Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Forty-Nine

In fulfilment of his promise to Pantera, Seneca reached Antium with the last of the sunlight on the night Sirius rose over Rome. Tethering his horse away from the road, he crawled in through a forest of thorn bushes until he lay in the dark behind the guardhouse with his head pressed to the earth, watching for an opportunity to act.

Ahead, Nero’s palace complex stretched out for a hundred paces on either side, a vast sprawl of torchlit marble, lying just beneath the horizon. To Seneca’s left, at the southernmost end of the houses and slave rooms, was the open-ended horse barn that housed the emperor’s chariot teams and in which, if he had understood Pantera correctly, Ajax was being held captive.

Guards marched back and forth at both ends. The pair nearest the palace were not soldiers, but the two eldest sons of a particular senator, whose father had paid for the privilege of their being allowed to pace back and forth in the dark. They were bored, and easily distracted. Three pebbles tossed towards the far end of the latrines sent them running down with their swords drawn, each trying not to outpace the other.

Ignoring the stiffness in his hips and a knifing pain in his left knee, Seneca slipped inside the stable block, and slid along the starlit aisle between the stalls. He dodged the snapping teeth of the brassy colt halfway down, and around the time the senator’s sons returned, grumbling, to their posts he reached the last stall on the left, where the oak doors had been reinforced with iron bars set from floor to ceiling. The bolt was padlocked securely in place.

He knew that lock. He knew where its key was kept. He could no more get to it than he could reach for the moon.

He heard a movement inside the stall. A finger scraped on the wall, drawing his attention to a knothole in the wood. He put his mouth to it.

‘It’s Seneca,’ he whispered, ‘sent by Pantera to free you so we can both free Math. I can’t get to the key. I’ll need to find some other way to pick the lock.’

‘Tiberius.’

Pantera stood in the alley leading to Saulos’ warehouse and spoke the code word in a hoarse whisper. A legionary guard eyed him with suspicion. ‘Throw back your hood.’

He did so, tilting his head in the way men do to appease their superiors. At his side, Shimon did the same, although his evident arthritis and stooped back meant the guard did not have a clear look at his face.

On the street behind, three children played noisily with a young hound. Pantera told them to leave. They ignored him. He turned and made shooing motions with his hands. They laughed and the girl stuck her tongue out.

The guard was old enough to have children and grandchildren of his own. Shaking his head, he waved the two men on.

‘Caligula.’

The second guard was half the age of the first. He, too, watched the children. The girl lifted her tunic and exposed herself. She was too young to be a whore and, in any case, the man had orders not to leave his post. He sent Pantera and Shimon on down the alley.

‘Claudius.’

The third guard was near the door, listening to a voice echoing from inside the warehouse. He waved them past and on, and in.

A moth fluttered in through the high vents, sailing on the last of the sun.

Hannah watched it briefly, but her attention was on Saulos, who had poured the wine for the front row of men and was back on the dais, preparing to preach. He was vibrating with a passion that filled the warehouse, so that it was impossible to look anywhere other than at this man standing between the tall, brilliant candlesticks.

For a while, the evening’s quiet was punctuated by the soft percussion of clay on beaten earth as the last of the newly filled beakers was set down on the floor. Then silence enveloped the crowd. Two hundred and thirteen men sat rapt. Their waiting was a palpable thing. If Hannah had not opened the back door, the pressure would have been unbearable.

‘Thank you.’ Saulos’ voice sailed high overhead. ‘You have come here so that, tonight, we can fulfil the new covenant that began with the death of a man thirty years ago. We will speak of that presently, but first I want to remind you of everything we have overcome to reach this place.’

Hannah expected tales of Saulos’ battles with the Sicarioi. What she heard was a litany of names and acts of personal courage that meant nothing to her, but everything to the men who were named.

He had been trained well, asking questions to which his men knew the answers at least in part, but giving them always more than they had before so that amongst the growing nods and murmurs of agreement was always surprise, and indignation, and, soon, a tide of righteous anger that rose to meet Saulos’ own passion as they cheered each rhetorical flourish.

He was not the best Hannah had heard — the priests of Isis and Serapis did the same thing better — but it was more than enough to rouse the warehouse and Hannah felt herself carried high on a wave of urgent, impatient need.

The moth slid down the sun. Unnoticed, it danced in the candlelight behind Saulos’ head. Two hundred and thirteen men stood spellbound, and did not see it.

‘… and so, as we go out to make manifest the prophecy of ancient times, as we strive to bring closer the Kingdom of Heaven, I say that the least of you will ascend to the highest place, that each tongue of flame that you light is a blessing, a kiss from our god even as this is his kiss to us now…’

Breaking off, Saulos cast his arm out, staff-straight, over the crowd and the moth’s giant shadow fell forward, kissing the back of his outstretched hand, his arm, and his brow.

Hannah didn’t know if he had seen the moth before he moved, or had guessed it was there, or somehow had control of it or was simply monumentally lucky; anything seemed possible. What was clear was that every one of the men in the room believed they had just witnessed a sign of divine favour.

They began to kneel. First was Poros, who stood directly in front of the dais, and then another, younger man, and another; and then row upon row, in a susurration of rumpled linen, they were all on their knees, bending forward to touch their brows to the ground.

Saulos prayed over them, in a voice that rose to the rafters and beyond. His fervour lit his face. His voice was a risen flute, played for his god, played by his god, bewitching his men.

He raised his arms to the heavens. His voice sang back and forth across the crowd, naming men and their families, speaking to them personally. Somewhere in the centre, a youth barely in his first beard fainted.

Hannah alone remained standing, at her place in the doorway, between the candlelight and the greying dusk of the courtyard. A small flame of outrage blossomed and grew as Saulos spoke of her father, taking his name in vain. She fanned it until her anger at least matched her fear.

Out of nowhere, she remembered Math’s face in the dark of a Gaulish night as he spoke of his father, and the sooty taste of his forehead as she kissed it, flavoured with smoke and boyish sweat.

‘Math.’ She spoke the name aloud, a final gathering point for her courage.

Nobody heard her. Outside, a cicada chirruped. Inside, the moth bumped against the back wall, lightly. Saulos widened his spread arms, gathering the crowd into his embrace. ‘… in drinking the wine which is his blood and eating the bread which is his flesh, we thereby remember the anointed one, our saviour, who gave himself for our sins, who died on the cross and was resurrected on the third day-’

‘No, he didn’t.’

Her words fell as a hammer’s blow across the crowd. Saulos froze in mid-sentence, his arm beckoning to the sky.

Hannah stepped half a pace sideways, so that the remaining light from the courtyard might cast her shadow across him.

‘He didn’t,’ she said succinctly, ‘and he didn’t and he wasn’t.’