M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

‘And snow might lie thick across the deserts in July.’ Pantera laid down his half-eaten bannock and leaned on one elbow on the dusty grass. ‘I came to make an offer, to you and to Math. I can’t travel with you, but I can stretch out my time here for a month. If nothing else, I can be looking for whoever tried to kill you all. In a month of nights, I can also offer to teach Math all that I can of spying, to build on that grounding so that he’ll have a chance to survive if he finds himself cast out alone. Thereafter, I’ll have to go to Alexandria and we may not meet until you’re well settled in. Will you go with him, at least that far, and stay that long? Or are you committed to go to Judaea with Shimon?’

Far behind him, a man was teaching a boy the use of sword against shield. The sun glanced off the polished bronze boss into Hannah’s eyes. Blinded, with a knifing pain in her head, she put her palms over her face and stared into darkness, seeking a clear path forward.

Thickly, she said, ‘In the night, I told Ajax I wasn’t part of the Green team.’

Pantera said nothing. She took her hands from her eyes and found him looking at her with patient curiosity.

‘And this morning?’ he asked. ‘Must the chaos of the night set the future’s path? Do you want to go to Jerusalem, to meet your cousins and persuade them that peace in servitude is preferable to war?’

‘No.’ With the saying of it, her headache began to ease. ‘I’ve never met them and they’ve never met me. My father died before I was born and my mother brought me up among the Sibyls. We would have nothing to say to each other that would not be better left unsaid.’

‘Then you could spare half a year at least.’ Pantera spread his hands. He was smiling, crookedly, with real humour. ‘Alexandria would be a very dull place without you.’

In the still night, a single drop of water rolled the full length of a tin sluice and splashed into the lower of two bronze vessels. Somewhere deep within the surrounding globe of brass and silver, the added weight caused a pan to tip, a lever to edge forward, a sprung arm to ease back. Elsewhere, a ratchet shuddered towards the end of its hourly cycle.

Math lay on his side on the sand beneath Nero’s great mechanical water clock, listening to the rumble of the falling water. If he held his breath and pressed his upper ear to the cold metal, he could hear each of the individual tubes and whistles making ready to strike the hour.

Know your friends, the spy, Pantera, had said at the beginning of Math’s month of secret nocturnal tuition in Gaul. A bull pen is your friend, a dog kept kennelled through the night, the uneven line of a roof ridge. Each one of these will hide you if you let it. Come to know them intimately.

The water clock was Math’s closest friend for the night and it told him the hour was nearly up. Covering his ears with his hands, he risked the last wriggle forward to where he could make out the outline of Nero’s geometric compound. The clock was its centrepiece, antique apple of the emperor’s eye, a gift from Alexandria’s elders to honour their Lord’s ambitions of Platonic perfection.

Laid out in a triangle around the clock’s sphere were the three dormitories within which slept the members of Nero’s three chosen teams, Green, White and Blue, marked out by the roof tiles of verdigrised copper, limed shingles and deep blue clay pans respectively.

At the end of the Blues’ line was a single chamber for Akakios in his role as overseer. A flag was bound to a mast there, as a sign that the emperor’s spymaster was not currently in residence, and that, instead, Poros of the Blues was in notional charge of the compound. It served as a timely warning; men — and boys — were flogged more often when Akakios was in residence and Math had promised the ghost of his father that if he saw the flag fluttering free he would turn round and go back to bed.

Tonight, it wasn’t. Safe, at least from that quarter, Math looked out beyond the triangle of the dormitories towards the square made by the horse stalls, the kitchens and the dining area and then on to the oval training track to the north and finally to the wide circular palisade that enclosed the whole compound, keeping the teams in and the curious onlookers of Alexandria out. Thus were all the philosophers’ shapes fulfilled in Nero’s creation, that their wisdom might infuse the drivers and their teams with all the skills necessary to outmatch the best of Rome, while at the same time keeping them well clear of the betting syndicates that would have paid in gold for news of their form.

That didn’t stop the team members from gambling amongst themselves. It didn’t, actually, stop them from laying bets outside the compound, just ensured that they were conducted secretly, and Math had only recently heard about it. The baker, apparently, was the conduit. His donkey cart drove in at dawn every morning laden with the day’s bread, and lately two or three of the loaves had contained gold in their heart, sent from the outside by men whose job it was to feed the betting circles of Rome with the information they needed to lay odds in the coming season. One of the Blues’ middle-ranking apprentices was said to be richer by three denarii as a result.

Doubtless, he had laid most of his money on his own team. Of the three teams, the Blues from Galatia were far and away the best; everyone had at least one wager on their winning the trial.

The Whites were from Cappadocia, which meant in their own tongue ‘Land of the White Horses’, which romantic fact, according to the guards, was the sole reason Nero had bought them here. Certainly it wasn’t for their skill.

They were widely acclaimed as the pacemakers. Everyone who wasn’t actually a member of the Whites expected them to be sent home as soon as another team came along that stood a hope of thrashing the Blues.

The Greens from Gaul were that team. All winter Ajax had trained under the eyes of the guards and the sensible money had been moving quietly in his direction for the past month. The fear amongst them all was that Ajax might fall ill or succumb to injury, for they lacked a credible second driver. Everyone agreed that Math had the talent, but he lacked the skill and experience to drive a winning team.

In Gaul, his dream of driving had been a pale, bloodless fantasy besides the excitement of the dockside thieving. But Ajax was a good tutor, possibly the best, and here in the compound, where every man and boy lived and breathed racing, Math had found that he wanted to drive a racing team more with each passing day.

Biting his lip, he dragged his mind back to the clock and the night; thoughts of racing ruined his concentration and tonight it mattered that he not make the same mistakes he had six months before.

Then, he had been caught by the Egyptian guards as he tried to climb the palisade, and had paid the price. The penalty for boys caught trying to leave the compound was precise and, as his team leader, Ajax had been woken and dragged, yawning and cursing, from his bed to administer the flogging.

The surprise of that had lasted at least for the start of what came after — because it was Ajax that Math had been following, and Ajax whom he had last seen very much awake and opening the small postern door with his key just before he had been caught.

The surprise had not lasted long; very soon it was impossible to think, or to breathe, or to do anything but hold the image of his father in the forefront of his mind and not let it go. At the end, he remembered Hannah coming to carry him back to her cell, and the bitter taste of the drink she had given him, and how it had shrivelled his tongue even as it stole the pain and let him sleep.