Rome: The Emperor's spy

Prologue

Jerusalem in the Reign of the Emperor Tiberius

Sebastos Abdes Pantera was twelve years old and nearly a man on the night he discovered that his father was a traitor.

It was spring, the bright time of flowers, and Passover, the time of celebration, sacrifice and riots. Every year, teams of priests worked without cease from sunrise to sunset, cutting the throats of countless thousands of lambs in the temple.

Every year, the multitudes of the faithful gathered to eat those lambs in memory of the angel of death who passed over their houses, striking down the firstborn of Egypt.

Every year, the Roman prefect cancelled all leave amongst his legions and set guards about the hot, dry city, packed to capacity with the hot, dry pride of a conquered people.

Through the nights of unleavened bread, conquerors and conquered waited alike for a spark bright enough to light the ultimate, uncontainable riot that would see the legions let loose and the streets run rivers of blood. It had not happened yet.

In a private garden beyond the city gates, the sounds of celebration were the muffled roar of a storm not yet broken. The air was heavy with the scent of almond blossom, lilies, crushed camphire and blood. A hot wind rent the trees, raining petals to the earth. It did not move the sullen clouds that marred the sky.

Crouching alone in the dark beneath the nut trees, Sebastos heard the approach and retreat of a watch-guard’s feet. He shut out all other noises, and made himself listen only to the soft clash of leather and metal on the path.

Before the second circuit, he knew that the nails of the guard’s right sandal had worn thin on the inside heel, and knew thereby that it was his father, best of all men, who strode alone in the leaden dark.

Julius Tiberius Abdes Pantera, decurion of the first wing of the first company of archers stationed in Judaea under the direct command of the prefect, may have got his son as a bastard on a Gaulish slave-woman, but none the less, Sebastos knew himself to be the child of a true soldier.

Since the day he could first walk, his father had taught him the secrets of the archer’s craft and had instilled with it, as the food and drink of his son’s young life, the twin bedrocks by which a soldier measured his own worth.

First of these was his absolute loyalty to his commander: a true legionary obeyed every order immediately and without question. Second, stemming from the first, was the unblemished virtue of his own honour which required that he always bring respect and dignity to his position.

Honour was everything. Sebastos lived to seem honourable in his father’s eyes and by now he knew how to do that. As he had been taught, he made himself explore his surroundings with his fingertips, discovering by touch the nature and size of any obstacles that might hinder or help his progress. In doing so, he kept his mind well away from the terrifying cloud above his head. All night, it had smothered the moon and stars and seemed likely at any moment to fall and smother him.

He had mentioned the cloud to his father in the afternoon, before the summons came to guard the tomb. In day’s safe light, his father had ruffled his hair and laughed and said that only a true Gaul feared the sky would fall on his head.

There had been a tremor in his voice and Sebastos had hoped that it grew from pride that the only son of an Alexandrian archer should take so truly after the barbarian tribes of his mother’s people, rather than from shame for that same thing.

Later, lying alone in the dark, yearning for the cloud to leave, Sebastos had realized that it had nothing to do with pride, and everything to do with grief — that his father still mourned his mother and Sebastos hadn’t thought to comfort him.

What kind of boy forgets the source of his father’s pain? Shame at his own stupidity had goaded him from his bed and up the hill, skirting the walls of the city to reach the gated garden on the slope with its many scented flowers and the trail of blood leading up to the tomb. Here, where his father marched alone, he had a chance to undo his mistake.

A thistle grew sharp behind Sebastos’ left foot. An ageing pomegranate guarded his right shoulder. To his left, a bed of kitchen herbs spiced the hot air. Beyond that, the path curved snake-like up the hill. Clouds loomed over, threateningly full.

His father reached the first row of almonds. The sound of his tread paused a moment, before beginning the march back up the slope. The watch-fire’s red glow caught him as he turned, casting his outline in proud silhouette.

Sebastos grinned. A fierce joy lifted the threat of the falling sky. Swift as the great spotted cat for which he was named, he slid out from under the almonds and ran through the dark towards his father.

‘Pantera?’

Sebastos cannoned to a halt, balanced on one foot. The call came from his left, down the path, less than a bow’s shot away. The voice was a woman’s, like his mother’s, but lacking her Gaulish accent.

Sebastos’ left hand found a wall of cool rock to lean on. He stood in the darkest of the dark and held his breath. His father, too, had stopped, but — unaccountably — did not challenge the incomer. Instead, he raised his fingers to his lips and gave a short, low whistle.

No answering call came back. Instead, from lower down the path, a whispering flame danced closer, and stronger, until it lit the woman and two men who brought it.

‘Julius. Thank you.’

The woman who stepped forward was his mother’s age, but under the kind blaze of the torch her face was smooth, her cheeks were clear, and her eyes were bright. Sebastos thought she had been weeping, and was close to it again.

His father was not weeping. His face had softened in a way the boy had not seen in six months.

‘Mariamne.’

Stepping into the puddle of light, Pantera spoke the tenderest, dearest form of the name, which a man might use only for his wife, or his daughter, or his sister. He raised a hand as if to touch the woman’s face and then dropped it again, his eyes wide with unspoken care.

The man holding the torch moved forward. Its light spilled out beyond the confines of the woman’s face and Sebastos saw that she was pregnant. The signs were not obvious yet; she was no more than three months gone. Only a boy trained from infancy to study every detail of those about him would have seen it.

His father knew, that much was clear. He had stepped back, making a sign that she should precede him up the path.

She hesitated, as if afraid to move on. ‘Is he still alive?’ Her voice was rich and light as a temple chime. The torch set the almond blossom dancing. Moths cast giant, floating shadows into the night.

His father bowed, as he might have done to his commander in the barracks. ‘My lady, he was when we brought him here.’

‘You have water and linen?’

‘Everything you asked for is here.’

‘Lead us, then,’ said the woman, and Sebastos pressed himself deeper into the dark and watched as his father abandoned twenty years of obedience to his commander and to Rome, and led a woman of the Hebrews and her two companions up the garden to the tomb he was supposed to be guarding.

Men were crucified for less. A dozen had been, through the long day. The body of one of them lay in a tomb cut into the rock at the garden’s end.

In a line, the incomers passed Sebastos, so that he saw them, one after the other. The two men walking behind the woman were as different one from the other as lily from desert thorn. The elder was a grey-haired rabbi, marked by the quality and style of his linen robes. He bore himself with an authority that was undercut by fear. He, at least, knew exactly what he risked.

The younger was hewn from rougher rock. The eagle’s crag nose and the long, uncut hair said that he hailed from Galilee, where the rule of Rome did not reach, where men thought themselves more righteous than their neighbours in Judaea, who lived in thrall to an emperor who called himself god.

If his hair showed where this man was born, the style of his tunic and the knotted leather labelled him beyond doubt as a zealot of the Sicarioi, the Hebrew assassins named for the curved razor-knives with which they slew the unbelievers and traitors, serving with a fierce fanaticism the word of their master.

True to his calling, the Sicari had killed once already that night; his curved knife was wet with new blood. He padded past, more silent than any leopard, and of the group, he alone knew no fear. His eyes searched the dark, and the light of their look fell on Sebastos so that they stared at one another face to face, or it seemed so.

Sebastos thought he might die then, pierced by that look, or the knife that must surely follow. He screwed up his courage to meet both with honour, but the restless gaze passed on without pause, as if it were normal to see a boy hiding in the dark on this night in this garden.

The small group was almost out of sight when Sebastos dared to breathe again, and slowly to inch his way up the slope behind them.

His night was changed beyond recognition. He had come because he feared the sky might fall on his head and it had done, so that his soul was crushed and the light snuffed out of his heart. His hope now lay in seeing his father set things to rights, as he had done so often in the past.

‘He’s alive. We will take him now. We owe you more than thanks.’

The woman stepped from the tomb’s dark to the light of the coming dawn. She gave her news to the Sicari zealot, to Sebastos’ father, to the garden, to the waking birds, to the world. Exhaustion and relief cracked the liquid bronze of her voice.

For a moment, nobody answered. They stood in the part-time between night and day. The cloud had lifted at last, leaving the final stars to blaze at the rising sun. The watch-fire was a crimson haze in the greys of almost-morning. By its light, the Sicari brought from the depths of his tunic a purse of poor hide, with the stitching frayed away at the seams. Silver spilled from it, easy as rain.

From his cramped, cold place of watching, Sebastos saw his father’s head snap round in shock. His hand dropped to his knife.

‘Do you think money bought him? Truly?’

His voice promised violence, for the cleansing of an insult. The Sicari looked as if he would happily oblige, but before either man could move the woman stepped forward, saying, ‘Shimon, that was not called for,’ and the man so named shrugged and stooped to gather his insult and when he rose again with the silver clenched in his fist, the moment for fighting had passed.

The woman ducked back into the tomb and returned moments later with the grey-haired rabbi. Between them, they carried a burden that was passed with infinite care through the low opening in the rock face.

The stench of blood was overpowering. Out of respect for his mother, Sebastos turned his face away. Other men took their sons to see the executions, believing fear was the best teacher and that only thus could they keep the hot blood of young men from frothing into open rebellion against the grinding-heel of Rome. When Sebastos’ father had prepared to do the same, his mother had stood in the doorway and forbidden it — the only time in his life Sebastos had seen her truly angry.

She was red-haired and taller than his father and while she might once have been his slave, she was free by then, and could speak her mind. At the height of the vicious row that followed, she spat a single word in a language Sebastos did not understand — a name, perhaps. It crashed through their hut like a living bull, leaving shock and silence in its wake.

White-faced, his father had turned on his heel and gone back to the barracks and not returned for nearly a month.

He had not taken his son to the place of execution then or later, but he had made sure Sebastos knew precisely the death inflicted on men who were caught in insurrection against the rule of Rome, the indignity of it, and the appalling duration that could span as much as three days of increasing, unremitting agony.

‘If they like you, they’ll break your legs,’ he had said. ‘Death comes more swiftly, but the pain before is greater.’ Worst, obviously, was the loss of honour, so much worse than a death in battle.

At the end, in case his son might not believe such a thing could happen to him, Sebastos’ father had filled the rest of that evening by reciting aloud the names of the five hundred young Hebrew men who had each been nailed to a cross on a single day after the fall of Sepphoris to the rebel leader known as the Galilean, and his army of zealots.

Whatever his intention, the father had succeeded in terrifying his son. Every night for the two years since that blood-stained evening, Sebastos had woken in the grey early morning sweating for terror of a threat that was as great as his fear of the falling sky.

But his father had failed in so far as Sebastos had not at any time, then or later, ceased to regard the Galilean as his hero, however many young men he might have led to their deaths.

The Galilean was everyone’s hero, even if he was the enemy. His growing band of followers drew young men from all quarters of the divided Judaea, uniting them in hatred of Rome and its rule. Sebastos might have considered himself loyal to the emperor, might have held in his heart the dream of Roman citizenship as the ultimate prize, but that did not stop him from idolizing a man who, by force of character, courage and arms, had stayed one step ahead of the legions for nearly four decades.

At a time when the Sadducee high priests kept themselves fat on the prefect’s leavings and counselled the proper paying of taxes, the Galilean and his hand-picked groups of Sicari zealots stole the taxes from the Herodian collectors and sent them back whence they came. Like every boy he knew, Sebastos burned to be a hero one day, and the Galilean showed how it could be done, even if he had set his sword against the might of Rome, and was thus destined to failure.

Over the years when mothers used the name to frighten their children into good behaviour, the Galilean had grown in Sebastos’ estimation to be a Hercules: courageous, astute and honourable, an indefatigable defender of the poor. Until that morning, when the hero had suffered exactly the death Sebastos’ father had so vividly described.

Sebastos was one of the few not to have seen it. As far as he was concerned, he remained under oath to his mother not to view a death by crucifixion unless it were his own, and he did not break his promise to her now, for the Galilean was not dead when the woman and the Pharisee brought him out of the tomb.

That might have been surprising, except that he had not hung for three days as he should have done, but had been cut down on the prefect’s orders at the eleventh hour, just before dusk, that his corpse might not profane the Passover Sabbath that began at sunset. In a city so prone to riots, it was a necessary precaution.

Sebastos’ father had said aloud at the time that he must have been very sick to have died so quickly, but it was a mercy, and he did not begrudge any man a swift death. That had been a lie to add to betrayal; Sebastos’ father had told the woman that he knew the Galilean was alive when they moved him to the tomb.

What kind of man tells lies to his own son?

Cold rage opened Sebastos’ eyes as the small cavalcade brought the not-dead man past his hiding place. He saw clearly the bandaged flesh, the ruined skin, the gaunt, unshaven face and the sunken eyes set deep within it, still clinging to their spark of life.

The Sicari assassin came last of the line, guarding the rear. He did not turn his head, or pause, or give any other sign that he knew they were not alone.

Even so, as he passed Sebastos’ hiding place, he stooped to pick up a pebble. Without turning his head, he tossed it high in the air. It bounced precisely on the crown of Sebastos’ head.

It took all morning to leave the garden, so slowly did Sebastos move. No man saw him, not even his father, who had trained him to see all things that live, however careful they might be. He was better than his father; he was not sullied by the taint of falsehood and treachery.

Slowness gave him the peace to settle his unsettled heart, and to think. By the time he reached the hut, he had come to a decision. He was twelve years old, and had already made his first kill. He was not as tall as his mother had been; he did not take directly after the great Gaulish warriors who slew Romans in battle with their bare hands, but he was taller than most of his contemporaries, and could pass for a boy at least three years older. He was rich after a fashion; he owned the clothes he stood up in and a new belt he had not yet used, and a worn calfskin pouch that his mother had left him, containing three silver denarii that carried the head of the Emperor Tiberius. He debated taking his bow. There was no doubt that he could steal more food than he could ever shoot, but it mattered that when he presented himself to ask for employment, he should be armed, and so he lifted his bow from its hook, and his hunting knife and his six arrows, three of them fully fletched.

Taking these things — his youth, his height, his training as an almost-archer, and his riches of silver and weapons — he left the house of his treacherous father and set his face to Alexandria where he had once lived.

He had been happy there, but that was not the reason to return. Alexandria was where he had met the pallid Roman philosopher with connections to the emperor.

For two years, the man had come to watch Sebastos often as he practised with his bow, or spun his knife at distant targets. He had seen him fight — and sometimes beat — the other bastard get of soldiers who foraged in the scrap-camp that followed the legions. He had observed Sebastos’ solitary nature, his unwillingness to curry favour with those who scorned him, or feared him, or even the few who admired him. Most, the philosopher had seen that his own watching was noticed, and then that he himself was watched in his turn.

It had become an unspoken game between them; the philosopher would go about his business, always watchful, and Sebastos would try covertly to follow him.

Later, when the boy could go a whole day and know all of the philosopher’s business and never be spotted once, the man made the game official, and paid him in bronze, or bread, or fletchings, if he could follow a distant man, pointed out in a crowded place, and report on his activities.

Over three more years, the tests had become ever harder, ever more dangerous. Sebastos had excelled at all of them, and grown in his understanding of himself; shadows were his allies, secrecy his life’s blood, and the philosopher was a teacher in the truest sense of the word. When his father had been posted to Judaea and the child had been forced to follow, Sebastos found he had lost his first friend without ever having known he had one.

It had been a tearful farewell for both of them. At the last moment of parting, the philosopher had caught Sebastos’ chin and tilted his head and promised that if ever a tall, comely boy with skill in knife and bow wanted truly to be a warrior for Rome, he could promise him a wage and a place to live, and perhaps, if he made himself useful, citizenship.

Citizenship: the ultimate prize. Sebastos held the name of his potential sponsor in his heart all the long, dusty journey to Alexandria: Lucius Anaeus Seneca, teacher to a lost mongrel child.