M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

Caradoc’s cold hand squeezed his wrist, briefly, and let go. With an effort, he reached round and brought a knife from the sheath at his belt.

‘Swear,’ he said. ‘And then take it for Math.’

Pantera laid his hands on hilt and blade. ‘I swear to the ends of my life and the four winds to do your bidding.’ He took the knife. ‘What must I do?’

‘Tell Math…’

The voice was almost gone. Pantera had seen men die and knew how fast it came at the end. He brought his face closer. ‘To know himself truly, Math must truly know who his father was. I’ll tell him if you tell me. Quickly. It matters.’

Pride warred with pain on the dying man’s face. ‘I am Caradoc, son of Cunobelin, scourge of Rome, heart of the Boudica, father to Cygfa, Cunomar, Graine — and Math. Cartimandua betrayed me to Rome. Claudius pardoned me. Nero ordered me slain.’

‘And you have lived, and under his nose this last half-month.’ The sheer audacity of it was breathtaking. Pantera exulted that such things could still happen. He had thought them all gone when Britain was crushed.

Caradoc grinned tightly. ‘Nero believes me dead. Men attested to it, swearing that they had seen my body; good men. So Math has been…’ His words dried. His eyes fell shut.

Pantera said, ‘Math has been kept safe. You did that for him. I’ll see he understands.’

Caradoc coughed. Bright blood spewed on to the oak beneath him. His grip on Pantera’s wrist tightened at the closeness of death. ‘Keep him safe. You were right this morning. Math is safest… with his family.’

‘Then hear my oath,’ Pantera said.

In the smoke and the searing heat, he found the formal ceremonial language of the tribes. Laying his hands on the blade that had been offered, he said, ‘In the name of Aerthen and of Gunovar, my daughter, I will keep Math safe and see him joined to his family. I swear it by my heart and my soul. While I live, my life is given for his.’

It was enough, and in time. Caradoc of Britain, scourge of Rome, smiled his relief. With a last, long-hoarded breath, he said, ‘My… son. Proud. Tell him I am… very proud.’

Scorched and hoarse, with his tunic abandoned to the conflagration, with every muscle in his body aching, Pantera carried Caradoc’s body from the blazing inn towards the huddle that was the dead man’s friends and family.

‘Does any of you know the rites that may be sung to usher a dead warrior to his place with the gods?’

A light breeze lifted the grass and the leaves and caressed his skin, seeking out the burns and soothing them. His question hung in the air. One man levered himself up from the ground. ‘I know the rites of a warrior’s passing,’ said Ajax of Athens.

He was naked, but for bandages at crown and thorax made from strips of torn linen, not of imperial quality, yet wound by a professional hand. He stood with the moon at his head and the fire bronzing his skin so that it shone as if greased with bear fat. His one ear poked out from under the linen at his crown, highlighting the loss of the other. If his head beneath had not been shaved, but instead had been crowned by the single line of hair that was the mark of…

In that moment, Pantera knew with certainty who the other man was, and could not think why he had taken so long to see it.

He was gaping, foolishly. He closed his mouth. ‘What should we do?’

‘Caradoc must be laid beneath a tree,’ Ajax said. ‘There’s an oak by the stream beyond the cattle. I can walk. I can’t carry him.’

‘I can do that.’ Pantera looked beyond the driver. ‘Math?’

Math stared up. His red-rimmed eyes, wide as an owl’s, searched the length of Pantera’s body and came to rest on his face.

He looked exactly like his father in the moments before dying, save that Caradoc had not been weeping and Math couldn’t stop. His face was awash with tears.

Balancing the dead man on his arms, Pantera eased himself into a crouch. ‘Math, your father was proud of you. Those were his last words. Would you come and see his soul set free?’

He did his best to ask it cleanly, but the weight of his oath pressed newly on him and he heard a hint of desperation in his plea.

Math heard it too. He turned away, his face a landscape of sorrow and scorn. ‘He was a warrior,’ he said thickly. ‘I don’t know the rites.’

‘Math, you can still-’

‘No!’ The boy wrenched away, running past Hannah, past Ajax, past the others of the Green team to the anonymity of the crowd.

‘Let him be,’ Ajax said. ‘Now is not the time. Hannah will care for him. For Caradoc’s sake, we need to act quickly. Come with me.’

The oak was old and vast with branches thick as a man’s two thighs. It stood alone in a quieter part of the meadow, where the blaze of the burning tavern barely outshone the stars. A stream ran nearby, murmuring songs to the moon. The grass was longer here, enough to shroud the dead man’s face when they laid him under the tree’s dappling branches. They knelt together. Ajax began to sing.

Pantera remembered the words and melody of the rite only slowly, joining in with Ajax’s resonant rendering halfway through. At the close, when the stream had carried the last notes away, Pantera stood. As the last one to see the dead man alive, he spoke the ending.

Softly, to be heard only by two men, the stream and the gods, he said, ‘He was Caradoc, lover of Breaca, father to Cygfa, Cunomar, Graine and Math. He was the greatest warrior his people have ever known. May he be remembered as such, by his sons and his daughters. May he return now with joy to those who have loved him.’

He made the sign over the man’s brow, releasing his spirit to the care of his god. In the still night, a subtle wind soughed briefly through the grass and then through the leaves of the oak. Pantera did not look at Ajax; he did not need to. Nothing that he had just said was news to this man.

Presently, Ajax pushed himself to his feet, taking care for his injuries, and slowly unwound the bandage from his crown. The moon shone on his shaved head, casting warped patches around the place where his ear had been cut away. His face was as unreadable as ever.

‘Shall we walk?’ he asked quietly. ‘Caradoc has no need of us now, and I would be further from the tavern fires.’ And from the small cluster of townsfolk who had gathered and listened to the rites as they sang: that did not need to be spoken aloud.

They walked together down the side of the stream, keeping by instinct to the darker places beneath the trees, not the light.

The river grew wider and then narrowed to tumble over a rocky lip in a shallow falls twice the height of a man. Above the cresting white rim, a single fallen dolmen hung out across the falls and the pool below, narrower at the neck, broad as a horse’s back as it approached midstream. It was the kind of place boys might come to fish in the summer, and cast their lines in the river behind; the kind of place where, later, they might test their courage on a moonlit night, seeing if they could walk barefoot along the ridge in the dark; the kind of place from which they might dive into the pool of unknown depth below, to show they had no fear of death. A boy could easily die, diving like that.

In Britain, Pantera had seen the warriors set each other such tests in the winter, to keep them sharp for the battles of spring. It was autumn now, with no battles in sight, but still the water’s promise drew him. Feeling the kiss of flying water on his naked back, he stepped out along the narrow stone to sit at the rounded end with his bare feet dangling over the water, and was not surprised when Ajax joined him and began to unwind the bandage Hannah had so carefully set about his chest.