M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

The fire burned less fiercely than it had done. Hannah leaned forward and busied herself laying on more wood. ‘I’m not one of the sisters,’ she said. ‘My mother was, but she married my father in fulfilment of a prophecy. After his death, she came back. I was raised among them, and trained at their expense. I did-’

‘Find love among them?’

She had not thought he might read her as she read him. With a hazel twig, she stirred the fire. Sparks danced amid drifting ash. Memories returned, and were banished, as she always banished them. ‘The rashness of youth,’ she said reflectively, ‘is exceptional only in its self-belief.’

His gaze rested on her face. ‘I am at the behest of an oracle of sorts,’ he said at last. ‘My sister dreamed that I would come here, and perhaps return home in the high summer with a brother I had thought lost.’

‘Perhaps?’

‘If I find him. If he lives through what is coming. If he chooses to come back with me. It must be his choice, freely made.’ Ajax rose smoothly, with the grace of his professions. ‘But first, we must win a race, and for that we must sleep. Even you, I think? The team would be sorely pressed without its healer.’

‘You go.’ Hannah did not stand. ‘I’ll come later when the fire’s less.’

He swept her a salute she didn’t recognize and was gone, treading soundless across the grass.

Hannah stared at the space where he had been and thought of choices freely made, of oracles and dreams and the duties they imposed, of family and friends, of past, present and future and knew herself only at a crossroads, with no idea at all of which route to take.

Between one breath and the next, Sebastos Abdes Pantera woke to the grey stirrings of race day at the Striding Heron tavern.

He lay still with his eyes shut, waiting, as he did every morning and, as every morning, in that finite space between sleeping and waking, Aerthen came to him, alive in the black echoes of his mind, bright-haired, green-eyed and laughing as she raced him on her mouse dun gelding in their first meeting, touched him with her eyes across the fire on a smoky winter’s evening not long later, made love to him soon after that, holding him in her long, long legs, in her warrior’s arms, against the cushion of her breasts, breathing his name into his ear and that she loved him.

She came to him naked first, and then dressed for war in a stolen legionary shirt with armoured leather wraps on her forearms taken from the tall, bronze-bearded Rhinelander who was the first man she had ever killed in battle.

She stood before him, weapon-ready, as tall as her spear, so that the shine of her eyes and the shine of its blade were as one before the rising sun, and then again, before the setting sun, when blade and face and body were rusted with others’ blood, and her smile was savage, lit with the hope of victory.

In the thick of battle she came to him, fighting to be at his side, to keep him safe, trusting him to keep her safe, and they fought together until that moment in the evening of the battle’s second day, when it was lost and all were dead, or soon to be so.

Then, she came to him still smiling her love and her courage, holding Gunovar, their golden-haired, ocean-eyed daughter, who was named for a hero of the Dumnonii who had fought in the Boudica’s rebel army against the legions. Aerthen’s loathing of Rome was legendary and so her child must feel it too, when she grew; how could she not with two such brave, proud parents? She slept in her mother’s arms, her peace perfect in all the din and chaos of battle.

Except not asleep, because now, in this last part of the visiting, there is bright, wet blood scarfing Aerthen’s stolen shirt, gathering in pools at her feet, and the smile on the child’s face is matched by the broader, red-lipped smile in her throat, where her mother’s blade has sliced it, so fast and so sharp that the child has never woken from the tea-drugged sleep.

And as he feels her spirit leave her to make the last walk to the gods, the man known as Hywell, the hunter, feels his wife reach for his hand, and press the blade into the sweaty wetness of his palm.

She has more courage than he. She caresses each part of him with her turbulent gaze and she smiles and tells him she loves him and asks this last gift of him and he gives it, he who has killed before in pity, in anger, in detachment, in scorn, but has never yet killed in love.

He kills in love now, holding her head in his one hand, finding the place with his fingers, in the ninth rib space, a little to the left of the breast bone, trying not to think of how often he has kissed here, how precious the skin, how strong, how fragile.

He finds the space and steadies it and she says his name, ‘Hywell,’ as a prayer and then, smiling, in love, ‘I will know all of you in a moment, all those places I could not find,’ because this has been a joke between them, that he had no past before he came to her, and he knows all of her but she knows so little of him.

And in this last moment, he smiles for her and says, ‘You will, and gladly so. I give you all of myself, in love, for now and ever. Wait for me.’

Before he can fail her, he slides the knife forward and up, through skin, through muscle, past the grate of her bone, through the sudden give of her lungs and up to the beat of her heart that makes the blade twitch like a live thing in his hand.

He almost stops there, but her eyes draw him in, and her voice, whispering, because she cannot speak. But she has not cried out, and will not, and so he slides the blade on, and tilts the point upwards, cutting the great muscle of her heart, and she bleeds, as their daughter Gunovar bled, but inwardly, so that she lives and lives and only leaves him when her eyes can no longer hold his face, and her mouth can no longer speak his name.

In his mind, he lowers her to the floor, as he has done every waking morning since. As every morning, he hears her voice, echoing in the sea’s rush of her eyes, I will know all of you in a moment, all those places I could not find, and his own voice, rich with his love for her, poisoned for ever by his own cowardice, You will, and gladly so. Wait for me.

Wait for me.

He had meant it, and would have joined her then but that, in wanting to leave both mother and child untainted by Rome, he had taken time to build a pyre for them, laying down his weapons for the first time in days. He had fought like a cornered rat against the men who came for him and four had died, but not him. Later, he came to understand that a part of him had wanted the kind of death they offered by taking him alive, in all its lingering pain.

They gave him his wish. With a skill born of fury, they had slowed the passage of his days until each hour became an eternity spent in agony. The pain surpassed anything he had ever known and his life had not been one of overwhelming comfort. But even then, he did not go to join Aerthen, however close to the brink they might have driven him.

In the end, that, too, was his fault. In a moment’s weakness he had lost the sense of her presence and called instead on the god that Rome had given him, and that god had answered, granting the blessing, or perhaps the curse, of life.

Wait for me.

Every waking moment, Pantera could feel her there, waiting on the other side of the silk-fine divide between living and dying. He had only to reach for her and she came.

Thus it was that in the attic room of the Striding Heron, on the morning of the day he was due to meet his emperor, Sebastos Abdes Pantera, who had also been Hywell the Hunter, gave his customary morning greeting to the woman who had been his wife and then, forcing himself to look beyond her ocean-green gaze, opened his own eyes and began to take stock of the day.