Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Head down, legs pumping, Pantera sprinted up the marble hallway towards the door.

Saulos came after, fast, hard, unhurt. Pantera’s knives had flown true, striking the place where his body should have been, but they bounced off a shield that had been covered by Calpurnius’ cloak so that in the dark it had looked like a torso.

Instinct made Pantera jink sideways. A knife clattered on the floor where he had been. He grabbed and missed and it skittered forward out of reach; he had no weapons left and Saulos had them all.

He ran on. The door was still thirty paces away; too far. He cannoned sideways again, curling an arm round Virgil, pushing the bronze off its plinth to crash forward on the marble. Behind him, Saulos laughed and leapt over the debris. A second knife cut the air between them.

‘You should have stayed in Britain.’ Saulos’ voice clattered among the colonnades, not far behind. ‘You were safe there.’

‘Safe? I was crucified.’

Saulos barked a laugh. ‘Then at least you know what’s coming. I’m not going to kill you. The tribune of the second can do that, as one of his first acts as prefect. I shall merely provide proof that you killed Calpurnius before I leave Rome.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Jerusalem. You read the prophecy. That, too, must fall. Stop hiding, damn you!’

Saulos had discovered the curse of the statues: that every one cast the life-sized shadow of a man. Pantera stood behind Anthony, and then Pompey, and then Crassus. The closer he came to the door, the brighter became the light, the stronger the shadows.

‘What about Hannah? Will you abandon your love so easily?’ Pantera sent the words back to bounce on the statues far behind. ‘Saulos? You’ve gone quiet. I thought you loved Hannah. Was I wrong?’

Talking covered the soft sounds of his movement as he undid his belt and wound one end round his hand. The pouch came free. Nero’s ring was inside, nestled in the hank of wool that once more kept his coins silent.

From the hallway, Saulos’ voice came brittle and cold. ‘Hannah is no longer your concern. We shall find her before the night’s out.’

‘We?’ Given more time, Pantera could have played Saulos as the emperor played his lute: badly, but well enough to hear the tune. He had no time. He hefted his pouch in one hand, testing the weight, letting Saulos’ own voice cover the sound of his movements.

‘The tribune of the second owns the Watch now.’ Saulos was pleased with himself; his voice rang off bronze and marble. ‘His men are already combing the city. They’re outside with orders to arrest you on sight. If you go out on to the steps, you’re a dead man. Surrender to me and we can come to an accommodation.’

Pantera laughed aloud. ‘An accommodation like the one you offered Ptolemy Asul? Do I look like a man who seeks death by hot irons? Seneca said you had no sense of logic. Is that why the Pharisees refused to let you train with them? Because you let your guts rule your head?’

‘They didn’t-’ Saulos spun and threw exactly at the place where Pantera’s pouch had bumped softly against the base of Julius Caesar’s statue. Even before his knife hit Caesar’s bronze chest, Saulos launched himself after it, slicing his sword in a long oval that made the air sing.

Pantera rose behind him, his belt taut between his two hands, and looped it over Saulos’ neck.

‘ No! ’ Saulos jabbed one elbow back with savage force. Pantera jerked away, his hands breaking free from the belt. He used his elbow and then his knee and felt both make satisfying contact.

Writhing, Saulos gouged for his eyes with one hand and with the other stabbed a knife up at his chest.

Pantera threw himself sideways, biting hard on the nearest sight of skin: a thumb. He tasted blood. Saulos screeched. Another man’s shout echoed it, and the sound of running feet in the hall.

Pantera kicked and wrenched away, rolling across the marble. Saulos’ blade hacked at his face, grazing his scalp. A trickle of blood joined the others on his cheek as he rolled free and ran for the wide gape of firelight that was the hall’s door.

Two men ran at him with the fire at their backs: officers, wearing the double carnelian flash of the treacherous second cohort. They converged on him from either side, shouting orders to stop, to surrender, to lie down if he valued his life. Pantera ducked between them, so that, turning, they crashed into each other in a clamour of dented armour.

He reached the doorway and the flood of light, with the dazzling Augustus above. Behind, the officers and Saulos were running together in the last yards of the hallway.

‘Murder!’ Pantera hurtled down the stairs zig-zagging like a hare, leaping over sleeping children and their white-faced, silent parents. He heard Saulos call his name and put his hands to his mouth to shout again, ‘Murderers! Treason! The prefect is-’

Saulos’ arm slammed across his mouth, silencing him. His hand reached for Pantera’s hair, dragging his head back, exposing his throat to the light, to his slashing blade.

Pantera fought back by instinct, as he had in his childhood in the stews of Jerusalem, in his youth in the ghettos of Alexandria, in his adulthood in the hell of a torture room in Britain. There wasn’t a single dirty move he hadn’t practised then or that he didn’t use now, gouging, biting, kicking, striking. By sheer weight of sustained attack, he got his fingers on Saulos’ knife hand, and twisted it in and round and down, aiming for the sweet spot to the left of his breastbone where ‘Stop!’ Someone kicked his leg. It wasn’t Saulos. Pantera pressed on. The same booted foot kicked him in the kidneys, harder.

He screamed. Pain crashed over him. Vomiting, he dropped the knife.

A hand drew his head back. The air sang to the sound of a blade.

‘No! He must live! He knows where Hannah is.’ The singing ceased. The pain did not.

Pantera opened one eye; the other was glued shut with his own blood. Saulos was kneeling on the steps less than a yard away, gasping as if he had run the length of Rome. His face was bleeding from a cut along his cheek. His eyes burned with a flat hate. The sword that had come so close to killing Pantera was held by the ox-broad tribune of the second cohort.

Pantera moved his gaze to meet the tribune’s. He scrabbled for the cord at his neck, but couldn’t reach it. ‘I hold… emperor’s seal. You owe… fealty.’

The tribune laughed. Saulos pushed himself up and came to stand over Pantera, wiping blood from his nose with the back of his hand. ‘He owes fealty to a higher power than a golden seal.’ More loudly, for the benefit of the listening crowd, he said, ‘You killed Calpurnius, the prefect. I will testify.’

The crowd knew Calpurnius. Their voices sighed in the night.

‘Will you testify before the emperor?’ asked the tribune.

‘If I must.’

‘You must. He’s here now. No other man is permitted to blow the war horn in the city of Rome.’

Pantera closed his eyes. He heard the horn sound once, and then again. And he heard the sound of hoofbeats, individual as a signature, and knew that Math had brought Nero to Rome.