by M C Scott
Zois, who has eyes of the same hot-ice green as her mother, looked up at him and said, ‘Your death is not at our hands.’
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask whose hand would kill him – we all saw that – but he must have known the ways of the dream and how it harms a man to hear too much of his future, for, with no further comment, he donned the loose white robes of the Berber, took a stick that we gave him, and leaned on it. He stooped his back, dropped his left hip as if the arthritis had crippled him, and like that, bent and old, he ventured out into the city that was hunting him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rome, 4 August AD 69
Marcus, silver-hand of the western Quirinal, speaking for his brothers
THE LITTLE WIZENED Berber didn’t look like a man who had been beaten half to death, although we had seen that happen. He didn’t look like a man who was hunted by Rome, either, though there were Guards throughout the forum and the markets, asking questions and spreading news of the rewards for his capture.
Did we know who he was, with all his black skin and wiry hair? Not at first. But we saw him come out of Scopius’ inn, and had not seen him go in, so we followed him on the rooftops, making the whistle signals, and we knew soon enough that he wasn’t what he pretended.
From the first, when he came out of the inn, he didn’t leave by the front entrance into the courtyard and on to the main street that runs up the Quirinal, the one with the widows’ houses off it. He went out of the back, down the Street of the Lame Dog where the Guard don’t dare go, and turned deeper and deeper into the hidden ways where the sun never reaches and bandits live with thieves and neither welcome strangers.
He was lame, he walked bent over, like he was crippled, but he didn’t walk as if he was afraid, and in those streets he should have been.
He came into my place then, where I owned the rooftops.
How did I get them? You think I’m too small to fight for them? Well, then, don’t ask me how. They were mine. Nobody was going to take them from me.
We were whistling one to another, just following him along, and then he went and ducked into a doorway and tucked his head out twice, to see if there was anybody watching. There wasn’t, not at ground level, so he waited a bit longer and then, not lame at all, hopped on to the wall that goes round the courtyard where Phenris kills his pigs and then up on to the rooftops. Fast as you like, he was here, where only the boys should be.
We all lay flat, and he didn’t look at us, but ran up and over the top and down the other side and then along and along and gone!
Well, some of the boys was for backing off and leaving him alone then. I mean, it’s not right, is it? The boys leave the rooftops behind when they become men – those that live to become men, which is few enough.
But he was there, heading down into a place that used to belong to the Kosian before he died of marsh fever, and before that it was Circan’s, and before that it was Florian’s and before that … anyway, it has always been someone’s place; we each have our own special place, hidden away, where nobody sees and the wind don’t reach too strong.
This one has brick on either side from the house walls and tiles that meet in the middle at the back and catches just enough sun in summer or winter to be warm all the time, but never too hot. It’s a palace of a place, really.
Pantera leaned back against the brick and tiles, looking like this is home.
We stopped whistling, all of us. There isn’t a tune for ‘That bastard’s just dropped into the Kosian’s place’. The others were all looking at me and I had to do something, so I picked two of them, Que— that is, Marcus and Marcus, and we went over to see him. You have to, don’t you? You have to face these things.
He’d got his eyes closed, all peaceful, and we just dropped in and settled down and waited for him to look back at us.
Which he did soon enough. He looked at us like we were friends, as if we didn’t each have salt in our hands, ready to throw in his face in case he tried to jump us. Actually, Fe—Marcus had something worse than salt.
He nodded at us as if we’d spoken, then brought both his hands out, nice and slow, like, and turned to one side and placed his palms flat on the wall and counted along the bricks.
We thought he was addled then, but we stayed and watched and after a while he pushed on a brick with the heel of his hand.
Nothing happened. Which, actually, was scary.
But he kept pressing and then gave a huff of frustration and hit it hard and then the brick jerked in, maybe only the breadth of your thumb, but still, it shouldn’t have done that, see?
Very slowly, with his eyes on us, he took his knife out from his sleeve and slid it in along the side of the brick, breaking the mud and shite that looked like mortar, and then, when he’d got it free, he worked the brick out.
It was only half a brick. So he laid it on the roof and stuck his hand back in and we all held our breath then, because whatever was in there’d been in since before we was born.
Finally, he got to what he was after: there was a kidskin pouch, tied at the top with rough twine and sealed with a blob of dark wax. The whole thing was clean and dry and untouched. He laid it on the ground between us and broke the wax with his knife and opened it, so that we could see what was inside the same time he did.
Coins. A stash of silver coins. All with the head of Tiberius on, as clean as the day they were made. No one’d cut them, no one’d marked them, no one’d tested them with his teeth. Did he let me hold one? Of course he didn’t! I saw, that’s all. I’m a silver-hand; I know what you’re carrying, how much and where. And in that pouch were fifty silver coins. Trust me.
He tipped the pouch a little towards us.
‘All yours,’ he said, ‘and perhaps gold besides.’
Gold? No one ever pays us in gold. There’s not many as pays in silver and then only when they want us not to talk about what they’ve done. Or to show anyone the marks. It always goes wrong in the end.
Anyway, he offered gold and we laughed in his face; not aloud, but he saw what we thought, and that we were ready to leave.
He hadn’t lifted one of the coins out, I’ll swear on my life he hadn’t, but suddenly he had one in his hand anyway, and he was turning it over and over, making it slide under one knuckle and across the rest, as if it was flowing in loops round his hand.
So we stayed, to see what else he could do. And he said, ‘Drusus, he’s at the House of the Lyre still, aye?’
He spoke like us, or like the boys used to speak back in the time of the Kosian and before. Some of it is Latin, some of it’s Greek, or Dacian or Gaulish or, if you’re near Drusus, it’s German, and we like to be near Drusus; he is one of us, grown and survived on account of his size; he gives us money from his own earnings, and food, and gets us work at the House if we want it.
And this man was asking about Drusus and the place he worked. So we listened to what he said next. It was a kind of code, see? To prove he was one of us, really, however weird he looked.
‘There is a house on the Aventine,’ Pantera said, and gave us a description, where it was, what it looked like; we knew it, and who lived there, but we let him tell us anyway; no point in giving up what you know if you don’t have to.
He said, ‘I’m going there now. You can follow me as long as you keep out of sight. One silver now if you do, two more this night if I know who comes and goes after I am gone and more yet if I know who follows me this day.’
He picked up his pouch, laid one silver coin where it had been. The face of the emperor Tiberius stared up at us like a ghost from the past.
I nodded. I took the coin. He knew already that I was leader.
To me, he said, ‘I will speak to Drusus later. He will tell you who I am and what I have been.’ He rose, smoothly, not lame at all, well maybe just a bit, in his left ankle. ‘It would be useful did I have a name to call you by.’
I told him Marcus. Yes, all of us. We were all called Marcus.
�
�Marcus.’ He said it as if he’d never heard the name before. ‘A fine choice. Marcus, you will know where I am.’
Which we would, of course, because we could follow him when he crossed to the Aventine hill and went to call on his friend.
So we did.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rome, 4 August AD 69
Jocasta
WHERE WERE WE? Pantera’s visit to my house on the Aventine. Yes, I remember. I was reading, I imagine, when Caliope came to find me.
Caliope was eighty-six and had had her tongue removed at fifteen by a senator who needed discretion and believed all women gossiped by nature. He cut off her ears at the same time, apparently thinking to make her deaf. A deaf and dumb servant is useful, you see; she can’t tell tales.
Anyway, Priscus was an idiot and my mother, Tiberia, bought Caliope while the wounds were still fresh, and nursed her back to health. She was beautiful in her youth, and showed a capacity for figures and accounting that outshone me or either of my brothers. She had had control of the household accounts in our family for nearly forty years and even now, when her sight is failing and she can only see figures written thrice their usual size, and must work the abacus by feel alone, she is fast and accurate. She is also utterly loyal.
The day we are talking about, the day after Pantera was beaten by the bandits, she came fast to me up on the third floor and tapped a spread-fingered rhythm on my arm. Her sign language is impenetrable by anyone outside the family.
‘A man?’ I asked. ‘The same one who came yesterday?’
No. A curt shake of the head. Caliope’s hair is white as winter ice and cut short, to evade the lice. In the mid-morning sun, it shone about her head like ermine, framing the dark holes of her ears.
She mimed a small man, hunched, and her vocal hands said that his skin was black as night. He asked for you by name. He said to tell you that he was here in the name of his Teacher.
Pantera, then. Nobody else still referred to Seneca by that name. Nobody else still spoke of the old man at all, except Pantera.
I called for wine, splashed water over my face, put on a smile and let Caliope lead me downstairs to where Pantera was waiting for me in the slaves’ room on the lowest floor.
The stench reached me before I saw him. I rounded the corner, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I—’
‘You can’t invite me upstairs. It’s all right; I know.’
Hades, but he looked different. I was expecting a disguise, but this? If he hadn’t spoken, I’d have thought Caliope had finally gone mad and was inviting in the debris from the streets.
I clamped my mouth shut and studied him. He wasn’t angry, and clearly he didn’t wish to talk about the night before, which was fine by me.
It’s possible he hadn’t seen me and the almost physical struggle I’d had with Domitian on the rooftops to persuade the boy to come away from the fight.
It’s just as possible that he hadn’t spotted the small, quiet, costly man I sent to follow Domitian home, but my man had seen Pantera and everything I have ever heard about this spy suggests to me that he sees those who follow him long before he is seen.
So I was fairly sure that he’d known I was there, and known also that I’d seen him in danger and not gone to his aid. And yet there was no rancour in his gaze. He seemed only to be waiting for my impression of his appearance and how he had changed.
What can I say? It wasn’t just that his skin was black and his hair curled, his whole demeanour was different; he was another man than the one I had met in the inn last night and he, again, had been different from the one who had spoken to Caenis in her house that evening. I could have said so aloud, but I thought that if he could read me at all, he would know that his guise was good.
My mother used to say that when in doubt, it’s always wise to pour the wine; so I did. My hand was steady.
‘How did you survive?’ I asked.
‘Last night? Your friend Trabo helped me.’
So he did see. ‘Did he know who you were?’
‘No, but he knew you in the inn and he had watched us go into Caenis’ house. I assume he followed me out. He left when the last three attackers tried to run. He killed them and then spent the night hunting Guards. Five are dead if the rumours are true. Give him long enough and he’ll wipe them all out.’
‘If they don’t get to him first.’
‘Which, of course, they will.’
There was another silence. Each time we met there was silence.
Irritable, I handed him his wine. ‘What brings you here?’
He rubbed the knuckle of his thumb along his brow and I watched him change his mind about what he was going to say and that, I have to tell you, was quite easily the most disconcerting moment in the entire series of disjointed, disconcerting meetings I’d had with this man.
With a kind of slow reluctance, he said, ‘Lucius knows who I am, what I am. We thought he did when he sent an assassin to Vespasian, but last night proves it. He knew I was going to the widows’ street. The Guards couldn’t have got there in time otherwise.’
Hades. I had gone cold. My palms were wet. ‘Nobody knew in advance where you were going, not even me.’
‘Somebody found out.’
He moved a little and I had to hold myself still not to flinch. He was armed, obviously. So was I, but I had seen how fast he could throw. It was a measure of how unsettled I was that I even thought he might attack me.
Nothing happened, naturally. We each waited for the other to make the first mistake, in the way Seneca taught us. We were his children, both of us, the product of his making, and we were never easy in each other’s company, even later, with everything that happened.
I searched his face for clues, but he was a small, black, wizened monkey of a man and his eyes were the same as they had always been, which was no help at all. And he believed there was a traitor close to Vespasian’s cause. I could have wept, but where would that have got us?
‘Did Caenis know to expect you?’ I asked. That was always possible. ‘Vespasian must have written to her, surely?’
‘I asked him not to, but even if he did, she loves Vespasian and he her. Many things can be bought, but not love. If we can trust anyone, we can trust her.’ He waited for me to answer and when I didn’t – I had nothing to say – he said, conversationally, ‘Lucius came to visit you yesterday.’
Who? Who told you that? Have you spies in my household? In his? Or do the silver-tongues on the street report to you so soon, when you’ve been here but two days?
I had spent three hard years trying to buy the favour and trust of the silver-tongues. I thought I had bought Scopius and his wife Gudrun at the Inn of the Crossed Spears, but never the boys who lived on the rooftops.
None of this I said aloud. None, I believed – I still believe – showed on my face. I shrugged. ‘He is coming back again today. Soon. I thought you were him.’
‘Does he know what you are?’
‘No! Do you think I’m insane?’ No other man knocks me off balance this easily. I pressed my lips tight, turned a circle on one heel, all the things one does to regain composure. I came back to him with my temper on a tight rein. ‘He has … difficulties with his wife. She is not the woman he wants her to be.’
‘And you are?’
‘He thinks I may be. I have not disabused him of that idea yet. I thought it might be useful if one of us was close to him and it can’t be you or Caenis or any member of Vespasian’s family, he wouldn’t allow it.’ I was talking too much. I stopped.
Whore.
The word hung between us. I waited for him to say it, for evidence that he was even thinking it, but there was, if anything, a new respect in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before.
‘Useful.’ He nodded, slowly. ‘Also immensely dangerous.’
‘Unlike walking round the city in broad daylight with a price of seven hundred sesterces on your head. Which is, of course, entirely safe.’
His laugh was there and go
ne too fast to catch, like a flash of winter sun, but there was a genuine warmth that was all the more surprising for its cause. Seneca had loved him. Slowly, over many meetings and in small currencies, I was beginning to understand why.
Still amused, he said, ‘Seven hundred already? I last heard six, but that was in the Palatine stews. It was five at dawn this morning. I am growing more precious by the hour.’ He sobered quickly. ‘So we each face danger.’ He leaned back against the wall, arms folded. ‘If it can be done safely, I think you should let Lucius know that the lady Caenis has invited you to dine with her. Let him know that you will report to him what you hear there. Let him know that you might be useful.’
‘And if he accepts? If he asks me to spy for him, what do I tell him?’
‘That you have to be free to use your own discretion, and that things will change with time. If it were me, I would tell him as much of the truth as I could without damaging me. Let him know that Caenis is intimately involved in Vespasian’s bid for power; if he hasn’t worked that out already, he’s not the man we think he is. Tell him small things, enough to make him trust you. If we’re going to defeat him, it will be by the piling on of small facts of questionable truth that hide the one big lie at the centre.’
‘So you trust me not to tell him everything?’
‘Truly?’ His smile grew thin and hard and didn’t go near his eyes. ‘At this moment, I don’t trust anybody. But I would like to grow to trust you.’
He was not that different, then, from every other man who ever crossed my path. Somehow, I had expected more. But I have had years of practice at hiding that kind of disappointment.
I said, ‘How will I reach you? I can’t be seen sending servants to Scopius; it’s too dangerous.’
‘With this,’ he said, and opened his palm. On it lay a small and shrivelled date. ‘Take it.’
I did, and discovered that it was not a date, but a simulacrum made of fired clay and painted so that it was the exact shape, size and lustre of an old winter date, the sweet kind, that breaks apart as you eat it.
