Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Twenty-Five

Hannah knew Pantera was nearby almost before he came through the door, certainly before he saw her. He was with Shimon, who dared to nod to her. She stood by a stall selling silver images of the god, weighing two as if deciding which to buy. When she looked up again, both men had gone.

She was searching the crowds for them when Saulos caught up with her. He thought she had been looking for him, and was briefly cheerful so that she had not the heart to tell him she hadn’t noticed he’d gone from her side.

‘I’m afraid I have to leave you for a while.’ He sketched a bow. ‘What I have to do shouldn’t take long, and then I’ll help you find Math, I promise.’

‘There’s no need for that,’ Hannah said. ‘Math won’t be far. We’ll go back to the marketplace and wait near the nightingale-seller until you come back. If it comes to the eighth hour and you haven’t returned, I’ll take Math back to the compound.’

‘Thank you.’ Unbidden, Saulos gripped her hand and then dropped it again. ‘Thank you. I will make it up to you one day.’

‘Go. This is my home. I’ll be safe here.’

She watched him weave his way through the crowds and then made her own, more circumspect route towards the exit, looking around haphazardly as if searching for a small boy thief who might have decided that he could put the god’s gold to better use if he liberated it from the supplicants.

‘Math?’ He was nowhere close, but she called anyway, pushing past the stall of silver idols and out on to the steps that led down to the Serapic Way.

After the temple’s shadow, the day was blindingly bright. She shaded her eyes with her palm and scanned the crowds. Even in the short time she had been in the temple, they had multiplied tenfold; she couldn’t have seen Saulos even if she wanted, but she did glimpse a shadow heading out towards the Temple of Apis, down the street on the left.

‘Excuse me. Excuse me, please. I’m so sorry, I’ve lost my son.’ She swept through the centre of a Syrian delegation, scattering men left and right. Those ahead had the sense to step aside, letting her through.

The temple itself was empty, or seemed so. She stepped into the dark, calling in a false whisper, ‘ Math! Whatever else you do, you can’t rob a god of his silver.’

The temple’s only room was too dark for her to see anything. She stood still.

‘That was well done,’ said a voice that was not the god’s.

To the dark, she said, ‘Math’s been teaching me.’

Her eyes were lost after the blazing day. Blindly, she turned to where she thought the voice had come from. ‘Have you found what you sought?’

‘Not yet,’ Pantera said, ‘but I have Shimon to help me. One of us will.’

He moved as he spoke. His voice came from three places at once. She remembered the sound of it from Gaul, rich as a river over stones, but dry, giving nothing away of heart or mind. It echoed in the small chamber.

She began to see things: the outline of the bull, solid in its overwhelming power; to its left, a closed door; at her side, the brass and bronze water-powered machine into which supplicants could slide a coin to find the answer to their question.

Still, she couldn’t see Pantera. ‘Math saw someone in the marketplace today,’ she said. ‘He left me to follow whoever it was. I assumed it must be you?’

She felt him smile in the dark. ‘I hope not, unless the pupil has already overtaken the master. I believe he was following Akakios. It is a thing he did for me with some success in Gaul.’

‘You set him to follow Akakios?’ Hannah slammed her balled fist on the side of the coin machine. ‘You’re as bad as Ajax! You must have known he’d try to get out of the compound to see you two meet this morning.’

She heard him pause, and think, and then, hesitantly, say, ‘Math’s good. He has the capacity to be very good. We either help him, or we leave him to find out for himself where his mistakes are made. I judged it better to help him. If I’m proved wrong, I’ll do whatever I can to make sure he doesn’t come to harm. There’s nothing more I can do. Will you accept an apology, sincerely given?’ Pantera took perhaps two steps forward. He had been standing between the bull’s forelegs. It was so tall that he could stay upright there and not have to crouch.

He was different from when she had last seen him. Then, he had worn Nero’s snowy tunic belted with silver. Now he was dressed in cheap linen with his hair crammed into a ridiculous cap. His bare feet and legs were covered with a week’s worth of dust and mud. She couldn’t see his scars and nor, therefore, could anyone else.

His face had seen Alexandrian sun for a winter and on into spring. The lines were cut deeper around his eyes and mouth, but the whole was as she remembered it from the first moment’s meeting when she had made herself filthy in Nero’s presence.

Her throat was filled with sand. She said, ‘You’re too like Ajax.’

‘Not in all ways. I think, in fact, not in many ways.’ He leaned on one of the bull’s forelegs. She could smell Nile mud and frankincense and the wildness of a barren mountain in spring. ‘But I do care for Math. I’ll find him and bring him back. Where will I find you?’

‘Near the nightingale-seller. Ask for Hannah the apothecary. Everyone knows me.’

She stood a long time alone in the shadow of the bull after he had gone. Presently, she searched for and found a coin of the right size and dropped it into the oracle machine.

As a child, it had fascinated her; she had come here often to ask questions that never needed answers, just to hear the mechanical swing of the gears, and watch the levers work. Now she found that, as so often with her childhood, memory dwarfed the reality; the water clock in the compound was a far greater feat of engineering than the one in front of her and she could too easily see how the god’s machine reached its conclusion.

The answer, when it arrived, was in the affirmative, but since she had not clearly set a question, it did not help at all in the matter of her choices. She left the machine to its deliberations and went back out into the hot and dusty day.

The Serapic Way was a tide of petitioners, sweeping back and forth to the great temple to her south. As she stepped out into the stream, it came to Hannah that she was alone, and likely to be so for some time, and that, given this unexpected freedom, there was one man in the whole of Alexandria whose company would soothe her soul and whose wisdom she cherished. And he would no doubt have spikenard, and could make the unguent she needed for Saulos.

As a native of the city, she knew all the best short cuts. Leaving the crowds, she passed south of the temple to a small bridge. Crossing it, she entered the friendly clutter of the streets she had known in her youth. For the first time in a decade, she felt herself truly at home.