by M C Scott
Pantera, Shimon and Seneca lay a long while afterwards. The wind rose and a thin rain stuttered, so the pearl sky became steadily pewter with streaks of sulphured yellow over the ocean where the clouds were most dense.
At last, Pantera rose to a crouch and dusted off his tunic. ‘All three were at the races earlier this morning.’ He turned to his left and bowed. ‘My lord Shimon, are you well?’
The old zealot grinned. ‘Apart from the smell of pig, I am exceedingly well. It’s been far too long since I hid on a rooftop. They are gone and will spend a happy afternoon searching where we have been. But I think they won’t go back to the room where we first started. Shall we return?’
They were stiff, and the jump down to the lower wall was not without mishap and swearing, but soon enough another wall-run and a jump down brought them back at the rear of the whorehouse with its clean, spare room already paid for.
Shimon went first, kicking his bare feet into the gap where the shutter slid back, tucking his tunic close to his buttocks so that he might not show his nakedness. Seneca followed less elegantly but with as much decorum. Pantera slid in like a fish and found himself between the other two. They stood all three, breathless as children with laughter and fear.
‘That was neatly done,’ Shimon said. ‘How long have we here?’
Pantera pulled the shutter across. In one corner, a shelf stood host to a small oil lamp with flint and tinder beside. He lit it and trimmed the wick until the light feathered the room, then set it beside the bed.
‘The room has been paid for until dusk,’ he said. ‘We’ll be gone long before then. What we have to do won’t take long.’
He sat with his back to the wall, looping his hands behind his head. ‘If I may reprise,’ he said, ‘you wish to prevent the destruction of Jerusalem while my lord Seneca wishes to prevent the burning of Rome, as does Nero. The man you call the Apostate wishes to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven and so will do his best to destroy Rome and then Jerusalem. It seems to me that the first may be easy – Rome is a tinder box and fires run through it like mould through cheese – but Jerusalem is not for the taking.’
‘If the young men rebel, Nero will send in the legions,’ Shimon said. ‘He has promised it. They’ll raze Jerusalem to the ground.’
‘And will the young men rebel?’ Pantera asked.
The old zealot nodded sadly. ‘Jerusalem, like Rome, is a tinder box waiting for the match. Every day I wake fearing I will hear news that riots have already begun.’
‘Then why are you not there, stopping them?’ It was Seneca who asked that, from his place by the door.
‘Because I used to be of the war party.’ Shimon’s gaze sought Pantera’s and held it. ‘In the days when the Galilean led us in constant battle against Rome, I was known as his lieutenant. I am old now, and I have seen what Rome can do. I will do what I can to work for peace, but I can’t speak for it with any credibility.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘I am here in Gaul for two reasons. First was to seek out the prophecy – we had heard that it was circulating and that it would be where Nero was. But I would have been here anyway, to speak with the Galilean’s daughter, to ask if she would come back with me to speak against her brothers in the name of peace.’
‘And will she?’
‘No. She has not said as much, but I fear not. Her life is here. Her troubles are not ours. Which leaves me with a question.’
He raised his old, tired eyes. The exhilaration of earlier had gone, but not the unbending pride. In formal Aramaic, he said, ‘Through you, I have found the prophecy – and yet it remains incomplete. To keep my people safe, I must find the prophet, and thereby discover the date on which Rome is set to burn, that I may prevent it. All other things lead from that. May I ask if Pantera, foster-son to my lord Seneca, would undertake to find this for those who used to be his people?’
There was time, in the pause before Pantera spoke, to hear the sow grunt again up the street, to hear a merchant on the dock discover that his purse had been cut, to hear the race crowds begin to leave the hippodrome and flow down the hill.
In the small, thyme-scented room, Pantera said, ‘I regret not,’ and meant it. ‘My emperor asked for my aid today in preventing Rome’s destruction and I refused him. With far greater sorrow, I fear I must also refuse you. I am not who I was and other things require my attention. I wish you luck, with my fullest apologies. And my earnest suggestion that we leave, and are not seen together again.’
They separated in the alley, Shimon to walk west towards his lodgings, Pantera and Seneca east to the tavern. Seneca waited until the pad of the old zealot’s footsteps could no longer be heard and then turned to Pantera.
‘Other things require my attention.’ He gave an effete lift to the words. ‘He’ll think you’re working for me.’
‘And he will be wrong.’
Pantera felt drained, as if he had marched his twenty miles and still had a way to go before he could rest. He said, ‘Nero saw Math at the races this morning. They walked the horses to the hippodrome together. The good citizens of Coriallum nearly died at the scandal.’
‘Ah.’ Seneca’s gaze was sharply amused. ‘How immensely fortunate that you don’t love the boy, nor he you.’
‘Will Nero kill him?’
‘He didn’t do such things when I ruled him, nor would he here, under the gaze of the magistrate. But in Rome, with the likes of Akakios and Rufus goading him to ever greater excesses? Yes. He’ll use Math, and then kill him. He won’t be able to help himself.’ Seneca turned and began to walk back towards the tavern. ‘If you would have the boy live,’ he said, ‘you will need to find something Nero values more highly and offer it in exchange. He understands that kind of bargaining. But it must be something he cannot get by other means.’
‘All I have to offer is myself.’
Seneca pursed his lips as if the idea were a novel one. Pantera caught his wrist and turned him round. ‘You said you didn’t want me to work for Nero.’
‘I don’t. I want you to work for me. But if, in doing so, you were to appear to take a commission for Nero, that would be different.’ Seneca was held in a patch of sunlight. His skin had the transparency of the old, but his eyes were sharp with plans laid and threads aweaving. ‘I love Rome. I have given my life to her and I don’t want to see her burn. Very few people have what it takes to stop this, perhaps only one.’ Seneca’s blue-veined hand caught Pantera’s chin and tilted it as it had when he was a child. ‘Will you do this for me?’ he asked. ‘Please?’
In all their time together, Pantera had never known the old philosopher beg. The hope in his eyes was hard to bear, and harder to crush.
‘I can’t,’ Pantera said, and heard genuine anguish in his own voice. ‘You are Roman.’
Seneca departed as Shimon had; despondent, but still able to keep to the shadows and, once in the open, to affect the dejection of poverty that makes a man invisible.
From the darkness of the alley, Pantera watched him leave, then turned and made his way back along to the endmost house of the row. One of Goro’s younger boys sat in the shade of a bay tree not far away chewing a leaf and playing knucklebones, right hand against left. He did not look up as Pantera passed, but shook his head.
Pantera bent to retrieve a coin he had not yet dropped.
‘The shutter’s open,’ he said to the dust at his feet. ‘Was it so when you came?’
By way of answer, the boy attempted to toss five small bones from a sheep’s knee from the back of his left hand to his right. As they landed, wobbling, he nodded, as if in satisfaction at his own skill.
‘You’re sure nobody’s been?’
With a huff of irritation the boy looked up and met his eye. ‘You paid silver. I’m sure.’
Pantera cursed. It had been closed when he had first checked it, when Lucius had newly entered. He let a copper coin slide to the dust, checked both ways along the alley and, seeing no one, hopped the low stone wall of the brothel’s courtya
rd. Then, stepping over a small but noxious midden, he hooked a leg over the sill and eased himself into the room the boy had been watching.
It was late afternoon. By the sun’s grim light alone, Pantera saw the narrow wound in Lucius’ throat and the black blood that spilled from it.
The body was cold to touch, but still pliable. The hands held no last record of hair clutched or a face scratched. If he had known death was coming, Lucius had faced it bravely; his face was at peace. His purse held half a dozen coins, none of them silver. Pantera emptied it and passed the contents to Goro’s boy, who was leaning in through the window.
‘Go,’ he said. ‘Tell Goro there’s no need to watch the front any longer.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
A red roan bull lowed in the courtyard of the Roan Bull inn.
Leaning over her patient in the long upper room, Hannah wiped sweat from her forehead with a hand that was still wet with blood. Her hair stuck to her temple. Wearily, she rubbed at the place. The bull lowed again, more urgently.
‘It needs water,’ Hannah said. ‘Can someone take it some?’
As a living sign of the inn’s name, the bull had been penned for the day next to the road in the hope that the emperor might see it and be enticed inside by the novelty. It was known, however, that the emperor disdained filth, and so a boy had been paid to keep the beast’s hide curried to shining copper, its manger full of dry hay, its pen freshly swept of every outpouring of shit and piss, and its water trough full. Doubtless it had been done assiduously before the race.
The emperor had not yet chanced to visit, and hence the inn was not only largely empty but clean, with new, sweet rushes on the floor. The miracle of Math’s gold coin had persuaded the gap-toothed tavern-keeper to open his doors to the healer, her patient and the crowding members of the Green team who insisted on being allowed to follow them inside and up the unstable ladder to the big, broad upper room that took up the inn’s full length.
The gold bought also the innkeeper’s solicitude, if not his speed. With aching slowness, he had arranged a winch and ropes and a long table had been hauled up through the trapdoor and set in the centre of the room and Ajax laid on it.
Early in the chaos that followed, Hannah had recruited the bull boy to fetch water and then linen; Math’s gold had bought speed from him. She was aware that at some point she needed to find out where the gold had come from – he swore it was not stolen and she wanted to believe him – but for now Ajax was her most pressing concern.
The bull lowed again, less loudly. She heard a splash of water and the slobbering of bovine drinking and was glad of the quiet. Turning back to Ajax, she found that the gush of scarlet blood flooding from where a shard of wheel had pierced the top of his left leg had slowed to an oozing dribble, although that was not always a good sign; in Hannah’s experience, men who ran dry of blood often died soon after.
She examined again the lengths of blood-soaked linen for the volume they might hold and allowed herself to believe that her first frantic efforts to stem the tide had been successful and his body was working with her now, not against her. More worrying was the blow to the left side of his head that had left the whites of his eyes red, and might yet kill him. She could do nothing for that while he remained unconscious, hovering on the borders of death.
Her visitor of yesterday, the friend of her father, would have said Ajax was visiting the judge-god of the Hebrews, whose name must not be spoken. The Gauls in the Roan Bull tavern believed he was flying to the heights of the sky with Taranis, god of lightning, and might choose to stay in the heavens. The few Romans in the party – at least one of whom Hannah recognized as an agent of the emperor – insisted he was sailing with Charon halfway across the Styx and might yet persuade the ferryman to turn about and bring him back.
All of these, in their own ways, feared the grim dark of death and tried to fight it. In Alexandria, the men and women amongst whom Hannah had trained, and for whom she had the deepest respect, loved death as a gift, a place of colour and light and all-seeing, a journey to be undertaken joyously, as a homecoming.
Kneeling on the floor in the upper room of the Roan Bull tavern, Hannah of Alexandria acknowledged the truth of her own heart: that she desperately wanted Ajax to come back to the living and to her; she yearned for it, in fact.
That realization, the unexpected power of it, was her own surprise in a day of difficult surprises, and her secret. It had crept up on her, much as her care for Math had done, but more quietly so that she only faced it fully at the point when, examining his head, she had found that the hair growing through on Ajax’s scalp was gold and not black.
His eyebrows were black, the hair of his armpits was black; even, she had observed with the detachment of a physician, the hair about his groin was black. But the hair on his head was growing through gold as summer’s corn.
She had bound his crown with linen then, not because she imagined it would change the outcome of his conversations with death, but in order that nobody else might see what she had seen. Briefly, she found herself wondering what dye he used that was proof against sweat and rain. Then she had rolled him over and discovered what had happened to his ribs and all thoughts of hair and dye and rain had burned away in the need to heal him.
The damage was on his left side, halfway down, near the strongest beat of his heart. A crescent of bruised and broken flesh showed where a hoof had struck with the full force of a galloping colt. Hannah thought it the pair to the one that had struck his head, if only because, when she closed her eyes, she could see the moment when the outside lead colt of the White team, racing out of control, had run across the top of him. She thought she had screamed then, but in the noise of the hippodrome she had not heard it, and even now was not sure.
The ruined flesh under her fingers was warm but not hot; that much was good. The skin had peeled back, with a sand rash all round it. She winced at the imagined pain, and thought ahead to the salves that would help it, but it, too, was not lethal. A strip of bone glinted white at the deepest arc of the hoofprint and there, along its length, was a fine, linear bubble of air growing through the blood. It was no bigger than the nail on her small finger, but it grew and grew as he breathed, then popped and fell back, leaving her awaiting the next small eructation.
Her mother had taught her that there were times when listening was better than looking, and this was one of them. Pushing back her hair, she bent her head until her ear was tight on her patient’s sternum.
Ajax breathed in. Hannah closed her eyes and tracked the breath as it came down past her ear, then split into two parts. Her mother had showed her the path it took, opening the body of a dead coney and blowing down its nose, inflating first one side of the chest and then the other. Men, she had said, were the same inside, at least within the confines of the ribs.
Now, Hannah followed the right part of Ajax’s life-air. It sang as it passed, bubbling only slightly with the blood in his mouth where he had bitten his tongue. Night after night in her childhood, she had lain thus with her ear on her mother’s chest, listening to the flow of breath back and forth. Her mother’s death was a knife’s pain at each remembering. Hannah felt it now, and held her own breath, waiting for the moment to pass.
On the next inhalation, she followed the left life-path as it moved on down to the bruise. It didn’t so much sing as whisper and crackle; the creep of a spider through leaves. She moved her head a fraction and listened again as the air came close to the damaged tissues around the injury.
It crept, it crackled, it seeped out slowly at the place where the rib was cracked and the bubbles had formed, but even when she tapped her forefinger on the bridged arc of a rib, Ajax’s chest did not make the too-resonant drumbeat that foretold death, nor did she hear the hiss of air escaping in great quantities that often spelled the same.
When she lifted her head it seemed that already the bubbles were forming more slowly, and that his breathing was better with each breath. The pulses at his th
roat and wrists, too, were stronger. His tongue was bleeding less than it had.
Hannah straightened, pushing her hair from her face with the back of her wrist. A circle of men and boys watched her, making a ring of waiting eyes. Math was in the centre, of course, flanked by the wainwright and his four apprentices. Beyond them she recognized among the others the loriner’s wall-eyed son, the widower who brought the hay and corn and had, apparently, helped with the foalings since Math’s mother had died, the German twins who had built the barns near the hippodrome and the old man with the bent, arthritic fingers who was still best at breaking the young stock.
She found a smile for all of them, and did not know how tired she looked.
‘Ajax’s rib may be cracked,’ she said, ‘but he is not yet suffocating on the air he breathes. His bleeding has stopped. If his spirit chooses to return from the place it has gone, wherever that may be’ – she saw the wainwright’s boys make the sign for Tanaris where they thought she wasn’t watching – ‘he will live.’
Someone passed her a mug of clear water. She drank and said, ‘He won’t heal faster for being watched. If one of you stays, the rest could eat and drink. If Math’s gold will allow it?’
‘My gold will allow it,’ said a man’s voice to her left.
She turned, slowly, not knowing the voice, but recognizing its arrogance and fearing the damage it could do.
He stood with his back to a window, framed by the sun’s last light, a tall man, with a hawk’s nose and a high brow and black hair that fell straight as a rod to his shoulders. His bitter eyes raked across each of them.
Hannah found that she knew him after all. Akakios. In the nightmare of the walk to the hippodrome, with Nero’s presence scorching her skin, she had heard the name spoken. Thinking back, she believed Pantera had said it, so that she and Ajax would know.
Akakios flipped a coin high in the air, a small, spinning sun that held everyone’s gaze. By chance or design, Math caught it.