M. Scott: Rome: The Emperor's spy

Math’s experience was otherwise, but he had learned long since that the man holding the food was always right. With the spit already flooding his mouth, he watched wide-eyed as Pantera led him to the mouth of the alley, and in the full glare of the tavern’s torches took the roll of cheese and cut it into four pieces.

He gave the first one to Math. ‘Eat it now. Then keep the rest in your purse. Divide the night into four by the arc of the moon. See — it’s just up above the houses, so this is the first quarter. When it’s high, at midnight, eat the next piece. At half-set eat the third and at dawn, when the moon is down, eat the fourth. That way the night seems less long. Do you understand?’

Not understanding at all, Math said, ‘Yes.’ He had no purse. He slipped the precious cheese down the front of his tunic until it lay at his waist, above his belt, feeling the warmth of another’s body through it. The fragment in his mouth was rich and ripe and exploded on his tongue.

Pantera was already walking away. ‘Good. We’ll come with you some of the way home. Will you show us which way we go to the horse barns?’

Math hadn’t planned to go home yet, but there wasn’t the slightest chance he was going to leave Pantera before he had to. He nodded, and walked between the two men away from the light of the tavern and into the dark thread of streets that made the upper part of Coriallum.

They were in full dark, with only the moon to light them, when he heard the footsteps behind them and knew they were no longer alone.

His own steps faltered. Pantera caught him a brief shove in the small of his back and dipped down to breathe in his ear. ‘Only one. He’s in the shelter of the tannery to our left and behind. Don’t stop.’

They walked on, talking together softly, like son to father, with the scrawny Roman trailing behind. The chunks of cheese in Math’s tunic began to sweat.

They came to the end of the town, at the top of the shallow hill half a mile or so along from the magistrate’s residence. Here, the villas and workshops stopped and the great flat grassy plain began, in the middle of which was the wooden hippodrome and the complex of paddocks and horse barns around it.

The moon was high now, flooding the plain with silver ghost-light. Making sure they were in profile to the watcher, Pantera knelt before Math and ruffled his hair, taking his leave as any other man might of the boy he had hired and might wish to see again.

‘Seneca was right,’ he said. ‘You were not risking your life when you followed me this evening, but then you were not paid enough to do that. If I offered you a denarius, would you risk your life for me — really risk it — now?’

Seneca. A denarius.

The two facts collided in Math’s mind. A denarius: a silver coin four times the worth of a brass sestertius, sixteen times the worth of the copper that Ajax paid his grooms for a month’s work.

And Seneca. The scrawny old Roman was Seneca: the man who had ruled Rome in all but name for most of Math’s short life. Seneca, who had been deposed, and permitted to retire when all around him had died in a bloodbath of Nero’s making. Seneca, who had paid him in brass, when Pantera was offering silver.

A denarius. Math would have risked his soul for Pantera for nothing at all.

Swallowing, he said, ‘You want me to follow the man who is following us?’

He said it more loudly than Pantera had done. Hearing him, Seneca’s head snapped round.

‘Yes,’ Pantera said. ‘Watch him, find out who he reports to and why, and then come back to Seneca’s lodgings with the news — you know where they are? Good. But if you are caught by this man or his master, you’ll have to tell them everything you know — my name, Seneca’s name, where we met and how, and all that happened this evening. Don’t hold anything back. The emperor’s men don’t ask nicely if they think they’re being lied to, but if you tell the truth, they might leave you alone and come after us. Math…?’ He caught Math’s cheek and turned his head. ‘Are you listening? You are following one of Nero’s servants and it will serve nobody if you are stubborn and die. You will not be protecting us. Is that clear?’

Math nodded. ‘They won’t catch me.’

‘Good. The man who’s following us is currently hiding behind the house with the gold on the roof tiles and the marble lions outside. In a moment, we’ll turn away. You will seem to run home. When we have gone out of sight, find him and follow him and hear all that he says and to whom. And eat your cheese sparingly. It might be a long night.’

He gripped Math’s shoulder, as men did when they came off the fishing boats after a storm. ‘Good luck.’

Pantera turned away and signalled for the scrawny Roman to follow. Math stood under the bright moon a moment and waved at their backs, then shrugged for the sake of the man watching, much as he had done at the docks, and loped off in the direction of the horse barns.

The night was uncomfortably quiet. Seneca the Younger, stoic philosopher, spymaster and one-time mentor to the Emperor Nero, waited in silence by a table in the dining room of a borrowed villa, and watched Pantera move about in the shadows beyond the candlelight.

Knowing his subject, the philosopher did not ask any of the questions that pressed so urgently for answers. After the disaster of their meeting in the alley, he had no wish to sully the evening further, and he had long ago found that with this man, of all those he had ever taught, patience was his best and most certain weapon.

Patiently, therefore, and in silence, he watched Pantera make a methodical examination of the room exactly as Seneca had taught him long ago, noting the exits and entrances, the points of weakness and of strength, the places where a man might stand hidden, listening to the discourse within.

There were few enough of these. The house was a soldier’s, neat and plain, with little by way of luxury.

Two dining couches stood by a table laid with cheese and olives, figs and grapes and small rolls of pickled fish. In one corner, a lit brazier glowed softly red, warding the night’s chill from the air. A nine-fold candelabra stuffed with fat candles was set at a careful angle so that it spilled brighter light across the seating, but left in shadow a niche in one wall wherein was set a simple altar. A row of four cages standing against the wall nearby held sleeping doves that might have been for sacrifice, if the god of the altar required such things.

On the floor, subdued mosaics picked scenes from the lives of Achilles and Patroklos, from first meeting through shared war to the final blazing funeral pyre and the frantic chariot race sponsored by the grieving hero in honour of his dead lover. The winning chariot ran ahead of the rest, pointing the way out of the room and through an open archway that, in turn, led on to an unroofed courtyard. Somewhere near the centre of that, a fountain spilled water into a raised pool alive with schools of small fish, while above, scattered stars made a dense and distant ceiling.

On this night of reunion, the moon was not yet full. Its reflection danced lopsidedly on the perfect circle of the fountain’s pool. When Pantera walked out under the black sky and stood beside it a while, observing his own reflection, Seneca’s patience cracked at last.

‘Nero will send for you,’ he said.

‘He already has.’ Pantera hitched one hip on to the fountain’s lip and trailed his fingers in the effervescent water. ‘I am to meet my lord and emperor in private conversation at the magistrate’s residence early tomorrow morning before the chariots line up for the first race. He wishes to thank me for my services in Britain.’

‘He wishes to hire you,’ Seneca said. ‘To bring you into his fold, to use you as he uses all the best that I made for him.’ It was his first fear and his deepest. He took pains to keep that fact from his face.