M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

None of which explained why Pantera was meeting Ajax in secret when, as the emperor’s oath-sworn man, he could have walked in through the gate and demanded an audience. Akakios seemed the likely answer. Akakios was the answer to most of Math’s problems, including the interesting question of how to get back into the compound unseen. He had an idea about that, if he managed to stay hidden until dawn.

Too late, the clouds unveiled the moon. Math moved his head a fraction, the better to stare at the place where a single shadow moved away from the palisade, and, splitting down its own length, became two men.

Morning was close. The baker was late again — the man was an unreliable harbinger of dawn — but beyond the palisade the first lick of light coloured the flat horizon. In the newly sharp shadows, Ajax and Pantera stepped apart with lingering slowness. Math heard his own name spoken softly as a question and a hushed reply.

Straining to hear, he closed his eyes. When he opened them bare moments later, the silence was so complete he could hear the crimp of sand under his own fist, but Pantera and Ajax were gone. He had heard neither the turn of the key nor the sound of a lame man’s walking, but clearly he was alone.

There was no point in trying to follow Pantera; Math knew his own limits. It was also pointless, not to say dangerous, to try to get back into the compound now when the dark was in retreat.

He relaxed, therefore, under the shadow of the horse trough, and looked out across the sea towards the great lighthouse of Pharos with its bronze mirror and indefatigable flame that sent its signal, so said the guards, five hundred miles out to sea, guiding sailors past the man-eating shoals at the mouths of the two harbours.

The flame shimmered to new life, even as Math watched, its pitch fire overtaken by the greater flame of the sun. Brought early to morning, cocks crowed and the gulls began to keen and wheel as, out on the eastern edge of the training grounds, the first savage edge of the sun lifted over the horizon, signalling the start of the working day.

Precisely on time, the melon-seller arrived, leading an ass-drawn cart and accompanied by the man who came three times a month with dates and almonds. A message-runner from Akakios stood apart, not wishing to sully the authority of his station. The baker had still not arrived, which meant they’d be eating yesterday’s bread at least until the noon meal. The chief cook hadn’t risen, and so hadn’t missed his key.

From inside the compound came the slow beginnings of the morning: cooking fires flared through their kindling, sending thin smoke to pepper the air; horses whinnied as stalls were opened; a gaggle of groom-boys flooded out of the gates, heading for the troughs with their buckets.

Elsewhere in Alexandria, the houses of the rich had their own cisterns, so that even the slaves need only turn a tap. In designing his compound, Nero could have diverted a branch of the Nile had he chosen. Instead, he had decided that it was healthier for the boys to carry water in from the pumps for the horses, for the small army of cooks who fed the greater army of drivers, grooms, stable-boys and slaves, and, first, for the great brass and silver clock that was the centrepiece of his compound. There were thirty boys, ten to each team. It took three trips each with two buckets to provide the necessary water.

They flooded out, muzzily sleepy and caught up in the squabbles of the day before. As the first of them gathered, Math stood, ducked his head into the trough and sluiced himself free of the night’s dust, then lifted the two buckets he had hidden here the day before for exactly this purpose, and filled them to the brim with the night-cold water.

The boys moved in a pack, not wanting to be either first or last, and it was easy to slide into the middle. Just inside the gates, Math let fall the stolen key and kicked sand over it, but not so much that it might not be found by another boy, more sharp-eyed than he, and returned in safety to the chief cook when he came to look for it.

Humming to himself, he set in motion his plan for the rest of the day.

‘Did you see Math go out to get the water?’ Ajax asked.

The morning was still young enough to be cool. He sat opposite Hannah at the weathered wooden dining trestles under an awning of shaved goatskin so thin the sun’s disc shone clearly through. It served to keep the worst of the glare from their breakfast, but not the flies. Nothing kept the flies off for long, although a gaunt slave squatting nearby pulled rhythmically on an overhead fan that kept them away from the fruit, bread and honeyed barley porridge with which the emperor’s chariot teams so richly broke their fasts.

In her time away from Alexandria, Hannah had forgotten the flies, and how summer multiplied them. They were bad enough now, in spring. Sighing, she batted the edge of her hand across a melon rind. ‘I didn’t see him go out with his bucket,’ she said, ‘but then I wasn’t really paying attention until Lentus of the Whites found the cook’s key in the sand at the gates.’

‘He depends on that, I think. None of us pays sufficient attention to the things we see every day. In some ways, Pantera taught him too well.’ Ajax kept his gaze averted as he spoke, which told Hannah more than he meant it to.

‘He’s been outside the compound without permission?’ She stared at him, disbelieving. ‘You’ve been out too, or he wouldn’t have dared! Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Ajax shrugged awkwardly, ‘I thought I’d rely on you to heal my back afterwards if they caught me.’

‘It wouldn’t have been your back. For talking to someone from the city, they would skin you alive and peg you out on the sands to be food for the flies!’

Hannah wanted to scream at him, and could not. Already the boys were milling about the training area harnessing the horses, close enough to hear. In any case, Ajax was looking at her at last, his gaze aggrieved.

‘I may not be Pantera,’ he said, ‘but you have to trust that I can get out of the compound and back in again without being caught.’

‘And that Math can do the same?’

‘He can. He did. Look at him. Does he look like a boy who might let himself be caught a second time?’

Math was leading out Brass and Bronze, his two wild-mad colts, ready for the morning’s run. Already they were creamed with sweat.

Hannah watched as he bridled them and set their harness on to the training chariot. He was fast and nimble, and the colts didn’t lunge at him with quite the savagery they reserved for everyone else. Then he was finished, and dived back into the crowd and would have been lost but that, amongst a horde of dark-haired, dark-skinned boys and their sweat-sheened colts, he stood out like a shooting star fallen to earth.

His hair had always been gold, but dustily so. Since Gaul, he had taken to rinsing it in citrus juice and that, combined with the Alexandrian sun, had spun it to finest gold. Then, too, he was smaller than the rest, and his skin less brown, and these three together made him a golden bounty-cock in a flock of black-brown hens. For these reasons alone, he could have been bullied without cease, but the other boys liked him, and revelled in his difference, and he was learning to play and take joy in others’ levity as he had not done in Gaul. Hannah wasn’t sure who had taught him that.

A slave hovered close by, ready to clear the table. Ajax selected a peach and began to rub it between his palms until it glistened.

Hannah said, ‘You met Pantera.’ If she closed her eyes, she could see the spy sitting on a stone by a fire eating an oat bannock smeared with honey, and hiding from her the sharpness of his mind. ‘And not for the first time?’