Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (19 page)

‘Hannah, don’t.’ A new hand grasped her shoulder firmly. In the searing, stinging, flame-bright dark was a new shape. Smoke-tears blurred everything.

‘Pantera?’ she said hesitantly, and then, with a surge of hope, ‘Math’s still up there.’

Pantera was drenched; steam rose from his tunic, making an arc of blessed cool. He shielded her with his body, drawing her fast away towards what was left of the door. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

She might have fought against him, too, but Math was in front of them suddenly; a small and ragged shape struggling down the ladder with a reluctance that made her heart ache.

Turning back, Pantera caught him before he reached the bottom, lifted him bodily off and set him at her side. His arms swept both of them. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Father’s there. He can’t walk.’ Math was weeping, not only from the smoke. He was blue from holding his breath and could barely speak. ‘At the top of the stairs. I couldn’t carry him. He—’ He fell into paroxysms of choking.

‘Go with Hannah.’ Pantera pushed them both together and propelled them towards the door. ‘I’ll bring him down.’

T
he burns on Math’s hands were already seeping yellowing fluid, like rope burns, but flatter and spread further across his palms, stretching up beyond his wrists on to his arms and shoulders. Smoke and ash made cooling crusts across his face, but he was not scarred there; his father had protected him from that.

His father was still trapped inside the burning tavern while Math sat out in the meadow and watched the building collapse. It fell slowly, beginning at one end and sagging down its length, like the capsizing of a long and stately boat caught by the stern on a reef.

Sails of flame billowed in the wind, lighting the surrounding land. Sparks tied twisted ropes to the smoke-blued moon, outshining the stars. Falling ash tainted everything.

The entire population of Coriallum was watching by then, standing, sitting or lying on the wide grass paddock where the cattle had grazed with their bull until the tavern-keeper had moved them out of reach of the fire. It had been his first move on escaping from his inn. Now he sat on an upturned pail, watching disconsolately as the last of his livelihood sagged into the gorging flames.

Around him, the burned and smoke-strangled survivors of his clientele lay on the grass, tended by Coriallum’s healing women, who put their pitch torches down unlit, finding they could work by light of the tavern’s blaze.

Math was sitting a little apart, with Hannah and Ajax and the rest of the Green team. He saw Hannah walk over to speak with the healing women. She came back with some salve in a small wooden pot.

‘It’s for burns,’ she said. ‘If you put it on your arms and hands now, they’ll heal faster.’

The salve stank of goose fat and seagull oil with a lift of rosemary. It rolled under Math’s fingers and stung the sore places so that he had to hold his breath as he rubbed it in. He did it anyway, feeling Hannah’s eyes on him. The warmth of her presence did nothing to shut out the cold from the place where his father should have been.

That one fact turned his world on its head, removing all the certainties by which he had lived. He gave back the pot and sat hugging his knees to his chest, half watching as Hannah knelt by Ajax and smeared the salve on his shoulders and arms.

This once, Hannah and Ajax were not what mattered most, and so not what he saw. Against his half-closed lids, Math watched again the shadow-figure pacing soft as a fox from the far corner of the inn’s upper room to the stairs, leaving a moth’s wing of flame and smoke behind him.

Math had only ever met one man who could walk that quietly: the man who had shaken his nights twice in a row; the man who had brought Nero to him and then kept him apart; the man who had taken the horses from him to walk into the hippodrome, having seen what no one else had seen, so that he could warn Ajax; the man who had given Math a gold coin –
gold
– and sent him to safety; the man who was, even now, struggling to bring his father out alive.

Pantera still made his armpits sweat as he had on the docks when first they met. Math didn’t believe for one moment that he had set light to the inn, but he knew that he was the one man who could find, and then kill, whoever had done. First, though, and far more important, he had to bring Math’s father out of the inn alive.

And in that was the turning of his life. Because what he saw in the dark of his half-closed eyes was his father, or rather the care that had leapt to his father’s eyes when Math had woken him with the smoke already filling the room.

His father had never looked at him like that before. Or perhaps he had, and Math had not seen it. Whichever was true, that single look had pierced his chest and set itself in his heart, so that when all the team had been woken and sent to the ladder and Math could have run to safety he had turned back, searching for a thing he knew his father had forgotten.

Sitting on the cold grass with the sour-sea stench of the seagull salve thick in his nostrils, he smelled again the smoke and the burned-hair smell of his father, and saw again the shifting thickness in the air that was Caradoc’s crippled progress as he came to find him.

‘We need to go,’ Caradoc had said. He was a warrior. Every part of him showed it.

Math felt a pride he had never thought possible. Under his father’s gaze, he lifted the leather coin pouch he had found in the nook of the inn’s corner, not far from where they had slept. Four gold coins and three silver jingled inside.

‘I got this for you,’ he had said, holding it up to be clear he had not meant to steal it. The confrontation over Akakios’ coin still lay between them and he wanted it gone. ‘I saw where you hid it.’

‘I thought you might have done,’ his father had said. ‘That was well done.’

Caradoc had said that so often, in exactly that voice. Never before had Math felt it touch him. There, in all the smoke and the flame, his father reached out and raised him to his feet. The smoke hung like a curtain between them. Only now, looking back, did Math see his father properly.

‘Hannah’s taken Ajax to the ladder,’ Caradoc had said hoarsely. ‘Nobody else is left to get out.’ And then, as Math turned back to where the ladder had been, ‘Not that way. A beam’s falling there. We need to go round by the other wall.’

His father set the pace. Through the thickening smoke, they felt their way round the seating benches and the smouldering remains of the pallets to the safety of the far wall.

Even that was burning. Flames lanced without warning through the smoke, spearing at their eyes. Sparks flew and lodged in their hair.

‘Math!’ Caradoc caught Math and drew him into the hollow of his body, hunching his shoulders round to keep him safe. They began a strange, shuffling run, dodging the falling debris, feeling forward with four hands, like a creature from the winter tales. The building goaded them, groaning and grinding, threatening to break apart under them, or over them, to carry them to death in fire and rubble.

Math had felt the floor lurch under his feet. Jumping sideways, he had felt his father follow, then brace and, with a lightness that defied his injuries, spin in mid-air, grabbing him by the waist and throwing him forward, and sideways, back the way he had come.

The beam had fallen to the place Math had been; the place his father now was. With sickening slowness, he heard unfragile wood smash into fragile bone and flesh.

‘Father!’ He groped outward, grabbing at wood and skin equally.

‘
Go!
’ The power in his father’s voice would have moved a tree from its rooting.

Math was not a tree. He was a son with an injured father. He crept forward. ‘Father, come with me.’

‘Math. Go to the ladder. I’ll follow.’

‘You can’t.’ Math was weeping. ‘I won’t leave you. We can go to Mother and the others together.’

There had been others, nameless brothers and sisters, he was sure. He had never spoken of them, nor heard them mentioned in his presence, but they had been the missing parts of his family, gaps that should have been filled, for as long as he could remember.

More than anything in the world, more than racing in Rome or being cherished by Nero, more than stealing gold or being with the horses, more than winning Pantera’s approval, in that moment Math wanted his family to be whole again.

‘Math, please, will you …’ His father’s voice had fallen away. Math turned his head, listening, and then he, too, had heard the miracle.

‘Pantera!’ He squirmed back towards the ladder. ‘He’ll help you. I’ll make him come up.’

‘Math, no—’

But he was already gone, and Pantera had done as he was bid, and gone up the ladder back into the fire to get his father, and all there was to do now, out on the cold meadow, with the blaze of the tavern lighting the whole sky, was to sit and wait and watch and listen to Ajax speaking to Hannah and pray with every part of his soul to the gods of sea and land and wind and forest that Pantera could bring out his father alive.

Hannah sat on the scorched grass and watched Math come back into himself from the place he had been. He was white and cold, so that the skin around the burns’ edges was blue.

She reached for him and found him stiff as wood. ‘You did well,’ she said. ‘He’ll be proud of you.’ She did not have to say who.

‘You’re peaceful,’ he said, as if that followed from what she had said. ‘But you’re alive.’ His face crumpled in a frown. ‘Father told Ajax that my mother found peace when she died. I heard him.’

‘Math …’ Hannah laid his hand down. Hesitantly, she leaned over and kissed his forehead. It tasted of soot and smoke and boyish sweat. She said, ‘When you live with peace, death seems not such a great thing, and not so far away. Like a leaf seen through thin ice, you could reach for it and take it easily.’

‘It’s not a bad thing?’

‘I don’t think so, no. Sometimes …’ She searched for words that she would not regret later. ‘Sometimes, it can seem like a gift. But it doesn’t do to seek it too early.’

He toyed with a tugged blade of grass, his eyes seeing something else. ‘But a warrior gives his life for his friend’s, so that his friend might not die.’

‘A warrior does that for honour,’ Ajax said, thinly, from Hannah’s other side. ‘Not because death is bad. Pantera’s been a warrior. He’ll bring Caradoc out alive if he can, even at the cost of his own life.’

‘Ajax!’ Hannah spun from the boy to the injured man. With consciousness had come pain. His face was grey, tinged to a bilious yellow around his eyes and mouth. She pulled back her hair and laid her ear to his sternum. His skin was warm, but not hot. She could hear the drum of his heart, stronger and more regular than it had been.

When she sat back, his eyes rested lightly on hers, questioning. He managed the ghost of a smile. ‘Will I live to see dawn?’

‘You should do. Whether you’ll drive or not remains to be seen.’ She lifted his left hand. ‘See if you can hold my finger with this hand … and this one … and then tell me if you can feel it when I pinch the finger ends …’

She tested the fingers of each hand to make sure he was able to feel and flex all of them. Across her head, to Math, Ajax said, ‘Drivers are indestructible.’

Math’s whole being was fixed on the fire. Hannah shook her head slowly. With a feigned lightness, she said, ‘That I doubt, but you’ll at least be able to hold the reins.’ She laid Ajax’s hands down on his lap. ‘I need to test the health of your mind. Can you tell me your name?’

She asked it without thinking: the question she always asked of men who had crossed the Lethe and returned again.

She saw him take a breath and let it out. ‘For tonight,’ he said, ‘I am Ajax, son of Demetrios of Athens.’

She felt her face freeze. ‘Will you name for me your parents? The ones for tonight?’

‘Hannah—’

He caught at her hand. She pulled it free. ‘Any names will do, as long as they’re consistent with who you claim to be.’

He closed his eyes. ‘Demetrios, my father, was a potter. My mother was the daughter of a horse trainer. Her name was Eurydike. She died two years ago.’

He forced open his eyes. He was angry, which was a new thing to see. ‘Must I speak of my cousins and uncles, or is that enough for you to believe my mind isn’t curdled?’

‘It’s enough.’

She had never been curt to him before. He grasped for her hand again, catching her one finger in the clumsiness of his burned palm. ‘Hannah …’

‘Don’t.’ She shook herself free. ‘I have never pried where my patients did not wish me to go.’

‘Am I only a patient? Still? You saw the bear last night.’ He was beyond tired and in a kind of pain she couldn’t begin to imagine, or he would never have said such a thing.

She laid a hand on his shoulder, where she thought it would hurt least. ‘You’ve cracked two ribs. You won’t drive a chariot for at least two months, but that should get you on board the ship for Alexandria. Once you get there, ask whoever you retain as the team’s physician to let you know when you’re fit.’

His eyes, which had drifted shut, flashed open. ‘I thought you’d come with us?’

‘Then you were wrong.’

‘But—’ He made himself sit upright. ‘If I lie, it’s for your safety.’

‘I know. I meant what I said. Your life is your own. I don’t want to know a name that will harm us both. It isn’t that.’

‘But you don’t want to return to Alexandria? Is the pain of old loss too great?’

‘It’s not that, either. I could return tomorrow if that were all that was keeping me away. The grief is old and long since ceased to hurt.’ That was a lie, but she spoke with a conviction that made it possible to believe otherwise.

‘Then why …?’ He started to reach for her a third time but let his hand fall. ‘Hannah, you’re a part of our team. We’re going to race for the emperor. We need you if we’re going to win.’

Hannah stared down at her hands, at the smears of old blood and new, at the burns and the cuts, at the miracle of their being whole, and not burned to raw stumps.

‘I can’t.’

‘Hannah!’

‘The fire was deliberate,’ she said. ‘It may be, as you said, that the Blues came to finish what they began this morning, but if they did so it was too late: for good or for ill, for your skill or’ – she glanced at Math and away – ‘for other reasons, Nero had already chosen the Greens. Akakios came to tell us in the inn before we ate and the whole of Coriallum knew it long before the fire started.’