Rome: The Emperor's spy

Chapter Nine

‘ Go Thunder! Go Sweat! Go! ’

Math was hoarse. His ears overflowed with the noise of his own voice lost in ten thousand others. His eyes watered from shouting. His bones rocked and his teeth rattled with the pounding thunder of four white-eyed, sweating chariot teams as they strove for the last ounce of speed.

There was sand on his face, in his mouth, in his eyes. His body poured sweat, crushed on all sides by other apprentices in their place down by the track, where they could run to the teams and help if needed. They paid nothing for this place, and it was the best in the whole hippodrome.

Math was young and therefore near the back, but if he pushed in the right places at the right times he could see through the tangle of waving arms in front of him and catch flashes of the teams: a gobbet of spit on a horse’s mouth, a spinning wheel, part of a raised whip, Ajax’s shaven head shining under the glancing sun…

He could taste the creaming sweat. Almost, he could smell the scent of winning. The Parthian team were not as fast as he had thought. They had two lengths on the other three; hardly anything.

‘ Ajax! Go! ’

Ajax was going like the wind. He had promised the emperor he would. The dream-like start to the race that had begun with Nero helping Math to plait the Green ribbons into the manes of the colts had continued with the emperor and his retinue — there had been sixteen of the giant flame-haired warriors by then — walking with Math and the Green team up to the mouth of the tunnel that led into the hippodrome.

Ajax had stripped off his jerkin and wound the four sets of reins round his waist, with the soft goatskin belt beneath so that they didn’t cut into him as he angled his body round the track.

The scars on his back and shoulders had gleamed under a layer of goose-grease, laid on to stop him losing his skin if he fell on to the sand of the track. Math watched the emperor study the scars of the flogging. Nero raised his brows once but said nothing. It was a day for not speaking the things that were thought.

The greatest of the not-spoken things was Math’s. He raged silently all the way to the hippodrome, and everyone with him knew it, if not why.

For the first time in his life, he had been allowed to lead the horses to the start. Ajax had promised that he could do it ‘some day’: a gift for when Math was ready; for when Lucius had gone; for when there was a good, well-earned reason to give a wayward child a reward for good behaviour.

Today had not been a reward for anything but an obvious attempt to break the growing connection between Math and the emperor, and it had failed for the simple reason that, in a blatant act of favouritism that had earned Ajax thunderous looks from the drivers of the other three chariots, Nero had chosen to walk alongside Math and the Greens to the mouth of the tunnel.

For Math, Nero’s presence had made the event a heart-crushing anticlimax. There were few things in his life he truly craved and the chance to lead Sweat and Thunder to a race had been one of them. But he had dreamed of it done with ceremony, and on his own merits, not as a means to keep him from an end.

All the way to the hippodrome, therefore, Math had been crabbily sullen and Nero had misread it, thinking him overawed, and had chatted pleasantly about nothing.

Ajax had been desperate and barely hiding it. He had swept his hand over and over across his shaved skull in the way he did only when he was most worried about the horses. Hannah had walked on the other side of the chariot, still looking like a tavern drudge. It had been impossible to tell what she thought, except that she was particularly wary of Nero. Whether the emperor had noticed or not was equally a mystery; he had been charming to everyone.

At the entrance to the tunnel, when it was truly impossible for him to walk any further without causing an irretrievable scandal, Nero had reached out a hand and brought the small procession to a halt.

He had not spoken to Math, only favoured him with the smile that said more than words. Almost as an afterthought, as he was turning to leave, he had turned back and looked up at Ajax.

‘Losing will change nothing,’ he had said. ‘We may buy the team, but not the driver. It would be best for everyone if you did your best to win, do you understand?’

Ajax was race-ready, pale-lipped, wet with sweat and smelling of the pine resin that swathed his hands to keep the reins from slipping, and coated the pale skin of his head simply because he had rubbed it so often. Already he was looking inward, beginning to weave himself into the minds of all four horses, so that they and he became one.

Too curtly for true politeness, he said, ‘I understand perfectly, lord. I always drive to win.’

‘See that you succeed.’

The flame-haired guards had formed a double line of eight on either side of the tunnel’s mouth. They saluted, as one, making the moment a ceremony in itself.

With a final nod to Math, the emperor had turned away and begun to mount the steps to his dais. The magistrate was already there with his wife and three daughters, dressed in such finery as Coriallum had never seen before.

The tunnel had beckoned: a short stripe of dark before the bright, wide swathe of the track, gleaming with new gold sand, and the central oak spina around which the track was built newly carved in the likeness of dark-haired Apollo, with his lyres and chariots. The smells of fresh sand and horse-sweat, of axle grease and pine resin, mingled to produce the unmistakable scent of a chariot race.

Sweat and Thunder knew and loved it; they grew half a hand taller just breathing it in, and strained forward in the traces, desperate to go.

Math had felt himself grow as they grew, had felt the faster beat of his heart, already racing. From the sand, three trumpets sounded, calling in the Red team. The line of chariots shuffled forward, leaving the Whites next to go. Green was last, because of Nero. Math had taken the first step to lead his colts into the tunnel when a hand fell on his shoulder.

‘I’ll lead them in,’ Pantera had said. ‘There is a thing your driver must know.’

Math had gaped at him, horrified, then looked to Ajax for permission to carry on into the tunnel. But, once again, Pantera’s green-brown eyes had met Ajax’s amber ones over Math’s head, and once again a decision had been made without him.

‘Math, go to the apprentices’ enclosure,’ Ajax had said. ‘The horses will be safe with the emperor’s bodyguard.’

It was the last in a series of mortal insults. Always, every single time, in every race in the history of racing, the boy who led the racehorses to the tunnel led them also through it to the start line.

Math had relinquished the lead ropes as if they were his life, swearing inwardly to all the gods he could think of that if the Green team lost he would know it was Pantera’s fault, or Ajax’s, or both.

He spun away, kicking at the chariot wheel in passing, kicking again at the wall of the hippodrome, kicking at the shin of the last boy in the queue lining up to go into the apprentices’ enclosure, which was suicidally stupid when Math had just been marked for the kind of special attention that saw boys scarred for life, if not dead.

Murder happened often enough in the apprentices’ enclosure and was never of great concern; the strongest lived and the weakest died and sometimes a silver coin changed hands afterwards to soften the blow to the driver who must find a new boy.

The offended youth had turned, slowly. He was as tall as Ajax, and as broad, but with a head full of hair and lacking the scars. His nose was flat from many fights, his eyes small and violent as a boar’s.

A White band at his brow identified his team as the matched blacks that ran for Gallia Lugdunensis. White ribbons danced and dangled from his wrists, light as a flight of moths settled by chance on a rutting bull.

He had two companions, equally big, equally beribboned. All three were armed with short, vicious eating knives, honed on both edges and curved at the tip. They had flashed forward, close enough to lift Math’s hair with the wind of their passing.

Math did not carry a knife; he had always relied on his speed and a greater knowledge of the streets to protect him. Here, in the open, the three youths were too close and the crowd pressed too tight to make running an option. He had stood his ground obstinately and thought what Ajax and Pantera might say when they found him dead. The idea held a certain bleak satisfaction.

‘Math?’

Hannah had caught his shoulder, spinning him round, away from the danger. In the few moments since he had left the tunnel’s mouth, she had become cleaner, and ceased to stoop. Green ribbons were bound about her wrists. On her, they were bright as new leaves.

‘Look.’ She had spoken in Greek, which lifted them apart from the mob. When Math had looked up at her, she had pointed back to the tunnel’s mouth. ‘It was for a reason you were sent away.’

She was a woman and a healer and she had held him in the crook of her arm as if the knives did not exist, nor the youths wielding them. For all of these reasons, but more for her courage, the White youths had left them alone.

Math had felt death brush him close and then leave. The knots in his bowels had loosed themselves, and he had passed wind noisily.

Hannah had said only, ‘Do you see? There’s something wrong with the chariot. The emperor’s scarred man saw it.’

‘Pantera,’ said Math, laying claim to the man by virtue of his name. ‘His name is Sebastos Abdes Pantera. He’s not the emperor’s man. He’s the one who paid me the denarius last night.’

Even as he was speaking, Math had watched Pantera say something and gesture towards the offside wheel of the chariot, and Ajax had turned in consternation, peering down at the chariot, or the harness, or the wheels.

He might have jumped down to look at whatever was wrong, but the three horns sounded for the fourth time, summoning the Green team to the start.

With an oath that Math barely heard, in a language that was not Greek, Latin or Gaulish, Ajax had clucked his tongue and flicked the horses forward and let Pantera lead him into the tunnel.

Math did not see the race start — the apprentices’ stands were good for the end of the race, not the beginning — but the roar of the crowd told him the Greens got off to a good start, and when they came into view it was clear Ajax held a good position, not quite in the lead — the Reds were truly unassailable — but good enough, and with no signs of a crisis.

For the first three laps of the seven, Math learned the details of the race from the cheers of those around him. Confused, unhappy and terrified at what Pantera might have seen that he had not, he had made the effort to jump to see past the boys in front.

The rest of the Green team had filtered in afterwards but kept their distance, ashamed to be with him. The wainwright’s apprentices were there, and the loriner’s half-blind son, plus one or two others who could lay claim to a Green ribbon and a place in the enclosure. None of them had spoken to him.

Even Hannah had not stayed with him. Seeing him safe from attack, she wormed her way out to the oak rails at the sides of the enclosure and hoisted herself up to perch on the top rail, the better to see the race.

Math joined her halfway through the fourth lap when the hammer of the race had moved his blood so that it wasn’t possible to stay silent any longer. There was no room for him on the rails, but he stood at her side jumping whenever he could to see the flashes of coloured ribbons from the horses’ manes and screaming when Hannah screamed.

Sometime in the progress of the laps, Lucius arrived, sullen and stupid and barely carrying a Green ribbon, but even that had not taken the shine off the morning. Math screamed louder, to make up for the older boy’s silence.

‘ Ajax! Go! Go Green! Go Sweat! Go Thunder! ’

‘May I help you?’

The yellow-haired Gaul sat at a bench in front of the harness-maker’s booth at the end of the Green barn. He was almost alone; every other man, woman and child of Coriallum was in the hippodrome watching the races. The laps could be counted by the volume of the screams; a notch higher with each dipping dolphin on the central spina. They were on the third as the man asked his question.

Pantera did not answer immediately, but leaned his shoulder against a pole of a nearby booth and watched a man of perhaps fifty years, made old early by battle, pain and loss, deftly turn the end of a breastpiece, stitching together two flaps of leather with padding between to make it softer. He used two needles, one above and one below, making a row of neat double stitches, perfectly spaced.

Behind him, the booth was clean and uncluttered. His tunic was old and worn thin at the elbows, but fastidiously clean. He smelled of new grass and neatsfoot oil and, beneath that, of the rubbing stones the warriors of Britain — and likely of Gaul — had used daily on their blades to keep the soul-spirit of the iron fresh and fed.

It was a combination Pantera had not encountered in nearly two years. It caused his mouth to water and his chest to ache with remembered loss. He pushed himself away from the tent pole and squatted on his heels in the way the elders had done among the Dumnonii.

‘I am told you are Caradoc of the Osismi,’ he said, ‘father of Math of that tribe. I had hoped to find you here, but I confess to surprise that you are not watching the race.’

‘My son prefers it thus. He fears I bring ill luck to him and his horses. On a day such as today when his team may be victorious, I would not blight his joy by my presence.’

‘And the team’s progress is as easily gauged from here as the stadium,’ Pantera said, cocking his head to the roar of a half-lap from the hippodrome.

‘Indeed.’ The rhythm of the stitching paused only a moment. ‘And you are?’ The man’s voice was perfectly neutral. A sheathed sword lay under his seat. His right foot had moved to rest on the hilt.

‘A friend,’ Pantera said. ‘One who cares for Math and his future. Not in the way you might think. I have just watched him encounter the Emperor Nero. It was… unfortunate.’

‘I imagine Math did not find it so.’

‘He told the emperor that his mother was dead and his father had been crippled in a tavern brawl. He told me, on the other hand, that you had been a warrior and were injured in battle. Either way, I am surprised to find you so active.’

‘It suits Math that others believe what he wishes. And he believes it to be true that I am injured beyond all use.’

‘Perhaps he is also protecting you with the story of the tavern brawl? It would not do to tell the emperor that his father had been wounded in battle against the legions.’

‘Did he tell you that?’

‘No. He told me you and his mother had been warriors. It may be that in our ancestors’ time the men and women of Gaul fought shoulder to shoulder. But in my experience, only in Britain has such a thing happened in our lifetime.’

‘Then your experience is wide indeed.’

Caradoc of the Osismi did not stop stitching, but he did lift his foot from his blade. Something altered in the angle of his shoulders and, for the first time, he looked up from his work.

His eyes were a clear, rain-washed grey, exactly like Math’s. His hair was the colour of old thatch, streaked through with grey, older by three decades than Math’s grubby gold but easily imagined as once the same, only cleaner, and so brighter. Manifestly, he was the father of his son.

He was also a reader of men. Pantera stood still under a scrutiny such as he had not borne since his first meeting with Aerthen’s mother.

‘Will you sit?’ Caradoc said at last. ‘I have no wine, but could offer ale.’

It sounded a simple offer. Pantera, who knew it was not, found he was offered both an answer and another, more difficult question.

The past days had been full of such. In each, he had made a choice that did not fit with his idea of the man he had become since leaving Britain: the choice to answer the emperor’s summons when it would have been as easy to walk up the long road from the Roman camp in Lugdunum and lose himself eventually in the wild tribes north of the Brigantes; the choice to let a grubby urchin follow him from the docks, and then not to kill him; the choice to let Seneca find them, and then not to kill him either, but to eat with him, and listen; the choice to speak to a race-driver who claimed falsely to be Greek about what had been done to his harness; and now, last, the choice to find the urchin’s crippled father, who was not, after all, anywhere near so crippled that his son must ply the docks to feed both of them.

At any point, Pantera could have walked away. He did not yet know why he had not.

‘Thank you.’ He sat on the iron-bound chest at the tent’s entrance that served both as a lock-box and a seat, waiting while Caradoc set down his harness and went to fetch ale from the back of his tent.

The former warrior moved slowly, using a stick for balance. His left leg had evidently been broken at some time and set at an awkward angle, so that his knee and foot turned outward.

Cautiously, Pantera said, ‘I have seen others who were fallen on by a horse. Few of them escaped with only lameness.’

‘But many more are able to throw themselves clear and walk away unhurt.’ Caradoc spoke with his back still turned. ‘I was holding Math. He was less than a month old. I had to keep him safe from more than a dying horse.’

Only in war were horses killed beneath their riders, and newborn infants threatened with danger so that their fathers must accept injury to keep them alive. ‘Does he know?’ Pantera asked.

‘No.’

Caradoc poured the ale and, halting, brought it back. In the hippodrome, the fourth lap came near its conclusion. At the tents, Pantera accepted the small beaker of boiled leather and the foaming ale within it. A further decision settled in his mind.

Raising his mug to the sun, he spoke aloud the first line of the invocation to Briga, mother of Nemain, keeper of life and death, of war and poetry, patron of leatherworkers and of the chariot drivers’ death-dance. Into the still silence after it, he said, ‘When I lived among the warriors of the Dumnonii, it was considered an insult to offer a man wine, it being of Rome. Ale, by contrast, was an honour.’ He spoke it all in the language of south-western Britain, enemy of Rome.

The clear grey eyes regarded him a while. ‘There are places in Britain still not under the heel of Rome,’ Caradoc said eventually. ‘The dreamers are gathered again on Mona, the island off the west coast, led by the Boudica’s brother, with her daughters at his side. Graine, for all her youth, is said to be amongst the foremost dreamers there. She has said already that Rome will take Mona in her lifetime, but that Hibernia, further west, will be safe and can be reached in time. Those who will set themselves against Rome believe her and gather under her uncle’s banner.’

He spoke the forbidden language with an ease and fluency that told of a lifetime’s daily use.

Pantera held the leather mug between his knees and stared down at the slow-moving islands of thin foam on the top. As Caradoc had done, he, too, answered the question that had so carefully not been asked. ‘I lost too much in Britain to go back there now. You, though, could return at any time.’

‘And take Math?’ The grey eyes flashed even as they looked past him to the hippodrome. ‘The boy who tells the emperor that his father was injured in a bar-room brawl? If you know my son at all, you will know that he despises warriors and all they stand for. How could I take him into a culture where warriors are honoured above all else?’

‘They’re not honoured above the dreamers,’ Pantera said softly.

‘My son is not a dreamer,’ Caradoc said. ‘Nor is he a leatherworker, a hunter, a weaver, a builder of roundhouses, or one who can find water, who can sense shoals of fish and draw them to his nets, who can charm a hare from the hill. He is a thief and a seller of himself and neither of these has a place in the tribes. In the pitiful port-sprawl that is Coriallum, Math has learned to be an urban creature. What would he be if I wrenched him from that?’

‘He would be safe from Nero. No one here can give him that protection now.’ Pantera set his ale on the grass. He had drunk a mouthful, which was more than Math’s father had done. ‘You are not of the Osismi,’ he said. ‘Ajax who drives for the Greens is not of Athens. Might he not help you to take Math to safety?’

Caradoc shook his head. ‘Not if Ajax wins the race. Or even if he comes a good second behind the magistrate’s wing-footed Parthian colts. He made an oath on the shade of Math’s mother he would do whatever was in his power to get the team — and so Math — to Rome if he could. And no’ — Caradoc held up his hand against Pantera’s almost-question — ‘I did not think it wise to give such an oath, but it was Math’s greatest wish and it seemed safer that he go with Ajax than that he try to get there alone.’ The old man smiled thinly. ‘He thinks Rome will be Coriallum wrought larger, and he will be the greatest dock thief of them all.’

Pantera said, ‘When I was a child, I thought the greatest gift I could have was Roman citizenship and that I would do whatever was in my power to earn it. We all make mistakes that in later adulthood we look back on with dismay.’

‘If we survive them,’ Caradoc said, and Pantera found it politic not to answer, but paused, listening to the sound of another lap finishing. The roar was the longest it had been, as the teams began their final lap.

He turned to face Caradoc for the first time. ‘If Ajax were to lose the race,’ he asked thoughtfully, ‘and Nero were not to require him to come to Rome, would Ajax help you get Math to safety then, do you think?’

Caradoc looked at him in alarm. ‘Tell me why Ajax might not win,’ he said sharply.

‘A youth of the Green team cut partway through the harness of the offside traces just before the horses left the barns. It was carefully done: the harness will stand for the greater part of the race, but it is my belief that if the team is made to angle hard to the outside, the strain will break at least one of the straps.’

‘Does Ajax know of this?’ They were both standing now, staring out towards the hippodrome. The thunder of the crowd was deafening.

‘I told him before he entered the arena,’ Pantera said. ‘I wouldn’t have come here to tell you otherwise. He will need help later. I thought you would be in a position to give it.’

In the hippodrome, the crowd sucked in a collective gasp. The noise was exactly that of the moment in battle when a champion has been downed in single combat.

Caradoc gripped Pantera’s shoulder. ‘If Ajax is injured, tell Math and Hannah to bring him to the upper room of the Roan Bull tavern; it’s closest to the hippodrome. Go now!’