M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

Early in the chaos that followed, Hannah had recruited the bull boy to fetch water and then linen; Math’s gold had bought speed from him. She was aware that at some point she needed to find out where the gold had come from — he swore it was not stolen and she wanted to believe him — but for now Ajax was her most pressing concern.

The bull lowed again, less loudly. She heard a splash of water and the slobbering of bovine drinking and was glad of the quiet. Turning back to Ajax, she found that the gush of scarlet blood flooding from where a shard of wheel had pierced the top of his left leg had slowed to an oozing dribble, although that was not always a good sign; in Hannah’s experience, men who ran dry of blood often died soon after.

She examined again the lengths of blood-soaked linen for the volume they might hold and allowed herself to believe that her first frantic efforts to stem the tide had been successful and his body was working with her now, not against her. More worrying was the blow to the left side of his head that had left the whites of his eyes red, and might yet kill him. She could do nothing for that while he remained unconscious, hovering on the borders of death.

Her visitor of yesterday, the friend of her father, would have said Ajax was visiting the judge-god of the Hebrews, whose name must not be spoken. The Gauls in the Roan Bull tavern believed he was flying to the heights of the sky with Taranis, god of lightning, and might choose to stay in the heavens. The few Romans in the party — at least one of whom Hannah recognized as an agent of the emperor — insisted he was sailing with Charon halfway across the Styx and might yet persuade the ferryman to turn about and bring him back.

All of these, in their own ways, feared the grim dark of death and tried to fight it. In Alexandria, the men and women amongst whom Hannah had trained, and for whom she had the deepest respect, loved death as a gift, a place of colour and light and all-seeing, a journey to be undertaken joyously, as a homecoming.

Kneeling on the floor in the upper room of the Roan Bull tavern, Hannah of Alexandria acknowledged the truth of her own heart: that she desperately wanted Ajax to come back to the living and to her; she yearned for it, in fact.

That realization, the unexpected power of it, was her own surprise in a day of difficult surprises, and her secret. It had crept up on her, much as her care for Math had done, but more quietly so that she only faced it fully at the point when, examining his head, she had found that the hair growing through on Ajax’s scalp was gold and not black.

His eyebrows were black, the hair of his armpits was black; even, she had observed with the detachment of a physician, the hair about his groin was black. But the hair on his head was growing through gold as summer’s corn.

She had bound his crown with linen then, not because she imagined it would change the outcome of his conversations with death, but in order that nobody else might see what she had seen. Briefly, she found herself wondering what dye he used that was proof against sweat and rain. Then she had rolled him over and discovered what had happened to his ribs and all thoughts of hair and dye and rain had burned away in the need to heal him.

The damage was on his left side, halfway down, near the strongest beat of his heart. A crescent of bruised and broken flesh showed where a hoof had struck with the full force of a galloping colt. Hannah thought it the pair to the one that had struck his head, if only because, when she closed her eyes, she could see the moment when the outside lead colt of the White team, racing out of control, had run across the top of him. She thought she had screamed then, but in the noise of the hippodrome she had not heard it, and even now was not sure.

The ruined flesh under her fingers was warm but not hot; that much was good. The skin had peeled back, with a sand rash all round it. She winced at the imagined pain, and thought ahead to the salves that would help it, but it, too, was not lethal. A strip of bone glinted white at the deepest arc of the hoofprint and there, along its length, was a fine, linear bubble of air growing through the blood. It was no bigger than the nail on her small finger, but it grew and grew as he breathed, then popped and fell back, leaving her awaiting the next small eructation.

Her mother had taught her that there were times when listening was better than looking, and this was one of them. Pushing back her hair, she bent her head until her ear was tight on her patient’s sternum.

Ajax breathed in. Hannah closed her eyes and tracked the breath as it came down past her ear, then split into two parts. Her mother had showed her the path it took, opening the body of a dead coney and blowing down its nose, inflating first one side of the chest and then the other. Men, she had said, were the same inside, at least within the confines of the ribs.

Now, Hannah followed the right part of Ajax’s life-air. It sang as it passed, bubbling only slightly with the blood in his mouth where he had bitten his tongue. Night after night in her childhood, she had lain thus with her ear on her mother’s chest, listening to the flow of breath back and forth. Her mother’s death was a knife’s pain at each remembering. Hannah felt it now, and held her own breath, waiting for the moment to pass.

On the next inhalation, she followed the left life-path as it moved on down to the bruise. It didn’t so much sing as whisper and crackle; the creep of a spider through leaves. She moved her head a fraction and listened again as the air came close to the damaged tissues around the injury.

It crept, it crackled, it seeped out slowly at the place where the rib was cracked and the bubbles had formed, but even when she tapped her forefinger on the bridged arc of a rib, Ajax’s chest did not make the too-resonant drumbeat that foretold death, nor did she hear the hiss of air escaping in great quantities that often spelled the same.

When she lifted her head it seemed that already the bubbles were forming more slowly, and that his breathing was better with each breath. The pulses at his throat and wrists, too, were stronger. His tongue was bleeding less than it had.

Hannah straightened, pushing her hair from her face with the back of her wrist. A circle of men and boys watched her, making a ring of waiting eyes. Math was in the centre, of course, flanked by the wainwright and his four apprentices. Beyond them she recognized among the others the loriner’s wall-eyed son, the widower who brought the hay and corn and had, apparently, helped with the foalings since Math’s mother had died, the German twins who had built the barns near the hippodrome and the old man with the bent, arthritic fingers who was still best at breaking the young stock.

She found a smile for all of them, and did not know how tired she looked.

‘Ajax’s rib may be cracked,’ she said, ‘but he is not yet suffocating on the air he breathes. His bleeding has stopped. If his spirit chooses to return from the place it has gone, wherever that may be’ — she saw the wainwright’s boys make the sign for Tanaris where they thought she wasn’t watching — ‘he will live.’

Someone passed her a mug of clear water. She drank and said, ‘He won’t heal faster for being watched. If one of you stays, the rest could eat and drink. If Math’s gold will allow it?’

‘My gold will allow it,’ said a man’s voice to her left.

She turned, slowly, not knowing the voice, but recognizing its arrogance and fearing the damage it could do.

He stood with his back to a window, framed by the sun’s last light, a tall man, with a hawk’s nose and a high brow and black hair that fell straight as a rod to his shoulders. His bitter eyes raked across each of them.