Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (38 page)

Light-headed with hunger, disoriented by the dark, Pantera found himself seeing the shade of his mother, who had taught him to fear that the sky might fall on his head. She walked beside him, through the wall of solid rock, and promised the earth was not as fallible as the sky, and would not fall.

Later, she was joined by Aerthen, who walked on his other side, carrying his daughter, Gunovar, so that, when he finally lost count of his steps and the litany of turns he thought they had made, he came to rely on their joint presence to keep his courage bright.

‘Stop.’ Hypatia’s voice carried the ring of authority. He stopped before he ran into her. The tunnel was cool. His back ran wet with sweat.

A peppery incense tickled the air and, from round a corner in front of them, a faint torchlight banished the ghosts on either side. Pantera closed his eyes, trying to bring them back.

Hypatia called out, ‘Alexandros?’

Footsteps shuffled in the dark tunnel ahead. A man’s stilted voice said, ‘Whom do you bring?’

‘The Leopard,’ Hypatia answered.

‘Not the Bear?’

‘The Bear came before us, by the direct path.’

‘Then I have met him and did not know it.’ A slight, stooped figure detached itself from the shadows by the wall. ‘The Bear is the one who came to take the Ferryman’s cloak? Who knew the questions and their answers?’

‘I believe so. You are spared the task you hate.’

Alexandros was older than Seneca. He was possibly older than any man Pantera had seen, although the dim light made it hard to tell. He carried an oak staff as high as his head and bore no weight on his right leg. He stood back, as if to let Hypatia past.

‘Wait.’ Pantera caught her arm. ‘Is that true? Has Ajax taken the Ferryman’s place at the crossing of the river Styx?’

‘In this place and this time,’ Hypatia said, ‘Ajax
is
the Ferryman. There are prophecies that speak of this. It happens only at the turning of the earth.’

‘What makes you think
Ajax
will let Saulos cross the river? He loathes him.’

‘Today, he is the Ferryman,’ Hypatia said again. ‘He is bound by laws greater than love or hate to put the questions that will bring the supplicant to deepest knowledge of himself. If Saulos can find the answers, Ajax will do what he must. As will we. Will you follow Alexandros into the temple? It’s not far along the tunnel from here. I’ll join you as soon as I may.’

‘
Reject me. But know that I cannot be forsaken
.

To lose me is to lose life’s greatest gift
.

Embrace me, and know that you are blessed
.

For is it better to yearn for me unheeded

Or to run from me, and yet be overtaken?

What am I?
’

T
he Ferryman’s voice lacked any trace of humanity, but echoed from the river to the tunnel’s high, curved roof and back. He stood upright, his pole reaching up into the dark. Behind him, the water of the Styx rushed past in near silence. His ferry was long and slender and lilted back and forth in the current. His eyes were black lights beneath his hood.

To Saulos, he said again, ‘What am I?’

‘That’s not …’ Hannah let her hand fall. The black eyes turned to her, frightening in their soullessness.

The hollow voice said, ‘I have asked the first question. The supplicant need not answer, but if he does, his response must be correct.’

Saulos’ head swivelled from the cowled figure to Hannah and back. His body was frozen in place. She couldn’t tell if he had recognized Ajax, or – more likely – if he was simply overwhelmed by the presence of a figure from his childhood nightmares. Had he fainted at her feet, he would not have been the first.

He said, ‘This is it? That’s all of the question?’ He had thought it would require knowledge, something to be drawn from the pool of his learning; the men always did.

‘This is all of it,’ Hannah agreed. ‘And I cannot help you.’

His pallid eyes searched her face, as might a blind man’s fingers, seeking clues to something heretofore unknown. His mobile hands were speechless. ‘May I hear it again?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Each riddle can be spoken only once by the Ferryman, although you may speak it aloud to yourself if you wish.’

‘If I choose not to answer, I must leave?’

‘You must. You will go safely, returning as we came.’

‘But if I answer incorrectly …?’

Kindly, she said, ‘You’ve got this far. The water is deep and the currents strong. The Ferryman is permitted to strike you once with his pole. Your death will be swift.’

Saulos gave a short, harsh laugh. ‘Whereas yours at Akakios’ hand most certainly won’t be. I would recommend you to join me in the water should I fail.’ He surprised her by sitting suddenly on the tunnel’s floor with his back pressed tight to the wall. He pushed his head back, flattening his hair. ‘But since I don’t wish either of us to die, fast or slow, I will think on this riddle.’

The silence that followed was greater than the water’s rush. When at last he spoke, Saulos directed his answer to the river, rather than the Ferryman.

‘I could not forsake you, for in doing so I would lose life’s greatest gift. I will embrace you when you come, for to yearn for you when you are denied is every man’s greatest fear. I cannot run from you, however I might wish to when life’s colour enchants me, for I will always be overtaken.’ He waited a moment longer, watching the water’s surface and the lamp’s wild reflection. Then, raising his head, he said clearly, ‘You are death.’

The Ferryman inclined his head. ‘I am death,’ he agreed. ‘The first is yours.’

Pantera stood alone at the threshold to the Temple of Truth, home of the Alexandrian Sibyl, trying to gauge how big the place was, and failing; a haze of wood smoke and incense smothered the floor and rose in clouds that obscured the walls and ceiling so completely, he couldn’t see where the one left off and the other began.

At his best guess, Pantera thought that it was a perfect replica of the Temple of Serapis that grew from the ground above it. The array of fluted columns supporting the roof was the same, and the rows of brackets holding the lit torches on the wall. But here, no statue of the god stood tall to impress the populace. In its place was a circular stone altar ringed by glowing braziers that stood to one side of the vast open space.

In its stark simplicity, it was far more terrifying than any god could have been and Pantera found himself drawn unwillingly towards it. He had only ever once felt as he did now, when he had been similarly drawn into a circle of standing stones on a moor near the hill fort of the Dumnonii. By the gods’ grace, he had left that place alive, although Aerthen had scolded him endlessly after for going near it uninvited, always with tears in her eyes.

He wanted her to scold him now, there in the circle of tight, cold air that took no warmth from the braziers. In her absence, he made himself study the altar, so that at least he could know what he faced. This close, it was clear that the stone was far denser than the local sandstone, and a deep grey, almost black. That, too, was like the standing stones of Britain and Gaul.

The top surface was a map of the moon, showing the hare that lives on its surface, but with marks at the edges to show the directions. The north wind and a stag at one edge were balanced by a salmon opposite. Pantera stood in what he thought was the east, marked by a rising sun that gave birth to a phoenix. To the west a hare leapt over a crescent moon. Between each of these ran smooth channels, black as old blood.

Across the room, near the door by which he had come in, a foot scuffed on a stone, deliberately. Pantera spun round – and found himself in the presence of the Oracle.

A tall, slender wraith, she emerged from what looked very like a blank wall, nearly hidden by the smoke, and came towards him, gliding effortlessly across the uncertain floor.

He thought he recognized her scent, and something in the carriage of her head, but there was no way to be sure; she was completely concealed in white linen that fell in thin drapes from her crown to her ankles and he could see no living part of her but her feet and narrow ankles. Most disturbingly, although he couldn’t see her eyes, he had no doubt at all that she could see his.

‘Did you bring the incense of life and death?’

Pantera fumbled in his belt pouch. The quarter-grain of frankincense nesting there had cost him all of his remaining money. He had stolen the myrrh, incense of death, at the risk of losing his right hand if he had been caught; in Alexandria, myrrh was valued more highly than a horse or a house.

He brought the two nuggets of resin out as if they were newborn fledglings, too frail to be held by more than cupped hands.

The Oracle – it was Hypatia, he was almost certain now – pointed over his left shoulder. ‘Give them to Alexandros.’

Pantera spun round and found himself facing the stooped figure, leaning on his staff. In a day of escalating terrors the fact that a lame man who walked with a stick could get within arm’s reach and Pantera not know it was as frightening as all the rest put together.

Weakly, he gave his two nuggets into the old man’s care. Alexandros limped past, circling the altar until he came to stand at the Oracle’s left hand. Two braziers stood in front of him, one each to left and right.

‘Watch now,’ said the Oracle, as Alexandros raised both his hands high and, with the dexterity of decades’ practice, crushed the resins in either fist and let loose the tiny seeds in two perfect, even streams on to the red hot braziers below.

Left and right, life and death, hope and trust; two skeins of white smoke leapt to the roof, sweet and sharp and beautiful.

Pantera breathed in and the ropes became veils that stretched wide, from wall to wall of the temple. On the second breath, they became windows to other worlds, to places past and gone and never seen, to the lost haunts of his youth. He felt his heart sing. He strained his eyes, looking for the ghosts that must arise in a place like this.

‘Don’t.’ The Oracle’s voice pierced the smoke, clear as cut ice. ‘Watch. Don’t think. If you become lost, we won’t be able to find you.’

It was hard to watch and not become lost. Pantera found himself staring down at the braziers, believing they might hold him in place, but the veils drew him in whatever he did; his home was there, and his mother – not as a ghost, but as she had been when he was young – and the friends of his boyhood. Under summer dawns and winter moons, his father had taught him to shoot his first arrows, and later to stalk lizards in the desert, and then men. He was joyful in ways he had forgotten and his grown self wept for the loss of who he had been.

The veils moved, and time with them, and he watched a living man brought from a tomb and felt the first thread of the Oracle’s meaning. Later, bitter-hearted, he left his home and walked across a desert to find a man who had once seemed a friend.

Friendship became apprenticeship became a profession. And in that profession a moment passed, a small thing, one meeting among many, held in a hostel on the border between Galilee and Syria, at the start of the road to Damascus. One idea was discussed. One theory floated. One solution proposed to the many crises that plagued that war-torn place. So small a thing, on which a world might turn. He clutched tightly to the image, to remember it later.

‘Pantera?’

Hypatia’s voice brought him back. The veils ripped apart, and all their joy with them. He found it hard to stand upright. Alexandros was at his side with his oak staff, holding him steady.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, once, and then twice more.

Hypatia – it was she, not the ageless voice – asked, with true compassion, ‘Can you stand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then do so, swiftly. Saulos is coming.’

Like a child caught in an act of theft, he looked round in alarm. ‘Where should I hide?’

Hypatia smiled at him then; he felt the full force of it through her cowl. ‘In the Chamber of Truth,’ she said, ‘there is no hiding. You will be here, aiding him in his request. Alexandros has all the cover you need.’

Alexandros stood steady as a rock at his side. Over his arm lay a cloak of coarse black cloth, with a hood that fell forward as a cowl.

T
he cowl was both a blindfold and a disguise.

Pantera made himself breathe, and counted the scents of incense and old spittle and unwashed hair and found them strangely comforting, like the harsh wool scratching his face.

And then, just as the smokes of frankincense and myrrh had become a vellum on which his past had been painted, so the cowl’s dense screen became a window to eyes other than the ones he was born with, so that he could see the true dimensions of the Oracle’s temple, and know how much greater it was than the one that housed the false god above; he could see the Oracle herself, and know how much greater she was than any one woman, even Hypatia; he could see Alexandros, and know that his lame leg was the gift that had led him to this place, and that his soul was light as a feather, held in balance on Osiris’ scales.

And with his new vision, he knew too the names and essences of the two men and a woman who were walking up the long corridor from the rushing river below.

Hannah came first, forging through the knee-high smoke with the hound’s baying draped all around her like a cloak.

In daylight, Pantera would have known her by the straightness of her back, by the curve of her neck, by the sweep of her black silk hair. Here, cloaked into blindness, he saw instead her courage and the texture of the peace that sustained her, even as sparks of red terror shot through when she saw him standing black-robed and silent behind the altar; she hadn’t expected him to be part of the Oracle.

Pantera hadn’t considered himself as a part of it before that moment either, but now, with neither arrogance, nor pride, nor fear, he knew it to be true; he was there because he was needed, because he was wanted, because time and the gods had ordained that it be so. And, because he had seen the past in the veils of smoke, he knew how to see at least part of the future written on the black screen of the cowl.