‘
No!
’ Saulos jabbed one elbow back with savage force. Pantera jerked away, his hands breaking free from the belt. He used his elbow and then his knee and felt both make satisfying contact.
Writhing, Saulos gouged for his eyes with one hand and with the other stabbed a knife up at his chest.
Pantera threw himself sideways, biting hard on the nearest sight of skin: a thumb. He tasted blood. Saulos screeched. Another man’s shout echoed it, and the sound of running feet in the hall.
Pantera kicked and wrenched away, rolling across the marble. Saulos’ blade hacked at his face, grazing his scalp. A trickle of blood joined the others on his cheek as he rolled free and ran for the wide gape of firelight that was the hall’s door.
Two men ran at him with the fire at their backs: officers, wearing the double carnelian flash of the treacherous second cohort. They converged on him from either side, shouting orders to stop, to surrender, to lie down if he valued his life. Pantera ducked between them, so that, turning, they crashed into each other in a clamour of dented armour.
He reached the doorway and the flood of light, with the dazzling Augustus above. Behind, the officers and Saulos were running together in the last yards of the hallway.
‘Murder!’ Pantera hurtled down the stairs zig-zagging like a hare, leaping over sleeping children and their white-faced, silent parents. He heard Saulos call his name and put his hands to his mouth to shout again, ‘Murderers! Treason! The prefect is—’
Saulos’ arm slammed across his mouth, silencing him. His hand reached for Pantera’s hair, dragging his head back, exposing his throat to the light, to his slashing blade.
Pantera fought back by instinct, as he had in his childhood in the stews of Jerusalem, in his youth in the ghettos of Alexandria, in his adulthood in the hell of a torture room in Britain. There wasn’t a single dirty move he hadn’t practised then or that he didn’t use now, gouging, biting, kicking, striking. By sheer weight of sustained attack, he got his fingers on Saulos’ knife hand, and twisted it in and round and down, aiming for the sweet spot to the left of his breastbone where—
‘Stop!’ Someone kicked his leg. It wasn’t Saulos. Pantera pressed on. The same booted foot kicked him in the kidneys, harder.
He screamed. Pain crashed over him. Vomiting, he dropped the knife.
A hand drew his head back. The air sang to the sound of a blade.
‘No! He must live! He knows where Hannah is.’ The singing ceased. The pain did not.
Pantera opened one eye; the other was glued shut with his own blood. Saulos was kneeling on the steps less than a yard away, gasping as if he had run the length of Rome. His face was bleeding from a cut along his cheek. His eyes burned with a flat hate. The sword that had come so close to killing Pantera was held by the ox-broad tribune of the second cohort.
Pantera moved his gaze to meet the tribune’s. He scrabbled for the cord at his neck, but couldn’t reach it. ‘I hold … emperor’s seal. You owe … fealty.’
The tribune laughed. Saulos pushed himself up and came to stand over Pantera, wiping blood from his nose with the back of his hand. ‘He owes fealty to a higher power than a golden seal.’ More loudly, for the benefit of the listening crowd, he said, ‘You killed Calpurnius, the prefect. I will testify.’
The crowd knew Calpurnius. Their voices sighed in the night.
‘Will you testify before the emperor?’ asked the tribune.
‘If I must.’
‘You must. He’s here now. No other man is permitted to blow the war horn in the city of Rome.’
Pantera closed his eyes. He heard the horn sound once, and then again. And he heard the sound of hoofbeats, individual as a signature, and knew that Math had brought Nero to Rome.
‘T
here, in front of the steps. Beneath the statue of Augustus. Stop there!’
The horses were beyond exhaustion. Black with sweat and ash, their flanks heaving like fire bellows, their paces raggedly uncoordinated, they barely pulled the chariot forward.
Math spoke to them over the fire’s roar, begging them to give him another step and another, but slowly, carefully, because the ground was slick with water and the press of people so great.
Like that, slowly, with care, he brought them broadside on to the wide stairway leading up to the blazing statue. Thunder tripped as he came to a halt. Math thought his tendons had burst.
‘The horses … May I … ?’
‘Do what you must. We will not forget what you have done for us this night.’ Nero’s face was radiant, even as he surveyed the wreckage of his city. He stood tall in the chariot, cradling the war horn to his chest like a victory spear. His voice carried out over the crowd with the benevolence and certainty of a father.
On the steps the people were standing, then kneeling. Someone set up a cheer, lost at first in the roar of the fire, but stronger as others took it up and others until the sound outdid the fire.
The six-man guard that had followed the chariot all the way from Antium chose that moment to arrive. Wrenching their horses side-on to the crowd, they dismounted in a flurry of hooves and threw themselves forward, forming a human chain between the emperor and his people.
Math knelt at Thunder’s feet, running his hands down his legs. The rank smell of horse-sweat outdid the fire. The colt’s hooves were red hot and his legs shuddered, finely, like leaves in an autumn storm, but the tendons were not bowed and Math could find no points of pain in either forelimb.
Some men passed him, dragging another. He ignored them and walked round to Sweat, who was in better shape and might race again, and then last to Brass and Bronze, who had done the best part of the work for the last two miles. The colts drew huge, shuddering gasps, each one slower than the last, each one a greater effort. Their heads drooped to touch the ground. Their ears hung flat.
‘I’ll get you water,’ Math said. ‘Just wait. Please wait. Don’t die now.’ There was water everywhere, and he had seen the bucket chains. Frantically, he looked round, searching for someone who might care about Nero’s horses at a time when fire ate Rome on three sides, and Nero was dispensing judgement on a traitor.
Three officers of the Watch were stacking buckets not far away. Math waved to catch their attention and turned to forge a way through the crowd where it was thinnest, in front of the chariot—
And so nearly stepped on Pantera, who knelt at sword-point on the cobbles in front of him.
Math jumped back in panic, biting off a cry. Nobody looked at him; everyone was watching the emperor.
‘Our city burns.’ Nero was weeping –
weeping!
– shaking with rage or grief or both. ‘We engaged you to stop this fire.’
‘Majesty.’ Pantera bowed forward, pressing his brow to the pavings. Every visible part of him was bruised. His voice was a broken whisper. With an effort, he spoke more loudly. ‘You engaged me also to protect the new prefect of the Watch, and he is slain. His body is in Augustus’ chariot inside the forum. Someone should recover him and give him due honour.’
‘Is that true?’ Two officers stood behind Pantera. Nero’s gaze raked them both. When neither of them answered immediately, the Germanic guards broke through the crowd, ran up the steps into the forum and came back again.
Pantera closed his eyes. Math thought he saw his lips move in prayer.
‘Calpurnius is there, lord. His throat is cut.’
‘Who did this? You—’ Nero used the war-horn as a pointer, stabbing it at Pantera. ‘Answer me. Who did this?’
Pantera raised his head. ‘Saulos the Idumaean, lord. When Seneca trained him, he was known as Herodias. In Judaea they know him as the Apostate. I tried to kill him. As you can see, in this, too, I failed, although only within the last moments.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He was with us on the steps beneath the father Augustus. He vowed to testify before your majesty as to the cause of Calpurnius’ death. Anyone within earshot will attest to that.’ Men in the crowd agreed, vocally, and then stopped, blanching, at Nero’s bellow.
‘
Where is he?
’
The horses flinched. The officer who had arrested Pantera stared at the ground and would not answer.
Levelly, Pantera said, ‘I believe he chose to leave before your majesty arrived here.’
‘You did not hold him prisoner?’
Nero spoke over his head and the tribune, directly addressed, could not avoid giving an answer. ‘Lord, this man bore a knife in the sacred hallway. He refused to submit to us and fought when we tried to detain him. We thought he alone was guilty. There was no need to arrest—’
‘Take them.’
The tribune’s sword was already turning as the Germanic guards stepped forward. They didn’t see his face from the angle Math did, and so were not fast enough to stop him from falling on to his knees, and from there on to his own blade.
It pierced him just below the breastbone and came out at the top of his back, by his shoulder blades. His breath frothed red at his mouth and nose and his blood flowed black on the pavings.
Nero licked his lips, watching the man die. It took longer than Math had expected. By the time the man’s eyes turned up, he had thought of Ajax and Constantin, and his father. He was not sick, and thought that each of them would be proud of him in their own way.
Nero nodded as the German guards took the body away. ‘He failed us. He deserves this. Take the centurion. Find out if he was bought by Akakios or was acting in good faith. You will remain kneeling.’ His eyes raked Pantera’s bruised and bloody face. ‘What have you done?’
Pantera blinked once. He was clearly in considerable pain, so that Math thought he might faint there, in front of the emperor, and knew without doubt that if he did the German guards would be ordered to kill him where he lay.
Surprisingly, his voice rang clear, as if the pain belonged to someone else. ‘I have prevented the utter destruction of Rome, lord. No man could have done more.’
‘Explain.’
‘The first cohort was loyal to you: we were sure of that. Calpurnius and I divided the centuries among the water towers and across the city, to protect the vital sites. In this we succeeded. Four districts out of fourteen are aflame. No more.’
‘Calpurnius is dead.’ Nero’s eyes were flat, like a fish.
‘And Saulos still lives. In that I have failed you. But I thought it more important to save the city of Rome than to hunt down one man within it.’
‘We do not consider
this
to be saved!’ Outraged, Nero flung out his left arm, letting his toga slide from his shoulder so it took on the shape and style of a stola. Like that, he turned a full circle, showing his palm to the audience.
On the stage, the move was known as ‘the woman’s revolve’. Good actors played it slowly, while their musicians sounded a particular note of the horn, the better to underline the woman’s anguish after the loss of her husband or son.
In this setting, surprisingly, Nero did not look effeminate, but rather gave voice to an otherwise unspeakable pain. The crowd sighed with him in a long, ululating note that mirrored his grief with theirs. The fire stood behind them as a backdrop. The moment was perfect.
‘Lord, may I speak?’ A centurion of the Watch pushed untimely through the crowd, shattering the spell.
Nero jerked round, his face aflame. Math recognized Mergus, the small, dark centurion who had been at Antium, and uttered a prayer for his life; few men interrupted Nero’s play-acting and lived to see another dawn.
Out of instinct, the Germanic guards stepped back a wary pace, leaving Mergus to stand beside the kneeling Pantera at the foot of the chariot. The flashing uniform of one contrasted greatly with the torn and filthy tunic of the other.
Caught in the open, focus of a thousand eyes, Mergus saluted with military precision. ‘I would speak for the sake of the city,’ he said.
Nero’s right brow danced high. ‘Yes?’
‘Our prefect is dead. The tribune of the second, his successor, has just died at his own hand – rightly so, for he was a traitor. But the fire grows apace and we need an officer to lead us. May I ask that one be appointed with all celerity?’
‘Who?’
‘My lord, that is not for me to say.’ As he spoke, Mergus took a single pace to his left and Math’s jaw dropped.
Perhaps later than the men and women on the steps, certainly later than Nero, he saw what Mergus had done. For the man was, if not an actor, then at least an aficionado of the stage, and, exactly as Nero had made of his chariot a pulpit, so he had made one of the space at the foot of the chariot. Now Pantera was at its centre and anyone who had ever seen a play would have recognized the kneeling man as the hero of a tragedy.
Pantera was staring at the ground. Math, who sat now at his horses’ feet, saw his eyes flare wide in surprise as he, too, understood what had happened. The crowd held its breath.
Nero ran his tongue round his teeth. A life, perhaps two lives, hung on his whim. Quietly, he said, ‘What would you advise that we do?’
‘Me, lord?’
‘You. The Leopard. My oath-sworn spy. The man who failed to keep Calpurnius alive.’
Pantera looked up slowly. ‘Evacuate the city to the Field of Mars. Throw open the gates to your gardens on the crest of the Capitoline nearby. Order the Watch to make the saving of life their first priority and the saving of property a distant second. Thereafter, promote the tribune of the sixth cohort to the prefecture and have his men follow their standing orders in case of a fire out of control; use the water to saturate buildings ahead of the fire and where that cannot be done, order thirty feet ahead of the flames brought down to make a firebreak. Beyond these things, there’s nothing any of us can do.’
‘We can pray.’
There was a hidden meaning to that and everyone heard it. Pantera bowed his head. Linear bruises on the side of his neck showed where someone had tried to strangle him. Nero’s gaze rested on him, waiting.
At length, struggling for words, Pantera said, ‘Your excellency holds in his hand that which is most dear. What more could a man ask but that it is held gently and with due care? I pray for that to the god who holds most power.’