Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (21 page)

In Britain, Pantera had seen the warriors set each other such tests in the winter, to keep them sharp for the battles of spring. It was autumn now, with no battles in sight, but still the water’s promise drew him. Feeling the kiss of flying water on his naked back, he stepped out along the narrow stone to sit at the rounded end with his bare feet dangling over the water, and was not surprised when Ajax joined him and began to unwind the bandage Hannah had so carefully set about his chest.

A red-black bruise in the shape of a horse’s foot showed under the driver’s left armpit. Across the rest of his chest, other, more linear bruises showed where he had been dragged in the sand.

Slowly, Pantera said, ‘When I was in Britain, it was said that the bear-warriors of the Eceni were most feared by the legions of all those who fought against Rome.’

There was quiet, with the rush of the river beneath their feet to take the words safely away. Ajax was naked now, his flesh starkly white between the bruising. He came to sit on the stone, close enough for Pantera to feel his body’s warmth.

‘Do you think Nero recognized the bear-scars this morning?’ He made no effort to deny what he was.

‘If he had done,’ Pantera said, ‘you would be dying by now.’

The night was quiet, waiting for what more he might say. The pool beneath their feet was a cauldron of busyness, except at one corner, where the surface was still, mirroring the stars. In such places, the gods or the beloved dead were known to show their faces.

Pantera found himself looking only there. The water was smooth as poured silver, and perfectly black. He could not see Aerthen anywhere in it, only the clear reflection of Ajax, who had pushed himself to his feet and stood at the dolmen’s edge, looking down.

‘How deep do you think the water is in the pool?’ he asked. ‘Deep enough to dive into?’

Pantera felt a tug in the pit of his guts. ‘I think the gods intend us to believe so,’ he said.

‘Good. Then we can continue this conversation in the water, where the gods will heal us best. I have need of a cleansing.’

Ajax’s dive was neat and straight; he entered the water sweetly, as a cormorant might, with little noise.

In the wait before he surfaced, Pantera stood and readied himself to dive, an act he had last performed in Britain, in the sweet time of peace when his love had consumed him. Before that, he had never been confident in water. In Aerthen’s company, he had learned to swim, if not to enjoy the experience.

He counted slowly to ten and Ajax did not reappear. Holding his breath, Pantera pushed off the balls of his feet.

The water was so cold, it burned his scorched skin. The pool was deeper than he had imagined, but not so deep that he did not feel rocks graze the skin of his forearms as he came to the limits of his dive.

Because Ajax had done it, he swept his arms against the current to keep himself under. Opening his eyes in the fierce black water, he found Ajax in front of him, alive: a face, a pair of wide, coppery eyes, a hand that reached out to take his forearm in the grip of one warrior to another. To take that grip and return it, even on dry land, implied an oath manifestly more binding than the one Pantera had refused to give Seneca in the afternoon and matched exactly the one he had freely given Caradoc.

Ajax gripped his arm again. His face came closer. The coppery eyes held Pantera’s, hard as stone, giving nothing, taking nothing, only offering in their depths, perhaps, a glimmer of friendship such as Pantera had long forgotten.

They had been underwater too long. Pantera’s lungs burned, and a reddening blackness made tunnels before his eyes. Hazily, it came to him that what was offered did not interfere with his oath to Caradoc. Blinded by lack of air, he felt the hand leave his arm and return again, urgently.

As urgently, he took it.

They breached the surface together like porpoises, coughing, and sucking in air. Together, they climbed up the side of the falls, and sat face to face on the harsh, prickling grasses, so close that each could see the goose-flesh rising cold on the other, that each could see the time the other took to come back to himself, and so find in the other a mettle worthy of respect.

In time, Ajax rose and crossed unsteadily to the stone that had been their diving platform. For a shocked moment, Pantera thought he might be about to jump again, but he stooped to pick up the bandages and brought them back so that Pantera could rewind them for him.

‘I gave an oath to Caradoc before he died,’ Pantera said, tying the first knot. ‘I swore to keep Math safe, my life for his, and to join him with his family. You, on the other hand, have already sworn to help Math get to Rome. It is in my mind that these two may not be as different as I had thought.’

The fire behind them was less now. In its place, other, smaller campfires had been lit across the paddock. The oak tree had been left, and the dark shape of a man’s body at its foot. Ajax stared at it a while. ‘If I can keep Math safe, if I can fulfil my oath to his mother and yet get him safely home to the rest of his father’s family … that would be a very good thing.’

‘Then we have a common goal. All we need to do is find a means to attain it.’ Pantera tied the last knot of the linen and stood. Together, they walked along the river’s bank to where the refugees were gathering, with fires and food and ale. Before they reached the greater light, Ajax paused and stooped to pick up a pebble and send it skipping across the water. It bounced three times, number of luck.

‘We have need of a leatherworker,’ he said. ‘You have lived among the Dumnonii. You could join us, perhaps, in that capacity?’

‘You flatter me.’ Pantera, too, chose a pebble from the river’s edge. His was a good one, flat and sharp around its edge; it went further, skipping seven times along the river’s length. In the good omen of that, he made the day’s last and greatest decision.

‘Yesterday, the emperor asked a service of me,’ he said slowly. ‘I refused. Now … it may be that the best way to protect Math is to accept. Whatever is said of him, Nero is not without honour. If I can do as he wants, it may serve us later.’

‘So you won’t come to Alexandria with us?’ There was disappointment in Ajax’s voice.

‘I will go, but on the emperor’s business, not as part of the Green team. You will be left to take care of Math. I’ll do what I can from outside the training compound.’

They were near the fires. Pantera stopped before the light caught them. ‘Caradoc gifted his knife to Math,’ he said. ‘But with his last breath, he said I was to tell his son that he was proud of him. It is in my mind that I told the wrong son of his father’s pride.’

‘He may have meant both.’ Ajax’s face was caught in shadows, unreadable. ‘We could be glad if it were so. A father should feel pride in all his children.’

T
he next day’s dawn saw Coriallum veiled in white ash, pure as virgin snow.

Hannah rose with the cock’s crow and found Math already up, with the fire lit outside her tent and a pot of water warming on it.

‘Did you sleep at all?’ she asked.

‘Of course.’ He eyed her askance, as if there were something improper in the question. ‘But Pantera came by earlier and woke me. He says the emperor will send clothes for us, so we can be decently dressed for our audience. He thought perhaps we should …’ He drifted to silence, his eyes flickering from the heating water to Hannah and back.

‘He thinks we should wash?’ She was laughing and scandalized at once. ‘Did he say that?’

‘He said that Nero would send Akakios to say it and it might be better if we were ready.’ Math was brittle in defence of his hero, but not as withdrawn as he had been. His face was filthy with ash, but there was colour beneath.

He had baked oat cakes. Now, he used a stick to ease one from the embers, spat on his fingers against the heat and passed it to her.

‘We went together to see my father’s body,’ he said. ‘Pantera thinks we could build a high frame later today and lay my father on it, so that the crows and ravens might take his body, piece by piece. It’s how the warriors were given their sky burial in the days of our grandfathers.’

‘Pantera said that?’

‘Ajax agreed. He was awake when we came back.’

Hannah had slept badly and was sluggish with exhaustion. Nevertheless, it seemed everyone else was ahead of her. She looked for Ajax where she had left him and saw only a ruck of folded bedding.

‘He’s with the horses,’ Math said. ‘I’m to tell you he’ll be back in time to wash his face for Nero.’

Slowly, she sat down on a stone set by the fire.

‘Then by all means let us wash,’ she said. ‘I have some ash soap in my tent, in the box with the acorn carved on the lid, under the nest of copper bowls. If you can find it, we might even get ourselves clean.’

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.’