M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

‘I can’t.’

‘Hannah!’

‘The fire was deliberate,’ she said. ‘It may be, as you said, that the Blues came to finish what they began this morning, but if they did so it was too late: for good or for ill, for your skill or’ — she glanced at Math and away — ‘for other reasons, Nero had already chosen the Greens. Akakios came to tell us in the inn before we ate and the whole of Coriallum knew it long before the fire started.’

‘So if the Blues lit it, they did so out of revenge rather than hope of success?’ Ajax eyed her thoughtfully. ‘Men have killed for lesser reasons. And if they had wiped out the entire Green team, they might yet have been chosen.’ Tentatively, he reached up and smoothed a hand across his scalp, feeling the bandage she had put there. ‘But none of that is a reason for you not to come with us to Alexandria or on to Rome. Do you think it was someone else?’

She looked down at her hands. ‘A friend of my father’s came to talk to me yesterday. He asked me to go with him to Judaea, to help calm the hotheads who are voting for war against Rome.’

‘Will you go?’ Math had asked it, in the same tone.

‘I don’t know. I told him I’d think about it. I am still-’

‘Hannah, they’re there!’ Math caught her burned shoulder. ‘They’re coming!’ His face shone.

She turned where he pointed, back in the direction of the burning inn. Through the dazzlement of flame, she made out the emerging figure of a man, and the burden he carried.

‘It’s Pantera,’ she said. ‘And he’s carrying your father.’

Pantera had been asleep in the Striding Heron tavern when Goro knocked on his door.

He woke sharply from dreams of dead youths and poorly mended nets. The first hint of smoke filtered through the shutters to his room even as the boy stuttered his news. Outside, the cries of a few voices multiplied in the brief time it took to rise and throw on some clothes. He felt Goro staring at his scars and passed him another denarius, destroying even further the economy of the dockside where far greater intimacies were bought and sold for copper.

Outside, the fire lit the sky. Men were forming half-built chains, trying to commandeer buckets, to shout orders at one another. All along the row of whorehouses, fishers’ hovels and taverns, men and women in various stages of undress began to spill out on to the dockside.

Goro was watching them, alert for a loose purse. Pantera caught his shoulder, ‘Get word to the emperor,’ he said. ‘The Ubians will tell him.’

‘Tell him what?’

‘That someone has tried to burn his new race team to death,’ Pantera said grimly.

He waited to see the boy forge his way through the swelling crowd, then elbowed his own way to the front and ran.

He reached the tavern as the first trickle of men and boys was dragged out from under the smouldering thatch. He looked for Hannah, or Math, and saw only the wainwright, who stumbled close enough to be caught and hauled clear of the morass.

‘Who of the Greens is still inside?’ Pantera asked.

‘All… they’re all upstairs.’ The man stared wildly about, as if they might appear at any moment as ghosts.

Pantera shook his shoulders. ‘Not all. Your apprentices are out. And some of the others.’ They were crouched not far away, with their heads between their knees, choking. ‘Who’s left? Is Hannah in there? Or Math?’

‘Math.’ The man snatched at the word. ‘And his father.’

‘And Ajax?’

‘I think so.’

Letting the wainwright go, Pantera had pushed through the gathering throng, counting heads of those who had soot-smeared faces and singed eyebrows. Math was not among them, nor his father, Caradoc.

A white-haired Gaul with soft eyes caught his arm. ‘You’re the emperor’s man? The boy’s still in there. Best get him out.’

He had no idea how he might do that. The door in front of him was no longer a door, but the searing mouth of a furnace. On either side, the once shuttered windows belched flame.

Three more men barrelled out, falling over each other in their haste to escape. A lone youth staggered after with a weight over his shoulder, calling aloud that he had Ajax, the Green driver, and needed help. Others rushed forward with water and rags to beat out the fires on his hair and clothes.

Pantera pushed his way to the threshold and stood there in the wash of flame and smoke, staring in.

Hannah was there, crushed between two Germanic warriors, as big as any of the emperor’s guards, trying to get back up the ladder.

‘Hannah!’

She couldn’t hear him. At that distance, she couldn’t hear anything but the fire. Even from the doorway, the heat was driving him back. Turning, Pantera grabbed a bucket of water from a man in the useless chain and upended it over his head, soaking his tunic, his hair, his shoes.

‘Hannah…’ She was trying to get up the ladder. ‘Hannah, no.’

He caught her shoulder and held her back and was about to speak when Math tumbled down the ladder sobbing that his father was upstairs, trapped under a fallen beam.

And so, against all reason, for a child, for a man, for the memory of a woman, or for the woman herself, Pantera hauled himself up into an inferno that was eating the ladder even as he climbed.

Caradoc was at the top, lying where he had fallen, with his head near the trapdoor in a slipstream of smoke-free air. Flames lit up a blooded burn across his forehead and the same ash-smeared features as everyone else. Smoke shadowed the rest of him. There might have been a roof beam near his legs, but in the gloom nothing was certain.

Pantera came up through the trapdoor so that their heads were level. Gratefully, he breathed the small pocket of smoke-free air that allowed him to speak. ‘Let me take you down.’

‘No.’ Caradoc caught Pantera’s wrist. ‘My back’s broken. There’s… bleeding inside. I’ve seen men die; I know the signs. This is my time. Not too soon.’

It did him no honour to argue with the truth. Pantera said, ‘I can still take you down. You can be with Math at the end.’

‘No. There’s not time. And there’s a thing you must know. Only you.’

His drenched tunic was steaming hotter than Rome’s hottest baths. Even so, the small hairs came erect on the back of Pantera’s neck.

‘Why me?’

‘You have been a warrior. There are few others in Coriallum.’

‘Ajax is one, I think?’

Caradoc gave the ghost of a smile. His hair was lit to gold by the fire. They could have been at a riverside, or in a roundhouse on a winter’s evening, waiting for the children to sleep. ‘Who were you?’ he asked.

The question caught at Pantera’s throat. Hoarsely, he said, ‘I was-’ He shook his head. ‘I am Hywell the hunter, heart of Aerthen, father of Gunovar. Both of these are dead. I fought with the Dumnonii at the end-battle. We had defeated the Second legion, but Paullinus came on us and we were trapped.’

In the swirling fire, Aerthen and Gunovar were beside him. They were real here, in all the smoke.

Caradoc’s gaze searched his scars. ‘The legions caught you,’ he said. ‘But you escaped?’

In the face of death, Pantera could not avoid the truth. ‘Not escaped,’ he said. ‘Let go. I was Roman first.’

The dying man nodded, and closed his eyes against the pain of the movement. ‘So you have lived a lie also. Not an… easy thing.’ His eyes opened. They fixed on Pantera with the same intensity as had his son’s. Only the question they asked was different. ‘And now you have a debt to pay?’

Their gods breathed on Pantera then. ‘I have a debt to pay,’ he agreed, and felt the same sense of hope he had felt on the rooftops with Seneca and Shimon. ‘I would gladly give my life for yours now in the warriors’ way to pay it, but we both know that hope is gone. Is there another way I might pay?’