In the Shadow of Heroes Read online

  A MESSAGE FROM CHICKEN HOUSE

  Buckle your sandals and pack your toga: you’re about to travel to the amazing world of ancient Rome – In the Shadow of Heroes will sweep you up on a voyage of wild discovery. Alongside two wonderful friends, Cadmus and Tog, you’ll uncover the secrets of the ancient heroes, cross the Roman Empire from Athens to a Britain of druids and magic, and find the truth hidden in the myths. (Plus, there’s a pet mouse!) Nick Bowling is a fast, funny, clever and mysterious writer – and this is a very special kind of storytelling.

  BARRY CUNNINGHAM

  Publisher

  Chicken House

  CONTENTS

  Prologus

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Epilogus

  Copyright

  For PSF and MJP

  magistris merentissimis

  Also by Nicholas Bowling

  Witchborn

  PROLOGUS

  The girl was like a visitor from the world below. Even if Silvanus had been able to stand, she still would have been a head taller than him; from where he lay, spread out on the couch and delirious with fever, she seemed inhumanly large, dark, insubstantial. Pluto himself come to take him away.

  He motioned to his slave to bring him a little water, then dismissed him. With difficulty he propped himself up on one elbow and beckoned the girl into the room. She approached the couch in two giant strides, bringing with her a clean smell of dust and hot air from outside. Healthy visitors only reminded Silvanus of how sick he was. His room was damp and fetid. The plaster on the walls seemed to sweat as much as he did.

  ‘You speak Latin?’ he asked. The girl stared at him and didn’t reply.

  That was good. It meant she wouldn’t be able to read what she was delivering.

  ‘Greek?’ he said.

  She nodded slowly.

  ‘You want to get out of this place, don’t you?’

  Her face remained expressionless, as though weighing up whether this might be some sort of trap. Then she nodded again.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Silvanus. ‘I have a job for you.’

  He hauled himself upright, his body sagging like a sack of grain. He waited for the throbbing in his temples to subside, and made his way to a strongbox in the corner of the room. Three times he stumbled and fell, three times the girl made no move to help him, but simply stood by the couch, watching with curiosity.

  Silvanus opened the box and took out a scroll and a wax tablet. He put the scroll on the desk and handed the tablet to the girl.

  ‘I’ve watched you,’ he said. ‘With the other slaves. You seem . . .’ He groped for the word. ‘Resilient.’

  Still she said nothing.

  ‘I want you to look after this tablet with the same vigour that you look after yourself. Do you understand? Its contents are very important. More important than I can tell you.’

  She was starting to look bored now.

  ‘Listen.’ Silvanus tried to shake her by the arm, but found himself clutching on to her to stop himself from falling. He coughed, tasting blood in the back of his mouth. ‘Listen to me. You must take this to a man in Rome. His name is written inside. Go to the harbour and get a boat to Italy. As quickly as possible. By any means possible. No one else is to read it.’

  His slave trotted back into the room behind them both, holding a circle of iron in his hands.

  ‘You’ll have to wear this, I’m afraid. I can’t afford to have the message going astray.’

  Silvanus took the collar from the boy and fumbled with the clasp. He fitted it around the girl’s neck. A wooden tag hung by a chain on to her chest, which read, in Latin:

  I BELONG TO GAIUS DOMITIUS TULLUS, SENATOR. IF YOU FIND ME, RETURN ME TO MY MASTER AT ROME.

  Silvanus could see that the collar was too tight around the girl’s muscular neck, and her brow twitched with discomfort.

  ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Don’t rest. The man in Rome will look after you. I promise.’

  He nodded to his slave, who led her out of the room, taking three steps for every one of hers. She never said a thing, and she never looked back.

  Silvanus watched them go and wondered, through the fog of his sickness, if he was making a terrible mistake. Perhaps, he thought, it would be better if all he knew went with him to his grave.

  He swayed a little on his feet. He rolled up the edge of his toga and looked at the two tiny puncture wounds on his thigh. The flesh around them had gone a sickening shade of yellow, threaded through with dark purple veins. No doctor in all of Athens had been able to do anything for him. Now he was resigned to prayer, and he very much doubted the gods wanted to listen to him.

  Behind him, the scroll that he had taken from his strongbox was still lying on the writing desk. He picked it up and held it for a moment, enjoying its weight, tracing his finger around the bosses at the top and bottom.

  Then he took the oil lamp from the tabletop, held it to the corner of the scroll, and set fire to it. He dropped it on to the tiles, and watched the tightly rolled papyrus burn and blacken and flutter like a crow’s feathers. His eyes watered from the smoke. He may have been crying, though he hardly had the energy for it. Either way, it was done. Now it was all down to the girl.

  Outside, he could hear the streets of Athens singing and clattering with life. Silvanus smiled. He’d hated the noise when he’d arrived, strange men hollering in strange accents. Now, on the brink of death, it sounded like music.

  He crushed the remains on the scroll with his heel. Then he stumbled back to the couch, pulled the coverlet over his body, and waited for night.

  I

  Cadmus draped a cold flannel over the polished, pink dome of his master’s head.

  ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘Antonius Macer lost his case in court today. It wouldn’t be wise to bring it up.’

  His master nodded. ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  ‘And Paulinus has just been elected praetor, so remember to congratulate him.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And Silvanus will eat three times as much as everyone else, so you’ll have to be, ah, tactical in where you place the dishes.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘And remember not to open the Falernian wine until the third course.’

  ‘Cadmus!’ His master whipped the damp cloth from his forehead and threw it with a slap against the wall. ‘If this is your attempt at calming me down, you are doing miserably.’

  ‘Forgive me, Master,’ said Cadmus, looking at the damp patch and trying not to laugh. The flannel had hit the painting of Venus square on her rosy cheeks. ‘Would you like me to fetch you something to drink?’

  ‘What I would like,’ his master said, massaging his temples, ‘is for you to be like every other slave and speak only when you’re spoken to.’

  ‘Of course, Master.’

  Poor old Gaius Domi
tius Tullus hosted one dinner party a year. Even that was too much for him, and when it came around he became nothing short of a nervous wreck. The prospect of raucous socializing and a drunken, interrupted night’s sleep had been a storm cloud hanging over him all week.

  ‘What need has a man of friends,’ Cadmus remembered him declaring (many, many times), ‘when he has his books?’ Cadmus tended to agree with that. Although, as a slave, his opportunities for making friends were fairly limited anyway.

  Tullus heaved himself from his couch and went out into the garden. Dusk had shrouded the city of Rome in purple. The crickets sang to each other in the silence, the air warm and heavy with the scents of cypress and lavender. The old man sighed to himself. Cadmus thought he looked particularly thin that night.

  There was a knock at the door of the villa. Tullus whirled around in dismay.

  ‘Cadmus? Who is that?’

  ‘I’m afraid the gods haven’t granted me the gift of foresight, Master.’

  ‘Don’t be clever with me, Cadmus. What are they doing here? Dinner won’t be served for another hour!’

  Tullus clutched at the folds of his toga and marched into the atrium, turned, marched back, then turned again and went for the door. The two slave girls sweeping the floor watched him in bewilderment.

  ‘Don’t just stand there,’ Tullus hissed at no one in particular. ‘Light some lamps!’ He reached the bronze door handle and stopped. ‘No, what am I thinking? Cadmus, you open it. Opening my own front door! Gods above!’

  One of the slave girls brought an oil lamp, which only served to highlight the sweat beading on his master’s head. Tullus stood back, a little to the side of the pool in the middle of the atrium, and composed himself. He looked rigid as a statue.

  When Cadmus eventually opened the door, the man on the other side was not a dinner guest at all. Neither were the praetorian guards who flanked him on both sides. Nobody acknowledged Cadmus as they barged noisily into the villa, the two armed men carrying a bronze strongbox between them. Tullus’s face, which had been so ruddy moments before, was now completely colourless.

  ‘Greetings, Tullus,’ said the man at the front. He was wearing a toga but he spoke his Latin with a strong Greek accent. A foreigner. One of Cadmus’s countrymen.

  His master looked like he was about to be sick. ‘Oh, I . . . Yes. Good evening. I’m sorry the house is in such a state, if I had known you were coming I would have . . .’ There was a flicker of recognition between the two of them, Cadmus noticed.

  The Greek man laughed. ‘Do not worry yourself, this is not a social call. Let’s be honest, Gaius, you aren’t exactly renowned for your hospitality, are you?’ Tullus tried to laugh but it just sounded like he was hacking some phlegm from the back of his throat. ‘No,’ the man continued, ‘I have actually come to bring you a gift.’

  ‘A gift?’

  ‘From Nero.’

  The guards dropped the chest on the floor of the atrium and it echoed coldly. Cadmus looked at it, then at the guards, then at the Greek intruder. Something wasn’t right.

  ‘The emperor?’ Tullus’s face didn’t know what to do with itself. ‘What have I deserved from the, ah, Divine Caesar?’

  ‘Nero wants to thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  The man smiled. ‘For all the fine work you are about to do for him.’

  Tullus gaped like a speared fish. Then, for the first time, the Greek turned to look at Cadmus.

  ‘Dismiss this one,’ he said. ‘We have much to discuss.’

  Cadmus kicked a stone from the peristyle into the garden.

  This one. He hated being spoken about like that. Living in Tullus’s household it was easy to forget how most other people viewed him.

  He went to the kitchen first, to tell the cooks they would need to delay serving the dinner for perhaps another hour. They took this news just as he expected them to, like a mouthful of sour fish sauce, and went back to the stoves sullenly and without reply. Worst of the lot was old Bufo, ‘the toad’, whose name really didn’t do justice to either his squatness or his ugliness. Tullus had inherited him years ago, before Cadmus had even been born, and treated him like an heirloom, some old piece of furniture to be treasured even though nobody wanted it in the house. While the others returned to work, Bufo dropped his ladle noisily into the bottom of the pan and stared at Cadmus out of the sagging folds of his face. He shook his head and tutted. Another black mark against his name, Cadmus knew.

  He’d grown used to it all, though. The educated didn’t talk to him because he was a slave, and the other slaves didn’t talk to him because he was educated – and certainly far too educated for a boy of fourteen – so he’d carved a lonely little niche for himself. There was also the matter of his appearance. He was too pale to look like he was Greek or Roman, even though he was born in Athens; so pale, in fact, he felt luminous when he wandered the house by night. And then there were his eyes. His right eye was perfectly normal, but his left was a strange yellowish colour that seemed to belong more to an animal than a human being. Most people never noticed, but when they did they had a tendency to sidestep him in the street. He was a prodigy, certainly, but not the good kind.

  Quite right, Tullus, he thought to himself. Who needs friends?

  He went back to his tiny bedroom, hearing the low talk of his master and the new guests as he passed the study. Their murmurs were tantalizing.

  He tried to ignore them, and pulled his blanket over his bare legs. It was tatty and thin and not particularly comfortable, but it was just about the only thing he could call his own – everything else in the room belonged to his master, just like Cadmus himself did. He spent a few moments writing up a letter that Tullus had dictated to him earlier in the day, then scraped down his wax tablet, cleaned and arranged his writing implements. He attempted to read some scrolls of his own.

  But it was no good. Occasionally he would catch a word of the discussion from across the atrium, and try to hear the rest. Tullus was agitated about something, but Cadmus couldn’t work out what.

  He couldn’t help himself. He threw down the scroll on to his bed, crept from his room and tiptoed through the darkness to where the curtain had been pulled across Tullus’s study. He stood with his back against the cool, smooth plaster, and listened.

  ‘It goes without saying,’ Tullus said, tiredness plain in his voice, ‘that this is a great honour. And it is not my place to refuse the will of the emperor.’

  ‘The will of the gods, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m not questioning Nero’s divinity. Not at all.’ Cadmus heard his master slurping nervously from a wine cup.

  ‘Then shouldn’t a god be in possession of godly things?’

  ‘Yes, of course, it’s just . . .’

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘I’m just not sure how useful I can be.’

  ‘Well, you can certainly be more useful than the last man who was in charge of the project.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘He is dead, Tullus. That’s why we’ve come to you.’

  Cadmus’s heart was hammering so loudly in his ribcage he was sure the visitors would hear it. Whatever the ‘project’ was, his master almost certainly wasn’t up to the task. The man couldn’t cope with planning the menu for his dinner party – being made to work according to the whims of the emperor would probably kill him.

  There was silence in the study for a moment. ‘Dead?’

  ‘Sadly.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘You knew him, I think. Quintus Aemilius Silvanus.’

  ‘Silvanus? He was meant to be coming here tonight! I didn’t even know he was out of the city!’ It sounded, just for a moment, like Tullus was more annoyed at having to change his seating plan than shocked at the man’s death. But Cadmus knew that his master would take it heavily. Silvanus was a scholar, like Tullus – younger than him, but still one of his few really close friends. He’d been due to read from his Argona
utica after dinner, an epic poem he had been working on for years. Cadmus had been rather looking forward to it.

  Tullus sighed. ‘Gods above. How did it happen?’

  ‘A fever, I think. Something he caught on his way to the excavation.’

  Excavation? What did he mean by that?

  ‘And the emperor is certain he would like me to replace him?’ said Tullus.

  ‘Sadly Silvanus’s research was destroyed in the hours before he died. Burnt by Silvanus himself. Or by one of his slaves, perhaps. At any rate, we need to start from scratch, and you come highly recommended. By Silvanus himself, I believe.’

  There was a long and strained pause.

  ‘I cannot,’ said Tullus, very quietly. ‘It is not proper. The gods—’

  ‘Nero is your god. You need to ask yourself whose displeasure you would rather risk: Jupiter’s, or Nero’s.’

  ‘Don’t force me to make that choice, Epaphroditus. Look at me. I’m an old man. I have no more hair to lose. Does he really think a frame like this is up to the task? Look what happened to Silvanus – and he was younger than me!’

  ‘He thinks you are the only person who is up to the task. With greater age comes greater wisdom. You are a scholar without equal, especially in this area of research. Or so Silvanus said.’

  ‘But I haven’t given this sort of thing any thought for decades. Silvanus was the real expert.’ Tullus paused. ‘I respectfully ask, if I may, that Nero lets me live out my few remaining years in peace.’

  Cadmus was surprised at the firmness in his master’s voice. He never would have thought the old man had the kind of backbone to turn down the emperor – he saw that backbone daily, and it was bent and arthritic from too much time in his library.

  The Greek man laughed unpleasantly through his nose.

  ‘I was assured you would be stubborn. Hence the gift.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘An incentive. Not yours to keep. The gift is simply to lay your eyes upon it.’

  There was the sound of the praetorians shuffling around in their armour, then two heavy clunks as the clasps of the strongbox were opened. A voice inside Cadmus’s head screamed at him to look. No, he couldn’t risk it. Tullus wouldn’t punish him if he were caught, but this visitor had a cruel look about him. And if Nero himself found out that a slave had been eavesdropping on official imperial business . . . Well, he’d be lucky to get away with crucifixion.