M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

He came to her only barely conscious. She caught him round his waist so that his head fell on her shoulder. Flames washed them both. Every breath scorched her lungs.

‘Let me.’

The loriner’s son was thin and wiry and had a persistently bad chest. If she’d been asked, Hannah would not have thought he had the strength to carry a lamb fresh from birthing, but, true to his word, he slung Ajax over his shoulder and ran with him. She could not see where he went.

The German twins slid down the ladder’s edges, stripping the skin from their palms as she had. They landed on either side of her, shielding her from the flames with their bodies. Another beam crashed down upstairs, rocking the oak above their heads. Somewhere in the conflagration of the ground floor, a wall collapsed.

To the twins, Hannah shouted, ‘ Caradoc? Math? ’

‘Coming,’ said one.

‘Behind us,’ said the other.

‘Both?’

‘Yes.’

They tried to make her leave, one on either side, taking her elbows. She dug in her heels and held the ladder and fought them to let her go. Her hands were burning, she felt the skin part on her knuckles.

‘Hannah, don’t.’ A new hand grasped her shoulder firmly. In the searing, stinging, flame-bright dark was a new shape. Smoke-tears blurred everything.

‘Pantera?’ she said hesitantly, and then, with a surge of hope, ‘Math’s still up there.’

Pantera was drenched; steam rose from his tunic, making an arc of blessed cool. He shielded her with his body, drawing her fast away towards what was left of the door. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

She might have fought against him, too, but Math was in front of them suddenly; a small and ragged shape struggling down the ladder with a reluctance that made her heart ache.

Turning back, Pantera caught him before he reached the bottom, lifted him bodily off and set him at her side. His arms swept both of them. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Father’s there. He can’t walk.’ Math was weeping, not only from the smoke. He was blue from holding his breath and could barely speak. ‘At the top of the stairs. I couldn’t carry him. He-’ He fell into paroxysms of choking.

‘Go with Hannah.’ Pantera pushed them both together and propelled them towards the door. ‘I’ll bring him down.’

The burns on Math’s hands were already seeping yellowing fluid, like rope burns, but flatter and spread further across his palms, stretching up beyond his wrists on to his arms and shoulders. Smoke and ash made cooling crusts across his face, but he was not scarred there; his father had protected him from that.

His father was still trapped inside the burning tavern while Math sat out in the meadow and watched the building collapse. It fell slowly, beginning at one end and sagging down its length, like the capsizing of a long and stately boat caught by the stern on a reef.

Sails of flame billowed in the wind, lighting the surrounding land. Sparks tied twisted ropes to the smoke-blued moon, outshining the stars. Falling ash tainted everything.

The entire population of Coriallum was watching by then, standing, sitting or lying on the wide grass paddock where the cattle had grazed with their bull until the tavern-keeper had moved them out of reach of the fire. It had been his first move on escaping from his inn. Now he sat on an upturned pail, watching disconsolately as the last of his livelihood sagged into the gorging flames.

Around him, the burned and smoke-strangled survivors of his clientele lay on the grass, tended by Coriallum’s healing women, who put their pitch torches down unlit, finding they could work by light of the tavern’s blaze.

Math was sitting a little apart, with Hannah and Ajax and the rest of the Green team. He saw Hannah walk over to speak with the healing women. She came back with some salve in a small wooden pot.

‘It’s for burns,’ she said. ‘If you put it on your arms and hands now, they’ll heal faster.’

The salve stank of goose fat and seagull oil with a lift of rosemary. It rolled under Math’s fingers and stung the sore places so that he had to hold his breath as he rubbed it in. He did it anyway, feeling Hannah’s eyes on him. The warmth of her presence did nothing to shut out the cold from the place where his father should have been.

That one fact turned his world on its head, removing all the certainties by which he had lived. He gave back the pot and sat hugging his knees to his chest, half watching as Hannah knelt by Ajax and smeared the salve on his shoulders and arms.

This once, Hannah and Ajax were not what mattered most, and so not what he saw. Against his half-closed lids, Math watched again the shadow-figure pacing soft as a fox from the far corner of the inn’s upper room to the stairs, leaving a moth’s wing of flame and smoke behind him.

Math had only ever met one man who could walk that quietly: the man who had shaken his nights twice in a row; the man who had brought Nero to him and then kept him apart; the man who had taken the horses from him to walk into the hippodrome, having seen what no one else had seen, so that he could warn Ajax; the man who had given Math a gold coin — gold — and sent him to safety; the man who was, even now, struggling to bring his father out alive.

Pantera still made his armpits sweat as he had on the docks when first they met. Math didn’t believe for one moment that he had set light to the inn, but he knew that he was the one man who could find, and then kill, whoever had done. First, though, and far more important, he had to bring Math’s father out of the inn alive.

And in that was the turning of his life. Because what he saw in the dark of his half-closed eyes was his father, or rather the care that had leapt to his father’s eyes when Math had woken him with the smoke already filling the room.

His father had never looked at him like that before. Or perhaps he had, and Math had not seen it. Whichever was true, that single look had pierced his chest and set itself in his heart, so that when all the team had been woken and sent to the ladder and Math could have run to safety he had turned back, searching for a thing he knew his father had forgotten.

Sitting on the cold grass with the sour-sea stench of the seagull salve thick in his nostrils, he smelled again the smoke and the burned-hair smell of his father, and saw again the shifting thickness in the air that was Caradoc’s crippled progress as he came to find him.

‘We need to go,’ Caradoc had said. He was a warrior. Every part of him showed it.

Math felt a pride he had never thought possible. Under his father’s gaze, he lifted the leather coin pouch he had found in the nook of the inn’s corner, not far from where they had slept. Four gold coins and three silver jingled inside.

‘I got this for you,’ he had said, holding it up to be clear he had not meant to steal it. The confrontation over Akakios’ coin still lay between them and he wanted it gone. ‘I saw where you hid it.’

‘I thought you might have done,’ his father had said. ‘That was well done.’

Caradoc had said that so often, in exactly that voice. Never before had Math felt it touch him. There, in all the smoke and the flame, his father reached out and raised him to his feet. The smoke hung like a curtain between them. Only now, looking back, did Math see his father properly.

‘Hannah’s taken Ajax to the ladder,’ Caradoc had said hoarsely. ‘Nobody else is left to get out.’ And then, as Math turned back to where the ladder had been, ‘Not that way. A beam’s falling there. We need to go round by the other wall.’

His father set the pace. Through the thickening smoke, they felt their way round the seating benches and the smouldering remains of the pallets to the safety of the far wall.