Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Thirty-Five

The rising sun carved a thin red band across an ochre sky as Hannah watched Saulos feel his way down the road leading to the Temple of Serapis.

She waited for him at a small, anonymous doorway along the temple side. Behind her, a long, sloping corridor led down into the room in which she had met Hypatia which led in turn to an underground maze of tunnels and rooms in which an untutored man — or a forgetful woman — could become fatally lost. In her youth, she had seen the cluttered grey bones of those who had done so, left where they lay.

Death by thirst was not the worst way of passing, but still not one to invite without cause. And so, because she was bound by the same rules as Saulos — more so because she knew the penalties — she hadn’t slept, or eaten, and had drunk only water in the time since she was last here. In addition, she had spent the previous night laying her mind open to the gaze of the stars, making of herself the empty vessel, cleared of all loves and hates, thoughts, cares and terrors.

Saulos saw her and veered off course.

‘This is it?’ He was expecting something larger, greater, more imposing; everyone did. In its very understatement, the entrance to the Oracle’s temple was intimidating. ‘I thought the lamps would be lit.’

‘I’ll light them when you come inside and we can let fall the hide that covers the door.’

Already, Hannah’s voice was changing. She heard it clear as a flute, and cold as a frosted morning. She had no idea what Saulos heard, but his eyes showed white at the rims and he avoided her gaze. He was afraid of her.

‘What must I do?’ he asked.

‘Have you fasted?’ It was the necessary question. Everything now was prescribed.

He ran his tongue across his teeth. ‘For a night and a day and a night I have taken no food and drunk only water. I have passed dung and urine and have no need to pass either again. I am dressed only in linen, with neither wool nor silk nor leather, nor anything of animalkind about me. My hair is combed with water and my cheeks are freshly shaved. I am as pure as any man can be who was not given to God at birth and has not spent his life on his knees in prayer.’

‘Purity is an aspect of the heart, not only of the body,’ Hannah said, but she stepped back and Saulos followed her in under the low lintel. She let fall the hide across the doorway, blocking out the strands of grey starlight and the peach fuzz of dawn.

In perfect darkness, she moved about, finding by feel flint and tinder and iron and the small, stubbed wick of the first lamp. Long before, she had done this. To do it now was to move backwards in time, to become younger, to re-find innocence and the joy that came with it.

Both youth and innocence departed as the first light brought her Saulos’ green-white face. His eyes followed her from lamp to lit lamp around the room, flinching from the walls and the things he read there.

He licked his lips for the second time. ‘The walls show death. I see treachery and slaughter, the punishment of innocence, the dominance of kings. Is there no chance of hope? Of life?’

‘We are the hope, you and I.’ The final lamp was lit. Hannah turned, watching her shadow spiral the room. ‘The way to life is across the river into death.’

‘Ferried there by Charon, who will ask me three questions.’ Even here, Saulos couldn’t resist a display of his learning.

‘Ferried there only if you can answer each of the three questions correctly.’

‘And if I don’t?’

Hannah stared at him flatly. ‘If you speak less than the truth, if you fail to answer any question correctly, you will not leave this place alive. As to the manner or duration of your death, I couldn’t say; a man can live a long time alone in darkness, I believe. But you needn’t face that. If you wish to walk away now, you may do so. Is that your wish?’

She had to ask; it was part of the entering and required truth as its answer, but she had never done so with so much of herself hanging on the answer. ‘Well?’

He closed his eyes, shutting her out. ‘Truthfully — is it the wish of my heart to leave this place? Of course. What sane man would not wish himself back in his bed, asleep, with dawn yet to come? Is it the wish of my courage? No. I was sent here by Akakios’ command, but having arrived I will not walk away at the first hurdle; we both know the cost of that.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ His eyes sprang open. ‘That’s my truth and I stand by it. If it’s not enough, then you can seal the door and leave me here now.’

‘It’s enough.’

‘May I ask you a question now, before we go in?’

‘I can’t see why not.’

‘Have you conducted others into here? Or am I the first?’

That made her laugh, warming the air between them. ‘Would you like to be the first?’

‘Of course.’ Saulos pulled a wry face. ‘But I think I’d feel safer if there had been others before me.’

‘There were three,’ Hannah said. ‘Two men and a woman. I can’t tell you their names or which of them lived and which died — but more lived than died. Let that cheer you as we pass down into Hades.’

On that, she lifted a single lamp from its niche and stepped past him to the opening that led deeper into the heart of the maze.

‘Have you fasted?’

Pantera lay under his oiled cloth cover in the building site behind the Temple of Serapis, beneath which lay the greater, more secret, Temple of Truth.

From the sound of her voice, Hypatia was less than ten feet away. He turned his head to where he thought she might be. ‘As you instructed,’ he said, ‘I have eaten nothing, and drunk only water. I have also passed dung and urine and found the first ridiculously easy and the second ridiculously hard. I thought I had faced all evils a man could suffer, and so was without fear, which of course was hubris on my part. Do men usually find themselves rendered weak with terror when they come here?’

‘The wise ones understand their own terror,’ Hypatia said. ‘The others enter and never leave.’ He heard her move a little. ‘Were you going to lie there all day? Saulos has already gone in.’

‘I know. And three of Akakios’ men watched him do so. But they’re not watching here. You chose your entrance well.’

‘Then you are free to join me in it.’

A block of granite the size of a ram and ten times its weight had been Pantera’s company through the night. Giving it a final, friendly pat, he eased out from under his oil cloth and crawled towards the leaning planks that hid the entrance he had used before.

Framed in the shadows of the oak planking, Hypatia was the same sculpted perfection as when he had first seen her in a hidden house in Alexandria. As then, she was dressed in white linen, but had added a broad belt woven through with gold threads. Like his, her feet were bare. Her hair was swept back from her face and fell in a silk sheen to her shoulders. She smelled faintly, as ever, of unnamed wild flowers.

The entrance to the underground room lay at her feet, as uninviting as it had been before — more now that Pantera knew the uncomfortable wriggle that led from it, and the room beyond, with its images of herons that had disturbed his sleep these past nights. He found his mouth aswill with nervous saliva and swallowed.

‘If this is Hades, the beginning will be the least of it, I imagine?’ His voice was not as shaken as he had feared it might be.

Hypatia raised one brow. ‘I imagine you may be right. If you-’

An owl called nearby. In daylight. Hypatia spat an oath in a language Pantera didn’t know. A small, wicked blade sprang into her hand; he hadn’t known she was armed.

He caught her wrist. ‘Wait.’

She twisted free, her face frozen with fury. ‘We must not be followed. This matters more than your life or mine.’

‘This man won’t follow if we don’t want him.’

He dropped her arm and, putting his cupped hands to his lips, blew a soft, answering cry. The reply came immediately. Relieved, Pantera said, ‘If you don’t want him to come in here, I’ll go out and tell him so.’

‘If you can find him.’ Hypatia had her eye to a crack in the wood. Her voice was thoughtful now. ‘How many men could have tracked you here, do you think?’

‘Until a moment ago, I would have said none.’

‘Exactly. So there’s a reason your young Briton has found us. Let him come.’

Ajax made a brief silhouette in the triangle of oak and then was on one knee before Hypatia.

‘Lady…’ He spoke in Egyptian, language of the Sibyls, which Pantera only barely understood. ‘I have fasted and drunk only water this past day. I am cleansed in body and of clear intent. If it is your will, I would enter this place.’

Astonished, Pantera said, ‘How do you know-’

‘He was trained on the island of Mona.’ Hypatia had laid her hand on Ajax’s crown. ‘The dreamers there know more of the oracles than anyone else on earth.’

‘Lady, I spent my youth badly and did not learn as much as I could have done. There may be ways in which I am in error. If so, I will leave this place and undertake not to return.’

‘You have come to protect Hannah?’

‘I have, lady. And to offer whatever other service I may.’

There was a weight to his voice that Pantera did not understand. Hypatia, though, clearly did. She was silent a long moment and Pantera saw her lips move twice, as if in conversation with someone or something unseen.

‘Do you have the questions and their answers?’ she asked, eventually. A sense of wonder lit her voice.

Ajax said, ‘I do.’

‘And you could navigate the two paths that lead to the river, the one straight as a staff, the other coiled like a snake and branched as often as an oak?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Then, by all means, you should go and take the role allotted. Tell Alexandros you come with my blessing.’

Step by slow step, caught in a shivering bubble of lamplight, Hannah and Saulos moved on and in and down through the labyrinth of ancient, man-made tunnels with their smooth stone walls and barely perceptible incline that took them ever deeper beneath the Serapeum.

Following a memory laid down in her childhood, they turned and wove, taking a right here, or a left there, with the lamp always pushing back the dark, but never so much that they could see more than two steps ahead.

Warm air swept Hannah’s ankles, so that at times she felt as if she were walking through tepid Nile water. She had been there before and knew it was not so, but Saulos looked down as often as he looked forward, and soon began to lift his feet higher, not trusting the evidence of his eyes and the patchy lamplight.

Not only their feet were affected. From their knees up, tendrils of warm air, even heat, snaked up from the tunnel’s depths to wrap their chests, their arms, their necks, to caress their faces and kiss their cheeks. The air was damp, with the smell of old breath.

‘Like walking into the mouth of a god,’ Hannah observed, as they turned yet another corner and faced a wall of damp air.

Archly, Saulos said, ‘My god does not open his mouth thus, but rather- Hannah! ’

He clutched at her arm. The wall of air had become, briefly, a gale, and had blown out the lamp. With Saulos clinging as a dead weight on one arm, Hannah reached out her free hand and sought the smooth wall, searching forward amidst the fine cracks and old scars until her questing fingers found the first in a series of small cupped depressions up at shoulder height that told her where she was.

She followed them forward, counting, dragging Saulos with her, step by unwilling step.

‘Have you no fear?’ His voice quavered, full of tears.

‘If I have fear in this place,’ Hannah said, ‘you are dead. Pray that I don’t.’

They walked on in silence. The air became intolerably humid. A wind soughed past, like the premonition of a desert storm, hissing, whispering, deafening.

Eight hundred blind paces, two left turns and a right-angled, right-sided bend later, Hannah’s fingers dropped into the deepest yet of the dimples on the wall. She stopped. Saulos slammed into her shoulder and backed off, cursing.

She said, ‘Don’t move. The river Styx runs at your feet, flowing at right angles to this path. If you step forward, you’ll drown. If, instead, you reach to your left, you’ll find a lamp. You must light it. Everything from here on must be done by you.’

Saulos found the lamp and struck the iron truly. The lamp took his spark and fed on it, sending a tall flame up the wick in a way that augured well. Hannah saw him smile, and say something to himself, or his listening god.

Then he turned, and saw the steaming water of the river, and the caped, hooded figure who stood by its edge and the ferryboat beside him, and the smile fell from his face.

‘Welcome to the Styx, Saulos of Idumaea,’ said the Ferryman pleasantly. ‘For due payment, I will take you across.’

Which was exactly as it should have been.

Except that the shadowed figure spoke in the voice that lined the halls of her sleep and carved its own path through her heart, and no part of Hannah’s training had prepared her for that.