M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

He said, ‘If I can’t, don’t wait for me. There are two women and a man in the goose-keeper’s house. Escort them to safety in the emperor’s name.’

‘I can’t do that if they’re already taken,’ Mergus said. ‘Centurion Appollonius is the son of a consul. I don’t have the authority to arrest him, or even obstruct him in the prosecution of his duties.’

‘You do now. Here-’

Pantera pulled open the pouch at his belt, retrieved earlier from Augustus’ forum. Nero’s gold and sapphire ring danced in a fading bloom of firelight.

Mergus gazed at it, unimpressed. ‘Tonight,’ he said drily, ‘it may be that the emperor’s authority is not what it was. And I wouldn’t trust him to take my word over Appollonius’ if it comes to an argument.’

Pantera was coming to like Mergus a great deal. ‘Take it anyway.’ He placed the ring in the other man’s hand, closing his fingers over it. ‘It may keep you from being crucified in the morning.’

‘Maybe.’ Mergus hid the gold beneath his leather jerkin. ‘And if it can’t, then- Mithras! Is the entire Aventine on fire?’

They had just turned a corner. Aghast, Mergus looked up the hill. ‘They’ve set a new blaze,’ he said, in horror. ‘The wind’s blowing in our faces; it would never have driven the fire up here. The bastards are ahead of us, setting fire to the streets behind them as they go.’

Smoke swirled around them, sucked this way and that by the fire. They could see nothing but burned and burning buildings, and, ahead, a wall of savage flame. And then from high up at the fire’s leading edge, they heard the voices of men raised in anger — and a woman scream.

Pantera put his hand on Mergus’ shoulder and pushed him up the hill. ‘That’s Hannah! Go! ’

On the Aventine hill, the gander, his geese and their sacred goslings slept safely in a stone goose-house that stood on a tiny island in the centre of the pond at the meadow’s far end, accessed by a wooden causeway. The goose-keeper’s cottage seemed similarly secure, encircled by water and far away from any of the neighbouring buildings from which burning debris might fall.

‘This place has withstood seventeen fires since it was first built,’ Hypatia had said when Shimon and Hannah had first knocked on the oak gate at the night’s beginning. ‘An eighteenth won’t touch it. Come in. You’ll be safe from the fire here.’

They had, indeed, been safe from the fire. Hannah had even managed to sleep, fitfully, until an hour or two before dawn, when the sound of falling masonry had woken her and, with Shimon and Hypatia, she had gone outside in the pre-dawn dark to watch the fire’s progress.

It came fast, and against the wind, but even when the saddler’s stall just down the hill burst into wild, greasy flame, it was clear that Hypatia had been right; it was never going to reach across Juno’s wide meadow to touch the geese or their keeper’s cottage.

Wide awake now, Hannah stood huddled with Hypatia and Shimon in the doorway watching flames scour the night sky, gauging the fire’s progress towards them by its colour and heat. Soon after the saddler’s, the silversmith’s took light. The workshop at the back was full of precious metals that burned in a rainbow cacophony of colours: acid greens lanced through deeper shades of blue and violet; red spheres rose to hover like bloody ghosts in the heat; a sheet of white washed through once, and was gone.

The fire moved on and the colours faded until only the spectrum of reds and paler golds remained, like a hearth fire, but so vast that it roused its own wind, growing ever fiercer until a fire-made gale seethed through the rafters loud enough to overwhelm the crash of tumbling masonry and falling beams in the street outside.

Which was how three people used to subterfuge, trained to hear the sounds beneath the murmur of the world, did not hear the guards who came to find them until six armoured men began to break down the oak gate with their fire axes.

Hypatia reacted first. ‘That’s not Pantera. Go!’ She shoved Hannah ungently in the small of the back. ‘We can hide in the goose-house on the island.’

Hannah ran across the meadow towards the bridge. Hypatia kept by her side all the way, urging her on, catching her elbow when she fell, hauling her up, pushing her ever faster, as if they were young again, running from some shrill Sibyl bent on revenge.

With her nose and throat full of gritty soot and her hair grey with smoke, Hannah stumbled across the bridge and under the weeping alders towards the mossy stone goose-house.

The stone hut was cloaked in darkness, hidden from the firelight by a fringe of hanging branches. Hypatia could see in the dark, it seemed. She reached forward and twisted and a door opened, dark on dark. The mellow smell of sleeping geese feathered out, thinning the smoke and soot.

‘Inside.’ Hypatia’s mouth was next to Hannah’s ear. ‘There’s a space to your right by the perches. Try not to tread on a gosling. They scream like wounded deer.’

Hannah squeezed in on her hands and knees, feeling ahead of herself for anything living. She touched hot goose faeces and an old, cold egg, and the scrawny leg of an adult goose that snibbed at her ribs, and then there was only the stone wall, old with cobwebs and dust.

She felt for the corner and turned round slowly, cramped by the stone on two sides and a wooden perch on the other. The door to the goose-hut swung shut, cutting off the fire and the smoke and the sounds of axes crashing on wood, and men committing violence.

Hannah’s eyes began slowly to find fragments of light and to build from them images of geese and wood, stone and flesh. Hypatia was very close. Her breath smelled pleasantly of wood smoke, as if the charnel house stench outside hadn’t touched her. Her elbows rested on Hannah’s knees. Nobody else was in the small space beyond her; there wasn’t room. Which meant…

‘Where’s Shimon?’ Hannah whispered.

‘Fulfilling his oath to your father.’

‘ Hypatia! Where is he?’

Hypatia kept her eye pressed to a gap in the door, from which she could watch the garden. She said, ‘He’s doing what the gander would do if the geese were attacked; he’s sacrificing his life that we mightNo! — Your death won’t stop his, or make it any swifter, or- Hannah, will you be still and listen?’ She grasped both of Hannah’s wrists, and physically prevented her from leaving the goose-house.

Cramped, scared, still whispering, Hannah was furious. ‘Why must he die for me? We despise Saulos for pretending that my father gave his life in sacrifice for people he could never know, why is this different? Hasn’t there been enough blood?’

‘He believes you are worth saving.’

‘But I don’t-’

‘Hush.’ Hannah felt Hypatia fumble to reach and lift her hand. Her cool, dry lips pressed briefly to the heel of her thumb. Her mother used to kiss her like that, a way to restrain, to hold, to keep Hannah quiet and safe at times when hot blood and youth might have caused her to speak or act out of turn. In all their time together, Hypatia had never kissed her thus. ‘This is his choice. Let him make it.’

Outside in the meadow, men shouted, one of them in pain. Hypatia dropped Hannah’s hand and pressed her eye to the gap in the door. Presently, easing back, she whispered, ‘He’s lied to them, told them we’ve gone. It may be enough to stop them searching any further. Sit very still.’

They sat crushed together in the dark with the fidgeting geese, holding cramped hand to cramped hand, barely breathing, with their hearts loud enough for each to hear the other and their tears dried with terror.

It wasn’t enough.