To hit that at any speed meant certain death; at racing speed … there wasn’t time to think how bad it would be. Math slewed the team into a turn so hard he thought his horses’ legs might shatter under the strain. They didn’t, but at the apex of the turn, when all his skill went into keeping the chariot upright, a stray lance of afternoon sunlight struck the emperor’s golden dais and rebounded, dazzlingly bright. A cacophony of light hit all four horses, and spooked them into a bolt that made racing speed seem like a sedate canter.
Coming out of the bend, Math lost all hope of control. Eyes streaming, he headed at a flat gallop up the length of the oval towards the stands that held Nero, which were as matchwood to racing colts. Immediately beyond them was the oakwood palisade, solid as a stone wall.
Math tilted his body and tilted and tilted, trying desperately to bring the trajectory of the team’s panic on to a line that would not hit Nero. He managed that much but little else and at a certain point, when he thought no one else was in danger, he stopped trying and sought instead the freedom of flying that had so exhilarated him the day before.
As he had then, Math called for his father, and felt his presence, and tasted the glory of a death bravely faced. Mourning only for his horses, he relaxed all grip on the reins and gave himself to the last, long gallop up the full length of the track.
As he passed the halfway point on the Spina, he realized that Hannah must be watching, and that she would grieve, not only for him, but for Ajax, who must be dead, or he would have come to take over the race by now. He was consoled by the thought that she would be left with Pantera, which would save her having to choose between the two men. Because she would have had to choose; he saw that with sudden clarity and could not think how he might ever have thought otherwise. It was not that Ajax and Pantera were lovers, but that both men loved Hannah, and she them. Just as Math did.
He carried the thought with him towards death, to give him courage; that Hannah would have the spy and Math would have Ajax, and all that he was. He thought death would be a good place, with Ajax there to greet him.
It was Ajax’s ghost, then, that came running out across the sands, clad only in a loincloth, scalp shining pink under the late afternoon sun, shouting in a language Math didn’t know, which must be the language of the dead, except that it sounded a lot like the songs that Math’s father used to sing, and the words were those Math had heard spoken softly in the nights before his mother had died, words of war and battle and glory and loss that reached into his chest and plucked at the strings of his heart.
He began to weep hot tears of fierce, painful joy, that filled his eyes and blurred his vision so that he thought he saw Ajax running alongside the chariot with his arm reaching up, and thought he heard him shouting out, ‘Give me your hand!’
Death was more exciting than he had dared imagine. Math reached out his hand as the ghost of Ajax grasped his wrist and, shouting ‘Hold tight!’, used it as an anchor by which to haul himself into the fragile wicker basket that was made for one man, not two.
‘Give me the whip! Lean your body to the left. Left. Left!
Left!
Good. Now stand very still. I need to take the reins from your waist.’
Math’s vision was still blurred, but there was no mistaking Ajax’s voice, nor Ajax’s nimble fingers unwinding the reins and retying them round his own body, nor Ajax’s whistle to the horses, that caused all of their ears to come straight, nor Ajax’s command for more speed that did things to the chariot Math had never even dreamed about.
Somewhere, a great many throats were cheering themselves hoarse. Math thought he heard Hannah’s voice within the cacophony. Certainly he heard Nero’s. It came to him in a dawn of wonder that neither he nor Ajax was dead, and that they were, in fact, racing. Two of them, racing in a one-man chariot. He dashed the tears from his eyes and looked around for Poros, and saw him four lengths ahead.
Ajax had the horses under control, if racing this fast was ever under control. He was standing spread-legged across the width of the wicker, with his feet braced on either side. Math was caught in the back corner. He looked up, just as Ajax glanced down and grinned at him. ‘You’re going to have to act as second man. Just don’t lean as far on the corners as you did before. This rig isn’t built for that.’
‘What are we doing?’ Math asked.
‘Racing. To win.’
But Math was watching Poros. The Blues’ driver was the only other person who mattered just now and he, too, had truly begun to race. He was one man, and they were two. Even with better horses, they couldn’t hope to make up four lengths.
A corner was coming. Seeing it, Math’s mind became startlingly clear. He let go of the chariot’s sides and shifted his weight to the inside. To Ajax, over the speed of their racing, he shouted, ‘You can’t win with two of us on board!’ and launched himself out across the sand.
He had six months of training; six months that were, really, a daily practice in throwing himself from a moving chariot without dying, although none of it had been anywhere close to the speed and angle and sheer insane danger of this.
For a moment, Math truly flew and, flying, curled himself into a ball as he had been taught, bringing his chin to his chest and bending his arms round so that his elbows made a circle rather than a corner, squeezing his knees up to his chest—
His world, briefly, was full of sound and light and the screams of the onlookers. The circling track and the palisade turned upside down. A voice he didn’t recognize said, ‘Math, curl tighter,
now
!’
He did his best. Soon after that, he hit the ground sickeningly hard, and knew nothing.
‘Math?’
The voice came from behind him. Nexos. It sounded like Nexos.
‘Math … wake up.’ A warm, friendly hand shook his shoulder twice, and then withdrew. In grief, Nexos said, ‘I can’t get him to wake.’
‘He’s as awake as he’s going to be. Let me see.’ It was Hannah. Math felt her hand on his brow, on his neck, on his wrist. He tried to grasp her fingers but his own hand had no strength. She lifted it and held it. ‘Math? Can you hear me?’
He could, but only just. Mostly what he could hear was the sound of a crowd going wild in a kind of delirious ecstasy, and somewhere over it a big colt, screaming his victory.
He said, ‘Is the race over?’
‘It is. You missed the best bit.’ Hannah was trying to sound cheerful, but in truth she was worried. Math frowned.
‘Ajax lost?’
‘No. Not at all. Not even close. He overtook Poros on the second to last lap and came in three lengths ahead. Nero was right; our four colts were more than a match for Poros’ when they were all raced together. It was the best race there’s ever been in Alexandria, everyone says so. Nero is a very happy man. I think you might be made an honorary member of his family.’
Math’s mind was too fuddled to make sense of everything all at once. He worked through it, step by step by step, and—
‘We’re going to Rome? The Green team’s going to race for Nero in Rome?’ There were all kinds of reasons why that was a very bad idea, but just now his chest ached with a burning, bursting pride.
‘We are.’ Hannah leaned down and kissed his cheek. ‘For better or worse, we are all going to Rome.’
R
ome’s cattle market opened at dawn two days after the ides of July to a bellowing of cattle, calves and bulls that easily drowned out the Tiber’s sullen mumble from the foot of the hill.
Dressed in the plain cloth of a rural farmer, Pantera sat on an upturned barrel beside a pen full of newly weaned heifers, whittling at a stick that might one day become a bull-goad. Around him, weather-beaten men steeped in the aroma of cow manure came to lean on the pen gates and shake their heads at the dismal quality of the stock displayed therein.
For the most part, they ignored him. When they tried to bargain, he grinned foolishly and spoke in fast, accented Gaulish, pointing to a red-haired man nearby who took their money and sold them his lean heifers. One or two of those who thought they had driven a good bargain threw a coin at the whittling fool as they left. Pantera scooped up the copper pieces and grinned his thanks and never took his eyes from the entrance to an alleyway a hundred paces away that he had been watching since daybreak.
Farmers and stockmen passed back and forth across the alley’s mouth, but not until the sun began to give colour to the cattle did anyone enter it. Then, Pantera laid down his bull-goad with a silver coin beneath, hobbled ungainly down the row of pens, ducked under a guard rope at the market’s edge and followed the solitary figure into the alley.
Akakios walked a hundred paces ahead of him, tall and bitter as the day was new. He wore a cloak against the morning’s chill and carried a short stabbing sword at his belt, angled tight to his leg, where it could be drawn with most speed.
Old stables and byres lined both sides of the narrow street, abandoned when the new stock buildings were put up in Caligula’s reign and long since fallen into disrepair. Pantera waited in a disused doorway and watched Akakios pause before each broken, unhinged door, examining it for scratch marks.
The last building, a long, low barn set at the alley’s foot, stood out amongst the rest. Mould grew on its walls and paint peeled from its door as much as from any of the others, but the roof was whole, and the gaps in its walls had recently been boarded over.
It was here that Akakios found the marks he wanted. As he lifted the wooden bar to let himself in, Pantera walked back out of the alley and turned right through the ghetto, towards a line of empty donkey stables, recently mucked out.
The door to the second hung ajar. Inside, Hannah and Shimon sat opposite each other on the straw, neat and clean in the patched linen of household slaves.
‘We were beginning to think you’d taken a liking to cattle dealing.’ Hannah passed Pantera a beaker of clean water and received a hunk of dried spiced beef in return. She split it three ways and they shared it comfortably.
Shimon leaned his staff near the door and sat cross-legged with his back to the far wall. ‘Poros is less than a mile away,’ he said. ‘Where’s Akakios?’
‘Heading for the cattle barn at the foot of the alley,’ Pantera answered. ‘Someone’s repaired the roof since I was there yesterday.’
‘Ha!’ Shimon clapped his hands. ‘The letter could be real, then. I had prayed so. You will have arranged a way for us to enter unseen?’
‘There’s a door at the back hanging open just enough to admit a man,’ Pantera said. ‘I put a pile of old roof beams in front when I checked it last night. If you’re careful, you can crawl in unseen and lie behind them.’
Shimon looked up sharply. ‘Am I going alone?’
‘No.’ Pantera finished the last of his breakfast, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘We need credible witnesses, or Nero will hang us for treason.’ He turned to Hannah. ‘The Emperor mustn’t know you’re a part of this. Could you go back to the goose-keeper’s cottage? If it goes well, I’ll meet you there after I’ve visited the imperial palace in Antium.’
The two officers of the Watch who leaned against the railings near the calf pens had not patrolled the market at any point in the morning. As far as Pantera could tell, they had been there for the sheer pleasure of a summer’s morning steeped in the stink of cattle; country men made to live too long in the city and glad of a respite.
Even so, they had kept their eyes open and their wits sharp: half a dozen times, they had noticed pickpockets working the crowd and had alerted their men subtly, so that the thieves could be arrested without fuss at the market’s edge.
The smaller, darker of the two was the sharper. He had olive skin and black hair curled ram-tight about his head. If it wasn’t for the fact that the men of the Watch were always recruited from families of Latin descent, Pantera would have said he was Syrian.
His colleague was taller by a head and broader by the worth of an ox. He had the build of a gladiator, with the fair skin and sun-shy complexion of a northern Latin. Neither of them wore any badges of rank and, early on, Pantera laid a private bet with himself that the smaller one outranked his taller, broader, more Latin colleague. Through the morning, he had seen no reason to change that view.
The pen nearest them held a cow in milk with a pair of twin calves at her side. Pantera hobbled up with a pail of fresh water and tipped it messily into the trough, then dumped the bucket to the ground and leaned both elbows on the rail.
‘When I was in Britain,’ he observed affably, ‘the stockbreeders of the tribes believed that the heifer calf of twins was always infertile.’ And then, into the silence that followed, ‘If you give me your names and ranks, we can proceed more swiftly.’
‘And you are …?’ It was the small, dark one who asked. He had the tattoo of the Twentieth legion on his right wrist and was the right age to have served in Britain.
‘If you open the pouch at my right side,’ Pantera said, ‘you’ll find the emperor’s ring wrapped in a white silk square. I wear his seal on a thong about my neck. If you wish to examine that, I suggest we leave the market. I have no wish to destroy an identity that’s taken me four days to create.’
‘We asked who you were.’
The taller guard spoke this time; his colleague was already occupied. With the smooth dexterity of a street boy, he lifted the ring from Pantera’s pouch, examined and returned it. Anyone watching would have seen him lean forward on the rails and look into the pen, nothing more.
‘He’s telling the truth,’ he said. ‘He’s the emperor’s man, however little he looks like it.’ And then, to Pantera, ‘We don’t need to see the seal; the man who bears Nero’s ring already outranks anyone else in Rome.’
He turned round, hooking his elbows over the rail and his thumbs in his belt. ‘I’m Appius Mergus, centurion of the first century, the first cohort of the Vigiles, tasked with care of the city at night and with protection against fire. I served three years with the Twentieth in Britain. This is Marcus Tullius Libo, my aquarius. He was with the Ninth when they lost to the Eceni. The market’s almost over. Unless the Lusitanian who’s just bought your cow discovers that the heifer calf is sterile and demands his money back with interest, we can leave now. What do you need us to do?’