M. Scott: Rome: The Emperor's spy

He thought he had enough left to walk to the cottage, and perhaps lie down. Except that he had to find Hannah first. If she was alive. If the Watch hadn’t slaughtered her out of hand.

He thought he should know if she were dead. He wasn’t certain of it.

He walked slowly towards the cottage, feeling the warm grass underfoot, then cool paving stones and more grass and He spun towards the dark, drew the knife that he had carried through the night, jerked his arm back to throw…

And let it down again.

I am too tired for this.

He blinked the sweat from his eyes and still he couldn’t tell if the shape coming at him across the meadow was a ghost from his past, or the first of the night’s dead come to find him.

The ghost stopped in the centre of the meadow.

‘Ajax? Ajax of Athens?’

Hannah’s voice. Her living voice. He sank to his knees on the hot, cindered grass.

‘Ajax?’ She flowed across the grass, jerkily.

Something more painful than loss blocked his throat. He tried to speak her name and it came out as a wordless croak of the kind he had heard too often through the night from inside burning buildings.

Rising, he met her coming down to him. They stumbled together to kneel on the grass.

Pantera said, ‘Not Ajax. I’m sorry.’

Light fingers strayed over his face, his eyes, his hair, feeling things he could not see. Her face was almost dizzily happy. He didn’t understand why.

She said, ‘Don’t be sorry. Please, please don’t be sorry. At least one prayer this night is answered. But you’re weeping. Who’s died? Is it Math?’

‘No. Math’s well.’ He caught his breath and coughed and said, ‘You. I thought you were dead. Not true. Obviously.’ And then she was kissing his neck over and over, saying his name. Her hands wrapped his body, her fingers dug in tight. Suddenly, entirely unexpectedly, probably hopelessly, he wanted other things, too, and wasn’t sure how to ask.

He found her chin and brow by feel, framing her with his hands. As his eyes cleared of tears and smoke, he found her face by sight, and he was able to kiss her cleanly, on the cheek, in greeting, in offering, asking the question he dared not speak aloud.

‘I’m covered in ash,’ he said, and he was laughing now, but only a little, and then he had to stop because she had found him at last, lip to lip, nose to nose, brow to brow, and her answer left him no air to breathe, or mind to think, or heart to grieve.

He felt her fingers lock in his hair, drawing his head back. ‘I think that’s just as well. If you weren’t, you’d be able to tell that I’d just spent part of the night hidden in the goose-house.’

He leaned back a little, so he could see her properly, and make sense of the smears on her arms.

‘The Watch took Shimon and Hypatia,’ she said.

‘I know. Mergus has gone after them. He has Nero’s ring. If they can be saved, he’ll do it.’ And then, closing his eyes, ‘Saulos was outside.’

‘Is he dead?’

‘He might be by now. Ajax has gone after him. Either one of us could have come over the wall to you. I was here first, so he chose to let me.’

This time he could not read her face, only that whatever warred within her was complex.

‘I’m sorry. If you’d have preferred-’

Her fingers stopped his mouth. ‘Tell me Saulos won’t kill him?’

‘He won’t kill him. He might escape, but he hasn’t got what it takes to kill Ajax.’

‘Or you?’

He looked down at his hands that she might not read the shame in his eyes. ‘Tonight, he might be able to kill me. He came close once already. I think that’s why Ajax chose the way he did.’

She let her gaze fall. ‘What now?’

Dawn was coming. Even had the distant trumpeter not marked the passing hours, Pantera had sat through the sunrise often enough to know the earliest signs of day: the growing contours in the grass where it was no longer a black velvet carpet, ripples on the pond that allowed a first tinge of silver, a shape under the trees on the island that must be the goose-house, the first colour to Hannah’s eyes.

He tugged his hand through his hair. ‘We can’t leave here yet. The gate’s blocked and the centurion set fire to the house next door. What was it, a bakery?’

‘A carpenter’s.’

He nodded. ‘It’s burning hard. We’re stuck here until the worst of it dies down.’

Hannah lifted his fingers, and kissed them. ‘Hypatia always said this was the safest place in Rome.’

‘And Hypatia, as we both know, is always right. And…’ he kissed her hand in his turn, and let his gaze meet hers, still testing what he thought he saw there, ‘you’re here, and alive, and I would like us to have time to celebrate that. Might we go into the cottage?’

They lay crushed together on the narrow bed beneath the window. The shutters hung open to the dawn. The gander was out on the water, but not yet the geese. The fire still cast its glow in the west, to rival the eastern sun.

Pantera lay on one side, propped on one elbow, with his back to the cold wall and Hannah’s breasts soft on his chest. His lower lip was swollen. He tasted blood where she had bitten it, or he had. He had thought himself too drained for anything but sleep, and had been powerfully wrong. Neither of them had slept yet.

The world was a new place, and he had not yet found his way in it. He had forgotten what it was to lay himself bare to another’s view, to be given freedom to discover the contours of another’s body. He had forgotten the soul-blinding beauty of a woman, freely given, and what that could do to him.

He explored every part of her even as she studied his scars, the misshaped shoulder, the flat white mess that had once been a brand of Mithras. He wanted to believe she wasn’t looking with a physician’s eye, or at least not only with that.

He felt the touch of her look and matched it with his free hand, tracing lines in their pooled sweat on her torso, about her navel, across and across the lines of her pelvic bones to her hips, and up to her breasts and then, when she was still looking, he leaned down and traced his lips along the line his fingers had marked, teasing and teasing until she gave the same throaty cry she had earlier in the dark and rolled over, finding him blindly with hands and tongue and teeth and then with all of her, pressing him flat on the goosefeather mattress, rising over him to greet the dawn again in her own way, with their hands entwined, palm to palm, fingers interlaced…

‘What is it?’ He felt the change in her hands first, and then the rest of her. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. Not you.’ They were still locked together. She slumped against him, pressing her forehead to his chest.

‘You don’t want a child?’ He studied her, searching, trying to see inside. ‘There are ways to be sure. We don’t have to-’

‘Hush.’ She kissed him to silence. ‘It’s not about a child, and anyway it’s too late for that. She’s made. What we do now is for us.’ Absently, she smoothed his hair over his brow. He watched her weigh a difficult choice and wished his heart did not crash so hard in his chest.

Biting her lower lip, she said, ‘Did you think of Aerthen when we

… earlier?’

‘I tried not to,’ he said, truthfully, and then, because he couldn’t slow the speed of his mind, even when it worked against him, he said, ‘and you thought of Hypatia. But I would be with Aerthen if she weren’t dead, and Hypatia’s still alive, so’ — he pushed himself up on his elbow again — ‘you should go to her.’

Hannah was looking away from him, out of the unshuttered window. ‘I can’t. I don’t know where she is, and in any case we can’t leave. You said so.’