Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Thirty-Two

‘It’s madness! It can’t be done. Bronze will kill Thunder or be killed in his turn. Math, you know this. Hannah, he does know; don’t look at me like that. It’ll be carnage. We’ll lose the horses and the rig before we ever get near the race. I’ll be dead and Nero will hang the rest of you for making him look like an idiot. Pantera will be left alone to do… whatever it is he has to do.’

They were in the stables, in shade and relative privacy, soaked in the smells of hay and horse dung, with only the faint flavour of rose-oil from the baths.

Ajax was running both hands over and over across his still-pink crown, pacing the length of the stalls. Hannah was the only breath of calm and Math let her soothe the shivering, shuddering ague that had been on him since he had left the baths and walked back to the compound with Ajax, Poros and the retinue of huge Ubian guards who had taken them there in the first place.

Hannah sat on an empty harness box. Outside, the compound buzzed with busy contentment, like a bee skep on a warm day. ‘Could it not be done just once, to win the trial?’ she asked, reasonably.

‘Absolutely not. If we do it once and win, we’d have to do it again in Rome.’

‘So then-’

‘So we won’t get any second chances with Bronze. Once he understands what’s coming, he’ll be ready. If we win here, all we’re doing is postponing the carnage till Rome.’

‘It can’t be undone now,’ Hannah said. ‘You have to at least appear to try. If you spend the next four days trying, and then fail, will it be enough to ward off Nero’s vengeance, do you think?’

‘We can’t. We have to win now.’ Ajax stepped away from Hannah and Math. He was brown as an Egyptian, the scars on his back thinned down to pale threads. His eyes were bright as copper, his brows thinly black. If he had hair enough to cover his absent ear, of the same colour and shine, he would have been the very image of Apollo. Math felt him catch Hannah’s eye in a question, and the subtle shift of her answer.

She said, ‘This isn’t just about the race, is it?’

‘Not any more.’ Ajax smoothed his palm across his scalp. ‘Math’s going to Rome and there’s nothing we can do about it. Nero will have him, one way or the other. If we’re to stay together, we have to win.’

‘You could do that with two colts.’

‘I believe I could. Nero, however, believes otherwise and Nero is our emperor. So if we’re going to avoid a bloodbath’ — Ajax lifted a headstall from the rack on the wall and threw it to Math — ‘we’ll have to spend the next three days running all four colts round that bloody track until they’re on their knees, too spent to fight.’

Math caught the headstall that was thrown him. It was the last thing his father had made, pliable and beautiful and very light. ‘We’re using the racing harness?’ he asked, wide-eyed. ‘And the racing rigs?’ In his dreams. In his best and wildest dreams…

‘The racing harness and the racing rigs,’ Ajax agreed. He didn’t look as if it would be the fulfilment of every boy’s wish. ‘You’ll drive Brass and Bronze, they’re the better schooled. I’ll drive Sweat and Thunder in the spare racing chariot. By the time we’re finished, they’ll be so bored of each other’s company, they won’t bother to fight. Get everything ready today. Make sure you can wind the reins in your sleep. We’ll start tomorrow morning at dawn.’

‘Go Bronze! Go Brass! Go! Go! Go! ’

Math was flying. Out of control, without Ajax to help him, he was flying. The light racing chariot bounced under his feet, light as a leaping deer. On any other day, he would have fallen and, in falling, killed himself. But today, at last, his body seemed to have its own knowing.

The parade race with Ajax had given him that, so that here, now, he could stand with his hands spread wide and his head back and he was not falling but flying, leaning into the turn, letting Bronze, hugely powerful, made of muscle, bone and teeth, made of rage and blood and hate, letting all of that go into pulling the light racing rig tight round the bend and up into the straight.

Where he met Ajax, coming the other way, racing right-handed, with the sun, which was quite astonishingly difficult and went against all his horses’ training, but they needed to do it, so that they might pass each other twice on each circuit, letting Bronze and Thunder pass each other, left hand to left hand, so they could meet and match, but not fight. For only when immersed in a race did the blood-mist of winning rise higher in each of the colts than the blood-mist of killing his rival. And Ajax’s alchemy seemed to be working. For three circuits now they had met and met again, and while both colts flattened their ears to their heads as they passed there was no war yet; nobody had died.

Nero’s watching men could report that they were genuinely trying and Poros could stand at the edge and fume and do nothing. Math didn’t have time to see if he was.

He barely had control. Actually, he had no control. If the horses hadn’t known the track as well as they knew their own stables, they would have crashed into the walls at the end of the first short straight.

But they did know it, and without the need to manoeuvre round other rigs Math had nothing to do but stand still and ride the wind. On the next long straight, he leaned forward and risked one single cast of his long thin whip to crack in the air above Bronze and Brass, to ask of them yet more speed.

As a ship surges forward from a newly unfurled sail in a greater breath of wind, so did his horses give him a burst of power to take him faster down the straight so that he was more than flying and the tears streaming past his temples were for joy as much as speed and he knew at last, in the seat of his soul, what it was to fly loose from his body, freed from all the weights and sorrows of the earth.

He understood in his soul why it was that Ajax came so alive out here on the sands and why his father had so loved battle.

Lifting his head, Math screamed out his father’s name and heard it lost in the thunder of his own movement. Flying over the red hot sands, he knew, with an indescribable elation, that nobody could ever take from him the memory of freedom.

Standing at the side rails, away from Poros and the emperor’s men, Hannah heard Caradoc’s name in the high hawk’s cry and wept for the joy of it, and the pain of a boy finding freedom who was too young to have lost it.

She bent her head to rest her forehead on her loosely clenched fists and so neither heard the footsteps nor saw the shadow at her side until a voice said, ‘It was Xenophon, I believe, who said a horse’s hooves should sound as cymbals on the sand. He was an exceptional horseman, but I’m not sure he heard cymbals as I hear them. I’d have said those four colts sound more like mallets driving pegs into wood.’

‘Akakios.’ Hannah kept her eyes on the track. Akakios came to lean on the rail by her side.

‘I’ve been speaking to men in Alexandria,’ he said conversationally. ‘Scholars of ancient wisdom, apothecaries, astrologers, priests. I have been honest with them about who I am, and what I want. They, in turn, have been honest with me. Five different men and one woman have independently told me the same thing so that even I begin to believe it.’

Hannah squeezed her hands together to keep them still. Math was on the far straight. His team passed Ajax at the middle marker, as they needed to. The horses noticed each other less each time.

Akakios waited until the two chariots were clear, then, ‘Can you guess what they told me?’

‘That if you enter the maze of the Oracle beneath the Temple of Serapis,’ Hannah said flatly, ‘you will never emerge alive.’

‘Exactly so. I did not kill Ptolemy Asul, but he was a man much valued by the Sibyls and they already know the part I played in his demise. Even if I were to reach the Styx — which I gather is unlikely — I would not cross it alive.’ He turned round, leaning back against the top rail with his arms folded. ‘Why did you not tell me this?’

‘I was about to. If you remember, we were interrupted.’

‘There has been time since then.’

‘In which you have been closeted with the emperor to the exclusion of anyone else, or abroad in Alexandria where I am now forbidden to go. You know, that’s what matters. We will cancel our arrangement. Nobody will be hurt.’

Hannah turned away, as if to leave. Akakios caught her wrist. His fingers left livid prints on the burns he had made six days before.

‘I need to know what the Oracle knows,’ he said. His eyes held exactly the quality of humanity they had in Ptolemy Asul’s house, which was none. ‘I will find that out, and you will help me to do so.’

‘Then we will both die.’ She let the scorn show in her voice. ‘I thought you might value your own life more highly than that.’

‘I do. And because I do, I value your life highly also. You should be grateful.’ He released her arm. The marks of his fingers stood out white against the healing burns. ‘My sources tell me that I can send a surrogate, a man who is not as… tainted as I am. Is this true?’

‘It may be… if you can find someone prepared to take the risk. Crossing the Styx is not without its dangers, even for a man pure of heart.’

‘You’d be surprised who will take risks on my behalf.’ Akakios’ smile made the gorge rise in her throat. ‘Saulos, in this instance, has professed himself glad to do so.’

‘Saulos?’ Hannah stared at him in frank astonishment. ‘Why?’

‘Because I told him you would die if he did not.’ Akakios tipped his head. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, he holds you in high esteem. He is, in fact, besotted. He’ll take whatever risks are asked of him to keep you safe. Is love not a wonderful thing?’ He turned again, to gaze out at the track where the horses were moving smoothly. There was still an obvious disparity between Ajax’s skill and Math’s, but it was growing less with each circuit.

Akakios turned back to face Hannah. ‘And whereas you might not return Saulos’ love,’ he said, ‘I know that I can rely upon you to do whatever you can in your turn to keep Ajax and Math safe. Have you petitioned the Oracle yet, to ask if you might conduct in a supplicant?’

Hannah shook her head.

‘My sources say that you must, and soon. When is appropriate?’

She found her voice. ‘The dawn of any day.’

‘Then tomorrow at dawn, you will ask for and receive permission to escort Saulos into Hades. At the time appointed, you will be his guide in all ways and will ensure that he remains alive and returns with the answer that I require. You will do this willingly and well or those whom you love will die as Ptolemy Asul died. You know I can do this, and I will.’

Ajax found her later, being sick into a bowl in her own quarters. He was alight with the success of his venture, with Math’s skill, with hope for the race, so that she didn’t want to tell him what had happened and he had to draw it out of her word by word.

When she was done, he sat on the edge of her bed staring straight at the wall. His face had taken on the smooth blankness she saw before a race, when his mind was turned inward. He said, ‘I could kill him, here, today, now. He wouldn’t threaten you then.’

‘He’ll have thought of that. If he dies, there will be an order left for you and Math to die. It’s the way men like him work.’

‘What will you do, then?’

Hannah set the bowl down and wiped her mouth with the heel of her hand. Making herself meet Ajax’s eyes was harder than giving her word to Akakios had been. Ajax could read her in ways Akakios never could; he knew the cost of what she was doing. She was glad Math wasn’t there.

‘I’ll do exactly what he asks,’ she said. ‘I’ll take Saulos into the tunnels beneath the Serapeum that lead to Hades, there to cross the Styx and meet with the Oracle. What happens after that is between him, the Ferryman and the Sibyl. If he dies, it won’t be of my doing.’