Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (35 page)

Akakios turned back to face Hannah. ‘And whereas you might not return Saulos’ love,’ he said, ‘I know that I can rely upon you to do whatever you can in your turn to keep Ajax and Math safe. Have you petitioned the Oracle yet, to ask if you might conduct in a supplicant?’

Hannah shook her head.

‘My sources say that you must, and soon. When is appropriate?’

She found her voice. ‘The dawn of any day.’

‘Then tomorrow at dawn, you will ask for and receive permission to escort Saulos into Hades. At the time appointed, you will be his guide in all ways and will ensure that he remains alive and returns with the answer that I require. You will do this willingly and well or those whom you love will die as Ptolemy Asul died. You know I can do this, and I will.’

Ajax found her later, being sick into a bowl in her own quarters. He was alight with the success of his venture, with Math’s skill, with hope for the race, so that she didn’t want to tell him what had happened and he had to draw it out of her word by word.

When she was done, he sat on the edge of her bed staring straight at the wall. His face had taken on the smooth blankness she saw before a race, when his mind was turned inward. He said, ‘I could kill him, here, today, now. He wouldn’t threaten you then.’

‘He’ll have thought of that. If he dies, there will be an order left for you and Math to die. It’s the way men like him work.’

‘What will you do, then?’

Hannah set the bowl down and wiped her mouth with the heel of her hand. Making herself meet Ajax’s eyes was harder than giving her word to Akakios had been. Ajax could read her in ways Akakios never could; he knew the cost of what she was doing. She was glad Math wasn’t there.

‘I’ll do exactly what he asks,’ she said. ‘I’ll take Saulos into the tunnels beneath the Serapeum that lead to Hades, there to cross the Styx and meet with the Oracle. What happens after that is between him, the Ferryman and the Sibyl. If he dies, it won’t be of my doing.’

D
awn came slowly to the man lying in the rubble of the half-built building that backed on to the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria.

Pantera had settled there in the dark, feeling his way, lit by grey stars. By feel, he had come to a place he had noted during the day, and to the oiled cloth he had hidden between the scattered stones. Then, feigning the appearance of a clerk sent to examine the site, he had made a space for himself, clearing it free of broken bricks and other debris so that he could lie unseen through an entire day if necessary.

Before dawn, he had eased himself in, and drawn the pale cloth over his head, for shade and camouflage together. He had laid his knife where he could reach it then rested his chin on his fists and prepared to wait.

And wait.

Dawn was a pale thing, scented with eucalyptus and juniper, brought to life by mosquitoes flying in droves from Lake Mareotis and then cicadas that hid with the scorpions in the walls. After the insects, songbirds came in great profusion, to blast the temple and its surround, to shake it awake, and all the priests who attended the god.

White-clad novices emerged and began to sweep the temple steps. Satisfied, the birds went away to sing other, less violent songs, except for one full-throated warbler that stayed behind to warn the priests and whoever else might listen of the man lying still under the canvas.

Unless, of course, the warning was meant for the man, to tell him he was not alone. It had been true once, in Britain, when Pantera had lain in wait for a small band of Roman auxiliaries and the clucking of a blackbird had warned him of the scout who might have run over him if he had not listened to the bird and moved in time.

He lay still, therefore, listening, scenting the breeze coming in off the lake, and so was not surprised when a single pebble bounced in front of his face and a light, acerbic voice said, ‘Leopard, must you lie in your lair in the full glare of the sun or will you come with me into privacy and shade?’

‘How may I come without being seen by the three men Akakios has set on watch?’ Pantera asked.

‘Slide backwards two lengths of your body and turn to your right eighty degrees. There you will find a stack of oak planking set at an angle against the wall. Behind it is an entrance such as a boy might crawl down. If your body will fit, you can go in there and nobody will ever see you.’

‘And if I don’t fit?’

‘Try it,’ said Hypatia of Alexandria from the thin air near the temple. ‘There’s no point in taking risks if what you desire can be achieved easily without.’

It wasn’t easy. He had never been happy in confined spaces, particularly not those fashioned by men, but he inserted himself feet first into the small round portal and slid-wriggled through into the room below. A woman’s hands caught his ankles and he let them guide him down on to a ledge and thence to the floor.

He stood in darkness made more complete by its contrast to the morning’s fierce sun. When he stretched his hands out his fingertips found smooth, flat limestone at each quarter. The roof was a bare hand’s breadth over his head. The walls were within reach on three sides. He could feel warmer air from the fourth, but also a hint of a fresh current that cut across to cool his right side, and brought with it the peppery tang of incense.

Hypatia left him and returned from an outer chamber bearing an oil lamp of soapstone with a good wick that didn’t smoke too much. The light pushed outwards, showing the small, perfect room into which she had brought him, the bench cut into the far wall, and the paintings.

The paintings: images of life, and greater than life. Behind him, instantly engaging, stood Cerberus, three-headed hound-guardian of Hades, made lifelike in a way men never were.

Each head was of a different kind of hound, one a great, broad-jawed mastiff, the next wise Anubis, the last a running dog from Britain. They had teeth to rend and their throats were red with blood. But the birds flying across the other walls unsettled him more.

‘Three herons,’ he said, tracing the outline of the first with his finger. ‘They’re souls, travelling to the underworld – am I right? And when they come down out of the sky, Charon, the Ferryman, takes them in his craft across the Styx to the landing stage guarded by the triple-headed hound. And this …’

He took the lamp from her hand and brought it close. The paint was old, and worn, but as clear as anything he had seen in Ptolemy Asul’s house. Around and above, ghosted images of birds and sexless men, of cats, ibis, oxen and hounds, ran all towards the third and final panel of the frieze.

There, the three herons came to rest, standing in a high domed room, with their wings spread as covers over the lying figure of a sleeping youth. He or she – it was impossible to tell which – had dark hair bound at the brow with a fillet of silver, and was covered from neck to foot by a thin white shroud, except where the arms were folded over the breast, hiding what might lie beneath.

‘This is the soul, brought home at death,’ Pantera said hoarsely, and wondered why it moved him so.

‘You’re right.’ He thought Hypatia sounded surprised, possibly impressed. ‘What you see there are the Ka and Ba – the first two herons – seeing the soul safely home, that it might not be lost in the world. We who are alive fear the manner of our death, when what we should fear is an unwitting death, in which our soul does not know itself free and cannot navigate its way forward. In which case—’

‘In which case it roams the place of its death, seeking to return into life.’ Pantera shivered and watched the shadows float about the room. ‘In Britain, the dreamers can speak with such lost souls and send them home. Here, I know of no one who could do that.’

‘Such people exist,’ Hypatia said drily, ‘but we’d be sewn into sacks and thrown into the Nile for heresy if we revealed ourselves openly.’

She stood close enough to touch. Her scent was the same as it had been when they had first met: a breath of wild roses, with ever more subtle tones of other flowers beneath. She wore it sparely, so that she smelled also of brick dust and eucalyptus and water from a cold, deep well.

Pantera turned his back to the herons. ‘The sisters have been here a long time, then.’ He made it half a question.

Hypatia took back the lamp. ‘We were here before Alexander ever set foot on the isthmus,’ she said. ‘We will be here long after Rome is dust.’

‘So the tale of the wheat flour poured on the sand to draw the streets of a city is a myth?’

‘No, the wheat flour is true; Alexander wanted to see how to lay out a city. What’s false is that he did it on an empty land. We were here, and had been so since before the pyramids were built. And it’s also not true that Ptolemy Soter alone decided to build the Serapeum.’ She waved her hands upwards. Pantera had a sense of a great weight pressing down on this room. ‘He was helped in the making of his new god.’

Pantera tried not to imagine the entire Temple of Serapis falling in on his head, heavier than the sky, and far more likely to collapse. He swept his arms overly wide, encompassing the room and its old, old murals. ‘The sisters designed the Serapeum to hide this?’

‘And all that it leads to.’ Unexpectedly, Hypatia smiled. ‘You
are
clever. And I am a poor host. Wait.’ She took the lamp and left him in darkness with her voice echoing in his ears.

She returned with two pewter mugs. The sides made satin mirrors, curving her reflection around her hand. She was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. And still the most unreadable.

Formally, she handed him a mug, saying, ‘I swear by the god we both believe in that this is untainted, and so safe for us to drink.’

‘Thank you. They say the oracles drug their petitioners to make them suggestible. I’m glad to hear it’s not true.’ He sipped self-consciously, tasting stone and the deepest earth. ‘Do we both believe in the same god? I didn’t know the Sibyls were given to Mithras.’

‘We’re not. But if you don’t know by now that the god’s name and shape is a shield, a bright pattern to catch the eyes and deflect them from the greater truth behind, then you shouldn’t be here.’

Pantera was considering the truth of that when a single stone fell – or was dropped – in the outer chamber. It bounced once, destroying any semblance of privacy.

Pantera had his knife half out when Hypatia caught his arm. ‘No. This isn’t for you.’ She set her beaker steadily on the floor. Three different shadows passed across her face. ‘Although it may be the other reason you came. Will you wait here a moment?’

She did not take the lamp this time. Her eyes, it seemed, could see into the blackness at the room’s margins. She became a moth’s wing, leaving, a soft shade that stepped up to the wall and through it and was gone.

Left to himself, Pantera set the lamp in a niche in the wall and stood with his back to it, blocking the light. He closed his eyes for a count of ten heartbeats and when he opened them the black had shades of grey within it, and he could see that the room in which he stood had not one but two other doorways besides the small, cramped tunnel that had given him entrance.

Two strands of air passed him, one from each doorway. He followed the cooler, fresher of the two, tasting juniper and sunlight on the incoming air. It gave way to a tunnel, which bent round to his left. He saw grey, hazed daylight and walked towards it.

‘You came,’ Hypatia said, as he neared the turn.

Pantera stopped still, as he had once in childhood, when his only fear had been of a falling sky, and the love he had sought was his father’s.

‘I came,’ agreed a woman he knew, in a voice he had never heard. ‘Akakios made me. He holds Math’s and Ajax’s lives against my good behaviour.’

‘You came only for that?’ asked the cooler voice. ‘For love of the Briton?’

Pantera closed his eyes and wished himself elsewhere, but in the long silence that followed, he did not walk away.

‘What must I do?’ Hannah asked at last.

‘Bring Saulos, as Akakios demands. Make sure he’s properly prepared. Take him to the Styx. The Ferryman will be there to conduct you over if he answers the questions correctly.’

‘He’ll answer if anyone can. Akakios chose well.’

‘In that case, the Oracle will be in the Temple of Truth as she has always been. If he approaches her properly, he will be given what he seeks.’

‘Pantera needs to know it also,’ Hannah said, from further away. ‘Could you … has he asked …?’

‘Yes. The prophecy can only be spoken once, but I will bring your leopard to the temple and he can hear what Saulos hears.’

He heard a pause, and a woman’s footsteps, pacing. Hannah said, ‘But then Akakios will kill him.’

‘There are ways and ways to bring a man to the Oracle. You will know Pantera while Saulos will not, and so will not be able to betray him to Akakios. In so far as any man can be, Pantera will be safe in this. And Ajax.’

‘Thank you.’ Hannah’s slow breaths filled the tunnel in which Pantera stood. She said, ‘Will I see you again?’

‘I’ll be in the temple.’

‘You know I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘I do, but also you know there are some things we are not allowed to see.’ It seemed to Pantera, listening, that Hypatia hovered on the brink of tears. With a strength of will that hurt to hear, she said, ‘My dear, you were followed when you came here. You will have to go back to Akakios and tell a story of such power that he’ll be too afraid to send in his men to wrest the information he wants by force. Can you do that?’

My dear
.

We were lovers
.

It was enough. Rising, Pantera walked back through the tunnel to a darkness where he could be alone.

The lamp had gone out in the room of the three herons. By touch, he sought and found the bench cut in the far wall and sat down. His hands roamed over it, coming to know the smooth edges of its surface and the patterns cut there of gods he barely knew. They gave him calm, whether he honoured them or not, so that when Hypatia came back he could rise and offer her the salute of one warrior to another that he had learned in Britain.