Read Online Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 by M. C. Scott - Free Book Online

on straw in her pallet as she lay to sleep.
    Her booth was not far from the end of the barn, set at the front of the newly named Green team’s huddle of tents and stalls with the white linen rag hung on a pole outside to show her profession. He waited until he could hear the sound of her sleep-breathing before he got up and moved through the warm, horse-filled dark to talk to Sweat first, who was his favourite, and then Thunder.
    He was not crying any longer. He wiped his face dry with his hands and let the colts lick the salt from his palms. He told them they were wonderful, and they would win if they raced, but that they must needs be patient in the morning when Brass and Bronze were harnessed to the big quadriga with the two trace horses who ran behind, and were never as important. They nudged him and flicked their tails and returned to the half-doze of sleep from which he had woken them.
    My mother bred them , he had said to Pantera, which makes them easier to handle .
    What he had not said was that his mother had bred all eight of the horses that ran for Ajax, the first and the second team, but that these two she had given to her son, taking him to the field on the day two long-legged bay colts were born, Sweat half a morning before Thunder.
    She had let him name them and had kept him with her all the way through their early training, until the year when he was five years old and they were three, when she gave them to him as his gift at the midsummer solstice.
    They were too good to be owned by a boy of five, of course, and had been sold, but Math knew that one of the conditions of sale was that he be taken on as apprentice when he came of age.
    Gordianus, who owned the team then, had said no boy could be an apprentice before he was ten years old. After his mother’s death, nobody expected Math to make ten years, including himself. But Gordianus had broken both his legs the previous year in an accident at the close of the autumn season and it was only by chance that Ajax had been there, just walking in off the last boat before the seas closed for winter, with his shaved head and one ear missing and black, black eyebrows and the scars on his body from races and war and a flogging once. He was jeered for that, early on, before they saw how he could race, and if he had told a dozen different people the story of how he got the scars, he had told a dozen different stories.
    To Math, he had said, ‘I was young and I hated the legions. I thought I could best them.’
    ‘And they caught you,’ Math had asked dutifully.
    ‘They did.’ Ajax’s quick grin set it on a par with being caught stealing fish from the docks, which happened to everyone. ‘And they’d have killed me after they flogged me. But my mother’s brother was an officer in the auxiliary and he was able to get me released. If your mother doesn’t have a brother in the auxiliary, don’t steal from legions, that’s my advice.’
    Somewhere in all the racing and tale-telling, Ajax had shown Gordianus the weight of his money and the deal had been struck; for an untold amount of gold, the practice chariots, the racing chariot, the eight racehorses, sixteen head of young stock, the wainwright and his three apprentices, the loriner and his son, the various stud hands who had kept the breeding herds going after Math’s mother had died, the harness-maker Caradoc of the Osismi – who was Math’s father – and Lucius, the existing apprentice, had all changed hands. So too had the promise to make Math the second apprentice when he came of age.
    At the midwinter solstice, not long after the fires had been doused and re-lit to honour the death and re-birth of the sun god, Ajax had come to Math and his father bearing a smoked herring and a sprig of mistletoe across his spread palms. His shaved head had shone in the candlelight as if he’d polished it with oil. The hole where his ear had been cut off was blue at the edges from the cold outside and his black