Pantera prised my fingers free from his poor ruined body, drew me up to standing. At my stuttered direction, he found me wine and I drank it. I wanted to die. I could think of no reason not to and a great many reasons why it would be a good idea. I still could not meet Pantera’s eye.
He tried to clean up, but the room was beyond cleaning. He gathered the shards of the pot that had cost half a talent of gold and laid Cerberus out decently, with his chin tucked in, closing the wound, so that it looked as if he was sleeping, if you didn’t breathe in the blood and see the mess.
Eventually, he came to sit opposite me. ‘I did know,’ he said.
‘Did you?’ I couldn’t focus on him properly for tears. ‘How?’
‘I watched here for three days after the first time I came. I saw you go to him.’ I believed him at the time. Now, I think the Marcuses told him; that from the first they were his, and not mine.
He said, ‘Can I know why?’
‘Oh, Hades, do you need to ask? He was torturing men to death for word of you! It was only a matter of time before he found out we’d been close as children. If I hadn’t gone to him, he’d have come to me and… I couldn’t have held silent for long when the knives came out. You know that.’ I can’t take pain. We both learned that a long time ago, when we were children. He can, you see. It’s one of those things that makes us so different.
‘I know.’ He took the wine, set it down, dipped a cloth in it and cleaned my face. ‘Horus, I’m not angry.’
‘You should be. Or at least you should be afraid.’ I was weeping big, bitter tears for more than the loss of Cerberus now. ‘He will break you. He has sworn it by everything he holds sacred. It’s all he thinks about. Why do you not leave Rome?’
‘You don’t think I can break him? Or at least, best him?’
‘Best the emperor’s brother? The man who is emperor in all but name? I think you’re insane to even consider it.’
‘And yet you protected me. One glance on your part and he’d have sent Geminus over the balcony to get me.’
‘And then? Do you think the likes of Lucius would pat me on the head and pay me in gold? I’d be in chains with you and the men with hot irons would draw my soul from my living body to find out how much more I knew. Trust me, if it were different, I’d have sold you. I am only safe while you are free. Which is why I wish you would get out of Rome. Are you really going south?’
‘I am really going south.’
‘Lucius will come after you.’
‘Yes. And we’ll finish this away from Rome, where fewer people will be hurt. But only if I can get out of here. I take it that there is a route out on the third storey, but it’s no longer safe to use. So there must be a different way. If you’ll show me, I’ll go.’
He was hoping for something he didn’t know about, I could see that in his eyes: a back door on the ground floor, or in the cellars, a tunnel, a secret passage; anything, but not what he knew in his heart to be true.
‘There.’ I nodded towards the balcony opposite.
His eyes flew wide. ‘Horus, I can’t jump that.’
‘Of course you can’t; no man could. That’s the point. Watch.’
At the back of the balcony, set against the wall, was a stand on which bird cages sat. It was made of bricks with planks laid across; roughshod, but fitting with the rest of the balcony’s decor. And, because it was fitting, it was not immediately obvious that the second shelf up was made of two planks.
‘Help me.’
Together, Pantera and I lifted the songbirds down, and set them on the floor, muttering and shuffling in their cages. Together we lifted the spare plank down. Alone, I eased it out across the gap until the far edge rested on the balcony opposite. It slipped snugly between two heavy vases, each holding a small, wind-shorn shrub.
I turned to the man who had once been a brother to me. ‘Just don’t look down.’ He has never been good with heights.
‘And if I don’t? If I make it across alive, when I step on to the balcony on the other side who is going to scream?’
‘Nobody,’ I said. ‘Callius and Clytemnestra are silk tailors; they never look up from their work. Should they chance to, they will say nothing. Their son’s name was in the lead lottery when Geminus picked yours. They know Lucius ordered it. They hate him more than he hates you, which is saying something.
‘From their house, doors lead through two more to a final door that exits on to the Street of the Weavers. Nobody will ask your name. Nobody will ever remember you have been there. Nobody will talk about it afterwards.’
‘Until Lucius offers them gold for information?’
‘No. I’m not stupid and this has been coming for a long time. Each of these families has lost husbands, brothers, sons, who followed Otho and died for it when Vitellius took power. They won’t sell you to Lucius. To Vespasian they might, but he has to win first.’ I set my foot on the plank’s end, steadying it. ‘Don’t come back unless you must. If any messages come, I will leave them with Cavernus at the White Hare. They don’t know of him yet.’
‘Not from you, anyway.’
My stomach turned over. ‘Has he-’
‘No. But tread carefully. I have never known Rome so dangerous as it is now. Only make contact if you absolutely have to, and make sure any message can be read in at least three different ways.’
We didn’t embrace; we never had done. But our parting felt more permanent than any that had gone before it.
Chapter 43
Rome, November, AD 69
Borros
‘ Come. Fast! ’
Pantera was running when he got to us. We’d been waiting where he left us, within sight of the entrance to the brothel where his friend worked.
We’d never been that close to the House before — it was always somewhere he went alone — but this time, because we knew Lucius was coming, he left us close. It was a trap, of sorts, but he was using himself as the bait and there was always a chance they might have out-trapped him, in which case our orders were clear: we were to kill him, and get out of there. I was going to Britain; I knew the ship, I knew the master’s name, I had a berth booked: he was that unsure he’d get out alive.
Then he came out alone, and ran to us where we hid in the salt-grinder’s hut with the air making our noses itch and he had a look on his face I’d never seen before. Wild. Not quite in control. Not like him at all. ‘Where’s Lucius?’
He asked this of Felix, our scout. Felix could go places a shadow would not slip through, hear conversations meant for no one, kill a man in a crowd and walk away. He had been closest to the House while we were in a room three doors away, armed and ready. I had a shortened spear stolen from a dead guard that looked like a carrying-pole if I reversed it and hung a pack over the butt end.
Amoricus, we had discovered, was a dead shot with a sling. He could split a hair held out between two hands at twenty paces and a man’s head at fifty.
Felix was our knife man. He held one now, idly picking the dirt from under his nails. He said, ‘Lucius hasn’t come out yet. His three men are still watching the front door and five others at the street’s end.’
‘He left before I did.’ Pantera closed his eyes, seemed to marshal himself, then took Felix’s knife — which in itself was an achievement; that he could do it for one, and that he did it without thinking — and drew a swift map on the dirt floor.
‘There’s a route out of the House on the second floor that gives on to the tanners’ street. The street bends round and makes a junction with the Street of the Lilacs about three hundred paces east of where we are. If they’ve gone that way, then all our easterly routes are blocked. A dozen men at the junction here — and a handful at the far end of the Lilacs, here’ — he marked crosses on the rough rectangle he’d drawn on the ground — ‘could block off all escape. Our only safe route is to cross over the Lilacs and into one of the alleys that lead back into the depths of the hill. If they know about that, if they’ve blocked it, we’ll have to fight our way out.’