Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Six

Between one breath and the next, Sebastos Abdes Pantera woke to the grey stirrings of race day at the Striding Heron tavern.

He lay still with his eyes shut, waiting, as he did every morning and, as every morning, in that finite space between sleeping and waking, Aerthen came to him, alive in the black echoes of his mind, bright-haired, green-eyed and laughing as she raced him on her mouse dun gelding in their first meeting, touched him with her eyes across the fire on a smoky winter’s evening not long later, made love to him soon after that, holding him in her long, long legs, in her warrior’s arms, against the cushion of her breasts, breathing his name into his ear and that she loved him.

She came to him naked first, and then dressed for war in a stolen legionary shirt with armoured leather wraps on her forearms taken from the tall, bronze-bearded Rhinelander who was the first man she had ever killed in battle.

She stood before him, weapon-ready, as tall as her spear, so that the shine of her eyes and the shine of its blade were as one before the rising sun, and then again, before the setting sun, when blade and face and body were rusted with others’ blood, and her smile was savage, lit with the hope of victory.

In the thick of battle she came to him, fighting to be at his side, to keep him safe, trusting him to keep her safe, and they fought together until that moment in the evening of the battle’s second day, when it was lost and all were dead, or soon to be so.

Then, she came to him still smiling her love and her courage, holding Gunovar, their golden-haired, ocean-eyed daughter, who was named for a hero of the Dumnonii who had fought in the Boudica’s rebel army against the legions. Aerthen’s loathing of Rome was legendary and so her child must feel it too, when she grew; how could she not with two such brave, proud parents? She slept in her mother’s arms, her peace perfect in all the din and chaos of battle.

Except not asleep, because now, in this last part of the visiting, there is bright, wet blood scarfing Aerthen’s stolen shirt, gathering in pools at her feet, and the smile on the child’s face is matched by the broader, red-lipped smile in her throat, where her mother’s blade has sliced it, so fast and so sharp that the child has never woken from the tea-drugged sleep.

And as he feels her spirit leave her to make the last walk to the gods, the man known as Hywell, the hunter, feels his wife reach for his hand, and press the blade into the sweaty wetness of his palm.

She has more courage than he. She caresses each part of him with her turbulent gaze and she smiles and tells him she loves him and asks this last gift of him and he gives it, he who has killed before in pity, in anger, in detachment, in scorn, but has never yet killed in love.

He kills in love now, holding her head in his one hand, finding the place with his fingers, in the ninth rib space, a little to the left of the breast bone, trying not to think of how often he has kissed here, how precious the skin, how strong, how fragile.

He finds the space and steadies it and she says his name, ‘Hywell,’ as a prayer and then, smiling, in love, ‘I will know all of you in a moment, all those places I could not find,’ because this has been a joke between them, that he had no past before he came to her, and he knows all of her but she knows so little of him.

And in this last moment, he smiles for her and says, ‘You will, and gladly so. I give you all of myself, in love, for now and ever. Wait for me.’

Before he can fail her, he slides the knife forward and up, through skin, through muscle, past the grate of her bone, through the sudden give of her lungs and up to the beat of her heart that makes the blade twitch like a live thing in his hand.

He almost stops there, but her eyes draw him in, and her voice, whispering, because she cannot speak. But she has not cried out, and will not, and so he slides the blade on, and tilts the point upwards, cutting the great muscle of her heart, and she bleeds, as their daughter Gunovar bled, but inwardly, so that she lives and lives and only leaves him when her eyes can no longer hold his face, and her mouth can no longer speak his name.

In his mind, he lowers her to the floor, as he has done every waking morning since. As every morning, he hears her voice, echoing in the sea’s rush of her eyes, I will know all of you in a moment, all those places I could not find, and his own voice, rich with his love for her, poisoned for ever by his own cowardice, You will, and gladly so. Wait for me.

Wait for me.

He had meant it, and would have joined her then but that, in wanting to leave both mother and child untainted by Rome, he had taken time to build a pyre for them, laying down his weapons for the first time in days. He had fought like a cornered rat against the men who came for him and four had died, but not him. Later, he came to understand that a part of him had wanted the kind of death they offered by taking him alive, in all its lingering pain.

They gave him his wish. With a skill born of fury, they had slowed the passage of his days until each hour became an eternity spent in agony. The pain surpassed anything he had ever known and his life had not been one of overwhelming comfort. But even then, he did not go to join Aerthen, however close to the brink they might have driven him.

In the end, that, too, was his fault. In a moment’s weakness he had lost the sense of her presence and called instead on the god that Rome had given him, and that god had answered, granting the blessing, or perhaps the curse, of life.

Wait for me.

Every waking moment, Pantera could feel her there, waiting on the other side of the silk-fine divide between living and dying. He had only to reach for her and she came.

Thus it was that in the attic room of the Striding Heron, on the morning of the day he was due to meet his emperor, Sebastos Abdes Pantera, who had also been Hywell the Hunter, gave his customary morning greeting to the woman who had been his wife and then, forcing himself to look beyond her ocean-green gaze, opened his own eyes and began to take stock of the day.

He started with his own body, documenting the pain, beginning with his ankles, working up through his spine and chest to his arms and last to his face. After the sea ride, his shoulders were on fire where the muscles had torn and never fully healed, and a nagging ache in his left ankle where the legionaries had seared the tendon had become sharper.

None of it was new or unexpected, only to be noted for how it might affect his movement in the day.

Rolling over on his side, he turned his attention to his immediate surroundings, to the straw in the mattress beneath him, to the rat urine recently voided near the foot of the bed, upward to the first grey light of dawn outlining the shutters, to the door a few feet away, which remained closed and had not been opened in the night; and finally, when he was sure he was alone in a room that had not been disturbed while he slept, Pantera directed his attention out to the coughs and curses of the waking guests in the tavern rooms on either side and below.

Listening with half an ear to bets offered and laid, and lengthy morning commentaries on the health of the horses and their drivers, Pantera rose at last, dragged his hand through his hair and crossed the room stiffly to the window, where he pushed himself through morning exercises that would have shamed Leonides and his Spartan martyrs at Thermopylae.

Feeling looser in spine and limb, he dashed water on his face from the ewer in the corner, rearranged his hair again, and lifted from his travelling chest the fine linen tunic that had been the legate’s gift on leaving, and the leather belt with the silver buckle fashioned to show the running deer of the Dumnonii that had been Aerthen’s and had by some miracle survived the inferno of the battle’s end.

His sandals had been made to his own design by the cobbler in Lugdunum. Their chief asset was that he could shed them easily and go barefoot if he needed to be silent.

His four knives lay on top of his second tunic in separate sheaths of walnut-dyed doe hide. Two together were ready to be strapped to the inside of one forearm, one other for his leg, and the last for his waist if he wanted it for show.

They were plain, but finely balanced, with only the single mark of Mithras branded into the pale beechwood hilts — and entirely inappropriate for his morning’s task. With regret, he placed them back in the chest, closed the lid and padlocked it.

On leaving, he took a pinch of fine, white flour from a pouch at his belt and blew a drift of it across the floor just inside the door. Thus protected, or at least forewarned, Sebastos Abdes Pantera readied himself for his meeting with his emperor.

In the lushly tended garden, in the heart of the magistrate’s residence, a eunuch of moderate provincial talent sang the Lament of Daedalus to greet the dawn.

Pantera stood under a sun-pinked marble archway and listened to the first notes waver up to a scratchy peak as four Germanic gate-guards searched him for weapons. They found none because he had left them locked in his chest for precisely this reason. When he said as much, stretching the limits of his German, they laughed at him and spoke fast amongst themselves in a dialect he could not follow.

They were Ubians, big, red-haired, over-armed barbarians from one of the tribes that lived along the swamp-banks of the Rhine, a hangover from Caligula’s time, when they had fought one another in single combat for the privilege of providing the emperor’s bodyguard. In Nero’s retinue, they outranked the praetorians, and were known from one side of the empire to the other for the blind ferocity of their loyalty. Astoundingly, given their reputation, these four were sober.

Ahead of him, on the far side of the atrium, the singer dragged Icarus to new heights.

The guards were immune to the song’s missed notes. Forming a small column fore and aft, they marched Pantera in through the gates and down a wide, echoing marble vestibule where the floor was a chequerboard of black on white mosaics and the walls were alive with a gilded, many-coloured frieze of Apollo Kitharoedus that showed the god holding forth with his lyre to four listening nymphs of striking, if androgynous, beauty. The high roof was laid with gold leaf, angled so that it caught the sun’s first rays and cast them ahead into the garden, blindingly. For the first time in many years, Pantera knew himself to be in the presence of truly effortless wealth.

The guards clashed to a halt. Pantera was ushered across the atrium to the edge of the greenly forested space that was the magistrate’s colonnaded garden.

The magistrate’s guests were at breakfast, or perhaps had not slept at all and were simply on the latest course of a many-layered dinner with suitable entertainment. Somewhere in all that foliage, screened behind the mulberry trees and cultivated citrus, the twining ivies and honeysuckles, the lament paused on a long, aching note. Small songbirds fluttered brightly in cages hanging from the pillars. A tame jay swooped down from left to right, and rose again, carrying a grape. Grey carp kissed the surface of an oval pool, reaching up to the endlessly still fingers of a naked stone Narcissus who leaned over the water, absorbed in his own reflection. The largest carp, when it rose, had a gold ring embedded in its dorsal fin.

In a garden of such beauty, the inhabitants could not be less so. An unclothed Nubian girl-slave passed by, who could have modelled for one of the nymphs on Apollo’s wall frieze. Two more girls and a boy followed, all naked, long-limbed as herons, graceful as swallows. Their bare feet made no sound on the marble floor.

The members of the emperor’s retinue were at least partially dressed; it was the easiest way to tell them apart from the slaves. For the most part, they were equally beautiful. The magistrate was one of the exceptions. Older than the others, his hair was silver and his features bore the stresses of political life. Even so, he had an air of grace that bound him to the group as a man of like kind.

One man there was not beautiful, neither did he drift between the columns talking to the other guests, but stood in the citrus grove to the magistrate’s right, staring at Pantera with undisguised loathing.

He was tall and bitter-faced, with a high brow and straight black hair pressed back by a receding hairline. He bore no obvious weapon, but a disturbance to the outline of the sleeve on his right arm spoke of a knife strapped there.

Inwardly, Pantera thanked Math for his night’s work. Affecting an interest in the carp, he edged round the pool, gauging the distance between them, all the while surveying the rest of the garden, and seeking his emperor.

He failed to find him, although the meal was clearly in Nero’s honour. The table laid at the garden’s far end was piled with such a magnitude of food that it could only have been for the imperial party. Set in the centre was an ice statue carved in the shape of a lyre, the emperor’s favoured signature for this year.

The Empress Poppaea walked out from behind the mulberries, Nero’s amber-haired second wife, who had been the wife of his friend. Her mother, they said, had been the loveliest woman of her day.

They, the chattering classes of Rome, Gaul and Britain, said very little about Poppaea herself and most of it recorded her earlier marriages as calculated stepping stones to her position as empress. They said also that she had made Nero kill his own mother because the old woman had disapproved of the wedding.

Given the long gap between one and the other, sane heads deemed that tale untrue and the empress, if she heard, didn’t show it. She took her role and built it around her with beauty and not a little grace.

Now, she glanced at Pantera and turned slowly as if she had not known he was there. Her eyes drifted across his face, as Aerthen’s had once done. He had not been scarred then. More recently, he had become used to the way eyes found him, then flinched away. The empress did not flinch, but let herself see all of him and him all of her.

She was taller than most Romans, with long hair arranged in coils to her shoulders. Outwardly, her chiton was modestly cut, of pale yellow linen, belted with silver rope and extending down to her ankles, but the modesty was overcome somewhat by the translucent nature of the silk from which it was fashioned, which served admirably to enhance the curve of her hips, belly and breasts. Her neck was slim and fine as a swan’s, held with the internal grace of the astoundingly beautiful. The skin of her face was fine as new-fired clay and her features carried the almost-Greek symmetry of the true Roman aristocrat. Her toenails were dyed a deep orange. Threads and chains of gold, silver and diamonds adorned ankle, wrist, neck and hair. On a lesser woman, they would have seemed vulgar.

Pantera bowed, but did not meet her eye. So far, he had counted thirteen among the emperor’s retinue. There was still no sign of Nero, even in disguise.

From behind Pantera’s back, one of the guards rang a small bell. Silver chimes wove through the garden, resting here and there on the spring blossom.

Beyond the mulberries the eunuch sent Icarus crashing mournfully to earth. There was a moment’s pause before the garden rang to enthusiastic applause, such as might have been offered to Rhemaxos, the Thracian singer currently wooing Rome with his exquisite songs.

But it had not been Rhemaxos who had sung, not even close, and thus the applause gave its own warning even as the high, thin voice reached out to Pantera.

‘You are early; good. We like that in a man. You may present yourself to us. It is long past due.’

Schooling his face to mild astonishment, Pantera stepped through the screening flowers and saluted, as if he were still attached to the legions, and thus owed this man his allegiance as his supreme commander.

‘You enjoyed my singing?’ asked Nero, emperor of Rome and all her provinces.

‘It was singularly exceptional, my lord.’

Nero might have sung like a eunuch, but he was older than the coin images made him out to be, less portly, more lightly graceful on his feet. His face was round, but still built on the strong bones of his ancestors, so that it wasn’t impossible to imagine him a scion of Augustus’ line.

Like the bodyguards, he was fully dressed, although not overly so, given that he was to grace the races later in the day. His toga was of linen, brilliantly white, with porphyry deep around the hem. A diadem of artfully cut diamonds lay on his thick, unbrushed curls, which took some courage: in Rome only women wore such gems in their hair. His body was freshly oiled, scented with mint and citrus and something else that Pantera recognized but could not name. The mix blended pleasingly with the camomile and lavender of the garden.

His eyes were sloe-dark, hidden by half-lowered lids dusted in blue powder. He pursed his lips. ‘Sebastos Abdes Pantera,’ he said. ‘Named for Augustus, my honoured forebear, and for the leopard, for which you are famed. They say you are broken and will never mend; that you are prone to bouts of unruled anger during which you might kill a man out of hand. Is it true?’

He tested men, of course; it was his nature. And he was an actor, who could sense acting in others as a serpent senses blood.

For both of those reasons, Pantera, bowing, spoke the truth. ‘I would like to believe it not true, lord, although I may yet be proved wrong. Did Fabius Africanus tell you that?’

Surprise purred among the courtiers. To Pantera’s left, a woman gave a short, astonished gasp.

The emperor laughed, lightly, not unlike the silver chimes of the bell. ‘How refreshing. Few people have the courage to ask questions of their emperor. It was Akakios who said it, actually. He had it from Suetonius Paullinus, who used to be governor in Britain. The legate, Africanus, told us that you called on your god when you were dying, and that you are given to Mithras.’ That, too, was a question.

‘Each of these is true, lord.’

‘We are a god also. We, too, can save lives.’

‘I am sure of it, lord.’

‘We could make you worship us, calling on us as you did on Mithras.’

‘Of course.’

All humour had gone. Slow death hung a hand’s clap away. In Britain, they had crucified him, using ropes instead of nails because the death took longer. If Pantera let himself think about that, ever, at any point of the day or night, he broke into the kind of sweat that covered horses after a race.

Not thinking of it now was hard, but necessary. Aerthen stood exceptionally close.

From the citrus grove, the Empress Poppaea said, as if to her slave, ‘For myself, I have always found love to be sweeter when it is freely given.’

‘How immensely wise.’ Nero smiled at his empress. The threat of death moved away. Released from a diverting tension, the ladies and gentlemen of the emperor’s retinue murmured to each other in low voices. In the citrus grove to Pantera’s left, the tall, bitter-faced man moved, subtly, using the sound as cover.

Nero saw it. The black eyes flickered there and back to Pantera. Thoughtfully, the emperor said, ‘We hear you had a different name when you lived amongst the tribes in Britain.’

He should not have known that. Nobody should, except the men and women of the Dumnonii who were safely dead. Pantera bowed again, hiding more than just his eyes. ‘Among the Dumnonii, I was Hywell, lord. It means hunter.’

‘A leopard who is also a hunter. Very good. You were their hunter, and yet you hunted them on our behalf, striving to bring us Britain as your prize, just as, six years ago, you gave us first blood against Parthia at great risk to yourself. We commend you and would find ways to repay the debt we owe. To that end, we wish to visit the chariot yards before the races and require that you be our bodyguard. Are you armed?’

‘Lord, no. I would not so profane your presence.’

‘Then that must be rectified.’ Nero clapped his hands. By a miracle of training, or of chance, the songbirds fell silent.

The tall figure moving to Pantera’s left also fell still. Without turning, Nero said, ‘Akakios, fetch for our leopard weapons to suit his needs. A knife, I believe, balanced to throw? And perhaps a second, longer blade?’

With palpable courage, the bitter-faced man stepped forward, saying, ‘Lord, may I ask… With greatest respect, is this safe? I do not question your wisdom, only desire to protect your hallowed person.’

‘Yes?’ Nero put his index finger to his cheek and tilted his head in an actor’s parody of contemplation. His gaze switched to Pantera.

‘Will you kill us, Leopard-who-is-hunter? Or assault our person?’ His voice was deeper than it had been; more like a woman’s, less like a boy’s.

‘No, lord, I will not. I give you my word.’ Pantera did not bow now. It mattered that his eyes be seen.

‘Your word, sworn on the slain bull of Mithras?’

‘If you request it, lord.’

‘Not yet. The offer is enough.’ With a wordless wave, Akakios was sent for weapons.

Summoning a slave to remove the diamonds from his hair, Nero began to walk towards the vestibule. The four Ubian guards jumped to present arms, two either side. What they lacked in legionary crispness, they made up for in their sheer bulk, and the ease with which they swung their long cavalry swords. They smiled for their emperor, showing corded necks, thick as bulls’.

‘Come,’ said Nero. ‘We would have you walk in our company.’

Pantera moved swiftly to catch up. Together he and his emperor passed over the black and white chequered mosaics, between the multicoloured visions of Apollo on his lyre. The god, he noticed now, had a thatch of thick black curls amongst which diamonds nestled.

The naked Nubian girl-slave came with a steaming cloth to wipe the paint from the emperor’s face. Standing for her in the vestibule, Nero said, ‘Akakios hates you. Why is that?’

‘I was trained by Seneca, lord, and he was not.’

‘That is reason enough?’

‘For a spy it is, yes. He trained with us for three years before he was turned away. Rejection makes a man bitter and such a thing can turn to hate if it festers long enough.’

‘Why was he rejected?’

Pantera shrugged. ‘He was impetuous. He didn’t listen. He thought he knew best one time too many. You, of all people, know exactly the standard Seneca requires of his pupils. Akakios had not the intellect or the self-restraint under pressure that was necessary. You will have seen that, I think, by now.’

‘But an impetuous man can kill as easily as one trained by Seneca. Watch him, he’s there now.’

Akakios was waiting for them at the entrance to the vestibule, bearing two knives and a sheathed blade. He was of Assyrian descent, which gave him the height and the angular hawk’s nose and the sharp-arrow eyebrows that pointed up in perpetual surprise. Always bitter, his face was scored now with a freshly kindled hatred.

‘Where were you last night?’ he asked, as Pantera and Nero emerged into the sunlit morning.

That he could speak so abruptly in the presence of his emperor spoke greatly of his power in the court. That the Ubians stepped away to give him privacy said even more.

With a further prayer of thanks to the half-starved urchin from the docks, Pantera said, ‘I spent the evening with my foster-father, Seneca, who once had the honour of serving his excellency. He has borrowed the lodgings of Fabius Africanus, legate to the Fourteenth legion. Afterwards, I took a room at the Striding Heron. It’s a rude place, but clean enough, and-’

‘At the docks?’ Nero said. ‘Full of fishermen and boys? We know it. Rude, as you say, but the fare is wholesome. Now you are here and I see Akakios has brought you a pair of throwing knives to use in our defence. You are expert in these, I believe?’

‘I have some small skill, lord.’

The knives were a matched pair, one balanced for a right-handed throw, one for left, with the weighting set subtly off centre for each. They had sanded beech handles, and plain iron blades. They were, in fact, the very image of the ones Pantera had left in his trunk in the inn, except that these did not have the mark of Mithras on the hilt. Pantera rubbed his thumb over the place, to see if it had been sanded away, and decided not.

‘They are perfect, lord. With these and the third at my belt, I believe I can keep you safe from any two or three men who may come against you. If there are more, we may have to fight together.’

‘Back to back, as the Gauls do?’

‘Exactly so.’

It had been a jest, offered as a foil on which the emperor could claim his battle skills.

Instead, smiling to show he had seen the joke, Nero said, ‘Then we had better hope our other defenders are prepared to give their lives in our defence, for we have not mastered the skills of battle. Our energies have all been on the chariots. You don’t race? A pity. We need someone of mettle who can… Wait!’

They were still within the line of the Ubian guards. Nero reached for a blade from the nearest. Without hesitation, it was given. The emperor was not deft, but he was not as clumsy as he allowed others to think. He swung round, setting the blade’s edge on Pantera’s bare skin at the place where his neck met his shoulder above his new court tunic. The scar was there, that had been made by a spear’s head and continued into a burn.

‘Kneel.’

Pantera knelt. The stone pathway was cold beneath his shins. Fragments of grit pressed into his knees. His left ankle ached suddenly. For a man who thought he wanted to die, he felt an uncommon desire not to do so now, with Akakios’ toxic shadow sliding between him and Aerthen’s presence. He licked his lips and found his mouth dry as a summer river, and sharply metallic, as if he had licked his own knife blade.

Nero moved the sword on to his collar bone and let it rest there. ‘You are not a citizen of Rome, is that correct?’

‘It is, lord.’

‘Which is why the legionaries in Britain were able to do to you what they did. If you had been a citizen, they could not have acted thus.’ The blade stroked across the scars on his shoulder. ‘We wish to rectify that. In any case, we cannot be seen to be guarded by a man who lacks the necessary status. What ever would the senate say?’

Nero laughed. Belatedly, the men around him laughed too, except Pantera, who studied the black eyes and saw no mirth in them. The blade drew a sliver of blood, much as his own had from Math in the alley’s dark.

‘What would you have of me, lord?’

‘That you swear to uphold the laws and honour of Rome. That you swear to defend my life and that of my family before all other lives, including your own. That you acknowledge the genius of your emperor as your guiding light. Do you so swear?’

Pantera swayed in the morning light. Voices from his childhood murmured in his head, bypassing the echoes of his more recent past; his mother was there, and his father, and Seneca. What do you live for but to earn your citizenship?

They were all wrong; Pantera had never lived for it, only used it as the mark by which he might have measured his own success. Britain had taken that from him. He had no concept of success since Aerthen’s death.

He said, ‘I do so swear.’

‘Rise,’ said Nero. ‘You are Roman, and so the fullest of humans. Now, Sebastos Julius Abdes Pantera, you will escort us to the chariot grounds and guard us as we inspect the teams. If you can pick for us the winner, we shall be well pleased.’