phoenix Year; what do you know of it?’
‘Nothing.’ He had said the same to Seneca. ‘Should I?’
‘If you love Rome and would save it from burning, you should, yes.’
They turned together into the next avenue between the barns. Green banners flew from the roof of the barn to their right, bright as spring grass. On the turf in front, the quadriga stood almost ready to race: a marvel of woven wicker, with fine larch spars bound in oiled bull’s hide and sinew, made to be light and flexible and yet strong enough to last the full seven laps, if not necessarily any further.
Two geldings waited ready in the traces, bright chestnuts, red as gold, with the grass-green ribbons of the corn goddess already woven into their manes and tails. A lanky youth came out of the barn, glanced left and right, and, satisfied, knelt at the back of the chariot, working on the harness. If he had noticed Pantera and the emperor, he did not recognize either man. From within the horse barns, a younger voice murmured the tones that every horseman uses to calm a fractious horse. Impatient hooves slammed on hard earth soon after.
Nero stood in the shadow of the reed roof’s overhang, watching.
With a prickle of premonition, Pantera said, ‘You said Rome would burn. What has that to do with the Phoenix Year?’
‘If we knew that, we would not need to ask you!’ Nero made a visible grasp for calm. ‘A prophecy is in circulation of which we have secured a part. It says that if Rome burns in the Phoenix Year, it will bring about a miracle.’
‘And the Phoenix Year is …?’
‘A thing of Alexandrian making, and perhaps of the pyramid-priests before them. As you know, a year is not exactly three hundred and sixty-five days long, but exceeds that number by a small amount. Those who know of such things measure the leftover hours in each year beyond the three hundred and sixty-five days and gather them together.’
The emperor was pacing now, watching the horses and Pantera equally. ‘Once every fourteen hundred and sixty years, the sum of those hours adds up to an entire year which they name for the Phoenix, believing that at midsummer of that year, after three days of death, the flame-bird arises from the ashes of its own destruction and soars up to perch in the upper branches of a date palm.’
‘And we are nearing such a year, or you would not speak of it.’
‘We are in it. The year began on the ides of August.’
The crowds were coming nearer again. It did not do to stand still. Pantera moved off into a bright place of safety, where all directions could easily be seen. Akakios came into view behind, but did not approach too closely.
Out on the training track, the four grey colts belonging to the magistrate were safely harnessed. A driver in the long grey battle-cloak of the Parthians, bordered in red with inlaid threads of gold, was trotting them round the track.
Nero was not watching. He said, ‘Can you read Greek?’ and at Pantera’s nod, pressed into his hand a piece of folded papyrus, thin as a leaf, such as the Alexandrians use for their writing.
Unfolded, the surface was clean, the writing neat and professionally done, with lines of even size and spacing, straight as a rule. Pantera read it once to himself, and then again out loud, to prove that he could.
‘… and thus will it come about in the Year of the Phoenix, on the night when the … there is a gap here … when the – something unknown – shall gaze down in wrath from beyond the knife-edge of the world, that in his sight shall the Great Whore be wreathed in fire, and burned to the utmost ashes, seared to nought in the pits of her depravity. Only when this has come to pass shall the Kingdom of Heaven be manifest as has been promised. Then shall … here’s another gap … be rent, never to be repaired, and all that was whole shall be broken and the covenant that was made shall be completed in accord with all that is written.’
In the gusting morning, with the sharp colours of the banners crisp against the late morning sky, with the chatter of children and the crying seagulls at the harbour, Pantera felt the world grow still and quiet.
Nero said, ‘Pantera?’
‘My lord, forgive me, this is … a deeper thing than I had imagined.’
‘So you understand it?’
‘Some of it, I think. Not all.’
Animated, Nero said, ‘It is the Hebrews, isn’t it? They believe in the Kingdom of Heaven, a time when their god will rule over all others, when their laws will be the only laws, when all men must be circumcized and refuse the meat of idols. Our uncle Claudius had them banned from our seat of rule seventeen years ago. We could do the same thing again.’
‘It is Hebrew in concept,’ Pantera agreed. ‘But only a fanatical few desire it and even they know that you would raze Jerusalem to the ground if they so much as contemplated burning Rome. If there’s a fire, it will not be lit by any man who cares for Judaea.’
He folded the note squarely, and handed it back to the emperor. ‘This is a copy,’ he said. ‘The gaps are deliberately made to leave the full meaning unknowable, particularly the date of the burning. May I see the full script?’
Nero shrugged. ‘We don’t have the original. Akakios … retrieved this from a Syrian messenger who was endeavouring to sell it. For a further sum of gold – a quite extortionate sum – the highest bidder was to be given the prophecy in full, which would give the date when the fire must occur and also a greater insight into what might be rent thereafter.’
‘The Syrian, then, can tell you where to find what you seek.’
‘Regrettably not.’
‘He died under questioning?’
Nero pulled a face. ‘As you have noted, Akakios is reckless. But the Syrian knew nothing of the prophecy or where it was kept. He hadn’t seen it or read it and knew nothing beyond that a white-haired, hoarse-voiced man had given him the copies and charged him with getting the best price for each. That much, I believe.’
‘Where did this take place? Where was he given the copies?’
‘In an inn named for the Black Chrysanthemum which is on the Street of the Lame
Lion in Alexandria.’ Nero spoke the place names as if they were sacred text. ‘He believed the vendor to have been a local astrologer, but could not be sure. The man spoke Greek with a local Alexandrian accent, and had ink stains on his fingers.’
Pantera laughed, and only late remembered that to do so in front of one’s emperor was not wise. ‘Astrologers in Alexandria are like fishermen in Coriallum: every second man makes it his profession and those in between believe they know more but simply don’t choose to make money thereby.’
‘And to say he was old, white-haired and greedy is merely stating a fact of all astrologers. We know this.’
The emperor leaned back against the stables, chewing his lip. Pantera moved to get the best view of both ends of the row. Around them, the barn was coming to life as, at last, the Green team began to make ready. The lanky youth at the chariot moved round and began to work on the harness on the offside. He gave every appearance of not yet having noticed the presence of his emperor.
Beyond him, a smaller, thinner boy with grubby blond hair and a tear in the hem of his tunic brought two fresh colts out of the barn, one rope held in either hand. His charges danced and spun irritably beside him. They were not of the calibre of the magistrate’s team, but Pantera would happily have bet the contents of his purse on their coming second.
Nero, too, was watching them. Absently, he said, ‘I was there when the Syrian spoke to us, so that I could hear the truth of it. At the end, he said something that was true, out of his love for me, not because it was wrenched from him by pain.’ He frowned, remembering. ‘He said that the prophecy is harmless to me and to Rome unless someone wishes so badly to bring about the Kingdom of God that they count it as nothing to murder thousands of men, women and children. What kind of man does that?’
‘The kind who hates Rome and Jerusalem equally,’ Pantera said, carefully. He, too, was watching the horses. ‘Men like that are few, and there are ways to find those with whom they conspire, although I doubt if they’re in Gaul, or even … my lord, forgive me, this is a subject of great weight, but I think we must speak of it later if we are not to see bloodshed. Those two chestnut colts are going to fight.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Math saw Pantera at the moment before Brass bit his arm hard enough to draw blood, and then lunged for Bronze.
In a morning filled with bad omens, it was the worst. First, Ajax had been called away by the magistrate’s steward to a meeting of the four race-drivers and had not yet returned. Then Lucius, the motherless son of a mange-ridden street dog who was the elder of Ajax’s two apprentices, had taken to fiddling with the traces and refused to help harness the two lead colts.
Lucius was sixteen years old, lanky and callow with bad skin and crooked teeth, and he was scared of horses. Gordianus had been his uncle, which was the only reason he had been given the apprenticeship, and Ajax, who could be breathtakingly soft at times, had promised to let him finish.
He and Math hated each other, and Lucius had taken to spending the nights in town with one of the newly arrived harness-makers, coming back with stories of work that far exceeded anything Math’s father could do. Ajax had neither listened to him nor beaten him into silence. Math was waiting for the day either might happen.
True to form, Lucius had spent the night before race-day in town and come back looking ragged and tired. He had been more than usually afraid of the colts all morning, and had not denied it when Math shouted the accusation, just put his head down by the back wheel and made a show of fixing the harness. Left alone, knowing that the other three teams were already out on the training track, Math had done what seemed best and brought the two colts out together.
His mother had always taught him, and from the first days of his apprenticeship Ajax had agreed, that if he were ever to harness the quadriga on his own, Math should always lead out the colts as a pair. Brought out singly, whichever of the two was put first in the traces was likely to fight the new one coming in and, as Ajax said at least once every morning and often in the afternoons and evenings as well, the colts were built of meat and bone and fury, while the chariots were of fragile wood and wicker. ‘Better to lose a bit of skin off a colt than the entire racing chariot.’
Ajax had never, Math thought, owned his own race-chariot before, while everyone in the world had owned a colt or two by the time they were twenty.
So he did as he was told and brought out Brass and Bronze together, the two chestnut colts, seven years old, in the primes of their lives, race-fit and lethal and, as Ajax had said, filled with fury.
They hated each other; it was what made them so exceptionally good, and so exceptionally difficult to handle. For the right driver, who could take all that rage and turn it into speed, they would run their hearts out to best each other, and so win the race. With the wrong driver, a man who lost his concentration, or did not have the beasts’ respect, they could run themselves to a halt and fight in the traces, wreaking havoc on the track. Math had seen that happen once, and never wished to again.
Getting them into the traces in the first place was his responsibility and, on the morning of the emperor’s race, it had seemed for a while as if he might succeed.
He had prayed to Nemain of the moon and to Manannan of the seas, who had become something of a favourite with the boys who plied the docks, and to his mother, who was his patron god and had bred the colts. With all that divine help, he had backed Brass and Bronze nearly up to the bar, with the two rearmost geldings standing peacefully enough.
And then Math saw two men standing in the avenue between the horse barns, and while the wealthier of the two was a stranger the other was Pantera, who was looking at him with exactly the same look he had given when Math had not returned the cheese the night before. For a fleeting moment, Math lost his focus on the colts, and the sky fell on his head.
‘Keep them away from the chariot!’
He had time to scream that, and haul both the lead ropes forward, before the world blurred to sky and turf and hooves and pain and his shoulder was wrenched from its socket and the colts were screaming and Lucius was screaming louder and higher, like a pig at slaughter, and other voices were shouting …
‘Math! Lord, stay back! Math, let go! Lord, you must not be injured, please stay back. Math, will you let go, I’ve got him.’
Math let go of Bronze and held on to Brass and hoped he had them in the right order. Not that he had any choice: Brass’s rope had become wrapped round his arm and he couldn’t have got free if he’d wanted to. With the hated enemy taken out of reach, the big chestnut colt reared one more time and came down, shaking and blowing and stamping, but no longer fighting.
Panting, bleeding, too shocked to speak, Math stood in a bubble of calm, with Pantera close by holding Bronze and looking, briefly, equally shaken.
They were not alone, although for a moment it had seemed so. A great many people stood around. A glance at either end of the barn showed a massive, flame-haired warrior-guard standing with his weapon bared, blocking entry. People crowded beyond, trying to see in, to find gossip to spread, but dared not pass. In the quiet avenue, Lucius sobbed piteously and was rightly being ignored. A number of young men in immensely expensive tunics, with silver and gold at their belts and fatly jingling purses, stood around, looking interested and amused in equal proportion.
The youngest of them, and the most expensively dressed – in a toga, actually, not a tunic, and with purple around the hem – was leaning down, examining Bronze’s off fore as if he knew what he was doing, ignoring, as he did so, Pantera’s strident protest.
So there was one man in the world who could ignore Pantera with impunity. In his dazed state, Math found that as interesting as what the young man was saying.
‘He’s bleeding. Is there a healer?’
‘Me,’ cawed a woman’s voice, in Gaulish, and Math spun round to see Hannah, looking uncommonly shabby, as if she had paused to wipe muck on her bare arms and scruff her hair and taken pains to coarsen her voice
.
It was hard to believe someone so unclean could be a healer. Certainly the young man looked as if he were about to dismiss her, when a commotion at the end of the stands told of Ajax confronting the big flame-haired guard who was blocking his way to his horses.
Bronze and Brass heard him, and perhaps saved his life, for the warrior-guard had raised his sword and, far from backing off, Ajax’s face had grown very still the way it did before a race. Math heard Pantera say, ‘Mithras, no!’ very quietly, under his breath, and then Brass and Bronze spun and reared and threw their heads back and screamed a clarion call for their master.
The sound carried all over the barns and the training track and the hippodrome, and made everyone else fall silent.
‘Lord, that’s the driver. The guard would do well to let him past.’ Pantera was diffident. That was new, too; he had been a great deal less than diffident with Seneca. But the wealthy youth in the toga listened and called an order, and the guard-giant lowered his sword and stood back just enough to let a single man step through.
Ajax was in driving mood. Even Hannah knew better than to go near him when he first stepped down from a chariot after a race, and he looked the same now: white-faced and grim, fit to kill anyone who came against him, not out of anger, but just because the need to win was so profound that he would clear anyone from his path to do it.
Pantera was in his path. In fact, to Math it seemed as if Pantera had put himself in his path, directly in front of the youth with the toga.
For a moment, Pantera, too, looked as if he had stepped off a chariot, tense and relaxed at the same time and with that careful, still look to his face that took in everything equally. He angled his head so that his eyes met Ajax’s and the world held its breath a moment, as each took the measure of the other.
Then Pantera shook his head, to himself or to Ajax or both, and turned to the youth and said smoothly, ‘Lord, I believe this is Ajax of Athens, driver of the Green chariot that will race today for your entertainment. Ajax, you are in the presence of Nero Claudius Germanicus, emperor of Rome.’