‘So if the Blues lit it, they did so out of revenge rather than hope of success?’ Ajax eyed her thoughtfully. ‘Men have killed for lesser reasons. And if they had wiped out the entire Green team, they might yet have been chosen.’ Tentatively, he reached up and smoothed a hand across his scalp, feeling the bandage she had put there. ‘But none of that is a reason for you not to come with us to Alexandria or on to Rome. Do you think it was someone else?’
She looked down at her hands. ‘A friend of my father’s came to talk to me yesterday. He asked me to go with him to Judaea, to help calm the hotheads who are voting for war against Rome.’
‘Will you go?’ Math had asked it, in the same tone.
‘I don’t know. I told him I’d think about it. I am still—’
‘Hannah, they’re there!’ Math caught her burned shoulder. ‘They’re coming!’ His face shone.
She turned where he pointed, back in the direction of the burning inn. Through the dazzlement of flame, she made out the emerging figure of a man, and the burden he carried.
‘It’s Pantera,’ she said. ‘And he’s carrying your father.’
P
antera had been asleep in the Striding Heron tavern when Goro knocked on his door.
He woke sharply from dreams of dead youths and poorly mended nets. The first hint of smoke filtered through the shutters to his room even as the boy stuttered his news. Outside, the cries of a few voices multiplied in the brief time it took to rise and throw on some clothes. He felt Goro staring at his scars and passed him another denarius, destroying even further the economy of the dockside where far greater intimacies were bought and sold for copper.
Outside, the fire lit the sky. Men were forming half-built chains, trying to commandeer buckets, to shout orders at one another. All along the row of whorehouses, fishers’ hovels and taverns, men and women in various stages of undress began to spill out on to the dockside.
Goro was watching them, alert for a loose purse. Pantera caught his shoulder, ‘Get word to the emperor,’ he said. ‘The Ubians will tell him.’
‘Tell him what?’
‘That someone has tried to burn his new race team to death,’ Pantera said grimly.
He waited to see the boy forge his way through the swelling crowd, then elbowed his own way to the front and ran.
He reached the tavern as the first trickle of men and boys was dragged out from under the smouldering thatch. He looked for Hannah, or Math, and saw only the wainwright, who stumbled close enough to be caught and hauled clear of the morass.
‘Who of the Greens is still inside?’ Pantera asked.
‘All … they’re all upstairs.’ The man stared wildly about, as if they might appear at any moment as ghosts.
Pantera shook his shoulders. ‘Not all. Your apprentices are out. And some of the others.’ They were crouched not far away, with their heads between their knees, choking. ‘Who’s left? Is Hannah in there? Or Math?’
‘Math.’ The man snatched at the word. ‘And his father.’
‘And Ajax?’
‘I think so.’
Letting the wainwright go, Pantera had pushed through the gathering throng, counting heads of those who had soot-smeared faces and singed eyebrows. Math was not among them, nor his father, Caradoc.
A white-haired Gaul with soft eyes caught his arm. ‘You’re the emperor’s man? The boy’s still in there. Best get him out.’
He had no idea how he might do that. The door in front of him was no longer a door, but the searing mouth of a furnace. On either side, the once shuttered windows belched flame.
Three more men barrelled out, falling over each other in their haste to escape. A lone youth staggered after with a weight over his shoulder, calling aloud that he had Ajax, the Green driver, and needed help. Others rushed forward with water and rags to beat out the fires on his hair and clothes.
Pantera pushed his way to the threshold and stood there in the wash of flame and smoke, staring in.
Hannah was there, crushed between two Germanic warriors, as big as any of the emperor’s guards, trying to get back up the ladder.
‘Hannah!’
She couldn’t hear him. At that distance, she couldn’t hear anything but the fire. Even from the doorway, the heat was driving him back. Turning, Pantera grabbed a bucket of water from a man in the useless chain and upended it over his head, soaking his tunic, his hair, his shoes.
‘Hannah …’ She was trying to get up the ladder. ‘Hannah, no.’
He caught her shoulder and held her back and was about to speak when Math tumbled down the ladder sobbing that his father was upstairs, trapped under a fallen beam.
And so, against all reason, for a child, for a man, for the memory of a woman, or for the woman herself, Pantera hauled himself up into an inferno that was eating the ladder even as he climbed.
Caradoc was at the top, lying where he had fallen, with his head near the trapdoor in a slipstream of smoke-free air. Flames lit up a blooded burn across his forehead and the same ash-smeared features as everyone else. Smoke shadowed the rest of him. There might have been a roof beam near his legs, but in the gloom nothing was certain.
Pantera came up through the trapdoor so that their heads were level. Gratefully, he breathed the small pocket of smoke-free air that allowed him to speak. ‘Let me take you down.’
‘No.’ Caradoc caught Pantera’s wrist. ‘My back’s broken. There’s … bleeding inside. I’ve seen men die; I know the signs. This is my time. Not too soon.’
It did him no honour to argue with the truth. Pantera said, ‘I can still take you down. You can be with Math at the end.’
‘No. There’s not time. And there’s a thing you must know. Only you.’
His drenched tunic was steaming hotter than Rome’s hottest baths. Even so, the small hairs came erect on the back of Pantera’s neck.
‘Why me?’
‘You have been a warrior. There are few others in Coriallum.’
‘Ajax is one, I think?’
Caradoc gave the ghost of a smile. His hair was lit to gold by the fire. They could have been at a riverside, or in a roundhouse on a winter’s evening, waiting for the children to sleep. ‘Who were you?’ he asked.
The question caught at Pantera’s throat. Hoarsely, he said, ‘I was—’ He shook his head. ‘I
am
Hywell the hunter, heart of Aerthen, father of Gunovar. Both of these are dead. I fought with the Dumnonii at the end-battle. We had defeated the Second legion, but Paullinus came on us and we were trapped.’
In the swirling fire, Aerthen and Gunovar were beside him. They were real here, in all the smoke.
Caradoc’s gaze searched his scars. ‘The legions caught you,’ he said. ‘But you escaped?’
In the face of death, Pantera could not avoid the truth. ‘Not escaped,’ he said. ‘Let go. I was Roman first.’
The dying man nodded, and closed his eyes against the pain of the movement. ‘So you have lived a lie also. Not an … easy thing.’ His eyes opened. They fixed on Pantera with the same intensity as had his son’s. Only the question they asked was different. ‘And now you have a debt to pay?’
Their gods breathed on Pantera then. ‘I have a debt to pay,’ he agreed, and felt the same sense of hope he had felt on the rooftops with Seneca and Shimon. ‘I would gladly give my life for yours now in the warriors’ way to pay it, but we both know that hope is gone. Is there another way I might pay?’
Caradoc’s cold hand squeezed his wrist, briefly, and let go. With an effort, he reached round and brought a knife from the sheath at his belt.
‘Swear,’ he said. ‘And then take it for Math.’
Pantera laid his hands on hilt and blade. ‘I swear to the ends of my life and the four winds to do your bidding.’ He took the knife. ‘What must I do?’
‘Tell Math …’
The voice was almost gone. Pantera had seen men die and knew how fast it came at the end. He brought his face closer. ‘To know himself truly, Math must truly know who his father was. I’ll tell him if you tell me. Quickly. It matters.’
Pride warred with pain on the dying man’s face. ‘I am Caradoc, son of Cunobelin, scourge of Rome, heart of the Boudica, father to Cygfa, Cunomar, Graine – and Math. Cartimandua betrayed me to Rome. Claudius pardoned me. Nero ordered me slain.’
‘And you have lived, and under his nose this last half-month.’ The sheer audacity of it was breathtaking. Pantera exulted that such things could still happen. He had thought them all gone when Britain was crushed.
Caradoc grinned tightly. ‘Nero believes me dead. Men attested to it, swearing that they had seen my body; good men. So Math has been …’ His words dried. His eyes fell shut.
Pantera said, ‘Math has been kept safe. You did that for him. I’ll see he understands.’
Caradoc coughed. Bright blood spewed on to the oak beneath him. His grip on Pantera’s wrist tightened at the closeness of death. ‘Keep him safe. You were right this morning. Math is safest … with his family.’
‘Then hear my oath,’ Pantera said.
In the smoke and the searing heat, he found the formal ceremonial language of the tribes. Laying his hands on the blade that had been offered, he said, ‘In the name of Aerthen and of Gunovar, my daughter, I will keep Math safe and see him joined to his family. I swear it by my heart and my soul. While I live, my life is given for his.’
It was enough, and in time. Caradoc of Britain, scourge of Rome, smiled his relief. With a last, long-hoarded breath, he said, ‘My … son. Proud. Tell him I am … very proud.’
S
corched and hoarse, with his tunic abandoned to the conflagration, with every muscle in his body aching, Pantera carried Caradoc’s body from the blazing inn towards the huddle that was the dead man’s friends and family.
‘Does any of you know the rites that may be sung to usher a dead warrior to his place with the gods?’
A light breeze lifted the grass and the leaves and caressed his skin, seeking out the burns and soothing them. His question hung in the air. One man levered himself up from the ground. ‘I know the rites of a warrior’s passing,’ said Ajax of Athens.
He was naked, but for bandages at crown and thorax made from strips of torn linen, not of imperial quality, yet wound by a professional hand. He stood with the moon at his head and the fire bronzing his skin so that it shone as if greased with bear fat. His one ear poked out from under the linen at his crown, highlighting the loss of the other. If his head beneath had not been shaved, but instead had been crowned by the single line of hair that was the mark of …
In that moment, Pantera knew with certainty who the other man was, and could not think why he had taken so long to see it.
He was gaping, foolishly. He closed his mouth. ‘What should we do?’
‘Caradoc must be laid beneath a tree,’ Ajax said. ‘There’s an oak by the stream beyond the cattle. I can walk. I can’t carry him.’
‘I can do that.’ Pantera looked beyond the driver. ‘Math?’
Math stared up. His red-rimmed eyes, wide as an owl’s, searched the length of Pantera’s body and came to rest on his face.
He looked exactly like his father in the moments before dying, save that Caradoc had not been weeping and Math couldn’t stop. His face was awash with tears.
Balancing the dead man on his arms, Pantera eased himself into a crouch. ‘Math, your father was proud of you. Those were his last words. Would you come and see his soul set free?’
He did his best to ask it cleanly, but the weight of his oath pressed newly on him and he heard a hint of desperation in his plea.
Math heard it too. He turned away, his face a landscape of sorrow and scorn. ‘He was a warrior,’ he said thickly. ‘I don’t know the rites.’
‘Math, you can still—’
‘No!’ The boy wrenched away, running past Hannah, past Ajax, past the others of the Green team to the anonymity of the crowd.
‘Let him be,’ Ajax said. ‘Now is not the time. Hannah will care for him. For Caradoc’s sake, we need to act quickly. Come with me.’
The oak was old and vast with branches thick as a man’s two thighs. It stood alone in a quieter part of the meadow, where the blaze of the burning tavern barely outshone the stars. A stream ran nearby, murmuring songs to the moon. The grass was longer here, enough to shroud the dead man’s face when they laid him under the tree’s dappling branches. They knelt together. Ajax began to sing.
Pantera remembered the words and melody of the rite only slowly, joining in with Ajax’s resonant rendering halfway through. At the close, when the stream had carried the last notes away, Pantera stood. As the last one to see the dead man alive, he spoke the ending.
Softly, to be heard only by two men, the stream and the gods, he said, ‘He was Caradoc, lover of Breaca, father to Cygfa, Cunomar, Graine and Math. He was the greatest warrior his people have ever known. May he be remembered as such, by his sons and his daughters. May he return now with joy to those who have loved him.’
He made the sign over the man’s brow, releasing his spirit to the care of his god. In the still night, a subtle wind soughed briefly through the grass and then through the leaves of the oak. Pantera did not look at Ajax; he did not need to. Nothing that he had just said was news to this man.
Presently, Ajax pushed himself to his feet, taking care for his injuries, and slowly unwound the bandage from his crown. The moon shone on his shaved head, casting warped patches around the place where his ear had been cut away. His face was as unreadable as ever.
‘Shall we walk?’ he asked quietly. ‘Caradoc has no need of us now, and I would be further from the tavern fires.’ And from the small cluster of townsfolk who had gathered and listened to the rites as they sang: that did not need to be spoken aloud.
They walked together down the side of the stream, keeping by instinct to the darker places beneath the trees, not the light.
The river grew wider and then narrowed to tumble over a rocky lip in a shallow falls twice the height of a man. Above the cresting white rim, a single fallen dolmen hung out across the falls and the pool below, narrower at the neck, broad as a horse’s back as it approached midstream. It was the kind of place boys might come to fish in the summer, and cast their lines in the river behind; the kind of place where, later, they might test their courage on a moonlit night, seeing if they could walk barefoot along the ridge in the dark; the kind of place from which they might dive into the pool of unknown depth below, to show they had no fear of death. A boy could easily die, diving like that.