Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1

by M C Scott

  Pantera’s hand was on her shoulder, as it had been then. He turned her away from the fire. ‘Were you thinking of Math or Caradoc?’ he asked. ‘Or both?’ He was bright again, filling her mind, for all that the soot lay in the lines about his eyes, in savage paint.

  ‘Both.’ Hannah dropped her tunic from her face. ‘We’ve done all we can here. We need to find Math and Ajax and get out. There are boats running on every tide from Antium. We could be halfway to Gaul by this time tomorrow.’

  ‘You should go. There are horses here. Shimon will take you.’

  ‘Not you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t leave while Saulos lives. I made him what he is. No one else can stop him now.’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘If you’re staying, I’m staying,’ she said.

  Pantera’s smile fell away. Briefly, she thought he might argue, but he looked past her to Shimon. The two men’s eyes met as they had done in the warehouse, their silent dialogue too complex for the time it took, too profound for the quiet on their faces.

  Pantera broke away first. ‘Shimon will help you get to the coast,’ he said. ‘I will see to Saulos. Seneca’s gone to Antium. If humanly possible, he’ll free Ajax and Math and buy passage for them on a ship. He’ll get you to Britain if I can’t join you.’

  ‘You weren’t listening. I said—’

  ‘I was listening. Hannah, the city is burning! There’s nowhere safe.’

  ‘Yes there is. The goose-keeper’s cottage has survived every fire for the past four centuries. Is Hypatia still there?’

  ‘She was when we left.’

  ‘Then I’ll go there. Shimon can go to the coast to meet Ajax and Math.’

  ‘They have Seneca, they have no need of me.’ Shimon’s old-snow hair was full of soot, turning him young again. When he shook his head, black flakes flew around them. ‘Where you go, I go. I owe it to your father. No—’ He held up a hand, forestalling Pantera. ‘We have as much right to stay as you do. We’ll wait at the goose-keeper’s house until dawn. Send us word when you can. If we hear nothing, we will assume you dead. In which case, I give you my word that I will protect Hannah with my life.’

  Pantera’s face was unreadable. The sky behind him was the perfect, crystalline blue of night-fall; the smoke had not reached there yet. His cheeks were burnished orange from the fire. His hair, lit from above, glowed gold as a Gaul’s.

  Hannah saw him nod to himself; then, amid the smoke and the mayhem, he lifted her hand. She felt the grit on his palm, and the hard rhythm of his pulse and the slip of saddle oil from Faustinos’ harness.

  He took Shimon’s hand too, joining them in a triangle. ‘I’ll hunt Saulos and when I find him I’ll kill him. Tomorrow morning we’ll leave here, whether the fire is out or not. Nero can find himself another spy.’ Pantera kissed the back of Hannah’s hand and let it fall. Shimon’s, he gripped a moment longer. ‘Take care of each other.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Tiers of beeswax candles blazed on both sides of Nero’s bed, sweetening the night air. Two polished silver mirrors on either wall took the dancing lights and multiplied them back and forth until Math’s eyes hurt.

  He was trying not to frown, which was harder than he might have expected, but gave him something to concentrate on that wasn’t the part-naked Nero, lying breadthways across the wine-red silk with his head by Math’s knee and his feet dangling over the far edge of the bed.

  After a day’s intimate attendance, the slaves had finally been banished. Left alone, Nero was smiling up at the Bacchus painted on the ceiling, fingering his favourite lyre. He played better than he sang.

  A flagon of Falernian lay empty by the bed and Math had drunk none of it. Nero had not been fully sober since early afternoon and now he was cheerfully and comprehensively drunk.

  If you ever let the emperor become familiar, if you ever come to see him intimately, in all the contortions and stupidity of a man consumed by his desires, then you will have to die.

  Pantera had said that in Gaul, and Math had believed it. Now, he hoped the spy was wrong and had some basis for his optimism. If rumour was even half correct, the Empress Poppaea had seen Nero in the ‘contortions of desires’ long before they were married, and she wasn’t dead yet, and some of the slave-boys might also have survived a night in this room, on this silk-ridden bed, caught between the silvered mirrors and the honey-scented candles. Math thought hard about who might have been here before him, in order not to think of Constantin. Or Ajax.

  Behind the darkness of his closed lids, Math saw Ajax, stripped of his skin, and Constantin, battered to death, and a baker, lying out in the sun with—

  He stopped. He was a street whore. He knew exactly how important it was to seem whole, clean, healthy, humble and, above all, cheerful, in the company of a client; the more powerful the client, the more important it was to be serene.

  With an effort, he set Ajax behind a bulwark in his mind and worked on keeping it solid and impregnable. Ajax had said that both their lives depended on his behaviour, and while intimacy with the emperor might yet mean certain death, Math wanted to believe that if he did all that was required of him, Ajax might be allowed to live afterwards.

  The emperor stopped playing and rolled on his side. He raised his gaze to meet Math’s. ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Lord?’

  ‘We wish to play music for you. What would cheer your heart?’

  A month living in the palace had taught Math more of courtly ways than the whole six months in Alexandria. Smoothly, he said, ‘My knowledge of music is too narrow to make a considered choice, lord. Perhaps something that Rhemaxos played in Alexandria? That was a good time.’

  ‘A good choice.’ Nero smiled, remembering. ‘He played the Air of Perseus while we were in the baths, as we remember. It’s difficult, and more suited to the kithara, but we shall assay it now.’

  The emperor’s fingers were thick and stubby, set about with a profusion of rings in silver, jet, copper, gold and coral. Softened by the candlelight, they became a blur of glistening colour, dancing across the strings. Wine had lubricated them just enough to enable him, in fact, to play quite well.

  Perseus slew the Gorgon in a crash of candle-shaking chords. In the quiet afterwards, Nero said, ‘You will disrobe.’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  Nero was still playing when Math finished; even allowing for his hurt shoulder, it hadn’t taken long. Not knowing what else to do, he slid under the wine-red silk. There was a trick to this that he had learned a long time ago, which was to concentrate only on the room, so that whoever else was in it might seem distant and small.

  Perversely, the brightness of the light here made it easier. And even after nearly a month in the palace, he had never experienced silk of quite this quality before.

  Pinching a thick loop, he let it slip through his fingers. Abruptly, he thought of Hannah’s hair and so of Hannah and so, unforgivably, of Ajax. Tears pricked the corners of his eyes. He dared not wipe them away; the mirrors showed everything and Nero’s eyes rested on him, twice reflected.

  The music sank to its thoughtful end.

  ‘Do you wish to be a father?’ Nero asked, in the silence that followed.

  ‘Lord? I’m too young to marry.’

  ‘But when you’re older, would you want that? Would you wish to sire a child?’

  They were stepping round a question nobody had ever asked Math before. In panic, he reached for an answer that might suffice. ‘Alexander, the great god-king of Macedon, fathered a child on Roxanne although he loved Hephaistion. It was his duty, so he did it.’

  The emperor thumbed his lyre. Three notes sprayed across the gulf between them. His foot, by chance, came to rest on Math’s calf.

  ‘Who amongst the Gauls,’ he asked, ‘relayed to you the tales of Alexander?’

  ‘My father did, lord.’ Math’s hands were sweating. Black marks smeared the silk where he had gripped it. Somewhere distant, he heard, or felt, the b
eginnings of a vibration that was the earth, shaking. He wanted to believe it was the earth, and not Ajax held somewhere under torture, shaking the foundations of the palace in his torment.

  Thinking of his father, who was safely dead, he said, ‘He told me Gaulish tales too, but he said we were becoming Roman and so I should know the heart of Rome. Every Roman of worth strives to model himself on Alexander.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘He did, lord.’ Inspired, Math remembered something Pantera had told him on the night of the fire. ‘He was proud of me. It’s good for a man to have a child to come after, to bear his name. I am proud to be my father’s son. Who else has the same pride, and carries the same love as a father for his son, and the son for his father?’

  Math surprised himself. Evidently, he surprised Nero, too. After a moment’s pause the emperor set his lyre against the wall, then rolled over on the bed until his head came level with Math’s hip.

  His breath was warm and smelled of wine. His drink-fuddled eyes were damp.

  ‘Your father was a wise man. We could wish …’ With a flick of his tongue, Nero licked away a tear that had dribbled to the corner of his mouth. ‘To have a father’s pride, and to feel it in return, that would be something remarkable. I would have liked to have met your father.’

  Another line crossed. When Nero ceased to be ‘we’ and ‘us’ and became ‘I’ and ‘me’, there was no turning back.

  Math unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth as Nero reached out and gripped his ankle. It was not an accidental move; Ajax had done the same in the mornings, to wake Math up. Nero lifted his gaze. His eyes were more focused now, and they asked a question.

  Answering it, Math said, ‘My father is dead, but his place is taken by Ajax now, who is as a brother to me.’

  ‘A brother?’

  ‘Or perhaps a second father.’

  Most emphatically not a lover, not a rival, not worthy of imperial envy or jealousy. Math made all of these things clear in his voice.

  Satisfied, Nero’s gaze came away from Math’s face and drifted downwards. His hand followed more slowly where his eyes led.

  Math made himself breathe. The bed shook in a steady rhythm. He did not think he was shivering, but he was no longer sure. With his eyes on the brilliant, much-reflected candles, he prayed to the spirit of his dead father for fortitude and courage and the ability to forget come morning.

  Distantly, as through a fog, he heard Nero, suddenly peevish, say, ‘Can you hear a galloping horse?’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Seneca stood in the dark and felt through his feet the stamp of the guards marching back and forth at both ends of the barn. The two senator’s sons were not remotely in step, but they were making enough noise to cover the slight sounds he made in trying to find a means to pick the lock that kept Ajax imprisoned.

  A fingertip search of the empty stall in which he stood offered nothing. Across the aisle was the tack area in which, searching by starlight, he found the racing chariot, the training chariot and two complete sets of harness. With a little more effort, he found six beautifully crafted, leaf-light racing bits hanging together from a hook on a slender hoop of wire, high up on the wall.

  In the traditional way, the hoop on which they hung was made from a single strand of wire bent into an eye at one end and a hook at the other; when the hook snagged the eye, it made a circle. And when straightened it could, with any luck at all, make a lock pick.

  Seneca was a man for whom luck was made, not given. With slow care, he slid the hook from the eye and the six racing bits from their wire. One by one, he laid them on soft hay where the rattle of sweet-iron would not alert the guards. With them gone, he turned his attention to the wire.

  An age later, he stood in the aisle outside Ajax’s prison holding his new lock pick in one hand. He ran his dry tongue around his drier teeth, found a knot hole in the wood and put his mouth to it. ‘It’s me. I think I can open the lock.’

  There was a moment’s surprised pause, then Ajax whispered, ‘I’ll piss in the bucket. The sound will give you cover.’

  Seneca’s instincts were not those of a thief as were Math’s, or even Pantera’s, but the lock was flashily big, made to withstand crowbars and axes, not to hold off a wire. Shortly after Ajax began noisily to spray his urine into the bucket Nero’s guards had provided, the padlock sprang open.

  If he had expected thanks, Seneca was disappointed. Lean as the wind, Ajax slid past him, patting his shoulder lightly as he crossed the aisle to the tack room.

  The man was feral, and preternaturally silent, and Seneca, who had trained the best assassins in the Roman empire, watched him as a circus-owner watches an exotic beast. He had met chariot-drivers aplenty. None of them had inspired in him the hope and fear that this man did.

  He was halfway to an idea when Ajax returned, carrying a set of reins from the harness on the wall. The thin, pliable leather smelled lightly of oil.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Seneca whispered.

  ‘Kill the guards.’ Ajax’s amber eyes flashed in the starlight. ‘We can’t get Math out with them there. You were planning to get Math?’

  ‘Of course. Pantera sent me to—’

  Ajax’s iron grip caught his wrist. It took a long, long moment before Seneca heard what Ajax had heard.

  When he did, he said, ‘That’s a horse, coming fast.’

  Ajax frowned. ‘Nero doesn’t like interruptions at night,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows that.’

  ‘Then Rome is burning. Nobody would come that fast for anything else.’ Seneca tugged his still-held wrist. ‘We must leave. We can come back for Math later.’

  ‘What will he do?’ Ajax asked.

  ‘Nero? That depends on whom he’s with and whom he’s trying to impress.’

  ‘Nero is with Math.’

  ‘Ah.’ Seneca blew out his cheeks. He wished he didn’t feel so old. ‘If they are already … occupied, nobody will dare to disturb him. If he is not yet engaged, and is halfway to sober, he will want to prove himself the great warrior, saviour of his people.’

  ‘Will he go back to Rome? Or organize relief from here?’

  ‘He hasn’t the power to do it from here. He’ll have to go to Rome.’

  ‘Can he ride well enough to get there in a hurry in the dark?’

  ‘No. He’ll take the chariot. Tonight, perhaps even the racing chariot.’

  Ajax laughed, a soft huff of derision that barely moved the night air. ‘Who’ll he take as driver?’

  ‘You. Except you’re in prison and he’s not likely to decide to let you out. So—’

  ‘Math.’ Ajax smacked his balled fist into his palm with a force that was no less frustrated for being silent. ‘He’ll have Math drive him with all four colts, it’ll be his greatest love-gift.’ He turned on his heel. ‘I need to be back in the prison. They’ll notice if I’m gone and rip the place apart looking for us. Lock me in again and then hide somewhere safe if you value your life. Quickly. The guards have noticed that someone’s coming.’

  * * *

  ‘You will drive for us. You wished to race for your emperor, and you will do so, not against other drivers, who might slow their horses and lose for fear of our displeasure, but against fire, which is driven by the gods.’

  Nero, fully dressed, and sober, stood in the aisle of the horse barn. Two dozen pitch-pine torches flared and spat, chasing the shadows. Grooms sprinted to do his bidding. The race chariot stood at the end of the barn, ready to drive. The two senator’s sons held Sweat and Thunder. Nexos, thick with sleep and fear, had been woken to harness Brass and Bronze and was doing so, badly.

  Math stood to one side, kept out of the way by men who treated him with undisguised contempt.

  ‘You should take the practice rig,’ a clear voice said from the far end of the barn. ‘The racing one will disintegrate on the roads long before you get to Rome.’

  That was true, but nobody had dared say so aloud. They didn’t
say so now, but kept their heads down and worked on with the horses.

  Nero turned slowly.

  ‘Who speaks?’ His voice was uncommonly low.

  ‘I do, lord. Ajax of Athens.’

  They had locked Ajax in a stable with no food and no water. Nero had told Math so. He had three days’ life, at most, before he died of thirst. For a man under sentence of lingering death, he sounded inhumanly composed.

  Nero stalked down the aisle to the last box. Two of the vast Germanic guards followed, each bearing a torch in one hand and his naked sword in the other. Nero lifted a chain from about his neck and used the key thereon to unlock the padlock that held Ajax’s stable-prison closed.

  ‘Come out.’

  ‘I am at your service—’

  ‘Down!’

  Before he could move, the larger of the two guards slammed the hilt of his sword against the driver’s head. Ajax dropped to his knees like a poleaxed ox. Math kept his eyes on the horses and dug his nails into his palms against the stinging in his eyes.

  ‘You are alive at my whim. For this insolence, you will die.’

  ‘We all die, lord. But if the emperor dies before he reaches Rome, the empire will lose its father. A racing chariot is not built to survive thirty miles on metalled roads. It will break before the halfway mark.’

  ‘Math!’

  ‘Lord.’ Math sprinted down the length of the barn.

  ‘Will the racing chariot break apart on the roads?’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Forgive me, lord.’ Math knelt as far from Ajax as he could. It mattered now to divert everyone’s attention to the chariots. ‘I was thinking only of speed. It would be safest for my lord if he used the practice vehicle.’

  ‘But slower?’

  ‘It matters not how fast you travel, lord, if you die before you reach the gates of Rome.’

  ‘Of course. Such wisdom from a child.’ Nero looked at the taller of the two guards. If he nodded, Math didn’t see it, but the effect was immediate.