Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (29 page)

His feet were human feet, rooted in the earth. His hands were human hands, pulling down the light of heaven and directing it in brilliant shafts from each of his fingers to enlighten his worshippers below.

Around his feet, set far enough back for those within to see up to the god’s crown without doing themselves undue harm, were open-fronted cubicles, with seats running round the three edges and, in some, a bed whereon the petitioner might lie the better to incubate a dream. A wealth of incense fogged the air, so that men and women sneezed in the silence.

‘There.’ Pantera’s voice was barely a whisper. ‘Waiting to go into the second booth from the end. He carries his knife in the right breast of his tunic.’

‘The one haggling with the incense-seller? There are three others similarly armed in neighbouring booths. And to the left of the bronze door to the library, affecting an interest in the soothsayer, is the Galilean’s daughter. It would do us both a service if you stopped pretending not to have noticed her.’

As befitted petitioners in the presence of their god, they approached Serapis’ right foot. Each reached for it, as if in pious awe. Shimon’s fingers brushed the air just above, not quite touching.

Pantera said, ‘I’m not the reason Hannah didn’t go with you to Judaea.’

‘Not entirely, no. Ajax was an equal reason. And the boy, Math, of course, who is a child in need of a mother while Hannah is a grown woman who has never conceived a child. Among our people, she would be considered an abomination. Did you know that Hannah’s mother was a Sibyl and she herself was raised by them?’

Pantera said warily, ‘Ptolemy Asul was raised by the sisters, too, I think. His mother was one of them.’

‘Indeed. He and Hannah will have known one another from the moment of her birth.’ Shimon nodded to a priest in a far alcove. He clasped his hands and his lips moved as if in prayer. ‘Akakios has given his incense. He is speaking to someone on the far side of the screen. I can’t tell who, but he’ll leave soon. If you wish to speak to Hannah, you should do so swiftly.’

‘I can’t leave you.’

‘Ha!’ Shimon laughed, quietly, then knelt and placed a fragment of incense on the god’s foot. He spoke the name of his own god as he did so, that he might not be guilty of idolatry. ‘Go. Speak with her to the ease of your soul. I will leave marks so that you will know which way we go.’

Pantera gripped his shoulder, briefly. ‘Keep safe. If Akakios is going to Ptolemy Asul’s house, don’t go in without me. I’ll catch you up soon.’

H
annah knew Pantera was nearby almost before he came through the door, certainly before he saw her. He was with Shimon, who dared to nod to her. She stood by a stall selling silver images of the god, weighing two as if deciding which to buy. When she looked up again, both men had gone.

She was searching the crowds for them when Saulos caught up with her. He thought she had been looking for him, and was briefly cheerful so that she had not the heart to tell him she hadn’t noticed he’d gone from her side.

‘I’m afraid I have to leave you for a while.’ He sketched a bow. ‘What I have to do shouldn’t take long, and then I’ll help you find Math, I promise.’

‘There’s no need for that,’ Hannah said. ‘Math won’t be far. We’ll go back to the marketplace and wait near the nightingale-seller until you come back. If it comes to the eighth hour and you haven’t returned, I’ll take Math back to the compound.’

‘Thank you.’ Unbidden, Saulos gripped her hand and then dropped it again. ‘Thank you. I will make it up to you one day.’

‘Go. This is my home. I’ll be safe here.’

She watched him weave his way through the crowds and then made her own, more circumspect route towards the exit, looking around haphazardly as if searching for a small boy thief who might have decided that he could put the god’s gold to better use if he liberated it from the supplicants.

‘Math?’ He was nowhere close, but she called anyway, pushing past the stall of silver idols and out on to the steps that led down to the Serapic Way.

After the temple’s shadow, the day was blindingly bright. She shaded her eyes with her palm and scanned the crowds. Even in the short time she had been in the temple, they had multiplied tenfold; she couldn’t have seen Saulos even if she wanted, but she did glimpse a shadow heading out towards the Temple of Apis, down the street on the left.

‘Excuse me. Excuse me, please. I’m so sorry, I’ve lost my son.’ She swept through the centre of a Syrian delegation, scattering men left and right. Those ahead had the sense to step aside, letting her through.

The temple itself was empty, or seemed so. She stepped into the dark, calling in a false whisper, ‘
Math!
Whatever else you do, you can’t rob a god of his silver.’

The temple’s only room was too dark for her to see anything. She stood still.

‘That was well done,’ said a voice that was not the god’s.

To the dark, she said, ‘Math’s been teaching me.’

Her eyes were lost after the blazing day. Blindly, she turned to where she thought the voice had come from. ‘Have you found what you sought?’

‘Not yet,’ Pantera said, ‘but I have Shimon to help me. One of us will.’

He moved as he spoke. His voice came from three places at once. She remembered the sound of it from Gaul, rich as a river over stones, but dry, giving nothing away of heart or mind. It echoed in the small chamber.

She began to see things: the outline of the bull, solid in its overwhelming power; to its left, a closed door; at her side, the brass and bronze water-powered machine into which supplicants could slide a coin to find the answer to their question.

Still, she couldn’t see Pantera. ‘Math saw someone in the marketplace today,’ she said. ‘He left me to follow whoever it was. I assumed it must be you?’

She felt him smile in the dark. ‘I hope not, unless the pupil has already overtaken the master. I believe he was following Akakios. It is a thing he did for me with some success in Gaul.’

‘You set him to follow Akakios?’ Hannah slammed her balled fist on the side of the coin machine. ‘You’re as bad as Ajax! You must have known he’d try to get out of the compound to see you two meet this morning.’

She heard him pause, and think, and then, hesitantly, say, ‘Math’s good. He has the capacity to be very good. We either help him, or we leave him to find out for himself where his mistakes are made. I judged it better to help him. If I’m proved wrong, I’ll do whatever I can to make sure he doesn’t come to harm. There’s nothing more I can do. Will you accept an apology, sincerely given?’ Pantera took perhaps two steps forward. He had been standing between the bull’s forelegs. It was so tall that he could stay upright there and not have to crouch.

He was different from when she had last seen him. Then, he had worn Nero’s snowy tunic belted with silver. Now he was dressed in cheap linen with his hair crammed into a ridiculous cap. His bare feet and legs were covered with a week’s worth of dust and mud. She couldn’t see his scars and nor, therefore, could anyone else.

His face had seen Alexandrian sun for a winter and on into spring. The lines were cut deeper around his eyes and mouth, but the whole was as she remembered it from the first moment’s meeting when she had made herself filthy in Nero’s presence.

Her throat was filled with sand. She said, ‘You’re too like Ajax.’

‘Not in all ways. I think, in fact, not in many ways.’ He leaned on one of the bull’s forelegs. She could smell Nile mud and frankincense and the wildness of a barren mountain in spring. ‘But I do care for Math. I’ll find him and bring him back. Where will I find you?’

‘Near the nightingale-seller. Ask for Hannah the apothecary. Everyone knows me.’

She stood a long time alone in the shadow of the bull after he had gone. Presently, she searched for and found a coin of the right size and dropped it into the oracle machine.

As a child, it had fascinated her; she had come here often to ask questions that never needed answers, just to hear the mechanical swing of the gears, and watch the levers work. Now she found that, as so often with her childhood, memory dwarfed the reality; the water clock in the compound was a far greater feat of engineering than the one in front of her and she could too easily see how the god’s machine reached its conclusion.

The answer, when it arrived, was in the affirmative, but since she had not clearly set a question, it did not help at all in the matter of her choices. She left the machine to its deliberations and went back out into the hot and dusty day.

The Serapic Way was a tide of petitioners, sweeping back and forth to the great temple to her south. As she stepped out into the stream, it came to Hannah that she was alone, and likely to be so for some time, and that, given this unexpected freedom, there was one man in the whole of Alexandria whose company would soothe her soul and whose wisdom she cherished. And he would no doubt have spikenard, and could make the unguent she needed for Saulos.

As a native of the city, she knew all the best short cuts. Leaving the crowds, she passed south of the temple to a small bridge. Crossing it, she entered the friendly clutter of the streets she had known in her youth. For the first time in a decade, she felt herself truly at home.

M
ath caught the eye of the small dark-haired boy with the scarlet silk thread tied at his throat. He was young and very thin with bright, sharp eyes. He flashed Math a wary look but edged sideways under the fruit-vendor’s stall and past the man selling carobwood jewellery boxes until he crouched nearby under the shelter of an empty donkey cart.

Math took off the cap he had stolen, which was covering his hair. ‘I want the one with the nose like a knife and no hair on his brow,’ he said to the silk-boy. ‘Only him. I won’t look at any of the others, I swear.’

A boy’s oath was worth nothing, they both knew that, but the law of the street – of any street in any city in any province or nation of the empire – said that promise must be given and taken, as if it had true value.

The silk-boy looked where Math pointed. Akakios was not overly fast, but he brooked no delay and even merchants about to seal a bargain stepped briskly aside to let him pass.

The boy twirled his red cord, thinking. ‘He’s going to the Hebrew quarter,’ he observed. ‘Men like him cross at the jewelled bridge on the main way where everyone can see them.’ Implicit was the assumption that Math would not want to be seen. ‘You could get there as fast if you go by the north bridge. It’s old and uncertain, but boys can cross it easily.’

Math nodded, looking around. ‘Where is it?’

‘Follow him until you reach the ivory-seller, then turn lakewards and go past the fish-women. Follow the fisher trail until you reach the soldier with one arm who begs. He’ll try to grab at you. The bridge is ahead of him. Go over it and you’ll be on the Street of the Three Palms. You’ll get there ahead of your man if you run.’

‘Thank you.’ Math ducked a nod. He could have paid, but he knew better than to open his own purse and reveal that he had silver in there. A wad of rancid cheese kept it silent.

He was nearly gone when the silk-boy caught his elbow. ‘What about the old Hebrew? I could slow him down.’

Math had seen the old Hebrew, but didn’t know the boy had seen him too. The old man was clearly a spy, that much was plain from his behaviour; he slid through the shadows like an eel through weed and neither bought goods nor examined them.

Math had noticed him first in the temple, when the old man had come out of the library. He was with Pantera and, it seemed, he knew Hannah and she him, both of which combined meant he was not a stranger, and might be a friend.

Most important of all, the old man didn’t want Akakios to see him and seemed to be succeeding in that, which made him very good indeed, because the emperor’s spymaster had eyes on all sides of his head that saw everything, almost.

‘No,’ Math said. ‘Let him alone.’

‘He hasn’t got any money anyway.’ The boy grinned and spat on his hand and held it out in a universal gesture as common on the docks of Gaul as the streets of Alexandria. ‘If you need help …’

‘I’ll whistle,’ Math said, and slipped away.

The boy’s directions were good. Keeping Akakios in sight, keeping his face mostly averted and his cap always on, ducking under stalls where he could do it without causing havoc and making use of all the available cover when he couldn’t, Math tracked Akakios – and by extension the nameless old Hebrew – until he came to a stall ripe with elephant tusks, lying in bundles, tied together with twine. To its left was a profusion of women selling dried fish, flat and black from the sun.

There was no room between them, but he flashed a grin at the three nearest women and slid into the stinking space under the counter, pushed his way past three sacks of stiff fish and emerged at the back of the stall.

Right, then left, and he saw a crippled legionary sitting in the noonday shadows with his cap on the ground. Some coins flashed in it, which was, frankly, reckless. Out of sheer habit, Math estimated the sum, the distance from here to there, and three distinct routes of escape – and abandoned them all in the sad understanding that the last thing he needed was a hue and cry.

Regretfully, he slipped past the old soldier – and only a month of Pantera’s uncompromising tuition stopped him from crying aloud as a hand grabbed at his ankle.

He stood very still. The hand was far stronger than any crippled beggar’s had a right to be. ‘Pantera?’ He whispered it, barely a sound.

‘If not, you’d be dead. Don’t walk so close to men you don’t know. I thought I’d taught you that.’

Abruptly, his ankle was released. Math managed not to gape with joy. He forgot all about Akakios. To be here, to
be
in Pantera’s presence, to have got this far himself …

He became aware that he was grinning foolishly, while Pantera was squinting up at him, grunting vague threats, because that was what the old soldier would have done. The threat in his eyes was not vague at all.