Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Forty-Six

‘Math?’

It was the middle of the afternoon and Math was asleep, as his physician directed. He had been ordered not to wake until dusk.

He eased his eyes open a fraction and closed them against the sun’s brilliance. It definitely wasn’t dusk, but Constantin tapped his collar bone in their private signal that meant it was safe to rise. ‘Math, you must wake up.’ He fumbled, lost in a sea of white silk.

If his health had been predicated on the luxury around him, Math would have been immortal by now. The bed was crafted from cedar and ebony, the headboard carved to show hunting scenes in the Egyptian fashion, with flat-faced archers and gem-collared leopards coursing lean, long-necked deer.

Beyond its foot, the afternoon sun shone in from Nero’s garden to glance brilliantly off a polished bronze war shield placed artfully on a pedestal for just that purpose. Nero liked his rooms to be brightly lit at all times of day and night; he hated darkness.

Math, by contrast, had found that since the accident in Alexandria he couldn’t bear bright light. Always, when he woke in the afternoons, he kept his eyes half shut against the shield’s glare. It helped ease the tenderness in his head, although it did nothing to stop his ribs hurting, particularly now, when Constantin was being unaccountably clumsy.

Always before the boy’s touch had been deftly sensuous, but not today. Math caught his breath and hissed it out slowly as he came to sitting.

Having got him upright, Constantin stepped back, which was more unusual still. Belatedly remembering what Pantera had taught him, Math listened to his surroundings before he opened his eyes any further.

Clearly, he was still in his sleeping chamber in Caesar’s palace: the gilded, marbled, perfumed bower set at the sea’s edge thirty miles from Rome. Listening to the hush of an ebbing tide, the peep of wading birds and the gulls screaming over the fishing boats returning to the harbour, Math decided it was mid-afternoon, another departure from the normal, but there was more, if he could only find out what it was.

On the physician’s orders, Constantin had bathed him in rosewater that morning and the faint scent covered the harsher, cleaner scent of the sea. But Math could also smell a tinge of oiled iron, garlic and leather. And behind the sea’s song, he heard the faint chink of mail and the creak of boots.

‘Math?’

Math jerked more upright. Ajax was there, in the palace, from which Nero’s hatred had banished him, and wearing chain mail — except that couldn’t happen. Nero wouldn’t allow it.

‘Math. Will you open your eyes now? Please.’

Ajax was being patient, which was a lot more frightening than when he was angry, in the way that falling off a horse was never quite as bad as the fear that came before it.

Math turned his head away from the shield’s glare and opened his eyes a fraction more.

And then wide.

Ajax was in the middle of the room, naked, flanked on either side by two of the giant Germanic guards. Their knives jutted loosely under his chin, drawing paired straggles of blood, but it was his eyes that caught Math; in their pale amber light burned a rage that caught his breath.

‘Ajax?’ Math said softly.

‘You need to dress. The emperor wishes to see you. Crystal will help.’

‘Cryst-’

Math’s head jerked round. And so he found that Constantin was not Constantin, but a younger, clumsier boy, who lacked Constantin’s long hair and ready smile. Who was, in fact, quite clearly terrified.

But he had tapped Math’s collar bone in a way only two people in the world had known.

‘Where’s Constantin?’ Math asked.

The boy who was Constantin’s replacement shook his head. He could have been his younger brother, but Constantin’s eyes had been a source of constant joy and this boy’s held only grief.

A single tear damped one black cheek. Wiping it away, Crystal thrust forward a bundle of clothing; a chiton in the Greek style, with keyed patterns at hem and neck, a copper belt inlaid with garnets and sapphires, subtle by Nero’s standards.

The metal shimmered and chimed as the shaking boy held it out. Constantin was dead, or dying; better dead. Ajax was held prisoner. And the belt buckle was a gift from Nero.

Math had been in the palace long enough to know that showing terror was a strategic catastrophe. Besides, if Ajax could keep calm with two knives at his throat, then Math could do at least as well.

He forced a smile. ‘Why are you called Crystal?’ he asked.

Either Crystal didn’t know palace intrigue well enough to smile back, or he was too scared. ‘The lord named me for his favourite horse,’ he said.

Nero’s favourite horse was an ageing grey mare. Math decided not to point this out. ‘It’s a good name,’ he offered. ‘He must favour you.’

‘He does,’ said Ajax crisply. ‘It’s why he’s sent him to wake you.’

Math’s smile fell away. Crystal held out the chiton as if it burned his hands. ‘You will dress? Please?’

‘Of course. I’ll-’

‘Don’t lift your arms too high,’ Ajax said helpfully, and then, as if they were alone and free to gossip, ‘Poros has gone into Rome to oversee arrangements for the race at the month’s end. He sends you his regards and best wishes for your recovery. You should let Crystal fix the belt. Your shoulder isn’t up to it yet although the physician says your mind is well now, which is good. We all rejoice.’

Math tried not to gape. Ajax had always been good at slipping in the vital information among a clutter of useless gossip. On this occasion, what mattered was that Poros had gone, because Poros’ bluff good manners had been a restraint on Nero. Math shuddered, suddenly cold.

Crystal was lifting his arms, sliding the chiton over his head. Math was not Ajax, to go naked into battle. He took a shallow breath and pushed his hands ahead of himself and dived in through the tunic’s mouth, wriggling out the other side with as little hurt to his ribs as he could manage.

As he emerged, Crystal’s shaking hands held out the belt. ‘My lord

…’

Math had never been ‘my lord’ to Constantin. He was about to correct the boy when he caught sight of Ajax, who had bowed his head. Ajax never, ever bowed, except…

‘Put on the belt,’ said Nero’s voice from behind him. Crystal stepped back, forcing his hand into his mouth. Math’s hair sprang stiff on his scalp.

‘Lord…’

Nero stood in the open space between the sun-shield and the door, eyeing him as a butcher eyes a fattened goose. ‘Our physician informs us that you are fit to engage in discourse. We have been watching you these past two days and we deduce you are well enough now to walk and to talk with us, even if you are perhaps not entirely well enough yet to race a chariot.’

‘To race? My lord, I-’

‘To race.’ Nero nodded to the two Ubian guards who held Ajax. They grabbed his arms and rammed them high up behind his back. Ajax gave one explosive grunt and was silent.

Math sprang forward. Astonishingly, Crystal grabbed for him, but it was the look on Ajax’s face that brought him up short.

‘Ajax?’

Ajax shook his head. It was impossible to think of him as merely a driver now. That guise had been stripped away on the sands of the race track in Alexandria.

He was a warrior, and Nero knew it, who hated men of courage.

The strings of Ajax’s shoulders showed as white glistening ropes under the tension from his hard-held arms. Sweat gathered in fat drops on his flanks. None of it showed on his face. ‘Do as your emperor asks,’ he said. ‘Your life and mine depend upon it.’

‘Your driver speaks the truth. Listen to what he says.’

Nero floated across the floor as if it were the stage of his private theatre. Long ago, someone had told him he looked good walking thus and had been believed.

An antique vase stood on another pedestal, behind the bronze sun-shield. It was half Math’s height and as wide across as the girdle of his hips. The image painted in blue around its brick-red circumference was from the time of Athens’ ascendancy and showed a thin, bearded man grasping a boy’s chin in one hand, and his genitals in the other. Nero had never spoken of it directly to Math, but he had let it be known that he valued it highly, and that it was reckoned to be worth at least as much on the open market as Ajax’s entire chariot team.

Now, the emperor lifted it on the palm of one hand. On the plinth it had been sturdy. Held aloft, it became fragile as the thinnest egg shell.

‘Your driver’s life is in my hand,’ Nero said. ‘It hangs on your good behaviour as much as does your own. If I so choose…’ He tilted his hand. The Greek vase shattered on the marble floor.

In spite of himself, Math flinched. Crystal cried aloud and leapt back. Neither the Ubian guards nor Ajax so much as blinked.

Nero gave a tight smile. ‘Will you behave for me, Math?’