Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Five

Hannah the healer, known in Coriallum for the calm she brought others, lay alone on her straw pallet staring up at the sky, seeking ways to find peace for herself.

The night was warm, not yet sharpened by autumn frosts. The roof of the healer’s booth was of sewn goatskin, with gaps at the ends of the ridge poles that let her see through to a blinking triad of stars. At the meadow’s end, a wide river ran lazily to the sea, hushing a lullaby for the lost of the world: for herself, for Math, for half of Coriallum if Ajax was right.

Too far from sleep, with her stomach still full from a celebration feast she did not want and the worry of Math crimping the borders of her mind, she let her eyes rest on the brief triangle of stars she could see. Presently, when her heart was less clamorous, she built the full sky around the three visible stars, setting the constellations in their places, naming them as she had been taught. Then, because she was still awake, lying in a tent in Coriallum, as far from Rome as she could get, she tried to remember instead the alien names and shapes of Gaul in place of those she had learned as a child.

The crocodile and the hippopotamus were gone, and she had no idea what replaced them. Amon, she thought, was still the ram, but Mentu, the bull, sacred to Mithras and Serapis, was named instead as a she-bear and worshipped by the warriors as a pattern on which to mould their own courage.

She had seen bears only in the market at Alexandria, sorry beasts chained through the nose and made to dance, but even in her short time here, the bards of Gaul had woven word-pictures of bears that matched the gods; great-voiced, great-hearted, greatly wise in the ways of beasts and humankind and possessed of a courage and ferocity that no other living thing could match.

She felt it, and then heard it, and then smelled it; richly, warmly dangerous. She was not asleep. In that moment, in fact, she could not have been more sharply awake.

She sat up. The beast padded past a second time.

‘Math? Is that you?’ She whispered it. The beast, unsurprisingly, did not reply.

In all the turbulence and wonder of her life, in the months of training spent in the desert, facing the demons of the inner and outer worlds, in the complex intrigue among the sisterhood in Alexandria, nobody had ever suggested that Hannah was a coward.

She rose and re-belted her tunic and pushed open the flap to her tent. Outside, a fire sent tendrils of sweet smoke to the clouded sky.

For one heart-stopping moment, she saw a bear crouched there, stirring the embers with a stick. Then she blinked, and there was only Ajax, the chariot driver, sitting with his back to her, staring at the new-wrought flames.

A smell of wetness came from him, of clean, cold river water. His body dripped star-silver dew. His head shone slick where his hair would have been had he not shaved it every morning. The gaping hole that was all that remained of his right ear was starkly black. He had not yet noticed her presence, so lost was he in the fire’s red heart.

She sank to a crouch, resting her weight on her heels, watching the lift and fall of his breathing. She saw the moment when he became aware of her presence and the moment after it, when he decided not to move. Some time later, when it was clear he wasn’t going to speak, she said quietly, ‘Do you never sleep?’

She saw the corner of his mouth twitch. ‘As much as you, it seems.’ He did move then; a small motion of his hand that invited her to join him at his fire, which had been her fire first.

She took her place at his right hand. ‘I thought I heard a bear,’ she said, ‘but it was you.’

He glanced at her sideways. ‘I was blundering more than I thought,’ he murmured. ‘I apologize.’

He had, in fact, been quite astonishingly quiet. They both knew that.

She said, ‘Was it the river caused your clumsiness? Did your gods speak to you there?’

He looked at her directly then, not a thing he did often. In daylight, his eyes were a curious pale amber, entirely at odds with the solid black of his brows. In the firelight, they glowed a rich copper-gold, bright as a hawk’s.

‘Am I still wet?’ he asked.

‘That, and you smell of river water.’ Hannah nodded to the barn. ‘I’ve been with Math, who has a new friend and has been learning to infer things from scent. Apparently one’s hair smells of horse piss if one stays too long in the stables.’

‘Good that I have no hair, then.’ Ajax laughed softly, and sobered. ‘Is Math all right?’

Hannah shrugged. ‘He has someone new who pays him in silver. And he’s… different, less petulant.’

‘That would make a pleasant change.’

Ajax smoothed his hand over his naked scalp. Watching him, Hannah realized she had no idea how old he was, only that he was younger than she had first thought, closer to her own age, in fact, and that the scars on his back and shoulders were not, as she had imagined, purely from falls taken racing.

It was a strange mistake to have made. Caught at an angle by the firelight, his scars were quite clearly layered, set years apart, and those at the top, the most recent, carried the savage incoherence of battle.

Beneath them, less chaotically, ran the ripped lines of the flail and beneath those, straighter yet, were splayed the regular cuts of ritual; a warrior ritual in all probability, although she had not heard of such things taking place among the Greeks since before the time of Alexander. She wanted to ask how he had come by them, but didn’t know how.

‘Did the river tell you about the race tomorrow?’ she asked instead.

‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘I asked for help. Whether the request is granted remains to be seen. One can never fully know.’ His eyes returned to the flames a while, listening to the crack of green wood burning. ‘Do you have gods?’ he asked, presently.

That stole her breath. Such a question wasn’t asked of semi-strangers, here on the edges of the world, where Nero proclaimed himself divine and it was a capital offence not to worship him; where the dreamers of Britain, so recently vanquished, were said to visit and men still held to the old gods of moon and water and listened to what they said.

Ajax waited, looking into his fire. His face showed only polite enquiry. Unlike the Gauls, unlike any Greeks she had met, he was not a man to write his thoughts across his face.

‘My father had a god,’ Hannah said, surprising herself, ‘and died for it at Rome’s hand. After his death, my mother left her two sons and went to Alexandria. I was born there six months later. In Alexandria, I learned…’

On a whim, she looked up. Tents huddled about, but none too near, and the lines of the horse stalls were silent; nobody was close enough to hear. She made a decision and hoped she would not regret it.

‘What do you know of the Sibylline sisters?’ she asked.

Ajax bit the edge of his thumb, considering. ‘I know they’re Egyptian by habit if not by birth and that the Romans are in awe of them as they are of no other women, possibly even afraid of them. Apart from that, I know only that they are respected across the empire as oracles and prophets, that they live in seclusion, keeping themselves unmarried, and- Ah.’

That last a short, violent out-breath. ‘So will you never marry?’ For all his self-possession, he couldn’t hide the broken hope in his eyes.

The fire burned less fiercely than it had done. Hannah leaned forward and busied herself laying on more wood. ‘I’m not one of the sisters,’ she said. ‘My mother was, but she married my father in fulfilment of a prophecy. After his death, she came back. I was raised among them, and trained at their expense. I did-’

‘Find love among them?’

She had not thought he might read her as she read him. With a hazel twig, she stirred the fire. Sparks danced amid drifting ash. Memories returned, and were banished, as she always banished them. ‘The rashness of youth,’ she said reflectively, ‘is exceptional only in its self-belief.’

His gaze rested on her face. ‘I am at the behest of an oracle of sorts,’ he said at last. ‘My sister dreamed that I would come here, and perhaps return home in the high summer with a brother I had thought lost.’

‘Perhaps?’

‘If I find him. If he lives through what is coming. If he chooses to come back with me. It must be his choice, freely made.’ Ajax rose smoothly, with the grace of his professions. ‘But first, we must win a race, and for that we must sleep. Even you, I think? The team would be sorely pressed without its healer.’

‘You go.’ Hannah did not stand. ‘I’ll come later when the fire’s less.’

He swept her a salute she didn’t recognize and was gone, treading soundless across the grass.

Hannah stared at the space where he had been and thought of choices freely made, of oracles and dreams and the duties they imposed, of family and friends, of past, present and future and knew herself only at a crossroads, with no idea at all of which route to take.