Chapter 43

Rome, November, AD 69

Borros

‘ Come. Fast! ’

Pantera was running when he got to us. We’d been waiting where he left us, within sight of the entrance to the brothel where his friend worked.

We’d never been that close to the House before — it was always somewhere he went alone — but this time, because we knew Lucius was coming, he left us close. It was a trap, of sorts, but he was using himself as the bait and there was always a chance they might have out-trapped him, in which case our orders were clear: we were to kill him, and get out of there. I was going to Britain; I knew the ship, I knew the master’s name, I had a berth booked: he was that unsure he’d get out alive.

Then he came out alone, and ran to us where we hid in the salt-grinder’s hut with the air making our noses itch and he had a look on his face I’d never seen before. Wild. Not quite in control. Not like him at all. ‘Where’s Lucius?’

He asked this of Felix, our scout. Felix could go places a shadow would not slip through, hear conversations meant for no one, kill a man in a crowd and walk away. He had been closest to the House while we were in a room three doors away, armed and ready. I had a shortened spear stolen from a dead guard that looked like a carrying-pole if I reversed it and hung a pack over the butt end.

Amoricus, we had discovered, was a dead shot with a sling. He could split a hair held out between two hands at twenty paces and a man’s head at fifty.

Felix was our knife man. He held one now, idly picking the dirt from under his nails. He said, ‘Lucius hasn’t come out yet. His three men are still watching the front door and five others at the street’s end.’

‘He left before I did.’ Pantera closed his eyes, seemed to marshal himself, then took Felix’s knife — which in itself was an achievement; that he could do it for one, and that he did it without thinking — and drew a swift map on the dirt floor.

‘There’s a route out of the House on the second floor that gives on to the tanners’ street. The street bends round and makes a junction with the Street of the Lilacs about three hundred paces east of where we are. If they’ve gone that way, then all our easterly routes are blocked. A dozen men at the junction here — and a handful at the far end of the Lilacs, here’ — he marked crosses on the rough rectangle he’d drawn on the ground — ‘could block off all escape. Our only safe route is to cross over the Lilacs and into one of the alleys that lead back into the depths of the hill. If they know about that, if they’ve blocked it, we’ll have to fight our way out.’

‘They’ll see us.’ Amoricus sat back on his heels. Already he had three small pieces of lead shot in his hand, ready for the sling. He wasn’t Felix, who lived to kill, but there was a part of him that relished the promise of combat. Funny, that. I’d have thought if you cut the balls off a man, he’d give up wanting to fight, but Amoricus was living proof to the contrary.

He said, ‘The Lilacs is one of the widest streets on the Capitol. You could drive three chariots abreast and they wouldn’t rub wheels.’ He rose, more fluidly than I’d seen him move all summer; no sign he was sore from his scars then. ‘You’ll need a diversion. Wait until you hear the shouting and then just wander over as if you’re coming to see what the fuss is about.’ He threw a shy grin at Pantera. ‘I’ve been wanting to do this for months.’

On another day, Pantera would have stopped him. But there was blood on his tunic and that wild look in his eye that I couldn’t read and when he might have come up with a better plan, this time, he just cocked his head and said, ‘Have fun,’ and it made us feel like boys on a thieving trip, not men on the run.

We waved Amoricus off without much more said, then gathered our weapons and listened to the scrabbling rats, to the whistles of the silver-boys, to the burbling doves somewhere in another street, high up on the rooftops.

And then it came; the shout of angry Guards and the scuff-hammer of nailed feet running on a dry road and ‘Halt! Halt, damn you!’ and the snap of a lead shot smacking on armour and the tumble of a body and then they stopped shouting and drew their swords.

The sound of iron whipping out of leather is one you’ll never forget, or the appalling realization that this is for real; that what they’ll do to you if they catch you is beyond your darkest nightmare. That’s when your bowels feel loose and your throat dries up.

‘Move.’ Pantera shoved his flat hand on the small of my back, thrusting me bodily forward. ‘If we stay, we waste his risk.’ He caught my belt and slowed me. ‘Not too fast. Walk with me. Look curious, not worried.’

It was the hardest thing I’d ever done; just walk to the open street, head swinging like a bruised bear wondering where all the noise was coming from.

Amoricus was putting on a one-man show of how to commit suicide. He was capering about in front of seven Guardsmen with one lying flat on the ground behind them. Even as we watched, he loaded up another shot and, whizzing it at the nearest, felled him like a tree.

We weren’t the only people in the street. Almost everyone sane was staying behind their shutters, but there were half a dozen still stupid enough, or curious enough, to come out.

Pantera slung his arm round Felix’ neck like they were lovers, pointed at Amoricus and said something obscene. Felix laughed and slapped his shoulder and they tussled their way out into the middle of the road, two young men coming out to see the fun.

I couldn’t have done that. I was shitting myself, or close to it. I shambled along behind them and it was all I could do to keep my spear haft over my shoulder and not bring it down and poke the sharp end at the nearest Guards.

We so nearly made it. They were all watching Amoricus, who was keeping them off him with his sling; they could have rushed him, but he’d dropped two out of eight and none of the six who were left wanted to be the next body cooling on the street.

We ambled idly across, with Felix and Pantera play-wrestling, which meant that their heads were under each other’s arms and neither was readily seen, and we were within site of the alleyway Pantera had drawn for us when ‘Stop! Stop that man! On the emperor’s order! A talent in gold to the man who stops him!’

A talent? A talent? You could have bought half of Rome with a talent of gold and this wasn’t from the Guards that Amoricus was taunting, but from behind and to our left and it was Lucius, on horseback, hurtling down the road like a man possessed, screaming out what he’d give to the man who caught Pantera, and what he’d do to those who stopped him.

Of course we bloody ran. Would I be here if we hadn’t?

The alley was in sight and we sprinted for it, heads down, feet pumping. Three of the onlookers came at us from the sides, their eyes alight with the promise of gold. Felix killed one with a slash of his knife that opened up the man’s throat and sent blood in a wide arc across the street. Pantera stabbed another neatly in the eye, so that he staggered back, screaming.

I came to my senses in time to hurl my pack at the next, and follow through with the wicked iron end of my foreshortened spear. His wasn’t a fast death; I hadn’t had the practice of the other two.

We were out of the road and into shadow. Above us, the silver-boys twittered and Pantera stopped long enough to put his fingers to his lips and tweet out a response; three notes, rising then falling. To this day, I don’t know what it meant.

There were horses behind us, crashing into a space made only for men. A spear burned past my right shoulder, missed Pantera by a hand’s breadth. He jinked left and right, fast as a hare, then in British shouted, ‘Left ahead, but veer right just before it,’ and we did exactly that, slewing right, then barrelling left at the last moment, into an alley so narrow, so dark, it was nothing more than a goat track between tall houses.

The sun had never shone here; the air was dank with mould and death and debris. We couldn’t run; we couldn’t see where we were going, but then neither could Lucius. He had to dismount from his sweating, bloodied horse and scream for torches.

That bought us time. Pantera caught both our hands and eased us forward, step by tremulous step, deeper into a dark we knew nothing about. It wasn’t like night in there, it was thicker than that, as if people waited just an arm’s reach away, and were watching us. It was the late afternoon and the rest of Rome lay soaked in sun and here we were in our own private underworld.

‘Go right.’ Pantera’s voice in my ear.

I fumbled to the right and found an opening, a doorway, and beyond it a room with a single lit lamp in one corner; a blessing of light, or a curse if it was seen outside, but it was tucked in an alcove and the door was shut behind us and nobody followed, so it can’t have been.

I was wet with thick, greasy sweat. My palms were soft with it. My bowels ached with the need to empty. There was more light in there, more like early dawn than midnight.

In the grey gloom, I saw Pantera lean his shoulders against the door, with his head turned to the side, listening. He held up one hand when I might have spoken and then, with a finger to his lips for silence, pointed to a shuttered window opposite.

It opened without sound and we wriggled through it, eellike, and out into another shaded alley, and then another opposite and another and we were halfway up the side of the Capitol and into the slums where Lucius could hunt for a year and never find us.

Felix got us watered wine, I don’t know where from. I fell back against a wall and drank until I could drink no more. I still felt parched when I was done. Pantera had sunk down with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He took one drink and looked up. He had aged ten years and his eyes were hollow spaces of no light.

Presently, the silver-boys’ whistling caught up with us; they had lost us for a while as we dodged between alleys in places even they didn’t know.

Pantera tilted his head and listened and gave an answering call. One small boy with tousled blond hair jumped down from a rooftop and spoke to him in a language that made no sense to me, gave a brief nod of his head and then vanished.

‘Amoricus,’ Pantera said. ‘They’ve got him.’

‘Hades.’ I felt sick. ‘We have to…’

Pantera was on his feet. ‘They’re taking him to the barracks. This way.’

We stood no chance of getting him, that much was clear. There were two tent-units of Guards around him, and Lucius at the front. They knew we’d try to free him. They didn’t know we had an oath that said a clean death was better than what Lucius would have made of his life. And he knew too much; it wasn’t all altruism. He could have destroyed us.

We took to the heights, to the apartment blocks, and one room in particular which was owned by a cook at Julius’ gladiator school and overlooked the street from the front.

Amoricus came along it soon, hobbled with iron chains at his ankles and others at his wrists, with a rope tied about his neck like an ox; they hauled him along like that. Sixteen men ringed him, with their swords out and their shields raised and barely a gap between them.

Pantera took that gap. He was white as salt, but his hand was steady. I’d never seen a man throw a knife more than the breadth of a room. He threw it from a distance of fifty paces at an angle down and back, from an upstairs window overlooking the street.

Before he threw, he gave a particular whistle, like the silver-boys’ talking-whistles, but also like a temple flute, and Amoricus looked up.

He saw us, I’m sure of it. And he smiled.

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