Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (47 page)

The urchins’ young hound gave song and dashed past in noisy pursuit of a rat, or a mouse, or a cockroach, or simply a thrown pebble; it was impossible to tell. In the ensuing commotion, Hannah repeated her final code word clearly, stepped past the guard and rapped out on the red ram’s head the rhythm that gave her entrance into Saulos’ headquarters.

Pantera reached the goose-keeper’s in the late afternoon. Shimon met him at the door with a beaker of well water and the news he didn’t want to hear.

‘Hannah came when you were away. She went back to Saulos.’

Pantera felt his heart clench. ‘You let her go?’

‘We had no way to stop her,’ Hypatia said. She came out of the shadows at the back of the cottage, where the herbs were kept. The light touch of her scent lit the air before Pantera saw her. ‘She said the warehouse is close to impregnable, that Saulos has two hundred men and can send them out through the maze of the ghetto so fast you’d need two legions to stop him and even then only if you surrounded the whole of the dockside. You’re to burn the warehouse if she hasn’t come out by dusk.’

‘With Hannah inside?’ Pantera stared from Shimon to Hypatia and back again.

‘That was the implication.’ Hypatia’s black gaze raked across his face. ‘She said to tell you she was doing it for Math.’

‘Of course she did.’ When, momentarily, Pantera closed his eyes, he saw Hannah standing in a burning inn, with Math tumbling down a ladder, begging for help for his father. He opened them again; Hypatia’s pitiless gaze was preferable. ‘Did she say what she was going to do before we set fire to everything around her?’ he asked.

‘No. But it isn’t hard to guess. She is the Galilean’s daughter. Who else can undermine Saulos’ credibility in front of his people?’

‘If she denounces him as a liar, he’ll kill her.’

Hypatia nodded. ‘Unless you can stop him. I thought you had a century of men?’

‘They won’t be enough. We won’t get so much as a handful in without alerting them well in advance.’ Pantera dragged his hand through his hair. ‘When did she leave?’

‘An hour ago.’ Shimon had gathered his olivewood staff from the room’s furthest corner. ‘But I followed her down the hill, behind Saulos’ two spies. There were children playing at the entrance to the alley. One of the girls had followed Hannah and heard the passwords. She sold them to me. I can get you and me past the sentries, at least as far as the door. After that—’

‘After that, we’re two men against two hundred, but if we can get Hannah out, the narrow alleys will work in our favour. I’ll see if I can set Mergus’ men outside.’ Pantera turned to Hypatia. ‘Will she do this? Will she name Saulos a liar in front of his own sworn men?

Hypatia nodded. Her black eyes were wide and full of helpless rage. ‘She’ll do whatever it takes to stop Saulos, even if it means she’s going to die trying.’

Hannah stepped into the warehouse as a gladiator steps on to the sands: outwardly calm and inwardly taut as a bow string. As the door swung shut on its new hinges, she was assaulted by the heat, sweat and thunderous noise of two hundred hungry men devouring their evening meal. The smells of cooked garlic, fish sauce, stewed beans and honey rose over the rank, sodden wool.

Poros was near the doors with half a dozen members of his Blue team. They waved to her with enthusiasm, who had barely exchanged two words with her when she was on the opposing team in Alexandria. She waved back, and exchanged welcomes with other men she had met in the morning.

The warehouse was transformed. When she had last seen it, the place had been darkly damp, and disorganized. Now, it was like a temple at Passover; full to capacity, but buzzing with order. Racks of wall candles pushed back the dark, scenting the sweaty air with beeswax, while the horizontal slats high up in the wooden walls let in the evening sun.

Dust motes sparked in the angled beams and men were sliced across their lengths by the light, seeming to dance in jerking steps as they moved among the military camp beds laid out in ordered rows across the floor, carrying bowls of stew to stand in huddles or sit on their blankets and eat.

Saulos himself was hammering the last nails into the dais that had been their treatment room. The curtain was gone now, and a lectern had been set up at the front, ready for an oration. Saulos reached for a new nail as she approached.

‘Hannah!’ He swung round to embrace her. ‘How are you?’ He held her at arm’s length, searching her face.

‘Better. I went into a cottage on the Aventine for water and the woman there gave me herbs for the pains.’ She told half the truth, and no lies, exactly as he had done in Hades. She found she could still hold his gaze cleanly, which was a relief.

‘Then you feel less …’ His hands filled in the words he couldn’t find.

‘Much less, thank you.’

‘Good. Come and see what we’ve got.’ He took her arm and ushered her across the floor to the far corner.

The crowds parted again to let him through. They were in his fiefdom now, among his chosen comrades, the foot soldiers ready to give their lives in the coming fight.

He knew them all by name. Here and there, he stopped to ask after a man’s wife, or his children, to enquire whether he had brought his son with him, or his brother, his nephew, uncle or distant cousin, whether some chore had been carried out, whether the auspices were good.

In all cases, the answer was
yes
; brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins and sons were here, or were on their way, and they had done everything he had asked of them. They waited now only to finish eating and to be given their final orders. As far as Hannah could tell, they would have been content without the meal; if Saulos hadn’t ordered them to eat, they would willingly have left on empty bellies.

They reached a wall, and so the end of the men. In the quiet, Saulos drew Hannah closer. ‘Did you see the line of the aqueduct when you were up the hill?’

‘I saw it and the Aqua Marcia, where it comes to an end on the Capitoline. If you want to prevent water from reaching the centre of Rome, you’ll have to destroy them both.’

‘Excellent!’ He beamed at her. ‘I’ll order Poros to take his men up there at the start. In the meantime, perhaps if you could help carry the candlesticks to the dais?’

The candlesticks were silver, taken from some temple. Each was taller than Saulos, taller even than Hannah, made from solid silver, with many-branching arms that held aloft more candles than she could count.

They carried them to the dais and set them up on either side of the lectern. The candles weren’t lit yet, and the warehouse was already as hot as the noonday. Hannah said, ‘If you’re going to light those, I should open the back door for a while. The men need clean air to breathe or the sour humours will stifle their courage before the evening’s work.’

‘Of course.’ Saulos waved a hand towards the door even as more men clamoured around him with questions. Poros ploughed a way through the crowd carrying wine jugs on a tray across both arms. Two broad-shouldered youths of the Blue team followed bearing another piled high with loaves of flat bread. Wine and bread. Hannah thought of Shimon, spitting, and wondered what he would do if he were here.

The area by the back door was quiet, away from the crush of men. Cobwebs draped the wall and door in one vast, dusty curtain, thick as silk. Fighting her way through, Hannah found the hinges were of old leather, gone hard with disuse, and that the iron catch was rusted shut, but not locked.

It gave way after some effort and she braced her shoulder against the jamb to force it open, letting in a rush of light and humid air from the river.

A shallow courtyard lay beyond, full of debris, surrounded by an oak palisade with gates that hung awry on torn hinges. Nobody was guarding this entrance. Hannah pushed through the broken gates and stepped out of the courtyard to the jetty beyond and found, as she had thought, that there was a direct route along the riverside, joining up all the warehouses and leading out eventually to one of Rome’s main arteries.

‘Hannah?’

She spun back towards the warehouse. Saulos stood in the doorway. His tunic was a clean one, belted with bleached linen cord, and his hair had been combed, but it was not the clothes that made her stare; they were the least of the changes in him. In all ways, from the set of his shoulders to the planes on his face, Saulos was as different from the stuttering fool she had met in Gaul as Pantera was from Nero. Here was a man who could kill Ptolemy Asul and revel in it.

He is without mercy
, Pantera said in the ear of her mind.
Please don’t underestimate him
.

She thought of her father, and of Math, and looked up to the clear sky. The river ran close, and a path to freedom.

‘Hannah?’ Saulos came forward and took her hand. ‘Will you come and help me give out the bread and wine? As we do so, I would ask you to think of the saviour whose death will free us all.’

I
n fulfilment of his promise to Pantera, Seneca reached Antium with the last of the sunlight on the night Sirius rose over Rome. Tethering his horse away from the road, he crawled in through a forest of thorn bushes until he lay in the dark behind the guardhouse with his head pressed to the earth, watching for an opportunity to act.

Ahead, Nero’s palace complex stretched out for a hundred paces on either side, a vast sprawl of torchlit marble, lying just beneath the horizon. To Seneca’s left, at the southernmost end of the houses and slave rooms, was the open-ended horse barn that housed the emperor’s chariot teams and in which, if he had understood Pantera correctly, Ajax was being held captive.

Guards marched back and forth at both ends. The pair nearest the palace were not soldiers, but the two eldest sons of a particular senator, whose father had paid for the privilege of their being allowed to pace back and forth in the dark. They were bored, and easily distracted. Three pebbles tossed towards the far end of the latrines sent them running down with their swords drawn, each trying not to outpace the other.

Ignoring the stiffness in his hips and a knifing pain in his left knee, Seneca slipped inside the stable block, and slid along the starlit aisle between the stalls. He dodged the snapping teeth of the brassy colt halfway down, and around the time the senator’s sons returned, grumbling, to their posts he reached the last stall on the left, where the oak doors had been reinforced with iron bars set from floor to ceiling. The bolt was padlocked securely in place.

He knew that lock. He knew where its key was kept. He could no more get to it than he could reach for the moon.

He heard a movement inside the stall. A finger scraped on the wall, drawing his attention to a knothole in the wood. He put his mouth to it.

‘It’s Seneca,’ he whispered, ‘sent by Pantera to free you so we can both free Math. I can’t get to the key. I’ll need to find some other way to pick the lock.’

‘Tiberius.’

Pantera stood in the alley leading to Saulos’ warehouse and spoke the code word in a hoarse whisper. A legionary guard eyed him with suspicion. ‘Throw back your hood.’

He did so, tilting his head in the way men do to appease their superiors. At his side, Shimon did the same, although his evident arthritis and stooped back meant the guard did not have a clear look at his face.

On the street behind, three children played noisily with a young hound. Pantera told them to leave. They ignored him. He turned and made shooing motions with his hands. They laughed and the girl stuck her tongue out.

The guard was old enough to have children and grandchildren of his own. Shaking his head, he waved the two men on.

‘Caligula.’

The second guard was half the age of the first. He, too, watched the children. The girl lifted her tunic and exposed herself. She was too young to be a whore and, in any case, the man had orders not to leave his post. He sent Pantera and Shimon on down the alley.

‘Claudius.’

The third guard was near the door, listening to a voice echoing from inside the warehouse. He waved them past and on, and in.

A moth fluttered in through the high vents, sailing on the last of the sun.

Hannah watched it briefly, but her attention was on Saulos, who had poured the wine for the front row of men and was back on the dais, preparing to preach. He was vibrating with a passion that filled the warehouse, so that it was impossible to look anywhere other than at this man standing between the tall, brilliant candlesticks.

For a while, the evening’s quiet was punctuated by the soft percussion of clay on beaten earth as the last of the newly filled beakers was set down on the floor. Then silence enveloped the crowd. Two hundred and thirteen men sat rapt. Their waiting was a palpable thing. If Hannah had not opened the back door, the pressure would have been unbearable.

‘Thank you.’ Saulos’ voice sailed high overhead. ‘You have come here so that, tonight, we can fulfil the new covenant that began with the death of a man thirty years ago. We will speak of that presently, but first I want to remind you of everything we have overcome to reach this place.’

Hannah expected tales of Saulos’ battles with the Sicarioi. What she heard was a litany of names and acts of personal courage that meant nothing to her, but everything to the men who were named.

He had been trained well, asking questions to which his men knew the answers at least in part, but giving them always more than they had before so that amongst the growing nods and murmurs of agreement was always surprise, and indignation, and, soon, a tide of righteous anger that rose to meet Saulos’ own passion as they cheered each rhetorical flourish.

He was not the best Hannah had heard – the priests of Isis and Serapis did the same thing better – but it was more than enough to rouse the warehouse and Hannah felt herself carried high on a wave of urgent, impatient need.

The moth slid down the sun. Unnoticed, it danced in the candlelight behind Saulos’ head. Two hundred and thirteen men stood spellbound, and did not see it.

‘… and so, as we go out to make manifest the prophecy of ancient times, as we strive to bring closer the Kingdom of Heaven, I say that the least of you will ascend to the highest place, that each tongue of flame that you light is a blessing, a kiss from our god even as
this
is his kiss to us now …’