M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

Hannah found that she knew him after all. Akakios. In the nightmare of the walk to the hippodrome, with Nero’s presence scorching her skin, she had heard the name spoken. Thinking back, she believed Pantera had said it, so that she and Ajax would know.

Akakios flipped a coin high in the air, a small, spinning sun that held everyone’s gaze. By chance or design, Math caught it.

Softly, Akakios said, ‘His excellency wishes you all to dine in his honour. Red may have won the day, but he feels the Green team has proved at last that Ceres may grace a worthy team. He will address you in the morning, with an invitation to join his teams in Alexandria, where they train away from the gaze of the empire. I will lead you there and look over you until the race season begins in Rome at the ides of July.’ He let his gaze drift across them all, to end on Ajax’s supine form. ‘In the continued incapacity of your driver, who leads the team?’

‘I do. I am Caradoc of the Osismi. In Ajax’s absence, I own the Green team. On his behalf, I offer our profound thanks to his excellency, and of course will attend him at his earliest request.’

Math’s father spoke better Latin than the emperor’s man. His voice filled the tavern’s upper room with a quiet certainty that left everyone silent, even while it calmed their fears. Hannah had heard that before only from her mother.

Math alone was not soothed, nor did he view his father with the respect accorded him by the others. Hannah saw him flush, as he had done for Nero, but angrily this time. Setting his jaw, he took the moment of the others’ inattention to search the group, checking the size and weight of the purses around him: a reflex reaction to his father’s presence.

He was reaching sideways towards the belt of the wainwright’s son when Hannah interrupted.

‘Math.’ She whispered it, that the others might not hear. His hand stopped, then withdrew. He looked up at her across Ajax’s body, his eyes hot and hurt and angry. Raising her brows, Hannah turned her head a fraction to where his father stood.

Caradoc had emerged now from the dark corner in which he had been standing. Hannah had no idea how he had got there. She had thought his old injuries too great for him to climb the three stone steps from the courtyard into the inn’s main bar below, let alone the tilting ladder to the upper room. And yet he had not only done it, but done it so silently and carefully that the men and boys of the Green team had not seen, heard or sensed him.

He stood in front of them now a figure of perfect, unbent pride, not hiding the damage to his arms, shoulders and knee that left him lame and fighting pain daily simply to have the use of his hands.

He was Math made old, everyone could see it; his hair was greying at the edges, but the difference in their colourings only served to make him more like his son, not less.

Hannah stepped away from the table. In the same formal Latin that Caradoc had used, she said, ‘Ajax may wake at any time. But meanwhile, he would be honoured that you are acting in his stead. If the emperor’s agent is serious in his offer, perhaps the other members of the Green team could eat? It has been a long day.’

‘And the horses have not yet been seen to,’ Caradoc said.

Almost to a one, the apprentices of the Green team studied their feet. Math alone glared wordless defiance at his father. The air between them crackled back and forth with disappointment and resentment, sharp as lightning, and as hurtful.

From the door, Akakios said, ‘His excellency understood your need to see to the injured man. He has set four of his own men to see to your horses. I am sure they will be settled by now, and perhaps best not further disturbed.’

Caradoc bowed. Crisply, he said, ‘On behalf of Ajax and all the Green team, we extend our grateful thanks to his excellency. We are desolate that he has had to undertake our work in our absence, but are confident that the horses are receiving the best possible care. And we thank you for the offer of gold, but will not need it. Math, if you will return the gentleman’s coin?’

Math flushed from the neck of his tunic to the burning red tips of his ears. With insolent slowness, he fumbled in his tunic for the coin, examined it, then tossed it high in the air for Akakios to catch. It glittered no less than it had done before, for all that it so clearly carried the taint of shame.

Hannah wanted to hug Math, and could not. Nor could she help his father, who possibly needed it more. With a healer’s eye, she saw the effort it took for Caradoc to hold himself upright, and because she was looking, she witnessed the brief, private moment when his gaze fell on Ajax’s face weighted with a depth of love and grief that easily matched his desperate, unrequited care for Math.

As with all rumours, news travelled fast that the emperor favoured the Green team, and would send them to Alexandria to match with his best and perhaps thence to Rome.

Finding he had heroes in his inn, the gap-toothed tavern-master sent up a second table, and a third, and followed the stews of pork and wild garlic with bread and ale and wine for those who wanted it.

Sated, drunk for the most part, elated as much by their belief in Ajax’s recovery as by the prospect of their promised journey, the family that was the Green team slept in the upper room, all twenty-three of them, laid out on straw pallets, with their cloaks rolled as pillows. Even Math was persuaded not to leave them in favour of the horses. In a gesture as close to conciliation as she had seen from him, he brought pallets from the pile for Hannah, his father and himself.

Hannah settled herself by the still-sleeping Ajax and nobody offered any ribald comments. Caradoc took the wounded man’s other side. She felt him lie awake for a while, staring at the thatch and the flittering bats and the sprinkling of starlight squeezing through the eaves. Later, she heard the steadiness of a breath that moves to sleep.

Math was on her other side. He lay awake longer. She thought he might get up and go down into the town as he had done so often before. She felt him tense once, and slid her arm across, so that the back of her hand touched his.

‘Please stay?’ she said, and waited until she felt him subside. She rolled on her side. He was a shape barely seen in the dark. She stroked a finger down his face. ‘You did it,’ she whispered. ‘Your horses were the best. They’ll be the best in Egypt too. You’ll go to Rome.’

‘Will we?’ He was too solemn for a boy of nearly ten, too aware of all that might go wrong, or that might go right, which could be worse.

‘All of you. Even your father.’

He pulled a face. She picked up his fingers and kissed them, and then his brow. After a while, he took her hand, too, and pressed hot, dry lips to the knuckle of her thumb before he rolled away to face the night. She thought he sank into sleep soon after.

Hannah lay awake longest, but even she slept in the end, on the well-tested basis that she could do her patient no further good by staying awake through the night, and that worrying changed nothing for the morning.

In her dream, Hannah lay on a river’s bank. Three men lay around her. Ajax was closest, sleeping, but whole. His hair had grown back gold as corn, but only in a ridge along the length of his scalp from brow to spine, so that it stuck up like the crest on a cockerel. His missing ear showed more clearly because of it. His face was peaceful. She loved him; in the dream, it was possible to acknowledge that.

Pantera lay on her other side, bleeding from wounds to his arms and legs. She knew those; they came from her earliest dreams of childhood. Because of them, she thought the third man, whom she could not properly see, might be her father although it could as easily have been Caradoc, who was the kind of man she would have liked as a father. She wanted to tell Math, but he was gone and she could not find him.