Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (10 page)

‘Each of these is true, lord.’

‘We are a god also. We, too, can save lives.’

‘I am sure of it, lord.’

‘We could make you worship us, calling on us as you did on Mithras.’

‘Of course.’

All humour had gone. Slow death hung a hand’s clap away. In Britain, they had crucified him, using ropes instead of nails because the death took longer. If Pantera let himself think about that, ever, at any point of the day or night, he broke into the kind of sweat that covered horses after a race.

Not thinking of it now was hard, but necessary. Aerthen stood exceptionally close.

From the citrus grove, the Empress Poppaea said, as if to her slave, ‘For myself, I have always found love to be sweeter when it is freely given.’

‘How immensely wise.’ Nero smiled at his empress. The threat of death moved away. Released from a diverting tension, the ladies and gentlemen of the emperor’s retinue murmured to each other in low voices. In the citrus grove to Pantera’s left, the tall, bitter-faced man moved, subtly, using the sound as cover.

Nero saw it. The black eyes flickered there and back to Pantera. Thoughtfully, the emperor said, ‘We hear you had a different name when you lived amongst the tribes in Britain.’

He should not have known that. Nobody should, except the men and women of the Dumnonii who were safely dead. Pantera bowed again, hiding more than just his eyes. ‘Among the Dumnonii, I was Hywell, lord. It means hunter.’

‘A leopard who is also a hunter. Very good. You were their hunter, and yet you hunted them on our behalf, striving to bring us Britain as your prize, just as, six years ago, you gave us first blood against Parthia at great risk to yourself. We commend you and would find ways to repay the debt we owe. To that end, we wish to visit the chariot yards before the races and require that you be our bodyguard. Are you armed?’

‘Lord, no. I would not so profane your presence.’

‘Then that must be rectified.’ Nero clapped his hands. By a miracle of training, or of chance, the songbirds fell silent.

The tall figure moving to Pantera’s left also fell still. Without turning, Nero said, ‘Akakios, fetch for our leopard weapons to suit his needs. A knife, I believe, balanced to throw? And perhaps a second, longer blade?’

With palpable courage, the bitter-faced man stepped forward, saying, ‘Lord, may I ask … With greatest respect, is this safe? I do not question your wisdom, only desire to protect your hallowed person.’

‘Yes?’ Nero put his index finger to his cheek and tilted his head in an actor’s parody of contemplation. His gaze switched to Pantera.

‘Will you kill us, Leopard-who-is-hunter? Or assault our person?’ His voice was deeper than it had been; more like a woman’s, less like a boy’s.

‘No, lord, I will not. I give you my word.’ Pantera did not bow now. It mattered that his eyes be seen.

‘Your word, sworn on the slain bull of Mithras?’

‘If you request it, lord.’

‘Not yet. The offer is enough.’ With a wordless wave, Akakios was sent for weapons.

Summoning a slave to remove the diamonds from his hair, Nero began to walk towards the vestibule. The four Ubian guards jumped to present arms, two either side. What they lacked in legionary crispness, they made up for in their sheer bulk, and the ease with which they swung their long cavalry swords. They smiled for their emperor, showing corded necks, thick as bulls’.

‘Come,’ said Nero. ‘We would have you walk in our company.’

Pantera moved swiftly to catch up. Together he and his emperor passed over the black and white chequered mosaics, between the multicoloured visions of Apollo on his lyre. The god, he noticed now, had a thatch of thick black curls amongst which diamonds nestled.

The naked Nubian girl-slave came with a steaming cloth to wipe the paint from the emperor’s face. Standing for her in the vestibule, Nero said, ‘Akakios hates you. Why is that?’

‘I was trained by Seneca, lord, and he was not.’

‘That is reason enough?’

‘For a spy it is, yes. He trained with us for three years before he was turned away. Rejection makes a man bitter and such a thing can turn to hate if it festers long enough.’

‘Why was he rejected?’

Pantera shrugged. ‘He was impetuous. He didn’t listen. He thought he knew best one time too many. You, of all people, know exactly the standard Seneca requires of his pupils. Akakios had not the intellect or the self-restraint under pressure that was necessary. You will have seen that, I think, by now.’

‘But an impetuous man can kill as easily as one trained by Seneca. Watch him, he’s there now.’

Akakios was waiting for them at the entrance to the vestibule, bearing two knives and a sheathed blade. He was of Assyrian descent, which gave him the height and the angular hawk’s nose and the sharp-arrow eyebrows that pointed up in perpetual surprise. Always bitter, his face was scored now with a freshly kindled hatred.

‘Where were you last night?’ he asked, as Pantera and Nero emerged into the sunlit morning.

That he could speak so abruptly in the presence of his emperor spoke greatly of his power in the court. That the Ubians stepped away to give him privacy said even more.

With a further prayer of thanks to the half-starved urchin from the docks, Pantera said, ‘I spent the evening with my foster-father, Seneca, who once had the honour of serving his excellency. He has borrowed the lodgings of Fabius Africanus, legate to the Fourteenth legion. Afterwards, I took a room at the Striding Heron. It’s a rude place, but clean enough, and—’

‘At the docks?’ Nero said. ‘Full of fishermen and boys? We know it. Rude, as you say, but the fare is wholesome. Now you are here and I see Akakios has brought you a pair of throwing knives to use in our defence. You are expert in these, I believe?’

‘I have some small skill, lord.’

The knives were a matched pair, one balanced for a right-handed throw, one for left, with the weighting set subtly off centre for each. They had sanded beech handles, and plain iron blades. They were, in fact, the very image of the ones Pantera had left in his trunk in the inn, except that these did not have the mark of Mithras on the hilt. Pantera rubbed his thumb over the place, to see if it had been sanded away, and decided not.

‘They are perfect, lord. With these and the third at my belt, I believe I can keep you safe from any two or three men who may come against you. If there are more, we may have to fight together.’

‘Back to back, as the Gauls do?’

‘Exactly so.’

It had been a jest, offered as a foil on which the emperor could claim his battle skills.

Instead, smiling to show he had seen the joke, Nero said, ‘Then we had better hope our other defenders are prepared to give their lives in our defence, for we have not mastered the skills of battle. Our energies have all been on the chariots. You don’t race? A pity. We need someone of mettle who can … Wait!’

They were still within the line of the Ubian guards. Nero reached for a blade from the nearest. Without hesitation, it was given. The emperor was not deft, but he was not as clumsy as he allowed others to think. He swung round, setting the blade’s edge on Pantera’s bare skin at the place where his neck met his shoulder above his new court tunic. The scar was there, that had been made by a spear’s head and continued into a burn.

‘Kneel.’

Pantera knelt. The stone pathway was cold beneath his shins. Fragments of grit pressed into his knees. His left ankle ached suddenly. For a man who thought he wanted to die, he felt an uncommon desire not to do so now, with Akakios’ toxic shadow sliding between him and Aerthen’s presence. He licked his lips and found his mouth dry as a summer river, and sharply metallic, as if he had licked his own knife blade.

Nero moved the sword on to his collar bone and let it rest there. ‘You are not a citizen of Rome, is that correct?’

‘It is, lord.’

‘Which is why the legionaries in Britain were able to do to you what they did. If you had been a citizen, they could not have acted thus.’ The blade stroked across the scars on his shoulder. ‘We wish to rectify that. In any case, we cannot be seen to be guarded by a man who lacks the necessary status. What ever would the senate say?’

Nero laughed. Belatedly, the men around him laughed too, except Pantera, who studied the black eyes and saw no mirth in them. The blade drew a sliver of blood, much as his own had from Math in the alley’s dark.

‘What would you have of me, lord?’

‘That you swear to uphold the laws and honour of Rome. That you swear to defend my life and that of my family before all other lives, including your own. That you acknowledge the genius of your emperor as your guiding light. Do you so swear?’

Pantera swayed in the morning light. Voices from his childhood murmured in his head, bypassing the echoes of his more recent past; his mother was there, and his father, and Seneca.
What do you live for but to earn your citizenship?

They were all wrong; Pantera had never lived for it, only used it as the mark by which he might have measured his own success. Britain had taken that from him. He had no concept of success since Aerthen’s death.

He said, ‘I do so swear.’

‘Rise,’ said Nero. ‘You are Roman, and so the fullest of humans. Now, Sebastos Julius Abdes Pantera, you will escort us to the chariot grounds and guard us as we inspect the teams. If you can pick for us the winner, we shall be well pleased.’

I
t was said of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus that he would often pass incognito through the slums of Rome at night, listening to the talk in the taverns and the baths to assure himself of his people’s care for him. It was further said that he knew chariots, horses and racing as if they were his profession, and could pick a good team by sight at a hundred paces.

Walking with him through the bright, blustery morning, beside the oval sawdust-lined training track, stopping among the great sea of traders’ booths before the four long barns that housed the race teams, watching the ease with which he caught an eye and drew a man to him, to talk of horses, of chariots, of the drivers, of the odds on one team or the other, of the training to win a race, Pantera could imagine both of these tales to be true.

Nero no longer wore gems in his hair or paint on his eyelids. Were it not for the unusually wide band of porphyry at the hem of his toga, and the fact that his face was on every coin in the empire, the crowd around them would not have known that their emperor passed among them, pausing here at a booth to examine the craftsmanship, or slowing there by the ropes at the head of the training track, wreathed in the rich, ripe fog of resin and horse manure, to watch the first of the quadrigas begin the slow warm-up before the race.

As it was, men, women and – belatedly – children bent their knees as soon as they realized who was among them, but it was all behind, after he had passed, so that Nero’s progress was that of a scythe through corn, leaving untidy rows felled in his wake.

None of it made life easier for Pantera in his role as bodyguard. Unlike any of his immediate predecessors, Nero had not taken a full company of praetorians to protect him in this sortie among his people, but only a small retinue of four companions amongst whom were Akakios and a pair of nervously alert Ubians, who had instructions to keep their weapons sheathed except in extremity. Pantera therefore gave only as much attention to the horses as Nero required at any given moment, and kept watch in turn on the wide plain in front, the training track to his right, and the booths and wooden horse barns lined up to his left.

The promised storm from the day before had not yet come; the morning was set fair, with white goosedown clouds flying before a brisk wind. Ahead, the sky met the earth in a long, smooth arc that left Pantera slightly giddy. After the mountains of Britain, it was strange to be in a place with no hills to carve open the perfect spread of the horizon.

The grassy plain that stretched from the magistrate’s residence to the hippodrome was open and flat. If a man was intent on exposing himself to danger, it was not a bad place to choose. No hills broke the perfect hemisphere of the horizon, no spinneys hid the horses of a mounted ambush, no rocky outcrops served to hide a company of archers, or spearmen, or armoured infantry. But the traders’ stalls, healers’ booths and cooking fires that lay sprawled in a veritable village to the left of the sawdust pathway were a nightmare of open possibilities and the horse barns beyond were worse: four long, low buildings with shadowed doorways along their lengths and narrow grassed alleyways between.

At the nearest end, almost blocking the path between the barns, clusters of tents marked the professions that kept each team running: the wainwrights, the harness-makers, the loriners, the boys who boiled the axle grease, the weavers who made the banners. Above each flew the colours allocated for this race: Red at the front for the magistrate, then Blue, then White and finally the Green of the home team.

‘The Red team will win, of course,’ Nero said. ‘The horses were a gift to the magistrate from the king of Parthia, who wishes to buy our favour and does it by flattering our friends. That team we cannot buy, and so our task for today is to decide which of the other three teams is worthy of our attentions and our gold. They are the best in Gaul. One of them must be good enough.’

Following the emperor’s gaze, Pantera saw a team of four grey colts grazing at the side of the track further down near the hippodrome. As yet they bore no ribbons in their manes to identify them, but even at this distance, with the high walls of the wooden hippodrome behind, it was clear these four were of a different stamp to their thicker, heavier brethren who ran for the other teams.

Pantera had lived five years in Britain where the tribes prided themselves on breeding horses to beat the world. The women of those horse runs would have given an entire year’s crop of colts for even the least of these.

Pointing, he said, ‘That’ll be the Red team there? The four matched greys? They look fit to beat anything Gaul could produce. Are they the magistrate’s gift?’