Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (12 page)

‘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.’

M
ath 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—’