Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1

by M C Scott

  Saulos’ head swivelled from the cowled figure to Hannah and back. His body was frozen in place. She couldn’t tell if he had recognized Ajax, or – more likely – if he was simply overwhelmed by the presence of a figure from his childhood nightmares. Had he fainted at her feet, he would not have been the first.

  He said, ‘This is it? That’s all of the question?’ He had thought it would require knowledge, something to be drawn from the pool of his learning; the men always did.

  ‘This is all of it,’ Hannah agreed. ‘And I cannot help you.’

  His pallid eyes searched her face, as might a blind man’s fingers, seeking clues to something heretofore unknown. His mobile hands were speechless. ‘May I hear it again?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Each riddle can be spoken only once by the Ferryman, although you may speak it aloud to yourself if you wish.’

  ‘If I choose not to answer, I must leave?’

  ‘You must. You will go safely, returning as we came.’

  ‘But if I answer incorrectly …?’

  Kindly, she said, ‘You’ve got this far. The water is deep and the currents strong. The Ferryman is permitted to strike you once with his pole. Your death will be swift.’

  Saulos gave a short, harsh laugh. ‘Whereas yours at Akakios’ hand most certainly won’t be. I would recommend you to join me in the water should I fail.’ He surprised her by sitting suddenly on the tunnel’s floor with his back pressed tight to the wall. He pushed his head back, flattening his hair. ‘But since I don’t wish either of us to die, fast or slow, I will think on this riddle.’

  The silence that followed was greater than the water’s rush. When at last he spoke, Saulos directed his answer to the river, rather than the Ferryman.

  ‘I could not forsake you, for in doing so I would lose life’s greatest gift. I will embrace you when you come, for to yearn for you when you are denied is every man’s greatest fear. I cannot run from you, however I might wish to when life’s colour enchants me, for I will always be overtaken.’ He waited a moment longer, watching the water’s surface and the lamp’s wild reflection. Then, raising his head, he said clearly, ‘You are death.’

  The Ferryman inclined his head. ‘I am death,’ he agreed. ‘The first is yours.’

  Pantera stood alone at the threshold to the Temple of Truth, home of the Alexandrian Sibyl, trying to gauge how big the place was, and failing; a haze of wood smoke and incense smothered the floor and rose in clouds that obscured the walls and ceiling so completely, he couldn’t see where the one left off and the other began.

  At his best guess, Pantera thought that it was a perfect replica of the Temple of Serapis that grew from the ground above it. The array of fluted columns supporting the roof was the same, and the rows of brackets holding the lit torches on the wall. But here, no statue of the god stood tall to impress the populace. In its place was a circular stone altar ringed by glowing braziers that stood to one side of the vast open space.

  In its stark simplicity, it was far more terrifying than any god could have been and Pantera found himself drawn unwillingly towards it. He had only ever once felt as he did now, when he had been similarly drawn into a circle of standing stones on a moor near the hill fort of the Dumnonii. By the gods’ grace, he had left that place alive, although Aerthen had scolded him endlessly after for going near it uninvited, always with tears in her eyes.

  He wanted her to scold him now, there in the circle of tight, cold air that took no warmth from the braziers. In her absence, he made himself study the altar, so that at least he could know what he faced. This close, it was clear that the stone was far denser than the local sandstone, and a deep grey, almost black. That, too, was like the standing stones of Britain and Gaul.

  The top surface was a map of the moon, showing the hare that lives on its surface, but with marks at the edges to show the directions. The north wind and a stag at one edge were balanced by a salmon opposite. Pantera stood in what he thought was the east, marked by a rising sun that gave birth to a phoenix. To the west a hare leapt over a crescent moon. Between each of these ran smooth channels, black as old blood.

  Across the room, near the door by which he had come in, a foot scuffed on a stone, deliberately. Pantera spun round – and found himself in the presence of the Oracle.

  A tall, slender wraith, she emerged from what looked very like a blank wall, nearly hidden by the smoke, and came towards him, gliding effortlessly across the uncertain floor.

  He thought he recognized her scent, and something in the carriage of her head, but there was no way to be sure; she was completely concealed in white linen that fell in thin drapes from her crown to her ankles and he could see no living part of her but her feet and narrow ankles. Most disturbingly, although he couldn’t see her eyes, he had no doubt at all that she could see his.

  ‘Did you bring the incense of life and death?’

  Pantera fumbled in his belt pouch. The quarter-grain of frankincense nesting there had cost him all of his remaining money. He had stolen the myrrh, incense of death, at the risk of losing his right hand if he had been caught; in Alexandria, myrrh was valued more highly than a horse or a house.

  He brought the two nuggets of resin out as if they were newborn fledglings, too frail to be held by more than cupped hands.

  The Oracle – it was Hypatia, he was almost certain now – pointed over his left shoulder. ‘Give them to Alexandros.’

  Pantera spun round and found himself facing the stooped figure, leaning on his staff. In a day of escalating terrors the fact that a lame man who walked with a stick could get within arm’s reach and Pantera not know it was as frightening as all the rest put together.

  Weakly, he gave his two nuggets into the old man’s care. Alexandros limped past, circling the altar until he came to stand at the Oracle’s left hand. Two braziers stood in front of him, one each to left and right.

  ‘Watch now,’ said the Oracle, as Alexandros raised both his hands high and, with the dexterity of decades’ practice, crushed the resins in either fist and let loose the tiny seeds in two perfect, even streams on to the red hot braziers below.

  Left and right, life and death, hope and trust; two skeins of white smoke leapt to the roof, sweet and sharp and beautiful.

  Pantera breathed in and the ropes became veils that stretched wide, from wall to wall of the temple. On the second breath, they became windows to other worlds, to places past and gone and never seen, to the lost haunts of his youth. He felt his heart sing. He strained his eyes, looking for the ghosts that must arise in a place like this.

  ‘Don’t.’ The Oracle’s voice pierced the smoke, clear as cut ice. ‘Watch. Don’t think. If you become lost, we won’t be able to find you.’

  It was hard to watch and not become lost. Pantera found himself staring down at the braziers, believing they might hold him in place, but the veils drew him in whatever he did; his home was there, and his mother – not as a ghost, but as she had been when he was young – and the friends of his boyhood. Under summer dawns and winter moons, his father had taught him to shoot his first arrows, and later to stalk lizards in the desert, and then men. He was joyful in ways he had forgotten and his grown self wept for the loss of who he had been.

  The veils moved, and time with them, and he watched a living man brought from a tomb and felt the first thread of the Oracle’s meaning. Later, bitter-hearted, he left his home and walked across a desert to find a man who had once seemed a friend.

  Friendship became apprenticeship became a profession. And in that profession a moment passed, a small thing, one meeting among many, held in a hostel on the border between Galilee and Syria, at the start of the road to Damascus. One idea was discussed. One theory floated. One solution proposed to the many crises that plagued that war-torn place. So small a thing, on which a world might turn. He clutched tightly to the image, to remember it later.

  ‘Pantera?’

  Hypatia’s voice brought him back. The veils ripped apart,
and all their joy with them. He found it hard to stand upright. Alexandros was at his side with his oak staff, holding him steady.

  Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, once, and then twice more.

  Hypatia – it was she, not the ageless voice – asked, with true compassion, ‘Can you stand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then do so, swiftly. Saulos is coming.’

  Like a child caught in an act of theft, he looked round in alarm. ‘Where should I hide?’

  Hypatia smiled at him then; he felt the full force of it through her cowl. ‘In the Chamber of Truth,’ she said, ‘there is no hiding. You will be here, aiding him in his request. Alexandros has all the cover you need.’

  Alexandros stood steady as a rock at his side. Over his arm lay a cloak of coarse black cloth, with a hood that fell forward as a cowl.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The cowl was both a blindfold and a disguise.

  Pantera made himself breathe, and counted the scents of incense and old spittle and unwashed hair and found them strangely comforting, like the harsh wool scratching his face.

  And then, just as the smokes of frankincense and myrrh had become a vellum on which his past had been painted, so the cowl’s dense screen became a window to eyes other than the ones he was born with, so that he could see the true dimensions of the Oracle’s temple, and know how much greater it was than the one that housed the false god above; he could see the Oracle herself, and know how much greater she was than any one woman, even Hypatia; he could see Alexandros, and know that his lame leg was the gift that had led him to this place, and that his soul was light as a feather, held in balance on Osiris’ scales.

  And with his new vision, he knew too the names and essences of the two men and a woman who were walking up the long corridor from the rushing river below.

  Hannah came first, forging through the knee-high smoke with the hound’s baying draped all around her like a cloak.

  In daylight, Pantera would have known her by the straightness of her back, by the curve of her neck, by the sweep of her black silk hair. Here, cloaked into blindness, he saw instead her courage and the texture of the peace that sustained her, even as sparks of red terror shot through when she saw him standing black-robed and silent behind the altar; she hadn’t expected him to be part of the Oracle.

  Pantera hadn’t considered himself as a part of it before that moment either, but now, with neither arrogance, nor pride, nor fear, he knew it to be true; he was there because he was needed, because he was wanted, because time and the gods had ordained that it be so. And, because he had seen the past in the veils of smoke, he knew how to see at least part of the future written on the black screen of the cowl.

  It was with that far-sight, therefore, that he saw Saulos emerge from the tunnel.

  At Hannah’s murmured order, he walked between the pillars and came to kneel before the altar. There was nothing humble in his supplication. He was faint from hunger and still weak from his own terror, but in his own estimation he was a man who had successfully battled the Ferryman to win his passage across the Styx and he entered the chamber of the Oracle alight with his own power, as if he had just earned the keys to all its wealth of worldly knowledge.

  Arrogance blazed from him, as peace had from Hannah. Pantera strove to see what lay beneath, but had no time, for a third soul was walking up the long tunnel that led from the Styx. Forewarned, Pantera lifted his head in time to see a third black-cowled figure enter the chamber, and knew that this was beyond all precedent; that even more than his own presence, that of the Ferryman changed the delicate balances of past, present and future.

  To Pantera’s left, Hypatia hissed out a long, slow breath, like the exhalation of a mountain as the sun’s light leaves at dusk.

  ‘You come as a supplicant. Have you the incense of life and of death?’ Her voice was the raw essence of power, greater than any man might carry, however great his arrogance. It filled the temple to the furthest reaches of the roof.

  Wordless, Saulos held up the two resins in his cupped palms.

  ‘Give to your left the Sense of Life and to your right the Sense of Death.’

  Without any volition on his part, Pantera found himself taking a step forward. Saulos’ eyes flew wide. For the first time he looked uncertain. Moved by forces beyond his own control, Pantera stretched out his hands to accept the frankincense as it was offered.

  His hands … that were not his hands.

  If he had had any command of his own body, he would have fallen in fright, then. The hands cupped together in the red light of the brazier were old and mottled and the fingers were longer than his had ever been.

  He stared at them even as he accepted Saulos’ offering, held the rich nugget high above the flames, crumbled it between finger and thumb, and, with a dexterity that amazed him, sent the fragments flowing down to the burning heart of the fire. To the Oracle’s left, Alexandros matched him grain for grain, spill for spill.

  Two columns of white smoke streamed evenly to the ceiling. Saulos breathed in the new scent, coughing. His eyes streamed and his nose began to run. He stared open-mouthed at the visions that were sent him. Whatever they were, Pantera could not see them.

  Presently, the Oracle’s ageless voice said, ‘You may ask one question. It will be answered with the truth.’

  ‘Only one?’

  By a clear act of will, Saulos managed not to give voice to the panic that flooded his mind. Instead, he gathered himself and bent his considerable intellect towards finding a single question that would give him the answers he needed. Oracles were famed for their ambiguity; on the precise framing of a question, whole kingdoms prospered or died.

  Pantera saw the shape of the words before they were spoken aloud, so that the hearing was an echo of something already asked and answered.

  ‘At what time of what day of what year must Rome burn to fulfil this prophecy as it was written?’

  Saulos drew from his tunic the copied prophecy with all its gaps and ambiguities and promises and held it out to the Oracle.

  Pantera could have recited it by rote, but in this place the power of the writing was made manifest, drawn as images across the veil of white smoke, and, this time, he could see where it led.

  He saw Jerusalem drenched in blood, Rome scarred and burned, rising again from the ruins of a fire, saw men and women burned within it, and again, and again, in cycles of death and violence spreading down the centuries for a hundred generations and more.

  The Oracle disdained to take the paper. ‘We issued this prophecy. We know where it leads. Are you sure that you do?’

  ‘Lady, I know only what is required of me.’ Dark passions curdled Saulos’ soul; arrogance, contempt, vengeance and a pure, unadulterated hatred, all of them hidden in daily life, all of them on view here, in the Temple of Truth. Ignoring them, he said, ‘If the Oracle issued these words, it must have been with a reason.’

  ‘We saw the beginnings of a great evil and sought to deflect it,’ the Oracle agreed. ‘If a god is drenched in blood, his kingdom will likewise be bloody, but a prophecy is only one path among many and, as men and women can bring it into being, so also can men and women prevent it. Such men and women as are here in this chamber today may not have it in their power to keep this evil from the world, but, knowing what may come, they can at least create a seed of hope to stand against the darkness. You have seen the bloodshed on which the new kingdom is built. Are you certain you wish me to answer your question?’

  Saulos clasped his hands together, cracking the knuckles. His arrogance blazed. ‘Lady, for the sake of one man and one woman who stand before you, I must say that I am.’

  ‘Hear this then.’ The Oracle raised her arms. Her leaf-light voice drifted out across the smoke, carrying to Saulos, to Pantera, to Hannah and, last, to Ajax, dressed as the Ferryman, who stood by the entrance to the tunnel that led to the Styx.

  ‘One comes who brings wrath and destruction, who brings death in the n
ame of life, hate in the name of love, pain in the name of compassion. His time is not endless, but will seem so. And thus will it come about in the Year of the Phoenix, on the night when the Great Hound shall gaze down from beyond the knife-edge of the world, that in his sight shall the Great Whore be wreathed in fire and those who would save her will stoke the flames.’

  ‘The Great Hound?’ Saulos closed his eyes in concentration. ‘Sirius, Hound of the Sky, known in Egypt as Sopdet? You have not given me a day or a date, nor even a year.’

  ‘You know already that this is the Phoenix Year,’ the Oracle said, not unkindly. ‘Sopdet rises this year over Rome on the eighteenth night of the month once known as Quintilis, but now named after Gaius Julius Caesar, who believed himself a god. You have until then to prepare – nearly four months. At least two of those months will, of necessity, be spent in a sea journey, but it will be no different for anyone else who strives to reach Rome in time.’

  ‘My lady, I offer my deepest thanks.’ Saulos’ bow was the lowest and most extravagant Pantera had ever seen. His relief rolled over them all.

  ‘You should leave,’ Hypatia said. The exhaustion in her voice was her own. ‘And you,’ she raised her head and looked directly at Ajax, ‘have a race to run.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Nero sat on a golden dais high up on the newly built stands at one end of the oval race track, under a banner of cloth of gold above it.

  Immediately beneath, in a display of unmatched arrogance, Bronze was throwing himself back and forth in a frenzy, with Math on the end of the lead rope, fighting to bring the big colt past Thunder and into his place in the Green team, last to be harnessed, last before the race began, last because Math had to lead Bronze himself – last because Ajax wasn’t there.

  Which meant he was truly going to have to drive the four colts in the race trial. Which meant, at best, he would lose, and at worst he would kill himself and his horses. If he lived long enough even to start.

  At the moment, that seemed unlikely. Bronze screamed again. A front hoof split the air by Math’s head. He threw himself sideways. The leather reins sliced his palm.