‘Here would be a good place to wait,’ he said. ‘Your father will see you easily when the fires have died down, and in the meantime there are many officers of the Watch around. When you see an officer who isn’t too busy, go to him and give your names and make sure the prefect learns that you’re here.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Inside the forum. The Temple of Mars is in there. I would speak to the god, and perhaps find a man I have been looking for.’
The crowd thinned suddenly near the top of the steps and, without warning, Pantera stepped from relative shadow into a wall of light cast by a dozen pitch-pine torches. In Augustus’ time, they had been set along the front of the forum to illuminate the gilded statue of the god-emperor that it might draw the eyes of all Rome to his memory throughout the hours of darkness.
In recent years, they had been left unlit except at the Saturnalia, but tonight an officer of the Watch had ordered them lit early on, that the crowds might find their way to the relative safety of the forum. Now, the fire outshone any torches, and nobody in the city looked up except Pantera, who gave one brief salute, for memory’s sake, before he passed beneath the statue’s feet into Augustus’ forum.
He stood still, letting his eyes adjust to the dark and his ears to the tomb-like quiet. Here, the air was dry and light, peppered with incense and expensive tallow, almost free of the stench of roasted flesh that rolled over the men, women and children outside.
It was too dark to see all the way down the broad hallway but Pantera had visited the Temple of Mars in daylight a decade before. A building within a building, gilded and martial at once, it had left him with a greater respect for the gods of war and peace.
His instinct had led him there, and a pair of torches set either side of the doorway drew him on. There was no sign of Saulos, nothing to hear, nothing to see, but Pantera felt as if his skin had been flayed from his body, leaving every nerve screaming. If a mouse had moved within a thirty-foot radius, he would have known it.
Softly, he padded down one side of a long hallway, squeezing between the colonnades and the life-sized bronze statues of Rome’s hallowed past. Here were Cincinnatus, Virgil, Cicero, Pompey, Caesar, Marc Antony. And in the very centre of the hallway, twice as large as life, a second bronze Augustus drove his four-horse chariot single-handed into eternity.
Pantera was squeezing past Claudius Centho, an early dictator of Rome, when he caught the scent of blood beneath the incense.
Fresh blood; in a place with no sign of life.
He turned towards it, easing the knife from the sheath on his left arm. In the stillness, fainter than his own heartbeat, he heard a drop splash on to marble.
The sound came from the centre of the hall, where Augustus’ giant chariot raced into eternity, drawn by the horses of the sun.
There was no cover at all between the colonnades at the sides of the hall and its centre. Pantera dropped to a crouch and made his way across as silently as he might. On the way, he heard three more drops, each one slower than the last. The iron-sweet smell of spilled blood became stronger with each yard crossed.
The chariot’s sculptor had modelled his horses for drama, not speed; all four stood on their hind legs, thrashing. Pantera ducked under the rearmost pair and lay in the clutter of their racing feet looking back down the hall to the stuttering torches that lit the Temple of Mars. They were smoky and unstable, but they sent light enough to burnish the bronze, and to cast in silhouette the clotted strings of blood that hung down from the back of the chariot. Here, the smell was loud and brash as a slaughterhouse.
Barely breathing, Pantera rose up and pressed his ear to the chariot’s shell, moving backwards until he felt a heartbeat that was faster than his own, and heard a quiet, careful breath, slower than his own erratic respiration, punctuated once by a sniff, as of a man whose nose perpetually runs.
Drawing his second knife, he crept to the chariot’s open back.
Gnaeus Calpurnius, lately made prefect of the Watch, lay curled like a sleeping child with his cut throat a dark gash against the burnished bronze. Behind him, nestled in the bowed front of the chariot, shielded by Augustus’ knees, was a living man. Two eyes shone in the torchlight. White teeth glimmered in a grimace, or a smile.
‘Saulos,’ Pantera said aloud, and threw both of his knives.
M
ath was living his dream, and it was a nightmare.
A roaring dragon devoured Rome. Wings of flame scorched the sky. Its tail destroyed houses, men and horses alike, smashing them to bloody bone. And Math was racing towards it.
He was racing as badly as he had done in Alexandria, probably worse. All four colts were bolting, entirely out of control, just as they had done in the final trial, with the difference that the road was clear in front of him, Poros was not trying to squeeze him on the corners – and there was not the slightest chance that Ajax could come to help him.
His ribs ached; they hadn’t stopped aching since he had woken in the palace with Crystal tapping his shoulder. His feet were bruised from bracing against the constant buck and dive of the chariot, and his tongue was sliced on both sides by his clattering teeth. Cut raw by the reins, his hands had long ago lost all feeling, and his ears hurt from the hammering hooves on the solid road, the slashing wind and, above both of these, the screaming encouragement of Nero, his emperor, who clung to the wicker at his side, goading him on like a madman.
They had a train of mounted men behind them, striving to keep up, of whom Faustinos, the water engineer, was the only one within reach. He had been given the big grey gelding, favoured son of Crystal, that Math thought the best of Nero’s riding horses. Driven by his need to get back to the city and repair his beloved cisterns, he hurled his mount at insane speeds after the chariot, shouting at Math to go faster.
The two Germanic guards and the detachment of dress cavalry detailed to guard Nero were hopelessly outdistanced. Inferior horsemen on inferior horses, they trailed a quarter of a mile behind with no chance of catching up, while Nero, who held their lives in his hand, rode with one hand on the wicker rail and one high in the air, brandishing a flaring torch, declaiming his love for the night, for himself and for Math.
Oblivious of danger, god-like in his euphoria, Nero had bellowed his promises to the city he was coming to save for the past thirty miles and continued unabated even as they reached the outer streets of Rome and felt the fire’s first breath scorch their faces and the stench of burning people began to send the horses wild.
Math was exhausted. Simply to stand in a chariot for thirty miles tested the limits of his endurance, but once in the city the challenge of keeping the smoke-maddened horses in line, keeping them from running anyone down, keeping them on the main streets, turning corners as Nero directed, required feats of concentration he had never considered possible.
But he survived each threat and surprisingly soon they were careering down a broad, open street, with the marbled villas on either side glowing red as if cast from molten metal. The sight of them caused Nero to let go of the rail and lunge at Math, brandishing what looked at first sight like a cudgel.
The chariot slewed off balance. Fighting for control, Math heard Nero shout, ‘Can you sound a horn?’
The thing blocking Math’s view of the road wasn’t a cudgel, but a bull’s horn of quite fantastic length, chased with silver at tip and rim, carved with intricate sigils across its belly.
‘Can you—’ Nero shouted again.
‘
Watch out!
’ Math threw his whole weight on the reins. Bronze screamed. Math thought Thunder’s foreleg buckled, but the colt took the weight of the turn and the chariot wrenched round, missing the family they had nearly run down. The man snatched his three children from the road. The woman sprang inelegantly into the gutter.
Nero fell sideways, hard. The chariot rocked and rolled as he clawed at Math and pulled himself upright. By a miracle, he had not dropped the horn.
‘You will announce my entry.’
The side of Nero’s face was bruised. Tears sparked in his eyes, and the first flickers of rage.
Math already had the reins tied to his waist. He worked his right hand free from the plaited leather rein and held it out.
Nero pressed the horn on to his palm. It was smooth as polished marble, but warm, with the silver worn by years of use.
‘Can you sound it?’
‘I’ve blown one like it.’ Twice, in fact, most recently when his mother died. Then, his father had given him a horn far smaller than this one, with only a single band of silver at the mouthpiece, and had bade him play it. It was to help his mother find the gods, apparently. Math had not believed it, but had played for his father’s sake.
He knew how because he had learned on the night his mother had last been well, when the tall, silver-haired man in the stained cloak had come from Britain and had given Math’s father news of a death, or perhaps of many deaths.
Later, when he had gone, Math’s father had blown the horn. Math had got up and gone to him and so it was that, before dawn, he had learned how to sound the lament and had done so, finding solace in the way it wrapped them together.
Now, for the third time in his life, as he rounded a bend with fire on two sides and people scattering before his horses like hogs before hounds, he lifted the long, elegant horn and pressed the silver to his lips and blew the only notes he knew: his father’s lament for the war-slain dead.
Bright, rippling horn music sang to the smoky stars. Falling back, it became by turns the sound of his father, weeping, and then a man’s voice, singing.
By a small, but necessary, miracle, the four colts slowed and became controllable.
Math took the horn from his lips but the music did not stop. At its behest, the crowd thinned, and moved aside, as corn moves before the wind, so that Math’s chariot passed through without bringing hurt to anybody.
A single man stood at the roadside, sounding his own horn. He was Ajax’s height but Pantera’s leaner build. He had Pantera’s hair, grown long, but Ajax’s mouth and the same slant to his nose. He had straight shoulders, which was entirely unlike either of them, and eyes that were black as the night sky seen in a millpond.
Math felt his gaze and turned his head and his eyes locked with a man who was neither Ajax nor Pantera, but an amalgam of both.
He wanted to call out, but his voice failed him. He had only the horn. He blew it again in a long, fine note and, as the sound fell away, the other music stopped.
H
ead down, legs pumping, Pantera sprinted up the marble hallway towards the door.
Saulos came after, fast, hard, unhurt. Pantera’s knives had flown true, striking the place where his body should have been, but they bounced off a shield that had been covered by Calpurnius’ cloak so that in the dark it had looked like a torso.
Instinct made Pantera jink sideways. A knife clattered on the floor where he had been. He grabbed and missed and it skittered forward out of reach; he had no weapons left and Saulos had them all.
He ran on. The door was still thirty paces away; too far. He cannoned sideways again, curling an arm round Virgil, pushing the bronze off its plinth to crash forward on the marble. Behind him, Saulos laughed and leapt over the debris. A second knife cut the air between them.
‘You should have stayed in Britain.’ Saulos’ voice clattered among the colonnades, not far behind. ‘You were safe there.’
‘Safe? I was crucified.’
Saulos barked a laugh. ‘Then at least you know what’s coming. I’m not going to kill you. The tribune of the second can do that, as one of his first acts as prefect. I shall merely provide proof that you killed Calpurnius before I leave Rome.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Jerusalem. You read the prophecy. That, too, must fall. Stop hiding, damn you!’
Saulos had discovered the curse of the statues: that every one cast the life-sized shadow of a man. Pantera stood behind Anthony, and then Pompey, and then Crassus. The closer he came to the door, the brighter became the light, the stronger the shadows.
‘What about Hannah? Will you abandon your love so easily?’ Pantera sent the words back to bounce on the statues far behind. ‘Saulos? You’ve gone quiet. I thought you loved Hannah. Was I wrong?’
Talking covered the soft sounds of his movement as he undid his belt and wound one end round his hand. The pouch came free. Nero’s ring was inside, nestled in the hank of wool that once more kept his coins silent.
From the hallway, Saulos’ voice came brittle and cold. ‘Hannah is no longer your concern. We shall find her before the night’s out.’
‘We?’ Given more time, Pantera could have played Saulos as the emperor played his lute: badly, but well enough to hear the tune. He had no time. He hefted his pouch in one hand, testing the weight, letting Saulos’ own voice cover the sound of his movements.
‘The tribune of the second owns the Watch now.’ Saulos was pleased with himself; his voice rang off bronze and marble. ‘His men are already combing the city. They’re outside with orders to arrest you on sight. If you go out on to the steps, you’re a dead man. Surrender to me and we can come to an accommodation.’
Pantera laughed aloud. ‘An accommodation like the one you offered Ptolemy Asul? Do I look like a man who seeks death by hot irons? Seneca said you had no sense of logic. Is that why the Pharisees refused to let you train with them? Because you let your guts rule your head?’
‘They didn’t—’ Saulos spun and threw exactly at the place where Pantera’s pouch had bumped softly against the base of Julius Caesar’s statue. Even before his knife hit Caesar’s bronze chest, Saulos launched himself after it, slicing his sword in a long oval that made the air sing.
Pantera rose behind him, his belt taut between his two hands, and looped it over Saulos’ neck.