Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Twenty-Three

Math spat, to clear his mouth of the sick. Hannah had asked him not to look as they passed the baker, but it was too late; he had already seen. The image of a man he had known, skinless, pegged out on the sand with his mouth full of flies and his muscles laid bare to the feasting vultures was printed on the back of his eyes so that he thought he might never see anything else.

At least it washed away the humiliation of Ajax’s fury. Math should have known, of course, that tipping the chariot on two wheels risked destroying not only the rig, but his horses’ legs with it; he should have known that it was necessary to bring the colts into matching stride on the long straight, and that, by failing to do so, he had put an inexcusable amount of pressure on Bronze, who had to hold the inside of a badly executed corner. Most, he should have known that nothing he could do would impress Ajax or make him any more likely to let him ride the racing rig before he was ready.

He had known that. He had just thought… he wasn’t sure what he had thought and whatever it might have been was washed away in the tidal wave of Ajax’s rage so that Saulos’ offer of a day outside in the city had been a gift straight from the gods.

Until he saw the baker, Math’s day had been almost made right again. Striving to set it back on course, he applied himself to spying, at which he was at least good enough to pass in the way Hannah wanted.

Pantera’s voice echoed in his mind’s ear.

Hide when you can; it’s always better not to be seen. But most of the time you can’t hide, and that’s when you need to know the spectrum of all that you could be and then choose one identity out of all the others and be it, in every part of your heart and mind and soul.

Of all the possibilities open to him, from apprentice driver to thief to whore, Math felt most comfortable in a wide-eyed curiosity that applied equally to any of these. It was a mask he had worn so often on Coriallum’s docks that he could don it now without effort.

And so, as they emerged again into the sun, and the noisy, cheerful chaos of the Hebrew quarter, he held fast to Hannah’s hand and sauntered at her side, staring at everything as if it were new, which it was.

He stared at the men in their multicoloured robes, at the women with dark skins and hidden hair, at the small signs of wealth displayed increasingly about the houses as they walked ever closer to the city centre; at the painted window shutters that took over from those simply carved, and the iron door fittings that replaced the leathern hinges and became in their turn gaudily gilded. He revelled in the feel of paved streets underfoot and breathed in the scents of spices he had never encountered in Coriallum or even in the compound.

Hannah was his mother in look and deed. She laughed and scolded and joined him in looking at the curiosities. To his delight, on this day of delights — he wasn’t forgetting the baker, only walling him off in a part of his mind that he didn’t have to look at — she, too, was good at being other than she was. She walked taller and smiled broadly at people she could not possibly know.

Smiling back, they did indeed take her to be Saulos’ wife and Math’s mother, and it seemed to him that she didn’t resent it, but rather gloried in the deception.

Saulos did not walk tall. Math wasn’t sure what he made of Saulos. Ajax loathed him, and Ajax was Math’s touchstone for almost everything, but Hannah seemed to like him, or at least to value his conversation, and now, it seemed, Saulos had a natural talent for deception.

With something close to awe, Math watched how, without altering his dress or his ornament — he had none — without so much as running a hand through his mouse-brown hair, Saulos became a shame-ridden cuckold, almost invisible beside his golden-haired son and radiant wife. Passing Hebrew men eyed him with pity, seeing one of their kind providing for a child so clearly not his own.

The houses became richer than any they had seen and the street broader, paved with granite and marble. Ahead, the road broadened, coming to a bridge over the Canopic Canal. A donkey cart piled high with bushels of onions and string upon string of garlic blocked the way on to it.

They were at the limits of the Hebrew quarter. With interest, Math watched to see if Saulos might abandon his guise and revert to the man of letters he was with Hannah, or the stuttering leatherworker who serviced the Green team’s harness, either of whom could plausibly have ordered the donkey’s youthful driver out of the way.

He did neither. Seeing the cart, Saulos sighed and ducked his head and turned right, and, still weighed down by the iniquities of his life, led his dissolute family upstream along the canalside to a second, unblocked bridge, and over it, towards the harbour.

‘Hannah, look!’ Math tugged at her arm, pulling her to the edge of the bridge to look over. Boats were below, laden with goods. He flagged his free hand, chattering, pointing out the colours and the goods as if he were perhaps a tall boy of six, not a small apprentice driver aged ten.

It was not hard to feign enthusiasm; Math had never seen the like. In Coriallum, bridges had been small things, often of wood, and the rivers beneath had not held boats. Here, within spitting distance of Alexandria’s royal quarter, the bridge was a wonder of engineering, with marble and granite facings and images of the gods worked within. It was wide enough for two donkey carts and the pedestrians who might accompany them.

The water in the canal was clear and utterly blue. Small fish flashed in shoals, clouds driven by an unseen wind. River birds paddled, twinned by the water’s mirror.

Floating as if on air, small flat-bottomed boats painted gaily in golds, blues and greens and garlanded with flowers drew dates and figs, dried and fresh fish, baskets of marigolds and bundles of sweet hay for the feeding of cattle and donkeys up to the inland harbour that lay to their north, and thence to the bazaar.

On the canal’s far banks a bustle of boys called up, offering small baubles to Hannah. One of them shouted something at Math in a language he did not understand. It sounded like the groom-boys at the stables, though, who managed to combine an insult, a question and an offer all in one. He grinned and made a gesture that was at once a greeting and a deadly insult. They laughed and ran away. He thought about running after them and remembered that he was being a street urchin, but was not one.

Hannah had felt it. She squeezed his hand in hers. Still looking down at the water, she said, ‘Math?’

He looked up happily.

‘Will you promise that you won’t leave us while we’re here? If we lose you, Saulos will be punished for it. And they might not let me come out again.’

‘I promise,’ Math said effortlessly. Promises were easy.

‘On your father’s shade?’

That was harder. He had to think past all the acting to the sacred core that was his father’s memory. He saw brief panic cross Hannah’s face before he said, ‘On my father’s shade.’

Saulos was at the far end of the bridge. Behind him was the massive central bazaar of Alexandria, long and low and flat, ringed about by the raised and gilded roofs of the palaces and the blazing lighthouse to the north and the temples, museums and libraries to the west and south.

‘We should keep moving,’ he said. ‘We might lose our son to the market boys else.’

‘And you?’ Hannah asked. ‘Have I lost you or are you a man again?’

Saulos spread his palms, as merchants did at the end of a hard bargain.

‘I am what you see,’ he said. ‘What others see, I am also. A Hebrew amongst the Hebrews, a Greek amongst Greeks, a merchant in the marketplace and a harness-maker to the winning team in the compound.’

‘And with us?’ Hannah asked. ‘What are you when you’re with us?’

Saulos’ smile encompassed them both. ‘In the company of a woman physician and a boy thief, what could I be but a simple man, purchaser of spikenard and retriever of honest men’s purses? Shall we go?’

Hannah offered thanks to whatever gods of sand and sun might be listening as she and her small family left the bridge together and, still together, entered the bazaar with its confusion of colour and noise and scent, with its proliferation of merchants and travellers, each with a purse inadequately hidden.

She held Math firmly, and felt the pulses of his intent come and go as he thought about leaving her, and remembered his oath and stayed at her side as they walked down the aisles and alleyways, as they examined silks for the quality of their weave and colour, linens for use as bandages — Hannah bought some of those; they were better than anything the guards had brought her — ate melon slices and dates, watched a black-skinned woman juggling firebrands and knives near a fountain, and saw a man selling mule foals with great sores on their backs so that they had to wait while Hannah found and bought salves and instructed him in their use.

It was some time soon after that she realized she was walking alone, hedged on either side by a man and a boy whose attention was all outward, however much they might try to disguise it.

She noticed it in Saulos first. He offered observations, picked at fabrics and tasted honeyed almonds as if he might seriously be thinking of making a purchase, but there was a subtle change in the quality of his looking, in the way his gaze lingered on the shadows rather than the light, that set him apart from the average stall-stroller.

Math was still a boy thief. She had no doubt he would cut any purse that lent itself to the cutting, but behind that mask he, too, was sifting the cross-current breezes that joined the lake in the south to the sea in the north and the information they carried of the hiding places and the watching places that might one day be useful and the people who had already found them so.

Forging her way through a thinning crowd, Hannah inhaled deeply, with something approaching joy. In the sun-baked air, freshly picked coriander vied with olive and almond blossom, rose oil with citrus fruits, and yes, in the midst of it all, the scent she had half followed, the earthy musk of spikenard, oil of nard, most expensive of unguents, prized for the anointing of royalty and for incense to favour the gods. She turned again down a new aisle, following the thread of its aroma as fast as she was able.

Three paces in, a hand grasped her elbow. ‘Are we playing a game?’ Saulos was panting as if he’d run a race. She had not known she was moving so fast, nor that he was having such trouble keeping up.

‘We’re finding your spikenard,’ Hannah said, with grace. ‘For the wound on your back. And also, should you need it, for the assurance of sexual fidelity.’ She favoured him with her best smile. ‘Do you find you need it, here in the bazaar that feeds the world? You have money. You could buy whomsoever you desired with that.’

She was fishing, which was unfair. He eyed her with sudden seriousness. ‘Whom I desire is not for sale.’

She turned up the aisle of the animals, past a chicken-seller, with his white-grizzled birds hung up by the ankles, still alive, past a basket of snakes, rustling, past parrots and finches, jewel-bright in their cages, past calves and lambs that panted, drooling, in the heat.

Math was a butterfly resting on her palm, light and dry, neither dragging behind nor leading ahead, but not fully present.

‘Come on, there are nightingales in cages at the bottom of the aisle. If Saulos lets you buy one and we let it go and it flies in the right direction, Osiris will grant you a wish and Isis will give us our luck back.’

Tugging him with her, she half ran to the stall of the nightingale-vendor who, by a miracle, was still where she remembered him to have been when so much else had changed.

Saulos offered to give them the necessary silver coin although it transpired that Math had some of his own. Hannah knew for a fact that when they had left the compound he had had no money, but his liquid eyes did not offer her lies and she let him pay for, and then release, the small brown bird.

A small crowd formed about them; for such things, men and women always stopped, ready to divine their own luck from the flight path.

This bird circled three times in the direction of the sun before straightening briefly northwards across the tomb of Alexander, heading straight towards the lighthouse, then turned left and flew with perfect purpose west towards the towering white marble edifice of the Serapeum and its attendant libraries.

Three sets of eyes in particular watched it fly — and then did not, for after a moment’s attention given to the divining of its path, Hannah felt first Math’s and then Saulos’ attention waver.

Both turned their awareness to the same place, but she looked later than they, and couldn’t find a face she recognized in the loosely gathered crowd.

Math glanced up at her. His mouth framed the question his eyes had already asked. Hannah looked round one more time. She could think of no one who would make him break his oath but Pantera.

At her side, Saulos was shading his face with his hand, staring up at the sky. He wished her to believe he was still watching the nightingale, but he, too, was scouring the crowd. For reasons she could not precisely divine, Hannah gave a small squeeze and opened her hand as if she were releasing a sacred soul to the fates. Light as a feather, Math slid away from her and was swallowed by the mass of people.

Saulos didn’t see him go. A crease knifed his brow, as when he was disconcerted in some point of argument. Still apparently watching the nightingale, he said, ‘Is the spikenard essential? Might you humour me and follow the bird to the temple of Ptolemy’s manufactured god?’

‘I’m your physician. I follow where you lead.’

She had said it in jest, but he took it as an order and swept forward, scything a path through the crowd towards the Serapeum.

The crowds lessened as they turned down the Serapic Way. Columns and temples to smaller gods lined both sides of the broad granite avenue. Here the prayerful could deposit a coin in a machine not unlike the water clock in the compound, only this dispensed holy water instead of chimes; or, with a different machine and a different coin, the faithful could pose a question and be given the answer, provided it was either yes or no.

The Serapeum dwarfed them all, the vast, overwhelming temple built by Ptolemy Soter for the god he had made.

She had been here before, many times, but always, when she came so close, Hannah was breathless for a moment, dazzled by the sun’s glance on the perfectly cut white marble.

That was its purpose, of course; the engineers of old knew every angle of the sun’s inclination and used them to further the glory of their god, drawing worshippers and casual visitors alike from the blistering white of the exterior in and ever in to the great, blue-robed god inside, vaster than anything in Alexandria or beyond, stretching his fingertips from wall to distant wall, taller, more sumptuously dressed, more peaceful in his stance at the gateway between life and death than any other counterfeit of man she had ever seen or hoped to see.

He stood, they said, on progressive layers of gold and silver, bronze and glass, Nile-mud and pottery, so that he might intimately know all parts of his earth as they lay beneath his feet. Standing in the doorway with blazing white marble at either side and the majesty of his image in front of her, Hannah believed it.

‘There are seats at the margins, where the prayerful might sit,’ Saulos said, making her jump. ‘If I were to ask you and Math to sit on them for a moment while I undertake some private business, would you do so?’

Which was when, with all semblance of surprise, Hannah discovered that Math was no longer with them.