‘Math, what have you got? Can I see?’
After a moment’s hesitation, he uncurled his fingers. She picked up the coin by feel.
‘It’s a denarius,’ he said, but she already knew that. She wasn’t rich; she might have hailed from Rome’s breadbasket, but if she had brought any of its wealth with her when she left, it was all in her head. Like everyone in the team, she owned the tunic she wore every day and a silver belt buckle. Beyond that, and the linen sack with its bandages and unguents, dried herbs and the five nested copper bowls for washing of wounds, she had come to the race barns with nothing and likely would depart with as little. Anyone who lived hand to mouth as she did knew the feel of a denarius without needing light to look.
Quietly, she gave it back to him, wrapping his fingers closed again. ‘Did you steal it? Is that how you scraped your face?’
‘I earned it.’ He could hear the stubborn pride in his own voice and hated it. ‘I didn’t steal it, I earned it.’
‘Oh, Math …’ She pulled him close again and this time he let her. ‘Please be careful.’
They sat in silence for a bit, breathing in each other’s warmth while the horses moved around them.
She was so like his mother. He made himself think of the differences, so that he would never confuse the two: Hannah was dark-haired where his mother had had hair the colour of ripe corn. Hannah’s eyes were a deep brown, his mother’s had been blue-grey, like a mackerel’s back. Hannah was, he thought, maybe ten years younger than his mother, more Ajax’s age, ten or fifteen years older than Math. Hannah spoke Greek first and then Latin and a faulty Gaulish while his mother had spoken three different dialects of northern Gaul for preference, Greek when she must and Latin only under sufferance. Hannah was trained in philosophy and medicine; she spoke to Ajax of Isis and Osiris and of Socrates and Plato, Pythagoras and Demetrius as if they were all alive, gods and men alike. Math’s mother had told him tales of the heroes of Britain who were dead for the most part, and had taught him the daily rituals by which the gods of oak and river were remembered. He chose, for the most part, to forget those now that she was dead.
But one thing the two women had in common was that their time in his life was short. His mother had already gone and Hannah, he knew, would leave soon, Ajax had said that she wasn’t the kind to stay long in one place, or with one man; that it didn’t do to fall in love with her. He had been speaking, it seemed to Math, largely for himself.
Hannah moved a little, and Math caught a brief scent of something else in the wood smoke.
‘What were you celebrating?’ he asked. He felt the searching quality of her look and said, ‘I can smell roast lamb.’
‘Ajax said you were quick.’ She looked down at the straw. ‘It wasn’t me. Someone was celebrating on my behalf.’
She was less still, suddenly, as if a stone had been thrown into the pool of her soul, ruffling the surface. Math sat, waiting.
In a while, she said, ‘A friend of my father’s has searched for me for over half a year. Today his journey ended. He gave a feast to show his gratitude.’
Math said, ‘You don’t like lamb.’ Hannah didn’t ever eat meat; it was another way she was different from his mother.
She nodded, ‘He doesn’t know that. My father died before I was born. My mother returned to Alexandria to give birth to me and see to my childhood. I have never met any of my father’s friends until today.’
They were quiet a while, listening to the horses’ slow eating. Hannah said, ‘His name is Shimon. He wants me to go back with him when he leaves.’
‘Will you?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘But you might?’
He thought this was the first time she had considered that. She reached up and teased a tangle of hair from Sweat’s mane. ‘I might.’
Math picked a piece of straw and sucked on the end, tasting the flavours of autumn and frost. He thought of how Ajax had changed when Hannah came and would change again if she left.
He said, ‘Ajax says everyone who comes to Coriallum is running from something. It’s as far away from Rome as a man can get.’
‘Or a woman?’ Hannah’s eyes were sharp in the grey light. ‘Might we not be running towards something?’
‘He didn’t say that.’
They were quiet a long time after that. Math stared up to the dark roof space.
‘If we win the race tomorrow, Nero will send us to Alexandria to train,’ he said eventually. ‘All his horses go there first, then he picks the best to race for him in Rome. They say it takes two months by sea, or three by road, but that would mean taking the horses over the mountains and they don’t want to do that. We’d have to go by the end of next month or the sea-lanes will be closed. If we win,’ he added. ‘But we won’t.’
Hannah’s hand moved to his shoulder. Math felt her come back from faraway thoughts. ‘Is that what’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘You think you might be stuck in Coriallum all your life? You won’t. The emperor will notice your horses, I’m sure of it.’
‘Ajax still thinks he can win.’ He let his voice show how stupid that was.
Hannah shook her head. Her silk-smoke hair brushed his cheek. He felt her smile. ‘No, he doesn’t. But he doesn’t want the entire team to decide that second place is good enough. “Good enough” is how you lose.’
‘Did Ajax say that?’
‘Yes, and he’s right. You need to keep aiming to win if you want to catch the emperor’s eye. It’s the fire in you all, the need to win, that’ll do it. Ajax said he’ll get you to Rome to race for the emperor if it kills him. He promised it on the shade of your mother.’
‘I know, I was there, but he can’t promise what’s not in his gift.’ Math shook his head. ‘He drew the Green ribbon this afternoon. The gods are against us.’
‘Just because you’ve always been the Red team before doesn’t mean—’
‘Nero hates Green, he thinks it’s unlucky.’
‘Then you’ll just have to show him it’s not.’ Hannah took his head in both her hands and kissed his brow. Her lips were cool and dry, as his mother’s had been except at the end, when they had been hot. ‘And to do that, you need to sleep. You’ll never be a race-driver if you spend the night before a race wide awake. You could come and sleep with me in the healer’s booth. I’ve got a straw pallet and hides. It’s warmer than here.’
The part of Math that stood apart watching others knew that Ajax would give a month’s food for an offer like that. It was almost worth accepting just to see his face in the morning when he found out.
The smell of cheese on his fingers reminded him that he needed to be alone. He shook his head. ‘I need to stay with Sweat and Thunder. They get upset the night before a race.’
‘But, Math, they’re not racing tomorrow. Only the first team goes in the traces.’ Her voice was gentle, not to upset him.
‘I know that,’ he said crossly. ‘But they don’t. They just smell the axle grease and know there’s a race coming. If I leave them now, they’ll keep everyone awake kicking the walls. I need to stay here. And I want to. I’m fine, honestly.’
‘You’re crying, Math. I’ve never seen you cry before.’
‘I was thinking of my mother. She bred Brass and Bronze, who are in the first team. She’d have wanted to see them race.’
‘Then I’ll leave you with her memory. Thank you for telling me.’ Hannah kissed his hair and didn’t comment on its smell. Standing, she said, ‘My mother’s dead, too. She was a healer, far better than me. When I bring a woman to childbirth and both dam and child are healthy, or set a bone and know it will mend, I cry too, out of pride at her memory. It’s not a thing to hide.’ She squeezed his hand again and began to worm her way back between Sweat and the edge of the stall to the passageway.
At the big open doorway, she paused, a black shadow lit by the starlight behind. Raising her head, she sent her voice back to find him. ‘Ajax says you’ll be a race-driver one day if you want it enough. Better than him if you put your mind to it.’
‘I know. Thank you.’ Math made his voice sound true, even if the rest of him knew that Ajax had told Hannah only so that she would pass it on as part of his plan to save Math from himself.
He lay in his straw hollow, listening to her quiet footsteps across the grass, and the splash of urine as she squatted to relieve herself, then the press of straw on straw in her pallet as she lay to sleep.
Her booth was not far from the end of the barn, set at the front of the newly named Green team’s huddle of tents and stalls with the white linen rag hung on a pole outside to show her profession. He waited until he could hear the sound of her sleep-breathing before he got up and moved through the warm, horse-filled dark to talk to Sweat first, who was his favourite, and then Thunder.
He was not crying any longer. He wiped his face dry with his hands and let the colts lick the salt from his palms. He told them they were wonderful, and they would win if they raced, but that they must needs be patient in the morning when Brass and Bronze were harnessed to the big quadriga with the two trace horses who ran behind, and were never as important. They nudged him and flicked their tails and returned to the half-doze of sleep from which he had woken them.
My mother bred them
, he had said to Pantera,
which makes them easier to handle
.
What he had not said was that his mother had bred all eight of the horses that ran for Ajax, the first and the second team, but that these two she had given to her son, taking him to the field on the day two long-legged bay colts were born, Sweat half a morning before Thunder.
She had let him name them and had kept him with her all the way through their early training, until the year when he was five years old and they were three, when she gave them to him as his gift at the midsummer solstice.
They were too good to be owned by a boy of five, of course, and had been sold, but Math knew that one of the conditions of sale was that he be taken on as apprentice when he came of age.
Gordianus, who owned the team then, had said no boy could be an apprentice before he was ten years old. After his mother’s death, nobody expected Math to make ten years, including himself. But Gordianus had broken both his legs the previous year in an accident at the close of the autumn season and it was only by chance that Ajax had been there, just walking in off the last boat before the seas closed for winter, with his shaved head and one ear missing and black, black eyebrows and the scars on his body from races and war and a flogging once. He was jeered for that, early on, before they saw how he could race, and if he had told a dozen different people the story of how he got the scars, he had told a dozen different stories.
To Math, he had said, ‘I was young and I hated the legions. I thought I could best them.’
‘And they caught you,’ Math had asked dutifully.
‘They did.’ Ajax’s quick grin set it on a par with being caught stealing fish from the docks, which happened to everyone. ‘And they’d have killed me after they flogged me. But my mother’s brother was an officer in the auxiliary and he was able to get me released. If your mother doesn’t have a brother in the auxiliary, don’t steal from legions, that’s my advice.’
Somewhere in all the racing and tale-telling, Ajax had shown Gordianus the weight of his money and the deal had been struck; for an untold amount of gold, the practice chariots, the racing chariot, the eight racehorses, sixteen head of young stock, the wainwright and his three apprentices, the loriner and his son, the various stud hands who had kept the breeding herds going after Math’s mother had died, the harness-maker Caradoc of the Osismi – who was Math’s father – and Lucius, the existing apprentice, had all changed hands. So too had the promise to make Math the second apprentice when he came of age.
At the midwinter solstice, not long after the fires had been doused and re-lit to honour the death and re-birth of the sun god, Ajax had come to Math and his father bearing a smoked herring and a sprig of mistletoe across his spread palms. His shaved head had shone in the candlelight as if he’d polished it with oil. The hole where his ear had been cut off was blue at the edges from the cold outside and his black eyebrows seemed drawn with charcoal. Even so, he had looked a little like the sun god, brought back from midwinter to give light to the world.
‘I am told I should give these to the mother of my future apprentice boy,’ he had said in formal tones, ‘as payment for the use of her son for the next nine years. But since he has no mother, I would ask Caradoc of the Osismi, father to Math of the Osismi, to do me the honour of accepting.’
Something had already been said, obviously; Math could see it in the way Ajax’s eyes met his father’s, in the silent communication that took place over his head. It was not the first time; Ajax and Caradoc had got along uncommonly well from the start, which was good, but also meant Math had two of them trying to change who he was.
His father had said, ‘Math? Do you still want to be a race-driver? The work will be hard.’
But not harder than working the docks. Math hadn’t said that, only thought it, but he saw his father read his face and was sorry for it. He was always sorry for the hurt he caused his father, but then almost everything he had done since his mother’s death seemed to bring it on, which was stupid, and made him cross.
And he did not want to be indebted to Ajax. Looking away, he had said, ‘I have work. I bring in enough for us both. I don’t need more.’
He felt their eyes meet again over his head. His father had wanted to answer. Ajax had forestalled him by standing up, saying, ‘Of course. I apologize for insulting you. We don’t have to speak of it again.’
He had shaken Caradoc’s hand. To Math he had said, ‘You have made the horses well. They’ll miss you.’
He had gone then, taking the mistletoe, but leaving the herring. Two nights later, Math had been passing the horse barns and found Ajax trying to use a straw wisp to bring out the shine in Brass’s coat. The horse had a ticklish stomach; there was a certain way to wisp him that worked and Ajax didn’t know it.
Taking the pad of woven straw from his hand, Math had shown him how. Ajax had been leaving when the boy had said, ‘I won’t stop working the docks.’