M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

‘No. He’s the reason the accident happened in the first place. Send this one. What’s your name, child?’

‘Math,’ said Math, ‘Math of the Osismi.’ A thought struck him, displacing the near promise of gold. ‘But Sweat and Thunder aren’t groomed. They have no ribbons. We’ll be late for the race if we take the time to do it properly now-’

Nero laughed, lightly, with a new intimacy. ‘The race cannot start before we start it. Therefore, if we were to help you, Math, you could not be late. Get the horses. Fly. We shall do it together.’

They did it together, Math of the Osismi and Nero Claudius Augustus Germanicus, emperor of Rome, who had deft fingers and a surprisingly good way with a horse so that Thunder stood for him who sometimes would barely stand for Ajax, and Sweat let Math vault on to his bare back so that he could plait the mane from the withers, standing up, with the horse raising his head high to let him reach the ones round his ears.

It was a recently developed trick; he had done it once to amuse Hannah. He did it now quite differently, blushing as if it were foolish but necessary, looking down and making shy as the emperor asked him questions and drew out of him the small facts of his life: his mother’s death, his father’s near-fatal wounding in a trivial bar brawl, his own miraculously early apprenticeship, his burning desire to be a race-driver and to take his mother’s horses to Rome, to race against the best the world could offer.

Math was honest to a fault. If he said nothing of theft and working the docks, it was because the emperor did not think to ask him.

Grown men commonly made foolish assumptions about Math of the Osismi. On this day of the races, with all to run for and success newly dangled in reach, Nero, emperor of Rome, seemed to be making most of them.

‘ Go Thunder! Go Sweat! Go! ’

Math was hoarse. His ears overflowed with the noise of his own voice lost in ten thousand others. His eyes watered from shouting. His bones rocked and his teeth rattled with the pounding thunder of four white-eyed, sweating chariot teams as they strove for the last ounce of speed.

There was sand on his face, in his mouth, in his eyes. His body poured sweat, crushed on all sides by other apprentices in their place down by the track, where they could run to the teams and help if needed. They paid nothing for this place, and it was the best in the whole hippodrome.

Math was young and therefore near the back, but if he pushed in the right places at the right times he could see through the tangle of waving arms in front of him and catch flashes of the teams: a gobbet of spit on a horse’s mouth, a spinning wheel, part of a raised whip, Ajax’s shaven head shining under the glancing sun…

He could taste the creaming sweat. Almost, he could smell the scent of winning. The Parthian team were not as fast as he had thought. They had two lengths on the other three; hardly anything.

‘ Ajax! Go! ’

Ajax was going like the wind. He had promised the emperor he would. The dream-like start to the race that had begun with Nero helping Math to plait the Green ribbons into the manes of the colts had continued with the emperor and his retinue — there had been sixteen of the giant flame-haired warriors by then — walking with Math and the Green team up to the mouth of the tunnel that led into the hippodrome.

Ajax had stripped off his jerkin and wound the four sets of reins round his waist, with the soft goatskin belt beneath so that they didn’t cut into him as he angled his body round the track.

The scars on his back and shoulders had gleamed under a layer of goose-grease, laid on to stop him losing his skin if he fell on to the sand of the track. Math watched the emperor study the scars of the flogging. Nero raised his brows once but said nothing. It was a day for not speaking the things that were thought.

The greatest of the not-spoken things was Math’s. He raged silently all the way to the hippodrome, and everyone with him knew it, if not why.

For the first time in his life, he had been allowed to lead the horses to the start. Ajax had promised that he could do it ‘some day’: a gift for when Math was ready; for when Lucius had gone; for when there was a good, well-earned reason to give a wayward child a reward for good behaviour.

Today had not been a reward for anything but an obvious attempt to break the growing connection between Math and the emperor, and it had failed for the simple reason that, in a blatant act of favouritism that had earned Ajax thunderous looks from the drivers of the other three chariots, Nero had chosen to walk alongside Math and the Greens to the mouth of the tunnel.

For Math, Nero’s presence had made the event a heart-crushing anticlimax. There were few things in his life he truly craved and the chance to lead Sweat and Thunder to a race had been one of them. But he had dreamed of it done with ceremony, and on his own merits, not as a means to keep him from an end.

All the way to the hippodrome, therefore, Math had been crabbily sullen and Nero had misread it, thinking him overawed, and had chatted pleasantly about nothing.

Ajax had been desperate and barely hiding it. He had swept his hand over and over across his shaved skull in the way he did only when he was most worried about the horses. Hannah had walked on the other side of the chariot, still looking like a tavern drudge. It had been impossible to tell what she thought, except that she was particularly wary of Nero. Whether the emperor had noticed or not was equally a mystery; he had been charming to everyone.

At the entrance to the tunnel, when it was truly impossible for him to walk any further without causing an irretrievable scandal, Nero had reached out a hand and brought the small procession to a halt.

He had not spoken to Math, only favoured him with the smile that said more than words. Almost as an afterthought, as he was turning to leave, he had turned back and looked up at Ajax.

‘Losing will change nothing,’ he had said. ‘We may buy the team, but not the driver. It would be best for everyone if you did your best to win, do you understand?’

Ajax was race-ready, pale-lipped, wet with sweat and smelling of the pine resin that swathed his hands to keep the reins from slipping, and coated the pale skin of his head simply because he had rubbed it so often. Already he was looking inward, beginning to weave himself into the minds of all four horses, so that they and he became one.

Too curtly for true politeness, he said, ‘I understand perfectly, lord. I always drive to win.’

‘See that you succeed.’

The flame-haired guards had formed a double line of eight on either side of the tunnel’s mouth. They saluted, as one, making the moment a ceremony in itself.

With a final nod to Math, the emperor had turned away and begun to mount the steps to his dais. The magistrate was already there with his wife and three daughters, dressed in such finery as Coriallum had never seen before.

The tunnel had beckoned: a short stripe of dark before the bright, wide swathe of the track, gleaming with new gold sand, and the central oak spina around which the track was built newly carved in the likeness of dark-haired Apollo, with his lyres and chariots. The smells of fresh sand and horse-sweat, of axle grease and pine resin, mingled to produce the unmistakable scent of a chariot race.

Sweat and Thunder knew and loved it; they grew half a hand taller just breathing it in, and strained forward in the traces, desperate to go.

Math had felt himself grow as they grew, had felt the faster beat of his heart, already racing. From the sand, three trumpets sounded, calling in the Red team. The line of chariots shuffled forward, leaving the Whites next to go. Green was last, because of Nero. Math had taken the first step to lead his colts into the tunnel when a hand fell on his shoulder.