Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Seventeen

The next day’s dawn saw Coriallum veiled in white ash, pure as virgin snow.

Hannah rose with the cock’s crow and found Math already up, with the fire lit outside her tent and a pot of water warming on it.

‘Did you sleep at all?’ she asked.

‘Of course.’ He eyed her askance, as if there were something improper in the question. ‘But Pantera came by earlier and woke me. He says the emperor will send clothes for us, so we can be decently dressed for our audience. He thought perhaps we should…’ He drifted to silence, his eyes flickering from the heating water to Hannah and back.

‘He thinks we should wash?’ She was laughing and scandalized at once. ‘Did he say that?’

‘He said that Nero would send Akakios to say it and it might be better if we were ready.’ Math was brittle in defence of his hero, but not as withdrawn as he had been. His face was filthy with ash, but there was colour beneath.

He had baked oat cakes. Now, he used a stick to ease one from the embers, spat on his fingers against the heat and passed it to her.

‘We went together to see my father’s body,’ he said. ‘Pantera thinks we could build a high frame later today and lay my father on it, so that the crows and ravens might take his body, piece by piece. It’s how the warriors were given their sky burial in the days of our grandfathers.’

‘Pantera said that?’

‘Ajax agreed. He was awake when we came back.’

Hannah had slept badly and was sluggish with exhaustion. Nevertheless, it seemed everyone else was ahead of her. She looked for Ajax where she had left him and saw only a ruck of folded bedding.

‘He’s with the horses,’ Math said. ‘I’m to tell you he’ll be back in time to wash his face for Nero.’

Slowly, she sat down on a stone set by the fire.

‘Then by all means let us wash,’ she said. ‘I have some ash soap in my tent, in the box with the acorn carved on the lid, under the nest of copper bowls. If you can find it, we might even get ourselves clean.’

As Pantera had predicted, Akakios arrived to collect the team just as the sun nudged over the horizon.

He required that they be cleansed of ash and the remnants of fire and when he found that they were already as clean as water could make them, he provided tunics of fresh new linen, bound at hem and sleeves with green. They were given each a leather belt buckled in silver, with the shape of a lyre emblazoned thereon. Math’s hair, which Hannah had washed and combed, was bound back with a fillet of silver. Ajax was brought a litter carried by four Dacian slaves and was not allowed to refuse, even when he showed he could walk.

And so, as his physician, Hannah had to go with him, and did not have time to inform Akakios that she was not committed to the Green team, and might yet follow her father’s friend to Judaea, nor, when they were ushered into the magistrate’s empty garden, with the fountains silenced and the gilded birdcages covered out of respect for the dead, did she find an opportunity to say the same to Nero.

The emperor entered, dressed in white for mourning, with few rings. He walked with the slow rhythm of the stage, used to denote a death. At the couch he reclined, gracefully. Through Akakios, he invited his guests to sit, and had them given food and watered wine. Out of sight, a single lyre played in perfect pitch.

Pantera did not take food with them, but was ushered in by three vast Germanic guards a short while later. He, too, had washed since the night. Like Math’s, his hair was flat from water and the comb. Like Ajax, he walked stiffly; worse, Hannah thought, on his left leg. His new tunic of snowy linen was belted with silver, not leather, its buckle inlaid with lapis and ivory.

He did not acknowledge Hannah, Math or Ajax. Walking between two of the guards, he came directly to the emperor and, kneeling at his feet, kissed his ringed hand. What oath he took they could not hear, but it pleased Nero and displeased Akakios equally. Nero slipped one of the rings from his thumb and gave it to Pantera, who accepted it with gravity and every outward appearance of humble gratitude.

He was dismissed soon after and it was the Green team’s turn to be led forward one by one to swear fealty to their emperor, to accept his nomination as the third of his three teams in training in Alexandria and to listen to the details of their journey: a ship to be made ready before the first of October, a bare month away; the horses to be ready and fit to travel, having been on and off a ship daily for the intervening time; both training and racing chariots to be dismantled for transport; the loriners, wheelwrights and grooms to be fit to serve; a new leatherworker to be found, although the emperor, in his wisdom, had found one, a nervous individual of late middle years, so profoundly unremarkable in dress, hair and features as to be almost invisible.

The new man’s nose ran with nerves. He cleared his throat with every second breath and wrung his hands throughout an unpromising introduction in which Akakios named him as Saulos, an Idumaean of good breeding fallen on hard times who was competent in leather working and desired to return to Alexandria, the city of his youth. Left to speak for himself, the man stammered his way through a salutation to the emperor, his hands twitching with terror.

Gravely, Nero welcomed him to the team, although of course there could never be any as good as the sadly deceased Caradoc. The emperor had given his approval for the sky burial that had been proposed. It was fitting, he said, for so honest a man, whose son now carried the family’s honour.

At last, Nero let his gaze drift to Math for the first time that morning. He nodded but refrained from anything more intimate. Math nodded solemnly in return and did not simper and Hannah breathed freely for the first time since rising.

Soon enough, the team found themselves dismissed, free to return to the tents and the stares of their former compatriots. Ajax, who had climbed down from the litter as they passed out through the gates to the magistrate’s house and made himself walk from there to the tents, allowed Hannah to lead him into the shade and took the drink she made for him of mugwort and valerian and the barest sprinkling of poppy, designed to bring sleep and ease the pain. She mixed something similar for herself, without the poppy, in the hope that it might damp down the worst of the headache that had grown through the morning and now held her skull in its vice.

Pantera came later in the afternoon, when Ajax was still asleep and Hannah had persuaded even Math to cease tending the horses and lie down away from the sun’s worst heat.

He squatted on the ground by the reddening ash of the fire and accepted an oat bannock with a smear of the soft white honey that had been a gift from the White team, delivered while they were away. After Caradoc’s death, no one begrudged them the win, it seemed. Even the Blues had sent a jug of ale and a set of racing bits as a gift.

Hannah sat on a stone, nursing her headache, fretfully. ‘We washed,’ she said, ‘as you told us to.’

He pulled a wry smile. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t stay to see you take your oaths. Was it bad?’

‘It was… decorous. The emperor understands how to mourn.’

‘He’s experienced enough of death to know how to behave. And he wishes to be seen above all as a ruler who cares for his people.’ He nibbled the edge of the oatcake, looking at her. ‘I heard a rumour you had been approached by a Hebrew. It is said you might yet go to Jerusalem.’

The headache knifed at the back of her eyes. She squinted at him, shading her brow against the enemy sun with the edge of her hand. ‘Did Ajax tell you that?’

‘No.’ Pantera shook his head. ‘I’ve had time to ask some questions. It’s what I do.’

He was looking at her, weighing her intelligence, or her awareness. Hannah thought of what she knew of him; a half-dozen meetings. Less. Flashes of wit and thoughtfulness and a striking ability to be in the right place at the right time. A realization came to her slowly, through the fogged pain in her head.

‘You’re a spy!’

‘I’m a good spy.’ His inflection robbed the word of its insult. ‘Better than Akakios. That’s why Nero wants me. That’s why I have to go to Alexandria. But if you choose to go to Judaea, Ajax will be left to care for Math alone.’

‘You think the rest of the Green team doesn’t love him like their own sons?’

‘I’m sure they do. But the rest of the Green team are provincial Gauls. They weren’t born and brought up in Egypt. They’ll be felled by the heat before they ever get off the boat. They’ll go mad at the sight of the first scorpions and faint at the snakes. And they’ll be too busy getting to grips with the rivalries in the compound to care for a boy who must break the rules or die of boredom.’

‘He might be different in Alexandria,’ Hannah said faintly. ‘The compound is locked against incomers and outgoers alike. He’ll be penned in with nothing to steal, and nowhere to go. He might take to racing and forget who he has been here.’

‘And snow might lie thick across the deserts in July.’ Pantera laid down his half-eaten bannock and leaned on one elbow on the dusty grass. ‘I came to make an offer, to you and to Math. I can’t travel with you, but I can stretch out my time here for a month. If nothing else, I can be looking for whoever tried to kill you all. In a month of nights, I can also offer to teach Math all that I can of spying, to build on that grounding so that he’ll have a chance to survive if he finds himself cast out alone. Thereafter, I’ll have to go to Alexandria and we may not meet until you’re well settled in. Will you go with him, at least that far, and stay that long? Or are you committed to go to Judaea with Shimon?’

Far behind him, a man was teaching a boy the use of sword against shield. The sun glanced off the polished bronze boss into Hannah’s eyes. Blinded, with a knifing pain in her head, she put her palms over her face and stared into darkness, seeking a clear path forward.

Thickly, she said, ‘In the night, I told Ajax I wasn’t part of the Green team.’

Pantera said nothing. She took her hands from her eyes and found him looking at her with patient curiosity.

‘And this morning?’ he asked. ‘Must the chaos of the night set the future’s path? Do you want to go to Jerusalem, to meet your cousins and persuade them that peace in servitude is preferable to war?’

‘No.’ With the saying of it, her headache began to ease. ‘I’ve never met them and they’ve never met me. My father died before I was born and my mother brought me up among the Sibyls. We would have nothing to say to each other that would not be better left unsaid.’

‘Then you could spare half a year at least.’ Pantera spread his hands. He was smiling, crookedly, with real humour. ‘Alexandria would be a very dull place without you.’