M. Scott: Rome: The Emperor's spy

In the disappearing light, Math followed his mark swiftly through Coriallum’s winding streets by instinct as much as sight. It was his talent, and he used it mercilessly. If the scrawny Roman had not paid him, he would have been at the harbour anyway, and would have followed whichever of the incomers had seemed to have the biggest purse.

He might not have followed Pantera. In the two years since his mother died, he had kept a promise to her memory that he would not put the lure of silver over his own safety. It seemed to Math that Pantera was by far the most dangerous man he had ever tried to follow and he did, after all, have his father to think of: he couldn’t afford for them both to be crippled.

He thought of his father as he hugged the wall of a tavern, letting the noise from inside cover the sound of his movement, and then the lack of it as he stopped. Up ahead, Pantera had paused and was asking directions of Cleona, the baker’s wife.

The Roan Bull tavern was a large, sprawling affair set at the top edge of the town, with a main room surrounded by sleeping bays and stables and a second storey upstairs, left wide open for feasts and meetings of the town’s council. Inside, three men were singing a battle song, sending the notes low and deep in their throbbing, incomprehensible dialect.

The language was foreign. Its words and rhythms caught at Math’s guts and tugged him back to long nights of his childhood when his parents, believing him asleep, had talked in this lilting foreign language around the night’s fire. Those were the nights when they invited in men and women Math never saw clearly, who spoke softly in their sing-song voices.

The visitors had always left before daylight, bearing with them food and gold and knives and swords that Math was not supposed to know had been hidden in the thatch. Even in winter they took food, leaving none behind, and always they left his parents talking in the heart of the night, speaking riddles in a foreign language.

Then one night a man had come who did not stay long, and in the morning Math’s mother had fallen sick with grief and she had stayed sick until the burning fever took her away from him, robbing him of love and his family of its only whole adult.

Math knew that his father had been a warrior once, of the kind whose praises were sung in the taverns; the kind who went to war as a hero and came back as a cripple, unable to earn enough to keep a man and a child fed through the hard days of winter when the woman who had kept them both was gone.

In the Roan Bull, the war-lament ended, dying away to quiet words and the occasional tight sob of a man who had drunk too much. The hanging hide that served as a door was flung back and two men staggered out, arm in arm, still humming.

Less than an arm’s reach away from them, Math spat with venom into the gutter and named it for all the heroes of all wars in all countries. They didn’t see him. He closed his eyes as they walked past, that they might not be drawn to the contempt in his gaze.

Turning his head back after they had gone, he saw the baker’s wife walk past. Of his mark, there was no sign.

‘ Shit! ’ He said that aloud, pushing himself to his feet. The woman let out a small squeal, then saw it was only Math and flapped her hands at him, hissing annoyance like a goose. He was already away, soft as a shadow, hugging the dark lees of the houses, casting left and right for a sense of where Pantera had gone.

Or a scent. He caught a snatched whiff of the sea and turned left into a dark, stinking, blind-ending alley that was barely wide enough to take a hound, still less a boy or a man. He was running now, ducking low, trying to dodge the puddles of urine and dog turds. He never saw the hand that caught his throat and brought him to a choking halt.

He couldn’t breathe. There was no light at all. In perfect darkness, Math felt a knife shave a sliver of skin from under his ear and hot, wet blood ooze after it.

Snoring like a pig, he struck out with both heels, hoping to catch the soft parts of the man’s groin. He failed. To prove it, the hand slammed downward, crashing his feet painfully hard into the packed earth.

‘Three mistakes,’ said a quiet voice in his ear. ‘And calling out now would be a fourth. Without doing that, can you list for me what the previous three were?’

He is prone to bouts of untrammelled anger… Math felt his bladder squeeze on and off, like a horse taking a piss. He was afraid of Pantera, but more, was terrified that he might soil himself and earn the man’s contempt.

He squeaked and hated himself for it. The hand at his throat shifted a fraction. Drinking great gulps of air, Math said, ‘Watched… men leave… tavern. Lost you. Mistake.’

‘That was what killed you,’ the voice agreed. ‘But I had seen you already by then. Three things drew me to you. What were they?’

In absolute darkness, Math could see the river-brown eyes perfectly, and their promise of death. He said, ‘I looked at you. I let your eyes meet mine.’

‘Good.’ The hand at his throat loosed its grip. ‘But I already knew you before then, or our eyes would never have met. So two other mistakes before that.’

Math could breathe normally now, and think more clearly. Screwing shut his eyes, he searched back through his memory to the boat’s arrival, to everything that had happened from when it was a speck on the far horizon to the point when Pantera’s gaze had met his.

‘Something to do with the clerks?’ he asked, eventually. ‘I shouldn’t have looked at them?’

‘No, that was neatly done. You looked, you saw nothing you liked, you put them off. I was already watching you, so the mistake was earlier.’

The hand that held him moved from his throat to his shoulder. Hard fingers dug into his collar bone. The knife still rested at his other cheek. With a lesser man, Math might have tried to wriggle free.

He shook his head as far as he dared. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Fish are shade-lovers; they shun direct sunlight,’ said the voice. ‘You were fishing in the sun’s full glare when all you had to do was make half a turn to your right and you could have dropped your line in shadow among the shoals that live there. A genuine fisher-boy would have done that, but it would have meant turning your back on the boat which you didn’t want to do. So you weren’t a fisher-boy, and then, when the clerks came, you spurned them, so you were also not a whore. That only left two things: a cutpurse, or a spy. You cut no purses on your way through the crowd and so, today at least, you are a spy. Am I right?’

There was no point in denying it. Math said, ‘That’s only two mistakes. What was the third?’

‘This.’ Pantera bent his head and sniffed. ‘Your hair stinks of horse piss. The wind was coming off-shore to the ship; that’s why the master rowed us in. I was already watching you before the boat made dock. Why would a fisher-boy reek of horse piss?’

‘Because I sleep in the horse barns!’ Too angry to care for the risk, Math threw his arm up and wrenched himself free and did not care about the knife at his cheek. ‘Because my father was a warrior ’ — he spat the word with all the pent-up fury of his own failures — ‘and now he is old and crippled and can’t make harness fast enough or well enough to earn good money and someone has to feed us both and I’m not a good enough cutpurse or whore to do it yet!’

His voice echoed shrill from the walls. There followed a stretching pause, during which the knife disappeared and the hand fell away from his shoulder. The first sharp edge of the moon rose over the wall at the end of the alley. By its light, Math was able to look for the first time into the face of the man who had caught him.