M. Scott: Rome: The Emperor's spy

Pantera’s nose had been broken and set a fraction off centre, destroying any symmetry his face might have had. He had broad, strong cheekbones, and fine brows that were a shade darker than his hair. A scar notched one of them, giving him a look of wry surprise, barely contained. Lines of wind and sun etched the corners of his eyes. The latter held amusement, Math thought, but under it a storm of passions too powerful and too complex to be let loose without bloodshed.

Math realized he was staring and looked away. Pantera leaned back on the nearest wall and folded his arms. ‘You don’t like warriors?’ he asked mildly.

Math shrugged. ‘My mother was a warrior,’ he said. ‘And my father.’

‘I see.’ He rubbed the bridge of his nose, where the break was. ‘Did your mother die in battle?’

‘No. But she would have liked to have done. Like my father. He was wounded in battle and survived when he would rather have died.’

He didn’t know what shadows the moon put on his face, or what Pantera might have heard in his voice, but the silence was longer this time, and thicker, and ghosts whispered within it.

‘Why do you sleep in the horse barns?’ Pantera asked. ‘Your father isn’t there, surely?’

There were too many answers to that. There was the past, which was his mother, and Math didn’t want to speak of her yet, perhaps ever. There was the future, which was Ajax the charioteer and so might never happen; Ajax was a dreamer of wild dreams and had not been around long enough for Math to know if he was the kind of man to make them happen. So he gave the answer that grew from the present, which had the benefit of truth, and didn’t hurt.

‘I work for Ajax, the charioteer who drives Coriallum’s horses. I help to look after the lead colts in the reserve team. My mother bred them, so they know me, which makes them easier to handle. They like it best if their groom sleeps nearby. And it’s warm in winter,’ he said, which was truest of all.

‘Of course. Your father must be proud of you.’ A bright thread of pain ran through Pantera’s voice, then.

Math looked up, searching for its reason, but Pantera glanced away down the alley, avoiding his eyes.

He said, ‘You could try washing your hair in citrus juice. It gets rid of the smell and makes the gold shine better. The clerks will see you all the sooner at the docks, and they’ll like you better without the smell.’

‘They like me well enough as I am.’

‘I’m sure they do.’ Abruptly, the warmth left Pantera’s voice. His whole attention was directed at the shadows at the end of the alley. ‘You should go now,’ he said, and took a step back.

Math felt himself released as suddenly as if a key had been turned in a lock. He stole a glance over his shoulder, to where the light of the tavern’s torches lit the alley’s mouth to amber. The way out was clear. The night had barely started. A world of drunken purses waited to be cut for a boy who knew how to run back down the hill to the richer taverns at the dockside.

Math did not want to run down the hill.

He wanted very badly to do whatever he could to heal the raw hurt he had just heard in Pantera’s voice and he knew how he might do it, if only temporarily. He reached forward, confident in his own skill.

‘ No! ’

Math’s wrist was snatched away and held. Danger surrounded him again and he did not understand why. He struggled briefly, then fell still. With a visible effort, Pantera loosed his grip.

‘Who told you to do that?’

Math felt himself flush. ‘No one. I just…’

‘Whoever paid you should have known better than to send-’

‘A whore?’ Math spat the word. He had never been ashamed of it before.

He heard Pantera hiss in a breath. The man crouched. His dangerous, fascinating gaze came level with Math’s.

‘I was going to say a boy as naturally good at following as you. Anyone else would have lost me, and so been safe. You have a gift that grown men would give their last coin in the world to buy. And somebody bought you, obviously.’

It was not a question, but Math nodded anyway.

‘Who was it?’ Pantera said. ‘Who paid you to follow me?’

‘I don’t know his name,’ Math said truthfully. ‘I would tell you if I did.’

‘You would, wouldn’t you?’ He saw Pantera soften, saw the planes of his face change, saw him close his eyes, and close off the volcano of his rage until he could smile, and lay his hand on Math’s arm, and say, more steadily, ‘If you stay a moment, you’ll learn something. After that I want you to leave. Will you do that?’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do.’

Standing, Pantera turned his face to the alley’s firelit mouth. Distinctly, he said, ‘Are you happy now? Will you come out where you can be seen, or must we come to you, like dogs to a whistle?’

‘If you know I’m here, what need is there to stand in the light?’ The scrawny Roman, who had offered Math more than he had ever earned for a task that had seemed as if it would be easy, stepped away from the shadow of the alley’s wall and stood in the open, cast in hazy silhouette by the torchlight from the tavern behind.

He looked much as he had in daylight, but that his thistledown hair — what was left of it — was cast in gold rather than silver by the flame’s kinder light. His head was too big for his body. His neck made the ungainly mismatch between head and body and was ill fitted for both, so that the skin hung in wattles and his larynx stuck out sharp as a stone.

One might laugh at such a man, but for the fact that he had tracked Math for a good part of the afternoon unseen, which was, at the very least, disconcerting.

His attention was all on Pantera now, although he spoke of Math. He said, ‘The boy will be as good as you when he’s older, if not better. I haven’t paid him yet. He earns his coin only if we speak, you and I.’

In a voice that made Math’s guts ache, Pantera said, ‘Then he has succeeded. You have spoken. I have replied. Pay him.’

‘Soon.’

The scrawny Roman was Pantera’s senior by at least a decade, more probably two, he had a bad hip and his hearing was less than perfect, but even so, he carried an authority in his dry, harsh voice that left Math wondering whether he could actually best Pantera in the way he seemed to think.

When he said, ‘Will you come with me? I have lodgings not far from here. We could talk properly there,’ it seemed inevitable that they should follow.

Pantera ignored him. He opened a purse that Math had neither heard nor seen at any point on the way up from the docks.

‘How much did you promise the boy?’ he asked.

The scrawny Roman did not answer fast enough. Math said, ‘One sestertius.’

He had thought it a fortune. Pantera clearly did not. He swore in a language that was neither Latin nor Gaulish but ripe with the force of his scorn.

‘You were Rome’s richest man and still you pay pennies to those who would risk their lives for you?’

The old man shrugged. ‘I am no longer rich by any measure. Nero has my fortune and I must live on my wits. And Math did not risk his life. You are not yet so damaged that you would kill a boy for following you in the street.’

‘Really?’ Pantera bent down to Math. ‘Have you eaten?’

That was a foolish question. Math stared at him. ‘Yes.’

‘I mean tonight. Have you eaten since sundown?’

Math shook his head.

‘Then take this.’ From his purse, Pantera produced a roll of white goat’s cheese, thick as his thumb and as long. ‘My father taught me this and so now I teach you. Always carry cheese in your purse — it stops the coins from chiming so the cutpurses can’t hear it, and it means you have food when you need it; you never know when you might have to stay awake until dawn. A hungry stomach craves sleep in the way a fed one may not.’