Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Nineteen

‘Did you see Math go out to get the water?’ Ajax asked.

The morning was still young enough to be cool. He sat opposite Hannah at the weathered wooden dining trestles under an awning of shaved goatskin so thin the sun’s disc shone clearly through. It served to keep the worst of the glare from their breakfast, but not the flies. Nothing kept the flies off for long, although a gaunt slave squatting nearby pulled rhythmically on an overhead fan that kept them away from the fruit, bread and honeyed barley porridge with which the emperor’s chariot teams so richly broke their fasts.

In her time away from Alexandria, Hannah had forgotten the flies, and how summer multiplied them. They were bad enough now, in spring. Sighing, she batted the edge of her hand across a melon rind. ‘I didn’t see him go out with his bucket,’ she said, ‘but then I wasn’t really paying attention until Lentus of the Whites found the cook’s key in the sand at the gates.’

‘He depends on that, I think. None of us pays sufficient attention to the things we see every day. In some ways, Pantera taught him too well.’ Ajax kept his gaze averted as he spoke, which told Hannah more than he meant it to.

‘He’s been outside the compound without permission?’ She stared at him, disbelieving. ‘You’ve been out too, or he wouldn’t have dared! Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Ajax shrugged awkwardly, ‘I thought I’d rely on you to heal my back afterwards if they caught me.’

‘It wouldn’t have been your back. For talking to someone from the city, they would skin you alive and peg you out on the sands to be food for the flies!’

Hannah wanted to scream at him, and could not. Already the boys were milling about the training area harnessing the horses, close enough to hear. In any case, Ajax was looking at her at last, his gaze aggrieved.

‘I may not be Pantera,’ he said, ‘but you have to trust that I can get out of the compound and back in again without being caught.’

‘And that Math can do the same?’

‘He can. He did. Look at him. Does he look like a boy who might let himself be caught a second time?’

Math was leading out Brass and Bronze, his two wild-mad colts, ready for the morning’s run. Already they were creamed with sweat.

Hannah watched as he bridled them and set their harness on to the training chariot. He was fast and nimble, and the colts didn’t lunge at him with quite the savagery they reserved for everyone else. Then he was finished, and dived back into the crowd and would have been lost but that, amongst a horde of dark-haired, dark-skinned boys and their sweat-sheened colts, he stood out like a shooting star fallen to earth.

His hair had always been gold, but dustily so. Since Gaul, he had taken to rinsing it in citrus juice and that, combined with the Alexandrian sun, had spun it to finest gold. Then, too, he was smaller than the rest, and his skin less brown, and these three together made him a golden bounty-cock in a flock of black-brown hens. For these reasons alone, he could have been bullied without cease, but the other boys liked him, and revelled in his difference, and he was learning to play and take joy in others’ levity as he had not done in Gaul. Hannah wasn’t sure who had taught him that.

A slave hovered close by, ready to clear the table. Ajax selected a peach and began to rub it between his palms until it glistened.

Hannah said, ‘You met Pantera.’ If she closed her eyes, she could see the spy sitting on a stone by a fire eating an oat bannock smeared with honey, and hiding from her the sharpness of his mind. ‘And not for the first time?’

Ajax balanced the peach in the centre of his palm. ‘I was going to meet him six months ago, on the night Math was caught trying to leave the compound. Clearly, I missed my appointment. Last night was the first time since then. We didn’t intend it so, but we had to wait for the right circumstances.’

‘Like Akakios being away from the compound for the night?’

‘And the moon giving favourable light and the right guards on the palisades. Indeed.’

Behind Ajax, a flash of gold caught Hannah’s eye. Out on the sands of the training track, the teams of each colour were harnessed and ready to begin their warm-up. This once, Math was ready first, with the resin wiped on his hands and the harness wound round his waist exactly as the first drivers did it.

With Hannah and Ajax watching, he took Bronze and Brass for what should have been an easy, lazy circuit of the track, except that nothing with these horses was ever lazy or easy and Math would not have wanted them if it was. He took them round one full circuit steadily enough; then, at the next corner, leaned into the turn as if it were a real race, and very nearly succeeded in lifting the heavy training rig on to two wheels, as if it were a racing chariot in full flight.

It was an impressive attempt. Other boys would have punched the air and checked to see who was watching. Math frowned and spoke to the colts and then rebalanced himself and took the next corner faster. This time he managed to lift the chariot up on to the two inside wheels for three paces, and set it neatly back down again. It wobbled a little as it settled.

On the sidelines, some of the younger apprentices applauded. Math didn’t look up. Hannah saw him bite his lower lip, frowning. The colts felt something from him, and extended their paces, so that for a while they flew with racing speed, until even the guards were cheering.

At Hannah’s side, Ajax cursed quietly. ‘I should thrash him senseless. He knows better than to push the horses before they’re properly warmed up.’

Hannah glanced sideways, expecting to see in him an undercurrent of pride. Instead, she saw that rare thing: Ajax truly angry. She took a moment to uncramp her hands. ‘We forget he’s only ten,’ she said. ‘You should let him race. He won’t stop trying to impress you until you do.’

‘ He forgets he’s only ten,’ Ajax said. ‘We don’t. And there’s no point in his racing until he can control the horses at speed, which he isn’t close to doing yet. In any case, the only race in sight is the trial against Poros and Math won’t be ready for that.’

Hannah was struggling to marshal a response when Ajax leaned both forearms on the table and said, ‘Pantera brought news this morning.’

‘He’s found the ink-stained apothecary who held a seat at the Black Chrysanthemum?’ Hannah felt her eyes flare wide.

Ajax grinned tightly. ‘After six months of searching and a great deal of Seneca’s gold surreptitiously spent, yes, Pantera has tracked down a particular man who sometimes dines at the inn of the Black Chrysanthemum on the Street of the Lame Lion and once asked a Syrian to sell copies of a certain prophecy to the highest bidder. The Syrian, it is said, sold precisely one: to a thin man with dark hair, shortly before he fell in with the emperor’s messenger, who is rumoured to have stolen another and killed the seller. If the man Pantera has found knows the date by which Rome may burn, then we have the first part of the riddle.’

‘But not the answer to who is trying to light the fire.’

‘We might have that, too.’

A slave-boy had come to hover nearby, sent by the chief cook, who, against all recent form, favoured the Whites. Ajax finished his peach and tossed the stone back into the bowl. Lacking any reason to stay, the boy picked it up and returned to the chief cook.

When he was out of earshot, Ajax said, ‘Akakios’ agents have been following Pantera for the past month. It may be that they simply want to know what he’s doing, but it may also be that Akakios is trying to discover the date of the fire.’

‘That doesn’t mean he’s necessarily trying to light it. Akakios won’t want Pantera to succeed where he has failed. He’d lose Nero’s favour.’

‘Which in this court is likely to be fatal.’ Ajax chewed on his lip. ‘At any rate, if Pantera can dispose of whoever’s following him — and I would bet on that man against anyone in Alexandria — then he’ll visit the ink-stained apothecary later today and return here tomorrow morning with news of what he’s found.’

‘And what makes you think Math won’t try to leave the compound again to watch you?’

‘Unless he’s got the hearing of a hawk, he won’t be there. He hid under the water troughs too far away to hear what we said.’

‘ Ajax! ’ Heads turned. More quietly, Hannah said, ‘If you saw him, then there’s no saying who else might have done. What will you do if-’

‘I didn’t see him. Pantera pointed him out or I wouldn’t have known he was there. I told you, he’s learned too well, just not yet perfectly, for which we should all be grateful.’ Grim-faced, Ajax stood, pushing the bench away from the table. Like all the drivers, he wore only a loincloth, so that when he raised his arms to ease his shoulders a stray finger of sunlight feathered the side of his ribs, filling the indentation where the hoof had crushed his chest.

In Gaul, the edges had flared scarlet, with fierce lancing scorch marks stretching out across the whole of his chest. But he was young and as fit as any man of his age and the scars of this accident had grown white, joining the mess of others on his back. Hannah had no idea where those others had come from. She traced them sometimes in her mind. He had been flogged once, clearly, but beneath that were marks she could not begin to name, and ‘Hannah?’ Ajax tapped lightly on the trestle. ‘Your admirer is here.’

‘Saulos?’ She snatched her mind back to the present. The team’s newest member had a wound on his back that she had been treating since before they left Gaul.

‘Saulos of the talking hands. The Idumaean harness-maker with a Greek education. Who else?’ Ajax spat succinctly into the dust. As everyone else had come to know and like Saulos, Ajax had come to loathe him, and made no effort to hide it. Saulos, for his part, was unfailingly civil. ‘He’ll offer you marriage soon, if you keep on encouraging him.’

Hannah laughed aloud. Against all her foreboding, it was a good morning, with kindness in the air.

‘I’m not encouraging him,’ she said, shooing Ajax away with her hands. ‘I’m his physician and he’s my patient. But if he offers anything more substantial than a copper coin in payment for his treatment, you can be sure I’ll tell you before anyone else.’

‘Good day.’

Saulos stood diffidently at the edge of the dining area. His expressive hands made a fluid, apologetic movement that conveyed both his regret at disturbing her, and his joy in her presence. ‘May I sit?’

‘Of course.’ Hannah motioned him forward. He stepped neatly past her, to take the bench Ajax had so recently vacated.

He was a neat man. Early on in their acquaintanceship, in her effort to find something remarkable about Saulos that might make him more visible than the invisible slaves, his fastidious neatness was the first thing she had noticed; he carried a rag of linen in his sleeve and wiped his lips with it after eating, which was curious enough to be memorable.

Later, she had come to enjoy the landscape of his mind; he was articulate, intelligent, thoughtful and funny, but shyly so, and it had taken work on her part to bring him out of himself.

It had been worth the effort. Through the winter, she had found that he was schooled in Greek, Latin and Hebrew literature, that he could recite the poetry of Homer and Nicander for an hour without pause, that he understood philosophy and could conduct reasoned discourse on the nature of thought and had been known to hold forth at length on the differing philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Epicurus, as if he had known each one personally.

He didn’t stammer, either; that came only when he was afraid. In Hannah’s presence, he was fluent and engaging and therein lay the heart of her conflict.

She loved Ajax; six months in his daily company had made that certain. She loved him for his courage, for his wisdom, for the scars on his back and the history she might never know. She loved the tone of his voice and his wildness, the sense of danger in his presence that left her so very safe. She loved his cautious, overwhelming care of Math, and his honouring of the oaths that bound him. She loved his eyes and the curve of his mouth. She loved his scent, after the end of a day’s riding.

But Saulos… Too often, the face that held her mind when she lay down to sleep was Saulos’. Too often, the voice that continued unbroken the discussions of the day was Saulos’, engaging her in conversation as if she were an equal, setting him far apart from the Greek-schooled sophists of Hannah’s acquaintance, all of whom treated women like cattle.

Unexpectedly, she remembered her mother, who had taught her of Pythagoras, who, almost uniquely amongst the philosophers of old, had schooled women alongside men. Blinking fiercely, she reached for the bag of linen, knives and salves and the nested copper pots that were her constant company.

‘I make you unhappy?’ Saulos asked.

Hannah shook her head. ‘I was thinking of my mother,’ she said. ‘She instructed me in the treatment of festering wounds.’

She spoke Greek with him, where Ajax and Math still spoke Gaulish. It felt fresh and sharp on her tongue, the language of poets and medicine. She said, ‘You wish me to change your dressing?’

‘I’m afraid I do. It’s the heat, I think. The wound festers more in summer than in winter, and here more than in Gaul. In the past day, it has become exceptionally fluid. I wouldn’t bother you otherwise.’

He leaned forward, resting his arms on the trestle in front of him, that she might see for herself. Unlike the drivers, he wore a thin linen tunic which meant that when flies came to investigate his wound, they settled on the fine weave and left spots behind. Hannah noted the speckled dirt of their passing just before a chance shift in the breeze brought her the smell. Saulos saw her wrinkle her nose.

‘I’m sorry.’ His hands spoke it better.

‘Should a patient apologize to his physician for needing care? I don’t think so.’

Hannah busied herself with the routine of preparations, the same each time so that she might not forget anything; first the linen strips laid out, and then the cotton dressings. Near to them, the salves in their order, and beyond them the nest of five hand-beaten copper pots that held each half the volume of the one above, down to the smallest that held a mouthful and was only for the very sweet or very bitter drenches. Last were the knives, forceps and the lead vessel topped with wax that held her scouring paste for the debridement of wounds.

No man ever liked to watch her lay out cold iron. Saulos sat in profile, looking past her to where Ajax had walked on to the track and was explaining to Math exactly why he should not have tried to show off earlier. Ajax was not speaking especially loudly, but his voice carried from one side of the compound to the other and every other apprentice boy heard it.

Math was scarlet; every part of him burned with shame. Hannah winced inside. On the far side of the table, Saulos pinched the bridge of his nose and clicked his tongue. ‘Math should ride a race soon,’ he said conversationally. ‘He’ll only learn properly if he’s put under pressure.’

‘We were just speaking of that,’ Hannah said. ‘Ajax pointed out that the only race coming up is the trial to see who will go to Rome. Too much hinges on it and, in any case, Math’s not ready.’

‘With respect,’ Saulos said, ‘I think he’s as ready as he’s ever going to be. He won’t improve without the added pressure. That boy is brilliant but lazy. He learns best when he must. What more could he ask for than a trial to prove himself?’

Hannah blew out her cheeks. ‘He’s not good enough yet,’ she said, and in the saying, knew it was true. ‘He was brought up riding horses, not driving them. It’s a different skill.’

‘But one he’s desperate to acquire. The need shines from him throughout the day. Only by being given the chance will he begin to learn what he needs. You wish me to remove my tunic?’

‘If you would.’

With a self-conscious modesty that only a Hebrew could achieve, Saulos turned fully away, stripped off his belt and pulled his tunic over his head, and with that she had to tear her mind away from Math and Ajax and turn it instead to her profession.

The bandage that encircled Saulos’ chest and reached over his right shoulder was soiled with only the usual dust and sweat, except at the place where the ulcer had oozed its foulness on to it. There, it was evilly crusted and glued to his body.

With clinical care, Hannah cut the linen, letting fall those parts that could do so. The skin beneath was the pale white of a Gaulish winter, untouched by the Alexandrian sun. The ulcer lay just medial to his scapula, and was a circular hand’s breadth in diameter. Here, in spite of the grease and ointments she had applied not five days before, and the lace of thin cotton gauze after, the dressing stuck firmly to the wound and surrounding skin.

She held her breath as she eased the stiff, foul cloth inwards from its margins. Saulos gasped, tightly. The excess flesh of his belly quivered and rolled. For both their sakes, she tugged the last bit sharply away.

‘Done.’

‘Thank you.’ His voice was a thread, whispering.

He had been right about the wound’s new fecundity. Damp humours, ripe and yellow as custard, covered its surface, with the wound edges palely friable beneath. The smell was of old death and liquefaction, sweetly rotting. Breathing only through her mouth against the stench, Hannah dropped the fetid bandage to the floor. An avalanche of flies fell on it, feasting.

She kicked the mess away and began to clean the wound, examining the ripe flesh at the edges and the bed of healing tissue beneath. A slave had brought warm water without her asking; after a winter in which she had cared for them as if they were freeborn, the slaves watched her as if she were the empress, whose will must be anticipated at every step. She reached for her gauze and began to swab at the edges.

‘It’s deeper and more extensive than it was,’ she said, when she had cleaned it fully, ‘but it hasn’t begun to under-run the skin again as it had done in Gaul.’

Saulos grimaced. ‘Forty lashes less one. You’d think that by now I had paid enough.’

Hannah raised a brow. She had been treating him for over six months and not once in all that time had he admitted that the wound was the result of an unhealed flogging. Now, she thought she heard regret in his voice, or shame.

Carefully, she said, ‘Ajax has been flogged. The scars are clear on his back. It didn’t make him a lesser man.’

He had no time to say he was less than Ajax, or that his flogging was for a lesser offence — both of which would have been his style — because by then she was applying the scouring paste and Saulos couldn’t have answered even if he had wanted to. He folded his forearms on the trestle ahead of him and leaned his brow on them, blanching the skin with the pressure. Over the space of the next while, the sweat grew slick at his temples and his fingers pressed on to the boards until they took on the same colour as the pale, sunned wood.

Hannah dropped the fouled spatula into a bucket of sand and used another the same to scrape the paste off, bringing with it the dead and dying matter of his wound. Slaves took the foul ones away and burned them.

When she had a bed of clean tissue, only bleeding a little, she layered on a fresh mix of honey wax and goose-grease as the base and set the herbs in it before she laid on the gauze and then wound the bandages.

At the end, as she knotted the bandage under his shoulder, Saulos lifted his head from his arms and asked, thinly, ‘Will it get worse?’

‘Yes, but you knew that. The heat has made the wound weep far more than it has done before now. To my shame, I haven’t healed you yet. I am a disgrace to my profession and my tutors.’

‘You are neither of those.’ Saulos pressed his hands to his face. ‘You’ve done your best, which is all anyone, god or man, can ask of you.’ He lifted his arm experimentally. ‘It feels better. It always does when you do it. My thanks.’

He drew on his tunic, sparing her the need to reply. The sun lit them both, angling in past the date palms that hedged the southern wall of the compound and the row of hay forks carefully lined along it.

Hannah took another bucket of sand and began to scour out the copper pots. It offended the slaves that she cleaned them herself, but she had always done so and saw no reason to change.

‘I’ve applied the yarrow and oil of almond as before,’ she said. ‘If you can find oil of spikenard, made from the crushed roots dug under a waxing moon, I think it might be better proof against the heat.’

‘Spikenard ensures sexual fidelity, does it not?’ Saulos’ glance flicked to her face and away. He was making fun of her, clumsily, as if he wasn’t sure how it was done.

‘It may do, I don’t know.’ Hannah washed her hands briskly in a fresh basin of warm water. The slaves carried the soiled bandage to a fire on the edge of the compound, where the smell would not infest the cooking. ‘If the spikenard is combined with a soured butter boiled with fennel, it may aid the closing of long-open wounds. You have Akakios’ trust — you can leave the compound any time you choose. If you were to go to the market, you might find someone to make you the ointment. Or at the very least find the base ingredients and bring them here for me to do it.’

‘After which, whether my wound heals or not, I will smell fit to send the dogs fleeing with their tails curled under their bellies.’ Saulos grinned. His hands opened a path in the air. ‘As you say, I have Akakios’ permission to leave the compound when I choose. I have also permission to take with me whomever I wish, as long as I provide surety for their behaviour and their safe return. Perhaps you might join me in visiting the city?’

If Hannah had one wish, it was to leave the compound and walk freely through Alexandria for an afternoon, to see how it had changed in the years since she had last been there, perhaps to call on old friends. But there were reasons why she had not yet asked Akakios for permission.

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but I need to be on hand while the teams train. If someone’s hurt, the compound has no other physician.’

‘Hannah, I think you forget that there was no physician in the compound before you came and they managed well enough. Poros of the Blues is skilled in basic physic and I have no doubt Ajax would prove competent in your absence. Math, of course, is prone to taking risks. But if we were to take him with us…?’

Saulos caught sight of Hannah’s face. Laughter danced in his eyes as his so-expressive hands opened a door and ushered her through. ‘So that’s settled. All you have to do is get Ajax to agree and we can leave as soon as Math can be spared from his duties.’

In the rising heat of the day, Sebastos Abdes Pantera walked fast along the Avenue of the Sphinx.

He wore a slave’s cheap long-sleeved tunic tied with hemp rope, frayed at both ends. He went barefoot, wearing neither sandals nor any ornament, and if he was armed, none of the passing merchants, fish-sellers, rope-makers, water-carriers, charcoal-makers, merchants, artisans, slaves or prostitutes of both genders saw it.

The Avenue of the Sphinx was one of the linear pulsing arteries of Alexandria. It stretched from the waterfront past the gold-roofed, white-walled palaces and on to the less gilded, better protected barracks of the legions permanently stationed in this, the gateway to Rome’s granary.

From these, it passed the houses of the tax collectors and the well-connected merchants with their gilded rooftops and saffron-painted shutters, and cut straight through the tentacled cobweb of the Hebrew quarter where the rich mixed with the less rich and no house was truly poor, to the slums, where a man’s god was as nothing compared to his ability to scrape a meal from the stinking gutter and defend it against all comers.

Somewhere near the indistinct boundary between these two last, on the Street of the Lame Lion, which ran at right angles to the Avenue of the Sphinx, the inn of the Black Chrysanthemum lay squeezed between a fishmonger and a tannery, in the forecourt of which a dozen clay pots of fermented human urine and dog faeces gave off a fog of unspeakable odour.

For six months Pantera had been engaged in careful idleness. He had gone sightseeing at the lighthouse, and visited the museum and the library, where a man versed in Greek and clothed in calfskin, tissue-of-gold and silk might yet converse with some of the sharpest minds of the age.

Changed into lesser clothing, he had drunk in taverns, caroused — sober — through whorehouses and haggled at the market. All of which, piecemeal, had yielded the location of the Black Chrysanthemum and, a long time later, the name and details of a particular alchemist-astrologer with white hair and ink stains on his fingers who ate and drank there.

Pantera’s past nine days had been devoted predominantly to watching the inn’s two entrances; the one on the street, and the lesser-used, more circumspect one that led out into the courtyard behind. In so doing, he had identified and then followed the astrologer to a house in a narrower, marginally less grim alleyway abutting the Street of the Lame Lion some distance down from the inn. The fact that this house had a rear door and that the tiny alley on to which it opened led directly through a particularly narrow passage to the inn was a useful feature that he had only recently discovered.

The inn was open, as it always was, but business was never brisk in the forenoon. In any case, the carrying of one of the foul tanner’s pots was sufficient to render any man invisible, slave or not, with the added advantage of a boundary at least ten feet in diameter within which no one sane dared step.

Knowing this, Pantera stooped to collect a black-lidded pot from the place he had left it the night before. The body was bulbous, flaring out to the base with a subtle inward curve that allowed it to sit on his shoulder without undue discomfort. It did not contain either men’s urine or fermenting dog excrement, but fluid slopped in it audibly and nobody came near enough to discover how bad it might smell.

Thus burdened, he adjusted his route more to the edge of the road as he continued on down past the inn of the Black Chrysanthemum, with its surprisingly smart red-tiled roof and the thousand-petalled flowers done in charcoal on the side boards, into the narrowing street where slaves and freemen mingled with little to distinguish them but that the former were, on the whole, better fed than the latter.

A gaunt prostitute standing in a doorway shouted an offer of exact anatomical precision. She was dressed in loose black, to hide her shape. Her lips had been painted with honey glaze and red dye, but not recently, and she wore bangles of copper about her bird-thin wrists and more at her ankles. She looked Hebrew, which set her apart from the bulk of her sisters who were Greek, or Egyptian, or, more rarely, black-skinned Nubians, who commanded a premium for their colour. She called to Pantera again, disparaging his manhood.

Grunting, red-faced, he gestured obscenely back, informing her in the local Greek patois that he was a slave with no money. He added a curse inventive in its ugliness.

Ten paces on, he hefted the pot down from his shoulder and set it on the ground near the whore before turning right, into the dark of an alley the sun had long ago abandoned all efforts to reach.

From the dark, he watched the woman retrieve the bronze coin he had left her beneath the pot. Some brief time later, he saw her take as a client a round-faced man wearing the short tunic and belted trews of a ship-hand, who turned her face to the wall and accepted her offer in all its exactitude.

Her new client was not a stranger to the street, but drank each night at the Black Chrysanthemum where he shouted tales of seafaring and piracy, all saved by the wonder of the lighthouse. Pantera had watched as, drunk and friendly, he had swayed with his companions from the tavern in the small hours of the night. Only when he had parted from them, never quite going where they went, did he become miraculously sober and return to the pleasanter surround of the legions’ barracks. There, he exchanged his sailor’s trousers for a tunic of quality linen and changed the nature of his dialect from that of a dockhand to the equally rough, but distinctly different patois of a legionary.

For five days, this particular individual had followed Pantera, and Pantera had gone about his business as if he had not seen him. Now, as the man released the whore without payment, looked left and right, belted his trews and stepped silently into the blackness of the minor alley, Pantera flicked out the edge of his palm much as he had trained Math to do in their nights together, aiming at throat height. The impact hurt, satisfyingly.

It hurt the man he had hit far more. Pantera caught the front of the sailor’s smock and twisted it tight on his neck, choking him. ‘I will say a name,’ he said, softly. ‘You will answer with a nod if you know it.’

The choking increased. The man flailed his feet, battering at his assailant’s calves. As he had done with Math, but with considerably more force, Pantera kicked his heels from under him and drove him into the ground. Bones shattered under the impact. The choking became an abortive attempt to shout.

Pulling the head into the crook of his arm, Pantera brought his mouth close to one cauliflower ear. ‘Akakios of Rhodes,’ he said.

The head jerked once.

‘Thank you.’

Pantera moved his elbow up and up and used his free hand to make the twist until he felt the vertebrae of the man’s neck begin to grind against each other. A final abrupt movement brought a short, hard snap. The ship-hand who had never manned a ship jerked once and fell still. Pantera lowered his body to the ground. It smelled suddenly of urine, and the first ripeness of faeces.

‘And me?’ asked a harsh voice made soft. ‘I told him where you had gone.’ The prostitute stood in the alley’s mouth, her face scarved by the shadows.

‘But first you told me that the man I seek is at home, for which I am grateful.’ Pantera opened his purse, and pulled from the hank of soft wool he kept therein — cheese became rancid too soon in this weather — a copper coin. She caught it without turning her head.

‘I don’t kill women unless they threaten me. Will you do so? Or your unborn child?’

He heard her hesitation. She was, he thought, pregnant by no more than four months and had believed her clothing covered it. ‘No.’

‘Then go. If someone asks what happened, tell them what you have seen. If nobody asks, I would advise you not to volunteer. Our late friend’s employers don’t stop at taking favours without payment.’

‘I saw a man kill another man,’ she said, turning away. ‘He paid me when he could have killed me. I will tell no one unless they ask.’

He reached for her wrist and held it. The bones were sharp. ‘My name is Abdes Pantera. I seek a man named Ptolemy Asul. If they ask, tell them I told you to say it.’

‘Such names would buy my life?’

‘One of them may do. I don’t know which one.’

The sun scooped her up and returned her to the doorway. Pantera waited in the dark for long enough to be sure no one else followed, then walked on, away from the light.

A door of iron-bound oak blocked the end of the alleyway, its very thickness setting it apart from the others in the Street of the Lame Lion.

Pantera stared at it, then slid a knife from his left forearm, and, holding the blade between thumb and fingers, rapped the hilt five times on the door in an offset rhythm. He heard light feet on the far side and sheathed the knife, stepping back out of sword’s reach.

What came was not a sword, but fire: a pitch-soaked torch, thrust out at chest height. Pantera stepped in, ducking under the flame, and came up hard, grabbing the wrist that held the torch and slamming it back against the door jamb so that the brand spun loose. His other hand brought his knife up to eye height.

Flames flared across the alley’s floor, stuttered and died. In the subsequent dark, two white-rimmed eyes gazed at him without fear. The hand he held did not move, either to pull away or to fight. He caught a faint scent of wild flowers, bright as spring.

He drew the knife back, ready to use it. ‘I thought you did not kill women?’ a woman’s voice said, lightly.

‘Stop this nonsense, both of you!’ That was a man, aged, but clear as struck bronze. ‘Pantera, if you are he, you would be made more welcome if you came to the front door and announced yourself properly.’

‘To whom should I make my address?’ Pantera did not relax his grip on the woman’s hand, or lower the knife. ‘An agent of Akakios?’

‘Hardly.’

The man spoke Greek with an accent too subtle to place. It sounded, in fact, exactly as Seneca had sounded at the height of his power, when the fate of the empire was his to command.

A single candle was lifted and brought forward down a dimly ambered corridor. By its light, Pantera saw a balding head fringed with white hair and, beneath, a long, lean face. He could not yet see the woman whose wrist he still held, but could only feel her breath stir the hairs on his cheek and the slow, steady lift of her breast against his arm. She had no fear of him, which was as unsettling as it was surprising. He thought she laughed at him, but could not be sure.

From the corridor, the dry Greek voice said, ‘If you will consent to follow her, Hypatia will lead you to an inner room, better hidden from prying eyes. There, you may make your address in the proper form to the man you seek. You are searching for Ptolemy Asul, are you not? I am he.’