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

green-faced clerks had gone.
    A dozen merchants followed them off the ship. They had better sea legs but carried about them the nervous aura of risk-takers, vivid as a whore’s scent. Lining up along the dock, they shouted instructions to the gathering stevedores concerning the immense worth of their goods and the disasters that would befall if anything were damaged in the lifting from boat to dock.
    There was a long gap then, filled busily by block-and-tackle work with ropes so that the boy thought no one else was coming ashore and that he had lost his fee.
    ‘Fuck.’ He said it quietly, but one of the stevedores heard him and reached to snatch the hat from his head. Beneath it, Math’s hair hung to his shoulders in a skein of dirty gold, gone to straw in the damp sea air. Set over a slim neck and a thin, interesting face, it shone brightly enough to lift him from the run of the gutter-thieves who worked the docks.
    The stevedore whistled an obscenity and mimed the spin of a coin through the air, then sent the hat to follow. Math spat an insult back and retrieved his hat. A ripple of laughter made the unloading work flow faster for a moment. Cursing colourfully, Math began to coil in his line.
    His attention had only been gone from the ship for a moment, but it was enough – almost too much.
    The man he had been sent to watch stepped lightly ashore between a bale of stinking, uncombed sheep’s fleece and a crate of tin ingots so massive that it took four of the laughing men to lift and haul it, and even then it rebounded off the dock and fractured, spreading shards of almost-silver across the stained oak boards. Two ingots slid noiseless into the sea, too heavy to splash. The merchant whose crate it was screamed as if the stevedores had stabbed him.
    The slight, slouch-shouldered figure that was the boy’s mark sprang sideways as the crate bounced off the side of the dock for a second time. In his bare feet and rough, undyed tunic, he might have been anything from another clerk to a deckhand released early from the boat.
    Math knew he was neither. Leaning back on the bollard, he let his hat droop and droop until he was looking through a gap in the brim. A stranger might have thought him asleep, which would have been foolish, but then grown men commonly made foolish assumptions about Math of the Osismi, most common of which was that he was charming, shy, and naturally honest and had never whored himself before.
    The scrawny old Roman who had paid him to watch the harbour had not made any such assumptions, which was the first point in his favour. The second was that he’d offered a whole sestertius to Math as payment if he could watch for and then follow a particular passenger stepping ashore from the Blue Mackerel . The fee was more than Math earned in a month in his paid work for Ajax, and far more than he would have dared steal.
    So that his quarry might not be missed, the scrawny Roman had given detailed physical characteristics of the man he was expecting to sail into Coriallum on the emperor’s ship. He has dark hair, not so striking as the fire-copper of your mad Gaulish countrymen who race their chariots so recklessly for the amusement of the emperor, nor yet the obsidian black of the Greeks, but somewhere between: a deep oak-brown that does not quite catch the eye .
    The man’s hair was not catching anyone’s eye; a straggling wood-dark nest that had been combed some time not long ago and then uncombed by the sea wind straight after. It lifted again now, jerkily, as he stepped over the fallen ingots to walk down the dock.
    He was not a whole man. The old Roman had said so and it was true. Had he been paraded at the autumn horse fair, Ajax would have passed him over, leaving lesser men to bid good silver for a beast that was not overtly lame, yet not perfectly sound.
    Ajax had an eye for such things and Math was learning it. So he saw that the man’s right shoulder was lower than it should have been and he