Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 Read online

  ‘Yes,’ Pantera said. ‘Watch him, find out who he reports to and why, and then come back to Seneca’s lodgings with the news – you know where they are? Good. But if you are caught by this man or his master, you’ll have to tell them everything you know – my name, Seneca’s name, where we met and how, and all that happened this evening. Don’t hold anything back. The emperor’s men don’t ask nicely if they think they’re being lied to, but if you tell the truth, they might leave you alone and come after us. Math …?’ He caught Math’s cheek and turned his head. ‘Are you listening? You are following one of Nero’s servants and it will serve nobody if you are stubborn and die. You will not be protecting us. Is that clear?’

  Math nodded. ‘They won’t catch me.’

  ‘Good. The man who’s following us is currently hiding behind the house with the gold on the roof tiles and the marble lions outside. In a moment, we’ll turn away. You will seem to run home. When we have gone out of sight, find him and follow him and hear all that he says and to whom. And eat your cheese sparingly. It might be a long night.’

  He gripped Math’s shoulder, as men did when they came off the fishing boats after a storm. ‘Good luck.’

  Pantera turned away and signalled for the scrawny Roman to follow. Math stood under the bright moon a moment and waved at their backs, then shrugged for the sake of the man watching, much as he had done at the docks, and loped off in the direction of the horse barns.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The night was uncomfortably quiet. Seneca the Younger, stoic philosopher, spymaster and one-time mentor to the Emperor Nero, waited in silence by a table in the dining room of a borrowed villa, and watched Pantera move about in the shadows beyond the candlelight.

  Knowing his subject, the philosopher did not ask any of the questions that pressed so urgently for answers. After the disaster of their meeting in the alley, he had no wish to sully the evening further, and he had long ago found that with this man, of all those he had ever taught, patience was his best and most certain weapon.

  Patiently, therefore, and in silence, he watched Pantera make a methodical examination of the room exactly as Seneca had taught him long ago, noting the exits and entrances, the points of weakness and of strength, the places where a man might stand hidden, listening to the discourse within.

  There were few enough of these. The house was a soldier’s, neat and plain, with little by way of luxury.

  Two dining couches stood by a table laid with cheese and olives, figs and grapes and small rolls of pickled fish. In one corner, a lit brazier glowed softly red, warding the night’s chill from the air. A nine-fold candelabra stuffed with fat candles was set at a careful angle so that it spilled brighter light across the seating, but left in shadow a niche in one wall wherein was set a simple altar. A row of four cages standing against the wall nearby held sleeping doves that might have been for sacrifice, if the god of the altar required such things.

  On the floor, subdued mosaics picked scenes from the lives of Achilles and Patroklos, from first meeting through shared war to the final blazing funeral pyre and the frantic chariot race sponsored by the grieving hero in honour of his dead lover. The winning chariot ran ahead of the rest, pointing the way out of the room and through an open archway that, in turn, led on to an unroofed courtyard. Somewhere near the centre of that, a fountain spilled water into a raised pool alive with schools of small fish, while above, scattered stars made a dense and distant ceiling.

  On this night of reunion, the moon was not yet full. Its reflection danced lopsidedly on the perfect circle of the fountain’s pool. When Pantera walked out under the black sky and stood beside it a while, observing his own reflection, Seneca’s patience cracked at last.

  ‘Nero will send for you,’ he said.

  ‘He already has.’ Pantera hitched one hip on to the fountain’s lip and trailed his fingers in the effervescent water. ‘I am to meet my lord and emperor in private conversation at the magistrate’s residence early tomorrow morning before the chariots line up for the first race. He wishes to thank me for my services in Britain.’

  ‘He wishes to hire you,’ Seneca said. ‘To bring you into his fold, to use you as he uses all the best that I made for him.’ It was his first fear and his deepest. He took pains to keep that fact from his face.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Pantera shifted slightly, so that the marble took all of his weight. He balanced, swaying, a breath away from falling into the water. Folding his arms, he turned back towards the light.

  ‘You’re thinner than you used to be,’ he observed. ‘Word has it that you live now on spring water and fresh dates, picked only by your own hand as a means to avoid the emperor’s poisoners.’

  His voice made it almost a question.

  ‘Partly.’ Seneca nodded towards the food arrayed for them both. ‘I eat more than dates, as you can see, but no red meat, no wine, nothing cooked. I feel better for it. And yes, I consider it safer. Nero could have me slain at any moment if he chose, but he’d see a particular irony in using poison after all I’ve done for him. I will avoid that if I can.’

  ‘And so Seneca no longer believes that a man eats to vomit and vomits to eat? The world is changing faster than I knew.’

  That was an old barb, slung for a cheap point. Sighing, Seneca pulled a footstool from beneath the table and sat on it. The lower rank of candles in the candelabra guttered above his head. He looked down at his laced fingers, at the clipped and then bitten nails.

  ‘I’m sorry for what happened in Britain,’ he said presently. ‘I didn’t intend it when I sent you.’

  ‘I never believed you did.’ As a child might, Pantera ran his fingers through the water, grasping at the stars.

  ‘I’m told you are damaged in mind more than body, and in spirit more than both. Is it true?’

  Forgetting one of his own first rules, Seneca spoke to the reflection rather than the man, and did not look up even when that reflection left him, so all that remained on the black water was the moon’s truncated circle.

  When he did finally raise his eyes, the candles had begun to fail in the dining room, making the shadows darker. In the harlequin light, Seneca could see no sign of Pantera, but heard a snap of leather and a slither of wool on skin. Against all his clamouring instincts, he made himself sit on and on until, unable to hold himself longer, he rose and followed the trail of small sounds.

  Forgetting himself, he gasped aloud.

  A naked figure stood in the soft spill of the candlelight. It took a moment for Seneca to recognize Pantera, but only because the man he knew had displayed the Hebrew distaste for nudity almost to the point of prudishness. In their three decades of life together he had never willingly shed his clothes in Seneca’s company.

  They left his face untouched for fear of killing him too quickly, but to the rest … they wrote their anger on his body. It’s what men do when they have lost their comrades to the enemy and believe they have one alive in their custody. Make yourself ready if you see him.

  A legate of the British legions had told Seneca that; Fabius Africanus, in fact, who owned this house.

  Now, in the unkind light, Seneca was perfectly placed to observe the truth of what he had said; that the pilus prior of the third century, the second cohort of the Second Augustan legion, and his three junior officers had quite literally written their rage on the body of the man they believed to be a British warrior, as a result of which Sebastos Abdes Pantera, who had once been a boy of wide-eyed, feline beauty, bore for ever branded into his chest and abdomen the mark of the second legion: LEG II AVG.

  The stretched leg of the L reached up to meet a knot of hideously scarred tissue at his right shoulder that looked as if a spear had been forced through just above his collar bone and he had been left to hang on it, tearing the tissue. The rest merged with a lacework of less organized burns and scars, where men with knives and hot irons had traced spider’s webs and carved their initials and made maps of their home villages, or the hills, or simpl
y counted time on his body.

  Hidden behind all that, so that he wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t looked, was an older, flat, scarred oval in the centre of the man’s chest that looked as if a fire had been lit there and left to burn.

  ‘Are you weeping?’ Pantera asked, with cold astonishment.

  ‘I believe I am.’ Seneca moved to the brazier and stood over it, warming his hands. ‘It would seem you have the power to hurt me still. Or the men who hurt you have that power. Would you let me arrange for a physician? Nero won’t listen to me, but Polyclitus holds the strings to the treasury, and can be prevailed upon. Largus is still the best of the emperor’s doctors; he could—’

  ‘Spare me false apothecaries, please!’

  Pantera’s voice was a whiplash. Seneca flinched. He had not come prepared for this.

  Pantera, too, was silent a moment. When he spoke again, it was with the dry humour with which he had always masked his soul.

  ‘Forgive me, but I am a little tired of bonesetters and herbalists. I was under the ministration of the governor’s physicians for well over a year. I’m as healed as I’m ever going to be and happy with it. If you think my injuries leave me too compromised to kill a man, or follow one without being seen, then you should have stopped me sending Math out after whoever was following us tonight and sent me instead. I’m sure we’d all have learned something useful.’

  ‘It was never my intent to set you against anyone else, be it in the open or in the dark of an alley. I haven’t come to ask you to work again. It has cost you too much.’ Seneca sensed a moment’s surprise, and allowed himself to believe that the conversation might be moving in the right direction at last.

  ‘What then?’ Pantera asked.

  ‘Retirement,’ Seneca said smoothly. ‘A peaceful step aside. My gold is gone to Nero, but I still own lands at Mentana that grow the best wine in the empire. There’s a farm of mine there with your name on it if you wish. Or elsewhere in the empire if you prefer? Dacia is cold in winter but said to be good. Or Britain, obviously. There are whole villages lacking masters now in the lands of the Dumnonii where corn grows thick as moss and they breed cattle, horses and hunting dogs that would shame any other land in the empire. But then you know that; you spent five years among them, so if you want to pick—’

  ‘No.’

  The vehemence of that one word, and the pain behind it, were as surprising as anything that had happened in an entirely surprising evening. Pantera sank to sit on the tiled floor. His elbows came to rest on his knees and his hands hung loose. He laid his head on his forearms and turned it sideways to the wall.

  For a long time, neither man spoke. At the end, as if in answer to another’s call, Pantera said quietly, ‘Not Britain. Never that.’

  Seneca let out the breath he had held. ‘Was it a woman?’

  Pantera said nothing, which was answer enough.

  ‘Is she still alive?’

  ‘No.’ Pantera still stared at the wall. He shook his head at whatever he saw there. ‘I killed her before the legionaries took us. It was her wish. Her name was Aerthen. It means “at the battle’s end”.’

  Seneca said nothing. After a while Pantera went on. ‘Her mother was one of their dreamers. She could read the future better than any Etruscan augur. So we knew Aerthen would die at the end of a battle, but not which one. It made the days together more precious, I think.’

  ‘Do you have a child still living amongst the Britons?’

  ‘Not living, no. Her mother and I killed her together when the battle’s tide turned. She was three years old.’

  The self-hate in that was unbearable. Seneca lowered his own brow to his forearms, hiding his face in his turn.

  Presently, Pantera reached for his tunic and drew it on. One of the candles failed. From beneath the lesser light, he said, ‘You sent me to Britain to ensure the defeat of the tribes. You had trained me, and I believed that I could do what you wanted. What neither of us expected was that the tribes would change me.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘In every way possible. Within months, when I fought with them, I fought for them. By the second year, I was leading their warriors, and at the very end, when Suetonius Paullinus marched his men down from his battle with the Boudica and the men and women I loved were caught between two lines of sword and shield, I fought as I have never fought before, and it was not for Rome.’

  ‘But you lost.’

  ‘Everyone I knew and cared for died.’

  Pantera’s face was a mask. Seneca railed against that as much as what he had heard. ‘You can’t take the blame for a battle’s loss all on yourself. You are one warrior, one sword, one shield, one—’

  ‘I should have died with them. They were expecting me to do that, to join them with their gods. I had the blade ready. It would have been so easy …’

  The river-brown eyes came round to meet Seneca’s. The pain in them was beyond any man’s bearing.

  ‘Why did you not die, Sebastos?’

  Sebastos. Seneca had not used that name in the reign of two emperors. It came now from the unexplored depths of his soul, unsettling them both.

  Pantera turned. He was holding a small, broad-bladed knife of the kind stabbed into the bull’s throat at sacrifice. ‘I tried,’ he said. ‘I killed four men when they came to take us. I didn’t think they would let me live after that.’

  ‘And yet, if what I’ve been told is true, you withstood three days of torture and told them nothing, even when they crucified you.’

  The knife spun in the air, sharp as a leopard’s tooth. ‘And still I didn’t die. It’s ironic, isn’t it? I should have done. I could have done. I wanted to. The god didn’t let me.’

  Seneca was barely breathing. Pantera lifted a second knife and began to juggle the two, spinning them high from one hand to the other. Iron caught soft gold candlelight and muted it to silver.

  Seneca said, ‘Was it my name that stopped them killing you?’

  ‘Sadly not.’ Pantera smiled. It was not a good thing to see. ‘When I told them I was one of yours, they spat at me for a liar and brought in new inquisitors with fresh ideas of how to break a man. It was only at the end, after they had grown tired of their sport and hung me up to die, that one of them passing heard me call on the god to take my soul. No Briton would ever have called on Mithras. The man spoke to his commander, who thought to find the legate and tell him they had one of the faith dressed as an enemy warrior. When he came, they thought I was dead. The physicians proved otherwise.’

  Pantera stopped juggling at last. He turned to face Seneca. ‘You are going to ask me to work for Rome,’ he said. ‘And I have just explained why you can never again trust my oath and should not ask for it. In the sight of my god, I tell you now that, for the rest of my life, whatever I do, for whatever pay, the oath of my heart – however and to whomsoever it is given – will carry more weight than the oath of my voice.’

  ‘The oath of your heart was given to Rome, once.’

  ‘It will never be so again.’

  Seneca pressed his cupped palms to his eyes. ‘Very well. You have told me why and I can believe it. With a wife and child dead at your own hand, it would be impossible for you to come back to us. But, in the sight of your god, whom I respect,’ Seneca let his hands fall, ‘I will tell you that I am not going to ask of you any more oaths. You weren’t listening. I am asking you to retire. It’s Nero who’ll ask you to work for Rome.’

  Seneca had spoken the truth, and it changed the balance between them so that it was possible to lean on the couches, to eat, to drink the cool well water that was laid ready for them. They didn’t speak. Once, it had been possible to spend hours in the balm of each other’s company in reflective silence, and at last it seemed to Seneca that it might be possible again.

  Presently, a scratching at the door led Pantera to cross the foyer and open it, saying, ‘Welcome, Math. Have you brought us news?’

  The boy scampered in and then slowed at t
he sight of the room’s stark beauty. His slight, angular shadow came to rest on the floor near the philosopher’s feet. An outdoor smell of stale urine and tree sap and mud and moss clung about him.

  Seneca turned slowly. The boy was filthier than he had been in the alley, which was hard to credit. His tunic had a rent in the hem on the right side and his bare feet and stick-thin legs were coated to the knee in congealing mud so that he left a trail of footprints across the clean marble floor. His hair was no longer gold, but hung in damp dregs to his shoulders. A scrape marred one malnourished cheek, blushing the skin blue in the hollows that hunger had left.

  For all of that, his wide grey eyes still commanded all of his face, lighting it with the incendiary mix of insolence, desperation, exhilaration, tenacity and sheer exhaustion that Seneca had seen once before, a long time ago, in the archer’s son who had walked to him from Judaea.

  That boy, now a scarred and wounded man, followed Math across the room and laid a hand on one thin shoulder. ‘Did he catch you?’ he asked.

  Math shook his head. He held himself silent one moment longer, then words spilled out, tumbling over themselves in their hurry.

  ‘He followed you here and stayed a while watching the door, but left when the moon reached its height and went back into town. He met one of the emperor’s men at the Striding Heron tavern opposite the docks. He said,’ his voice deepened in a good approximation of a man’s Latinized Greek speaking Gaulish, ‘“The Leopard met with the Owl at Africanus’s house. The emperor should know before morning.” They left together. I followed them some of the way, but they went into the magistrate’s residence. I nearly went in after them, but …’

  ‘But better to stay alive and come back to tell us,’ Pantera said, drily, ‘than to face certain death at the emperor’s hand. Nero doesn’t like to be spied on. Ask Seneca – he was paid to see it didn’t happen for the first five years of his reign. Description?’

  Math stared, mouth agape.

  Pantera said, ‘What was he like?’

  ‘He was rich. He had silver and gold in his purse and a green jewel on his dagger’s handle. He didn’t look at any of the boys, even when they offered. I think he was going to bed the serving—’