Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 Read Free

to pick up a pebble. Without turning his head, he tossed it high in the air. It bounced precisely on the crown of Sebastos’ head.
    It took all morning to leave the garden, so slowly did Sebastos move. No man saw him, not even his father, who had trained him to see all things that live, however careful they might be. He was better than his father; he was not sullied by the taint of falsehood and treachery.
    Slowness gave him the peace to settle his unsettled heart, and to think. By the time he reached the hut, he had come to a decision. He was twelve years old, and had already made his first kill. He was not as tall as his mother had been; he did not take directly after the great Gaulish warriors who slew Romans in battle with their bare hands, but he was taller than most of his contemporaries, and could pass for a boy at least three years older. He was rich after a fashion; he owned the clothes he stood up in and a new belt he had not yet used, and a worn calfskin pouch that his mother had left him, containing three silver denarii that carried the head of the Emperor Tiberius. He debated taking his bow. There was no doubt that he could steal more food than he could ever shoot, but it mattered that when he presented himself to ask for employment, he should be armed, and so he lifted his bow from its hook, and his hunting knife and his six arrows, three of them fully fletched.
    Taking these things – his youth, his height, his training as an almost-archer, and his riches of silver and weapons – he left the house of his treacherous father and set his face to Alexandria where he had once lived.
    He had been happy there, but that was not the reason to return. Alexandria was where he had met the pallid Roman philosopher with connections to the emperor.
    For two years, the man had come to watch Sebastos often as he practised with his bow, or spun his knife at distant targets. He had seen him fight – and sometimes beat – the other bastard get of soldiers who foraged in the scrap-camp that followed the legions. He had observed Sebastos’ solitary nature, his unwillingness to curry favour with those who scorned him, or feared him, or even the few who admired him. Most, the philosopher had seen that his own watching was noticed, and then that he himself was watched in his turn.
    It had become an unspoken game between them; the philosopher would go about his business, always watchful, and Sebastos would try covertly to follow him.
    Later, when the boy could go a whole day and know all of the philosopher’s business and never be spotted once, the man made the game official, and paid him in bronze, or bread, or fletchings, if he could follow a distant man, pointed out in a crowded place, and report on his activities.
    Over three more years, the tests had become ever harder, ever more dangerous. Sebastos had excelled at all of them, and grown in his understanding of himself; shadows were his allies, secrecy his life’s blood, and the philosopher was a teacher in the truest sense of the word. When his father had been posted to Judaea and the child had been forced to follow, Sebastos found he had lost his first friend without ever having known he had one.
    It had been a tearful farewell for both of them. At the last moment of parting, the philosopher had caught Sebastos’ chin and tilted his head and promised that if ever a tall, comely boy with skill in knife and bow wanted truly to be a warrior for Rome, he could promise him a wage and a place to live, and perhaps, if he made himself useful, citizenship.
    Citizenship: the ultimate prize. Sebastos held the name of his potential sponsor in his heart all the long, dusty journey to Alexandria: Lucius Anaeus Seneca, teacher to a lost mongrel child.

I
C ORIALLUM , N ORTHERN G AUL
L ATE S UMMER, AD 63
I N THE R EIGN OF THE
E MPEROR N ERO

C HAPTER O NE
    T he spy made landfall the evening before the chariot races began.
    His ship sailed in on a narrow slide of sunlight, splitting the