by M C Scott
Each name branded itself on my liver, each death was like wood hurled on to the fire that burned in my heart, sending it roaring until my blood fizzed in my ears and my head rang. I made myself breathe slowly, look around, smile, join the jokes.
I passed the dream-teller and threw a coin, laughing, and then, in a flush of pretend goodwill, bought a drink for myself and three junior officers of the Guard who stood in a cluster nearby. They were strangers to Rome, these men; they didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them, but I knew their like and how to play them with the right mix of deference and reverence, and the offer of wine; I was them once, or their like.
The risk seemed to work, for the officers clapped me on the shoulder and bought me a drink in return, and I had that giddy feeling of unnatural luck, as if the gods had cloaked me in more than simply four months’ growth of beard and a worn leather hat. I accepted the beaker of raw wine that was pressed on me, though I spilled more than I drank, and I used the centurions as a shield while I kept my eye on the oak-leaf door halfway along the widows’ street; I could just see it from where I stood without straining.
Presently the centurions went on their way. I was heading back to buy another drink when a hand caught my wrist.
‘Do you dream of oak leaves, carter?’
It was the dream-teller. Small, dry, with a face like old driftwood crusted with salt-white hair, the man was impossible to age. I shook his hand off my arm and would have struck him, but I remembered who I was: a drunken carter.
‘I dream of wine,’ I said, thickly, ‘and then women.’
‘Do you so?’ Sharp eyes stitched across my face, pinning the lie. ‘When you are ready to dream of oak leaves, come and find Scopius and he’ll tell you the fortune they bring.’
I was a carter; my only need for fortune was in good sales. Tugging on my hat, I forced a grin.
‘I’ll be gone before that, old man, while you’ll be lucky if you’re still alive. All soothsayers are to be out of the city by the first of October, or they’ll sew you in a sack with a snake and a dog and throw you in the Tiber.’
‘They won’t sack me.’ Scopius had the gaze of an owl, if an owl had eyes the colour of a dusk sky. ‘I’m a dream-teller, not an astrologer. I know nothing about the stars, only about the dreams that grow beneath them. Come back when you’re ready, carter.’
It was the edge he put on that last word that destroyed my evening. If he knew, who else?
Alert now, with an itch between my shoulder blades, I turned away and pretended a fascination with the acrobats.
In the short time I had been distracted, they’d stretched a tightrope across the street from one wall to the other, and now they were dancing along it, leaping up on to each other’s shoulders, building a six-man pyramid with the lower three all balanced on the rope.
I thought at least the small one on top and definitely the blonde one in the middle row were girls. Looking more closely, I became sure of it; their tunics were short about the thigh to let them move freely, and belted tight. Their breasts were not full, but they were there, pliable, and firm and lovely.
The top girl, a dark-haired androgyne, leapt high into a neat-tucked somersault and I don’t think I was the only man suddenly to think of bedding her. It was five months since I last had a woman and here was one, near naked, athletic as you like, almost within reach. I thought of the gold in my belt, and what it might buy me. There were houses in Rome, one on the side of the Capitoline in particular, that I had heard of, where you had to show your fortune even to get into it, but once in … there was nothing you couldn’t do, if you were prepared to pay for it.
I had to think of the war and Otho’s death to drag my mind away from that and from the acrobat girls. I got myself another drink and sat down at the entrance to the courtyard to watch the door with the oak leaves carved above the lintel.
It was a lifetime’s instinct, I think, that told me I was not the only one interested in it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rome, 3 August AD 69
The lady Jocasta Papinus Statius
I SAW TRABO before I saw Pantera, and yes, I knew him. We had played together as children, my brother had been in love with him for years; I recognized him immediately. He didn’t recognize me.
I was in the courtyard of the Inn of the Crossed Spears. Pantera had sent a message to say he was back in Rome, and that we needed to meet.
How well did I know him? Did anyone claim to know that man? I had met him twice before that I knew of. Seneca did his best to keep his better pupils apart so that none of us, if taken, could reveal the identities of the others, so we only met after his death. The meetings hang in my memory, all of them.
The first was in spring, the bright time of flowers, in Nero’s reign, soon after Seneca’s forced suicide. Gone with him in the same failed conspiracy were Lacan and Piso and Piso’s wife and fifty other good men and women who had cared about the future of Rome. The city was brittle as winter ice with the shock of it. Men talked in whispers, women planned for widowhood and everyone crept from dusk to dawn like mice under the eye of a starving cat, wondering where Nero’s paranoid gaze might fall next.
Pantera had been in Judaea. At my summons, he came to the house of Seneca’s widow, the small, quiet woman who had been restrained from killing herself alongside her husband and now walked in the misery of the recently bereaved. She opened the door to him and then went outside, to see who might be watching, and to give us privacy to talk, that she might not hear what we had to say about her late husband. He had shared many things with her, but even so, there were some matters she was better off not knowing.
So we were alone in Seneca’s spare, quiet house and I’m sure I was not the only one for whom it was full of memories.
The small central atrium had no columns, and only four shuttered windows to the outside with two rooms off. I had arrived first and arranged the room as I needed it, then gone to stand by the window, with the morning sun coming in over my shoulder.
That day, when he walked over the threshold, I saw what he wanted me to see: an unremarkable nobody with a stiff left ankle. I knew from what I’d been told that he had been questioned in Britain and had more scars about his body than you could count, but they were all hidden under a tattered tunic. He was clean, he was presentable, and you wouldn’t have noticed him if you’d passed him in the street.
He stopped in the doorway and I watched him make the same assessment as me. Seneca always taught us it was best to stand in shadow, but if that was impossible, then to keep ourselves in bright light: each allows you the advantage of seeing before you are seen.
Pantera was of the shadows, I was of the light. That has been true all along. My feeling is that if you can’t be invisible, or don’t want to be, then you do everything you can to draw attention to yourself. That way, people see those things to which you guide their eyes, not the things that you wish to keep hidden.
With that in mind, knowing the importance of a first meeting, I was dressed in fine white linen, and my hair was bound up on top of my head. The three gold pins that adorned it bore butterflies jewelled in scarlet and amber, lapis and green. I wore no other jewels, nor any make-up; on walking into the room, his gaze and his attention were caught by the glitter of those pins.
Any normal man would have seen them first, and then the shape of my body beneath my shift. Later, when asked, he’d have said I was tall and dark-haired and wore gold pins with butterflies on my head. He would have described my figure in detail. If he was particularly attentive, he might have said that my shift was white.
Pantera was not a normal man. He glanced once at the pins and then his eyes stripped me from head to toe and back again. You might think that was nothing extraordinary, but the point is he wasn’t looking at my body, rather at what my shift might conceal, and when he was done he let his gaze rest on my face, on my eyes, whence danger might first be signalled.
He, too, had been asking around the city for informa
tion about me, and because I was … who I was I had been able to control what he had heard, and those bits I could not control I at least knew about.
He knew, therefore, that I was considered attractive, but was too wilful to be truly beautiful; that my brother was famous for his poetry but I believed myself the better writer and passed off my own work as his – that’s true, by the way; that I was a widow and childless, although nobody knew the cause of my husband’s death. Bloody flux, poison and a dagger in the night had each been mentioned, at which Pantera had remarked that any man would have to be particularly unlucky to fall foul of all three. None of his informants had laughed.
From another source, he had heard a whisper that I had been to the poison school set up by Nero after the death of Britannicus, and had been a willing and able pupil there. Another rumour said I was Nero’s mistress and that he was planning to marry me when I fell pregnant.
Nobody mentioned that I had been a pupil of Seneca’s, but that’s because so few people knew about Seneca’s spy network, and not even those who belonged to it knew the identities of their fellows. And nobody else in the world was privy to Seneca’s private code, which I had used when I summoned Pantera here.
So that was our first meeting.
I tried to read his face: puzzlement, curiosity, hope, discovery, anger … all were there, but it was the sense of a watching intellect that was arresting, and brought to mind what I had been told of him.
He is wounded, but he is still the Leopard, still dangerous. His eyes look through you, until they don’t. That’s when he’ll kill you.
Seneca used to say that to anyone who would listen and Pantera never took the time to contradict him. So I watched his eyes, watching mine, and I waited.
We both waited. Seneca taught all his students not to speak too early in any conversation, to let the other party make careless admissions on first greeting. Evidently, we had both been good students: the silence hugged us, gathering the scents of willow and running water, the sounds of birdsong; it did not break.
When it was clear that I must move first, I drew from my sleeve the scroll I had secreted there. It was sealed with undyed beeswax on which was pressed Seneca’s mark of the counting stick. I laid it on the farthest edge of the small cherrywood table that was the room’s only furniture, next to a lit candle in a plain silver stick.
I said, ‘He wrote this for you on the day he died.’
Naturally, Pantera expected it: why else would he have been called to Rome, to this house, at this time, if not to hear his mentor’s last request? But he opened the letter slowly, not sure, I think, that he was ready to read such a thing in my presence.
His relationship with Seneca had been complex, and although I believe the greatest rift had been healed soon after he returned from Britain, there must have been a lot that had never been spoken.
I watched him scan the first lines.
From Seneca to the son of his soul, with love, greetings …
And so there it was, in black and white, the son of his soul. Pantera glanced up, wondering if I had read it, but I, of course, was looking out of the window at the stream, not at him.
I could hear his thoughts in my head as if he breathed them in my ear: I never loved him as he wanted, and hated him for wanting it. But he was Seneca; how could you truly hate him?
He didn’t speak aloud, just read on.
The handwriting was even and steady and unmistakably Seneca’s. Nobody, reading it, would have known that it was written in the maw of death; a final, dying plea. Two final pleas, actually.
I ask you to honour this woman as you honoured me.
It’s obvious now, of course, but it wasn’t then. Pantera was being asked to give to me the same loyalty he gave Seneca, to accept me as the new spymaster. Her name will be the Poet.
Seneca had been known to all of us as the Teacher and that name died with him. I chose the name Poet for myself and do not think it any more arrogant than his.
But for Pantera?
A woman, this woman: me. Not him. Spymaster.
Owner, commander, caregiver to the entire Senecan network.
He raised his head. I was trapped by his gaze. His eyes look through you, until they don’t …
Outside, small birds tussled over a nest. I wrested my gaze from his. I said, ‘He presumes much.’ I didn’t ask if it was too much.
Pantera laid the scroll down on the table, and placed his palms flat beside it. ‘He wanted to believe himself loved,’ he said. ‘And if not loved, then hated.’
If I had misunderstood him then, I have no doubt that Pantera would have left, and there was every chance that he would have taken the network with him. I knew he had planned for this moment and that he could have done it. Whether he would have destroyed it or run it for his own ends was a different question; I’m not certain even he knew the answer.
Uncertainty lit the air between us.
I said, ‘We all want that, don’t we? Not to be ignored? Not to be so insignificant that we are not even worth hating?’ I smoothed my stola and let him see that I carried a knife at my girdle, although in truth he had already seen it.
It’s not as if I expected him to be afraid. Or unarmed. But I wanted him to understand the same of me: that I was not afraid, nor unarmed; a match for all he had become.
I said, ‘It’s hard not to hate the man who uses you and would throw your life away on an instant did it suit his ends.’
‘Will you do the same?’ Pantera asked: will, not would. He was halfway to a decision.
‘Of course.’ I smiled, but it felt tight, and not convincing. I had worked for years to bring us to this point, and everything balanced on the blade’s edge. Control was all, for both of us. ‘You would do the same if Seneca had named you, not me. And you’d hate yourself for it daily, as he did and I will.’
Looking out of a window, I bit the edge of my thumb, carelessly. I was in profile, then, with the sun behind, and there are few spring fabrics that are not at least a little translucent.
I heard the catch in his breath; he was not one to be snared, only to be reminded that snaring was possible.
When I looked back, he had dropped his eyes and was reading the letter again, where were only a dead man’s words.
From Seneca to the son of his soul … He did say something like that once; I heard him.
I said, ‘He told me that you’d be hardest. But also that I could not succeed without you. I would like to suggest that we forget any loyalty either of us might have had to our late teacher. As the new spymaster, I will ask only that you keep what promises you give. And if you can keep none, nor wish to make any, that you say so and leave. Now.’
‘Did he tell you that I had sworn never to give my oath to Rome?’
‘He did. He said that you had told him once that you would give the oath of your tongue, but never the oath of your heart. But he also said that you had changed since then, that there were things that mattered to you more than the sum of your dead. He said he hoped you knew that.’ All this is true, I swear it now, by your gods and mine.
Pantera said nothing. He had reached the letter’s second request. If anything, it was more momentous; certainly more dangerous.
If I am dead, then Nero still lives: I made him and I would have destroyed him, but I have failed in that and you are left to repair the damage I have wrought. Find a man of worth and substance: find a match for Caesar – the Caesar, Gaius Julius – and put him on the throne. Somebody has to.
Corbulo.
A victorious general, beloved of his legions; a man who could easily have become the new Caesar.
His name was not written on the page, but leapt from it none the less. None of us was going to write it down; it would have been a death sentence for the empire’s best hope if it had been found. Even so much as was written had the potential to end all our lives.
Nothing in this room was there by accident, certainly not a lit candle in the good morning light. Pantera leane
d over and tilted the letter to the flame’s bright tip. The paper was Egyptian, thin and costly. It crisped and curled into smoke.
He held it until his fingers were scorched, then, dropping the last corner, said, ‘I have to go east; there is a man in Caesarea whom I must kill. Afterwards, if I am alive, we will talk about what oaths I can and cannot give.’
CHAPTER NINE
Rome, 3 August AD 69
Jocasta
SECOND MEETING: EIGHTEEN months later; still in Nero’s reign. Pantera was alive and his enemy was dead. So was another man, one who had come to matter to him more; a king who could have saved his people. It was a year since that one had died and the hurt was still fresh in Pantera’s eyes when I met him.
It was autumn, time of first frosts. Trees were cast in bronze and black; roads were etched with ice, and dangerous. I had arranged to meet Pantera in the Mariner’s Rest, a tavern at the port of Ravenna, where the eastern fleet of the Roman navy waited out every winter.
Outside, two dozen warships wallowed at anchor and gulls slid on hard, salty air. Inside, the innkeeper kept a vat of hare stew against the cold. The smell of juniper berries and rich flesh was earthen in its power.
The room was packed with legionaries and marines. Pantera pushed through to where I was sitting at a table in the corner and we waited while the stew was placed before him. Unlike the first meeting, this one saw us both somewhat disguised. He had the dress of a moderately successful merchant; I was a tavern wench, hair down, coarse tunic cut low.
The Rest wasn’t a bar that entertained many women, and so those few of us who were there caused something of a stir. When I leaned in to kiss Pantera’s cheek, the men at the neighbouring tables glared their hatred at him, wanting to see what he had that they lacked. He smiled at them, blandly. They looked away.
