Rome: The Emperor's spy

II: Alexandria, Late Spring, AD 64
Chapter Eighteen

In the still night, a single drop of water rolled the full length of a tin sluice and splashed into the lower of two bronze vessels. Somewhere deep within the surrounding globe of brass and silver, the added weight caused a pan to tip, a lever to edge forward, a sprung arm to ease back. Elsewhere, a ratchet shuddered towards the end of its hourly cycle.

Math lay on his side on the sand beneath Nero’s great mechanical water clock, listening to the rumble of the falling water. If he held his breath and pressed his upper ear to the cold metal, he could hear each of the individual tubes and whistles making ready to strike the hour.

Know your friends, the spy, Pantera, had said at the beginning of Math’s month of secret nocturnal tuition in Gaul. A bull pen is your friend, a dog kept kennelled through the night, the uneven line of a roof ridge. Each one of these will hide you if you let it. Come to know them intimately.

The water clock was Math’s closest friend for the night and it told him the hour was nearly up. Covering his ears with his hands, he risked the last wriggle forward to where he could make out the outline of Nero’s geometric compound. The clock was its centrepiece, antique apple of the emperor’s eye, a gift from Alexandria’s elders to honour their Lord’s ambitions of Platonic perfection.

Laid out in a triangle around the clock’s sphere were the three dormitories within which slept the members of Nero’s three chosen teams, Green, White and Blue, marked out by the roof tiles of verdigrised copper, limed shingles and deep blue clay pans respectively.

At the end of the Blues’ line was a single chamber for Akakios in his role as overseer. A flag was bound to a mast there, as a sign that the emperor’s spymaster was not currently in residence, and that, instead, Poros of the Blues was in notional charge of the compound. It served as a timely warning; men — and boys — were flogged more often when Akakios was in residence and Math had promised the ghost of his father that if he saw the flag fluttering free he would turn round and go back to bed.

Tonight, it wasn’t. Safe, at least from that quarter, Math looked out beyond the triangle of the dormitories towards the square made by the horse stalls, the kitchens and the dining area and then on to the oval training track to the north and finally to the wide circular palisade that enclosed the whole compound, keeping the teams in and the curious onlookers of Alexandria out. Thus were all the philosophers’ shapes fulfilled in Nero’s creation, that their wisdom might infuse the drivers and their teams with all the skills necessary to outmatch the best of Rome, while at the same time keeping them well clear of the betting syndicates that would have paid in gold for news of their form.

That didn’t stop the team members from gambling amongst themselves. It didn’t, actually, stop them from laying bets outside the compound, just ensured that they were conducted secretly, and Math had only recently heard about it. The baker, apparently, was the conduit. His donkey cart drove in at dawn every morning laden with the day’s bread, and lately two or three of the loaves had contained gold in their heart, sent from the outside by men whose job it was to feed the betting circles of Rome with the information they needed to lay odds in the coming season. One of the Blues’ middle-ranking apprentices was said to be richer by three denarii as a result.

Doubtless, he had laid most of his money on his own team. Of the three teams, the Blues from Galatia were far and away the best; everyone had at least one wager on their winning the trial.

The Whites were from Cappadocia, which meant in their own tongue ‘Land of the White Horses’, which romantic fact, according to the guards, was the sole reason Nero had bought them here. Certainly it wasn’t for their skill.

They were widely acclaimed as the pacemakers. Everyone who wasn’t actually a member of the Whites expected them to be sent home as soon as another team came along that stood a hope of thrashing the Blues.

The Greens from Gaul were that team. All winter Ajax had trained under the eyes of the guards and the sensible money had been moving quietly in his direction for the past month. The fear amongst them all was that Ajax might fall ill or succumb to injury, for they lacked a credible second driver. Everyone agreed that Math had the talent, but he lacked the skill and experience to drive a winning team.

In Gaul, his dream of driving had been a pale, bloodless fantasy besides the excitement of the dockside thieving. But Ajax was a good tutor, possibly the best, and here in the compound, where every man and boy lived and breathed racing, Math had found that he wanted to drive a racing team more with each passing day.

Biting his lip, he dragged his mind back to the clock and the night; thoughts of racing ruined his concentration and tonight it mattered that he not make the same mistakes he had six months before.

Then, he had been caught by the Egyptian guards as he tried to climb the palisade, and had paid the price. The penalty for boys caught trying to leave the compound was precise and, as his team leader, Ajax had been woken and dragged, yawning and cursing, from his bed to administer the flogging.

The surprise of that had lasted at least for the start of what came after — because it was Ajax that Math had been following, and Ajax whom he had last seen very much awake and opening the small postern door with his key just before he had been caught.

The surprise had not lasted long; very soon it was impossible to think, or to breathe, or to do anything but hold the image of his father in the forefront of his mind and not let it go. At the end, he remembered Hannah coming to carry him back to her cell, and the bitter taste of the drink she had given him, and how it had shrivelled his tongue even as it stole the pain and let him sleep.

Afterwards, when Math was well enough to begin driving the horses again, he thought Ajax had treated him with more respect. Certainly he had pushed him harder, which was probably a good thing, even if the falls came more frequently and the bruises were worse.

Even so, Ajax had not told Math that he was going to meet Pantera. Math found out only because he had smiled his particular smile for the melon-seller’s assistant every day through the entire winter and it had finally paid its dividend that morning, when the melon-seller had delivered to Ajax a gift of a bear standing with its claws outstretched towards half of a moon disc. Math, who had been given a secret glimpse beforehand, had read in it a message that he thought he understood.

Which was why he was hiding under the water clock within sight of the palisade for a second time, six months older and wiser, with greater respect for the Egyptian soldiers who stood night-guard along the heights, and an absolute terror of Akakios, the emperor’s spymaster, and de facto overseer of the compound.

The last drop of water rolled from flute to vessel. A pan tipped, a lever moved, a ratchet clicked suddenly off the end of its cycle. The entire clock shivered like a hound shedding water. Three hammers snapped forward, hard.

In the silence of the compound, the great mother bell rang not quite loudly enough to wake those who slept. A flute whistled twice. A chime pierced the air with teeth-aching insistence.

On its second ring, Math threw himself across the sand on his hands and knees to the foot of the palisade.

Pressing up against the postern, he eased a key from within his tunic. Apart from Akakios’ master key, there were four other keys in the compound: one each for the three team drivers and the last given to the chief cook, who was trusted to go out to the markets. The cook had a fondness for wine and a particular boy of the White team and Math was betting the skin of his back that the key wouldn’t be missed before morning.

His hands were shaking. Under the fading chimes of the water clock, the key hushed in the lock. The well-oiled door opened without a sound.

Never go through any opening — a gate, a door, a curtain to a room, the entrance to a cave — if you are not certain what’s on the other side. One day, it will be your death.

With Pantera’s instruction ringing in his head, he pressed his face to the opening and let his eyes find the shapes and the unshapes of the world beyond the compound: the outlines of the city, half a mile distant, with its tall silhouetted palaces and the taller beacon of the lighthouse behind; the closer bulk of the city’s hippodrome; the canal that led to the Nile and the shuffle of boats thereon.

Tilting his head, Math listened for the rhythmic breathing of the guard directly above, the grunts of night beasts in the desert, the sea’s distant serenade, so much like home. Last, he sifted the scents of the desert, of cold sand and wood and men, from the more distant sea-smells of the harbour. He smelled the garlic that the guards had eaten at the last meal, and the wine, and the old, stale flatulence. He didn’t smell either Ajax or Pantera, which meant that neither of them was there yet. Ahead, an unbroken expanse of sand reached out fifty paces to the emperor’s horse trough with the bent arm of the pump over it like a standing heron. Math slid through the postern gate and locked it behind him, then set out to crawl across the open desert.

It was further than it seemed in daylight. Desiccated grit pushed itself up his nose, into his mouth and eyes. Twice, he had to stop and press his nose to stop himself from sneezing and when he finally lay prone in the cold, safe dark beneath the trough, sharp-footed insects bigger than mice began to scrabble over his arms, exploring routes into his tunic and out again so that lying still was a torture in itself.

He chose to believe that none of the insects was a scorpion. According to Saulos, the stammering Idumaean who had taken Caradoc’s place as the Green team’s harness-maker, the emperor had ordered his compound kept clear of venomous things and Akakios would have been required to fall on his own sword if so much as one brown snake had been found within the palisade.

Away from Nero’s malign influence, Saulos had proved to be a fluent communicator, possessed of an encyclopaedic knowledge of Alexandria which was second only to Hannah’s in its depth and breadth. He seemed also to be the only man in the compound who chose to spend friendly time with Akakios, which was little short of amazing, but meant that the story about the snakes might actually be true.

The night passed and no scorpions came. Math lay still and practised the ways Pantera had taught him to keep his mind awake without succumbing to a boredom that could kill him. After a while, for the fun of it, he imagined seeing Pantera, gliding ghost-like towards the palisade.

It worked. Between one blink and the next, Pantera was there — there! — a knife-blade shadow sliding over the sand with the same halting fluidity that Math had seen when first he had stepped off the boat on to Coriallum’s dock half a year before.

The spy might have been lame, his shoulder might have been scarred beyond repair, but Math had not yet seen anyone else who could move like that. Even Ajax, who had once seemed to be the best of the best, was not that good, which was one reason, Math supposed, why Ajax felt the way he did.

Pantera stopped halfway to the palisade and turned on his heel, scanning the land around. Math’s palms sprang suddenly sweaty. He half-closed his eyes and tried to press himself deeper into the sand.

In the desert night, an owl called softly twice and was answered. There were no owls near the emperor’s training compound, but the sounds merged so completely with the waking coughs and cries of desert and city that only a boy who would make of himself a spy might have noticed them.

Because he was looking in the right direction, Math saw a man’s shape peel away from the palisade and walk towards Pantera. At the last moment, dusty starlight reflected from Ajax’s shaven head, leaving no doubt who met whom in the shadow of the palisade.

Singing to himself inside, Math watched the two men reach for each other in the warrior’s grasp he had once so despised, then move together back into the shadows, to a place he had no hope of seeing or hearing.

He felt rather than heard the murmur of quiet speech. Words rolled together and even their timbre was not clear. Math frowned into the dark, begging the half-moon to give him more light.

It didn’t; instead, a billowing cloud drew its veil across what little light there was, and a sudden breeze tossed handfuls of sand about the open space, making a noise that covered any other sounds. The two men could have coupled there, standing upright against the oak planking, and Math wasn’t even sure he would hear it.

Certainly, he wouldn’t have seen it, just as he had seen nothing when Ajax and Pantera had walked together down the riverbank on the night of his father’s death. They hadn’t been out of sight for long, but Math knew — who better? — how little time it took to consummate desire if both parties were eager. And he knew enough of such things to name for himself the change he had seen in Pantera and Ajax afterwards: two men who had departed the inn fire as strangers had come back close as brothers, with the shine of new discovery bright on their skin.

Things had passed between those two that night that no other heard or knew, but Math had seen Pantera grip Ajax’s arm as he left them to return to his solitary bed in a distant tavern and had seen him the next day giving his oath to the emperor; an oath that had kept him apart from the Green team, so that, in the busy month of preparation that followed, his absence had hung over them as certainly as Math’s father’s had done.

None of which explained why Pantera was meeting Ajax in secret when, as the emperor’s oath-sworn man, he could have walked in through the gate and demanded an audience. Akakios seemed the likely answer. Akakios was the answer to most of Math’s problems, including the interesting question of how to get back into the compound unseen. He had an idea about that, if he managed to stay hidden until dawn.

Too late, the clouds unveiled the moon. Math moved his head a fraction, the better to stare at the place where a single shadow moved away from the palisade, and, splitting down its own length, became two men.

Morning was close. The baker was late again — the man was an unreliable harbinger of dawn — but beyond the palisade the first lick of light coloured the flat horizon. In the newly sharp shadows, Ajax and Pantera stepped apart with lingering slowness. Math heard his own name spoken softly as a question and a hushed reply.

Straining to hear, he closed his eyes. When he opened them bare moments later, the silence was so complete he could hear the crimp of sand under his own fist, but Pantera and Ajax were gone. He had heard neither the turn of the key nor the sound of a lame man’s walking, but clearly he was alone.

There was no point in trying to follow Pantera; Math knew his own limits. It was also pointless, not to say dangerous, to try to get back into the compound now when the dark was in retreat.

He relaxed, therefore, under the shadow of the horse trough, and looked out across the sea towards the great lighthouse of Pharos with its bronze mirror and indefatigable flame that sent its signal, so said the guards, five hundred miles out to sea, guiding sailors past the man-eating shoals at the mouths of the two harbours.

The flame shimmered to new life, even as Math watched, its pitch fire overtaken by the greater flame of the sun. Brought early to morning, cocks crowed and the gulls began to keen and wheel as, out on the eastern edge of the training grounds, the first savage edge of the sun lifted over the horizon, signalling the start of the working day.

Precisely on time, the melon-seller arrived, leading an ass-drawn cart and accompanied by the man who came three times a month with dates and almonds. A message-runner from Akakios stood apart, not wishing to sully the authority of his station. The baker had still not arrived, which meant they’d be eating yesterday’s bread at least until the noon meal. The chief cook hadn’t risen, and so hadn’t missed his key.

From inside the compound came the slow beginnings of the morning: cooking fires flared through their kindling, sending thin smoke to pepper the air; horses whinnied as stalls were opened; a gaggle of groom-boys flooded out of the gates, heading for the troughs with their buckets.

Elsewhere in Alexandria, the houses of the rich had their own cisterns, so that even the slaves need only turn a tap. In designing his compound, Nero could have diverted a branch of the Nile had he chosen. Instead, he had decided that it was healthier for the boys to carry water in from the pumps for the horses, for the small army of cooks who fed the greater army of drivers, grooms, stable-boys and slaves, and, first, for the great brass and silver clock that was the centrepiece of his compound. There were thirty boys, ten to each team. It took three trips each with two buckets to provide the necessary water.

They flooded out, muzzily sleepy and caught up in the squabbles of the day before. As the first of them gathered, Math stood, ducked his head into the trough and sluiced himself free of the night’s dust, then lifted the two buckets he had hidden here the day before for exactly this purpose, and filled them to the brim with the night-cold water.

The boys moved in a pack, not wanting to be either first or last, and it was easy to slide into the middle. Just inside the gates, Math let fall the stolen key and kicked sand over it, but not so much that it might not be found by another boy, more sharp-eyed than he, and returned in safety to the chief cook when he came to look for it.

Humming to himself, he set in motion his plan for the rest of the day.