M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

Math snatched the coin deftly from the air. Aglow with pride, he followed at Pantera’s heel while the man found a bowl on the table and filled it with water from the well, then, crouching, used the sleeve of his own tunic to wipe away the filth from Math’s face, cleaning the edges of the graze underneath.

He moved slowly, tenderly, as he might with a wounded hound. Finishing, he said, ‘You did truly do well, but you know that. And now you have two pieces of cheese to give back to me?’

There was a short, difficult silence.

‘You ate it?’ Pantera asked.

‘I was coming back.’

‘And you were sure there was nothing else to be done for the night. In which case-’ Pantera stood, dusting his hands. ‘You’re right, there is nothing else. You may go.’

It was as curt a dismissal as any Seneca had heard. Math’s face flashed from white to scarlet and back to white. His eyes became great grey pools, filled to the brink with swimming tears. He opened his mouth to speak and shut it again.

Too fast, he turned on his heel and ran for the doorway, leaving yet another muddy trail across the immaculate floor. A short while later, the outer door was flung open but not shut. A dog snarled in a gateway and fell silent.

Pantera absorbed himself wringing out his soiled sleeve over the bowl. Seneca glared at him, waiting.

‘What?’ Pantera asked, without raising his head.

‘Did you think to stop him loving you?’ Seneca threw up his hands. ‘You won’t do it with harsh words alone.’

Pantera abandoned the effort to clean his sleeve. Wandering over to the table, he picked at a small curl of pickled herring the size of a hazelnut and popped it in his mouth, chewing reflectively.

‘He doesn’t love me,’ he said. ‘He’s looking for a man he can respect who will take the place of the father he despises. His father was a warrior. When he finds I was the same in Britain, he will despise me too.’

Seneca laughed bluntly. ‘If you think that, then five years among the Dumnonii has made you a fool, for you were not one when you left Rome. Take him in, what harm is there? If you treat him well, he’ll work for you with all his heart.’

‘The spymaster’s philosophy?’ Pantera’s face hardened. ‘Take the boy and you can mould the man?’

‘I didn’t take you,’ Seneca said. ‘I never touched you, in fact. You’d have killed me if I’d tried.’ And still might. That fear was always there.

‘I was never a whore.’

‘No, but you would have been within a month if I hadn’t taken you in. You couldn’t have gone on thieving for ever.’

‘You may choose to believe so.’ Pantera ate an olive, wiping his lips neatly afterwards with the edge of his sleeve. ‘But we were talking of Math, who is both a whore and a thief and successful at both. He needs no help from me.’

‘You think? For all his bravado, that boy’s been plying his trade for less than six months and he’ll die a whore’s death within the year, as well you know. With a face like that, and the spirit to match, it’s only a matter of time before he’s taken by someone who finds pleasure in another’s pain — and when he fights back, he’ll die.’

Seneca stopped. Always before, he had kept his composure while others ranted around him. His final words rang in a leaden silence.

‘None the less, I prefer to leave him to his own fortunes,’ Pantera said, coldly. ‘I have one child’s death on my conscience. You’ll forgive me if I choose not to add another.’

He was already leaving. ‘Wait!’ Seneca snatched at his sleeve. ‘What do you know of the Phoenix Year?’

Pantera stared down at the offending fingers distastefully. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Nero will ask you of it tomorrow. If he does — when he does — will you find a way to see me that Akakios cannot follow? There’s a man you should meet who is asking the same question and has more of the answers.’

‘If I’m alive, I’ll give it thought.’

Twisting out of Seneca’s grip, Pantera followed Math’s line of muddy footprints towards the door.

‘Math? Are you all right?’

Hannah found him; dark-eyed, still-souled Hannah, the healer from Alexandria, who was Ajax’s new woman. Not yet so much his woman as he wanted, perhaps; in the month she had been among them, Math had not seen her let Ajax so much as lay a finger on her, but his interest had been clear from the start. In this, she was the due opposite of the other women who hovered on the fringes of the team who would have given themselves to Ajax in a moment, had he but asked.

He had never asked any of them, and Math had thought that women were not his interest until Hannah had arrived, carrying stillness as a gift that gave ease to the driver and his team in a way no one else could do.

It was for this, her gift of tranquillity and the way she lit Ajax’s eyes, that the team had loved her first. Soon, though, it became clear that Hannah was a healer of a different stamp from those who customarily served the citizens of Coriallum.

Not ten days before, she had tended one of the younger colts who had gone down with colic, giving him a drench that brought him right within the day. Since then, the entire team had wooed her, not just Ajax, hanging on her every word, running to answer her every need, in the urgent hope that she might cleave to them and not the other teams, that she might keep their horses and their driver in racing fitness at least until the emperor’s contest had been won.

They wouldn’t win, of course, they all realized that as soon as they saw the magistrate’s new horses, but they all knew, also, that a good second would do. It was Math’s heart’s dream to race a chariot before the emperor — and win — or it had been before he met Pantera. Now, he needed to think about that, to weigh his heart and its dreams, and to do that he needed to be alone.

Hannah was there, close and warm and still, like a forest pool on a summer’s river. The barn was lit only by the stars, and those were faint. Math could barely see her; no more than a wave of black hair falling like smoked silk from her high, clear brow, and the straight nose beneath it.

Her face was near his, peering in the dark.

‘Math, what’s the matter? What happened to your cheek? Did one of your men hit you? Did you cut a purse and someone caught you?’

Hannah was a breath of fresh air in many ways, not least of which was her quiet acceptance of what he did and why. And she was good with the horses, too, nearly as good as his mother had been. Nobody else, except possibly Ajax, could have crouched down now as she was doing, almost between Sweat’s two back feet, to look into the warm nest Math had made for himself in the straw. The colt fidgeted, stamping his foot, but he did not try to kick her head to a pulp, or rip her scalp from her skull with his teeth.

She was close to Math now, sharing his huddle of straw. Her forefinger had stroked once down his cheek, feeling the wet, and she had said nothing. His mother would have done such a thing; noting the tears but not having to name them.

Thickly, Math said, ‘You shouldn’t come in here. Your hair’ll smell of horse piss when you go.’

‘Really?’ She took his hand and squeezed it and he saw the flash of her smile in the warm, damp dark. ‘I’ve probably smelled of nothing else since I first came to look at your colt ten days ago.’

She didn’t. She smelled of wood smoke and warm hair, of wool and belt-leather and woman-sweat that was quite different from the sweat of men. The temptation to bury himself in her arms was like a thirst on a hot day. He supposed Ajax felt the same. The thought gave him strength to resist.