‘Shimon?’
‘Shimon will die this evening. He is Nero’s scapegoat; a man on whom all blame can rest.’
‘Oh, Shimon …’ She pressed her head to his chest where the even beat of his heart reached her. ‘I don’t want to lose you.’ The words were jagged in her throat.
He kissed the crown of her head. ‘I’ll be with Hypatia. We can talk of you together. Ajax couldn’t have done that.’ He leaned back, and tilted her head up. ‘I promised I’d bring her to greet you. She’s here, she’ll come if you want her, but she said it would be easier on both of you not to meet again. You said your goodbyes in the goose-hut.’
Hannah said nothing; speech was impossible. Pantera read the answer in her eyes. ‘I’ll tell her,’ he said.
He stepped back. She caught his wrists, thinking he was leaving. ‘Will your daughter never know you?’ she asked. ‘What do I tell her?’
‘Tell her the truth. That you loved two men, one of whom sired her, one of whom fathered her. Ajax has said he will tell her the same.’ He eased his hands free, kindly. ‘Ajax said I could come and find you when Saulos is dead. I’ll send word first. If you don’t want me, if it will make your lives too difficult, tell me so and I will find somewhere else to go.’
‘I won’t do that.’ She was frantic now, feeling the end. ‘I couldn’t.’
‘Don’t sell your future to the present. Only raise our daughter well, knowing love, and not war. You and Ajax can do this. It’s what matters most.’
He bent his head and kissed her and straightened and walked away to speak to Math. Hannah did not move until he was gone.
Without knowing, Pantera had saved the hardest to last.
Math came to him slowly, as one who expects a beating. As he crossed the white stone, Pantera had time to think how long he had known it would come to this. Entering Nero’s garden, certainly, it had been clear there was no other way out. Leaving the goose-keeper’s cottage, he was fairly sure he had already known it. And then perhaps before he got there, in the night when he made his bargain with Nero and was prefect for the duration of darkness, with a promise that a boy would be freed with the dawn. Or before that, even, before he’d returned to Rome, when he saw the race in the compound at Alexandria, and Nero’s grief. Or in Coriallum, giving his oath to a dying man in a fire. Or stepping on to the dock, to see a gold-headed, filthy dock thief pretending to fish with the stink of horses in his hair. Or—
‘Must you go?’ Math’s voice was breaking. For the first time, Pantera heard it slide down and crack and come back again. ‘Nero won’t find us if you don’t do as he said.’
‘I’m afraid he will. And there’s no honour in giving an oath and then breaking it. Even to such as he. Valerius and Ajax will teach you that.’
‘I want to learn it from you.’ Math’s face was pinched and white under the violent afternoon sun. Blued echoes of sleeplessness and anguish laid their prints beneath his eyes. The joy with which he had held Ajax was burned away in a loss for which he felt responsible.
Pantera felt himself too tall, but did not want to crouch. He sat on a stone bollard set into the dockside and so brought his face level with Math’s. ‘You’ve learned almost as much as I can teach you,’ he said. ‘But I promise you now that if it’s possible to come back after we’ve killed Saulos, I will do it. And an oath to you given from the heart is worth ten to other people.’
Math bit his lip. ‘Will you really kill Saulos?’
‘I swear to you I will do everything I possibly can to kill Saulos.’
‘And not let him kill you?’
‘Not if I can help it, no. Math—’ He caught his hand awkwardly. He was not Math’s brother, and had never known how to hold him. ‘You can blame yourself for this, and become bitter and sour. Or you can accept the gift of freedom and know that bitterness will not sweeten anything for anyone. Will you try not to be bitter, if I try not to get myself killed?’
Math’s grey eyes were swollen and red. A single tear spilled from one corner. ‘I’ll try.’
‘Which is the best anyone can do. If I can free the chariot colts, I’ll do it. If I get them, I’ll send them to Britain; that way you’ll know I’m still alive and hunting Saulos. You should go now. I think they’re waiting.’ He put his arm round Math and hugged him. It felt right. ‘Don’t forget this.’
Math walked alone down the dockside and up the wooden plank that led to the ship.
The
Sun Horse
was manned by eight Gauls; big blond men who spoke little and moved about the boat with soft feet and deft hands and took their places willingly at the rowing benches to take the ship from harbour; on this boat, there were no slaves. Her master knew Ajax by his other name, and greeted Math as if he were royalty.
‘Son of Caradoc,’ he said, ‘we have waited for you these ten long years. Welcome.’
Math found a place at the stern, where he could still watch the shore. A yard away, on the dockside, separated from them by an arm’s length of sea that could have been stepped over with ease, Pantera had remounted.
With Seneca on one side and Mergus on the other, he waited to see the ship leave and it seemed to Math that the spy’s grief hung around him like raven’s wings, as Hannah’s did. She had gone to the front of the boat, and would not look back. So much hurt, and so much joy. Math thought he might tear apart, pulled by each of them.
Pantera caught his eye and waved. Math waved back, and on that signal the ship’s master blew a whistle. Seven men moved into place with military speed. Last, the Gaul remaining on shore cast off the rope and jumped aboard and they pushed off from the harbour.
The oars dipped and pulled. The boat lurched forward and again, and then settled into the surge and ebb of smooth rowing.
The tall man of Math’s dreams came to stand at his side. ‘There’s a woman standing in the shade of the harbourmaster’s house,’ Valerius said. He didn’t point, but directed his eyes a little south. ‘Hannah knows she’s there, but not, I think, your brother. He sees what he needs, and it seems he does not need to see that. Who would she be?’
Math looked where he was shown. ‘It’s Hypatia,’ he said. ‘She’s going to Jerusalem with Pantera to help kill Saulos.’
‘Thank you. I had hoped it would be so. I’ll leave you now. Segoventos says we’ll have good weather for the full voyage. He was trained by his father, who was the best ship’s master I’ve ever met. Even so, I shall spend the days puking over the side. You would be doing me a kindness if you did not offer me food.’
T
he ship sailed due west, down the line of the setting sun. Late in the evening, Math moved to the bow to catch the last of the failing light. Between one breath and the next, he saw the sun set fire to the world. What had been tints of flame on the bow-wave spread out and out across the wide sea until the whole blue-grey glittering ocean became a bed of living flame too bright to bear.
He closed his eyes. The fire grew stronger behind the dark of his lids, rising from sea to sky. A hand reached through it. He extended his own hand in response and felt it grasped by a dry, firm grip.
‘Welcome. I had hoped it would be you.’
The voice was Shimon’s, the peaceful voice of a man come home to himself.
Math opened his eyes. Hot fire continued to rise to the sky, blotting out the sunset. It filled the whole of the world, from horizon to horizon, with living flame; the ship was gone.
Shimon was the fire’s centre, standing upright, bound to a stake. Beyond and behind, men and women watched in their straggling hundreds, huddled in groups together. Their mouths were open, shouting. No sound came, not even the roaring flames.
‘Math?’ Shimon spoke in the silence in his head. ‘Could you assist me?’
Math had no idea what to do, and then did. He reached a hand out to untie the bindings that held his friend. The fire did not touch him.
‘Thank you.’
Stepping free, Shimon rinsed his hands and face in the flames as he might at the morning’s water trough. He looked past Math. His face, cast in shimmering gold by the fire, became radiant with a new joy.
‘Lord.’ He made to kneel. A man came forward from Math’s left, and caught him, saying, ‘Don’t kneel, my friend. All kneeling is done. You have done all that could have been asked of you, and more. Be safe now, and well.’
They embraced, two men of same height and same build, only that Shimon was the elder by three decades.
A woman came, wreathed in flame and sun. Her hair was black smoked silk. Her eyes were almonds. She said, ‘Shimon,’ and it was a summoning and a welcome and a thanks. The fire consumed them, all three.
‘Math.’ Valerius’ voice reached for him. ‘You need to come back now.’
Hannah’s face grew from the fire. Ajax was a bear, hunting the sunset. Pantera had blood dribbling down over one eye.
Math closed his own eyes and opened them again. The faces vanished, replaced by the darkling waves. The sun was old and almost set. It laid beaten copper on the ocean.
Valerius sat beside him looking vaguely ill. ‘What did you dream?’ he asked.
‘Shimon’s dead,’ Math said. ‘He wants us to know that he’s safe and beyond pain. And Hannah’s mother sends her love to all of us.’ He turned, to look into the black eyes. ‘Pantera will come and find us, won’t he? Later, when he’s killed Saulos?’
‘The god holds that man close,’ Valerius said. ‘When he’s killed Saulos, if he can travel to join us, he will.’
He left soon after that. Math stayed at the bow until the sun’s last bruise left the waves and the moon rose to salt them silver, colour of new hope, and new life.
Then he sent his mind forward to the land ahead, to the sisters he had never met, that she might know he was coming, and might dream a safe journey home.
THE END
The Emperor’s Spy
has had a long gestation period. The first seeds were set while I was writing the first novel in the four-part Boudica cycle, when I was looking forward to a time beyond Boudica, and wanting to revisit some of the surviving characters beyond the events of ad 61.
I knew very little of the great fire of Rome apart from the useful fact that it was three years after the end of the Boudican revolt, which seemed a good time frame for a sequel. Later, while researching the life of the Emperor Nero for the second Boudica novel, I found more – for instance that there’s no way Nero fiddled while Rome burned, in part because fiddles hadn’t been invented in ad 64, but mainly because, contrary to popular opinion, he was doing his level best to help his people. Nero was a chariot racer as well as an actor/singer and I spent most of
Boudica: Dreaming the Bull
with an image in the back of my mind showing a boy racing his chariot against a background of flames.
True to that image, at the end of
Boudica: Dreaming the Bull
I left Caradoc and his newborn son, Math, in Gaul with plans to come back later. In the four years that followed, I gathered snippets of useful information. In particular, I watched a television documentary in which it was pointed out that the fire was lit on the first night in ad 64 in which Sirius, the dog star, rose over Rome – and that there were in circulation at the time ‘apocalyptic manuscripts’ which predicted that the Kingdom of Heaven would arise only if Rome were to burn under the eye of the dog star.
Even for a hardened cynic, that was too much of a coincidence to be accidental. The programme went on to suggest that ‘one of the many sects of Christianity’ had lit the fire on the grounds that they were the only ones with a vested interest in bringing about the Kingdom of Heaven, which in turn seemed entirely reasonable.
Thus, when it came time to begin
The Emperor’s Spy
, there were two primary routes of research. The first was to create the characters who could successfully carry through what was by then looking like a spy thriller. The second was to come to grips with the history of very early Christianity – that period between the death of the man we know today as Jesus Christ and the development of the ‘many sects’ who battled it out for control of the new religion in the second and third centuries.
The first of these was by far the easier. Quite early on, I discovered references to the gravestone of an archer named Julius Abdes Pantera. He died in Germany, but he had served in Judaea and there are mentions in early Christian texts that Christ was in fact the son of Pantera. I chose not to carry that through (it was a complication too far), but ‘the Leopard’ was such a perfect name for a spy that I couldn’t let it go completely. Sebastos Abdes Pantera arrived early, bright and shiny and whole – a writer’s dream.
Others grew around him: I have followed Ajax from childhood and wish to follow him through his adulthood into old age, if he survives that long. Valerius is an old friend and I considered bringing him back, but decided that he had grown through the great learning of his life and deserved some peace, so we see him only at the end.
* * *
And so I began to investigate the ‘many sects’ of Christianity, to find which one might have started the fire. I had an idea that Peter, Paul and Mary might each have founded their own traditions by then, each teaching something different, and that this might have been a source of conflict.
I was wrong. In fact, I was completely wrong, and so was the TV documentary. There were, it turns out, dozens of early sects, each claiming a monopoly on the truth – but none of them got off the ground until the early second century. At the time we’re talking about – the mid-60s of the first century ad, thirty years after the crucifixion – there were no sects at all, just two competing groups of people.
The first, much larger group was composed of the Sicari zealots who had lived, worked and fought with the man known then as Judas the Galilean, and continued his work after his death. They were supported by the many, many thousands of followers who had joined what the contemporary historian Josephus calls ‘the Fourth Philosophy’.
The second, smaller group was led by the man we know as St Paul, self-proclaimed ‘apostle to the Gentiles’ who had been sprinting around the eastern Mediterranean doing his utmost to undermine the Galilean’s followers, preaching a new covenant based on the abjuration of the old Hebrew laws and the creation of a new faith. Reading between the lines of Acts, Paul’s attested letters and the book of James, it seems clear to me that he hated them and they hated him to the point where they tried to kill him and only swift action by the local Roman legions in Jerusalem got him out alive.