M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

Math twisted round. Where a moment before had been a heaving pack of boys, now Pantera leaned on the rough-sawn rail. And there was space on either side of him. Space. At the rails.

Math gaped at him, caught in a turmoil of joy and resentment. Then the meaning of what he had said sank home. ‘My father makes the harness!’ He had to scream it over the crowd. ‘It never breaks!’

Pantera pulled a face. ‘I know, but it will this time. Your lanky friend shaved the traces with a knife as you were tacking up. They’ve held this long, but they won’t stand up to the stress of another hard turn.’

In all the noise, they stood then in a bubble of bewildered silence. ‘Ajax will kill Lucius,’ Math said, with utter confidence.

‘He has to live long enough,’ Hannah said softly. ‘The Blue driver knows about the harness. Look.’

Not wanting to look, unable to look away, Math tore his gaze round in time to see the team of roan colts that ran for the Blues sweep past Sweat and Thunder and cut in hard across the track, slewing their chariot sideways so sharply it nearly tipped over.

It was a dangerous move for both teams, and nearly illegal. In Rome, such things happened all the time. In Gaul, Math had never seen anything like it. A great aching groan rolled across the spectators, deepest among the Whites, who were cut to the back. Even the Blues gasped.

Amongst the small group of Greens around Hannah, there was silence. Very quietly, Pantera began to curse.

Ajax was left with no choice. Math saw the flash of the sun on his shaved and sweating head as he threw himself sideways, wrenching his own team out of the way, spinning all four on their hocks in a turn as sharp, as hard and as desperate as any ever executed.

They almost made it. Sweat and Thunder reared high, screaming anger and defiance. The two geldings behind took the brunt of the quadriga’s weight and turned it bravely to the outside, arcing out beyond the Blue’s team. Then Ajax howled a new order, throwing himself and his whip forward, as if, by his own two hands, by the power of his command, by sheer force of will, he could move his four horses out of the way of the White team.

He came so very close to succeeding.

For months afterwards, taverns across Gaul were packed with men who had never driven a team of four in their lives describing in detail how they would have wrenched the four White colts to a halt in time to stop them surging at full speed into the back of Ajax’s chariot.

Because the White driver was only human, he tried to do exactly that — and failed. His horses slowed, but not enough. Ajax’s team strove with all their strength to cut outwards and away to safety, but not enough.

The crash happened slowly, with too little noise, tumbling out along the track like a mosaic spread by the gods.

Fragile wicker and wood, bone and flesh and fury — and a man caught between, who was all three.

Math was over the rails at the front of the enclosure before the first of the colts had crashed, screaming, to his knees. Hannah was with him.

Pantera caught his shoulder and pressed a gold coin into his palm. Pantera’s voice said in his ear, ‘Get Ajax to the Roan Bull tavern and pay the keeper for the upper room. Leave quickly, before the riot starts. The Reds have won, but nobody will care. The local team has been damaged and tempers are running high; they’ll be fighting as soon as the emperor leaves the stadium.’

In the gathering, clamouring crowd, he was gone.

In all the chaos at the race-side, Lucius was easy to follow: the only boy pushing away from the rails.

Pantera tailed him effortlessly away from the apprentice boys’ enclosure, across the grassy plain past the stables and down the long hill into town and along the harbour front until he arrived at the green door of the last and least of the whorehouses ranged in a row at the dock front on either side of the Striding Heron tavern.

It was harder to manufacture a reason to wait outside, but presently Pantera was seated in moderate comfort on an upturned half-barrel, mending a net. He wasn’t entirely alone; three older men, too deaf to care about the races, were doing the same further down the dock and half a dozen filthy boys gathered soon from nowhere, recognizing him as a stranger, and therefore a potential victim.

The leader was Math’s age, but taller and with ginger hair. Pantera slipped a pair of silver coins from his belt pouch and, as the boy edged forward, explained the three things he wanted done, each more difficult than its predecessor.

The boy’s name was Goro. With a lopsided grin, he accepted the first coin as a down payment, and took promise on the second, issuing a stream of orders in a local patois that no one older than fifteen, or from further away than ten miles, could ever hope to understand.

The boys broke into three groups and went their separate ways. Pantera watched until they were out of sight, then settled back in the afternoon sun to mend a net that wasn’t broken, and to wait.

The shadows had stretched by half a hand’s length before Goro returned to the alley that ran between the tavern and one of the more salubrious whorehouses.

Pantera set his net on the ground, stretched his arms, yawned, and sauntered to the alley to relieve himself. Goro leaned on the wall further back, too far in to be seen from the dockside.

‘The men are on their way.’ The boy flicked a glance to the alley’s end. ‘And no one’s come out of the back window of the whorehouse. Your friend’s still in there.’

‘A lusty youth,’ Pantera observed drily. ‘If he leaves, let me know where he goes and with whom.’

The second silver coin slipped from palm to palm and Goro was gone, fast as a slipped fish, whistling a long looping call, like the cry of a seagull, to summon his small group of followers.

Pantera finished his business and walked down to the alley’s far end, beyond which both the tavern and the brothel were graced by south-facing, low-walled courtyards.

Olives and lemon trees grew in the corners of the brothel’s yard with benches set in the shade below. Behind the tavern, the same space was occupied by a goat pen. Leaning over, scratching the wiry neck of the milk-goat within, was Seneca the Younger, former spymaster to the emperor.

Pantera vaulted on to the courtyard wall and sat astride it in the sun. ‘This morning, Nero asked me to work for him,’ he said conversationally. ‘I turned him down.’

‘Then why are you here?’ Seneca ran his thumb along the goat’s arched neck. ‘Why am I?’

‘You’re here because Goro spoke a pass code you haven’t heard in twenty years and your curiosity is insatiable.’ Pantera picked a sprig of olive leaves from the neighbouring garden and offered them to the goat. ‘I’m here because Nero spoke to me of the Phoenix Year. You said that if he did so, there was a man I should meet — in privacy and without Akakios’ knowledge.’

‘And Akakios is currently occupied trying to prevent a riot at the hippodrome,’ Seneca observed drily. ‘I gather he may have some trouble preventing the Green supporters from killing the Whites and both from slaughtering the Blues, but even so, he has agents who are less easily deflected. Goro and I were followed at least for the first third of our walk here.’

‘Of course you were; after last night, they’re hardly going to let you wander the town with impunity. We should go on down the row. Goro will provide us with a diversion.’

Pantera slid off the wall, took Seneca by the arm and steered him through the courtyard’s gate to the small alley behind that served the entire row. Walking briskly towards the brothels at the row’s end, he said, ‘I took the liberty of sending another of Goro’s friends to request the presence of Shimon the zealot, formerly aide to the Galilean, currently guest in the home of the deputy governor.’