M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

Grunting, red-faced, he gestured obscenely back, informing her in the local Greek patois that he was a slave with no money. He added a curse inventive in its ugliness.

Ten paces on, he hefted the pot down from his shoulder and set it on the ground near the whore before turning right, into the dark of an alley the sun had long ago abandoned all efforts to reach.

From the dark, he watched the woman retrieve the bronze coin he had left her beneath the pot. Some brief time later, he saw her take as a client a round-faced man wearing the short tunic and belted trews of a ship-hand, who turned her face to the wall and accepted her offer in all its exactitude.

Her new client was not a stranger to the street, but drank each night at the Black Chrysanthemum where he shouted tales of seafaring and piracy, all saved by the wonder of the lighthouse. Pantera had watched as, drunk and friendly, he had swayed with his companions from the tavern in the small hours of the night. Only when he had parted from them, never quite going where they went, did he become miraculously sober and return to the pleasanter surround of the legions’ barracks. There, he exchanged his sailor’s trousers for a tunic of quality linen and changed the nature of his dialect from that of a dockhand to the equally rough, but distinctly different patois of a legionary.

For five days, this particular individual had followed Pantera, and Pantera had gone about his business as if he had not seen him. Now, as the man released the whore without payment, looked left and right, belted his trews and stepped silently into the blackness of the minor alley, Pantera flicked out the edge of his palm much as he had trained Math to do in their nights together, aiming at throat height. The impact hurt, satisfyingly.

It hurt the man he had hit far more. Pantera caught the front of the sailor’s smock and twisted it tight on his neck, choking him. ‘I will say a name,’ he said, softly. ‘You will answer with a nod if you know it.’

The choking increased. The man flailed his feet, battering at his assailant’s calves. As he had done with Math, but with considerably more force, Pantera kicked his heels from under him and drove him into the ground. Bones shattered under the impact. The choking became an abortive attempt to shout.

Pulling the head into the crook of his arm, Pantera brought his mouth close to one cauliflower ear. ‘Akakios of Rhodes,’ he said.

The head jerked once.

‘Thank you.’

Pantera moved his elbow up and up and used his free hand to make the twist until he felt the vertebrae of the man’s neck begin to grind against each other. A final abrupt movement brought a short, hard snap. The ship-hand who had never manned a ship jerked once and fell still. Pantera lowered his body to the ground. It smelled suddenly of urine, and the first ripeness of faeces.

‘And me?’ asked a harsh voice made soft. ‘I told him where you had gone.’ The prostitute stood in the alley’s mouth, her face scarved by the shadows.

‘But first you told me that the man I seek is at home, for which I am grateful.’ Pantera opened his purse, and pulled from the hank of soft wool he kept therein — cheese became rancid too soon in this weather — a copper coin. She caught it without turning her head.

‘I don’t kill women unless they threaten me. Will you do so? Or your unborn child?’

He heard her hesitation. She was, he thought, pregnant by no more than four months and had believed her clothing covered it. ‘No.’

‘Then go. If someone asks what happened, tell them what you have seen. If nobody asks, I would advise you not to volunteer. Our late friend’s employers don’t stop at taking favours without payment.’

‘I saw a man kill another man,’ she said, turning away. ‘He paid me when he could have killed me. I will tell no one unless they ask.’

He reached for her wrist and held it. The bones were sharp. ‘My name is Abdes Pantera. I seek a man named Ptolemy Asul. If they ask, tell them I told you to say it.’

‘Such names would buy my life?’

‘One of them may do. I don’t know which one.’

The sun scooped her up and returned her to the doorway. Pantera waited in the dark for long enough to be sure no one else followed, then walked on, away from the light.

A door of iron-bound oak blocked the end of the alleyway, its very thickness setting it apart from the others in the Street of the Lame Lion.

Pantera stared at it, then slid a knife from his left forearm, and, holding the blade between thumb and fingers, rapped the hilt five times on the door in an offset rhythm. He heard light feet on the far side and sheathed the knife, stepping back out of sword’s reach.

What came was not a sword, but fire: a pitch-soaked torch, thrust out at chest height. Pantera stepped in, ducking under the flame, and came up hard, grabbing the wrist that held the torch and slamming it back against the door jamb so that the brand spun loose. His other hand brought his knife up to eye height.

Flames flared across the alley’s floor, stuttered and died. In the subsequent dark, two white-rimmed eyes gazed at him without fear. The hand he held did not move, either to pull away or to fight. He caught a faint scent of wild flowers, bright as spring.

He drew the knife back, ready to use it. ‘I thought you did not kill women?’ a woman’s voice said, lightly.

‘Stop this nonsense, both of you!’ That was a man, aged, but clear as struck bronze. ‘Pantera, if you are he, you would be made more welcome if you came to the front door and announced yourself properly.’

‘To whom should I make my address?’ Pantera did not relax his grip on the woman’s hand, or lower the knife. ‘An agent of Akakios?’

‘Hardly.’

The man spoke Greek with an accent too subtle to place. It sounded, in fact, exactly as Seneca had sounded at the height of his power, when the fate of the empire was his to command.

A single candle was lifted and brought forward down a dimly ambered corridor. By its light, Pantera saw a balding head fringed with white hair and, beneath, a long, lean face. He could not yet see the woman whose wrist he still held, but could only feel her breath stir the hairs on his cheek and the slow, steady lift of her breast against his arm. She had no fear of him, which was as unsettling as it was surprising. He thought she laughed at him, but could not be sure.

From the corridor, the dry Greek voice said, ‘If you will consent to follow her, Hypatia will lead you to an inner room, better hidden from prying eyes. There, you may make your address in the proper form to the man you seek. You are searching for Ptolemy Asul, are you not? I am he.’

Ptolemy Asul, it became evident, lived a life of contradictions.

His house was as hidden as it was possible to be in Alexandria. Surrounded by stinking shadows, another iron-bound door at the end of the corridor contrived to open on to a peristyled garden, where a fountain played into a marble bowl and small birds pecked in dusty sunlight. The rooms off were open and airy, scented with dried roses and peppery hyacinth, the floors done in mosaics of the old type, depicting Ptah and Sekhmet, Hathor and Horus in pastel shades of blues, citrons and golds with an artistry that had been lost three generations before. Sunlight angled in through painted screens so that Pantera walked on a carpet of subtly shaded teardrops in honey, amber, lavender and lime.

At length, he was brought to a dusty library. Shutters closed the windows incompletely, allowing light to leak around their edges. Shelves lined all the walls, piled high with papyrus scrolls and sheaves of parchment, with jars and vessels and bottles marked illegibly with the signs of the apothecary’s trade and all covered with the dust that thickened the air and layered every surface.