‘They must be. Come.’ Nero’s cheeks dimpled with the pleasure of finally finding a man who understood his passion. Together, he and Pantera turned back towards the training track.
The magistrate’s team of gift-horses was momentarily blocked from sight by the passing of two other beribboned teams – chestnut colts sporting Blue and a team of blacks spectacular in White – already hitched and warming up ostentatiously before groups of watchful gamblers who changed the odds with each slow circuit. Knowing they were watched, the drivers trotted sunwise on the thick layer of sawdust, showing off their paces, but not tiring their horses. In the race, they travelled in the opposite direction; knowing this made the difference.
The colts in both teams were snappy and moody, snaking bites at their teammates and opponents. Their drivers called to them, cajoling and threatening in turn. Other men ran alongside, shouting instructions and encouragement, or calling for a stop to change the set of the harness. Only the local Coriallum team was not out yet, and still last in the betting.
The grey colts grazing at the track’s end had not even been harnessed, which said a lot for the confidence of their driver, but even as the emperor’s party turned to watch, two boys in the magistrate’s livery began to weave ribbons of brightest scarlet into their manes, leaving the ends hanging loose to fly back as banners with their speed.
Appreciatively, Nero said, ‘They’re built of the wind, with desert storms in their blood and stars lighting their feet. They’ll win today unless each of them breaks a leg; they outmatch the others by more than a track’s length without trying.’
‘If you wanted to buy a team to race in Rome, surely these are they?’ Pantera asked.
‘But Cornelius Proculus, the magistrate, has long been our friend, and these are his heart’s joy; it would be theft for us to buy them from him. In any case, they may be fast as the wind now, but they won’t stay that way for long.’
To Pantera’s frustration and the evident consternation of the Ubian guards, Nero turned away from the peeled hazel barrier at the edge of the training track and turned left towards a leather-worker’s stand set back amongst half a dozen others, where he fingered a tooled woman’s belt with images of storks and cranes set about it, the better to bring on a child.
To Pantera, he said, ‘Parthian horses are weak in the hocks and can’t manage the constant tight turns of a chariot track for more than half a season. We need horses that will last all year, if not longer. There will be another team here today that will be the one to take with us to Rome. We will buy it, and its driver, and all who come with it, and make it our own. In time, if the horses prove suitable, we will race them ourselves.’
A wave of a finger saw one of the Ubians reach into his purse to buy the belt.
The stall-tender, crimson with shock, or pleasure, or terror, fell to his knees, protesting in halting Latin that it must be a gift, that he could not possibly accept money from his emperor whom he adored and who was doing him the most exceptional honour of attending his unworthy stall.
He was given a gold coin in any case, which was a hundred times the worth of what he might have dared ask for the belt. The air rang with the emperor’s praises as they passed on.
Notoriously, Nero said of himself that he was the most popular emperor Rome had ever seen. In Coriallum in northern Gaul, if only on that day, it was true.
The imperial group moved deeper into the sprawl of booths and stalls. Pie-vendors bawled their wares. Bolts of woollen cloth, plain or dyed, lay in neat rows on wooden planks, to be untidied by a thousand feeling fingers by the day’s end. A healer’s booth was marked by a rag of torn white linen showing that the occupant was a woman and would undertake a childbirth. Closer to the horses, harness-makers plied their wares. Nero stopped at several to feel the quality of the leather, but, to the chagrin of the vendors, did not buy.
Keeping abreast of his emperor, watching ahead on both sides for signs of ill intent, Pantera said, ‘Talk in the tavern this morning was that the team of black colts from Gallia Lugdunensis running under the White banner might win the race if the magistrate’s horses all died in the traces. Blue and Green were not words on the lips of anyone sober enough to think.’
‘Truly?’ Nero raised a delicately plucked brow. ‘The magistrate seemed to think the local team was good. But they drew Green in the lottery for colour, and while it may be for Ceres and the vernal season, in our experience it is always unlucky. Perhaps we make it so by believing it; we are emperor and such things are not unknown, but it cannot be changed. Come, we shall go to the horse barns and view the second teams. Sometimes the ones that do not race are better than those that do.’
Pantera spun in alarm. ‘My lord, as your bodyguard, I must protest—’
He fell silent as Nero caught his arm. Men around them looked away, too quickly. The Ubians raced forward, laying hands to their sword hilts, but not yet drawing. Akakios was already there. His knife blade glanced in the blustery sun. Its tip was dulled with a brown, waxy resin.
Nero dismissed them all with a wave of one finger, as an infant might wave away a wasp.
‘Walk with us alone, Leopard,’ he said. ‘We would speak to you in private.’
Given no option, Pantera followed where his emperor led, leaving Akakios and his poison behind. To their left and in front, stall-tenders fell silent and bowed. Word of their coming was spreading even as they walked.
Ahead were the four horse barns, with their thin oak-planked sides and roofs thatched with reed from the river’s edge. Grassy avenues the width of a chariot’s length kept them apart. Manure heaps smouldered at the end of each, ripening the air.
The colours flew above them, snapping in the wind: Red for Mars, battle and summer, which had been taken by the magistrate and not entered in the colour lottery the day before when the other three teams drew their ribbon. In that lottery, Lugdunum, capital of Gallia Lugdunensis to the south, had won White for winter. Blue was for autumn, the colour drawn by Noviomagus across the easterly border, who fielded the best team from Gallia Belgica. Green, as Nero had said, was for spring and Ajax had drawn it for Coriallum. Thus all three parts of Gaul were represented, plus the magistrate’s team, racing for him alone.
Nero and Pantera turned down the barn side, passing the Red-bannered barns of the magistrate on the way to the White of Lugdunensis. Here, boys were still mucking out, heaving straw on to the manure heaps with a demented speed, desperate to get their task done before the race began. At the barn itself, four black heads peered at the incomers from open-fronted stalls; the second-string horses, left behind and unhappy for it.
Nero walked up and fussed the first, looking behind to check that his retinue had not strayed too close. Satisfied, he planted himself near a barn and set both fists on his hips. It was a practised pose: old statues had shown his ancestor Julius Caesar thus.
He said, ‘Pantera, the Leopard, we wish you to work for us. Akakios’ loyalty is beyond question, but he has shown himself to be reckless in his execution of orders. And as you have confirmed, he was not of the status that Seneca required. We believe you are his superior in the field of espionage.’
Pantera let a horse nudge his elbow, and teased a tangle from its mane. He kept his face studiously still. ‘I am flattered, lord, and what you say might once have been true, but I am not the man I was. As you have been told, I am damaged, possibly beyond repair. Akakios is whole, which is worth more than it may seem. He is reckless because he feels it necessary. Like an unruly race colt, it may be that he could be calmed by a judicious hand on the reins.’
Crowds were growing at the far end of the barn. Pantera began to walk away from the horses, leading the dance for the first time. Nero followed, twining together three strands of black mane hair that he had pulled loose.
‘We could compel you,’ he said.
‘Undoubtedly. But a man does not spy well who has been broken to another’s will. I believe we touched on that this morning in the magistrate’s garden.’
They passed beyond the boys mucking out and came away with the mellow ripeness of manure scenting their clothes.
Feeling his way to the truth, Pantera said, ‘To be a good spy, a man must immerse himself in the identity of another, and I have done that for too long in Britain to be able to do it again successfully now. I must be myself again, and find what that is, before I can ever take another’s place. I can’t believe there is such peril to Rome that it would not be better served by Akakios, however much it pains me to say so.’
‘Gods alive, why are we ever surrounded by arrogance!’ Nero bounced his balled fist off the oak plank of the barn. White-lipped, he said, ‘There
is
such peril. Would we ask you else?’
It was necessary to resist a matching anger. With fragile calm, Pantera said, ‘What nature of peril, lord?’
‘The Phoenix Year; what do you know of it?’
‘Nothing.’ He had said the same to Seneca. ‘Should I?’
‘If you love Rome and would save it from burning, you should, yes.’
They turned together into the next avenue between the barns. Green banners flew from the roof of the barn to their right, bright as spring grass. On the turf in front, the quadriga stood almost ready to race: a marvel of woven wicker, with fine larch spars bound in oiled bull’s hide and sinew, made to be light and flexible and yet strong enough to last the full seven laps, if not necessarily any further.
Two geldings waited ready in the traces, bright chestnuts, red as gold, with the grass-green ribbons of the corn goddess already woven into their manes and tails. A lanky youth came out of the barn, glanced left and right, and, satisfied, knelt at the back of the chariot, working on the harness. If he had noticed Pantera and the emperor, he did not recognize either man. From within the horse barns, a younger voice murmured the tones that every horseman uses to calm a fractious horse. Impatient hooves slammed on hard earth soon after.
Nero stood in the shadow of the reed roof’s overhang, watching.
With a prickle of premonition, Pantera said, ‘You said Rome would burn. What has that to do with the Phoenix Year?’
‘If we knew that, we would not need to ask you!’ Nero made a visible grasp for calm. ‘A prophecy is in circulation of which we have secured a part. It says that if Rome burns in the Phoenix Year, it will bring about a miracle.’
‘And the Phoenix Year is …?’
‘A thing of Alexandrian making, and perhaps of the pyramid-priests before them. As you know, a year is not exactly three hundred and sixty-five days long, but exceeds that number by a small amount. Those who know of such things measure the leftover hours in each year beyond the three hundred and sixty-five days and gather them together.’
The emperor was pacing now, watching the horses and Pantera equally. ‘Once every fourteen hundred and sixty years, the sum of those hours adds up to an entire year which they name for the Phoenix, believing that at midsummer of that year, after three days of death, the flame-bird arises from the ashes of its own destruction and soars up to perch in the upper branches of a date palm.’
‘And we are nearing such a year, or you would not speak of it.’
‘We are in it. The year began on the ides of August.’
The crowds were coming nearer again. It did not do to stand still. Pantera moved off into a bright place of safety, where all directions could easily be seen. Akakios came into view behind, but did not approach too closely.
Out on the training track, the four grey colts belonging to the magistrate were safely harnessed. A driver in the long grey battle-cloak of the Parthians, bordered in red with inlaid threads of gold, was trotting them round the track.
Nero was not watching. He said, ‘Can you read Greek?’ and at Pantera’s nod, pressed into his hand a piece of folded papyrus, thin as a leaf, such as the Alexandrians use for their writing.
Unfolded, the surface was clean, the writing neat and professionally done, with lines of even size and spacing, straight as a rule. Pantera read it once to himself, and then again out loud, to prove that he could.
‘
… and thus will it come about in the Year of the Phoenix, on the night when the …
there is a gap here …
when the
– something unknown –
shall gaze down in wrath from beyond the knife-edge of the world, that in his sight shall the Great Whore be wreathed in fire, and burned to the utmost ashes, seared to nought in the pits of her depravity. Only when this has come to pass shall the Kingdom of Heaven be manifest as has been promised. Then shall …
here’s another gap
… be rent, never to be repaired, and all that was whole shall be broken and the covenant that was made shall be completed in accord with all that is written
.’
In the gusting morning, with the sharp colours of the banners crisp against the late morning sky, with the chatter of children and the crying seagulls at the harbour, Pantera felt the world grow still and quiet.
Nero said, ‘Pantera?’
‘My lord, forgive me, this is … a deeper thing than I had imagined.’
‘So you understand it?’
‘Some of it, I think. Not all.’
Animated, Nero said, ‘It is the Hebrews, isn’t it? They believe in the Kingdom of Heaven, a time when their god will rule over all others, when their laws will be the only laws, when all men must be circumcized and refuse the meat of idols. Our uncle Claudius had them banned from our seat of rule seventeen years ago. We could do the same thing again.’
‘It is Hebrew in concept,’ Pantera agreed. ‘But only a fanatical few desire it and even they know that you would raze Jerusalem to the ground if they so much as contemplated burning Rome. If there’s a fire, it will not be lit by any man who cares for Judaea.’
He folded the note squarely, and handed it back to the emperor. ‘This is a copy,’ he said. ‘The gaps are deliberately made to leave the full meaning unknowable, particularly the date of the burning. May I see the full script?’
Nero shrugged. ‘We don’t have the original. Akakios … retrieved this from a Syrian messenger who was endeavouring to sell it. For a further sum of gold – a quite extortionate sum – the highest bidder was to be given the prophecy in full, which would give the date when the fire must occur and also a greater insight into what might be rent thereafter.’