Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Seven

It was said of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus that he would often pass incognito through the slums of Rome at night, listening to the talk in the taverns and the baths to assure himself of his people’s care for him. It was further said that he knew chariots, horses and racing as if they were his profession, and could pick a good team by sight at a hundred paces.

Walking with him through the bright, blustery morning, beside the oval sawdust-lined training track, stopping among the great sea of traders’ booths before the four long barns that housed the race teams, watching the ease with which he caught an eye and drew a man to him, to talk of horses, of chariots, of the drivers, of the odds on one team or the other, of the training to win a race, Pantera could imagine both of these tales to be true.

Nero no longer wore gems in his hair or paint on his eyelids. Were it not for the unusually wide band of porphyry at the hem of his toga, and the fact that his face was on every coin in the empire, the crowd around them would not have known that their emperor passed among them, pausing here at a booth to examine the craftsmanship, or slowing there by the ropes at the head of the training track, wreathed in the rich, ripe fog of resin and horse manure, to watch the first of the quadrigas begin the slow warm-up before the race.

As it was, men, women and — belatedly — children bent their knees as soon as they realized who was among them, but it was all behind, after he had passed, so that Nero’s progress was that of a scythe through corn, leaving untidy rows felled in his wake.

None of it made life easier for Pantera in his role as bodyguard. Unlike any of his immediate predecessors, Nero had not taken a full company of praetorians to protect him in this sortie among his people, but only a small retinue of four companions amongst whom were Akakios and a pair of nervously alert Ubians, who had instructions to keep their weapons sheathed except in extremity. Pantera therefore gave only as much attention to the horses as Nero required at any given moment, and kept watch in turn on the wide plain in front, the training track to his right, and the booths and wooden horse barns lined up to his left.

The promised storm from the day before had not yet come; the morning was set fair, with white goosedown clouds flying before a brisk wind. Ahead, the sky met the earth in a long, smooth arc that left Pantera slightly giddy. After the mountains of Britain, it was strange to be in a place with no hills to carve open the perfect spread of the horizon.

The grassy plain that stretched from the magistrate’s residence to the hippodrome was open and flat. If a man was intent on exposing himself to danger, it was not a bad place to choose. No hills broke the perfect hemisphere of the horizon, no spinneys hid the horses of a mounted ambush, no rocky outcrops served to hide a company of archers, or spearmen, or armoured infantry. But the traders’ stalls, healers’ booths and cooking fires that lay sprawled in a veritable village to the left of the sawdust pathway were a nightmare of open possibilities and the horse barns beyond were worse: four long, low buildings with shadowed doorways along their lengths and narrow grassed alleyways between.

At the nearest end, almost blocking the path between the barns, clusters of tents marked the professions that kept each team running: the wainwrights, the harness-makers, the loriners, the boys who boiled the axle grease, the weavers who made the banners. Above each flew the colours allocated for this race: Red at the front for the magistrate, then Blue, then White and finally the Green of the home team.

‘The Red team will win, of course,’ Nero said. ‘The horses were a gift to the magistrate from the king of Parthia, who wishes to buy our favour and does it by flattering our friends. That team we cannot buy, and so our task for today is to decide which of the other three teams is worthy of our attentions and our gold. They are the best in Gaul. One of them must be good enough.’

Following the emperor’s gaze, Pantera saw a team of four grey colts grazing at the side of the track further down near the hippodrome. As yet they bore no ribbons in their manes to identify them, but even at this distance, with the high walls of the wooden hippodrome behind, it was clear these four were of a different stamp to their thicker, heavier brethren who ran for the other teams.

Pantera had lived five years in Britain where the tribes prided themselves on breeding horses to beat the world. The women of those horse runs would have given an entire year’s crop of colts for even the least of these.

Pointing, he said, ‘That’ll be the Red team there? The four matched greys? They look fit to beat anything Gaul could produce. Are they the magistrate’s gift?’

‘They must be. Come.’ Nero’s cheeks dimpled with the pleasure of finally finding a man who understood his passion. Together, he and Pantera turned back towards the training track.

The magistrate’s team of gift-horses was momentarily blocked from sight by the passing of two other beribboned teams — chestnut colts sporting Blue and a team of blacks spectacular in White — already hitched and warming up ostentatiously before groups of watchful gamblers who changed the odds with each slow circuit. Knowing they were watched, the drivers trotted sunwise on the thick layer of sawdust, showing off their paces, but not tiring their horses. In the race, they travelled in the opposite direction; knowing this made the difference.

The colts in both teams were snappy and moody, snaking bites at their teammates and opponents. Their drivers called to them, cajoling and threatening in turn. Other men ran alongside, shouting instructions and encouragement, or calling for a stop to change the set of the harness. Only the local Coriallum team was not out yet, and still last in the betting.

The grey colts grazing at the track’s end had not even been harnessed, which said a lot for the confidence of their driver, but even as the emperor’s party turned to watch, two boys in the magistrate’s livery began to weave ribbons of brightest scarlet into their manes, leaving the ends hanging loose to fly back as banners with their speed.

Appreciatively, Nero said, ‘They’re built of the wind, with desert storms in their blood and stars lighting their feet. They’ll win today unless each of them breaks a leg; they outmatch the others by more than a track’s length without trying.’

‘If you wanted to buy a team to race in Rome, surely these are they?’ Pantera asked.

‘But Cornelius Proculus, the magistrate, has long been our friend, and these are his heart’s joy; it would be theft for us to buy them from him. In any case, they may be fast as the wind now, but they won’t stay that way for long.’

To Pantera’s frustration and the evident consternation of the Ubian guards, Nero turned away from the peeled hazel barrier at the edge of the training track and turned left towards a leather-worker’s stand set back amongst half a dozen others, where he fingered a tooled woman’s belt with images of storks and cranes set about it, the better to bring on a child.

To Pantera, he said, ‘Parthian horses are weak in the hocks and can’t manage the constant tight turns of a chariot track for more than half a season. We need horses that will last all year, if not longer. There will be another team here today that will be the one to take with us to Rome. We will buy it, and its driver, and all who come with it, and make it our own. In time, if the horses prove suitable, we will race them ourselves.’

A wave of a finger saw one of the Ubians reach into his purse to buy the belt.

The stall-tender, crimson with shock, or pleasure, or terror, fell to his knees, protesting in halting Latin that it must be a gift, that he could not possibly accept money from his emperor whom he adored and who was doing him the most exceptional honour of attending his unworthy stall.

He was given a gold coin in any case, which was a hundred times the worth of what he might have dared ask for the belt. The air rang with the emperor’s praises as they passed on.

Notoriously, Nero said of himself that he was the most popular emperor Rome had ever seen. In Coriallum in northern Gaul, if only on that day, it was true.

The imperial group moved deeper into the sprawl of booths and stalls. Pie-vendors bawled their wares. Bolts of woollen cloth, plain or dyed, lay in neat rows on wooden planks, to be untidied by a thousand feeling fingers by the day’s end. A healer’s booth was marked by a rag of torn white linen showing that the occupant was a woman and would undertake a childbirth. Closer to the horses, harness-makers plied their wares. Nero stopped at several to feel the quality of the leather, but, to the chagrin of the vendors, did not buy.

Keeping abreast of his emperor, watching ahead on both sides for signs of ill intent, Pantera said, ‘Talk in the tavern this morning was that the team of black colts from Gallia Lugdunensis running under the White banner might win the race if the magistrate’s horses all died in the traces. Blue and Green were not words on the lips of anyone sober enough to think.’

‘Truly?’ Nero raised a delicately plucked brow. ‘The magistrate seemed to think the local team was good. But they drew Green in the lottery for colour, and while it may be for Ceres and the vernal season, in our experience it is always unlucky. Perhaps we make it so by believing it; we are emperor and such things are not unknown, but it cannot be changed. Come, we shall go to the horse barns and view the second teams. Sometimes the ones that do not race are better than those that do.’

Pantera spun in alarm. ‘My lord, as your bodyguard, I must protest-’

He fell silent as Nero caught his arm. Men around them looked away, too quickly. The Ubians raced forward, laying hands to their sword hilts, but not yet drawing. Akakios was already there. His knife blade glanced in the blustery sun. Its tip was dulled with a brown, waxy resin.

Nero dismissed them all with a wave of one finger, as an infant might wave away a wasp.

‘Walk with us alone, Leopard,’ he said. ‘We would speak to you in private.’

Given no option, Pantera followed where his emperor led, leaving Akakios and his poison behind. To their left and in front, stall-tenders fell silent and bowed. Word of their coming was spreading even as they walked.

Ahead were the four horse barns, with their thin oak-planked sides and roofs thatched with reed from the river’s edge. Grassy avenues the width of a chariot’s length kept them apart. Manure heaps smouldered at the end of each, ripening the air.

The colours flew above them, snapping in the wind: Red for Mars, battle and summer, which had been taken by the magistrate and not entered in the colour lottery the day before when the other three teams drew their ribbon. In that lottery, Lugdunum, capital of Gallia Lugdunensis to the south, had won White for winter. Blue was for autumn, the colour drawn by Noviomagus across the easterly border, who fielded the best team from Gallia Belgica. Green, as Nero had said, was for spring and Ajax had drawn it for Coriallum. Thus all three parts of Gaul were represented, plus the magistrate’s team, racing for him alone.

Nero and Pantera turned down the barn side, passing the Red-bannered barns of the magistrate on the way to the White of Lugdunensis. Here, boys were still mucking out, heaving straw on to the manure heaps with a demented speed, desperate to get their task done before the race began. At the barn itself, four black heads peered at the incomers from open-fronted stalls; the second-string horses, left behind and unhappy for it.

Nero walked up and fussed the first, looking behind to check that his retinue had not strayed too close. Satisfied, he planted himself near a barn and set both fists on his hips. It was a practised pose: old statues had shown his ancestor Julius Caesar thus.

He said, ‘Pantera, the Leopard, we wish you to work for us. Akakios’ loyalty is beyond question, but he has shown himself to be reckless in his execution of orders. And as you have confirmed, he was not of the status that Seneca required. We believe you are his superior in the field of espionage.’

Pantera let a horse nudge his elbow, and teased a tangle from its mane. He kept his face studiously still. ‘I am flattered, lord, and what you say might once have been true, but I am not the man I was. As you have been told, I am damaged, possibly beyond repair. Akakios is whole, which is worth more than it may seem. He is reckless because he feels it necessary. Like an unruly race colt, it may be that he could be calmed by a judicious hand on the reins.’

Crowds were growing at the far end of the barn. Pantera began to walk away from the horses, leading the dance for the first time. Nero followed, twining together three strands of black mane hair that he had pulled loose.

‘We could compel you,’ he said.

‘Undoubtedly. But a man does not spy well who has been broken to another’s will. I believe we touched on that this morning in the magistrate’s garden.’

They passed beyond the boys mucking out and came away with the mellow ripeness of manure scenting their clothes.

Feeling his way to the truth, Pantera said, ‘To be a good spy, a man must immerse himself in the identity of another, and I have done that for too long in Britain to be able to do it again successfully now. I must be myself again, and find what that is, before I can ever take another’s place. I can’t believe there is such peril to Rome that it would not be better served by Akakios, however much it pains me to say so.’

‘Gods alive, why are we ever surrounded by arrogance!’ Nero bounced his balled fist off the oak plank of the barn. White-lipped, he said, ‘There is such peril. Would we ask you else?’

It was necessary to resist a matching anger. With fragile calm, Pantera said, ‘What nature of peril, lord?’

‘The Phoenix Year; what do you know of it?’

‘Nothing.’ He had said the same to Seneca. ‘Should I?’

‘If you love Rome and would save it from burning, you should, yes.’

They turned together into the next avenue between the barns. Green banners flew from the roof of the barn to their right, bright as spring grass. On the turf in front, the quadriga stood almost ready to race: a marvel of woven wicker, with fine larch spars bound in oiled bull’s hide and sinew, made to be light and flexible and yet strong enough to last the full seven laps, if not necessarily any further.

Two geldings waited ready in the traces, bright chestnuts, red as gold, with the grass-green ribbons of the corn goddess already woven into their manes and tails. A lanky youth came out of the barn, glanced left and right, and, satisfied, knelt at the back of the chariot, working on the harness. If he had noticed Pantera and the emperor, he did not recognize either man. From within the horse barns, a younger voice murmured the tones that every horseman uses to calm a fractious horse. Impatient hooves slammed on hard earth soon after.

Nero stood in the shadow of the reed roof’s overhang, watching.

With a prickle of premonition, Pantera said, ‘You said Rome would burn. What has that to do with the Phoenix Year?’

‘If we knew that, we would not need to ask you!’ Nero made a visible grasp for calm. ‘A prophecy is in circulation of which we have secured a part. It says that if Rome burns in the Phoenix Year, it will bring about a miracle.’

‘And the Phoenix Year is…?’

‘A thing of Alexandrian making, and perhaps of the pyramid-priests before them. As you know, a year is not exactly three hundred and sixty-five days long, but exceeds that number by a small amount. Those who know of such things measure the leftover hours in each year beyond the three hundred and sixty-five days and gather them together.’

The emperor was pacing now, watching the horses and Pantera equally. ‘Once every fourteen hundred and sixty years, the sum of those hours adds up to an entire year which they name for the Phoenix, believing that at midsummer of that year, after three days of death, the flame-bird arises from the ashes of its own destruction and soars up to perch in the upper branches of a date palm.’

‘And we are nearing such a year, or you would not speak of it.’

‘We are in it. The year began on the ides of August.’

The crowds were coming nearer again. It did not do to stand still. Pantera moved off into a bright place of safety, where all directions could easily be seen. Akakios came into view behind, but did not approach too closely.

Out on the training track, the four grey colts belonging to the magistrate were safely harnessed. A driver in the long grey battle-cloak of the Parthians, bordered in red with inlaid threads of gold, was trotting them round the track.

Nero was not watching. He said, ‘Can you read Greek?’ and at Pantera’s nod, pressed into his hand a piece of folded papyrus, thin as a leaf, such as the Alexandrians use for their writing.

Unfolded, the surface was clean, the writing neat and professionally done, with lines of even size and spacing, straight as a rule. Pantera read it once to himself, and then again out loud, to prove that he could.

‘… and thus will it come about in the Year of the Phoenix, on the night when the… there is a gap here… when the — something unknown — shall gaze down in wrath from beyond the knife-edge of the world, that in his sight shall the Great Whore be wreathed in fire, and burned to the utmost ashes, seared to nought in the pits of her depravity. Only when this has come to pass shall the Kingdom of Heaven be manifest as has been promised. Then shall… here’s another gap… be rent, never to be repaired, and all that was whole shall be broken and the covenant that was made shall be completed in accord with all that is written.’

In the gusting morning, with the sharp colours of the banners crisp against the late morning sky, with the chatter of children and the crying seagulls at the harbour, Pantera felt the world grow still and quiet.

Nero said, ‘Pantera?’

‘My lord, forgive me, this is… a deeper thing than I had imagined.’

‘So you understand it?’

‘Some of it, I think. Not all.’

Animated, Nero said, ‘It is the Hebrews, isn’t it? They believe in the Kingdom of Heaven, a time when their god will rule over all others, when their laws will be the only laws, when all men must be circumcized and refuse the meat of idols. Our uncle Claudius had them banned from our seat of rule seventeen years ago. We could do the same thing again.’

‘It is Hebrew in concept,’ Pantera agreed. ‘But only a fanatical few desire it and even they know that you would raze Jerusalem to the ground if they so much as contemplated burning Rome. If there’s a fire, it will not be lit by any man who cares for Judaea.’

He folded the note squarely, and handed it back to the emperor. ‘This is a copy,’ he said. ‘The gaps are deliberately made to leave the full meaning unknowable, particularly the date of the burning. May I see the full script?’

Nero shrugged. ‘We don’t have the original. Akakios… retrieved this from a Syrian messenger who was endeavouring to sell it. For a further sum of gold — a quite extortionate sum — the highest bidder was to be given the prophecy in full, which would give the date when the fire must occur and also a greater insight into what might be rent thereafter.’

‘The Syrian, then, can tell you where to find what you seek.’

‘Regrettably not.’

‘He died under questioning?’

Nero pulled a face. ‘As you have noted, Akakios is reckless. But the Syrian knew nothing of the prophecy or where it was kept. He hadn’t seen it or read it and knew nothing beyond that a white-haired, hoarse-voiced man had given him the copies and charged him with getting the best price for each. That much, I believe.’

‘Where did this take place? Where was he given the copies?’

‘In an inn named for the Black Chrysanthemum which is on the Street of the Lame Lion in Alexandria.’ Nero spoke the place names as if they were sacred text. ‘He believed the vendor to have been a local astrologer, but could not be sure. The man spoke Greek with a local Alexandrian accent, and had ink stains on his fingers.’

Pantera laughed, and only late remembered that to do so in front of one’s emperor was not wise. ‘Astrologers in Alexandria are like fishermen in Coriallum: every second man makes it his profession and those in between believe they know more but simply don’t choose to make money thereby.’

‘And to say he was old, white-haired and greedy is merely stating a fact of all astrologers. We know this.’

The emperor leaned back against the stables, chewing his lip. Pantera moved to get the best view of both ends of the row. Around them, the barn was coming to life as, at last, the Green team began to make ready. The lanky youth at the chariot moved round and began to work on the harness on the offside. He gave every appearance of not yet having noticed the presence of his emperor.

Beyond him, a smaller, thinner boy with grubby blond hair and a tear in the hem of his tunic brought two fresh colts out of the barn, one rope held in either hand. His charges danced and spun irritably beside him. They were not of the calibre of the magistrate’s team, but Pantera would happily have bet the contents of his purse on their coming second.

Nero, too, was watching them. Absently, he said, ‘I was there when the Syrian spoke to us, so that I could hear the truth of it. At the end, he said something that was true, out of his love for me, not because it was wrenched from him by pain.’ He frowned, remembering. ‘He said that the prophecy is harmless to me and to Rome unless someone wishes so badly to bring about the Kingdom of God that they count it as nothing to murder thousands of men, women and children. What kind of man does that?’

‘The kind who hates Rome and Jerusalem equally,’ Pantera said, carefully. He, too, was watching the horses. ‘Men like that are few, and there are ways to find those with whom they conspire, although I doubt if they’re in Gaul, or even… my lord, forgive me, this is a subject of great weight, but I think we must speak of it later if we are not to see bloodshed. Those two chestnut colts are going to fight.’

Math saw Pantera at the moment before Brass bit his arm hard enough to draw blood, and then lunged for Bronze.

In a morning filled with bad omens, it was the worst. First, Ajax had been called away by the magistrate’s steward to a meeting of the four race-drivers and had not yet returned. Then Lucius, the motherless son of a mange-ridden street dog who was the elder of Ajax’s two apprentices, had taken to fiddling with the traces and refused to help harness the two lead colts.

Lucius was sixteen years old, lanky and callow with bad skin and crooked teeth, and he was scared of horses. Gordianus had been his uncle, which was the only reason he had been given the apprenticeship, and Ajax, who could be breathtakingly soft at times, had promised to let him finish.

He and Math hated each other, and Lucius had taken to spending the nights in town with one of the newly arrived harness-makers, coming back with stories of work that far exceeded anything Math’s father could do. Ajax had neither listened to him nor beaten him into silence. Math was waiting for the day either might happen.

True to form, Lucius had spent the night before race-day in town and come back looking ragged and tired. He had been more than usually afraid of the colts all morning, and had not denied it when Math shouted the accusation, just put his head down by the back wheel and made a show of fixing the harness. Left alone, knowing that the other three teams were already out on the training track, Math had done what seemed best and brought the two colts out together.

His mother had always taught him, and from the first days of his apprenticeship Ajax had agreed, that if he were ever to harness the quadriga on his own, Math should always lead out the colts as a pair. Brought out singly, whichever of the two was put first in the traces was likely to fight the new one coming in and, as Ajax said at least once every morning and often in the afternoons and evenings as well, the colts were built of meat and bone and fury, while the chariots were of fragile wood and wicker. ‘Better to lose a bit of skin off a colt than the entire racing chariot.’

Ajax had never, Math thought, owned his own race-chariot before, while everyone in the world had owned a colt or two by the time they were twenty.

So he did as he was told and brought out Brass and Bronze together, the two chestnut colts, seven years old, in the primes of their lives, race-fit and lethal and, as Ajax had said, filled with fury.

They hated each other; it was what made them so exceptionally good, and so exceptionally difficult to handle. For the right driver, who could take all that rage and turn it into speed, they would run their hearts out to best each other, and so win the race. With the wrong driver, a man who lost his concentration, or did not have the beasts’ respect, they could run themselves to a halt and fight in the traces, wreaking havoc on the track. Math had seen that happen once, and never wished to again.

Getting them into the traces in the first place was his responsibility and, on the morning of the emperor’s race, it had seemed for a while as if he might succeed.

He had prayed to Nemain of the moon and to Manannan of the seas, who had become something of a favourite with the boys who plied the docks, and to his mother, who was his patron god and had bred the colts. With all that divine help, he had backed Brass and Bronze nearly up to the bar, with the two rearmost geldings standing peacefully enough.

And then Math saw two men standing in the avenue between the horse barns, and while the wealthier of the two was a stranger the other was Pantera, who was looking at him with exactly the same look he had given when Math had not returned the cheese the night before. For a fleeting moment, Math lost his focus on the colts, and the sky fell on his head.

‘ Keep them away from the chariot! ’

He had time to scream that, and haul both the lead ropes forward, before the world blurred to sky and turf and hooves and pain and his shoulder was wrenched from its socket and the colts were screaming and Lucius was screaming louder and higher, like a pig at slaughter, and other voices were shouting…

‘ Math! Lord, stay back! Math, let go! Lord, you must not be injured, please stay back. Math, will you let go, I’ve got him.’

Math let go of Bronze and held on to Brass and hoped he had them in the right order. Not that he had any choice: Brass’s rope had become wrapped round his arm and he couldn’t have got free if he’d wanted to. With the hated enemy taken out of reach, the big chestnut colt reared one more time and came down, shaking and blowing and stamping, but no longer fighting.

Panting, bleeding, too shocked to speak, Math stood in a bubble of calm, with Pantera close by holding Bronze and looking, briefly, equally shaken.

They were not alone, although for a moment it had seemed so. A great many people stood around. A glance at either end of the barn showed a massive, flame-haired warrior-guard standing with his weapon bared, blocking entry. People crowded beyond, trying to see in, to find gossip to spread, but dared not pass. In the quiet avenue, Lucius sobbed piteously and was rightly being ignored. A number of young men in immensely expensive tunics, with silver and gold at their belts and fatly jingling purses, stood around, looking interested and amused in equal proportion.

The youngest of them, and the most expensively dressed — in a toga, actually, not a tunic, and with purple around the hem — was leaning down, examining Bronze’s off fore as if he knew what he was doing, ignoring, as he did so, Pantera’s strident protest.

So there was one man in the world who could ignore Pantera with impunity. In his dazed state, Math found that as interesting as what the young man was saying.

‘He’s bleeding. Is there a healer?’

‘Me,’ cawed a woman’s voice, in Gaulish, and Math spun round to see Hannah, looking uncommonly shabby, as if she had paused to wipe muck on her bare arms and scruff her hair and taken pains to coarsen her voice.

It was hard to believe someone so unclean could be a healer. Certainly the young man looked as if he were about to dismiss her, when a commotion at the end of the stands told of Ajax confronting the big flame-haired guard who was blocking his way to his horses.

Bronze and Brass heard him, and perhaps saved his life, for the warrior-guard had raised his sword and, far from backing off, Ajax’s face had grown very still the way it did before a race. Math heard Pantera say, ‘Mithras, no!’ very quietly, under his breath, and then Brass and Bronze spun and reared and threw their heads back and screamed a clarion call for their master.

The sound carried all over the barns and the training track and the hippodrome, and made everyone else fall silent.

‘Lord, that’s the driver. The guard would do well to let him past.’ Pantera was diffident. That was new, too; he had been a great deal less than diffident with Seneca. But the wealthy youth in the toga listened and called an order, and the guard-giant lowered his sword and stood back just enough to let a single man step through.

Ajax was in driving mood. Even Hannah knew better than to go near him when he first stepped down from a chariot after a race, and he looked the same now: white-faced and grim, fit to kill anyone who came against him, not out of anger, but just because the need to win was so profound that he would clear anyone from his path to do it.

Pantera was in his path. In fact, to Math it seemed as if Pantera had put himself in his path, directly in front of the youth with the toga.

For a moment, Pantera, too, looked as if he had stepped off a chariot, tense and relaxed at the same time and with that careful, still look to his face that took in everything equally. He angled his head so that his eyes met Ajax’s and the world held its breath a moment, as each took the measure of the other.

Then Pantera shook his head, to himself or to Ajax or both, and turned to the youth and said smoothly, ‘Lord, I believe this is Ajax of Athens, driver of the Green chariot that will race today for your entertainment. Ajax, you are in the presence of Nero Claudius Germanicus, emperor of Rome.’

Emperor of Rome. Nero. The young man with the purple-edged toga who had stooped to examine an injured colt and had its blood even now on his hands.

In bowel-watering consternation, Math saw Ajax turn on the emperor a heartbeat’s savage hatred that went far beyond the ice-cold, driven rage of racing, but that moment, too, was gone almost before he saw it, and then Math watched a small and unpleasant miracle, as Ajax folded into himself, in the opposite of what he did to race. He curved his shoulders, making himself smaller, and wrung his hands together and simpered — simpered! — in the way craven stall-holders did to rich men.

He fell to one knee. ‘Lord, please accept my apologies. Our horses are raw and not fully trained. The boy-’

‘Get up, man! The boy did well to hold the colts as far as he did. He should never have been left alone. He is to be commended.’ Nero turned commending eyes on Math.

Pantera was moving. Ajax was moving. Because they were both moving towards Math, they collided before they reached him. And so it was that they left the way clear for Math to look squarely at his emperor and for Nero to favour Math with a fond and certain smile.

Math blushed and looked down. Not because the look was new, although he didn’t especially want Hannah to see him working, but because it was what he did when a man of great wealth looked at him like that.

And even then, glancing down at his own bare feet, which were filthy from the unshovelled horse muck, a part of him was singing bright, sparkling praises to Nemain, god of moon and water, favourite of his mother, to Manannan, to Hannah’s Egyptian Isis and her philosopher-gods, to whoever had brought him to this glorious possibility to earn himself a gold piece, and maybe more than that.

The emperor was known to buy chariot teams for all kinds of reasons, and some of those reasons had nothing to do with the horses.

There was a short, hard silence, when everyone knew what had happened, and nobody knew what to say.

The emperor broke it; he was the only one who could. ‘This colt has injured his tendon,’ he said. ‘He should be trotted up, to see the damage.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Ajax said.

With a surprisingly regal bow, he took Bronze from Pantera and trotted him out, away from the small group and back towards them. The colt was brave and fired up and ready to race, but the emperor was right, he was definitely lame. It took a good horseman to see it, but Math was a good horseman, and surrounded by the same.

‘He will heal, given time,’ Nero said. ‘But he will need to be replaced for the race. Have you another horse?’

‘There’s Sweat,’ said Ajax doubtfully, ‘but-’

‘He won’t run with Brass,’ blurted Math, forgetting his place. ‘He’ll fight and not run. Really. They’ll kill each other before they get to the track. It’ll be worse than war.’

‘Is it so?’ The emperor smiled as if this were a great insight. Math looked down at his feet again.

‘It is so, lord,’ Ajax said tightly. ‘If you wish a true contest, it would perhaps be better to run the two second-string colts together, although they are not yet fully racing fit. Lucius, go and fetch-’

‘No. He’s the reason the accident happened in the first place. Send this one. What’s your name, child?’

‘Math,’ said Math, ‘Math of the Osismi.’ A thought struck him, displacing the near promise of gold. ‘But Sweat and Thunder aren’t groomed. They have no ribbons. We’ll be late for the race if we take the time to do it properly now-’

Nero laughed, lightly, with a new intimacy. ‘The race cannot start before we start it. Therefore, if we were to help you, Math, you could not be late. Get the horses. Fly. We shall do it together.’

They did it together, Math of the Osismi and Nero Claudius Augustus Germanicus, emperor of Rome, who had deft fingers and a surprisingly good way with a horse so that Thunder stood for him who sometimes would barely stand for Ajax, and Sweat let Math vault on to his bare back so that he could plait the mane from the withers, standing up, with the horse raising his head high to let him reach the ones round his ears.

It was a recently developed trick; he had done it once to amuse Hannah. He did it now quite differently, blushing as if it were foolish but necessary, looking down and making shy as the emperor asked him questions and drew out of him the small facts of his life: his mother’s death, his father’s near-fatal wounding in a trivial bar brawl, his own miraculously early apprenticeship, his burning desire to be a race-driver and to take his mother’s horses to Rome, to race against the best the world could offer.

Math was honest to a fault. If he said nothing of theft and working the docks, it was because the emperor did not think to ask him.

Grown men commonly made foolish assumptions about Math of the Osismi. On this day of the races, with all to run for and success newly dangled in reach, Nero, emperor of Rome, seemed to be making most of them.