Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (27 page)

Out in the desert, Math had abandoned the camel bones and was practising handsprings across the sand. ‘But in Egypt,’ Hannah said absently, ‘death has no sting. Even the untutored know that death is another doorway that leads to the journey they left at birth. Ptolemy knew that; he wanted his new god to— There’s something ahead. Can you see it?’

Math had stopped his handsprings, and was standing absolutely still. Ahead, near the Canopic Gate with its carved eagle and the Eye of Horus above the keystone, a vulture erupted from the sands, and another. Three others wheeled in the sky.

Five vultures. Uneasily, Hannah glanced at the shadows to see if it was noon yet; one of her tutors had taught her the Etruscan augurs by which bird-flight might be read. Finding it still morning, she strove to remember the lines as she had been taught them.

If five are they who circle ’neath the fore-day sun

Bring forth the witness who with clearest heart may—

Saulos caught her arm. ‘There were five,’ he said. ‘Now there are nine. That changes the meaning.’ Always, he surprised her with the things he knew.

‘Nine. Number of ill-omen.’ Hannah’s head snapped round to count. Nine. In three groups of three, circling sunwise. She knew the meaning of that without needing the couplet; some things are never forgotten. She said, ‘Someone will die this afternoon, before sundown.’

‘We could turn back now if you’re worried,’ Saulos offered.

‘The danger’s not for me,’ Hannah said, ‘or for Math. Nine signals death for a grown man. If you like, certainly we could return to the compound.’

Saulos looked up at the dense blue sky, as if instruction came from it. ‘There are many grown men in Alexandria,’ he said presently. ‘If I am to die, turning back will make no difference. And each of us can only do his best in the eyes of his god. The best I can do, I think, is to go on in, although—’ He turned a frank, clear gaze on Hannah. ‘The gate takes us through the Hebrew quarter. You’re an unmarried woman and Math is neither your son nor mine.’

‘We will meet with disapproval?’

He grinned. ‘At the very least. And if we’re unlucky, disapproval might lead to stones being thrown. I love this place, but the people are hotheads, prone to over-zealous action. I hesitate to say this, but I think we might attract less notice – less opprobrium – if we were temporarily family: you as my wife, and Math as my son.’

Despite the vultures, Hannah laughed. She let her gaze rest on Saulos’ lank hair and unremarkable eyes. ‘I might reasonably be taken for your wife,’ she said, ‘but only a blind man would think Math was your son.’

‘Of course.’ Saulos shrugged. ‘But then it will seem as if I have been told by my unfaithful wife that he is my son, and that I have not had the courage to confront her. Men see what they want to see, and they delight most in feeling scorn for others. It renders them blind to many things, which can be a boon at times. They will not, for instance, question why a woman of your beauty would choose to marry a man of such little distinction.’ He cocked his head to one side. ‘If you will let it, we can make this happen. I believe it will be safer.’

‘I’m sure it will, as long as we— what is
that
?’

Something bloody lay on the sand. Math had stopped and was backing away. The hesitant breeze brought a first scent of blood, and pain and terror. Hannah said, ‘Somebody’s dying.’

‘Ah.’ Saulos bit his lip. ‘We are under Roman justice, after all. Will you wait here while I look? For Math’s sake?’

For Math, Hannah waited, and for Math’s pride, she didn’t go out and gather him from the desert, but stood and watched him, and he her, so that they seemed each stranded on a spit of sand, unreachable.

Saulos returned faster than he had gone, with the news she expected. ‘The baker,’ he said quietly. ‘Flayed and pegged out. And the boy of the Blue team who sold him the information on Poros’ third colt that has strained its tendon.’

Hannah quelled a surge of bile. ‘Dead?’

‘The boy is. His throat is cut. The baker … may not be dead yet. A man can’t live long under the sun without his skin, but I think he’s breathing still. The guards are watching, so we can’t go close, but we must go past to enter the city. If you don’t want Math to see it, I suggest we walk past swiftly and he doesn’t look to his right.’

They passed subdued, averting their eyes. The baker was not yet dead, but there was no way to hasten his passing. Eight legionaries watched from the city walls, to be sure nobody interfered with the emperor’s justice.

Math was sick before they reached the gates. Hannah held his shoulders while he fell to his knees and vomited thin bile and the remains of the morning’s bread. She had no cloth to wipe his mouth and would have given him her sleeve, but he used desert dust and smeared it, so that his whole mouth was darkened.

After, she picked him up and carried him for a few paces, but he wanted to walk and she set him down, and kept hold of his hand as they entered Alexandria.

The Canopic Gate loomed ahead, the height of four men and three across. The Eye of Horus gazed down at them, and an eagle hovered over with outstretched wings, mirror to the wheeling vultures.

‘Math?’ Hannah pulled him to a stop. ‘As we pass through the Hebrew quarter, you’re our son, mine and Saulos’. Can you be that?’

His quick, scornful glance said that he was a spy, trained by a spy, and he could do anything. She watched him shrug on the new mantle, and the change it brought to his eyes.

‘I can try,’ he said, with a child’s solemnity, so that she and Saulos laughed a little and then more, and like that, laughing, their small family left behind the heat of the desert and passed under the Canopic Gate with its welcome in three languages carved across the keystone.

M
ath spat, to clear his mouth of the sick. Hannah had asked him not to look as they passed the baker, but it was too late; he had already seen. The image of a man he had known, skinless, pegged out on the sand with his mouth full of flies and his muscles laid bare to the feasting vultures was printed on the back of his eyes so that he thought he might never see anything else.

At least it washed away the humiliation of Ajax’s fury. Math should have known, of course, that tipping the chariot on two wheels risked destroying not only the rig, but his horses’ legs with it; he should have known that it was necessary to bring the colts into matching stride on the long straight, and that, by failing to do so, he had put an inexcusable amount of pressure on Bronze, who had to hold the inside of a badly executed corner. Most, he should have known that nothing he could do would impress Ajax or make him any more likely to let him ride the racing rig before he was ready.

He
had
known that. He had just thought … he wasn’t sure what he had thought and whatever it might have been was washed away in the tidal wave of Ajax’s rage so that Saulos’ offer of a day outside in the city had been a gift straight from the gods.

Until he saw the baker, Math’s day had been almost made right again. Striving to set it back on course, he applied himself to spying, at which he was at least good enough to pass in the way Hannah wanted.

Pantera’s voice echoed in his mind’s ear.

Hide when you can; it’s always better not to be seen. But most of the time you can’t hide, and that’s when you need to know the spectrum of all that you could be and then choose one identity out of all the others and
be
it, in every part of your heart and mind and soul
.

Of all the possibilities open to him, from apprentice driver to thief to whore, Math felt most comfortable in a wide-eyed curiosity that applied equally to any of these. It was a mask he had worn so often on Coriallum’s docks that he could don it now without effort.

And so, as they emerged again into the sun, and the noisy, cheerful chaos of the Hebrew quarter, he held fast to Hannah’s hand and sauntered at her side, staring at everything as if it were new, which it was.

He stared at the men in their multicoloured robes, at the women with dark skins and hidden hair, at the small signs of wealth displayed increasingly about the houses as they walked ever closer to the city centre; at the painted window shutters that took over from those simply carved, and the iron door fittings that replaced the leathern hinges and became in their turn gaudily gilded. He revelled in the feel of paved streets underfoot and breathed in the scents of spices he had never encountered in Coriallum or even in the compound.

Hannah was his mother in look and deed. She laughed and scolded and joined him in looking at the curiosities. To his delight, on this day of delights – he wasn’t forgetting the baker, only walling him off in a part of his mind that he didn’t have to look at – she, too, was good at
being
other than she was. She walked taller and smiled broadly at people she could not possibly know.

Smiling back, they did indeed take her to be Saulos’ wife and Math’s mother, and it seemed to him that she didn’t resent it, but rather gloried in the deception.

Saulos did not walk tall. Math wasn’t sure what he made of Saulos. Ajax loathed him, and Ajax was Math’s touchstone for almost everything, but Hannah seemed to like him, or at least to value his conversation, and now, it seemed, Saulos had a natural talent for deception.

With something close to awe, Math watched how, without altering his dress or his ornament – he had none – without so much as running a hand through his mouse-brown hair, Saulos became a shame-ridden cuckold, almost invisible beside his golden-haired son and radiant wife. Passing Hebrew men eyed him with pity, seeing one of their kind providing for a child so clearly not his own.

The houses became richer than any they had seen and the street broader, paved with granite and marble. Ahead, the road broadened, coming to a bridge over the Canopic Canal. A donkey cart piled high with bushels of onions and string upon string of garlic blocked the way on to it.

They were at the limits of the Hebrew quarter. With interest, Math watched to see if Saulos might abandon his guise and revert to the man of letters he was with Hannah, or the stuttering leatherworker who serviced the Green team’s harness, either of whom could plausibly have ordered the donkey’s youthful driver out of the way.

He did neither. Seeing the cart, Saulos sighed and ducked his head and turned right, and, still weighed down by the iniquities of his life, led his dissolute family upstream along the canalside to a second, unblocked bridge, and over it, towards the harbour.

‘Hannah, look!’ Math tugged at her arm, pulling her to the edge of the bridge to look over. Boats were below, laden with goods. He flagged his free hand, chattering, pointing out the colours and the goods as if he were perhaps a tall boy of six, not a small apprentice driver aged ten.

It was not hard to feign enthusiasm; Math had never seen the like. In Coriallum, bridges had been small things, often of wood, and the rivers beneath had not held boats. Here, within spitting distance of Alexandria’s royal quarter, the bridge was a wonder of engineering, with marble and granite facings and images of the gods worked within. It was wide enough for two donkey carts and the pedestrians who might accompany them.

The water in the canal was clear and utterly blue. Small fish flashed in shoals, clouds driven by an unseen wind. River birds paddled, twinned by the water’s mirror.

Floating as if on air, small flat-bottomed boats painted gaily in golds, blues and greens and garlanded with flowers drew dates and figs, dried and fresh fish, baskets of marigolds and bundles of sweet hay for the feeding of cattle and donkeys up to the inland harbour that lay to their north, and thence to the bazaar.

On the canal’s far banks a bustle of boys called up, offering small baubles to Hannah. One of them shouted something at Math in a language he did not understand. It sounded like the groom-boys at the stables, though, who managed to combine an insult, a question and an offer all in one. He grinned and made a gesture that was at once a greeting and a deadly insult. They laughed and ran away. He thought about running after them and remembered that he was
being
a street urchin, but was not one.

Hannah had felt it. She squeezed his hand in hers. Still looking down at the water, she said, ‘Math?’

He looked up happily.

‘Will you promise that you won’t leave us while we’re here? If we lose you, Saulos will be punished for it. And they might not let me come out again.’

‘I promise,’ Math said effortlessly. Promises were easy.

‘On your father’s shade?’

That was harder. He had to think past all the acting to the sacred core that was his father’s memory. He saw brief panic cross Hannah’s face before he said, ‘On my father’s shade.’

Saulos was at the far end of the bridge. Behind him was the massive central bazaar of Alexandria, long and low and flat, ringed about by the raised and gilded roofs of the palaces and the blazing lighthouse to the north and the temples, museums and libraries to the west and south.

‘We should keep moving,’ he said. ‘We might lose our son to the market boys else.’

‘And you?’ Hannah asked. ‘Have I lost you or are you a man again?’

Saulos spread his palms, as merchants did at the end of a hard bargain.

‘I am what you see,’ he said. ‘What others see, I am also. A Hebrew amongst the Hebrews, a Greek amongst Greeks, a merchant in the marketplace and a harness-maker to the winning team in the compound.’

‘And with us?’ Hannah asked. ‘What are you when you’re with us?’

Saulos’ smile encompassed them both. ‘In the company of a woman physician and a boy thief, what could I be but a simple man, purchaser of spikenard and retriever of honest men’s purses? Shall we go?’

Hannah offered thanks to whatever gods of sand and sun might be listening as she and her small family left the bridge together and, still together, entered the bazaar with its confusion of colour and noise and scent, with its proliferation of merchants and travellers, each with a purse inadequately hidden.