M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

‘Then why are you not there, stopping them?’ It was Seneca who asked that, from his place by the door.

‘Because I used to be of the war party.’ Shimon’s gaze sought Pantera’s and held it. ‘In the days when the Galilean led us in constant battle against Rome, I was known as his lieutenant. I am old now, and I have seen what Rome can do. I will do what I can to work for peace, but I can’t speak for it with any credibility.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘I am here in Gaul for two reasons. First was to seek out the prophecy — we had heard that it was circulating and that it would be where Nero was. But I would have been here anyway, to speak with the Galilean’s daughter, to ask if she would come back with me to speak against her brothers in the name of peace.’

‘And will she?’

‘No. She has not said as much, but I fear not. Her life is here. Her troubles are not ours. Which leaves me with a question.’

He raised his old, tired eyes. The exhilaration of earlier had gone, but not the unbending pride. In formal Aramaic, he said, ‘Through you, I have found the prophecy — and yet it remains incomplete. To keep my people safe, I must find the prophet, and thereby discover the date on which Rome is set to burn, that I may prevent it. All other things lead from that. May I ask if Pantera, foster-son to my lord Seneca, would undertake to find this for those who used to be his people?’

There was time, in the pause before Pantera spoke, to hear the sow grunt again up the street, to hear a merchant on the dock discover that his purse had been cut, to hear the race crowds begin to leave the hippodrome and flow down the hill.

In the small, thyme-scented room, Pantera said, ‘I regret not,’ and meant it. ‘My emperor asked for my aid today in preventing Rome’s destruction and I refused him. With far greater sorrow, I fear I must also refuse you. I am not who I was and other things require my attention. I wish you luck, with my fullest apologies. And my earnest suggestion that we leave, and are not seen together again.’

They separated in the alley, Shimon to walk west towards his lodgings, Pantera and Seneca east to the tavern. Seneca waited until the pad of the old zealot’s footsteps could no longer be heard and then turned to Pantera.

‘ Other things require my attention.’ He gave an effete lift to the words. ‘He’ll think you’re working for me.’

‘And he will be wrong.’

Pantera felt drained, as if he had marched his twenty miles and still had a way to go before he could rest. He said, ‘Nero saw Math at the races this morning. They walked the horses to the hippodrome together. The good citizens of Coriallum nearly died at the scandal.’

‘Ah.’ Seneca’s gaze was sharply amused. ‘How immensely fortunate that you don’t love the boy, nor he you.’

‘Will Nero kill him?’

‘He didn’t do such things when I ruled him, nor would he here, under the gaze of the magistrate. But in Rome, with the likes of Akakios and Rufus goading him to ever greater excesses? Yes. He’ll use Math, and then kill him. He won’t be able to help himself.’ Seneca turned and began to walk back towards the tavern. ‘If you would have the boy live,’ he said, ‘you will need to find something Nero values more highly and offer it in exchange. He understands that kind of bargaining. But it must be something he cannot get by other means.’

‘All I have to offer is myself.’

Seneca pursed his lips as if the idea were a novel one. Pantera caught his wrist and turned him round. ‘You said you didn’t want me to work for Nero.’

‘I don’t. I want you to work for me. But if, in doing so, you were to appear to take a commission for Nero, that would be different.’ Seneca was held in a patch of sunlight. His skin had the transparency of the old, but his eyes were sharp with plans laid and threads aweaving. ‘I love Rome. I have given my life to her and I don’t want to see her burn. Very few people have what it takes to stop this, perhaps only one.’ Seneca’s blue-veined hand caught Pantera’s chin and tilted it as it had when he was a child. ‘Will you do this for me?’ he asked. ‘Please?’

In all their time together, Pantera had never known the old philosopher beg. The hope in his eyes was hard to bear, and harder to crush.

‘I can’t,’ Pantera said, and heard genuine anguish in his own voice. ‘You are Roman.’

Seneca departed as Shimon had; despondent, but still able to keep to the shadows and, once in the open, to affect the dejection of poverty that makes a man invisible.

From the darkness of the alley, Pantera watched him leave, then turned and made his way back along to the endmost house of the row. One of Goro’s younger boys sat in the shade of a bay tree not far away chewing a leaf and playing knucklebones, right hand against left. He did not look up as Pantera passed, but shook his head.

Pantera bent to retrieve a coin he had not yet dropped.

‘The shutter’s open,’ he said to the dust at his feet. ‘Was it so when you came?’

By way of answer, the boy attempted to toss five small bones from a sheep’s knee from the back of his left hand to his right. As they landed, wobbling, he nodded, as if in satisfaction at his own skill.

‘You’re sure nobody’s been?’

With a huff of irritation the boy looked up and met his eye. ‘You paid silver. I’m sure.’

Pantera cursed. It had been closed when he had first checked it, when Lucius had newly entered. He let a copper coin slide to the dust, checked both ways along the alley and, seeing no one, hopped the low stone wall of the brothel’s courtyard. Then, stepping over a small but noxious midden, he hooked a leg over the sill and eased himself into the room the boy had been watching.

It was late afternoon. By the sun’s grim light alone, Pantera saw the narrow wound in Lucius’ throat and the black blood that spilled from it.

The body was cold to touch, but still pliable. The hands held no last record of hair clutched or a face scratched. If he had known death was coming, Lucius had faced it bravely; his face was at peace. His purse held half a dozen coins, none of them silver. Pantera emptied it and passed the contents to Goro’s boy, who was leaning in through the window.

‘Go,’ he said. ‘Tell Goro there’s no need to watch the front any longer.’

A red roan bull lowed in the courtyard of the Roan Bull inn.

Leaning over her patient in the long upper room, Hannah wiped sweat from her forehead with a hand that was still wet with blood. Her hair stuck to her temple. Wearily, she rubbed at the place. The bull lowed again, more urgently.

‘It needs water,’ Hannah said. ‘Can someone take it some?’

As a living sign of the inn’s name, the bull had been penned for the day next to the road in the hope that the emperor might see it and be enticed inside by the novelty. It was known, however, that the emperor disdained filth, and so a boy had been paid to keep the beast’s hide curried to shining copper, its manger full of dry hay, its pen freshly swept of every outpouring of shit and piss, and its water trough full. Doubtless it had been done assiduously before the race.

The emperor had not yet chanced to visit, and hence the inn was not only largely empty but clean, with new, sweet rushes on the floor. The miracle of Math’s gold coin had persuaded the gap-toothed tavern-keeper to open his doors to the healer, her patient and the crowding members of the Green team who insisted on being allowed to follow them inside and up the unstable ladder to the big, broad upper room that took up the inn’s full length.

The gold bought also the innkeeper’s solicitude, if not his speed. With aching slowness, he had arranged a winch and ropes and a long table had been hauled up through the trapdoor and set in the centre of the room and Ajax laid on it.