M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

At the big open doorway, she paused, a black shadow lit by the starlight behind. Raising her head, she sent her voice back to find him. ‘Ajax says you’ll be a race-driver one day if you want it enough. Better than him if you put your mind to it.’

‘I know. Thank you.’ Math made his voice sound true, even if the rest of him knew that Ajax had told Hannah only so that she would pass it on as part of his plan to save Math from himself.

He lay in his straw hollow, listening to her quiet footsteps across the grass, and the splash of urine as she squatted to relieve herself, then the press of straw on straw in her pallet as she lay to sleep.

Her booth was not far from the end of the barn, set at the front of the newly named Green team’s huddle of tents and stalls with the white linen rag hung on a pole outside to show her profession. He waited until he could hear the sound of her sleep-breathing before he got up and moved through the warm, horse-filled dark to talk to Sweat first, who was his favourite, and then Thunder.

He was not crying any longer. He wiped his face dry with his hands and let the colts lick the salt from his palms. He told them they were wonderful, and they would win if they raced, but that they must needs be patient in the morning when Brass and Bronze were harnessed to the big quadriga with the two trace horses who ran behind, and were never as important. They nudged him and flicked their tails and returned to the half-doze of sleep from which he had woken them.

My mother bred them, he had said to Pantera, which makes them easier to handle.

What he had not said was that his mother had bred all eight of the horses that ran for Ajax, the first and the second team, but that these two she had given to her son, taking him to the field on the day two long-legged bay colts were born, Sweat half a morning before Thunder.

She had let him name them and had kept him with her all the way through their early training, until the year when he was five years old and they were three, when she gave them to him as his gift at the midsummer solstice.

They were too good to be owned by a boy of five, of course, and had been sold, but Math knew that one of the conditions of sale was that he be taken on as apprentice when he came of age.

Gordianus, who owned the team then, had said no boy could be an apprentice before he was ten years old. After his mother’s death, nobody expected Math to make ten years, including himself. But Gordianus had broken both his legs the previous year in an accident at the close of the autumn season and it was only by chance that Ajax had been there, just walking in off the last boat before the seas closed for winter, with his shaved head and one ear missing and black, black eyebrows and the scars on his body from races and war and a flogging once. He was jeered for that, early on, before they saw how he could race, and if he had told a dozen different people the story of how he got the scars, he had told a dozen different stories.

To Math, he had said, ‘I was young and I hated the legions. I thought I could best them.’

‘And they caught you,’ Math had asked dutifully.

‘They did.’ Ajax’s quick grin set it on a par with being caught stealing fish from the docks, which happened to everyone. ‘And they’d have killed me after they flogged me. But my mother’s brother was an officer in the auxiliary and he was able to get me released. If your mother doesn’t have a brother in the auxiliary, don’t steal from legions, that’s my advice.’

Somewhere in all the racing and tale-telling, Ajax had shown Gordianus the weight of his money and the deal had been struck; for an untold amount of gold, the practice chariots, the racing chariot, the eight racehorses, sixteen head of young stock, the wainwright and his three apprentices, the loriner and his son, the various stud hands who had kept the breeding herds going after Math’s mother had died, the harness-maker Caradoc of the Osismi — who was Math’s father — and Lucius, the existing apprentice, had all changed hands. So too had the promise to make Math the second apprentice when he came of age.

At the midwinter solstice, not long after the fires had been doused and re-lit to honour the death and re-birth of the sun god, Ajax had come to Math and his father bearing a smoked herring and a sprig of mistletoe across his spread palms. His shaved head had shone in the candlelight as if he’d polished it with oil. The hole where his ear had been cut off was blue at the edges from the cold outside and his black eyebrows seemed drawn with charcoal. Even so, he had looked a little like the sun god, brought back from midwinter to give light to the world.

‘I am told I should give these to the mother of my future apprentice boy,’ he had said in formal tones, ‘as payment for the use of her son for the next nine years. But since he has no mother, I would ask Caradoc of the Osismi, father to Math of the Osismi, to do me the honour of accepting.’

Something had already been said, obviously; Math could see it in the way Ajax’s eyes met his father’s, in the silent communication that took place over his head. It was not the first time; Ajax and Caradoc had got along uncommonly well from the start, which was good, but also meant Math had two of them trying to change who he was.

His father had said, ‘Math? Do you still want to be a race-driver? The work will be hard.’

But not harder than working the docks. Math hadn’t said that, only thought it, but he saw his father read his face and was sorry for it. He was always sorry for the hurt he caused his father, but then almost everything he had done since his mother’s death seemed to bring it on, which was stupid, and made him cross.

And he did not want to be indebted to Ajax. Looking away, he had said, ‘I have work. I bring in enough for us both. I don’t need more.’

He felt their eyes meet again over his head. His father had wanted to answer. Ajax had forestalled him by standing up, saying, ‘Of course. I apologize for insulting you. We don’t have to speak of it again.’

He had shaken Caradoc’s hand. To Math he had said, ‘You have made the horses well. They’ll miss you.’

He had gone then, taking the mistletoe, but leaving the herring. Two nights later, Math had been passing the horse barns and found Ajax trying to use a straw wisp to bring out the shine in Brass’s coat. The horse had a ticklish stomach; there was a certain way to wisp him that worked and Ajax didn’t know it.

Taking the pad of woven straw from his hand, Math had shown him how. Ajax had been leaving when the boy had said, ‘I won’t stop working the docks.’

Ajax had gone as far as the door at the barn’s end before he turned round; far enough for Math to feel real fear that he had lost his chance.

‘I won’t ask you to,’ Ajax had said. ‘Just know that work for me comes first, before anything else. If you leave things undone, you’ll be out of a job. To save me having to watch you, do you give me your word to put race work before everything else? That’s all I ask.’

Nobody had ever asked him for his word. Alarmed and flattered at once, Math had spat on his hand to seal the oath, knowing full well that Ajax planned to work him to exhaustion, so that he wouldn’t have time to go down to the docks.

That had been over half a year ago, at the winter solstice, and now it was nearly the equinox and Ajax had become distracted by the need to win the emperor’s race. It was not his idea — anyone could tell he would rather have spent another half year getting to know his horses — but he had promised to race, and to win, too, spitting on his palm and swearing by his Greek bear-gods, for Gordianus, and for the shade of Math’s mother, just as Hannah had said.