Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Twelve

A red roan bull lowed in the courtyard of the Roan Bull inn.

Leaning over her patient in the long upper room, Hannah wiped sweat from her forehead with a hand that was still wet with blood. Her hair stuck to her temple. Wearily, she rubbed at the place. The bull lowed again, more urgently.

‘It needs water,’ Hannah said. ‘Can someone take it some?’

As a living sign of the inn’s name, the bull had been penned for the day next to the road in the hope that the emperor might see it and be enticed inside by the novelty. It was known, however, that the emperor disdained filth, and so a boy had been paid to keep the beast’s hide curried to shining copper, its manger full of dry hay, its pen freshly swept of every outpouring of shit and piss, and its water trough full. Doubtless it had been done assiduously before the race.

The emperor had not yet chanced to visit, and hence the inn was not only largely empty but clean, with new, sweet rushes on the floor. The miracle of Math’s gold coin had persuaded the gap-toothed tavern-keeper to open his doors to the healer, her patient and the crowding members of the Green team who insisted on being allowed to follow them inside and up the unstable ladder to the big, broad upper room that took up the inn’s full length.

The gold bought also the innkeeper’s solicitude, if not his speed. With aching slowness, he had arranged a winch and ropes and a long table had been hauled up through the trapdoor and set in the centre of the room and Ajax laid on it.

Early in the chaos that followed, Hannah had recruited the bull boy to fetch water and then linen; Math’s gold had bought speed from him. She was aware that at some point she needed to find out where the gold had come from — he swore it was not stolen and she wanted to believe him — but for now Ajax was her most pressing concern.

The bull lowed again, less loudly. She heard a splash of water and the slobbering of bovine drinking and was glad of the quiet. Turning back to Ajax, she found that the gush of scarlet blood flooding from where a shard of wheel had pierced the top of his left leg had slowed to an oozing dribble, although that was not always a good sign; in Hannah’s experience, men who ran dry of blood often died soon after.

She examined again the lengths of blood-soaked linen for the volume they might hold and allowed herself to believe that her first frantic efforts to stem the tide had been successful and his body was working with her now, not against her. More worrying was the blow to the left side of his head that had left the whites of his eyes red, and might yet kill him. She could do nothing for that while he remained unconscious, hovering on the borders of death.

Her visitor of yesterday, the friend of her father, would have said Ajax was visiting the judge-god of the Hebrews, whose name must not be spoken. The Gauls in the Roan Bull tavern believed he was flying to the heights of the sky with Taranis, god of lightning, and might choose to stay in the heavens. The few Romans in the party — at least one of whom Hannah recognized as an agent of the emperor — insisted he was sailing with Charon halfway across the Styx and might yet persuade the ferryman to turn about and bring him back.

All of these, in their own ways, feared the grim dark of death and tried to fight it. In Alexandria, the men and women amongst whom Hannah had trained, and for whom she had the deepest respect, loved death as a gift, a place of colour and light and all-seeing, a journey to be undertaken joyously, as a homecoming.

Kneeling on the floor in the upper room of the Roan Bull tavern, Hannah of Alexandria acknowledged the truth of her own heart: that she desperately wanted Ajax to come back to the living and to her; she yearned for it, in fact.

That realization, the unexpected power of it, was her own surprise in a day of difficult surprises, and her secret. It had crept up on her, much as her care for Math had done, but more quietly so that she only faced it fully at the point when, examining his head, she had found that the hair growing through on Ajax’s scalp was gold and not black.

His eyebrows were black, the hair of his armpits was black; even, she had observed with the detachment of a physician, the hair about his groin was black. But the hair on his head was growing through gold as summer’s corn.

She had bound his crown with linen then, not because she imagined it would change the outcome of his conversations with death, but in order that nobody else might see what she had seen. Briefly, she found herself wondering what dye he used that was proof against sweat and rain. Then she had rolled him over and discovered what had happened to his ribs and all thoughts of hair and dye and rain had burned away in the need to heal him.

The damage was on his left side, halfway down, near the strongest beat of his heart. A crescent of bruised and broken flesh showed where a hoof had struck with the full force of a galloping colt. Hannah thought it the pair to the one that had struck his head, if only because, when she closed her eyes, she could see the moment when the outside lead colt of the White team, racing out of control, had run across the top of him. She thought she had screamed then, but in the noise of the hippodrome she had not heard it, and even now was not sure.

The ruined flesh under her fingers was warm but not hot; that much was good. The skin had peeled back, with a sand rash all round it. She winced at the imagined pain, and thought ahead to the salves that would help it, but it, too, was not lethal. A strip of bone glinted white at the deepest arc of the hoofprint and there, along its length, was a fine, linear bubble of air growing through the blood. It was no bigger than the nail on her small finger, but it grew and grew as he breathed, then popped and fell back, leaving her awaiting the next small eructation.

Her mother had taught her that there were times when listening was better than looking, and this was one of them. Pushing back her hair, she bent her head until her ear was tight on her patient’s sternum.

Ajax breathed in. Hannah closed her eyes and tracked the breath as it came down past her ear, then split into two parts. Her mother had showed her the path it took, opening the body of a dead coney and blowing down its nose, inflating first one side of the chest and then the other. Men, she had said, were the same inside, at least within the confines of the ribs.

Now, Hannah followed the right part of Ajax’s life-air. It sang as it passed, bubbling only slightly with the blood in his mouth where he had bitten his tongue. Night after night in her childhood, she had lain thus with her ear on her mother’s chest, listening to the flow of breath back and forth. Her mother’s death was a knife’s pain at each remembering. Hannah felt it now, and held her own breath, waiting for the moment to pass.

On the next inhalation, she followed the left life-path as it moved on down to the bruise. It didn’t so much sing as whisper and crackle; the creep of a spider through leaves. She moved her head a fraction and listened again as the air came close to the damaged tissues around the injury.

It crept, it crackled, it seeped out slowly at the place where the rib was cracked and the bubbles had formed, but even when she tapped her forefinger on the bridged arc of a rib, Ajax’s chest did not make the too-resonant drumbeat that foretold death, nor did she hear the hiss of air escaping in great quantities that often spelled the same.

When she lifted her head it seemed that already the bubbles were forming more slowly, and that his breathing was better with each breath. The pulses at his throat and wrists, too, were stronger. His tongue was bleeding less than it had.

Hannah straightened, pushing her hair from her face with the back of her wrist. A circle of men and boys watched her, making a ring of waiting eyes. Math was in the centre, of course, flanked by the wainwright and his four apprentices. Beyond them she recognized among the others the loriner’s wall-eyed son, the widower who brought the hay and corn and had, apparently, helped with the foalings since Math’s mother had died, the German twins who had built the barns near the hippodrome and the old man with the bent, arthritic fingers who was still best at breaking the young stock.

She found a smile for all of them, and did not know how tired she looked.

‘Ajax’s rib may be cracked,’ she said, ‘but he is not yet suffocating on the air he breathes. His bleeding has stopped. If his spirit chooses to return from the place it has gone, wherever that may be’ — she saw the wainwright’s boys make the sign for Tanaris where they thought she wasn’t watching — ‘he will live.’

Someone passed her a mug of clear water. She drank and said, ‘He won’t heal faster for being watched. If one of you stays, the rest could eat and drink. If Math’s gold will allow it?’

‘My gold will allow it,’ said a man’s voice to her left.

She turned, slowly, not knowing the voice, but recognizing its arrogance and fearing the damage it could do.

He stood with his back to a window, framed by the sun’s last light, a tall man, with a hawk’s nose and a high brow and black hair that fell straight as a rod to his shoulders. His bitter eyes raked across each of them.

Hannah found that she knew him after all. Akakios. In the nightmare of the walk to the hippodrome, with Nero’s presence scorching her skin, she had heard the name spoken. Thinking back, she believed Pantera had said it, so that she and Ajax would know.

Akakios flipped a coin high in the air, a small, spinning sun that held everyone’s gaze. By chance or design, Math caught it.

Softly, Akakios said, ‘His excellency wishes you all to dine in his honour. Red may have won the day, but he feels the Green team has proved at last that Ceres may grace a worthy team. He will address you in the morning, with an invitation to join his teams in Alexandria, where they train away from the gaze of the empire. I will lead you there and look over you until the race season begins in Rome at the ides of July.’ He let his gaze drift across them all, to end on Ajax’s supine form. ‘In the continued incapacity of your driver, who leads the team?’

‘I do. I am Caradoc of the Osismi. In Ajax’s absence, I own the Green team. On his behalf, I offer our profound thanks to his excellency, and of course will attend him at his earliest request.’

Math’s father spoke better Latin than the emperor’s man. His voice filled the tavern’s upper room with a quiet certainty that left everyone silent, even while it calmed their fears. Hannah had heard that before only from her mother.

Math alone was not soothed, nor did he view his father with the respect accorded him by the others. Hannah saw him flush, as he had done for Nero, but angrily this time. Setting his jaw, he took the moment of the others’ inattention to search the group, checking the size and weight of the purses around him: a reflex reaction to his father’s presence.

He was reaching sideways towards the belt of the wainwright’s son when Hannah interrupted.

‘Math.’ She whispered it, that the others might not hear. His hand stopped, then withdrew. He looked up at her across Ajax’s body, his eyes hot and hurt and angry. Raising her brows, Hannah turned her head a fraction to where his father stood.

Caradoc had emerged now from the dark corner in which he had been standing. Hannah had no idea how he had got there. She had thought his old injuries too great for him to climb the three stone steps from the courtyard into the inn’s main bar below, let alone the tilting ladder to the upper room. And yet he had not only done it, but done it so silently and carefully that the men and boys of the Green team had not seen, heard or sensed him.

He stood in front of them now a figure of perfect, unbent pride, not hiding the damage to his arms, shoulders and knee that left him lame and fighting pain daily simply to have the use of his hands.

He was Math made old, everyone could see it; his hair was greying at the edges, but the difference in their colourings only served to make him more like his son, not less.

Hannah stepped away from the table. In the same formal Latin that Caradoc had used, she said, ‘Ajax may wake at any time. But meanwhile, he would be honoured that you are acting in his stead. If the emperor’s agent is serious in his offer, perhaps the other members of the Green team could eat? It has been a long day.’

‘And the horses have not yet been seen to,’ Caradoc said.

Almost to a one, the apprentices of the Green team studied their feet. Math alone glared wordless defiance at his father. The air between them crackled back and forth with disappointment and resentment, sharp as lightning, and as hurtful.

From the door, Akakios said, ‘His excellency understood your need to see to the injured man. He has set four of his own men to see to your horses. I am sure they will be settled by now, and perhaps best not further disturbed.’

Caradoc bowed. Crisply, he said, ‘On behalf of Ajax and all the Green team, we extend our grateful thanks to his excellency. We are desolate that he has had to undertake our work in our absence, but are confident that the horses are receiving the best possible care. And we thank you for the offer of gold, but will not need it. Math, if you will return the gentleman’s coin?’

Math flushed from the neck of his tunic to the burning red tips of his ears. With insolent slowness, he fumbled in his tunic for the coin, examined it, then tossed it high in the air for Akakios to catch. It glittered no less than it had done before, for all that it so clearly carried the taint of shame.

Hannah wanted to hug Math, and could not. Nor could she help his father, who possibly needed it more. With a healer’s eye, she saw the effort it took for Caradoc to hold himself upright, and because she was looking, she witnessed the brief, private moment when his gaze fell on Ajax’s face weighted with a depth of love and grief that easily matched his desperate, unrequited care for Math.

As with all rumours, news travelled fast that the emperor favoured the Green team, and would send them to Alexandria to match with his best and perhaps thence to Rome.

Finding he had heroes in his inn, the gap-toothed tavern-master sent up a second table, and a third, and followed the stews of pork and wild garlic with bread and ale and wine for those who wanted it.

Sated, drunk for the most part, elated as much by their belief in Ajax’s recovery as by the prospect of their promised journey, the family that was the Green team slept in the upper room, all twenty-three of them, laid out on straw pallets, with their cloaks rolled as pillows. Even Math was persuaded not to leave them in favour of the horses. In a gesture as close to conciliation as she had seen from him, he brought pallets from the pile for Hannah, his father and himself.

Hannah settled herself by the still-sleeping Ajax and nobody offered any ribald comments. Caradoc took the wounded man’s other side. She felt him lie awake for a while, staring at the thatch and the flittering bats and the sprinkling of starlight squeezing through the eaves. Later, she heard the steadiness of a breath that moves to sleep.

Math was on her other side. He lay awake longer. She thought he might get up and go down into the town as he had done so often before. She felt him tense once, and slid her arm across, so that the back of her hand touched his.

‘Please stay?’ she said, and waited until she felt him subside. She rolled on her side. He was a shape barely seen in the dark. She stroked a finger down his face. ‘You did it,’ she whispered. ‘Your horses were the best. They’ll be the best in Egypt too. You’ll go to Rome.’

‘Will we?’ He was too solemn for a boy of nearly ten, too aware of all that might go wrong, or that might go right, which could be worse.

‘All of you. Even your father.’

He pulled a face. She picked up his fingers and kissed them, and then his brow. After a while, he took her hand, too, and pressed hot, dry lips to the knuckle of her thumb before he rolled away to face the night. She thought he sank into sleep soon after.

Hannah lay awake longest, but even she slept in the end, on the well-tested basis that she could do her patient no further good by staying awake through the night, and that worrying changed nothing for the morning.