Most Wanted (2 page)
Authors: Kate Thompson
W
hen I was small, before Little Boots took our cart horses, I was sometimes allowed to sit up on one of them while our good old slave Drusus led it on the delivery round. I never got to go faster than a shambling kind of trot, but I did at least know how it felt to have a horse underneath me.
If I hadn't, I'm sure Incitatus would have lost me in the first three strides. He took off as though he were back on the racecourse, as if he were sick and tired of being a consul and wanted nothing more than a good gallop around the streets.
I clung to his thick mane and prayed to Artemis to keep me safe. The purple blanket was no substitute for a saddle, but it could have been worse. In the summertime, so I'd heard, Incitatus wore a silk one, and if he had been wearing that now, my head would have been bouncing off the cobbles.
I couldn't remember how to steer. I'm not sure I ever learned, because the cart horses always had someone leading them. I wanted to turn to the right, but the end of the chain was in my left hand and on the left side of the horse's neck. But if I pulled it and turned left, it would lead me back toward the center of the city, straight into the swords of the palace guard.
The desire to stay alive gave me the courage to do something that seemed, to my inexperienced mind, to be practically impossible. I leaned forward as far as I could and passed the chain beneath the horse's neck, from my left hand to my right. Just in the nick of time I pulled on it. The consul's head turned, and we skidded around the corner and into the next street.
Sparks flew from his shoes. Seeing the open stretch of the street ahead of him, Incitatus dropped his head and increased his speed. He swerved around a porter carrying a huge sack, who must have been deaf because he didn't get out of the way. Everyone else in that street squeezed themselves flat against the walls as we went thundering by, the purple blanket fluttering like an empty sail behind us.
I changed hands again and turned Incitatus sharply to the left, into an alley that was too narrow for a cart. A girl flattened herself into a doorway. I saw the breeze of our passage ruffle her hair as we shot past. A smaller child squealed and called for his mother and crouched beneath the open window of his house in terror.
Left again, not so sharply this time, and into another narrow street with tall apartment buildings leaning in to meet one another above our heads and shutting out the light. They were badly built, most of those places, and several of them had collapsed over the past few years. Dozens of people had been killed, but there was no help for the survivors. Not from the builders or from the landlords or from the emperor. They could sleep on the streets for all anyone cared, and the truth is a lot of them did.
To the right again now, and then left, and straight on across another main thoroughfare. I prayed that it wouldn't be filled with soldiers looking for Incitatus. It wasn't, but just as we got there our crossing was blocked by two more of our bakery handcarts, both of them empty. One was being pushed by my brother Lucius, the other by my cousin Quintus. They heard the horse charging toward them and abandoned the carts. Incitatus hesitated, but he was going far too fast to stop. He altered his stride, and I felt the decision through his body as he powered forward and gathered himself for the jump. I clung on, certain of disaster, but the consul cleared the carts with ease and plunged straight on into the opposite street.
One more right turn, then one more, and I was home. At the gates of our yard I hauled on the golden chain. The horse was reluctant to stop, and we overshot the gates and went on several more yards before I got him under control and turned him back. I slid off and leaned, weak-kneed and quivering, against our compound gates.
I
have a bit of a reputation in my family and it's not really fair. Whenever anything goes missing or gets broken, I'm blamed for it, whether it's my fault or not. It's true that I'm a bit on the clumsy side and my arms and legs don't always go exactly where I want them to, but it's still not right to blame everything on me.
I did lose two sacks of wheat once, but that was because a lad tricked me into going to look at an enormous fish, and while I was gone, some other lads robbed my cart. And it's true that I once harnessed the wrong ox to the grinder. It was a young one that hadn't been properly trained, and it went berserk and pulled the whole thing to pieces. But everyone makes mistakes sometimes, don't they?
I'm not really a walking disaster, but I have to admit I found myself wondering about it as I hammered on the compound gates. Maybe it would have been smarter to keep riding until I reached the outskirts of the city and then abandon the horse when he was too tired to follow me home. But you know what? I couldn't have done it.
I was flushed with excitement after the race through town, and I was totally besotted with the horse that had shared the adventure with me. He had looked after me, done what I asked, and brought me safely home. He had outrun the soldiers, kept his feet on the uneven stones of the streets, and jumped a pair of handcarts. I wouldn't have abandoned him now if Little Boots himself had arrived to collect him.
Well. Maybe I would.
“Who is it?” my father called through the gates.
“It's me, Marcus,” I said. “And . . . and I've brought the consul Incitatus home with me.”
I
ncitatus and I stood in the middle of the yard as the crowd around us grew. First there was only my father, staring at us as if we had dropped out of the clouds, and then he was joined by my two sisters, Tiberia and Appia, and my mother, and then my aunt came out of her house with two more of my cousins, and then my grandmother and the two elderly slaves who still looked after her.
None of them wanted to believe that the horse was the consul Incitatus. My father wanted to strip all the finery off him and turn him out into the lane.
“Whatever he is, he's trouble,” he said. “How could you be so stupid as to bring him here?”
I told the story again, carefully explaining that I'd had no choice, but no one seemed to understand.
“Better to keep the horse and throw the boy out,” said my aunt. “He's nothing but trouble and always has been.”
I saw my mother turn on her and braced myself for another of their interminable arguments, but just then Incitatus raised his tail and dropped a heap of steaming manure onto the dusty floor of the yard. That silenced everyone. Not because of the smell and the mess. We have always had animals in the yardâhorses in the old days, only oxen now. It was what we saw in the dung that left us all speechless. It glittered. It shone. It was full of tiny sparkling pieces of gold.
That was another of the stories that everyone had heard about the emperor's favorite horse but no one ever quite believed: Incitatus was fed on mangoes and apples and on oats mixed through with gold flakes.
My aunt looked around. With the gates closed no one could see into our compound, but all the same it was as though there were eyes everywhere. We all felt it. My older sister, Appia, scooped the dung into a bucket and hid it underneath the lemon tree.
“We have to get him out of sight,” my mother said. She opened the door to one of the stables and let our three dogs out. Two of the other stables had broken roofs, and the remaining ones had gradually filled with junk since the horses had gone.
I led Incitatus to the door. He stopped.
“Come on,” I said. “Nice stable for you, see?”
But the consul did not agree and refused to go in. My father raised his arms and growled at him, but Incitatus laid back his ears and ignored him.
“Get him in!” said my aunt, and we could all hear the panic in her voice. “Quickly! Before someone comes and sees him.”
Appia fetched the whip we use to drive the oxen on the grinder. My father raised it threateningly, but Incitatus took exception to this and reversed determinedly away from the stable door, dragging me helplessly with him.
“Stupid boy!” said my aunt, but neither she nor my father dared actually use the whip on Incitatus. Horse or no horse, he was one of Rome's consuls and a member of the emperor's household.
“At least take off the purple robe,” said my mother.
But no one dared to do that, either, and while we were all standing around wondering what to do next, there was a loud knock at the yard gates.
The dogs barked. Everyone froze where they stood, with the exception of Incitatus, who gave me a hard nudge with his nose and began to walk over to the inviting double doors of the bakery. I pulled him up, but my mother shook her head and gestured to me to take him in there.
This time he didn't hesitate but marched straight into the dark, sweet-scented building. I can't say I blamed him. It was a palace compared with that small, doggy stable. My mother closed the door behind us, and I heard my father quiet the dogs and ask who was at the gates.
“Quintus and Lucius,” came my brother's voice. “Let us in, quick!”
Even behind the bakery doors I could hear the monstrous sigh as everyone let out their breaths together. The gates creaked, and the handcarts rattled in. I knocked. My mother opened the doors a crack and let me out.
“Have you heard the news?” Lucius was saying.
“What news?” said my father.
But my brother waited until the gates were firmly closed and bolted and the family gathered in a close huddle around him before he would say any more. Even then he whispered as he told us what he had heard.
“It isn't certain,” he said, “but they're saying on the street that Little Boots is dead.”
Y
ou would expect us to celebrate, perhaps, to clap and cheer and dance around the compound with delight. We didn't. Instead a silence fell over us, so profound that even the dogs stopped their energetic activities and slumped down in the dust.
Behind the bakery doors Incitatus whickered anxiously, and I heard the
thud-thud-thud
of more of his golden droppings landing on the spotless floor. Every one of us hoped that what we had heard was true, but every one of us, from my aged grandmother right down to my seven-year-old cousin, was thinking the same thing.
It was a trick.
It would be just like Little Boots to do something like that: spread the word that he was dead and then, while people are celebrating and sacrificing victims to the gods, send out his soldiers to arrest them all for disloyalty. Then he could confiscate their property and use the proceeds to finance his perverted pleasures, and send them to the Circus Maximus to fight his professional gladiators, or cut off their hands and string them around their necks, or feed them to his lions and alligators and other dreadful beasts.
But we would not fall into that trap. We stayed silent. Incitatus whickered again, and I opened one of the doors so he could see us.
“We continue as usual,” said my grandmother at last. She spoke softly, afraid of eavesdroppers. “We do nothing and say nothing until we smell the smoke from his funeral pyre.”
“Not even then,” said my father. “I would need more proof than that.”
“Who will be emperor next?” said my little sister, Tiberia.
“Shhh,” said my mother. “Hold your tongue.”
We had a plan then, about how to react to the rumor. But we still had a serious problem on our hands.
“What are we going to do about the consul?” I said.
“The best plan,” said my father, “is to wait until dark, then strip all the finery off him and turn him loose in the street.”
“That kind of plan never works,” said my mother. “There's always some child or a nosy old sweeper who's bound to see you. And what would it look like, turning loose a perfectly good horse?”
My grandmother agreed. “The emperor would have us in our own ovens if he ever found out we did that.”
“In any case,” I said, “Incitatus likes us. If we turn him out, he won't go anywhere. He'll just stand outside the gates until we let him back in.”
My aunt glared at me, but she didn't say anything.
“So there are two choices, as far as I can see,” said my mother. “We take him back to the palace and hand him over, or we keep him here, hidden away until we discover what has happened.”
“There's another thing we can do,” said my tough cousin Quintus. “We can cut him up and feed him to the dogs.”
Lucius grinned. “That would serve Little Boots right.”
My grandmother stepped forward into our midst. “Now listen, all of you,” she said. “That boy”âshe poked me hard in the collarboneâ“came riding in here this afternoon at a very high speed. The horse is wearing a purple robe and a head collar dripping with jewels. Does everyone here really believe that no one will have noticed?”
Everyone didn't. When we stopped to think about it,
no
one did.
“Someone somewhere knows that Incitatus is here,” my grandmother went on. “So losing him or feeding him to the dogs will do us no good.”
Quintus shrugged, but everyone else nodded, and my grandmother continued. “It's my opinion that your son, my own grandson, signed a death sentence for everyone in this family when he brought Incitatus to these gates.”
My heart stopped and my breath got stuck in my throat. I felt as though I were already standing in front of Little Boots, waiting to hear what particular horrors he had chosen for me.
“No!” I managed to blurt.
“He didn't mean it,” said my mother, moving closer to me.
“Always the same,” said my grandmother. “Never stops to think.”
“Well, what would you have done in his position?” asked my mother indignantly.
“What I would have done is beside the point,” said my grandmother. “It's what we do now that will decide whether we live or die.”
“And that is . . . ?” said my father.
“We treat the consul as an honored guest. You invite him into your house and give him the best bedroom.”
“
My
house!” said my father. “Why not your house?”
“Because mine is humble and small and yours is large and elegant. Or at least it used to be when I lived in it.”
He had to concede the point. “And what then?” he said. “What happens if they discover him here?”
“Then we tell the truth. We say that we heard dreadful rumors concerning the health of the emperor, and your son witnessed unrest and violence not far from the palace. For the consul's own safety he invited him to reside with us until the situation settled down and the true facts became known.”
“I invited him?” I said.
“Indeed you did,” said my grandmother. “And he most graciously accepted.”
