Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (28 page)

She held Math firmly, and felt the pulses of his intent come and go as he thought about leaving her, and remembered his oath and stayed at her side as they walked down the aisles and alleyways, as they examined silks for the quality of their weave and colour, linens for use as bandages – Hannah bought some of those; they were better than anything the guards had brought her – ate melon slices and dates, watched a black-skinned woman juggling firebrands and knives near a fountain, and saw a man selling mule foals with great sores on their backs so that they had to wait while Hannah found and bought salves and instructed him in their use.

It was some time soon after that she realized she was walking alone, hedged on either side by a man and a boy whose attention was all outward, however much they might try to disguise it.

She noticed it in Saulos first. He offered observations, picked at fabrics and tasted honeyed almonds as if he might seriously be thinking of making a purchase, but there was a subtle change in the quality of his looking, in the way his gaze lingered on the shadows rather than the light, that set him apart from the average stall-stroller.

Math was still a boy thief. She had no doubt he would cut any purse that lent itself to the cutting, but behind that mask he, too, was sifting the cross-current breezes that joined the lake in the south to the sea in the north and the information they carried of the hiding places and the watching places that might one day be useful and the people who had already found them so.

Forging her way through a thinning crowd, Hannah inhaled deeply, with something approaching joy. In the sun-baked air, freshly picked coriander vied with olive and almond blossom, rose oil with citrus fruits, and yes, in the midst of it all, the scent she had half followed, the earthy musk of spikenard, oil of nard, most expensive of unguents, prized for the anointing of royalty and for incense to favour the gods. She turned again down a new aisle, following the thread of its aroma as fast as she was able.

Three paces in, a hand grasped her elbow. ‘Are we playing a game?’ Saulos was panting as if he’d run a race. She had not known she was moving so fast, nor that he was having such trouble keeping up.

‘We’re finding your spikenard,’ Hannah said, with grace. ‘For the wound on your back. And also, should you need it, for the assurance of sexual fidelity.’ She favoured him with her best smile. ‘Do you find you need it, here in the bazaar that feeds the world? You have money. You could buy whomsoever you desired with that.’

She was fishing, which was unfair. He eyed her with sudden seriousness. ‘Whom I desire is not for sale.’

She turned up the aisle of the animals, past a chicken-seller, with his white-grizzled birds hung up by the ankles, still alive, past a basket of snakes, rustling, past parrots and finches, jewel-bright in their cages, past calves and lambs that panted, drooling, in the heat.

Math was a butterfly resting on her palm, light and dry, neither dragging behind nor leading ahead, but not fully present.

‘Come on, there are nightingales in cages at the bottom of the aisle. If Saulos lets you buy one and we let it go and it flies in the right direction, Osiris will grant you a wish and Isis will give us our luck back.’

Tugging him with her, she half ran to the stall of the nightingale-vendor who, by a miracle, was still where she remembered him to have been when so much else had changed.

Saulos offered to give them the necessary silver coin although it transpired that Math had some of his own. Hannah knew for a fact that when they had left the compound he had had no money, but his liquid eyes did not offer her lies and she let him pay for, and then release, the small brown bird.

A small crowd formed about them; for such things, men and women always stopped, ready to divine their own luck from the flight path.

This bird circled three times in the direction of the sun before straightening briefly northwards across the tomb of Alexander, heading straight towards the lighthouse, then turned left and flew with perfect purpose west towards the towering white marble edifice of the Serapeum and its attendant libraries.

Three sets of eyes in particular watched it fly – and then did not, for after a moment’s attention given to the divining of its path, Hannah felt first Math’s and then Saulos’ attention waver.

Both turned their awareness to the same place, but she looked later than they, and couldn’t find a face she recognized in the loosely gathered crowd.

Math glanced up at her. His mouth framed the question his eyes had already asked. Hannah looked round one more time. She could think of no one who would make him break his oath but Pantera.

At her side, Saulos was shading his face with his hand, staring up at the sky. He wished her to believe he was still watching the nightingale, but he, too, was scouring the crowd. For reasons she could not precisely divine, Hannah gave a small squeeze and opened her hand as if she were releasing a sacred soul to the fates. Light as a feather, Math slid away from her and was swallowed by the mass of people.

Saulos didn’t see him go. A crease knifed his brow, as when he was disconcerted in some point of argument. Still apparently watching the nightingale, he said, ‘Is the spikenard essential? Might you humour me and follow the bird to the temple of Ptolemy’s manufactured god?’

‘I’m your physician. I follow where you lead.’

She had said it in jest, but he took it as an order and swept forward, scything a path through the crowd towards the Serapeum.

The crowds lessened as they turned down the Serapic Way. Columns and temples to smaller gods lined both sides of the broad granite avenue. Here the prayerful could deposit a coin in a machine not unlike the water clock in the compound, only this dispensed holy water instead of chimes; or, with a different machine and a different coin, the faithful could pose a question and be given the answer, provided it was either yes or no.

The Serapeum dwarfed them all, the vast, overwhelming temple built by Ptolemy Soter for the god he had made.

She had been here before, many times, but always, when she came so close, Hannah was breathless for a moment, dazzled by the sun’s glance on the perfectly cut white marble.

That was its purpose, of course; the engineers of old knew every angle of the sun’s inclination and used them to further the glory of their god, drawing worshippers and casual visitors alike from the blistering white of the exterior in and ever in to the great, blue-robed god inside, vaster than anything in Alexandria or beyond, stretching his fingertips from wall to distant wall, taller, more sumptuously dressed, more peaceful in his stance at the gateway between life and death than any other counterfeit of man she had ever seen or hoped to see.

He stood, they said, on progressive layers of gold and silver, bronze and glass, Nile-mud and pottery, so that he might intimately know all parts of his earth as they lay beneath his feet. Standing in the doorway with blazing white marble at either side and the majesty of his image in front of her, Hannah believed it.

‘There are seats at the margins, where the prayerful might sit,’ Saulos said, making her jump. ‘If I were to ask you and Math to sit on them for a moment while I undertake some private business, would you do so?’

Which was when, with all semblance of surprise, Hannah discovered that Math was no longer with them.

‘H
e can’t read Hebrew, did you know that?’

‘I’m sorry?’ They were in the library, speaking softly. Pantera bowed, as befitted a pupil who has recently found his master.

Shimon favoured him with an imperious gaze. ‘The Apostate. The one who wishes to destroy Rome and then Jerusalem. The man I have been hunting since we last met. He preaches the word of our god but he can’t read it in the language in which it was written. He relies instead on this—’ He jerked a disparaging thumb at the open scroll before him. ‘The Greeks have never understood our language. Why they thought they could render holy scripture into their godless tongue is beyond me. He uses it in his ministries, and so his lies are based on a falsehood at their start.’

Shimon of Galilee, zealot in the service of his god, leaned his elbows on a table in the library of the Serapeum and glared at Pantera, daring him to answer.

He had aged since Pantera had seen him in Gaul. Soft, slanting light angled kindly down from the tall, narrow windows and domed roof of the library, but even so, the lines about his eyes and mouth were more deeply scored and his eyes did not hold the humour they had once done. His voice, when not livened with anger, was flat.

In his guise as a junior scholar, Pantera picked up a scroll from the pile lying on the table at the old man’s elbow and began to untie the thongs. Around him, oak shelves lined every part of the interior, with sections for the scrolls and papyri that were the library’s gold. The benches and tables were of cedar inlaid with ebony, amber and silver. The smell of resin mixed with the dusts of ink and learning and the sweat of many men, reading.

He smoothed open the scroll and weighted down the corners with small stubs of lead. ‘Why are you telling me this,’ he asked, ‘when we are hunting Akakios?’

‘
You
are hunting Akakios. I told you in Gaul that the only man who would light your fire was the Apostate. No one else loathes Rome and Jerusalem equally.’

‘Akakios doesn’t loathe Rome, but he might conceivably want to rebuild parts of the ghettos to the greater glory of the emperor. Currently, people are living on the land he wants to use. The fire will clear it for his architects, in the way it clears a forest for the plough.’

‘You have proof of this?’

Pantera pinched his lip. ‘No, but I have heard it often enough now, from sufficiently reliable sources, to begin to believe it.’

‘Does Nero know?’

‘I hope not.’

A short-sighted scholar walked past, reading from a parchment held close to his face. Pantera cocked his head towards Shimon and ran his finger along a line on the scroll, as if underlining a particularly difficult passage. ‘Akakios is seeking the prophecy,’ he said. ‘There’s no doubt about that. Have you proof that your Apostate is doing the same? Is he even in Alexandria?’

Shimon bent low over the scroll. ‘He’s here. I haven’t found him, but I can feel him the way you can feel another spy in the room.’

‘Is he preaching?’

‘No. He’d be easier to find if he were. He hasn’t preached since he was excommunicated two years ago and the synagogues won’t let him through the door. Any honest Hebrew has a duty to kill him if he reveals himself. He’s keeping himself hidden somewhere. I have no idea where.’

‘So to achieve anything, he’ll have to work through others? That should slow him down.’

‘Not noticeably.’ Shimon pulled a face. ‘He has no shortage of followers. Even now, there are men who prefer his imaginary covenant to the one given by God. Poros of the Blues, for instance.’

‘
What?
’ Heads jerked in their direction. The parblind scholar half turned on his heel. Pantera hissed, ‘Poros barely leaves the compound and then only to source fodder for the horses. How can he have turned into a follower on the basis of one meeting a month, if that?’

‘The Blue team are from Galatia. The Apostate has preached often in the synagogues of the eastern sea coast. Poros was suborned long before he came to Alexandria, and to good effect. Until Ajax arrived, the Blue team was going to Rome with nothing in its way.’

‘And Akakios with them. Are they working together?’

‘Poros and Akakios? I don’t know. I don’t have access to the compound.’

‘Whereas I do.’

‘Exactly.’ Shimon tapped the table for emphasis. ‘Which is one of the reasons I thought we should meet.’

Thoughtfully, Pantera re-rolled the scroll, tied the calfhide thong about it and set it with the others. He took a moment to make the stack neat, like a pyramid with even sides. The morning’s amber light slid along each one, setting them in honeyed sun against the rich wood.

He said, ‘I was sent here by Hypatia, from the home of Ptolemy Asul. You have found him also, evidently.’

‘I received your letter. Of course I found him. The question is whether Akakios, too, has done so.’

‘I killed one of his men in the alleyway outside Ptolemy Asul’s house, so we can safely say that he has. He’s here, did you know?’

‘How could I not? The entire Roman world knows that the emperor’s spymaster is in a compound in the desert taking care of the emperor’s racehorses – and the golden-haired boy who may one day drive them.’

‘No,
here
,’ Pantera said. ‘In the temple of Serapis, less than a hundred paces from where we stand.’

‘
Why?
’

‘I have no idea. He didn’t follow me. And I assume you didn’t let anyone follow you. I imagine he’s here to meet someone although, as far as I know, Poros is still in the compound. It may be one of his agents?’

‘Or the Apostate?’

‘If he dares show himself.’ Pantera’s left arm lay on the lectern in front of them. He eased back his sleeve a fraction; enough to show the tip of the knife he kept there. He said, ‘Akakios has at least four men who guard his life wherever he goes. When I lived amongst the Dumnonii, we spoke an oath to our shield-mates as we prepared for battle:
My life for yours in the face of the enemy
. If I were to offer that oath to you for today, for the duration of whatever we find when we track Akakios, would you take it?’

‘Your life for mine?’ Shimon eyed him thoughtfully. ‘And so mine for yours?’ He had already wrapped the last of his scrolls. He took a moment to hang it correctly, tags out, in its ordained position on the shelves.

When he turned, the colour had returned to his face. ‘My life for yours,’ he said. ‘I accept.’

The dome of Serapis’ temple was the highest in Alexandria, and still the god’s head nearly touched the top. Sunlight came in from all sides, glancing off polished marble, off silver, off gold. Mosaics of sapphire, topaz and lapis gave colour to the light, casting a blue glow about the god’s head that then danced in reflected glory down his raiment to his feet.