M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

Afterwards, when Math was well enough to begin driving the horses again, he thought Ajax had treated him with more respect. Certainly he had pushed him harder, which was probably a good thing, even if the falls came more frequently and the bruises were worse.

Even so, Ajax had not told Math that he was going to meet Pantera. Math found out only because he had smiled his particular smile for the melon-seller’s assistant every day through the entire winter and it had finally paid its dividend that morning, when the melon-seller had delivered to Ajax a gift of a bear standing with its claws outstretched towards half of a moon disc. Math, who had been given a secret glimpse beforehand, had read in it a message that he thought he understood.

Which was why he was hiding under the water clock within sight of the palisade for a second time, six months older and wiser, with greater respect for the Egyptian soldiers who stood night-guard along the heights, and an absolute terror of Akakios, the emperor’s spymaster, and de facto overseer of the compound.

The last drop of water rolled from flute to vessel. A pan tipped, a lever moved, a ratchet clicked suddenly off the end of its cycle. The entire clock shivered like a hound shedding water. Three hammers snapped forward, hard.

In the silence of the compound, the great mother bell rang not quite loudly enough to wake those who slept. A flute whistled twice. A chime pierced the air with teeth-aching insistence.

On its second ring, Math threw himself across the sand on his hands and knees to the foot of the palisade.

Pressing up against the postern, he eased a key from within his tunic. Apart from Akakios’ master key, there were four other keys in the compound: one each for the three team drivers and the last given to the chief cook, who was trusted to go out to the markets. The cook had a fondness for wine and a particular boy of the White team and Math was betting the skin of his back that the key wouldn’t be missed before morning.

His hands were shaking. Under the fading chimes of the water clock, the key hushed in the lock. The well-oiled door opened without a sound.

Never go through any opening — a gate, a door, a curtain to a room, the entrance to a cave — if you are not certain what’s on the other side. One day, it will be your death.

With Pantera’s instruction ringing in his head, he pressed his face to the opening and let his eyes find the shapes and the unshapes of the world beyond the compound: the outlines of the city, half a mile distant, with its tall silhouetted palaces and the taller beacon of the lighthouse behind; the closer bulk of the city’s hippodrome; the canal that led to the Nile and the shuffle of boats thereon.

Tilting his head, Math listened for the rhythmic breathing of the guard directly above, the grunts of night beasts in the desert, the sea’s distant serenade, so much like home. Last, he sifted the scents of the desert, of cold sand and wood and men, from the more distant sea-smells of the harbour. He smelled the garlic that the guards had eaten at the last meal, and the wine, and the old, stale flatulence. He didn’t smell either Ajax or Pantera, which meant that neither of them was there yet. Ahead, an unbroken expanse of sand reached out fifty paces to the emperor’s horse trough with the bent arm of the pump over it like a standing heron. Math slid through the postern gate and locked it behind him, then set out to crawl across the open desert.

It was further than it seemed in daylight. Desiccated grit pushed itself up his nose, into his mouth and eyes. Twice, he had to stop and press his nose to stop himself from sneezing and when he finally lay prone in the cold, safe dark beneath the trough, sharp-footed insects bigger than mice began to scrabble over his arms, exploring routes into his tunic and out again so that lying still was a torture in itself.

He chose to believe that none of the insects was a scorpion. According to Saulos, the stammering Idumaean who had taken Caradoc’s place as the Green team’s harness-maker, the emperor had ordered his compound kept clear of venomous things and Akakios would have been required to fall on his own sword if so much as one brown snake had been found within the palisade.

Away from Nero’s malign influence, Saulos had proved to be a fluent communicator, possessed of an encyclopaedic knowledge of Alexandria which was second only to Hannah’s in its depth and breadth. He seemed also to be the only man in the compound who chose to spend friendly time with Akakios, which was little short of amazing, but meant that the story about the snakes might actually be true.

The night passed and no scorpions came. Math lay still and practised the ways Pantera had taught him to keep his mind awake without succumbing to a boredom that could kill him. After a while, for the fun of it, he imagined seeing Pantera, gliding ghost-like towards the palisade.

It worked. Between one blink and the next, Pantera was there — there! — a knife-blade shadow sliding over the sand with the same halting fluidity that Math had seen when first he had stepped off the boat on to Coriallum’s dock half a year before.

The spy might have been lame, his shoulder might have been scarred beyond repair, but Math had not yet seen anyone else who could move like that. Even Ajax, who had once seemed to be the best of the best, was not that good, which was one reason, Math supposed, why Ajax felt the way he did.

Pantera stopped halfway to the palisade and turned on his heel, scanning the land around. Math’s palms sprang suddenly sweaty. He half-closed his eyes and tried to press himself deeper into the sand.

In the desert night, an owl called softly twice and was answered. There were no owls near the emperor’s training compound, but the sounds merged so completely with the waking coughs and cries of desert and city that only a boy who would make of himself a spy might have noticed them.

Because he was looking in the right direction, Math saw a man’s shape peel away from the palisade and walk towards Pantera. At the last moment, dusty starlight reflected from Ajax’s shaven head, leaving no doubt who met whom in the shadow of the palisade.

Singing to himself inside, Math watched the two men reach for each other in the warrior’s grasp he had once so despised, then move together back into the shadows, to a place he had no hope of seeing or hearing.

He felt rather than heard the murmur of quiet speech. Words rolled together and even their timbre was not clear. Math frowned into the dark, begging the half-moon to give him more light.

It didn’t; instead, a billowing cloud drew its veil across what little light there was, and a sudden breeze tossed handfuls of sand about the open space, making a noise that covered any other sounds. The two men could have coupled there, standing upright against the oak planking, and Math wasn’t even sure he would hear it.

Certainly, he wouldn’t have seen it, just as he had seen nothing when Ajax and Pantera had walked together down the riverbank on the night of his father’s death. They hadn’t been out of sight for long, but Math knew — who better? — how little time it took to consummate desire if both parties were eager. And he knew enough of such things to name for himself the change he had seen in Pantera and Ajax afterwards: two men who had departed the inn fire as strangers had come back close as brothers, with the shine of new discovery bright on their skin.

Things had passed between those two that night that no other heard or knew, but Math had seen Pantera grip Ajax’s arm as he left them to return to his solitary bed in a distant tavern and had seen him the next day giving his oath to the emperor; an oath that had kept him apart from the Green team, so that, in the busy month of preparation that followed, his absence had hung over them as certainly as Math’s father’s had done.