M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

And then Math saw two men standing in the avenue between the horse barns, and while the wealthier of the two was a stranger the other was Pantera, who was looking at him with exactly the same look he had given when Math had not returned the cheese the night before. For a fleeting moment, Math lost his focus on the colts, and the sky fell on his head.

‘ Keep them away from the chariot! ’

He had time to scream that, and haul both the lead ropes forward, before the world blurred to sky and turf and hooves and pain and his shoulder was wrenched from its socket and the colts were screaming and Lucius was screaming louder and higher, like a pig at slaughter, and other voices were shouting…

‘ Math! Lord, stay back! Math, let go! Lord, you must not be injured, please stay back. Math, will you let go, I’ve got him.’

Math let go of Bronze and held on to Brass and hoped he had them in the right order. Not that he had any choice: Brass’s rope had become wrapped round his arm and he couldn’t have got free if he’d wanted to. With the hated enemy taken out of reach, the big chestnut colt reared one more time and came down, shaking and blowing and stamping, but no longer fighting.

Panting, bleeding, too shocked to speak, Math stood in a bubble of calm, with Pantera close by holding Bronze and looking, briefly, equally shaken.

They were not alone, although for a moment it had seemed so. A great many people stood around. A glance at either end of the barn showed a massive, flame-haired warrior-guard standing with his weapon bared, blocking entry. People crowded beyond, trying to see in, to find gossip to spread, but dared not pass. In the quiet avenue, Lucius sobbed piteously and was rightly being ignored. A number of young men in immensely expensive tunics, with silver and gold at their belts and fatly jingling purses, stood around, looking interested and amused in equal proportion.

The youngest of them, and the most expensively dressed — in a toga, actually, not a tunic, and with purple around the hem — was leaning down, examining Bronze’s off fore as if he knew what he was doing, ignoring, as he did so, Pantera’s strident protest.

So there was one man in the world who could ignore Pantera with impunity. In his dazed state, Math found that as interesting as what the young man was saying.

‘He’s bleeding. Is there a healer?’

‘Me,’ cawed a woman’s voice, in Gaulish, and Math spun round to see Hannah, looking uncommonly shabby, as if she had paused to wipe muck on her bare arms and scruff her hair and taken pains to coarsen her voice.

It was hard to believe someone so unclean could be a healer. Certainly the young man looked as if he were about to dismiss her, when a commotion at the end of the stands told of Ajax confronting the big flame-haired guard who was blocking his way to his horses.

Bronze and Brass heard him, and perhaps saved his life, for the warrior-guard had raised his sword and, far from backing off, Ajax’s face had grown very still the way it did before a race. Math heard Pantera say, ‘Mithras, no!’ very quietly, under his breath, and then Brass and Bronze spun and reared and threw their heads back and screamed a clarion call for their master.

The sound carried all over the barns and the training track and the hippodrome, and made everyone else fall silent.

‘Lord, that’s the driver. The guard would do well to let him past.’ Pantera was diffident. That was new, too; he had been a great deal less than diffident with Seneca. But the wealthy youth in the toga listened and called an order, and the guard-giant lowered his sword and stood back just enough to let a single man step through.

Ajax was in driving mood. Even Hannah knew better than to go near him when he first stepped down from a chariot after a race, and he looked the same now: white-faced and grim, fit to kill anyone who came against him, not out of anger, but just because the need to win was so profound that he would clear anyone from his path to do it.

Pantera was in his path. In fact, to Math it seemed as if Pantera had put himself in his path, directly in front of the youth with the toga.

For a moment, Pantera, too, looked as if he had stepped off a chariot, tense and relaxed at the same time and with that careful, still look to his face that took in everything equally. He angled his head so that his eyes met Ajax’s and the world held its breath a moment, as each took the measure of the other.

Then Pantera shook his head, to himself or to Ajax or both, and turned to the youth and said smoothly, ‘Lord, I believe this is Ajax of Athens, driver of the Green chariot that will race today for your entertainment. Ajax, you are in the presence of Nero Claudius Germanicus, emperor of Rome.’

Emperor of Rome. Nero. The young man with the purple-edged toga who had stooped to examine an injured colt and had its blood even now on his hands.

In bowel-watering consternation, Math saw Ajax turn on the emperor a heartbeat’s savage hatred that went far beyond the ice-cold, driven rage of racing, but that moment, too, was gone almost before he saw it, and then Math watched a small and unpleasant miracle, as Ajax folded into himself, in the opposite of what he did to race. He curved his shoulders, making himself smaller, and wrung his hands together and simpered — simpered! — in the way craven stall-holders did to rich men.

He fell to one knee. ‘Lord, please accept my apologies. Our horses are raw and not fully trained. The boy-’

‘Get up, man! The boy did well to hold the colts as far as he did. He should never have been left alone. He is to be commended.’ Nero turned commending eyes on Math.

Pantera was moving. Ajax was moving. Because they were both moving towards Math, they collided before they reached him. And so it was that they left the way clear for Math to look squarely at his emperor and for Nero to favour Math with a fond and certain smile.

Math blushed and looked down. Not because the look was new, although he didn’t especially want Hannah to see him working, but because it was what he did when a man of great wealth looked at him like that.

And even then, glancing down at his own bare feet, which were filthy from the unshovelled horse muck, a part of him was singing bright, sparkling praises to Nemain, god of moon and water, favourite of his mother, to Manannan, to Hannah’s Egyptian Isis and her philosopher-gods, to whoever had brought him to this glorious possibility to earn himself a gold piece, and maybe more than that.

The emperor was known to buy chariot teams for all kinds of reasons, and some of those reasons had nothing to do with the horses.

There was a short, hard silence, when everyone knew what had happened, and nobody knew what to say.

The emperor broke it; he was the only one who could. ‘This colt has injured his tendon,’ he said. ‘He should be trotted up, to see the damage.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Ajax said.

With a surprisingly regal bow, he took Bronze from Pantera and trotted him out, away from the small group and back towards them. The colt was brave and fired up and ready to race, but the emperor was right, he was definitely lame. It took a good horseman to see it, but Math was a good horseman, and surrounded by the same.

‘He will heal, given time,’ Nero said. ‘But he will need to be replaced for the race. Have you another horse?’

‘There’s Sweat,’ said Ajax doubtfully, ‘but-’

‘He won’t run with Brass,’ blurted Math, forgetting his place. ‘He’ll fight and not run. Really. They’ll kill each other before they get to the track. It’ll be worse than war.’

‘Is it so?’ The emperor smiled as if this were a great insight. Math looked down at his feet again.

‘It is so, lord,’ Ajax said tightly. ‘If you wish a true contest, it would perhaps be better to run the two second-string colts together, although they are not yet fully racing fit. Lucius, go and fetch-’