Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Fifty-Five

I’ll hunt Saulos and when I find him I’ll kill him.

Pantera had meant what he said, and still did. But how do you find one man in a city of thousands? How do you find him when that city is on fire, with the wind driving the blaze ever inland, ever higher, ever hotter?

He turned a slow circle with his eyes half shut, blurring his vision, working to remember each time he had seen Saulos, from the mewling, stammering idiot who had been introduced by Nero in Gaul to the wild-haired, wilder-eyed orator on the podium in the warehouse and all the minor meetings in between. He weighed what little Seneca had told him, and all that he knew of the training the old spymaster had given to the men who worked for him.

And last, because all he knew was too little to be of use, he stopped thinking and let his instinct roam free; the sense, far beyond the other five, tingled at the back of his neck and pulled him northwards, to the Forum Romanum that was the heart of the city.

He opened his eyes. A half-dressed merchant ran past, smoke plaiting his hair. Pantera caught his elbow and wrenched him aside from the herd. ‘Go to the forum,’ he shouted. ‘To the forum! The fire won’t reach there.’

The man struggled free. He wore no shoes nor tunic, only his bath robe, badly wrapped. Deaf to good advice, he cast one frantic look behind and hurled himself back into the flood tide of fleeing humanity.

Pantera took a step back and was surprised to find that Mergus had not yet left.

‘I’ve sent the men to find the prefect,’ Mergus said, lifting one shoulder, as if that had been the plan all along. His face was deeply lined, far more than his age allowed. When he smiled, as he did now, it creased his features, obliquely. ‘I thought you might want help hunting your mad arsonist.’

It was tempting. And impossible. ‘Mergus, no.’ Pantera gripped the smaller man’s arm. ‘Calpurnius will need you to organize the defence against the fire. And if he dies, you’ll need to do everything you can to keep yourself and your men safe from the tribune of the second. He’s Saulos’ man, without a doubt. He’ll kill you if he gets the chance. Go now. I’ll meet you in the forum when I’m done.’

Mergus eyed him flatly. ‘This is too personal to accept help?’

That was too close to the truth. Pantera said, ‘One man alone can become part of the crowd. Two together can’t, particularly when one of them is a centurion of the Watch. I can do this better on my own.’

‘I’ll wager Saulos is waiting for you to do just that.’ Mergus gave the salute the legions had used in Britain. ‘Good luck. Against that one, you’ll need it.’

The first cohort of the Watch had control of the Forum Romanum, centre of Rome’s law, of its commerce, of its worship.

All down the side of the Via Sacra, past the full and ancient length of the Temple of the Vestals, men replicated the human bucket-chain they had practised at Pantera’s command. In the dark now, with the panicked crowds already growing thick, the rope and tar buckets passed effortlessly from hand to swinging hand on a single note from the whistle. The bath-house sizzle of hot steam was competing with the stench of smoke and burning flesh. In places, the water chains were winning. In other places, clearly not.

Pantera spotted one of Mergus’ men ahead in the crowd and, putting his hands to his mouth, shouted, ‘The Basilica Julia needs a pump machine!’

The man spun, pointing. ‘Behind you!’

Pantera leapt out of the way just in time.

‘ Make way! Make way! ’

The crowd ripped apart to let through a team of blinkered, smoke-shy horses dragging a water cart. It cannoned past Pantera and slid to a halt by the Basilica Julia, where flames twenty feet high were lashing at the stone.

Vast, half naked, with his helmet jammed on his head as an afterthought, Libo rode at the head of the engine. He saw Pantera and waved a greeting even as he directed his men towards a water tank set at ground level.

Another stream of commands saw a siphon from the back of his cart lowered into the tank and four uniformed watchmen set themselves to pumping the handles. Two further men held the nozzle. Water drizzled from the mouth like the poor end of a piss.

Astonishingly — insanely — a crowd gathered to watch, growing larger with every stroke of the pump. Having tried to push through them and failed, Pantera turned back, shouting, ‘Hose the crowd!’

Libo had jumped down and was working with the men at the water tank, too far away to hear. The two watchmen holding the hose stared at him and did nothing. A lifetime’s training had taught them to take orders from their aquarius, not from a lame man with a crooked right shoulder wearing a torn and filthy tunic who lacked even the most basic symbols of rank.

Pantera drew a fresh breath. ‘Hose the crowd, damn you! Make them wet. Save them from the fire. It’ll take two strokes of the pump. Then you can go back to keeping Caesar’s basilica and all the forums safe. Do it! Nero will know of it if you let the people burn for want of a little water.’

The emperor’s name worked magic. The two men turned the hose on to the crowd just as the full power of the pump engine began to bite. A fountain’s spit of water arced up, over and down, wetly. Children screamed, but only briefly. Their parents had heard Pantera and understood what he was doing for them. Someone somewhere roused a cheer.

The crowd loosened and Pantera broke his way through. Reaching the far side, he called out, ‘Move on! Get to the Field of Mars! Safety beckons at the Field of Mars!’

When he began to run, men and women from the crowd ran with him. Behind them, the watchmen at the pump machine turned their hoses on the basilica.

Pantera pushed on. He was soaked to the skin and glad to be so; too soon his tunic felt warm again and he smelled of steam more than smoke.

At the head of the Via Sacra, he stopped a moment and turned a circle, seeking Saulos, or signs of Saulos or thoughts of Saulos; anything that might bring them together.

A wash of flame lit the sky behind him, casting shadows forward, and there, to the east, he caught a clear sight of the gilded statue of Augustus, perched atop his own forum, which housed the Temple of Mars Ultor where all Rome’s wars were begun.

To lose the seat of Mars was to lose Rome’s soul. Even after the light died away and smoke shrouded the city anew, Pantera’s instinct drew him there: the eleventh sense that thought now as Saulos thought, and hated as he hated; that sought, above all else, to rip the beating heart from Rome’s corpse.

He had told Mergus that a single man could progress faster and more secretly than two and it was true, but here he was without family, which set him apart from the rest. He ran on, skirting the bucket chains and the men who commanded them. Rounding a corner, he saw the Temple of Minerva directly in front of him and, sitting on the bottom step below the colonnades, a copper-haired boy of around ten years old, holding tight to a big tan-coloured hound bitch at his one side and a girl of no more than three years at his other.

‘Are you lost?’ Pantera crouched down, offering his hand to the hound to sniff. It whined and licked a graze on his wrist, where the skin had been scraped off in the warehouse fight. He addressed his question only to the boy. The girl had stuffed the back of her hand in her mouth and was staring at him with pebble-wide eyes.

‘Father told me to find a safe place.’ The boy had the crystal-pure voice of a singer. ‘He said he’d find us after the fire.’

‘You’ve done well, then, to find this place. Minerva always protects the young. But I think the Forum of Augustus might be safer. The Temple of Mars Ultor is there.’

‘Thank you, but we are content to remain here.’

The boy turned his head away, signalling to anyone of good breeding that the conversation was closed. Lit by the coming fire, the side of his face shone wetly from the corner of his eye to his chin. His cheeks were thickly freckled and his hair shimmered in a particular shade of reddish blond that Pantera had most recently seen beneath an aquarius’ helmet.

‘Is your father Marcus Tullius Libo, aquarius to the first century, first cohort of the Watch, serving under Centurion Mergus?’ he asked.

The boy’s eyes flew wide.

‘I just left him.’ Pantera waved a hand back into the chaos. ‘He’s working hard to save the Basilica Julia. I’m sure he’ll succeed and then come to find you, but even so you’d be better waiting at the Forum Augusta. Minerva is good to children, but Mars Ultor and Venus support the soldiers and the sons of soldiers. I could escort you both, if you wish?’

‘How do you know my father?’ The boy gazed up at Pantera, wanting to believe.

‘We met in Britain during the final battles there. Tonight, he was fighting the fire as bravely as any of the legions fought the Boudica’s warriors.’

That was true, loosely, and every child knew of the bloody war in Britain. To mention it was to lay claim to valour beyond the shabbiness of the night.

The boy stood, smartly. To his sister, he said, ‘We should go to the Forum of Augustus and wait for Father there.’

‘Perhaps you would allow me to carry her?’ Pantera put his hand on his own sternum, where his brand had been burned away. ‘I swear in Mithras’ name that I won’t let her come to harm.’

The bull-god’s name carried more magic even than the Boudica’s. At last, the boy remembered his manners. ‘Her name is Sulla,’ he said. ‘I am Sextus.’

‘I am Sebastos Abdes Pantera, in service to the emperor.’ Pantera crouched down. ‘Sulla, if I lift you on to my shoulders, could you look ahead and tell me when we’re coming to Augustus’ forum? Look for the very tall marble colonnades with the gilded statue of the god Augustus on top of the triangular bit above the columns. He’s pointing east to the rising sun, showing the dawn, which will be the fire’s end.’

Thus, in perfect disguise, with a girl-child balanced on his better shoulder and a boy with a hound at his side, anonymous and unremarked as any father saving his family, he made his way through the chaos towards the long flight of steps that led up to the marbled majesty of Augustus’ monument to himself.

There, he set Sulla down on the lowermost step. She gazed up at him with a wobbly smile. Once, in the naivete of his youth, Pantera would have thought her docile and been grateful for it. Then he became a father and discovered the depths within the very young. Now, he knew that the girl was in shock, but that a thaw was on its way and promised to be spectacular when it arrived. He laid a hand on Sextus’ shoulder.

‘Here would be a good place to wait,’ he said. ‘Your father will see you easily when the fires have died down, and in the meantime there are many officers of the Watch around. When you see an officer who isn’t too busy, go to him and give your names and make sure the prefect learns that you’re here.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Inside the forum. The Temple of Mars is in there. I would speak to the god, and perhaps find a man I have been looking for.’

The crowd thinned suddenly near the top of the steps and, without warning, Pantera stepped from relative shadow into a wall of light cast by a dozen pitch-pine torches. In Augustus’ time, they had been set along the front of the forum to illuminate the gilded statue of the god-emperor that it might draw the eyes of all Rome to his memory throughout the hours of darkness.

In recent years, they had been left unlit except at the Saturnalia, but tonight an officer of the Watch had ordered them lit early on, that the crowds might find their way to the relative safety of the forum. Now, the fire outshone any torches, and nobody in the city looked up except Pantera, who gave one brief salute, for memory’s sake, before he passed beneath the statue’s feet into Augustus’ forum.

He stood still, letting his eyes adjust to the dark and his ears to the tomb-like quiet. Here, the air was dry and light, peppered with incense and expensive tallow, almost free of the stench of roasted flesh that rolled over the men, women and children outside.

It was too dark to see all the way down the broad hallway but Pantera had visited the Temple of Mars in daylight a decade before. A building within a building, gilded and martial at once, it had left him with a greater respect for the gods of war and peace.

His instinct had led him there, and a pair of torches set either side of the doorway drew him on. There was no sign of Saulos, nothing to hear, nothing to see, but Pantera felt as if his skin had been flayed from his body, leaving every nerve screaming. If a mouse had moved within a thirty-foot radius, he would have known it.

Softly, he padded down one side of a long hallway, squeezing between the colonnades and the life-sized bronze statues of Rome’s hallowed past. Here were Cincinnatus, Virgil, Cicero, Pompey, Caesar, Marc Antony. And in the very centre of the hallway, twice as large as life, a second bronze Augustus drove his four-horse chariot single-handed into eternity.

Pantera was squeezing past Claudius Centho, an early dictator of Rome, when he caught the scent of blood beneath the incense.

Fresh blood; in a place with no sign of life.

He turned towards it, easing the knife from the sheath on his left arm. In the stillness, fainter than his own heartbeat, he heard a drop splash on to marble.

The sound came from the centre of the hall, where Augustus’ giant chariot raced into eternity, drawn by the horses of the sun.

There was no cover at all between the colonnades at the sides of the hall and its centre. Pantera dropped to a crouch and made his way across as silently as he might. On the way, he heard three more drops, each one slower than the last. The iron-sweet smell of spilled blood became stronger with each yard crossed.

The chariot’s sculptor had modelled his horses for drama, not speed; all four stood on their hind legs, thrashing. Pantera ducked under the rearmost pair and lay in the clutter of their racing feet looking back down the hall to the stuttering torches that lit the Temple of Mars. They were smoky and unstable, but they sent light enough to burnish the bronze, and to cast in silhouette the clotted strings of blood that hung down from the back of the chariot. Here, the smell was loud and brash as a slaughterhouse.

Barely breathing, Pantera rose up and pressed his ear to the chariot’s shell, moving backwards until he felt a heartbeat that was faster than his own, and heard a quiet, careful breath, slower than his own erratic respiration, punctuated once by a sniff, as of a man whose nose perpetually runs.

Drawing his second knife, he crept to the chariot’s open back.

Gnaeus Calpurnius, lately made prefect of the Watch, lay curled like a sleeping child with his cut throat a dark gash against the burnished bronze. Behind him, nestled in the bowed front of the chariot, shielded by Augustus’ knees, was a living man. Two eyes shone in the torchlight. White teeth glimmered in a grimace, or a smile.

‘Saulos,’ Pantera said aloud, and threw both of his knives.