Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Two

Dusk fell quickly; it always did at this time of year.

In the disappearing light, Math followed his mark swiftly through Coriallum’s winding streets by instinct as much as sight. It was his talent, and he used it mercilessly. If the scrawny Roman had not paid him, he would have been at the harbour anyway, and would have followed whichever of the incomers had seemed to have the biggest purse.

He might not have followed Pantera. In the two years since his mother died, he had kept a promise to her memory that he would not put the lure of silver over his own safety. It seemed to Math that Pantera was by far the most dangerous man he had ever tried to follow and he did, after all, have his father to think of: he couldn’t afford for them both to be crippled.

He thought of his father as he hugged the wall of a tavern, letting the noise from inside cover the sound of his movement, and then the lack of it as he stopped. Up ahead, Pantera had paused and was asking directions of Cleona, the baker’s wife.

The Roan Bull tavern was a large, sprawling affair set at the top edge of the town, with a main room surrounded by sleeping bays and stables and a second storey upstairs, left wide open for feasts and meetings of the town’s council. Inside, three men were singing a battle song, sending the notes low and deep in their throbbing, incomprehensible dialect.

The language was foreign. Its words and rhythms caught at Math’s guts and tugged him back to long nights of his childhood when his parents, believing him asleep, had talked in this lilting foreign language around the night’s fire. Those were the nights when they invited in men and women Math never saw clearly, who spoke softly in their sing-song voices.

The visitors had always left before daylight, bearing with them food and gold and knives and swords that Math was not supposed to know had been hidden in the thatch. Even in winter they took food, leaving none behind, and always they left his parents talking in the heart of the night, speaking riddles in a foreign language.

Then one night a man had come who did not stay long, and in the morning Math’s mother had fallen sick with grief and she had stayed sick until the burning fever took her away from him, robbing him of love and his family of its only whole adult.

Math knew that his father had been a warrior once, of the kind whose praises were sung in the taverns; the kind who went to war as a hero and came back as a cripple, unable to earn enough to keep a man and a child fed through the hard days of winter when the woman who had kept them both was gone.

In the Roan Bull, the war-lament ended, dying away to quiet words and the occasional tight sob of a man who had drunk too much. The hanging hide that served as a door was flung back and two men staggered out, arm in arm, still humming.

Less than an arm’s reach away from them, Math spat with venom into the gutter and named it for all the heroes of all wars in all countries. They didn’t see him. He closed his eyes as they walked past, that they might not be drawn to the contempt in his gaze.

Turning his head back after they had gone, he saw the baker’s wife walk past. Of his mark, there was no sign.

‘ Shit! ’ He said that aloud, pushing himself to his feet. The woman let out a small squeal, then saw it was only Math and flapped her hands at him, hissing annoyance like a goose. He was already away, soft as a shadow, hugging the dark lees of the houses, casting left and right for a sense of where Pantera had gone.

Or a scent. He caught a snatched whiff of the sea and turned left into a dark, stinking, blind-ending alley that was barely wide enough to take a hound, still less a boy or a man. He was running now, ducking low, trying to dodge the puddles of urine and dog turds. He never saw the hand that caught his throat and brought him to a choking halt.

He couldn’t breathe. There was no light at all. In perfect darkness, Math felt a knife shave a sliver of skin from under his ear and hot, wet blood ooze after it.

Snoring like a pig, he struck out with both heels, hoping to catch the soft parts of the man’s groin. He failed. To prove it, the hand slammed downward, crashing his feet painfully hard into the packed earth.

‘Three mistakes,’ said a quiet voice in his ear. ‘And calling out now would be a fourth. Without doing that, can you list for me what the previous three were?’

He is prone to bouts of untrammelled anger… Math felt his bladder squeeze on and off, like a horse taking a piss. He was afraid of Pantera, but more, was terrified that he might soil himself and earn the man’s contempt.

He squeaked and hated himself for it. The hand at his throat shifted a fraction. Drinking great gulps of air, Math said, ‘Watched… men leave… tavern. Lost you. Mistake.’

‘That was what killed you,’ the voice agreed. ‘But I had seen you already by then. Three things drew me to you. What were they?’

In absolute darkness, Math could see the river-brown eyes perfectly, and their promise of death. He said, ‘I looked at you. I let your eyes meet mine.’

‘Good.’ The hand at his throat loosed its grip. ‘But I already knew you before then, or our eyes would never have met. So two other mistakes before that.’

Math could breathe normally now, and think more clearly. Screwing shut his eyes, he searched back through his memory to the boat’s arrival, to everything that had happened from when it was a speck on the far horizon to the point when Pantera’s gaze had met his.

‘Something to do with the clerks?’ he asked, eventually. ‘I shouldn’t have looked at them?’

‘No, that was neatly done. You looked, you saw nothing you liked, you put them off. I was already watching you, so the mistake was earlier.’

The hand that held him moved from his throat to his shoulder. Hard fingers dug into his collar bone. The knife still rested at his other cheek. With a lesser man, Math might have tried to wriggle free.

He shook his head as far as he dared. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Fish are shade-lovers; they shun direct sunlight,’ said the voice. ‘You were fishing in the sun’s full glare when all you had to do was make half a turn to your right and you could have dropped your line in shadow among the shoals that live there. A genuine fisher-boy would have done that, but it would have meant turning your back on the boat which you didn’t want to do. So you weren’t a fisher-boy, and then, when the clerks came, you spurned them, so you were also not a whore. That only left two things: a cutpurse, or a spy. You cut no purses on your way through the crowd and so, today at least, you are a spy. Am I right?’

There was no point in denying it. Math said, ‘That’s only two mistakes. What was the third?’

‘This.’ Pantera bent his head and sniffed. ‘Your hair stinks of horse piss. The wind was coming off-shore to the ship; that’s why the master rowed us in. I was already watching you before the boat made dock. Why would a fisher-boy reek of horse piss?’

‘Because I sleep in the horse barns!’ Too angry to care for the risk, Math threw his arm up and wrenched himself free and did not care about the knife at his cheek. ‘Because my father was a warrior ’ — he spat the word with all the pent-up fury of his own failures — ‘and now he is old and crippled and can’t make harness fast enough or well enough to earn good money and someone has to feed us both and I’m not a good enough cutpurse or whore to do it yet!’

His voice echoed shrill from the walls. There followed a stretching pause, during which the knife disappeared and the hand fell away from his shoulder. The first sharp edge of the moon rose over the wall at the end of the alley. By its light, Math was able to look for the first time into the face of the man who had caught him.

Pantera’s nose had been broken and set a fraction off centre, destroying any symmetry his face might have had. He had broad, strong cheekbones, and fine brows that were a shade darker than his hair. A scar notched one of them, giving him a look of wry surprise, barely contained. Lines of wind and sun etched the corners of his eyes. The latter held amusement, Math thought, but under it a storm of passions too powerful and too complex to be let loose without bloodshed.

Math realized he was staring and looked away. Pantera leaned back on the nearest wall and folded his arms. ‘You don’t like warriors?’ he asked mildly.

Math shrugged. ‘My mother was a warrior,’ he said. ‘And my father.’

‘I see.’ He rubbed the bridge of his nose, where the break was. ‘Did your mother die in battle?’

‘No. But she would have liked to have done. Like my father. He was wounded in battle and survived when he would rather have died.’

He didn’t know what shadows the moon put on his face, or what Pantera might have heard in his voice, but the silence was longer this time, and thicker, and ghosts whispered within it.

‘Why do you sleep in the horse barns?’ Pantera asked. ‘Your father isn’t there, surely?’

There were too many answers to that. There was the past, which was his mother, and Math didn’t want to speak of her yet, perhaps ever. There was the future, which was Ajax the charioteer and so might never happen; Ajax was a dreamer of wild dreams and had not been around long enough for Math to know if he was the kind of man to make them happen. So he gave the answer that grew from the present, which had the benefit of truth, and didn’t hurt.

‘I work for Ajax, the charioteer who drives Coriallum’s horses. I help to look after the lead colts in the reserve team. My mother bred them, so they know me, which makes them easier to handle. They like it best if their groom sleeps nearby. And it’s warm in winter,’ he said, which was truest of all.

‘Of course. Your father must be proud of you.’ A bright thread of pain ran through Pantera’s voice, then.

Math looked up, searching for its reason, but Pantera glanced away down the alley, avoiding his eyes.

He said, ‘You could try washing your hair in citrus juice. It gets rid of the smell and makes the gold shine better. The clerks will see you all the sooner at the docks, and they’ll like you better without the smell.’

‘They like me well enough as I am.’

‘I’m sure they do.’ Abruptly, the warmth left Pantera’s voice. His whole attention was directed at the shadows at the end of the alley. ‘You should go now,’ he said, and took a step back.

Math felt himself released as suddenly as if a key had been turned in a lock. He stole a glance over his shoulder, to where the light of the tavern’s torches lit the alley’s mouth to amber. The way out was clear. The night had barely started. A world of drunken purses waited to be cut for a boy who knew how to run back down the hill to the richer taverns at the dockside.

Math did not want to run down the hill.

He wanted very badly to do whatever he could to heal the raw hurt he had just heard in Pantera’s voice and he knew how he might do it, if only temporarily. He reached forward, confident in his own skill.

‘ No! ’

Math’s wrist was snatched away and held. Danger surrounded him again and he did not understand why. He struggled briefly, then fell still. With a visible effort, Pantera loosed his grip.

‘Who told you to do that?’

Math felt himself flush. ‘No one. I just…’

‘Whoever paid you should have known better than to send-’

‘A whore?’ Math spat the word. He had never been ashamed of it before.

He heard Pantera hiss in a breath. The man crouched. His dangerous, fascinating gaze came level with Math’s.

‘I was going to say a boy as naturally good at following as you. Anyone else would have lost me, and so been safe. You have a gift that grown men would give their last coin in the world to buy. And somebody bought you, obviously.’

It was not a question, but Math nodded anyway.

‘Who was it?’ Pantera said. ‘Who paid you to follow me?’

‘I don’t know his name,’ Math said truthfully. ‘I would tell you if I did.’

‘You would, wouldn’t you?’ He saw Pantera soften, saw the planes of his face change, saw him close his eyes, and close off the volcano of his rage until he could smile, and lay his hand on Math’s arm, and say, more steadily, ‘If you stay a moment, you’ll learn something. After that I want you to leave. Will you do that?’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do.’

Standing, Pantera turned his face to the alley’s firelit mouth. Distinctly, he said, ‘Are you happy now? Will you come out where you can be seen, or must we come to you, like dogs to a whistle?’

‘If you know I’m here, what need is there to stand in the light?’ The scrawny Roman, who had offered Math more than he had ever earned for a task that had seemed as if it would be easy, stepped away from the shadow of the alley’s wall and stood in the open, cast in hazy silhouette by the torchlight from the tavern behind.

He looked much as he had in daylight, but that his thistledown hair — what was left of it — was cast in gold rather than silver by the flame’s kinder light. His head was too big for his body. His neck made the ungainly mismatch between head and body and was ill fitted for both, so that the skin hung in wattles and his larynx stuck out sharp as a stone.

One might laugh at such a man, but for the fact that he had tracked Math for a good part of the afternoon unseen, which was, at the very least, disconcerting.

His attention was all on Pantera now, although he spoke of Math. He said, ‘The boy will be as good as you when he’s older, if not better. I haven’t paid him yet. He earns his coin only if we speak, you and I.’

In a voice that made Math’s guts ache, Pantera said, ‘Then he has succeeded. You have spoken. I have replied. Pay him.’

‘Soon.’

The scrawny Roman was Pantera’s senior by at least a decade, more probably two, he had a bad hip and his hearing was less than perfect, but even so, he carried an authority in his dry, harsh voice that left Math wondering whether he could actually best Pantera in the way he seemed to think.

When he said, ‘Will you come with me? I have lodgings not far from here. We could talk properly there,’ it seemed inevitable that they should follow.

Pantera ignored him. He opened a purse that Math had neither heard nor seen at any point on the way up from the docks.

‘How much did you promise the boy?’ he asked.

The scrawny Roman did not answer fast enough. Math said, ‘One sestertius.’

He had thought it a fortune. Pantera clearly did not. He swore in a language that was neither Latin nor Gaulish but ripe with the force of his scorn.

‘You were Rome’s richest man and still you pay pennies to those who would risk their lives for you?’

The old man shrugged. ‘I am no longer rich by any measure. Nero has my fortune and I must live on my wits. And Math did not risk his life. You are not yet so damaged that you would kill a boy for following you in the street.’

‘Really?’ Pantera bent down to Math. ‘Have you eaten?’

That was a foolish question. Math stared at him. ‘Yes.’

‘I mean tonight. Have you eaten since sundown?’

Math shook his head.

‘Then take this.’ From his purse, Pantera produced a roll of white goat’s cheese, thick as his thumb and as long. ‘My father taught me this and so now I teach you. Always carry cheese in your purse — it stops the coins from chiming so the cutpurses can’t hear it, and it means you have food when you need it; you never know when you might have to stay awake until dawn. A hungry stomach craves sleep in the way a fed one may not.’

Math’s experience was otherwise, but he had learned long since that the man holding the food was always right. With the spit already flooding his mouth, he watched wide-eyed as Pantera led him to the mouth of the alley, and in the full glare of the tavern’s torches took the roll of cheese and cut it into four pieces.

He gave the first one to Math. ‘Eat it now. Then keep the rest in your purse. Divide the night into four by the arc of the moon. See — it’s just up above the houses, so this is the first quarter. When it’s high, at midnight, eat the next piece. At half-set eat the third and at dawn, when the moon is down, eat the fourth. That way the night seems less long. Do you understand?’

Not understanding at all, Math said, ‘Yes.’ He had no purse. He slipped the precious cheese down the front of his tunic until it lay at his waist, above his belt, feeling the warmth of another’s body through it. The fragment in his mouth was rich and ripe and exploded on his tongue.

Pantera was already walking away. ‘Good. We’ll come with you some of the way home. Will you show us which way we go to the horse barns?’

Math hadn’t planned to go home yet, but there wasn’t the slightest chance he was going to leave Pantera before he had to. He nodded, and walked between the two men away from the light of the tavern and into the dark thread of streets that made the upper part of Coriallum.

They were in full dark, with only the moon to light them, when he heard the footsteps behind them and knew they were no longer alone.

His own steps faltered. Pantera caught him a brief shove in the small of his back and dipped down to breathe in his ear. ‘Only one. He’s in the shelter of the tannery to our left and behind. Don’t stop.’

They walked on, talking together softly, like son to father, with the scrawny Roman trailing behind. The chunks of cheese in Math’s tunic began to sweat.

They came to the end of the town, at the top of the shallow hill half a mile or so along from the magistrate’s residence. Here, the villas and workshops stopped and the great flat grassy plain began, in the middle of which was the wooden hippodrome and the complex of paddocks and horse barns around it.

The moon was high now, flooding the plain with silver ghost-light. Making sure they were in profile to the watcher, Pantera knelt before Math and ruffled his hair, taking his leave as any other man might of the boy he had hired and might wish to see again.

‘Seneca was right,’ he said. ‘You were not risking your life when you followed me this evening, but then you were not paid enough to do that. If I offered you a denarius, would you risk your life for me — really risk it — now?’

Seneca. A denarius.

The two facts collided in Math’s mind. A denarius: a silver coin four times the worth of a brass sestertius, sixteen times the worth of the copper that Ajax paid his grooms for a month’s work.

And Seneca. The scrawny old Roman was Seneca: the man who had ruled Rome in all but name for most of Math’s short life. Seneca, who had been deposed, and permitted to retire when all around him had died in a bloodbath of Nero’s making. Seneca, who had paid him in brass, when Pantera was offering silver.

A denarius. Math would have risked his soul for Pantera for nothing at all.

Swallowing, he said, ‘You want me to follow the man who is following us?’

He said it more loudly than Pantera had done. Hearing him, Seneca’s head snapped round.

‘Yes,’ Pantera said. ‘Watch him, find out who he reports to and why, and then come back to Seneca’s lodgings with the news — you know where they are? Good. But if you are caught by this man or his master, you’ll have to tell them everything you know — my name, Seneca’s name, where we met and how, and all that happened this evening. Don’t hold anything back. The emperor’s men don’t ask nicely if they think they’re being lied to, but if you tell the truth, they might leave you alone and come after us. Math…?’ He caught Math’s cheek and turned his head. ‘Are you listening? You are following one of Nero’s servants and it will serve nobody if you are stubborn and die. You will not be protecting us. Is that clear?’

Math nodded. ‘They won’t catch me.’

‘Good. The man who’s following us is currently hiding behind the house with the gold on the roof tiles and the marble lions outside. In a moment, we’ll turn away. You will seem to run home. When we have gone out of sight, find him and follow him and hear all that he says and to whom. And eat your cheese sparingly. It might be a long night.’

He gripped Math’s shoulder, as men did when they came off the fishing boats after a storm. ‘Good luck.’

Pantera turned away and signalled for the scrawny Roman to follow. Math stood under the bright moon a moment and waved at their backs, then shrugged for the sake of the man watching, much as he had done at the docks, and loped off in the direction of the horse barns.

The night was uncomfortably quiet. Seneca the Younger, stoic philosopher, spymaster and one-time mentor to the Emperor Nero, waited in silence by a table in the dining room of a borrowed villa, and watched Pantera move about in the shadows beyond the candlelight.

Knowing his subject, the philosopher did not ask any of the questions that pressed so urgently for answers. After the disaster of their meeting in the alley, he had no wish to sully the evening further, and he had long ago found that with this man, of all those he had ever taught, patience was his best and most certain weapon.

Patiently, therefore, and in silence, he watched Pantera make a methodical examination of the room exactly as Seneca had taught him long ago, noting the exits and entrances, the points of weakness and of strength, the places where a man might stand hidden, listening to the discourse within.

There were few enough of these. The house was a soldier’s, neat and plain, with little by way of luxury.

Two dining couches stood by a table laid with cheese and olives, figs and grapes and small rolls of pickled fish. In one corner, a lit brazier glowed softly red, warding the night’s chill from the air. A nine-fold candelabra stuffed with fat candles was set at a careful angle so that it spilled brighter light across the seating, but left in shadow a niche in one wall wherein was set a simple altar. A row of four cages standing against the wall nearby held sleeping doves that might have been for sacrifice, if the god of the altar required such things.

On the floor, subdued mosaics picked scenes from the lives of Achilles and Patroklos, from first meeting through shared war to the final blazing funeral pyre and the frantic chariot race sponsored by the grieving hero in honour of his dead lover. The winning chariot ran ahead of the rest, pointing the way out of the room and through an open archway that, in turn, led on to an unroofed courtyard. Somewhere near the centre of that, a fountain spilled water into a raised pool alive with schools of small fish, while above, scattered stars made a dense and distant ceiling.

On this night of reunion, the moon was not yet full. Its reflection danced lopsidedly on the perfect circle of the fountain’s pool. When Pantera walked out under the black sky and stood beside it a while, observing his own reflection, Seneca’s patience cracked at last.

‘Nero will send for you,’ he said.

‘He already has.’ Pantera hitched one hip on to the fountain’s lip and trailed his fingers in the effervescent water. ‘I am to meet my lord and emperor in private conversation at the magistrate’s residence early tomorrow morning before the chariots line up for the first race. He wishes to thank me for my services in Britain.’

‘He wishes to hire you,’ Seneca said. ‘To bring you into his fold, to use you as he uses all the best that I made for him.’ It was his first fear and his deepest. He took pains to keep that fact from his face.

‘Perhaps.’ Pantera shifted slightly, so that the marble took all of his weight. He balanced, swaying, a breath away from falling into the water. Folding his arms, he turned back towards the light.

‘You’re thinner than you used to be,’ he observed. ‘Word has it that you live now on spring water and fresh dates, picked only by your own hand as a means to avoid the emperor’s poisoners.’

His voice made it almost a question.

‘Partly.’ Seneca nodded towards the food arrayed for them both. ‘I eat more than dates, as you can see, but no red meat, no wine, nothing cooked. I feel better for it. And yes, I consider it safer. Nero could have me slain at any moment if he chose, but he’d see a particular irony in using poison after all I’ve done for him. I will avoid that if I can.’

‘And so Seneca no longer believes that a man eats to vomit and vomits to eat? The world is changing faster than I knew.’

That was an old barb, slung for a cheap point. Sighing, Seneca pulled a footstool from beneath the table and sat on it. The lower rank of candles in the candelabra guttered above his head. He looked down at his laced fingers, at the clipped and then bitten nails.

‘I’m sorry for what happened in Britain,’ he said presently. ‘I didn’t intend it when I sent you.’

‘I never believed you did.’ As a child might, Pantera ran his fingers through the water, grasping at the stars.

‘I’m told you are damaged in mind more than body, and in spirit more than both. Is it true?’

Forgetting one of his own first rules, Seneca spoke to the reflection rather than the man, and did not look up even when that reflection left him, so all that remained on the black water was the moon’s truncated circle.

When he did finally raise his eyes, the candles had begun to fail in the dining room, making the shadows darker. In the harlequin light, Seneca could see no sign of Pantera, but heard a snap of leather and a slither of wool on skin. Against all his clamouring instincts, he made himself sit on and on until, unable to hold himself longer, he rose and followed the trail of small sounds.

Forgetting himself, he gasped aloud.

A naked figure stood in the soft spill of the candlelight. It took a moment for Seneca to recognize Pantera, but only because the man he knew had displayed the Hebrew distaste for nudity almost to the point of prudishness. In their three decades of life together he had never willingly shed his clothes in Seneca’s company.

They left his face untouched for fear of killing him too quickly, but to the rest… they wrote their anger on his body. It’s what men do when they have lost their comrades to the enemy and believe they have one alive in their custody. Make yourself ready if you see him.

A legate of the British legions had told Seneca that; Fabius Africanus, in fact, who owned this house.

Now, in the unkind light, Seneca was perfectly placed to observe the truth of what he had said; that the pilus prior of the third century, the second cohort of the Second Augustan legion, and his three junior officers had quite literally written their rage on the body of the man they believed to be a British warrior, as a result of which Sebastos Abdes Pantera, who had once been a boy of wide-eyed, feline beauty, bore for ever branded into his chest and abdomen the mark of the second legion: LEG II AVG.

The stretched leg of the L reached up to meet a knot of hideously scarred tissue at his right shoulder that looked as if a spear had been forced through just above his collar bone and he had been left to hang on it, tearing the tissue. The rest merged with a lacework of less organized burns and scars, where men with knives and hot irons had traced spider’s webs and carved their initials and made maps of their home villages, or the hills, or simply counted time on his body.

Hidden behind all that, so that he wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t looked, was an older, flat, scarred oval in the centre of the man’s chest that looked as if a fire had been lit there and left to burn.

‘Are you weeping?’ Pantera asked, with cold astonishment.

‘I believe I am.’ Seneca moved to the brazier and stood over it, warming his hands. ‘It would seem you have the power to hurt me still. Or the men who hurt you have that power. Would you let me arrange for a physician? Nero won’t listen to me, but Polyclitus holds the strings to the treasury, and can be prevailed upon. Largus is still the best of the emperor’s doctors; he could-’

‘Spare me false apothecaries, please!’

Pantera’s voice was a whiplash. Seneca flinched. He had not come prepared for this.

Pantera, too, was silent a moment. When he spoke again, it was with the dry humour with which he had always masked his soul.

‘Forgive me, but I am a little tired of bonesetters and herbalists. I was under the ministration of the governor’s physicians for well over a year. I’m as healed as I’m ever going to be and happy with it. If you think my injuries leave me too compromised to kill a man, or follow one without being seen, then you should have stopped me sending Math out after whoever was following us tonight and sent me instead. I’m sure we’d all have learned something useful.’

‘It was never my intent to set you against anyone else, be it in the open or in the dark of an alley. I haven’t come to ask you to work again. It has cost you too much.’ Seneca sensed a moment’s surprise, and allowed himself to believe that the conversation might be moving in the right direction at last.

‘What then?’ Pantera asked.

‘Retirement,’ Seneca said smoothly. ‘A peaceful step aside. My gold is gone to Nero, but I still own lands at Mentana that grow the best wine in the empire. There’s a farm of mine there with your name on it if you wish. Or elsewhere in the empire if you prefer? Dacia is cold in winter but said to be good. Or Britain, obviously. There are whole villages lacking masters now in the lands of the Dumnonii where corn grows thick as moss and they breed cattle, horses and hunting dogs that would shame any other land in the empire. But then you know that; you spent five years among them, so if you want to pick-’

‘ No.’

The vehemence of that one word, and the pain behind it, were as surprising as anything that had happened in an entirely surprising evening. Pantera sank to sit on the tiled floor. His elbows came to rest on his knees and his hands hung loose. He laid his head on his forearms and turned it sideways to the wall.

For a long time, neither man spoke. At the end, as if in answer to another’s call, Pantera said quietly, ‘Not Britain. Never that.’

Seneca let out the breath he had held. ‘Was it a woman?’

Pantera said nothing, which was answer enough.

‘Is she still alive?’

‘No.’ Pantera still stared at the wall. He shook his head at whatever he saw there. ‘I killed her before the legionaries took us. It was her wish. Her name was Aerthen. It means “at the battle’s end”.’

Seneca said nothing. After a while Pantera went on. ‘Her mother was one of their dreamers. She could read the future better than any Etruscan augur. So we knew Aerthen would die at the end of a battle, but not which one. It made the days together more precious, I think.’

‘Do you have a child still living amongst the Britons?’

‘Not living, no. Her mother and I killed her together when the battle’s tide turned. She was three years old.’

The self-hate in that was unbearable. Seneca lowered his own brow to his forearms, hiding his face in his turn.

Presently, Pantera reached for his tunic and drew it on. One of the candles failed. From beneath the lesser light, he said, ‘You sent me to Britain to ensure the defeat of the tribes. You had trained me, and I believed that I could do what you wanted. What neither of us expected was that the tribes would change me.’

‘Did they?’

‘In every way possible. Within months, when I fought with them, I fought for them. By the second year, I was leading their warriors, and at the very end, when Suetonius Paullinus marched his men down from his battle with the Boudica and the men and women I loved were caught between two lines of sword and shield, I fought as I have never fought before, and it was not for Rome.’

‘But you lost.’

‘Everyone I knew and cared for died.’

Pantera’s face was a mask. Seneca railed against that as much as what he had heard. ‘You can’t take the blame for a battle’s loss all on yourself. You are one warrior, one sword, one shield, one-’

‘I should have died with them. They were expecting me to do that, to join them with their gods. I had the blade ready. It would have been so easy…’

The river-brown eyes came round to meet Seneca’s. The pain in them was beyond any man’s bearing.

‘Why did you not die, Sebastos?’

Sebastos. Seneca had not used that name in the reign of two emperors. It came now from the unexplored depths of his soul, unsettling them both.

Pantera turned. He was holding a small, broad-bladed knife of the kind stabbed into the bull’s throat at sacrifice. ‘I tried,’ he said. ‘I killed four men when they came to take us. I didn’t think they would let me live after that.’

‘And yet, if what I’ve been told is true, you withstood three days of torture and told them nothing, even when they crucified you.’

The knife spun in the air, sharp as a leopard’s tooth. ‘And still I didn’t die. It’s ironic, isn’t it? I should have done. I could have done. I wanted to. The god didn’t let me.’

Seneca was barely breathing. Pantera lifted a second knife and began to juggle the two, spinning them high from one hand to the other. Iron caught soft gold candlelight and muted it to silver.

Seneca said, ‘Was it my name that stopped them killing you?’

‘Sadly not.’ Pantera smiled. It was not a good thing to see. ‘When I told them I was one of yours, they spat at me for a liar and brought in new inquisitors with fresh ideas of how to break a man. It was only at the end, after they had grown tired of their sport and hung me up to die, that one of them passing heard me call on the god to take my soul. No Briton would ever have called on Mithras. The man spoke to his commander, who thought to find the legate and tell him they had one of the faith dressed as an enemy warrior. When he came, they thought I was dead. The physicians proved otherwise.’

Pantera stopped juggling at last. He turned to face Seneca. ‘You are going to ask me to work for Rome,’ he said. ‘And I have just explained why you can never again trust my oath and should not ask for it. In the sight of my god, I tell you now that, for the rest of my life, whatever I do, for whatever pay, the oath of my heart — however and to whomsoever it is given — will carry more weight than the oath of my voice.’

‘The oath of your heart was given to Rome, once.’

‘It will never be so again.’

Seneca pressed his cupped palms to his eyes. ‘Very well. You have told me why and I can believe it. With a wife and child dead at your own hand, it would be impossible for you to come back to us. But, in the sight of your god, whom I respect,’ Seneca let his hands fall, ‘I will tell you that I am not going to ask of you any more oaths. You weren’t listening. I am asking you to retire. It’s Nero who’ll ask you to work for Rome.’

Seneca had spoken the truth, and it changed the balance between them so that it was possible to lean on the couches, to eat, to drink the cool well water that was laid ready for them. They didn’t speak. Once, it had been possible to spend hours in the balm of each other’s company in reflective silence, and at last it seemed to Seneca that it might be possible again.

Presently, a scratching at the door led Pantera to cross the foyer and open it, saying, ‘Welcome, Math. Have you brought us news?’

The boy scampered in and then slowed at the sight of the room’s stark beauty. His slight, angular shadow came to rest on the floor near the philosopher’s feet. An outdoor smell of stale urine and tree sap and mud and moss clung about him.

Seneca turned slowly. The boy was filthier than he had been in the alley, which was hard to credit. His tunic had a rent in the hem on the right side and his bare feet and stick-thin legs were coated to the knee in congealing mud so that he left a trail of footprints across the clean marble floor. His hair was no longer gold, but hung in damp dregs to his shoulders. A scrape marred one malnourished cheek, blushing the skin blue in the hollows that hunger had left.

For all of that, his wide grey eyes still commanded all of his face, lighting it with the incendiary mix of insolence, desperation, exhilaration, tenacity and sheer exhaustion that Seneca had seen once before, a long time ago, in the archer’s son who had walked to him from Judaea.

That boy, now a scarred and wounded man, followed Math across the room and laid a hand on one thin shoulder. ‘Did he catch you?’ he asked.

Math shook his head. He held himself silent one moment longer, then words spilled out, tumbling over themselves in their hurry.

‘He followed you here and stayed a while watching the door, but left when the moon reached its height and went back into town. He met one of the emperor’s men at the Striding Heron tavern opposite the docks. He said,’ his voice deepened in a good approximation of a man’s Latinized Greek speaking Gaulish, ‘“The Leopard met with the Owl at Africanus’s house. The emperor should know before morning.” They left together. I followed them some of the way, but they went into the magistrate’s residence. I nearly went in after them, but…’

‘But better to stay alive and come back to tell us,’ Pantera said, drily, ‘than to face certain death at the emperor’s hand. Nero doesn’t like to be spied on. Ask Seneca — he was paid to see it didn’t happen for the first five years of his reign. Description?’

Math stared, mouth agape.

Pantera said, ‘What was he like?’

‘He was rich. He had silver and gold in his purse and a green jewel on his dagger’s handle. He didn’t look at any of the boys, even when they offered. I think he was going to bed the serving-’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Oh.’ Math closed his eyes and wrinkled his face. ‘Tall. Tall and lean and bitter-faced with no hair on the front half of his head, but straight black hair behind and a high brow and a nose like a hawk’s. There was a triangular tear in the left elbow of his tunic and he wears his knife to the right, so that his left hand can draw it. He spoke Greek and Gaulish and Latin.’ Math opened his eyes. He looked from Pantera to Seneca and back again. ‘That’s all I found out.’

There was a weighty pause. Pantera looked past the boy to Seneca. ‘Well?’

‘Well what? Aren’t you going to tell him well done?’

‘I might when I know who it was.’

Seneca frowned. ‘Tall, bitter-faced with a high brow setting off straight black hair, left-handed, prone to tearing his clothes, speaks eight languages that I know of and kills without a second thought? That would be Akakios. Notionally, he’s a tribune in the Praetorian Guard. In practice, he’s Nero’s unseen hand in the outside world: if someone threatens the emperor, Akakios sees them dead first; quite often they die before they’ve had a chance to make their threat. He’s more dangerous than a nest full of scorpions. If we’re all still alive this time tomorrow, then Math did immensely well. I told you he’d be better than you one day.’

‘Then he should be paid.’ Pantera took a silver denarius from his purse and spun it high, catching the candle’s light. ‘Thank you, Math. That was well done.’

Math snatched the coin deftly from the air. Aglow with pride, he followed at Pantera’s heel while the man found a bowl on the table and filled it with water from the well, then, crouching, used the sleeve of his own tunic to wipe away the filth from Math’s face, cleaning the edges of the graze underneath.

He moved slowly, tenderly, as he might with a wounded hound. Finishing, he said, ‘You did truly do well, but you know that. And now you have two pieces of cheese to give back to me?’

There was a short, difficult silence.

‘You ate it?’ Pantera asked.

‘I was coming back.’

‘And you were sure there was nothing else to be done for the night. In which case-’ Pantera stood, dusting his hands. ‘You’re right, there is nothing else. You may go.’

It was as curt a dismissal as any Seneca had heard. Math’s face flashed from white to scarlet and back to white. His eyes became great grey pools, filled to the brink with swimming tears. He opened his mouth to speak and shut it again.

Too fast, he turned on his heel and ran for the doorway, leaving yet another muddy trail across the immaculate floor. A short while later, the outer door was flung open but not shut. A dog snarled in a gateway and fell silent.

Pantera absorbed himself wringing out his soiled sleeve over the bowl. Seneca glared at him, waiting.

‘What?’ Pantera asked, without raising his head.

‘Did you think to stop him loving you?’ Seneca threw up his hands. ‘You won’t do it with harsh words alone.’

Pantera abandoned the effort to clean his sleeve. Wandering over to the table, he picked at a small curl of pickled herring the size of a hazelnut and popped it in his mouth, chewing reflectively.

‘He doesn’t love me,’ he said. ‘He’s looking for a man he can respect who will take the place of the father he despises. His father was a warrior. When he finds I was the same in Britain, he will despise me too.’

Seneca laughed bluntly. ‘If you think that, then five years among the Dumnonii has made you a fool, for you were not one when you left Rome. Take him in, what harm is there? If you treat him well, he’ll work for you with all his heart.’

‘The spymaster’s philosophy?’ Pantera’s face hardened. ‘Take the boy and you can mould the man?’

‘I didn’t take you,’ Seneca said. ‘I never touched you, in fact. You’d have killed me if I’d tried.’ And still might. That fear was always there.

‘I was never a whore.’

‘No, but you would have been within a month if I hadn’t taken you in. You couldn’t have gone on thieving for ever.’

‘You may choose to believe so.’ Pantera ate an olive, wiping his lips neatly afterwards with the edge of his sleeve. ‘But we were talking of Math, who is both a whore and a thief and successful at both. He needs no help from me.’

‘You think? For all his bravado, that boy’s been plying his trade for less than six months and he’ll die a whore’s death within the year, as well you know. With a face like that, and the spirit to match, it’s only a matter of time before he’s taken by someone who finds pleasure in another’s pain — and when he fights back, he’ll die.’

Seneca stopped. Always before, he had kept his composure while others ranted around him. His final words rang in a leaden silence.

‘None the less, I prefer to leave him to his own fortunes,’ Pantera said, coldly. ‘I have one child’s death on my conscience. You’ll forgive me if I choose not to add another.’

He was already leaving. ‘Wait!’ Seneca snatched at his sleeve. ‘What do you know of the Phoenix Year?’

Pantera stared down at the offending fingers distastefully. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Nero will ask you of it tomorrow. If he does — when he does — will you find a way to see me that Akakios cannot follow? There’s a man you should meet who is asking the same question and has more of the answers.’

‘If I’m alive, I’ll give it thought.’

Twisting out of Seneca’s grip, Pantera followed Math’s line of muddy footprints towards the door.