Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1

by M C Scott

  As Pantera had predicted, Akakios arrived to collect the team just as the sun nudged over the horizon.

  He required that they be cleansed of ash and the remnants of fire and when he found that they were already as clean as water could make them, he provided tunics of fresh new linen, bound at hem and sleeves with green. They were given each a leather belt buckled in silver, with the shape of a lyre emblazoned thereon. Math’s hair, which Hannah had washed and combed, was bound back with a fillet of silver. Ajax was brought a litter carried by four Dacian slaves and was not allowed to refuse, even when he showed he could walk.

  And so, as his physician, Hannah had to go with him, and did not have time to inform Akakios that she was not committed to the Green team, and might yet follow her father’s friend to Judaea, nor, when they were ushered into the magistrate’s empty garden, with the fountains silenced and the gilded birdcages covered out of respect for the dead, did she find an opportunity to say the same to Nero.

  The emperor entered, dressed in white for mourning, with few rings. He walked with the slow rhythm of the stage, used to denote a death. At the couch he reclined, gracefully. Through Akakios, he invited his guests to sit, and had them given food and watered wine. Out of sight, a single lyre played in perfect pitch.

  Pantera did not take food with them, but was ushered in by three vast Germanic guards a short while later. He, too, had washed since the night. Like Math’s, his hair was flat from water and the comb. Like Ajax, he walked stiffly; worse, Hannah thought, on his left leg. His new tunic of snowy linen was belted with silver, not leather, its buckle inlaid with lapis and ivory.

  He did not acknowledge Hannah, Math or Ajax. Walking between two of the guards, he came directly to the emperor and, kneeling at his feet, kissed his ringed hand. What oath he took they could not hear, but it pleased Nero and displeased Akakios equally. Nero slipped one of the rings from his thumb and gave it to Pantera, who accepted it with gravity and every outward appearance of humble gratitude.

  He was dismissed soon after and it was the Green team’s turn to be led forward one by one to swear fealty to their emperor, to accept his nomination as the third of his three teams in training in Alexandria and to listen to the details of their journey: a ship to be made ready before the first of October, a bare month away; the horses to be ready and fit to travel, having been on and off a ship daily for the intervening time; both training and racing chariots to be dismantled for transport; the loriners, wheelwrights and grooms to be fit to serve; a new leatherworker to be found, although the emperor, in his wisdom, had found one, a nervous individual of late middle years, so profoundly unremarkable in dress, hair and features as to be almost invisible.

  The new man’s nose ran with nerves. He cleared his throat with every second breath and wrung his hands throughout an unpromising introduction in which Akakios named him as Saulos, an Idumaean of good breeding fallen on hard times who was competent in leather working and desired to return to Alexandria, the city of his youth. Left to speak for himself, the man stammered his way through a salutation to the emperor, his hands twitching with terror.

  Gravely, Nero welcomed him to the team, although of course there could never be any as good as the sadly deceased Caradoc. The emperor had given his approval for the sky burial that had been proposed. It was fitting, he said, for so honest a man, whose son now carried the family’s honour.

  At last, Nero let his gaze drift to Math for the first time that morning. He nodded but refrained from anything more intimate. Math nodded solemnly in return and did not simper and Hannah breathed freely for the first time since rising.

  Soon enough, the team found themselves dismissed, free to return to the tents and the stares of their former compatriots. Ajax, who had climbed down from the litter as they passed out through the gates to the magistrate’s house and made himself walk from there to the tents, allowed Hannah to lead him into the shade and took the drink she made for him of mugwort and valerian and the barest sprinkling of poppy, designed to bring sleep and ease the pain. She mixed something similar for herself, without the poppy, in the hope that it might damp down the worst of the headache that had grown through the morning and now held her skull in its vice.

  * * *

  Pantera came later in the afternoon, when Ajax was still asleep and Hannah had persuaded even Math to cease tending the horses and lie down away from the sun’s worst heat.

  He squatted on the ground by the reddening ash of the fire and accepted an oat bannock with a smear of the soft white honey that had been a gift from the White team, delivered while they were away. After Caradoc’s death, no one begrudged them the win, it seemed. Even the Blues had sent a jug of ale and a set of racing bits as a gift.

  Hannah sat on a stone, nursing her headache, fretfully. ‘We washed,’ she said, ‘as you told us to.’

  He pulled a wry smile. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t stay to see you take your oaths. Was it bad?’

  ‘It was … decorous. The emperor understands how to mourn.’

  ‘He’s experienced enough of death to know how to behave. And he wishes to be seen above all as a ruler who cares for his people.’ He nibbled the edge of the oatcake, looking at her. ‘I heard a rumour you had been approached by a Hebrew. It is said you might yet go to Jerusalem.’

  The headache knifed at the back of her eyes. She squinted at him, shading her brow against the enemy sun with the edge of her hand. ‘Did Ajax tell you that?’

  ‘No.’ Pantera shook his head. ‘I’ve had time to ask some questions. It’s what I do.’

  He was looking at her, weighing her intelligence, or her awareness. Hannah thought of what she knew of him; a half-dozen meetings. Less. Flashes of wit and thoughtfulness and a striking ability to be in the right place at the right time. A realization came to her slowly, through the fogged pain in her head.

  ‘You’re a spy!’

  ‘I’m a good spy.’ His inflection robbed the word of its insult. ‘Better than Akakios. That’s why Nero wants me. That’s why I have to go to Alexandria. But if you choose to go to Judaea, Ajax will be left to care for Math alone.’

  ‘You think the rest of the Green team doesn’t love him like their own sons?’

  ‘I’m sure they do. But the rest of the Green team are provincial Gauls. They weren’t born and brought up in Egypt. They’ll be felled by the heat before they ever get off the boat. They’ll go mad at the sight of the first scorpions and faint at the snakes. And they’ll be too busy getting to grips with the rivalries in the compound to care for a boy who must break the rules or die of boredom.’

  ‘He might be different in Alexandria,’ Hannah said faintly. ‘The compound is locked against incomers and outgoers alike. He’ll be penned in with nothing to steal, and nowhere to go. He might take to racing and forget who he has been here.’

  ‘And snow might lie thick across the deserts in July.’ Pantera laid down his half-eaten bannock and leaned on one elbow on the dusty grass. ‘I came to make an offer, to you and to Math. I can’t travel with you, but I can stretch out my time here for a month. If nothing else, I can be looking for whoever tried to kill you all. In a month of nights, I can also offer to teach Math all that I can of spying, to build on that grounding so that he’ll have a chance to survive if he finds himself cast out alone. Thereafter, I’ll have to go to Alexandria and we may not meet until you’re well settled in. Will you go with him, at least that far, and stay that long? Or are you committed to go to Judaea with Shimon?’

  Far behind him, a man was teaching a boy the use of sword against shield. The sun glanced off the polished bronze boss into Hannah’s eyes. Blinded, with a knifing pain in her head, she put her palms over her face and stared into darkness, seeking a clear path forward.

  Thickly, she said, ‘In the night, I told Ajax I wasn’t part of the Green team.’

  Pantera said nothing. She took her hands from her eyes and found him looking at her with patient curiosity.

  ‘And this morning?’ he ask
ed. ‘Must the chaos of the night set the future’s path? Do you want to go to Jerusalem, to meet your cousins and persuade them that peace in servitude is preferable to war?’

  ‘No.’ With the saying of it, her headache began to ease. ‘I’ve never met them and they’ve never met me. My father died before I was born and my mother brought me up among the Sibyls. We would have nothing to say to each other that would not be better left unsaid.’

  ‘Then you could spare half a year at least.’ Pantera spread his hands. He was smiling, crookedly, with real humour. ‘Alexandria would be a very dull place without you.’

  II

  ALEXANDRIA, LATE SPRING, AD 64

  IN THE REIGN OF THE

  EMPEROR NERO

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In the still night, a single drop of water rolled the full length of a tin sluice and splashed into the lower of two bronze vessels. Somewhere deep within the surrounding globe of brass and silver, the added weight caused a pan to tip, a lever to edge forward, a sprung arm to ease back. Elsewhere, a ratchet shuddered towards the end of its hourly cycle.

  Math lay on his side on the sand beneath Nero’s great mechanical water clock, listening to the rumble of the falling water. If he held his breath and pressed his upper ear to the cold metal, he could hear each of the individual tubes and whistles making ready to strike the hour.

  Know your friends, the spy, Pantera, had said at the beginning of Math’s month of secret nocturnal tuition in Gaul. A bull pen is your friend, a dog kept kennelled through the night, the uneven line of a roof ridge. Each one of these will hide you if you let it. Come to know them intimately.

  The water clock was Math’s closest friend for the night and it told him the hour was nearly up. Covering his ears with his hands, he risked the last wriggle forward to where he could make out the outline of Nero’s geometric compound. The clock was its centrepiece, antique apple of the emperor’s eye, a gift from Alexandria’s elders to honour their Lord’s ambitions of Platonic perfection.

  Laid out in a triangle around the clock’s sphere were the three dormitories within which slept the members of Nero’s three chosen teams, Green, White and Blue, marked out by the roof tiles of verdigrised copper, limed shingles and deep blue clay pans respectively.

  At the end of the Blues’ line was a single chamber for Akakios in his role as overseer. A flag was bound to a mast there, as a sign that the emperor’s spymaster was not currently in residence, and that, instead, Poros of the Blues was in notional charge of the compound. It served as a timely warning; men – and boys – were flogged more often when Akakios was in residence and Math had promised the ghost of his father that if he saw the flag fluttering free he would turn round and go back to bed.

  Tonight, it wasn’t. Safe, at least from that quarter, Math looked out beyond the triangle of the dormitories towards the square made by the horse stalls, the kitchens and the dining area and then on to the oval training track to the north and finally to the wide circular palisade that enclosed the whole compound, keeping the teams in and the curious onlookers of Alexandria out. Thus were all the philosophers’ shapes fulfilled in Nero’s creation, that their wisdom might infuse the drivers and their teams with all the skills necessary to outmatch the best of Rome, while at the same time keeping them well clear of the betting syndicates that would have paid in gold for news of their form.

  That didn’t stop the team members from gambling amongst themselves. It didn’t, actually, stop them from laying bets outside the compound, just ensured that they were conducted secretly, and Math had only recently heard about it. The baker, apparently, was the conduit. His donkey cart drove in at dawn every morning laden with the day’s bread, and lately two or three of the loaves had contained gold in their heart, sent from the outside by men whose job it was to feed the betting circles of Rome with the information they needed to lay odds in the coming season. One of the Blues’ middle-ranking apprentices was said to be richer by three denarii as a result.

  Doubtless, he had laid most of his money on his own team. Of the three teams, the Blues from Galatia were far and away the best; everyone had at least one wager on their winning the trial.

  The Whites were from Cappadocia, which meant in their own tongue ‘Land of the White Horses’, which romantic fact, according to the guards, was the sole reason Nero had bought them here. Certainly it wasn’t for their skill.

  They were widely acclaimed as the pacemakers. Everyone who wasn’t actually a member of the Whites expected them to be sent home as soon as another team came along that stood a hope of thrashing the Blues.

  The Greens from Gaul were that team. All winter Ajax had trained under the eyes of the guards and the sensible money had been moving quietly in his direction for the past month. The fear amongst them all was that Ajax might fall ill or succumb to injury, for they lacked a credible second driver. Everyone agreed that Math had the talent, but he lacked the skill and experience to drive a winning team.

  In Gaul, his dream of driving had been a pale, bloodless fantasy besides the excitement of the dockside thieving. But Ajax was a good tutor, possibly the best, and here in the compound, where every man and boy lived and breathed racing, Math had found that he wanted to drive a racing team more with each passing day.

  Biting his lip, he dragged his mind back to the clock and the night; thoughts of racing ruined his concentration and tonight it mattered that he not make the same mistakes he had six months before.

  Then, he had been caught by the Egyptian guards as he tried to climb the palisade, and had paid the price. The penalty for boys caught trying to leave the compound was precise and, as his team leader, Ajax had been woken and dragged, yawning and cursing, from his bed to administer the flogging.

  The surprise of that had lasted at least for the start of what came after – because it was Ajax that Math had been following, and Ajax whom he had last seen very much awake and opening the small postern door with his key just before he had been caught.

  The surprise had not lasted long; very soon it was impossible to think, or to breathe, or to do anything but hold the image of his father in the forefront of his mind and not let it go. At the end, he remembered Hannah coming to carry him back to her cell, and the bitter taste of the drink she had given him, and how it had shrivelled his tongue even as it stole the pain and let him sleep.

  Afterwards, when Math was well enough to begin driving the horses again, he thought Ajax had treated him with more respect. Certainly he had pushed him harder, which was probably a good thing, even if the falls came more frequently and the bruises were worse.

  Even so, Ajax had not told Math that he was going to meet Pantera. Math found out only because he had smiled his particular smile for the melon-seller’s assistant every day through the entire winter and it had finally paid its dividend that morning, when the melon-seller had delivered to Ajax a gift of a bear standing with its claws outstretched towards half of a moon disc. Math, who had been given a secret glimpse beforehand, had read in it a message that he thought he understood.

  Which was why he was hiding under the water clock within sight of the palisade for a second time, six months older and wiser, with greater respect for the Egyptian soldiers who stood night-guard along the heights, and an absolute terror of Akakios, the emperor’s spymaster, and de facto overseer of the compound.

  The last drop of water rolled from flute to vessel. A pan tipped, a lever moved, a ratchet clicked suddenly off the end of its cycle. The entire clock shivered like a hound shedding water. Three hammers snapped forward, hard.

  In the silence of the compound, the great mother bell rang not quite loudly enough to wake those who slept. A flute whistled twice. A chime pierced the air with teeth-aching insistence.

  On its second ring, Math threw himself across the sand on his hands and knees to the foot of the palisade.

  Pressing up against the postern, he eased a key from within his tunic. Apart from Akakios’ master key, there were four other keys in the com
pound: one each for the three team drivers and the last given to the chief cook, who was trusted to go out to the markets. The cook had a fondness for wine and a particular boy of the White team and Math was betting the skin of his back that the key wouldn’t be missed before morning.

  His hands were shaking. Under the fading chimes of the water clock, the key hushed in the lock. The well-oiled door opened without a sound.

  Never go through any opening – a gate, a door, a curtain to a room, the entrance to a cave – if you are not certain what’s on the other side. One day, it will be your death.

  With Pantera’s instruction ringing in his head, he pressed his face to the opening and let his eyes find the shapes and the unshapes of the world beyond the compound: the outlines of the city, half a mile distant, with its tall silhouetted palaces and the taller beacon of the lighthouse behind; the closer bulk of the city’s hippodrome; the canal that led to the Nile and the shuffle of boats thereon.

  Tilting his head, Math listened for the rhythmic breathing of the guard directly above, the grunts of night beasts in the desert, the sea’s distant serenade, so much like home. Last, he sifted the scents of the desert, of cold sand and wood and men, from the more distant sea-smells of the harbour. He smelled the garlic that the guards had eaten at the last meal, and the wine, and the old, stale flatulence. He didn’t smell either Ajax or Pantera, which meant that neither of them was there yet. Ahead, an unbroken expanse of sand reached out fifty paces to the emperor’s horse trough with the bent arm of the pump over it like a standing heron. Math slid through the postern gate and locked it behind him, then set out to crawl across the open desert.

  It was further than it seemed in daylight. Desiccated grit pushed itself up his nose, into his mouth and eyes. Twice, he had to stop and press his nose to stop himself from sneezing and when he finally lay prone in the cold, safe dark beneath the trough, sharp-footed insects bigger than mice began to scrabble over his arms, exploring routes into his tunic and out again so that lying still was a torture in itself.