Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Fifty-Three

Tiers of beeswax candles blazed on both sides of Nero’s bed, sweetening the night air. Two polished silver mirrors on either wall took the dancing lights and multiplied them back and forth until Math’s eyes hurt.

He was trying not to frown, which was harder than he might have expected, but gave him something to concentrate on that wasn’t the part-naked Nero, lying breadthways across the wine-red silk with his head by Math’s knee and his feet dangling over the far edge of the bed.

After a day’s intimate attendance, the slaves had finally been banished. Left alone, Nero was smiling up at the Bacchus painted on the ceiling, fingering his favourite lyre. He played better than he sang.

A flagon of Falernian lay empty by the bed and Math had drunk none of it. Nero had not been fully sober since early afternoon and now he was cheerfully and comprehensively drunk.

If you ever let the emperor become familiar, if you ever come to see him intimately, in all the contortions and stupidity of a man consumed by his desires, then you will have to die.

Pantera had said that in Gaul, and Math had believed it. Now, he hoped the spy was wrong and had some basis for his optimism. If rumour was even half correct, the Empress Poppaea had seen Nero in the ‘contortions of desires’ long before they were married, and she wasn’t dead yet, and some of the slave-boys might also have survived a night in this room, on this silk-ridden bed, caught between the silvered mirrors and the honey-scented candles. Math thought hard about who might have been here before him, in order not to think of Constantin. Or Ajax.

Behind the darkness of his closed lids, Math saw Ajax, stripped of his skin, and Constantin, battered to death, and a baker, lying out in the sun with He stopped. He was a street whore. He knew exactly how important it was to seem whole, clean, healthy, humble and, above all, cheerful, in the company of a client; the more powerful the client, the more important it was to be serene.

With an effort, he set Ajax behind a bulwark in his mind and worked on keeping it solid and impregnable. Ajax had said that both their lives depended on his behaviour, and while intimacy with the emperor might yet mean certain death, Math wanted to believe that if he did all that was required of him, Ajax might be allowed to live afterwards.

The emperor stopped playing and rolled on his side. He raised his gaze to meet Math’s. ‘What would you like?’

‘Lord?’

‘We wish to play music for you. What would cheer your heart?’

A month living in the palace had taught Math more of courtly ways than the whole six months in Alexandria. Smoothly, he said, ‘My knowledge of music is too narrow to make a considered choice, lord. Perhaps something that Rhemaxos played in Alexandria? That was a good time.’

‘A good choice.’ Nero smiled, remembering. ‘He played the Air of Perseus while we were in the baths, as we remember. It’s difficult, and more suited to the kithara, but we shall assay it now.’

The emperor’s fingers were thick and stubby, set about with a profusion of rings in silver, jet, copper, gold and coral. Softened by the candlelight, they became a blur of glistening colour, dancing across the strings. Wine had lubricated them just enough to enable him, in fact, to play quite well.

Perseus slew the Gorgon in a crash of candle-shaking chords. In the quiet afterwards, Nero said, ‘You will disrobe.’

‘Yes, lord.’

Nero was still playing when Math finished; even allowing for his hurt shoulder, it hadn’t taken long. Not knowing what else to do, he slid under the wine-red silk. There was a trick to this that he had learned a long time ago, which was to concentrate only on the room, so that whoever else was in it might seem distant and small.

Perversely, the brightness of the light here made it easier. And even after nearly a month in the palace, he had never experienced silk of quite this quality before.

Pinching a thick loop, he let it slip through his fingers. Abruptly, he thought of Hannah’s hair and so of Hannah and so, unforgivably, of Ajax. Tears pricked the corners of his eyes. He dared not wipe them away; the mirrors showed everything and Nero’s eyes rested on him, twice reflected.

The music sank to its thoughtful end.

‘Do you wish to be a father?’ Nero asked, in the silence that followed.

‘Lord? I’m too young to marry.’

‘But when you’re older, would you want that? Would you wish to sire a child?’

They were stepping round a question nobody had ever asked Math before. In panic, he reached for an answer that might suffice. ‘Alexander, the great god-king of Macedon, fathered a child on Roxanne although he loved Hephaistion. It was his duty, so he did it.’

The emperor thumbed his lyre. Three notes sprayed across the gulf between them. His foot, by chance, came to rest on Math’s calf.

‘Who amongst the Gauls,’ he asked, ‘relayed to you the tales of Alexander?’

‘My father did, lord.’ Math’s hands were sweating. Black marks smeared the silk where he had gripped it. Somewhere distant, he heard, or felt, the beginnings of a vibration that was the earth, shaking. He wanted to believe it was the earth, and not Ajax held somewhere under torture, shaking the foundations of the palace in his torment.

Thinking of his father, who was safely dead, he said, ‘He told me Gaulish tales too, but he said we were becoming Roman and so I should know the heart of Rome. Every Roman of worth strives to model himself on Alexander.’

‘He said that?’

‘He did, lord.’ Inspired, Math remembered something Pantera had told him on the night of the fire. ‘He was proud of me. It’s good for a man to have a child to come after, to bear his name. I am proud to be my father’s son. Who else has the same pride, and carries the same love as a father for his son, and the son for his father?’

Math surprised himself. Evidently, he surprised Nero, too. After a moment’s pause the emperor set his lyre against the wall, then rolled over on the bed until his head came level with Math’s hip.

His breath was warm and smelled of wine. His drink-fuddled eyes were damp.

‘Your father was a wise man. We could wish…’ With a flick of his tongue, Nero licked away a tear that had dribbled to the corner of his mouth. ‘To have a father’s pride, and to feel it in return, that would be something remarkable. I would have liked to have met your father.’

Another line crossed. When Nero ceased to be ‘we’ and ‘us’ and became ‘I’ and ‘me’, there was no turning back.

Math unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth as Nero reached out and gripped his ankle. It was not an accidental move; Ajax had done the same in the mornings, to wake Math up. Nero lifted his gaze. His eyes were more focused now, and they asked a question.

Answering it, Math said, ‘My father is dead, but his place is taken by Ajax now, who is as a brother to me.’

‘A brother?’

‘Or perhaps a second father.’

Most emphatically not a lover, not a rival, not worthy of imperial envy or jealousy. Math made all of these things clear in his voice.

Satisfied, Nero’s gaze came away from Math’s face and drifted downwards. His hand followed more slowly where his eyes led.

Math made himself breathe. The bed shook in a steady rhythm. He did not think he was shivering, but he was no longer sure. With his eyes on the brilliant, much-reflected candles, he prayed to the spirit of his dead father for fortitude and courage and the ability to forget come morning.

Distantly, as through a fog, he heard Nero, suddenly peevish, say, ‘Can you hear a galloping horse?’