Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Sixty-Four

The only route in to find Hannah was over the wall. To that end, Seneca gave him a leg up. Feeling for handholds, he discovered that the top was not covered in spikes, as he had feared it might be.

On the far side, he dangled for a moment, hanging by his hands. He had no idea how far he was from the ground. On a prayer, he let go. The fall was just far enough to jar his ankles, but not so far as to break them. He landed hard on the paved path below, rolled a little and pushed himself up to standing.

The gardens were not as fire-bright as the street outside; the same walls of the neighbouring houses that kept the meadow safe also shaded it from the flames. Neither were the moon and stars any use for light; the entire sky was blurred to bloody mess by the smoke.

He stood still, breathing the cleaner air. Had he been asked earlier in the day — by Seneca, say, or Math — he would have said he knew exactly, to the nearest heartbeat, the limits of his own exhaustion; that he had plumbed his own depths so often that he knew when it was impossible to push himself further.

The night had proved him clearly wrong; several times he had thought he must stop and rest, and had found the necessary reserves to continue. In the cold light of sanity, he permitted himself the honest appraisal that climbing the wall had been a push too far.

He thought he had enough left to walk to the cottage, and perhaps lie down. Except that he had to find Hannah first. If she was alive. If the Watch hadn’t slaughtered her out of hand.

He thought he should know if she were dead. He wasn’t certain of it.

He walked slowly towards the cottage, feeling the warm grass underfoot, then cool paving stones and more grass and He spun towards the dark, drew the knife that he had carried through the night, jerked his arm back to throw…

And let it down again.

I am too tired for this.

He blinked the sweat from his eyes and still he couldn’t tell if the shape coming at him across the meadow was a ghost from his past, or the first of the night’s dead come to find him.

The ghost stopped in the centre of the meadow.

‘Ajax? Ajax of Athens?’

Hannah’s voice. Her living voice. He sank to his knees on the hot, cindered grass.

‘Ajax?’ She flowed across the grass, jerkily.

Something more painful than loss blocked his throat. He tried to speak her name and it came out as a wordless croak of the kind he had heard too often through the night from inside burning buildings.

Rising, he met her coming down to him. They stumbled together to kneel on the grass.

Pantera said, ‘Not Ajax. I’m sorry.’

Light fingers strayed over his face, his eyes, his hair, feeling things he could not see. Her face was almost dizzily happy. He didn’t understand why.

She said, ‘Don’t be sorry. Please, please don’t be sorry. At least one prayer this night is answered. But you’re weeping. Who’s died? Is it Math?’

‘No. Math’s well.’ He caught his breath and coughed and said, ‘You. I thought you were dead. Not true. Obviously.’ And then she was kissing his neck over and over, saying his name. Her hands wrapped his body, her fingers dug in tight. Suddenly, entirely unexpectedly, probably hopelessly, he wanted other things, too, and wasn’t sure how to ask.

He found her chin and brow by feel, framing her with his hands. As his eyes cleared of tears and smoke, he found her face by sight, and he was able to kiss her cleanly, on the cheek, in greeting, in offering, asking the question he dared not speak aloud.

‘I’m covered in ash,’ he said, and he was laughing now, but only a little, and then he had to stop because she had found him at last, lip to lip, nose to nose, brow to brow, and her answer left him no air to breathe, or mind to think, or heart to grieve.

He felt her fingers lock in his hair, drawing his head back. ‘I think that’s just as well. If you weren’t, you’d be able to tell that I’d just spent part of the night hidden in the goose-house.’

He leaned back a little, so he could see her properly, and make sense of the smears on her arms.

‘The Watch took Shimon and Hypatia,’ she said.

‘I know. Mergus has gone after them. He has Nero’s ring. If they can be saved, he’ll do it.’ And then, closing his eyes, ‘Saulos was outside.’

‘Is he dead?’

‘He might be by now. Ajax has gone after him. Either one of us could have come over the wall to you. I was here first, so he chose to let me.’

This time he could not read her face, only that whatever warred within her was complex.

‘I’m sorry. If you’d have preferred-’

Her fingers stopped his mouth. ‘Tell me Saulos won’t kill him?’

‘He won’t kill him. He might escape, but he hasn’t got what it takes to kill Ajax.’

‘Or you?’

He looked down at his hands that she might not read the shame in his eyes. ‘Tonight, he might be able to kill me. He came close once already. I think that’s why Ajax chose the way he did.’

She let her gaze fall. ‘What now?’

Dawn was coming. Even had the distant trumpeter not marked the passing hours, Pantera had sat through the sunrise often enough to know the earliest signs of day: the growing contours in the grass where it was no longer a black velvet carpet, ripples on the pond that allowed a first tinge of silver, a shape under the trees on the island that must be the goose-house, the first colour to Hannah’s eyes.

He tugged his hand through his hair. ‘We can’t leave here yet. The gate’s blocked and the centurion set fire to the house next door. What was it, a bakery?’

‘A carpenter’s.’

He nodded. ‘It’s burning hard. We’re stuck here until the worst of it dies down.’

Hannah lifted his fingers, and kissed them. ‘Hypatia always said this was the safest place in Rome.’

‘And Hypatia, as we both know, is always right. And…’ he kissed her hand in his turn, and let his gaze meet hers, still testing what he thought he saw there, ‘you’re here, and alive, and I would like us to have time to celebrate that. Might we go into the cottage?’

They lay crushed together on the narrow bed beneath the window. The shutters hung open to the dawn. The gander was out on the water, but not yet the geese. The fire still cast its glow in the west, to rival the eastern sun.

Pantera lay on one side, propped on one elbow, with his back to the cold wall and Hannah’s breasts soft on his chest. His lower lip was swollen. He tasted blood where she had bitten it, or he had. He had thought himself too drained for anything but sleep, and had been powerfully wrong. Neither of them had slept yet.

The world was a new place, and he had not yet found his way in it. He had forgotten what it was to lay himself bare to another’s view, to be given freedom to discover the contours of another’s body. He had forgotten the soul-blinding beauty of a woman, freely given, and what that could do to him.

He explored every part of her even as she studied his scars, the misshaped shoulder, the flat white mess that had once been a brand of Mithras. He wanted to believe she wasn’t looking with a physician’s eye, or at least not only with that.

He felt the touch of her look and matched it with his free hand, tracing lines in their pooled sweat on her torso, about her navel, across and across the lines of her pelvic bones to her hips, and up to her breasts and then, when she was still looking, he leaned down and traced his lips along the line his fingers had marked, teasing and teasing until she gave the same throaty cry she had earlier in the dark and rolled over, finding him blindly with hands and tongue and teeth and then with all of her, pressing him flat on the goosefeather mattress, rising over him to greet the dawn again in her own way, with their hands entwined, palm to palm, fingers interlaced…

‘What is it?’ He felt the change in her hands first, and then the rest of her. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. Not you.’ They were still locked together. She slumped against him, pressing her forehead to his chest.

‘You don’t want a child?’ He studied her, searching, trying to see inside. ‘There are ways to be sure. We don’t have to-’

‘Hush.’ She kissed him to silence. ‘It’s not about a child, and anyway it’s too late for that. She’s made. What we do now is for us.’ Absently, she smoothed his hair over his brow. He watched her weigh a difficult choice and wished his heart did not crash so hard in his chest.

Biting her lower lip, she said, ‘Did you think of Aerthen when we

… earlier?’

‘I tried not to,’ he said, truthfully, and then, because he couldn’t slow the speed of his mind, even when it worked against him, he said, ‘and you thought of Hypatia. But I would be with Aerthen if she weren’t dead, and Hypatia’s still alive, so’ — he pushed himself up on his elbow again — ‘you should go to her.’

Hannah was looking away from him, out of the unshuttered window. ‘I can’t. I don’t know where she is, and in any case we can’t leave. You said so.’

‘I also said that Mergus has orders to do whatever it takes to keep them safe. When he finds them, he’ll take them to the forum.’

‘What if he doesn’t find them?’

‘Tonight, I am prefect of the Watch. As soon as we can leave here, I’ll find them.’

In his mind, Pantera was already out in the charred streets, setting the Watch — his Watch — to find a Sibyl with black hair and the scent of lilies. He didn’t think she would be dead; she was too clever for that.

We were lovers… Earlier, at the height of her passion, Hannah had spoken a word and he had not heard it. Only now did he know it as a name. He closed his eyes and then opened them again, staring up at the ceiling.

‘Don’t. Please.’

Hannah caught his hair, painfully, and brought his head round to hers. A dozen heartbeats ago, he would have loved her for that, and met her with his own power. Now, his gaze skidded over her face.

She pulled him back a second time. ‘Please… I need to be truthful, that’s all. What’s this’ — her sweeping arm took in the bed, and shut out the world — ‘without truth? Neither of us comes to this unscarred, or completely whole. We are who we are. Don’t let it destroy us. Please.’

‘But you love her.’

‘And you love Aerthen.’

‘Who is dead. Hypatia is not.’

‘But here, now, she may as well be. Will you allow me to have a past, and believe me that it is past? Please?’ She said it more quietly this time, and reached across the finger’s-width gap that had become a chasm between them. ‘Some things are always going to be of her. And from tonight, some things will always be of you.’

He was in uncharted water, with nothing to show him the way. His attention was caught by the curve of her collar bones, by the shine of her sweat and his, caught in a stray shard of firelight, by the pool of dark just above it, curtained by the raw smoke-silk of her hair. Unthinking, he asked, ‘Has there ever been another man?’

‘Never.’ She squinted at him. ‘You?’

‘A man?’ Astonishingly, he found himself laughing. ‘I’ll make you a promise,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave your past alone if you’ll leave mine. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds good.’ She glanced down at him. ‘Did you know when Aerthen died?’

‘I killed her.’

She shut her eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. Are you telling me you’ll know if Hypatia dies?’

‘I hope so. It’s not happened yet, but she thought it would be soon and was trying not to be afraid.’ Her smile was infinitely sad. ‘Can we lie together again? Please?’

He lowered her down to lie on him, sternum to sternum. For a long time, they pressed together, motionless, skin on skin, so that he could feel her heartbeat against his own ribs.

He thought she had fallen asleep until abruptly she roused and, shaking herself like a dog out of water, propped up on her elbows and bent to kiss him.

He said, ‘Hannah, we don’t have to-’

‘I want to. Be still. Let me do this.’ Her kisses drifted down to his chest, to the scar of Mithras, and below it.

For a long time, he did lie still until it became unbearable not to move, and even then he waited until she made it clear beyond doubt what she wanted of him.

Then he was not still at all, and when they linked fingers again they were both aware of what they did, but lost in the wildness, with their pasts kept apart from the present, and when she arced up high over him, taut as a drawn bow, the name she spoke was clearly his, and he did not think of Aerthen.