Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Sixteen

Scorched and hoarse, with his tunic abandoned to the conflagration, with every muscle in his body aching, Pantera carried Caradoc’s body from the blazing inn towards the huddle that was the dead man’s friends and family.

‘Does any of you know the rites that may be sung to usher a dead warrior to his place with the gods?’

A light breeze lifted the grass and the leaves and caressed his skin, seeking out the burns and soothing them. His question hung in the air. One man levered himself up from the ground. ‘I know the rites of a warrior’s passing,’ said Ajax of Athens.

He was naked, but for bandages at crown and thorax made from strips of torn linen, not of imperial quality, yet wound by a professional hand. He stood with the moon at his head and the fire bronzing his skin so that it shone as if greased with bear fat. His one ear poked out from under the linen at his crown, highlighting the loss of the other. If his head beneath had not been shaved, but instead had been crowned by the single line of hair that was the mark of…

In that moment, Pantera knew with certainty who the other man was, and could not think why he had taken so long to see it.

He was gaping, foolishly. He closed his mouth. ‘What should we do?’

‘Caradoc must be laid beneath a tree,’ Ajax said. ‘There’s an oak by the stream beyond the cattle. I can walk. I can’t carry him.’

‘I can do that.’ Pantera looked beyond the driver. ‘Math?’

Math stared up. His red-rimmed eyes, wide as an owl’s, searched the length of Pantera’s body and came to rest on his face.

He looked exactly like his father in the moments before dying, save that Caradoc had not been weeping and Math couldn’t stop. His face was awash with tears.

Balancing the dead man on his arms, Pantera eased himself into a crouch. ‘Math, your father was proud of you. Those were his last words. Would you come and see his soul set free?’

He did his best to ask it cleanly, but the weight of his oath pressed newly on him and he heard a hint of desperation in his plea.

Math heard it too. He turned away, his face a landscape of sorrow and scorn. ‘He was a warrior,’ he said thickly. ‘I don’t know the rites.’

‘Math, you can still-’

‘No!’ The boy wrenched away, running past Hannah, past Ajax, past the others of the Green team to the anonymity of the crowd.

‘Let him be,’ Ajax said. ‘Now is not the time. Hannah will care for him. For Caradoc’s sake, we need to act quickly. Come with me.’

The oak was old and vast with branches thick as a man’s two thighs. It stood alone in a quieter part of the meadow, where the blaze of the burning tavern barely outshone the stars. A stream ran nearby, murmuring songs to the moon. The grass was longer here, enough to shroud the dead man’s face when they laid him under the tree’s dappling branches. They knelt together. Ajax began to sing.

Pantera remembered the words and melody of the rite only slowly, joining in with Ajax’s resonant rendering halfway through. At the close, when the stream had carried the last notes away, Pantera stood. As the last one to see the dead man alive, he spoke the ending.

Softly, to be heard only by two men, the stream and the gods, he said, ‘He was Caradoc, lover of Breaca, father to Cygfa, Cunomar, Graine and Math. He was the greatest warrior his people have ever known. May he be remembered as such, by his sons and his daughters. May he return now with joy to those who have loved him.’

He made the sign over the man’s brow, releasing his spirit to the care of his god. In the still night, a subtle wind soughed briefly through the grass and then through the leaves of the oak. Pantera did not look at Ajax; he did not need to. Nothing that he had just said was news to this man.

Presently, Ajax pushed himself to his feet, taking care for his injuries, and slowly unwound the bandage from his crown. The moon shone on his shaved head, casting warped patches around the place where his ear had been cut away. His face was as unreadable as ever.

‘Shall we walk?’ he asked quietly. ‘Caradoc has no need of us now, and I would be further from the tavern fires.’ And from the small cluster of townsfolk who had gathered and listened to the rites as they sang: that did not need to be spoken aloud.

They walked together down the side of the stream, keeping by instinct to the darker places beneath the trees, not the light.

The river grew wider and then narrowed to tumble over a rocky lip in a shallow falls twice the height of a man. Above the cresting white rim, a single fallen dolmen hung out across the falls and the pool below, narrower at the neck, broad as a horse’s back as it approached midstream. It was the kind of place boys might come to fish in the summer, and cast their lines in the river behind; the kind of place where, later, they might test their courage on a moonlit night, seeing if they could walk barefoot along the ridge in the dark; the kind of place from which they might dive into the pool of unknown depth below, to show they had no fear of death. A boy could easily die, diving like that.

In Britain, Pantera had seen the warriors set each other such tests in the winter, to keep them sharp for the battles of spring. It was autumn now, with no battles in sight, but still the water’s promise drew him. Feeling the kiss of flying water on his naked back, he stepped out along the narrow stone to sit at the rounded end with his bare feet dangling over the water, and was not surprised when Ajax joined him and began to unwind the bandage Hannah had so carefully set about his chest.

A red-black bruise in the shape of a horse’s foot showed under the driver’s left armpit. Across the rest of his chest, other, more linear bruises showed where he had been dragged in the sand.

Slowly, Pantera said, ‘When I was in Britain, it was said that the bear-warriors of the Eceni were most feared by the legions of all those who fought against Rome.’

There was quiet, with the rush of the river beneath their feet to take the words safely away. Ajax was naked now, his flesh starkly white between the bruising. He came to sit on the stone, close enough for Pantera to feel his body’s warmth.

‘Do you think Nero recognized the bear-scars this morning?’ He made no effort to deny what he was.

‘If he had done,’ Pantera said, ‘you would be dying by now.’

The night was quiet, waiting for what more he might say. The pool beneath their feet was a cauldron of busyness, except at one corner, where the surface was still, mirroring the stars. In such places, the gods or the beloved dead were known to show their faces.

Pantera found himself looking only there. The water was smooth as poured silver, and perfectly black. He could not see Aerthen anywhere in it, only the clear reflection of Ajax, who had pushed himself to his feet and stood at the dolmen’s edge, looking down.

‘How deep do you think the water is in the pool?’ he asked. ‘Deep enough to dive into?’

Pantera felt a tug in the pit of his guts. ‘I think the gods intend us to believe so,’ he said.

‘Good. Then we can continue this conversation in the water, where the gods will heal us best. I have need of a cleansing.’

Ajax’s dive was neat and straight; he entered the water sweetly, as a cormorant might, with little noise.

In the wait before he surfaced, Pantera stood and readied himself to dive, an act he had last performed in Britain, in the sweet time of peace when his love had consumed him. Before that, he had never been confident in water. In Aerthen’s company, he had learned to swim, if not to enjoy the experience.

He counted slowly to ten and Ajax did not reappear. Holding his breath, Pantera pushed off the balls of his feet.

The water was so cold, it burned his scorched skin. The pool was deeper than he had imagined, but not so deep that he did not feel rocks graze the skin of his forearms as he came to the limits of his dive.

Because Ajax had done it, he swept his arms against the current to keep himself under. Opening his eyes in the fierce black water, he found Ajax in front of him, alive: a face, a pair of wide, coppery eyes, a hand that reached out to take his forearm in the grip of one warrior to another. To take that grip and return it, even on dry land, implied an oath manifestly more binding than the one Pantera had refused to give Seneca in the afternoon and matched exactly the one he had freely given Caradoc.

Ajax gripped his arm again. His face came closer. The coppery eyes held Pantera’s, hard as stone, giving nothing, taking nothing, only offering in their depths, perhaps, a glimmer of friendship such as Pantera had long forgotten.

They had been underwater too long. Pantera’s lungs burned, and a reddening blackness made tunnels before his eyes. Hazily, it came to him that what was offered did not interfere with his oath to Caradoc. Blinded by lack of air, he felt the hand leave his arm and return again, urgently.

As urgently, he took it.

They breached the surface together like porpoises, coughing, and sucking in air. Together, they climbed up the side of the falls, and sat face to face on the harsh, prickling grasses, so close that each could see the goose-flesh rising cold on the other, that each could see the time the other took to come back to himself, and so find in the other a mettle worthy of respect.

In time, Ajax rose and crossed unsteadily to the stone that had been their diving platform. For a shocked moment, Pantera thought he might be about to jump again, but he stooped to pick up the bandages and brought them back so that Pantera could rewind them for him.

‘I gave an oath to Caradoc before he died,’ Pantera said, tying the first knot. ‘I swore to keep Math safe, my life for his, and to join him with his family. You, on the other hand, have already sworn to help Math get to Rome. It is in my mind that these two may not be as different as I had thought.’

The fire behind them was less now. In its place, other, smaller campfires had been lit across the paddock. The oak tree had been left, and the dark shape of a man’s body at its foot. Ajax stared at it a while. ‘If I can keep Math safe, if I can fulfil my oath to his mother and yet get him safely home to the rest of his father’s family… that would be a very good thing.’

‘Then we have a common goal. All we need to do is find a means to attain it.’ Pantera tied the last knot of the linen and stood. Together, they walked along the river’s bank to where the refugees were gathering, with fires and food and ale. Before they reached the greater light, Ajax paused and stooped to pick up a pebble and send it skipping across the water. It bounced three times, number of luck.

‘We have need of a leatherworker,’ he said. ‘You have lived among the Dumnonii. You could join us, perhaps, in that capacity?’

‘You flatter me.’ Pantera, too, chose a pebble from the river’s edge. His was a good one, flat and sharp around its edge; it went further, skipping seven times along the river’s length. In the good omen of that, he made the day’s last and greatest decision.

‘Yesterday, the emperor asked a service of me,’ he said slowly. ‘I refused. Now… it may be that the best way to protect Math is to accept. Whatever is said of him, Nero is not without honour. If I can do as he wants, it may serve us later.’

‘So you won’t come to Alexandria with us?’ There was disappointment in Ajax’s voice.

‘I will go, but on the emperor’s business, not as part of the Green team. You will be left to take care of Math. I’ll do what I can from outside the training compound.’

They were near the fires. Pantera stopped before the light caught them. ‘Caradoc gifted his knife to Math,’ he said. ‘But with his last breath, he said I was to tell his son that he was proud of him. It is in my mind that I told the wrong son of his father’s pride.’

‘He may have meant both.’ Ajax’s face was caught in shadows, unreadable. ‘We could be glad if it were so. A father should feel pride in all his children.’