Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Eleven

In all the chaos at the race-side, Lucius was easy to follow: the only boy pushing away from the rails.

Pantera tailed him effortlessly away from the apprentice boys’ enclosure, across the grassy plain past the stables and down the long hill into town and along the harbour front until he arrived at the green door of the last and least of the whorehouses ranged in a row at the dock front on either side of the Striding Heron tavern.

It was harder to manufacture a reason to wait outside, but presently Pantera was seated in moderate comfort on an upturned half-barrel, mending a net. He wasn’t entirely alone; three older men, too deaf to care about the races, were doing the same further down the dock and half a dozen filthy boys gathered soon from nowhere, recognizing him as a stranger, and therefore a potential victim.

The leader was Math’s age, but taller and with ginger hair. Pantera slipped a pair of silver coins from his belt pouch and, as the boy edged forward, explained the three things he wanted done, each more difficult than its predecessor.

The boy’s name was Goro. With a lopsided grin, he accepted the first coin as a down payment, and took promise on the second, issuing a stream of orders in a local patois that no one older than fifteen, or from further away than ten miles, could ever hope to understand.

The boys broke into three groups and went their separate ways. Pantera watched until they were out of sight, then settled back in the afternoon sun to mend a net that wasn’t broken, and to wait.

The shadows had stretched by half a hand’s length before Goro returned to the alley that ran between the tavern and one of the more salubrious whorehouses.

Pantera set his net on the ground, stretched his arms, yawned, and sauntered to the alley to relieve himself. Goro leaned on the wall further back, too far in to be seen from the dockside.

‘The men are on their way.’ The boy flicked a glance to the alley’s end. ‘And no one’s come out of the back window of the whorehouse. Your friend’s still in there.’

‘A lusty youth,’ Pantera observed drily. ‘If he leaves, let me know where he goes and with whom.’

The second silver coin slipped from palm to palm and Goro was gone, fast as a slipped fish, whistling a long looping call, like the cry of a seagull, to summon his small group of followers.

Pantera finished his business and walked down to the alley’s far end, beyond which both the tavern and the brothel were graced by south-facing, low-walled courtyards.

Olives and lemon trees grew in the corners of the brothel’s yard with benches set in the shade below. Behind the tavern, the same space was occupied by a goat pen. Leaning over, scratching the wiry neck of the milk-goat within, was Seneca the Younger, former spymaster to the emperor.

Pantera vaulted on to the courtyard wall and sat astride it in the sun. ‘This morning, Nero asked me to work for him,’ he said conversationally. ‘I turned him down.’

‘Then why are you here?’ Seneca ran his thumb along the goat’s arched neck. ‘Why am I?’

‘You’re here because Goro spoke a pass code you haven’t heard in twenty years and your curiosity is insatiable.’ Pantera picked a sprig of olive leaves from the neighbouring garden and offered them to the goat. ‘I’m here because Nero spoke to me of the Phoenix Year. You said that if he did so, there was a man I should meet — in privacy and without Akakios’ knowledge.’

‘And Akakios is currently occupied trying to prevent a riot at the hippodrome,’ Seneca observed drily. ‘I gather he may have some trouble preventing the Green supporters from killing the Whites and both from slaughtering the Blues, but even so, he has agents who are less easily deflected. Goro and I were followed at least for the first third of our walk here.’

‘Of course you were; after last night, they’re hardly going to let you wander the town with impunity. We should go on down the row. Goro will provide us with a diversion.’

Pantera slid off the wall, took Seneca by the arm and steered him through the courtyard’s gate to the small alley behind that served the entire row. Walking briskly towards the brothels at the row’s end, he said, ‘I took the liberty of sending another of Goro’s friends to request the presence of Shimon the zealot, formerly aide to the Galilean, currently guest in the home of the deputy governor.’

Seneca shot him a startled glance. ‘How did you know?’

‘The Phoenix Year is Alexandrian, not Gaulish. In the entirety of Coriallum, only half a dozen people at most hail from the east and of those only two have the initiative and courage to speak to you. One is Hannah, physician to the Green team. On balance, I thought it unlikely to be her.’

‘Nevertheless, she’s an exceptional woman,’ Seneca murmured. ‘Sorely wasted on the Gauls.’

‘I doubt if they see it that way,’ said Pantera. ‘Turn right through the gate here. I’ve paid for a room and unlocked the shutters

… the green ones on the left.’

The shutters were palely painted, new and neat. They opened smoothly, and clipped back against the white wall. Seneca leaned inside to take stock of the small room.

‘You know Shimon led the Sicarioi after the Galilean’s death?’ he said. ‘He’ll cut our throats and leave us dead if he thinks this is a trap.’

‘Then perhaps it’s as well that I sent for him in your name, with promises of safe-keeping,’ Pantera answered. ‘Is he tall, with a thin face and white hair?’

‘You’ve seen him?’

‘He was making his way along the harbour front when I left. If Goro’s boys are good enough, he’ll be here to meet us soon. I suggest we go in through the window; there’s less chance of being seen that way.’

One after the other, they climbed in through the open window. The room was clean and sparse, scented with thrown thyme and fresh straw, with a bucket in one corner and shuttered windows to both front and back. The bed was low and narrow, its straw pallet big enough only for two adults if they lay on their sides, or one atop the other. Seneca sat on it, rubbing his hands free of the faint aroma of goat.

Pantera positioned himself with his eye to the shutter at the front, watching a flock of gulls mob a boat coming into dock. Along the harbour front, four of Goro’s boys similarly circled a merchant waiting at the dockside who had made the mistake of letting his wealth show. Shimon the zealot, tall, barefoot and considerably less foolish, passed through them like a blade through cheese, and came away unscathed. Moments later, he tapped on the door of the room, and was admitted.

Seen close up, he was as old as Seneca, but the pressures of life had worn him more thoroughly. His hair, though plentiful, was the white of old snow as it rots in spring, flat and greyly stained in places with the colours of his earlier life.

He was dressed in a much-travelled linen robe, undyed and tied at the waist with a cord of the same material. His bare feet were hard as hooves from a lifetime’s unshod wanderings. The olivewood staff on which he leaned was old and notched where it had been used to effect against blades that might have sought its owner’s life. If he carried up his sleeve the infamous Sicari blade with which to cut the throats of apostates, Pantera could not see it.

Shimon leaned back against the closed door and took out a battered cloth from his belt to wipe the sweat from his face. From behind it, only a little muffled, he said, ‘My lord Seneca I know. You… I could not name?’

He asked his question in Greek, language of all civility. In Aramaic, language of his youth, Pantera answered, ‘I am Sebastos Abdes Pantera, Lion of Mithras, honoured to meet you, although it is not the first time.’

He had not intended to mention it, but the memory of a pebble thrown in a dawn-lit garden was so vivid that it occupied the whole of the small room, and could not be ignored.

Shimon let his kerchief fall. ‘Your father,’ he said slowly, ‘would be proud of his son who has become a friend of Seneca’s. And perhaps more?’

Seneca was looking out of the back window. Without turning, he said, ‘He is my foster-son. Best of all the men I trained. And was made a citizen of Rome by the emperor yesterday morning.’

‘My lord has ears in the most unlikely of places,’ said Pantera. ‘And he is overly kind. I am an agent of limited means and I doubt very much if my father would have been proud of what I have become.’

Shimon eyed him with wry amusement. ‘I’m sure your father was a good man,’ he said. ‘He will know your heart and see it good. In his honour, then, we meet. You should know that I was followed on my way here. It will surprise them that I have come to a whorehouse, but it may not prevent them from coming inside.’

He joined Seneca at the window. ‘This courtyard is not easily overlooked. If we were to leave the way you came in — I am correct, yes? — then we could avail ourselves of the warren of small lanes behind here. I am the eldest among us. If I undertake not to slow down our party, perhaps we could leave behind the slothful idiots who think to set themselves against us?’

It was a challenge, however diffidently made. Pantera let Seneca catch his eye. The philosopher was already kilting up his tunic, tucking the long ends into his belt.

‘By all means,’ he said. ‘If we three can’t outfox Akakios’ agents, we deserve all that he can visit on us. Shall we go?’

Shimon might have been the oldest, but he did not need his staff to climb out of the small window, nor, afterwards, to follow soundlessly as Pantera led them down the alley that ran behind the inn and thence, via a potter’s shed, a baker’s courtyard with an uncovered well and long pans of dough souring in the afternoon sun, and a weaver’s shop displaying vats of green and yellow dye, to the western edge of town where the magistrate, his two brothers and his many cousins had their houses.

A little breathless, they paused in the angle between two high walls, with three streets leading away and an orchard behind. Apples and pears drooped and swayed above them, and wild doves called. The hubbub of the dock was no louder than the sea, the sound smothered by fountains and distant, well-bred laughter.

Seneca was enjoying himself, hopping from one foot to the other, his head flicking three ways at once, checking each of the streets at whose intersecting corner they had paused. Shimon kept in the shadows with the smallest of the walls at his back, and his olive staff angled so that he could use it equally as a weapon or as a means of pushing himself over the wall. When nobody appeared to be following, he turned to Pantera.

‘My host owns this house,’ he said. ‘I came from here less than an hour ago.’

‘I know. And so the last thing they’ll expect is that we’ll come back, which may buy us some time. We won’t stay long, but I think we all three need to look at this.’

Watching both men, Pantera drew from within the fold of his belt the slip of papyrus Nero had given him in the morning and spread it flat against the wall in a leaf-dappled band of afternoon sun.

Shimon sighed a long-held breath. Squinting a little, he leaned forward. ‘Where did you come by this?’

‘Nero gave it to me,’ Pantera said. ‘It’s a copy of a copy that was taken from a Syrian who had it in turn from an apothecary-astrologer with ink-stained fingers who works out of the Black Chrysanthemum tavern in the Street of the Lame Lion in Alexandria. You now know as much as any of us does, although it may be that other copies were sold before our hapless Syrian made the mistake of trying to sell one to Akakios. Have you seen it before?’

‘No. I have hunted across nine nations for this and had given up hope of finding it.’ He held out his hand. ‘May I?’

‘Of course.’

Shimon held the note at arm’s length, the better to see it with his ageing eyes. He became a harder man as he read. His fingers whitened on the text, his breathing slowed. At the end, he laced his fingers together, and said softly, furiously, ‘“ Then shall the veil be rent, never to be repaired.”’ He spoke in Hebrew. The papyrus was written in Greek. The new language was itself an answer to one of their questions.

From his place at the junction of the three walls, Seneca said, ‘It refers to the veil in the Temple of Jerusalem?’

‘Where else?’ In his agitation, Shimon strode to the corner and back. Doves erupted from the apple trees above. ‘Even now, he wishes to destroy us.’

‘Who does?’ Pantera asked.

‘An apostate. One who hates us, who despises us, who wishes us removed from the earth.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we would not let him train to be a teacher. He thought himself the best of our scholars, when in fact he never had the sharpness of mind and hid behind vehemence and passion, thinking them enough to win arguments. We dismissed him, but did not kill him. That was our first mistake.’

‘He would do exceedingly well in Rome,’ Seneca said sourly.

‘He has done exactly that, and in the Greek cities on the eastern shore of the Mother Sea. With his self-taught rhetoric and his passions, with his half-knowledge and his reading of un-truths, he has taken the law and broken it, has turned men to the drinking of blood and the eating of flesh, has claimed for himself a death that never was and made of it one of his Greek sacrifices. He is an apostate, a liar and a thief, and now he would destroy us by-’

The old man stopped suddenly, his face a rough terrain of warring passions.

Pantera had held up his hand. ‘Listen.’

Coriallum was quieter than it had been. At the hippodrome, order was being restored. At the docks, Goro’s boys were silent in their work. In the house behind the orchard wall, a woman spoke to her lover, and was answered.

None the less, someone hid in the small sounds that remained, and was coming closer. Pantera eased his sleeve-knife in its sheath. To his left, Shimon held up three fingers. ‘Three men,’ he whispered. ‘Perhaps one followed each of us and now they are joined? They come from the direction of the whorehouses.’

‘Then we should go where they least expect us.’ Pantera set his back to the wall and linked his hands to make a foot rest. ‘Will you accept my aid to mount the walls? And you, my lord Seneca?’

‘We’ll be seen,’ Seneca said.

‘Not if we go north and drop down. Trust me. I have been in this town for nearly a day and have explored it. I know where we can go. But only if you can climb.’

‘I can climb,’ Shimon said.

‘And I,’ added Seneca.

‘Good,’ said Pantera. ‘If you go up from my hands, there’s a niche for a foot and a handhold higher up.’

‘Then you may grasp my staff to make your ascent,’ Shimon said.

Pantera grinned. ‘Thank you.’

The wall was eight feet high. The top was capped with curved stones, firmly mortared in place. The two old men swarmed up it like lizards, to crouch on top.

Pantera joined them, and led them away, crouching, grasping the capstones with both hands. Behind, Shimon came delicately with his staff held horizontal, giving him balance. Seneca skipped sprightly after. The eyes of both were alive with the joy of young boys stealing apples.

Pantera felt his own blood fizz through his marrow. Every sense was sharpened so that he could smell the different layers of the sea from the weed-rimed depths to the cresting swell to the prickling air of an incoming storm. He could feel each stone of the wall. In the afternoon light he could see the edges of the streets and the houses beyond.

And in all of that was the sense of a razor’s edge drawn slowly down his skin, the beginning needles of fear that were the food on which his soul fed.

For the first time since Britain, Pantera felt alive, and Seneca knew it. He glanced at him and raised one brow in a question that was its own answer.

Standing, Pantera turned on the balls of his feet. ‘Can you jump?’

Two old men nodded.

He asked, ‘My lord Shimon, will your faith allow you to hide atop a pig pen?’

‘It will allow me to do whatever I might in order to live.’

‘Come then.’ The pig pen across the street held a lazy sow and her near-grown young. Pantera measured the gap by eye, swung back his arms and leapt.

He caught the edge with his foot, swayed back and then forward and was on. Seneca followed, not as clumsily as he might have expected. Shimon jerked back his arm and hurled his staff like a spear so that only three years of battle training amongst the Dumnonii let Pantera catch it and swing it out of the way as the old man launched himself across after it.

The sow grunted and opened one eye, flounder-like, to view them. The piglets squealed and played, but no louder than they had done. Pantera made a sign, flattening his palms, and then lay down, pressing his face, his chest, his whole body tight to the clay tiles of the sow’s stall.

As he did so, three men rounded the building’s end cautiously, heads high like hounds on an air-scent, all shabbily dressed to merge with the dockhands, and armed with knives that caught the afternoon sun.

Pantera kept his eyes half closed and his breathing shallow. His own knife was in his hand. Shimon was likewise armed, his knife slender and curved along its length.

The men padded past in the alley below, leaving a scent of anxious sweat and wine and iron that wove upwards briefly to swamp the smell of pigs.

Pantera, Shimon and Seneca lay a long while afterwards. The wind rose and a thin rain stuttered, so the pearl sky became steadily pewter with streaks of sulphured yellow over the ocean where the clouds were most dense.

At last, Pantera rose to a crouch and dusted off his tunic. ‘All three were at the races earlier this morning.’ He turned to his left and bowed. ‘My lord Shimon, are you well?’

The old zealot grinned. ‘Apart from the smell of pig, I am exceedingly well. It’s been far too long since I hid on a rooftop. They are gone and will spend a happy afternoon searching where we have been. But I think they won’t go back to the room where we first started. Shall we return?’

They were stiff, and the jump down to the lower wall was not without mishap and swearing, but soon enough another wall-run and a jump down brought them back at the rear of the whorehouse with its clean, spare room already paid for.

Shimon went first, kicking his bare feet into the gap where the shutter slid back, tucking his tunic close to his buttocks so that he might not show his nakedness. Seneca followed less elegantly but with as much decorum. Pantera slid in like a fish and found himself between the other two. They stood all three, breathless as children with laughter and fear.

‘That was neatly done,’ Shimon said. ‘How long have we here?’

Pantera pulled the shutter across. In one corner, a shelf stood host to a small oil lamp with flint and tinder beside. He lit it and trimmed the wick until the light feathered the room, then set it beside the bed.

‘The room has been paid for until dusk,’ he said. ‘We’ll be gone long before then. What we have to do won’t take long.’

He sat with his back to the wall, looping his hands behind his head. ‘If I may reprise,’ he said, ‘you wish to prevent the destruction of Jerusalem while my lord Seneca wishes to prevent the burning of Rome, as does Nero. The man you call the Apostate wishes to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven and so will do his best to destroy Rome and then Jerusalem. It seems to me that the first may be easy — Rome is a tinder box and fires run through it like mould through cheese — but Jerusalem is not for the taking.’

‘If the young men rebel, Nero will send in the legions,’ Shimon said. ‘He has promised it. They’ll raze Jerusalem to the ground.’

‘And will the young men rebel?’ Pantera asked.

The old zealot nodded sadly. ‘Jerusalem, like Rome, is a tinder box waiting for the match. Every day I wake fearing I will hear news that riots have already begun.’

‘Then why are you not there, stopping them?’ It was Seneca who asked that, from his place by the door.

‘Because I used to be of the war party.’ Shimon’s gaze sought Pantera’s and held it. ‘In the days when the Galilean led us in constant battle against Rome, I was known as his lieutenant. I am old now, and I have seen what Rome can do. I will do what I can to work for peace, but I can’t speak for it with any credibility.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘I am here in Gaul for two reasons. First was to seek out the prophecy — we had heard that it was circulating and that it would be where Nero was. But I would have been here anyway, to speak with the Galilean’s daughter, to ask if she would come back with me to speak against her brothers in the name of peace.’

‘And will she?’

‘No. She has not said as much, but I fear not. Her life is here. Her troubles are not ours. Which leaves me with a question.’

He raised his old, tired eyes. The exhilaration of earlier had gone, but not the unbending pride. In formal Aramaic, he said, ‘Through you, I have found the prophecy — and yet it remains incomplete. To keep my people safe, I must find the prophet, and thereby discover the date on which Rome is set to burn, that I may prevent it. All other things lead from that. May I ask if Pantera, foster-son to my lord Seneca, would undertake to find this for those who used to be his people?’

There was time, in the pause before Pantera spoke, to hear the sow grunt again up the street, to hear a merchant on the dock discover that his purse had been cut, to hear the race crowds begin to leave the hippodrome and flow down the hill.

In the small, thyme-scented room, Pantera said, ‘I regret not,’ and meant it. ‘My emperor asked for my aid today in preventing Rome’s destruction and I refused him. With far greater sorrow, I fear I must also refuse you. I am not who I was and other things require my attention. I wish you luck, with my fullest apologies. And my earnest suggestion that we leave, and are not seen together again.’

They separated in the alley, Shimon to walk west towards his lodgings, Pantera and Seneca east to the tavern. Seneca waited until the pad of the old zealot’s footsteps could no longer be heard and then turned to Pantera.

‘ Other things require my attention.’ He gave an effete lift to the words. ‘He’ll think you’re working for me.’

‘And he will be wrong.’

Pantera felt drained, as if he had marched his twenty miles and still had a way to go before he could rest. He said, ‘Nero saw Math at the races this morning. They walked the horses to the hippodrome together. The good citizens of Coriallum nearly died at the scandal.’

‘Ah.’ Seneca’s gaze was sharply amused. ‘How immensely fortunate that you don’t love the boy, nor he you.’

‘Will Nero kill him?’

‘He didn’t do such things when I ruled him, nor would he here, under the gaze of the magistrate. But in Rome, with the likes of Akakios and Rufus goading him to ever greater excesses? Yes. He’ll use Math, and then kill him. He won’t be able to help himself.’ Seneca turned and began to walk back towards the tavern. ‘If you would have the boy live,’ he said, ‘you will need to find something Nero values more highly and offer it in exchange. He understands that kind of bargaining. But it must be something he cannot get by other means.’

‘All I have to offer is myself.’

Seneca pursed his lips as if the idea were a novel one. Pantera caught his wrist and turned him round. ‘You said you didn’t want me to work for Nero.’

‘I don’t. I want you to work for me. But if, in doing so, you were to appear to take a commission for Nero, that would be different.’ Seneca was held in a patch of sunlight. His skin had the transparency of the old, but his eyes were sharp with plans laid and threads aweaving. ‘I love Rome. I have given my life to her and I don’t want to see her burn. Very few people have what it takes to stop this, perhaps only one.’ Seneca’s blue-veined hand caught Pantera’s chin and tilted it as it had when he was a child. ‘Will you do this for me?’ he asked. ‘Please?’

In all their time together, Pantera had never known the old philosopher beg. The hope in his eyes was hard to bear, and harder to crush.

‘I can’t,’ Pantera said, and heard genuine anguish in his own voice. ‘You are Roman.’

Seneca departed as Shimon had; despondent, but still able to keep to the shadows and, once in the open, to affect the dejection of poverty that makes a man invisible.

From the darkness of the alley, Pantera watched him leave, then turned and made his way back along to the endmost house of the row. One of Goro’s younger boys sat in the shade of a bay tree not far away chewing a leaf and playing knucklebones, right hand against left. He did not look up as Pantera passed, but shook his head.

Pantera bent to retrieve a coin he had not yet dropped.

‘The shutter’s open,’ he said to the dust at his feet. ‘Was it so when you came?’

By way of answer, the boy attempted to toss five small bones from a sheep’s knee from the back of his left hand to his right. As they landed, wobbling, he nodded, as if in satisfaction at his own skill.

‘You’re sure nobody’s been?’

With a huff of irritation the boy looked up and met his eye. ‘You paid silver. I’m sure.’

Pantera cursed. It had been closed when he had first checked it, when Lucius had newly entered. He let a copper coin slide to the dust, checked both ways along the alley and, seeing no one, hopped the low stone wall of the brothel’s courtyard. Then, stepping over a small but noxious midden, he hooked a leg over the sill and eased himself into the room the boy had been watching.

It was late afternoon. By the sun’s grim light alone, Pantera saw the narrow wound in Lucius’ throat and the black blood that spilled from it.

The body was cold to touch, but still pliable. The hands held no last record of hair clutched or a face scratched. If he had known death was coming, Lucius had faced it bravely; his face was at peace. His purse held half a dozen coins, none of them silver. Pantera emptied it and passed the contents to Goro’s boy, who was leaning in through the window.

‘Go,’ he said. ‘Tell Goro there’s no need to watch the front any longer.’