Excerpt from Peacock

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From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Sparrow comes another spellbinding historical epic set in the last days of a dying Roman empire . . .

Sparrow has flown from the confines of the Roman brothel where he was raised. Now older and smarter, and having learned the arts of deception and enticement from the women who raised him, he vies to become a player in the internal politics at Arcadia, the home of his new master, a man who is himself playing with political fire. Sparrow soon realizes that the key to survival in this turbulent place is information, and he must gather it at any cost.

As the dangers mount for Sparrow, he is forced to choose where his loyalties lie and which of these powerful Romans is most likely to ensure his survival.

Epic and intimate, spectacularly vivid, Peacock is the story of a boy becoming a man as an empire falters in the face of the rise of Christianity. On his journey this boy will learn what it is to be in love, and what it is to be hated, but he is also perfecting his own manipulative powers . . .

Sparrow has never seen the stars like this before. They spill across the sky from horizon to horizon, massed and sharp, pointing at him like spears. At the zenith, far above him, a river of light streams across the darkness like a brilliant gutter. Far below, at the dead centre of the black, gleaming disc of the sea, a tiny ship see-saws on the swell, its single mast waving back and forth as if beckoning him closer. Sparrow tucks his wings and plummets toward the ship, then at the last moment spreads them again to hang just above the masthead. The rigging creaks, the timbers groan, the sail snaps and thumps in the inconstant wind. By starlight he sees sailors asleep on the planking or curled on coils of rope. He floats above the helmsman huddled over the tiller, who is singing quietly to keep himself awake. Slowly beating his wings, Sparrow drifts over a cage on the deck, where a boy – a slave, a whore, a motherless son – lies rigidly on his back with wrists crossed and fists clenched over his chest, staring wide-eyed and wide awake up through the iron grid of the cage at the silhouette of Sparrow printed against the stars.
      Sleep, they told me, but how can I sleep when the deck below me sways and shudders, lifts me and drops me, twists me from side to side? How can I sleep when the swell slaps and seethes against the hull? In the life I lived until just three days ago, I used to lie full length in the dirt of a tavern garden and stare up at the stars, and the earth was massive and cool and immovable beneath my back. There, in Carthago Nova, it was the stars that moved, wheeling slowly within the frame of the garden walls, and I watched them glide, one by one, behind the roofline of the tavern. Over the course of days, I watched the moon swell and deflate like a bladder. But here, out of sight of land, my old life has sunk beneath the waves behind me, and everything under and around me rocks and creaks and groans – except the silent sky, where the river of light directly overhead bears me away from everything and everyone I knew. Meanwhile Sparrow, my old friend, my last remaining friend, drifts against the stars, staring down at me as I stare up at him.
      We are linked, he and I, by an unbreakable cord, or so I’ve always thought. He comes when I need him most, when I’m afraid or in pain, when no one else can help me, and tonight he hovers over me as I clutch myself to keep my heart from pounding out of my chest and try not to weep out loud. I’m safer in this cage than I have ever been before – without the key, no one can get at me – but I’m also more exposed than I have ever been, with no way out and nowhere to run. The cage lets in the wind and the salt spray and the glittering spearpoints of the stars, and if I lift my head, all I can see beyond the sides of the ship are black, slowly tumbling waves, ridges and valleys rising and sinking endlessly all the way to the horizon, swirling with pale blue luminescence. Sparrow cannot see the land, either, but he’s outside the cage, floating free in the briny air and coolly watching me below. As I dig my ragged fingernails into my palms, part of my terror is that he, too, will abandon or betray me, the way everyone else has, that he will fly away and never come back.
      A big wave splashes against the hull, and fat droplets sail through the starlight and drench me, soaking my tunic to the skin and plastering my hair to my skull. Gasping as the water slowly streams away, I swipe my eyes with the heels of my hands. My mouth is full of seawater, and it’s true what I’ve always heard – the sea does taste like salt. It reminds me of semen, sweat, and blood, tastes I know well, but it also tastes like other things that I can’t identify, salts I’ve never tasted before. As the water clears from my eyes, I see beyond Sparrow to the fierce stars penetrating me through the bars of the cage, and I think of Euterpe, the only person who has ever really loved me, awake on the deck of another ship going somewhere else, far away from me.
      I asked her once, ‘What are the stars?’ Euterpe was my mother and not my mother, and at the time we were both sitting under the tender blue of a morning sky, with not a star to be seen. We almost never sat under a dark sky together, because she was a wolf – a tavern whore – and always worked at night. Soon enough, so was I. Even so, I asked her what they were, because on those nights when I’d lain awake outside on my own, I had noticed that most of the stars were fixed in relation to each other and turned slowly, while a few bright ones moved on their own from night to night. Once in a while a star streaked against the dark, flaring before it faded as swiftly as an ember. Stars, it seemed, weren’t immortal. They could die, just like people.
      ‘And some of them flow together in a stream,’ I said, tracing an arc against the blue with my hand, ‘like . . . like . . .’
      ‘Like milk,’ Euterpe said, and I laughed, because she was right. Then, as was her practice, she told me a story that didn’t quite answer my question, but entertained me enough for me to forget what I had asked. In the time of the old gods, she told me, when there were many of them and not just the one god of the Christians, someone brought Juno, the queen of the gods, a half-human child to suckle, without telling her who it was. She pitied the boy and let him fix on her breast, but he sucked so vigorously that he hurt her, and she realized that he was Hercules, one of the bastard children of her cheating husband Jupiter, the king of the gods. So she angrily pushed the boy away, and the milk from her teat sprayed across the night sky, glittering like all the stars around it, because it was the milk of a goddess.
      ‘What happened to Hercules?’ That’s what I took from the story – that the boy was pushed away by his mother, or someone like his mother. Stars could fall, goddesses could be bitter and hateful, children could be thrown away. Nothing in this world was certain.
‘Did he die?’ I said.
      ‘No.’ Euterpe held me close and kissed the top of my head. ‘He grew up to become the strongest man in the world.’ She tipped my face up to hers. ‘If you can survive being spurned by a goddess,’ she said, ‘you can survive anything.’
Wasn’t that just like her, to tell me something hopeful that wasn’t entirely true? In the end she tried to save me, she tried to save us both, but in our attempt to escape we were caught and torn apart for ever. The woman who engineered our separation was another one of my teachers – I won’t call her mother – the conniving wolf Melpomene, and for her sins, I helped to murder her and burn down the tavern where we all lived and worked. It hurts to think of all of this, but it hurts even more to know I will never see Euterpe again. Is she safe tonight on the deck of her ship, looking up at the same stars I’m looking at, or is she below decks with all the other slaves, bearing the raw stripes of the lash and already wearing the iron collar of a runaway? All I can be certain of is that, wherever she is and whatever they’ve done to her, she’s wondering the same about me. She’s thinking of me more than she thinks of herself. No one in my life, before or since, has ever loved me like Euterpe did. If she’s not my mother, then I never had a mother.
      Now the stars are blurry, and I hear someone whimper. It’s me, of course, and I’m angry at myself. Slaves don’t cry – the tavern’s pimp Audo and the kitchen slave Focaria taught me that, Audo with his fists, Focaria with her sharp tongue and sometimes a strap. I don’t want the helmsman to hear me crying, so I draw a deep, shuddering breath and let it slowly, shuddering, out. I swipe my eyes again with the heels of my hands, which are still stinging with cuts from the events of the past few days. I’m still wearing bruises on my arms, my face, and my neck, and my throat is still raw from breathing smoke. Above me, the grid of the cage prints itself in silhouette against Juno’s milk, and the ship’s sail swells and deflates, bleached pale by starlight. Below me, the mat they gave me to sleep on is sodden with seawater. Nearby, the helmsman quietly sings his mournful song in a language I don’t recognize.
      Has he had me? I wonder. It’s not unlikely, and even if he hasn’t, it’s not unlikely that some of his shipmates have. The tavern in Carthago Nova was close to the harbour, and many of the punters who came into my cell and used me like a woman were sailors. But if he or any of his shipmates had fucked me, how would I know? I don’t remember faces usually, because when it’s happening, Sparrow takes me away. Like my sisters, the other wolves, I had my local regulars whose faces and names I did know, some of whom even reclined on my cot afterwards and told me their troubles as if I was their friend, their slave, or their son. But many of the punters were simply passing through the city, and if we came face to face in the street, or on the deck of this ship, we would not know each other. I was just another boy in another port, something they used to scratch an itch, to relieve their boredom. Just another hole to empty themselves into.
      But now I have been made new – born again, as the Christians say. I am still a slave, but my new owner, Tatius the slave dealer, tells me that he intends me to become the plaything of only one man, a powerful imperial official in the city of Tarraco, the capital of the province of Tarraconensis. This is why I lie alone in a cage on the deck: I’m too valuable to wedge into the hold with his other slaves. They are all shackled at the ankles, shoulder to shoulder, arse to arse, breathing each other’s farts and underarms and sour breath. I curl on my side at the edge of the soaking mat, clutch my knees to my chest, and press my ear to the damp planking of the deck. I can hear them all below, snoring, sighing, coughing, groaning. Some of them whisper together, someone sings quietly to herself. Someone else, seasick, throws up, and I hear meaty thumps as the nearby slaves punch him. I even hear two slaves fucking, but I can’t tell if it’s a man and a woman, or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. But their grunts and moans are as familiar to me as the bruises on my skin.
      Wherever I’m going, Tatius means for me to arrive there unmarked, unharmed, and unmolested. I saved my own life several days ago, mustering a cunning I didn’t know I possessed – the legacy of Melpomene – but now that I have been expelled from everything and everyone I ever knew, I have no idea what’s coming next. Will life in Tarraco be as hard as life in Carthago Nova? Will my new Dominus be better or worse? Usually, Sparrow only appears when I’m in pain or physical danger, but tonight I am in mortal fear for my future, and he flutters just above my cage, as if he’s trying to decide whether to stay or to abandon me.
      Then the ship heels and another wave pummels me, sloshing me up against the side of the cage. The water seethes away, and I slide back from the bars and flop flat on the wet deck, huffing and gasping, my arms and legs spread wide, my vision blurred with stinging saltwater. As my sight clears, Sparrow and I look at each other through each other’s eyes, and we say to each other, in the same instant, in one voice, I will never leave you. I cough out a mouthful of seawater, with its taste of strange salts, and as I lie there spreadeagled, drenched and cold and exhausted, I come to the only conclusion I can under the circumstances.
      The sea tastes like starlight. It tastes like loneliness and betrayal and abandonment. It tastes like the bitter milk of an angry goddess.