Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (18 page)

He stood in front of them now a figure of perfect, unbent pride, not hiding the damage to his arms, shoulders and knee that left him lame and fighting pain daily simply to have the use of his hands.

He was Math made old, everyone could see it; his hair was greying at the edges, but the difference in their colourings only served to make him more like his son, not less.

Hannah stepped away from the table. In the same formal Latin that Caradoc had used, she said, ‘Ajax may wake at any time. But meanwhile, he would be honoured that you are acting in his stead. If the emperor’s agent is serious in his offer, perhaps the other members of the Green team could eat? It has been a long day.’

‘And the horses have not yet been seen to,’ Caradoc said.

Almost to a one, the apprentices of the Green team studied their feet. Math alone glared wordless defiance at his father. The air between them crackled back and forth with disappointment and resentment, sharp as lightning, and as hurtful.

From the door, Akakios said, ‘His excellency understood your need to see to the injured man. He has set four of his own men to see to your horses. I am sure they will be settled by now, and perhaps best not further disturbed.’

Caradoc bowed. Crisply, he said, ‘On behalf of Ajax and all the Green team, we extend our grateful thanks to his excellency. We are desolate that he has had to undertake our work in our absence, but are confident that the horses are receiving the best possible care. And we thank you for the offer of gold, but will not need it. Math, if you will return the gentleman’s coin?’

Math flushed from the neck of his tunic to the burning red tips of his ears. With insolent slowness, he fumbled in his tunic for the coin, examined it, then tossed it high in the air for Akakios to catch. It glittered no less than it had done before, for all that it so clearly carried the taint of shame.

Hannah wanted to hug Math, and could not. Nor could she help his father, who possibly needed it more. With a healer’s eye, she saw the effort it took for Caradoc to hold himself upright, and because she was looking, she witnessed the brief, private moment when his gaze fell on Ajax’s face weighted with a depth of love and grief that easily matched his desperate, unrequited care for Math.

* * *

As with all rumours, news travelled fast that the emperor favoured the Green team, and would send them to Alexandria to match with his best and perhaps thence to Rome.

Finding he had heroes in his inn, the gap-toothed tavern-master sent up a second table, and a third, and followed the stews of pork and wild garlic with bread and ale and wine for those who wanted it.

Sated, drunk for the most part, elated as much by their belief in Ajax’s recovery as by the prospect of their promised journey, the family that was the Green team slept in the upper room, all twenty-three of them, laid out on straw pallets, with their cloaks rolled as pillows. Even Math was persuaded not to leave them in favour of the horses. In a gesture as close to conciliation as she had seen from him, he brought pallets from the pile for Hannah, his father and himself.

Hannah settled herself by the still-sleeping Ajax and nobody offered any ribald comments. Caradoc took the wounded man’s other side. She felt him lie awake for a while, staring at the thatch and the flittering bats and the sprinkling of starlight squeezing through the eaves. Later, she heard the steadiness of a breath that moves to sleep.

Math was on her other side. He lay awake longer. She thought he might get up and go down into the town as he had done so often before. She felt him tense once, and slid her arm across, so that the back of her hand touched his.

‘Please stay?’ she said, and waited until she felt him subside. She rolled on her side. He was a shape barely seen in the dark. She stroked a finger down his face. ‘You did it,’ she whispered. ‘Your horses were the best. They’ll be the best in Egypt too. You’ll go to Rome.’

‘Will we?’ He was too solemn for a boy of nearly ten, too aware of all that might go wrong, or that might go right, which could be worse.

‘All of you. Even your father.’

He pulled a face. She picked up his fingers and kissed them, and then his brow. After a while, he took her hand, too, and pressed hot, dry lips to the knuckle of her thumb before he rolled away to face the night. She thought he sank into sleep soon after.

Hannah lay awake longest, but even she slept in the end, on the well-tested basis that she could do her patient no further good by staying awake through the night, and that worrying changed nothing for the morning.

I
n her dream, Hannah lay on a river’s bank. Three men lay around her. Ajax was closest, sleeping, but whole. His hair had grown back gold as corn, but only in a ridge along the length of his scalp from brow to spine, so that it stuck up like the crest on a cockerel. His missing ear showed more clearly because of it. His face was peaceful. She loved him; in the dream, it was possible to acknowledge that.

Pantera lay on her other side, bleeding from wounds to his arms and legs. She knew those; they came from her earliest dreams of childhood. Because of them, she thought the third man, whom she could not properly see, might be her father although it could as easily have been Caradoc, who was the kind of man she would have liked as a father. She wanted to tell Math, but he was gone and she could not find him.

A frond of grass tickled her nose, making her sneeze. She pushed it away and it became instead a veil of long black hair, shimmering in the river light. Two women in her life had had hair like that. One of them was dead. Hannah sat up slowly.

Her mother knelt at her side, young and beautiful, as in her earliest memories. Her mother’s hair made her sneeze a second time. Her mother’s voice said, ‘Wake. Hannah, you must wake. It is not for this you were born. Your world is afire.’

‘Three men,’ Hannah said, smiling, ‘do not constitute a fire. Perhaps a small conflagration, but nothing I cannot walk away from.’

‘It’s a fire,’ her mother insisted. ‘You must not walk now, you must run, and the men with you. Two of them only, not the third.’

Once before, Hannah had dreamed of a death, and had not acted in time. The weight of it pressed her days. To repeat that mistake was unthinkable. Urgently, she caught her mother’s wrist. ‘Which one dies?’

But her hand closed on river air; her mother was already gone. Only the warmth of her voice remained, becoming warmer, even as she departed. ‘Wake, Hannah. Wake and run.’

‘
Hannah!
’

Math tugged at her wrist. His face hovered over her, his eyes wide as owls’. ‘Hannah, wake up. Please wake up. Hannah!’

In the middle of the night, she could see the shine of his hair as if it were noon. That fact alone brought her sharply awake. Smoke streamed around her, like morning fog, stinging her eyes. She sneezed again, the third time, and heard the predatory roar of a young fire, stretching itself.

Math shook her again. ‘There was a man,’ he hissed urgently. ‘I saw him! Quiet, like Pantera. He’s just gone.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen him before. But he’s made a fire!’

Hannah sat up. Blistering orange flames lit Math and then Ajax, and beyond them both a room of sleeping men.

‘We have to get Ajax out,’ she said, rising. ‘Wake your father.’

Caradoc lay on Ajax’s other side, nearer the smoke. Math leaned over and shook his father, stiffly, as if it were a thing he had never done.

Hannah saw the heartbeat of wary unknowing as Caradoc opened his eyes, the shock of understanding and the need to move. Then she saw him reach for his son’s hand and briefly clasp it. ‘Thank you.’

Math flashed a shy grin and helped his father up. Caradoc turned an uneven circle on his heel, taking in the room, the smoke, the flames, the single exit. As he came full circle back to Hannah, she felt him lift the weight of responsibility from her to him. ‘Take what help you need to get Ajax down the ladder,’ he said. ‘Math and I will wake the rest.’

Math needed no second word. Through the haze, Hannah saw him dodge nimbly among the pallets, shaking awake men and boys who had taken wine with their meal and so were slow to wake, and fuddled when they did so.

With a thief’s quick wits, he began to sift those who could help from those whose panic made them a liability. The former he sent to Hannah, to help her move Ajax. The latter he herded instead towards the ladder, with orders to wake the landlord and the town’s foremen, who might come with water to help.

Caradoc gripped Hannah’s shoulder. ‘Get Ajax out as soon as you can,’ he said. ‘I’ll help Math.’

Her mother’s warning sang in her mind. Two of them, not three. She took Caradoc’s hand and held it. ‘Keep safe.’

He smiled for her through the fire and smoke and was gone.

Flames skirted her head, singeing her hair. She knelt at Ajax’s side and laid her fingers on his neck, to feel his pulse. At her touch, he opened his eyes, foggily.

She said, ‘Fire.’

‘Deliberate?’ Even wounded, he thought faster than any man she knew.

‘Math said he saw someone.’

‘The Blues,’ Ajax said caustically. ‘Come to finish what they started in the race.’

Men and boys pushed past her, heading for the hatch and freedom. She heard the hollow clatter of their boots on the ladder. Already, the smoke was too thick to see who went down.

At Math’s instruction, three had stayed back from the rush to escape: the German twins who were from the Rhine banks and so feared nothing but the river of their birth, plus the loriner’s son, who was blind in one eye and not great in the other and had long ago learned to move by feel, and not to panic in the dark.

A clod of burning thatch fell near the trapdoor and the ladder. Holding her breath, Hannah rolled Ajax on to his undamaged side. His nose was streaming; she felt the mucus smear up her forearm.

She said, ‘Do you hurt?’

‘Everywhere.’ Remarkably, his smile was real. ‘I don’t think I can walk. I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t want you to. You’ve cracked a rib.’

She turned to the shapes half seen in the smoke. ‘Get the table! We need to carry him flat.’

The German twins broke the table in half along its length and dragged the slimmer part to her. The effort brought them all to coughing. In the short time of her inattention, the smoke had filled the room. She looked down. All she could see of Ajax was his eyes and the pale bandage at his head.

Caradoc came to her, a figure in the dark. His tunic was gone. He felt for Hannah’s hand. ‘Take this.’ He pressed into her palm a scrap of torn wool, hotly wet.

‘What?’ She, too, was coughing now.

‘Tunic … pee,’ he said, and then, more clearly, with his mouth near her ear, ‘Wool soaked in urine. Press it to your nose and breathe. It keeps off the smoke.’

He was right. Her mother had given her the same advice once, in life, not in a dream. Her mother had not had Caradoc of the Osismi to tear up his tunic and piss on it for her.

Hannah pressed the square of wool to her nose and breathed in. Above the howl of the fire, she shouted, ‘It works. Do it,’ and saw the German twins shrug at each other and take what Caradoc gave them.

With their help, she rolled Ajax on to the table. He winced, but offered no complaint. The Germans took one end, a corner each. The loriner’s son took the other. She felt Caradoc push forward for the fourth.

She caught his shoulder. ‘Where’s Math?’

‘Gone down the ladder.’

‘I didn’t see him.’ She looked about her.

The Germans shook their heads. ‘Not here,’ they said together.

Caradoc spun about. She heard him breathe in through the pissed wool, then lift it away.

‘Math?’ His voice echoed damply from the rafters, and again, louder. ‘
Math!
’

The fire answered, roaring. Somewhere in the middle of the room, an oak beam cracked and fell with sickening force.

Above the noise, Hannah shouted, ‘He must have gone downstairs.’

‘I’ll make sure,’ Caradoc yelled back. ‘Get Ajax out. The four of you can do that.’

They could. Slow as slugs, they crossed the floor, kicking burning pallets out of the way, swimming through a fog of smoke to the bright light that was the flame-arched trapdoor and the ladder to safety.

Or not to safety. Reaching it, Hannah found the ladder led to more fire; the downstairs was on fire now as well. A gout of flame shot up from the trapdoor to greet her.

From the table’s end, one of the German twins shouted, ‘The table will not fit in the trapdoor. Go down, you and the blind one. We will pass you the driver.’

Hannah hesitated, feeling the fire’s heat. The loriner’s son shouted close to her ear. ‘We may as well die in the fire down there as up here. If they lower him to us, I can run with him.’

The climb down the ladder was a nightmare of burning oak that ate the skin of her hands, but they came to the beaten earth of the tavern’s floor alive. Shouting a warning, the twins sent Ajax slithering feet first down the ladder.

He came to her only barely conscious. She caught him round his waist so that his head fell on her shoulder. Flames washed them both. Every breath scorched her lungs.

‘Let me.’

The loriner’s son was thin and wiry and had a persistently bad chest. If she’d been asked, Hannah would not have thought he had the strength to carry a lamb fresh from birthing, but, true to his word, he slung Ajax over his shoulder and ran with him. She could not see where he went.

The German twins slid down the ladder’s edges, stripping the skin from their palms as she had. They landed on either side of her, shielding her from the flames with their bodies. Another beam crashed down upstairs, rocking the oak above their heads. Somewhere in the conflagration of the ground floor, a wall collapsed.

To the twins, Hannah shouted, ‘
Caradoc? Math?
’

‘Coming,’ said one.

‘Behind us,’ said the other.

‘Both?’

‘Yes.’

They tried to make her leave, one on either side, taking her elbows. She dug in her heels and held the ladder and fought them to let her go. Her hands were burning, she felt the skin part on her knuckles.