‘No. He’s the reason the accident happened in the first place. Send this one. What’s your name, child?’
‘Math,’ said Math, ‘Math of the Osismi.’ A thought struck him, displacing the near promise of gold. ‘But Sweat and Thunder aren’t groomed. They have no ribbons. We’ll be late for the race if we take the time to do it properly now—’
Nero laughed, lightly, with a new intimacy. ‘The race cannot start before we start it. Therefore, if we were to help you, Math, you could not be late. Get the horses. Fly. We shall do it together.’
They did it together, Math of the Osismi and Nero Claudius Augustus Germanicus, emperor of Rome, who had deft fingers and a surprisingly good way with a horse so that Thunder stood for him who sometimes would barely stand for Ajax, and Sweat let Math vault on to his bare back so that he could plait the mane from the withers, standing up, with the horse raising his head high to let him reach the ones round his ears.
It was a recently developed trick; he had done it once to amuse Hannah. He did it now quite differently, blushing as if it were foolish but necessary, looking down and making shy as the emperor asked him questions and drew out of him the small facts of his life: his mother’s death, his father’s near-fatal wounding in a trivial bar brawl, his own miraculously early apprenticeship, his burning desire to be a race-driver and to take his mother’s horses to Rome, to race against the best the world could offer.
Math was honest to a fault. If he said nothing of theft and working the docks, it was because the emperor did not think to ask him.
Grown men commonly made foolish assumptions about Math of the Osismi. On this day of the races, with all to run for and success newly dangled in reach, Nero, emperor of Rome, seemed to be making most of them.
‘
G
o Thunder! Go Sweat! Go!
’
Math was hoarse. His ears overflowed with the noise of his own voice lost in ten thousand others. His eyes watered from shouting. His bones rocked and his teeth rattled with the pounding thunder of four white-eyed, sweating chariot teams as they strove for the last ounce of speed.
There was sand on his face, in his mouth, in his eyes. His body poured sweat, crushed on all sides by other apprentices in their place down by the track, where they could run to the teams and help if needed. They paid nothing for this place, and it was the best in the whole hippodrome.
Math was young and therefore near the back, but if he pushed in the right places at the right times he could see through the tangle of waving arms in front of him and catch flashes of the teams: a gobbet of spit on a horse’s mouth, a spinning wheel, part of a raised whip, Ajax’s shaven head shining under the glancing sun …
He could taste the creaming sweat. Almost, he could smell the scent of winning. The Parthian team were not as fast as he had thought. They had two lengths on the other three; hardly anything.
‘
Ajax! Go!
’
Ajax was going like the wind. He had promised the emperor he would. The dream-like start to the race that had begun with Nero helping Math to plait the Green ribbons into the manes of the colts had continued with the emperor and his retinue – there had been sixteen of the giant flame-haired warriors by then – walking with Math and the Green team up to the mouth of the tunnel that led into the hippodrome.
Ajax had stripped off his jerkin and wound the four sets of reins round his waist, with the soft goatskin belt beneath so that they didn’t cut into him as he angled his body round the track.
The scars on his back and shoulders had gleamed under a layer of goose-grease, laid on to stop him losing his skin if he fell on to the sand of the track. Math watched the emperor study the scars of the flogging. Nero raised his brows once but said nothing. It was a day for not speaking the things that were thought.
The greatest of the not-spoken things was Math’s. He raged silently all the way to the hippodrome, and everyone with him knew it, if not why.
For the first time in his life, he had been allowed to lead the horses to the start. Ajax had promised that he could do it ‘some day’: a gift for when Math was ready; for when Lucius had gone; for when there was a good, well-earned reason to give a wayward child a reward for good behaviour.
Today had not been a reward for anything but an obvious attempt to break the growing connection between Math and the emperor, and it had failed for the simple reason that, in a blatant act of favouritism that had earned Ajax thunderous looks from the drivers of the other three chariots, Nero had chosen to walk alongside Math and the Greens to the mouth of the tunnel.
For Math, Nero’s presence had made the event a heart-crushing anticlimax. There were few things in his life he truly craved and the chance to lead Sweat and Thunder to a race had been one of them. But he had dreamed of it done with ceremony, and on his own merits, not as a means to keep him from an end.
All the way to the hippodrome, therefore, Math had been crabbily sullen and Nero had misread it, thinking him overawed, and had chatted pleasantly about nothing.
Ajax had been desperate and barely hiding it. He had swept his hand over and over across his shaved skull in the way he did only when he was most worried about the horses. Hannah had walked on the other side of the chariot, still looking like a tavern drudge. It had been impossible to tell what she thought, except that she was particularly wary of Nero. Whether the emperor had noticed or not was equally a mystery; he had been charming to everyone.
At the entrance to the tunnel, when it was truly impossible for him to walk any further without causing an irretrievable scandal, Nero had reached out a hand and brought the small procession to a halt.
He had not spoken to Math, only favoured him with the smile that said more than words. Almost as an afterthought, as he was turning to leave, he had turned back and looked up at Ajax.
‘Losing will change nothing,’ he had said. ‘We may buy the team, but not the driver. It would be best for everyone if you did your best to win, do you understand?’
Ajax was race-ready, pale-lipped, wet with sweat and smelling of the pine resin that swathed his hands to keep the reins from slipping, and coated the pale skin of his head simply because he had rubbed it so often. Already he was looking inward, beginning to weave himself into the minds of all four horses, so that they and he became one.
Too curtly for true politeness, he said, ‘I understand perfectly, lord. I always drive to win.’
‘See that you succeed.’
The flame-haired guards had formed a double line of eight on either side of the tunnel’s mouth. They saluted, as one, making the moment a ceremony in itself.
With a final nod to Math, the emperor had turned away and begun to mount the steps to his dais. The magistrate was already there with his wife and three daughters, dressed in such finery as Coriallum had never seen before.
The tunnel had beckoned: a short stripe of dark before the bright, wide swathe of the track, gleaming with new gold sand, and the central oak spina around which the track was built newly carved in the likeness of dark-haired Apollo, with his lyres and chariots. The smells of fresh sand and horse-sweat, of axle grease and pine resin, mingled to produce the unmistakable scent of a chariot race.
Sweat and Thunder knew and loved it; they grew half a hand taller just breathing it in, and strained forward in the traces, desperate to go.
Math had felt himself grow as they grew, had felt the faster beat of his heart, already racing. From the sand, three trumpets sounded, calling in the Red team. The line of chariots shuffled forward, leaving the Whites next to go. Green was last, because of Nero. Math had taken the first step to lead his colts into the tunnel when a hand fell on his shoulder.
‘I’ll lead them in,’ Pantera had said. ‘There is a thing your driver must know.’
Math had gaped at him, horrified, then looked to Ajax for permission to carry on into the tunnel. But, once again, Pantera’s green-brown eyes had met Ajax’s amber ones over Math’s head, and once again a decision had been made without him.
‘Math, go to the apprentices’ enclosure,’ Ajax had said. ‘The horses will be safe with the emperor’s bodyguard.’
It was the last in a series of mortal insults. Always, every single time, in every race in the history of racing, the boy who led the racehorses to the tunnel led them also through it to the start line.
Math had relinquished the lead ropes as if they were his life, swearing inwardly to all the gods he could think of that if the Green team lost he would know it was Pantera’s fault, or Ajax’s, or both.
He spun away, kicking at the chariot wheel in passing, kicking again at the wall of the hippodrome, kicking at the shin of the last boy in the queue lining up to go into the apprentices’ enclosure, which was suicidally stupid when Math had just been marked for the kind of special attention that saw boys scarred for life, if not dead.
Murder happened often enough in the apprentices’ enclosure and was never of great concern; the strongest lived and the weakest died and sometimes a silver coin changed hands afterwards to soften the blow to the driver who must find a new boy.
The offended youth had turned, slowly. He was as tall as Ajax, and as broad, but with a head full of hair and lacking the scars. His nose was flat from many fights, his eyes small and violent as a boar’s.
A White band at his brow identified his team as the matched blacks that ran for Gallia Lugdunensis. White ribbons danced and dangled from his wrists, light as a flight of moths settled by chance on a rutting bull.
He had two companions, equally big, equally beribboned. All three were armed with short, vicious eating knives, honed on both edges and curved at the tip. They had flashed forward, close enough to lift Math’s hair with the wind of their passing.
Math did not carry a knife; he had always relied on his speed and a greater knowledge of the streets to protect him. Here, in the open, the three youths were too close and the crowd pressed too tight to make running an option. He had stood his ground obstinately and thought what Ajax and Pantera might say when they found him dead. The idea held a certain bleak satisfaction.
‘Math?’
Hannah had caught his shoulder, spinning him round, away from the danger. In the few moments since he had left the tunnel’s mouth, she had become cleaner, and ceased to stoop. Green ribbons were bound about her wrists. On her, they were bright as new leaves.
‘Look.’ She had spoken in Greek, which lifted them apart from the mob. When Math had looked up at her, she had pointed back to the tunnel’s mouth. ‘It was for a reason you were sent away.’
She was a woman and a healer and she had held him in the crook of her arm as if the knives did not exist, nor the youths wielding them. For all of these reasons, but more for her courage, the White youths had left them alone.
Math had felt death brush him close and then leave. The knots in his bowels had loosed themselves, and he had passed wind noisily.
Hannah had said only, ‘Do you see? There’s something wrong with the chariot. The emperor’s scarred man saw it.’
‘Pantera,’ said Math, laying claim to the man by virtue of his name. ‘His name is Sebastos Abdes Pantera. He’s not the emperor’s man. He’s the one who paid me the denarius last night.’
Even as he was speaking, Math had watched Pantera say something and gesture towards the offside wheel of the chariot, and Ajax had turned in consternation, peering down at the chariot, or the harness, or the wheels.
He might have jumped down to look at whatever was wrong, but the three horns sounded for the fourth time, summoning the Green team to the start.
With an oath that Math barely heard, in a language that was not Greek, Latin or Gaulish, Ajax had clucked his tongue and flicked the horses forward and let Pantera lead him into the tunnel.
Math did not see the race start – the apprentices’ stands were good for the end of the race, not the beginning – but the roar of the crowd told him the Greens got off to a good start, and when they came into view it was clear Ajax held a good position, not quite in the lead – the Reds were truly unassailable – but good enough, and with no signs of a crisis.
For the first three laps of the seven, Math learned the details of the race from the cheers of those around him. Confused, unhappy and terrified at what Pantera might have seen that he had not, he had made the effort to jump to see past the boys in front.
The rest of the Green team had filtered in afterwards but kept their distance, ashamed to be with him. The wainwright’s apprentices were there, and the loriner’s half-blind son, plus one or two others who could lay claim to a Green ribbon and a place in the enclosure. None of them had spoken to him.
Even Hannah had not stayed with him. Seeing him safe from attack, she wormed her way out to the oak rails at the sides of the enclosure and hoisted herself up to perch on the top rail, the better to see the race.
Math joined her halfway through the fourth lap when the hammer of the race had moved his blood so that it wasn’t possible to stay silent any longer. There was no room for him on the rails, but he stood at her side jumping whenever he could to see the flashes of coloured ribbons from the horses’ manes and screaming when Hannah screamed.
Sometime in the progress of the laps, Lucius arrived, sullen and stupid and barely carrying a Green ribbon, but even that had not taken the shine off the morning. Math screamed louder, to make up for the older boy’s silence.
‘
Ajax! Go! Go Green! Go Sweat! Go Thunder!
’
‘May I help you?’
The yellow-haired Gaul sat at a bench in front of the harness-maker’s booth at the end of the Green barn. He was almost alone; every other man, woman and child of Coriallum was in the hippodrome watching the races. The laps could be counted by the volume of the screams; a notch higher with each dipping dolphin on the central spina. They were on the third as the man asked his question.
Pantera did not answer immediately, but leaned his shoulder against a pole of a nearby booth and watched a man of perhaps fifty years, made old early by battle, pain and loss, deftly turn the end of a breastpiece, stitching together two flaps of leather with padding between to make it softer. He used two needles, one above and one below, making a row of neat double stitches, perfectly spaced.