Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 (49 page)

Because now they were fighting amongst themselves; there was a battle going on in the body of the warehouse that kept more men from assaulting the small group at the front. They were three against Poros and the Blue team with Saulos somewhere in the smoke, invisible and dangerous. Pantera was nearby, but Hannah couldn’t see him, only heard him to her left, shouting in the mayhem.

Poros had found a sword and was swinging it, matching Shimon’s staff in a delicate, lethal dance. With her iron bar held near its end, Hannah slid in through the door and sideways with her back to the wall. The fire scorched her face. Smoke choked her. She fought against panic, against memories of Gaul. Poros loomed ahead, made bigger by the warping shadows. The iron bar spun in her sweat-wet hands as, ducking under Shimon’s cudgel, she put the full force of her back, her shoulders, her legs, into a swing aimed at his head.

She missed.

Poros saw her and ducked under the swing. Hannah was thrown off balance, spun further round and crashed into the dais. The iron bar flew from her hands, skittering across the oak boards. The second candlestick toppled over, spraying beeswax and fire into the dark space to her right.

‘
Hannah! Move!
’

She rolled sideways, out, down, away from the fire and the dais, into a flickering dark. A knife hissed past and stuck in the wall, shuddering. Shimon stepped over her, protectively, cudgel blurred in the bad light. Smoke crowned him. He was dancing with Poros, who was better armed. Pantera was there, fighting to Shimon’s left, protecting his shoulder as warriors did in battle. He had fought in Britain, where men died for the honour of saving each other. It was his voice that had shouted her name through the mayhem.

The knife sagged from the dry wood in the wall above her. Hannah grabbed the hilt and wrenched it out and this time she didn’t stand up where she could be seen, but kept to her belly beneath the wavering ceiling of smoke and crept forward along the edge of the dais until she could see Poros’ blunt, bearded silhouette.

Shimon was opposite him. Seeing her, he dropped his guard a fraction. Poros lunged forward, his blade a slice of vengeance, cutting straight for Shimon’s heart.

There was no time to think, to regret, to imagine the ending of a man’s life. Hannah thought of Math, made to race when he wasn’t ready. With his broken face in her mind’s eye, she thrust herself upwards, aiming for the broad back, midway down, just off centre to the left.

Her stolen knife grated on a rib, glancing out and up in another miss. Already Poros was turning away from it, wrenching round. His face loomed over hers, his teeth a slash of white in his beard. But the knife still had purchase.

Math loomed between them, bright blood clotting in his hair.

‘
No!
’ Hannah brought her other hand up and rammed her balled fist on top of the first and felt the blade slide forward with sickening ease into the sheath of flesh and lung and heart.

The end flipped like a landed fish, once, twice, with the steady beat of his heart, and then, even as he roared a name she did not know, the rhythm stuttered and sprang, wildly erratic.

Hannah still had hold of the handle, wet now with his blood. She dragged the tip sideways, to make the hole in his heart bigger, to let the blood out faster, to bring death with greater mercy; her only gift.

The twitching stopped and, moments later, Poros fell like a tree, stunning the ground at her feet. Over the smoke and sweat and fear, she smelled the sharp iron-sweetness of blood, and then urine. She had never killed before except in mercy: Ptolemy Asul, and, once, a child born with its legs fused together. Nobody had ever known. The parents had burned myrrh at the statue of Serapis in thanks that their child was born dead. And now—

‘Hannah!’ A hand caught her wrist. ‘Back! Now!’ It was Pantera, a shape in the smoke. His face was shining with heat and sweat. ‘The fire’s gone wild. The roof’s coming down. It’s the inn at Gaul all over again. Shimon’s already in the courtyard. Will you come out? Come out with us now? Please?’

The courtyard was empty of men. To the right of the door stood a barrel, half full of spring rain. Hannah grabbed it, rolling it on its edge. ‘The door … block … the door.’ She was coughing now that they were in the clear air, as if her lungs preferred the smoke.

Pantera grabbed the barrel’s rim. Together they swung it across the door, holding it shut. Men hammered on it from the inside. The damaged hinge was breaking.

‘Come on,’ Shimon called from the courtyard gate. ‘That won’t hold them for long.’

‘Where’s Saulos?’ she asked, running.

Pantera was at her side, barely lame. They passed out of the courtyard together. ‘Escaped through the front door. A dozen with him.’

Hannah said, ‘He’ll go for the water towers. He’s the only one who knows how to turn the taps off. We have to—’

‘I set Mergus there. Twenty men are guarding each of the five closest towers. It’s the fire that matters. Where will they start the blaze?’

‘Everywhere. They have wool and pitch set at a dozen places nearby. Five men would be enough.’

‘Then a dozen will be a disaster.’

‘Maybe Mergus’ men will stop them?’

‘If they’re not betrayed by others of the Watch.’ Pantera ran on her left. To her right, the Tiber ran slick and slow under the evening sun. ‘Mergus was at the tower by the Claudian temple. We should reach him as soon as we can.’

‘It’s another quarter-mile up the hill,’ Hannah said. ‘Can you run that far?’ This last to Shimon, who was bent double with his hands on his knees, choking in the aftermath of the smoke.

‘Anywhere you can lead, I can run.’ His eyes streamed with smoke-born tears, but behind that they were ablaze with a fire of their own. ‘Just let us stop Saulos and I will ream out my lungs and spit blood for the rest of my life.’

The first rush of water met them at a crossroads below Claudius’ temple; a shining snake, slithering down the street, gathering dust and children and thirsty dogs.

Three men of the Watch came fast after it; an officer and two others skidding down on wet pavings. Pantera waved them to a stop. All three bled from new-made wounds. The officer was small, dark, wiry.

‘Mergus!’ Pantera gripped his arms. ‘The second or the sixth?’

‘The second. A century came at us. We were outnumbered four to one. We chose not to die protecting a cistern.’

‘Good. Is Libo alive?’

‘He should be. I left him in charge of the water engines at the forum.’

Hannah asked, ‘Did you see Saulos?’

‘How would I know him?’

‘You wouldn’t,’ Pantera said shortly. ‘That’s his strength. And you won’t—’ He stopped suddenly, looking west. ‘Damn,’ he said softly. ‘It’s begun.’

Hannah turned to look. A thread of black smoke angled straight as a drawn line from the foot of the hippodrome.

‘The wind’s heading inland from the river. It’ll spread faster than Ajax’s mad colts.’ Pantera bent to catch water from the flood about his ankles and dashed it over his hair and the shoulders of his tunic. ‘This may be Saulos’ fire, but if a portion of the Watch is supporting it, the Urban Guard may follow. Mergus – you know what to do?’

‘We do. We’ll meet in the forum still?’

Pantera eyed him, shaking his head. ‘I have to find Saulos. When that’s done, I’ll come to the forum. But first …’ He spun in a circle. ‘We need Nero. The emperor’s presence still counts for more than gold or promises. For that, we need someone with a horse who can ride thirty miles in the dark and be believed when he gets to Antium.’

‘Faustinos,’ Mergus said. ‘The water engineer. He’s Iberian. They’re born on horseback. He lives here somewhere. I don’t know exactly.’

‘I do.’ Hannah grabbed Pantera’s arm. He shot her a look of surprised appreciation. ‘He’s two streets from here,’ she said. ‘Saulos went there after I dressed his wound this morning.’ She was already running. ‘Come
on
.’

S
oot fell in great, fat flakes, like soft snow. Already –
already
– the stench of burning flesh pierced the smoke and the screaming panic of men, women, children, mules, pigs, dogs, rats sliced the air.

It was Gaul again, only greater.

Hannah wiped the grime from her face and considered how it would feel to strangle Faustinos, the Iberian water engineer, with her bare hands.

He had been unbearably slow to rouse from his dinner couch. In that first bubble of time, in the agony of explanation, while Pantera selected and saddled a horse from his stable, while Mergus and Shimon together impressed on him the truth of the catastrophe, while Faustinos finally saw the water flooding past his open door and grasped the fact that his trust had been betrayed and that only the emperor could save his beloved aqueducts, while he was physically lifted into the saddle by Pantera and made to repeat his mission and finally, tardily, departed … in that time, the lazy thread of smoke stitching the evening sky had been joined by a dozen others and others and each had broadened to a feather, to a flag, to a tidal wave of flame, sent roaring east towards the heart of the city by the rising wind.

An early tide of refugees flooded with them. The children came first; the street urchins who were always fastest, not sure if it was serious, running backwards, shouting jests and wagers, throwing trophies to each other and to the adults, slaves and beasts who came after them.

They ran over the uneven pavings in front of Faustinos’ meagre house, past the officer and two men of the Watch, past Hannah, Shimon and Pantera.

The fire hadn’t reached here yet; the breached settling tank was keeping the flames and heat at bay. But the smoke came where the fire could not. Hannah swept her arm across her face, pressing the coarse wool of her tunic to her nose and mouth, and even so she could barely breathe. For a moment, she was in Gaul again, standing beneath a ladder, waiting for a man and his son to come down to her.

Pantera’s hand was on her shoulder, as it had been then. He turned her away from the fire. ‘Were you thinking of Math or Caradoc?’ he asked. ‘Or both?’ He was bright again, filling her mind, for all that the soot lay in the lines about his eyes, in savage paint.

‘Both.’ Hannah dropped her tunic from her face. ‘We’ve done all we can here. We need to find Math and Ajax and get out. There are boats running on every tide from Antium. We could be halfway to Gaul by this time tomorrow.’

‘You should go. There are horses here. Shimon will take you.’

‘Not you?’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t leave while Saulos lives. I made him what he is. No one else can stop him now.’

Hannah shook her head. ‘If you’re staying, I’m staying,’ she said.

Pantera’s smile fell away. Briefly, she thought he might argue, but he looked past her to Shimon. The two men’s eyes met as they had done in the warehouse, their silent dialogue too complex for the time it took, too profound for the quiet on their faces.

Pantera broke away first. ‘Shimon will help you get to the coast,’ he said. ‘I will see to Saulos. Seneca’s gone to Antium. If humanly possible, he’ll free Ajax and Math and buy passage for them on a ship. He’ll get you to Britain if I can’t join you.’

‘You weren’t listening. I said—’

‘I was listening. Hannah, the city is
burning
! There’s nowhere safe.’

‘Yes there is. The goose-keeper’s cottage has survived every fire for the past four centuries. Is Hypatia still there?’

‘She was when we left.’

‘Then I’ll go there. Shimon can go to the coast to meet Ajax and Math.’

‘They have Seneca, they have no need of me.’ Shimon’s old-snow hair was full of soot, turning him young again. When he shook his head, black flakes flew around them. ‘Where you go, I go. I owe it to your father. No—’ He held up a hand, forestalling Pantera. ‘We have as much right to stay as you do. We’ll wait at the goose-keeper’s house until dawn. Send us word when you can. If we hear nothing, we will assume you dead. In which case, I give you my word that I will protect Hannah with my life.’

Pantera’s face was unreadable. The sky behind him was the perfect, crystalline blue of night-fall; the smoke had not reached there yet. His cheeks were burnished orange from the fire. His hair, lit from above, glowed gold as a Gaul’s.

Hannah saw him nod to himself; then, amid the smoke and the mayhem, he lifted her hand. She felt the grit on his palm, and the hard rhythm of his pulse and the slip of saddle oil from Faustinos’ harness.

He took Shimon’s hand too, joining them in a triangle. ‘I’ll hunt Saulos and when I find him I’ll kill him. Tomorrow morning we’ll leave here, whether the fire is out or not. Nero can find himself another spy.’ Pantera kissed the back of Hannah’s hand and let it fall. Shimon’s, he gripped a moment longer. ‘Take care of each other.’

T
iers of beeswax candles blazed on both sides of Nero’s bed, sweetening the night air. Two polished silver mirrors on either wall took the dancing lights and multiplied them back and forth until Math’s eyes hurt.

He was trying not to frown, which was harder than he might have expected, but gave him something to concentrate on that wasn’t the part-naked Nero, lying breadthways across the wine-red silk with his head by Math’s knee and his feet dangling over the far edge of the bed.

After a day’s intimate attendance, the slaves had finally been banished. Left alone, Nero was smiling up at the Bacchus painted on the ceiling, fingering his favourite lyre. He played better than he sang.

A flagon of Falernian lay empty by the bed and Math had drunk none of it. Nero had not been fully sober since early afternoon and now he was cheerfully and comprehensively drunk.

If you ever let the emperor become familiar, if you ever come to see him intimately, in all the contortions and stupidity of a man consumed by his desires, then you will have to die
.

Pantera had said that in Gaul, and Math had believed it. Now, he hoped the spy was wrong and had some basis for his optimism. If rumour was even half correct, the Empress Poppaea had seen Nero in the ‘contortions of desires’ long before they were married, and she wasn’t dead yet, and some of the slave-boys might also have survived a night in this room, on this silk-ridden bed, caught between the silvered mirrors and the honey-scented candles. Math thought hard about who might have been here before him, in order not to think of Constantin. Or Ajax.