Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Fifty-Two

Soot fell in great, fat flakes, like soft snow. Already — already — the stench of burning flesh pierced the smoke and the screaming panic of men, women, children, mules, pigs, dogs, rats sliced the air.

It was Gaul again, only greater.

Hannah wiped the grime from her face and considered how it would feel to strangle Faustinos, the Iberian water engineer, with her bare hands.

He had been unbearably slow to rouse from his dinner couch. In that first bubble of time, in the agony of explanation, while Pantera selected and saddled a horse from his stable, while Mergus and Shimon together impressed on him the truth of the catastrophe, while Faustinos finally saw the water flooding past his open door and grasped the fact that his trust had been betrayed and that only the emperor could save his beloved aqueducts, while he was physically lifted into the saddle by Pantera and made to repeat his mission and finally, tardily, departed… in that time, the lazy thread of smoke stitching the evening sky had been joined by a dozen others and others and each had broadened to a feather, to a flag, to a tidal wave of flame, sent roaring east towards the heart of the city by the rising wind.

An early tide of refugees flooded with them. The children came first; the street urchins who were always fastest, not sure if it was serious, running backwards, shouting jests and wagers, throwing trophies to each other and to the adults, slaves and beasts who came after them.

They ran over the uneven pavings in front of Faustinos’ meagre house, past the officer and two men of the Watch, past Hannah, Shimon and Pantera.

The fire hadn’t reached here yet; the breached settling tank was keeping the flames and heat at bay. But the smoke came where the fire could not. Hannah swept her arm across her face, pressing the coarse wool of her tunic to her nose and mouth, and even so she could barely breathe. For a moment, she was in Gaul again, standing beneath a ladder, waiting for a man and his son to come down to her.

Pantera’s hand was on her shoulder, as it had been then. He turned her away from the fire. ‘Were you thinking of Math or Caradoc?’ he asked. ‘Or both?’ He was bright again, filling her mind, for all that the soot lay in the lines about his eyes, in savage paint.

‘Both.’ Hannah dropped her tunic from her face. ‘We’ve done all we can here. We need to find Math and Ajax and get out. There are boats running on every tide from Antium. We could be halfway to Gaul by this time tomorrow.’

‘You should go. There are horses here. Shimon will take you.’

‘Not you?’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t leave while Saulos lives. I made him what he is. No one else can stop him now.’

Hannah shook her head. ‘If you’re staying, I’m staying,’ she said.

Pantera’s smile fell away. Briefly, she thought he might argue, but he looked past her to Shimon. The two men’s eyes met as they had done in the warehouse, their silent dialogue too complex for the time it took, too profound for the quiet on their faces.

Pantera broke away first. ‘Shimon will help you get to the coast,’ he said. ‘I will see to Saulos. Seneca’s gone to Antium. If humanly possible, he’ll free Ajax and Math and buy passage for them on a ship. He’ll get you to Britain if I can’t join you.’

‘You weren’t listening. I said-’

‘I was listening. Hannah, the city is burning! There’s nowhere safe.’

‘Yes there is. The goose-keeper’s cottage has survived every fire for the past four centuries. Is Hypatia still there?’

‘She was when we left.’

‘Then I’ll go there. Shimon can go to the coast to meet Ajax and Math.’

‘They have Seneca, they have no need of me.’ Shimon’s old-snow hair was full of soot, turning him young again. When he shook his head, black flakes flew around them. ‘Where you go, I go. I owe it to your father. No-’ He held up a hand, forestalling Pantera. ‘We have as much right to stay as you do. We’ll wait at the goose-keeper’s house until dawn. Send us word when you can. If we hear nothing, we will assume you dead. In which case, I give you my word that I will protect Hannah with my life.’

Pantera’s face was unreadable. The sky behind him was the perfect, crystalline blue of night-fall; the smoke had not reached there yet. His cheeks were burnished orange from the fire. His hair, lit from above, glowed gold as a Gaul’s.

Hannah saw him nod to himself; then, amid the smoke and the mayhem, he lifted her hand. She felt the grit on his palm, and the hard rhythm of his pulse and the slip of saddle oil from Faustinos’ harness.

He took Shimon’s hand too, joining them in a triangle. ‘I’ll hunt Saulos and when I find him I’ll kill him. Tomorrow morning we’ll leave here, whether the fire is out or not. Nero can find himself another spy.’ Pantera kissed the back of Hannah’s hand and let it fall. Shimon’s, he gripped a moment longer. ‘Take care of each other.’