Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (46 page)

But he had tapped Math’s collar bone in a way only two people in the world had known.

‘Where’s Constantin?’ Math asked.

The boy who was Constantin’s replacement shook his head. He could have been his younger brother, but Constantin’s eyes had been a source of constant joy and this boy’s held only grief.

A single tear damped one black cheek. Wiping it away, Crystal thrust forward a bundle of clothing; a chiton in the Greek style, with keyed patterns at hem and neck, a copper belt inlaid with garnets and sapphires, subtle by Nero’s standards.

The metal shimmered and chimed as the shaking boy held it out. Constantin was dead, or dying; better dead. Ajax was held prisoner. And the belt buckle was a gift from Nero.

Math had been in the palace long enough to know that showing terror was a strategic catastrophe. Besides, if Ajax could keep calm with two knives at his throat, then Math could do at least as well.

He forced a smile. ‘Why are you called Crystal?’ he asked.

Either Crystal didn’t know palace intrigue well enough to smile back, or he was too scared. ‘The lord named me for his favourite horse,’ he said.

Nero’s favourite horse was an ageing grey mare. Math decided not to point this out. ‘It’s a good name,’ he offered. ‘He must favour you.’

‘He does,’ said Ajax crisply. ‘It’s why he’s sent him to wake you.’

Math’s smile fell away. Crystal held out the chiton as if it burned his hands. ‘You will dress? Please?’

‘Of course. I’ll—’

‘Don’t lift your arms too high,’ Ajax said helpfully, and then, as if they were alone and free to gossip, ‘Poros has gone into Rome to oversee arrangements for the race at the month’s end. He sends you his regards and best wishes for your recovery. You should let Crystal fix the belt. Your shoulder isn’t up to it yet although the physician says your mind is well now, which is good. We all rejoice.’

Math tried not to gape. Ajax had always been good at slipping in the vital information among a clutter of useless gossip. On this occasion, what mattered was that Poros had gone, because Poros’ bluff good manners had been a restraint on Nero. Math shuddered, suddenly cold.

Crystal was lifting his arms, sliding the chiton over his head. Math was not Ajax, to go naked into battle. He took a shallow breath and pushed his hands ahead of himself and dived in through the tunic’s mouth, wriggling out the other side with as little hurt to his ribs as he could manage.

As he emerged, Crystal’s shaking hands held out the belt. ‘My lord …’

Math had never been ‘my lord’ to Constantin. He was about to correct the boy when he caught sight of Ajax, who had bowed his head. Ajax never, ever bowed, except …

‘Put on the belt,’ said Nero’s voice from behind him. Crystal stepped back, forcing his hand into his mouth. Math’s hair sprang stiff on his scalp.

‘Lord …’

Nero stood in the open space between the sun-shield and the door, eyeing him as a butcher eyes a fattened goose. ‘Our physician informs us that you are fit to engage in discourse. We have been watching you these past two days and we deduce you are well enough now to walk and to talk with us, even if you are perhaps not entirely well enough yet to race a chariot.’

‘To race? My lord, I—’

‘To race.’ Nero nodded to the two Ubian guards who held Ajax. They grabbed his arms and rammed them high up behind his back. Ajax gave one explosive grunt and was silent.

Math sprang forward. Astonishingly, Crystal grabbed for him, but it was the look on Ajax’s face that brought him up short.

‘Ajax?’

Ajax shook his head. It was impossible to think of him as merely a driver now. That guise had been stripped away on the sands of the race track in Alexandria.

He was a warrior, and Nero knew it, who hated men of courage.

The strings of Ajax’s shoulders showed as white glistening ropes under the tension from his hard-held arms. Sweat gathered in fat drops on his flanks. None of it showed on his face. ‘Do as your emperor asks,’ he said. ‘Your life and mine depend upon it.’

‘Your driver speaks the truth. Listen to what he says.’

Nero floated across the floor as if it were the stage of his private theatre. Long ago, someone had told him he looked good walking thus and had been believed.

An antique vase stood on another pedestal, behind the bronze sun-shield. It was half Math’s height and as wide across as the girdle of his hips. The image painted in blue around its brick-red circumference was from the time of Athens’ ascendancy and showed a thin, bearded man grasping a boy’s chin in one hand, and his genitals in the other. Nero had never spoken of it directly to Math, but he had let it be known that he valued it highly, and that it was reckoned to be worth at least as much on the open market as Ajax’s entire chariot team.

Now, the emperor lifted it on the palm of one hand. On the plinth it had been sturdy. Held aloft, it became fragile as the thinnest egg shell.

‘Your driver’s life is in my hand,’ Nero said. ‘It hangs on your good behaviour as much as does your own. If I so choose …’ He tilted his hand. The Greek vase shattered on the marble floor.

In spite of himself, Math flinched. Crystal cried aloud and leapt back. Neither the Ubian guards nor Ajax so much as blinked.

Nero gave a tight smile. ‘Will you behave for me, Math?’

G
rey smoke smeared the sky in a broad ribbon from the peaked roof of Augustus’ forum in the east to the temple of the vestals on the Sacred Way that lay to the south of where Pantera stood.

Beside him, Mergus lifted a deer-bone whistle to his lips and shrilled a long, high blast. A chain of men in boiled leather armour lifted their tarred rope buckets so smoothly, so completely in unison, that it was as if a giant beast had rolled on its side, exposing a black band along one flank.

A shouted order followed, and another and another and another so close together that if Mergus had not told Pantera the sequence beforehand, he would have missed it.

Lift empty. Drop. Lift full. Pass
.

Libo, Mergus’ broad-shouldered aquarius, was one of the eight men surrounding the open-topped water tank. They were all equally huge. On the drop, each man filled his bucket. On the lift and the pass, their muscles stretched and grew as they raised them, full now, and sent them back down their lines. Not a single drop of water fell to blacken the dusted pavings around the cistern.

The chain of full buckets rippled and grew in a way that was opposite in every respect to the gaggle of old men and boys in Gaul who had done their best to keep an inn from burning.

Here, the fire was a pile of old straw mattresses. Only lice died and most of those were drowned before they could burn, so fast and so complete was the deluge poured upon them. A larger fire, a hundred paces away, was put out as fast by a team working a horse-drawn fire engine with an eight-man pump that was worked in relays by three teams, so that there was time for each to recover before they had to step up again.

Pantera watched, mesmerized by the near-mechanical precision of the work. To his surprise, he found that he was still moved to see that men could be so trained, could entertain such pride in their work; that they could reach for perfection, and find it, and hold it, and not let the beauty of their own success bring them down. He thought of his father’s endless drilling with the bow, and his heart ached as it had when he was a child in Judaea and wanted nothing more than to join the legions.

Mergus’ whistle sounded three short blasts and one long. Before the last note died, the men stood down. An obstinate drizzle of smoke marred the high point of the sky but beneath it was unblemished blue, sharp as crystal, clear as a mountain stream.

A final blast blew, on a different note. As one, the line of men turned and bowed to their tribune, temporarily made prefect of the Watch, who stood on an ox-cart a little away from the action.

From his place a hundred paces away, Mergus murmured, ‘That was as good as it gets. Calpurnius will hate it on principle, he always does.’

Pantera squinted into the sun. Gnaeus Calpurnius, tribune of the first cohort of the Watch, was an awkward, angular figure, with a high patrician brow and an unfortunate nervous tic that left him sneering even when he smiled. ‘He doesn’t look particularly—’

‘This is insane!’ A voice like a bullhorn cut over the hush of stacking buckets. ‘Do you think Rome’s made of water? Did you enquire of the engineers if they had sufficient to spare? What will you do if there’s a real fire? Throw feathers at it?’ A grey-haired bull of a man ran past Pantera and Mergus to the ox-cart and hurled his ire at Calpurnius.

Pantera watched with open curiosity. ‘Don’t they decimate men for insubordination in the Guard?’ he asked.

‘Not the officers,’ Mergus said, ‘only the men. And it’s not been done yet. That’s Quinctillius Varus, tribune of the second cohort. And beyond him, looking just as upset, is Annaeus of the sixth. I think we can safely say that neither of them wants his cohort to hold a drill.’

‘Which is either immensely sensible, given the obvious paucity of water, or it’s insane given the obvious likelihood of a fire. I think I should confess my role in this, don’t you?’

Pantera strode forward past the line of watching men. At the ox-cart, he vaulted up to take the space alongside Calpurnius, gaining height over the two complaining tribunes.

‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ he said, untying the pouch at his belt. ‘Sebastos Abdes Pantera, currently acting under order from his imperial majesty.’

The belt had been a parting gift from Nero. The new pouch thereon bore the imperial mark of the lyre and the chariot. Sight of that alone cut both men silent, but the seal he drew out of it caused them to salute, and then to bow.

Pantera took his time retying the pouch. The silence grew painful.

‘I rode in from Antium this morning. The prefect’ – he nodded to Calpurnius – ‘will vouch for my bona fides. The emperor is rightly concerned with the risk of fire amongst his subjects. I assured him that with his trust and bearing his goodwill’ – he tapped the pouch with his forefinger – ‘I could arrange a fire drill. Vigilance is everything, as I’m sure you know.’

That was the motto of the Watch and if they didn’t hate him already, the two tribunes did so then. But he carried the imperial seal and they had each sworn fealty to it and its holder. They bowed their way back towards their waiting cohorts.

Gnaeus Calpurnius, who was far from a stupid man, waited until they were out of earshot. ‘Did that tell you what you needed to know?’ he asked mildly.

‘A little.’ Pantera blew out his cheeks. ‘Of the six cohorts, the second and sixth are led by men who are either exceptionally thoughtful and have full care of Rome—’

‘Or they wish to see it burn. And either way,’ Calpurnius said, ‘traitors or not, you’ll die for what you just did if they find you alone.’

Pantera ran his fingers through his hair, teasing out the particles of soot. ‘Then I will endeavour to ensure that they don’t.’

I
f Hannah had not spent years learning to navigate the Sibylline labyrinths, she would never have found her way back through the warren of narrow alleys and broken buildings that protected the entrance to Saulos’ headquarters.

For a while, even with the map laid out in her mind, she thought she had got lost, and that she might have to abandon her plan in its infancy. She stopped then, on the corner of an alley, and stared up at the high, blue sky, letting the colour clear her mind so that she could be certain she was not, after all, acting rashly, or purely for vengeance.

Vengeance was there; a vision of Ptolemy Asul stained her mind whenever she saw Saulos now, and it cried for vengeance. So, too, did the more distant, hazier image of the father she had never known, who had given his life for his men, and had his death traduced for political gain.

But it wasn’t only for them. Staring up into the limitless blue, Hannah knew that she was here because she had spent nearly a year with Pantera and Ajax, because their cause had become her cause, and she was as bound now to its success as they were.

A collared dove flew over, from north to south, heading towards the river. She followed its path down the alley. At the foot, she found the ox-hide door with the mark of the tent-maker on its upper right hand corner and knew she was not, in fact, lost. She passed through it into the low-roofed goat-pen and then out again into the knife edge of sunlight that lit the final alley leading down to the warehouse.

At first glance, the only sign of life was a group of grubby urchins playing with a tan and white, floppy-eared hound whelp that ran back and forth across the narrow passageway. One of the girls looked up and grinned, showing blue eyes beneath matted black hair. Hannah flipped her a silver coin as she pushed between them and felt the shadow of their presence behind her; children were everywhere, invisible as slaves. The smell of the river reached her over the low warehouse roofs, and somewhere, not far away, men shouted as they loaded or unloaded a boat.

The guards were there, but well hidden. These were not the men who had seen her in Saulos’ company in the morning. Like their predecessors, these were legionaries, but younger, fitter, better armed, with shields and short javelins in addition to their gladii. Their passwords had changed and she had no idea what the new ones were, but they had orders to let her past. She had each tell her the word, in case she had need of it later.

The last of them stood a dozen paces from the warehouse, not quite beyond reach of the stench of wet wool. A red ram’s head marked the wool-merchant’s door. More recently, some wag had scratched a wine jug on it and more recently still, another had drawn an image of Nero with his lyre. Strictly speaking, that was an offence against the person and god-head of the emperor, but here, where no emperor ever came, even incognito, there was little danger that the owner of the warehouse would be arrested, even if he could ever be tracked down.