M. Scott - Rome - The Emperor's spy

‘Perhaps.’ Pantera shifted slightly, so that the marble took all of his weight. He balanced, swaying, a breath away from falling into the water. Folding his arms, he turned back towards the light.

‘You’re thinner than you used to be,’ he observed. ‘Word has it that you live now on spring water and fresh dates, picked only by your own hand as a means to avoid the emperor’s poisoners.’

His voice made it almost a question.

‘Partly.’ Seneca nodded towards the food arrayed for them both. ‘I eat more than dates, as you can see, but no red meat, no wine, nothing cooked. I feel better for it. And yes, I consider it safer. Nero could have me slain at any moment if he chose, but he’d see a particular irony in using poison after all I’ve done for him. I will avoid that if I can.’

‘And so Seneca no longer believes that a man eats to vomit and vomits to eat? The world is changing faster than I knew.’

That was an old barb, slung for a cheap point. Sighing, Seneca pulled a footstool from beneath the table and sat on it. The lower rank of candles in the candelabra guttered above his head. He looked down at his laced fingers, at the clipped and then bitten nails.

‘I’m sorry for what happened in Britain,’ he said presently. ‘I didn’t intend it when I sent you.’

‘I never believed you did.’ As a child might, Pantera ran his fingers through the water, grasping at the stars.

‘I’m told you are damaged in mind more than body, and in spirit more than both. Is it true?’

Forgetting one of his own first rules, Seneca spoke to the reflection rather than the man, and did not look up even when that reflection left him, so all that remained on the black water was the moon’s truncated circle.

When he did finally raise his eyes, the candles had begun to fail in the dining room, making the shadows darker. In the harlequin light, Seneca could see no sign of Pantera, but heard a snap of leather and a slither of wool on skin. Against all his clamouring instincts, he made himself sit on and on until, unable to hold himself longer, he rose and followed the trail of small sounds.

Forgetting himself, he gasped aloud.

A naked figure stood in the soft spill of the candlelight. It took a moment for Seneca to recognize Pantera, but only because the man he knew had displayed the Hebrew distaste for nudity almost to the point of prudishness. In their three decades of life together he had never willingly shed his clothes in Seneca’s company.

They left his face untouched for fear of killing him too quickly, but to the rest… they wrote their anger on his body. It’s what men do when they have lost their comrades to the enemy and believe they have one alive in their custody. Make yourself ready if you see him.

A legate of the British legions had told Seneca that; Fabius Africanus, in fact, who owned this house.

Now, in the unkind light, Seneca was perfectly placed to observe the truth of what he had said; that the pilus prior of the third century, the second cohort of the Second Augustan legion, and his three junior officers had quite literally written their rage on the body of the man they believed to be a British warrior, as a result of which Sebastos Abdes Pantera, who had once been a boy of wide-eyed, feline beauty, bore for ever branded into his chest and abdomen the mark of the second legion: LEG II AVG.

The stretched leg of the L reached up to meet a knot of hideously scarred tissue at his right shoulder that looked as if a spear had been forced through just above his collar bone and he had been left to hang on it, tearing the tissue. The rest merged with a lacework of less organized burns and scars, where men with knives and hot irons had traced spider’s webs and carved their initials and made maps of their home villages, or the hills, or simply counted time on his body.

Hidden behind all that, so that he wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t looked, was an older, flat, scarred oval in the centre of the man’s chest that looked as if a fire had been lit there and left to burn.

‘Are you weeping?’ Pantera asked, with cold astonishment.

‘I believe I am.’ Seneca moved to the brazier and stood over it, warming his hands. ‘It would seem you have the power to hurt me still. Or the men who hurt you have that power. Would you let me arrange for a physician? Nero won’t listen to me, but Polyclitus holds the strings to the treasury, and can be prevailed upon. Largus is still the best of the emperor’s doctors; he could-’

‘Spare me false apothecaries, please!’

Pantera’s voice was a whiplash. Seneca flinched. He had not come prepared for this.

Pantera, too, was silent a moment. When he spoke again, it was with the dry humour with which he had always masked his soul.

‘Forgive me, but I am a little tired of bonesetters and herbalists. I was under the ministration of the governor’s physicians for well over a year. I’m as healed as I’m ever going to be and happy with it. If you think my injuries leave me too compromised to kill a man, or follow one without being seen, then you should have stopped me sending Math out after whoever was following us tonight and sent me instead. I’m sure we’d all have learned something useful.’

‘It was never my intent to set you against anyone else, be it in the open or in the dark of an alley. I haven’t come to ask you to work again. It has cost you too much.’ Seneca sensed a moment’s surprise, and allowed himself to believe that the conversation might be moving in the right direction at last.

‘What then?’ Pantera asked.

‘Retirement,’ Seneca said smoothly. ‘A peaceful step aside. My gold is gone to Nero, but I still own lands at Mentana that grow the best wine in the empire. There’s a farm of mine there with your name on it if you wish. Or elsewhere in the empire if you prefer? Dacia is cold in winter but said to be good. Or Britain, obviously. There are whole villages lacking masters now in the lands of the Dumnonii where corn grows thick as moss and they breed cattle, horses and hunting dogs that would shame any other land in the empire. But then you know that; you spent five years among them, so if you want to pick-’

‘ No.’

The vehemence of that one word, and the pain behind it, were as surprising as anything that had happened in an entirely surprising evening. Pantera sank to sit on the tiled floor. His elbows came to rest on his knees and his hands hung loose. He laid his head on his forearms and turned it sideways to the wall.

For a long time, neither man spoke. At the end, as if in answer to another’s call, Pantera said quietly, ‘Not Britain. Never that.’

Seneca let out the breath he had held. ‘Was it a woman?’

Pantera said nothing, which was answer enough.

‘Is she still alive?’

‘No.’ Pantera still stared at the wall. He shook his head at whatever he saw there. ‘I killed her before the legionaries took us. It was her wish. Her name was Aerthen. It means “at the battle’s end”.’

Seneca said nothing. After a while Pantera went on. ‘Her mother was one of their dreamers. She could read the future better than any Etruscan augur. So we knew Aerthen would die at the end of a battle, but not which one. It made the days together more precious, I think.’

‘Do you have a child still living amongst the Britons?’

‘Not living, no. Her mother and I killed her together when the battle’s tide turned. She was three years old.’

The self-hate in that was unbearable. Seneca lowered his own brow to his forearms, hiding his face in his turn.

Presently, Pantera reached for his tunic and drew it on. One of the candles failed. From beneath the lesser light, he said, ‘You sent me to Britain to ensure the defeat of the tribes. You had trained me, and I believed that I could do what you wanted. What neither of us expected was that the tribes would change me.’