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 18
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.’