Kyros was pretty sure that wasn’t true, but he had seen the rotund master chef bring a chopping knife down a finger’s breadth away from the hand of an undercook who was cleaning leeks carelessly. The knife had stuck, quivering, in the table. The undercook had looked at it, at his own precariously adjacent fingers, and fainted. ‘Toss him in the horse trough,’ Strumosus had ordered. Kyros’s bad foot had excused him from that duty, but four others had done it, carrying the unconscious undercook out the door and down the portico steps. It had been winter then, a bitterly cold, grey afternoon. The surface of the water in the trough across the courtyard was frozen. The undercook revived, spectacularly, when they dropped him in.
Working for a notoriously temperamental cook was not the easiest employment in the City.
Still, Kyros had surprised himself over the course of a year and a half by discovering that he enjoyed the kitchen. There were mysteries to preparing food, and Kyros had found himself thinking about them. It helped that this wasn’t just any kitchen, or any chef. The short, hot-tempered, ample-stomached man who supervised the food here was a legend in the City. There were those who held the view that he was far too aware of the fact, but if a cook could be an artist, Strumosus was. And his kitchen was the Blues’ banqueting hall in Sarantium, where feasts for two hundred people were known to take place some nights.
Tonight, in fact. Strumosus, in a fever of brilliance, controlled chaos, and skin-blistering invective, had co-ordinated the preparation of eight elaborate courses of culinary celebration, climaxing in a parade of fifty boys—they’d recruited and cleaned up the stablehands—carrying enormous silver platters of shrimp-stuffed whitefish in his celebrated sauce around the wildly cheering banquet room while trumpets sounded and blue banners were madly waved. An overly enthused Clarus—the Blues’ principal male dancer—had leaped flamboyantly from his seat at the high table and hastened over to plant a kiss full on the lips of the cook in the doorway to the kitchens. Shouts and ribald laughter ensued as Strumosus pretended to swat the little dancer away and then acknowledged the applause and whistles.
It was the last night of Dykania, end of another racing season, and the Glorious Blues of Great Renown had once more thrashed the hapless whey-faced Greens, both during the long season and today. Scortius’s astonishing victory in the first afternoon race already seemed destined to become one of those triumphs that were talked about forever.
The wine had flowed freely all night, and so had the toasts that came with it. The faction’s poet, Khardelos, had stood up unsteadily, propped himself with one splayed hand on the table, and improvised a verse, flagon lifted:
Amid the thundering voices of the gathered throng
Scortius flies like an eagle across the sand
beneath the eagle’s nest of the kathisma!
All glory to the glorious Emperor!
Glory to the swift Soriyyan and his steeds!
All glory to the Blues of Great Renown!
Kyros had felt prickles of sheer delight running along his spine. Like an eagle across the sand. That was wonderful! His eyes misted with emotion. Strumosus, beside him at the kitchen door in the momentary lull of activity, had snorted softly. ‘A feeble wordsmith,’ he’d murmured, just loudly enough for Kyros to hear. He often did that. ‘Old phrases and butchered ones. Must talk to Astorgus. The charioteers are splendid, the kitchen is matchless, as we all know. The dancers are good enough. The poet, however, must go. Must go.’
Kyros had looked over and blushed to see Strumosus’s sharp, small eyes on him. ‘Part of your education, boy. Be not seduced by cheap sentiment any more than by a heavy hand with spices. There’s a difference between the accolades of the masses and the approval of those who really know.’ He turned and went back into the heat of the kitchen. Kyros quickly followed.
Later, scarred, craggy-faced Astorgus, once the most celebrated charioteer in the City himself and now the Blues’ factionarius, made a speech announcing a new statue to Scortius for the spina in the Hippodrome. There were already two of them, but both had been raised by the pustulent Greens. This one, Astorgus declared, would be made of silver not bronze, to the greater glory of the Blues and the charioteer, both. There was a deafening roar of approval. One of the younger serving boys in the kitchen, startled by the noise, dropped a dish of candied fruit he was carrying out. Strumosus buffeted him about the head and shoulders with a long-handled wooden spoon, breaking the spoon. The spoons broke easily, as it happened. Kyros had noticed that the cook seldom did much actual damage, for all the apparent force of his blows.
When he had a moment, Kyros paused in the doorway again, looking at Astorgus. The factionarius was drinking steadily but to little evident effect. He had an easy, smiling word for everyone who stopped by his seat at the table. A calm, immensely reassuring man. Strumosus said Astorgus was the principal reason for the Blues’ current domination of the racing and many other matters. He had wooed Scortius, Strumosus himself, was said to be working on other clever schemes all the time. Kyros wondered, though: how would it feel to be known as a competent administrator when you had once been the object yourself of all the wild cheers, the statues raised, the enraptured speeches and poems comparing you to eagles and lions, or to the great Hippodrome figures of all the ages? Was it hard? It must be, he thought, but couldn’t really know, not from looking at Astorgus.
The banquet meandered its way to a vague close, as such events tended to. A few quarrels, someone violently ill in a corner of the hall, too sick to make it as far as the room set aside for vomiting. Columella, the horse doctor, slumped in his seat morosely, chanting verses from Trakesia long ago in a monotone. He was always like that late at night. He knew more old poetry than Khardelos did. Those on either side of him were fast asleep with their heads among the platters on the table. One of the younger female dancers was doing a sequence of movements by herself, over and over, face intent, hands fluttering up like paired birds, then falling to rest at her sides as she spun. Kyros seemed to be the only one watching her. She was pretty, he thought. Another pair of dancers took her with them when they left. Then Astorgus left, helping Columella along, and soon no one was left in the hall. That had been a while ago.
As far as Kyros could judge, it had been a very successful banquet. Scortius hadn’t been there, of course. He had been summoned to the Imperial Precinct, and so was forgiven his absence. An invitation from the Emperor brought glory to them all.
On the other hand, the brilliant charioteer was also the reason Strumosus—exhausted, dangerously irritable—and a handful of unfortunate boys and undercooks were still awake in the kitchen in the depths of an autumn night after even the most impassioned of the partisans had staggered to their homes and beds. The Blues’ staff and administration were asleep by now across the courtyard in the dormitory or their private quarters, if rank had earned them such. The streets and squares beyond the gated compound were quiet at the end of the festival. Slaves under the supervision of the Urban Prefect’s office would be out already, cleaning the streets. It was cold outside now; a north wind had come slicing down out of Trakesia, winter in it.
Ordinary life would resume with the sun. The parties were over.
But it seemed that Scortius had solemnly promised the master cook of the Blues that he would come to the kitchens after the Emperor’s banquet and sample what had been offered tonight, comparing it to the fare in the Imperial Precinct. He was late. It was late. It was very late. No approaching footsteps could be heard outside.
They had all been enthused at the prospect of sharing the last of a glorious day and night with the charioteer, but that had been a long time ago. Kyros suppressed a yawn and eyed the low fire, stirring his fish soup, careful not to let it boil. He tasted it, and decided against adding any more sea salt. It was an extreme honour for one of the scullion boys to be entrusted with supervising a dish and there had been indignation when Kyros was given such tasks after barely a year in the kitchen. Kyros himself had been astonished; h
e hadn’t known Strumosus was even aware of his presence.
He hadn’t actually wanted to be here at the beginning. As a boy he’d planned to be a charioteer, of course: all of them did. Later, he’d expected to follow his father as an animal trainer for the Blues, but reality had descended upon that idea when Kyros was still very young. A trainer dragging a clubbed foot around with him was unlikely to survive even a season among the big cats and bears. Kyros’s father had appealed to the faction administration to find another place for his son when Kyros was of age. The Blues tended to look after their own. Administrative wheels had turned, on a minor scale, and Kyros had been assigned to apprentice in the great kitchen with the newly recruited master cook. You didn’t have to run, or dodge dangerous beasts there.
Other than the cook.
Strumosus reappeared in the doorway from the portico outside. Rasic, with his uncanny survival instinct, had already stopped his muttering, without turning around. The chef looked fevered and overwrought, but he often did, so that didn’t signify greatly. Kyros’s mother would have paled to see Strumosus walking to and from the hot kitchens and the cold courtyard at such an hour as this. If the noxious vapours didn’t afflict you in the black depths of night then the spirits of the half-world would, she firmly believed.
Strumosus of Amoria had been hired by the Blues—at a cost rumoured to be outrageous—from the kitchens of the exiled Lysippus, once Quaestor of Imperial Revenue, banished in the wake of the Victory Riot. The two factions competed in the hippodromes with their chariots, in the theatres of the Empire, with their poets’ declamations and group chants, and—not at all infrequently—in the streets and alleyways with cudgels and blades. Cunning Astorgus had decided to take the competition into the kitchens of the faction compounds, and recruiting Strumosus—though he was prickly as a Soriyyan desert plant—had been a brilliant stroke. The City had talked about nothing else for months; a number of patricians had discovered a hitherto unknown affiliation to the Blues and had happily fattened themselves in the faction’s banquet hall while making contributions that went a long way towards fattening Astorgus’s purse for the horse auctions or the wooing of dancers and charioteers. The Blues appeared to have found yet another way to fight—and defeat—the Greens.
Blues and Greens had fought side by side two years ago, in the Victory Riot, but that astonishing, almost unprecedented fact hadn’t done anything to stop them from dying when the soldiers had come into the Hippodrome. Kyros remembered the riot, of course. One of his uncles had been killed by a sword in the Hippodrome Forum and his mother had taken to her bed for two weeks after that. The name of Lysippus the Calysian had been one to spit upon in Kyros’s household, and in a great many others, of all ranks and classes.
The Emperor’s taxation master had been ruthless, but they always were, taxation masters. It was more than that. The stories of what went on after darkfall in his city palace had been ugly and disturbing. Whenever young people of either sex went missing eyes were cast at those blank, windowless stone walls. Wayward children were threatened with the gross Calysian to frighten them into obedience.
Strumosus hadn’t added anything to the rumours, being uncharacteristically reticent on the subject of his former employer. He’d arrived in the Blues’ kitchens and cellars, spent a day glaring at what he found, thrown out almost all of the implements, much of the wine, dismissed all but two of the undercooks, terrified the boys, and—within days—had begun producing meals that dazzled and amazed.
He was never happy, of course: complaining endlessly, verbally and physically abusing the staff he hired, hectoring Astorgus for a larger budget, offering opinions on everything from poets to the proper diet for the horses, moaning about the impossibility of subtle cooking when one had to feed so many uneducated chewers of food. Still, Kyros had noted, for all the flow of grievances, there never did seem to be an end to the changing dishes they prepared in the great kitchen, and Strumosus didn’t seem at all financially constrained in his market purchases of a morning.
That was one of Kyros’s favourite tasks: accompanying the cook to market just after the invocation in chapel, watching him appraise vegetables and fish and fruit, squeezing and smelling, sometimes even listening to food, devising the day’s meals on the spot in the light of what he found.
In fact, it was most likely because of his obvious attention at such times, Kyros later decided, that the cook had elevated him from washing platters and flasks to supervising some of the soups and broths. Strumosus almost never addressed Kyros directly, but the fierce, fat little man seemed always to be talking to himself at the market as he moved swiftly from stall to stall, and Kyros, keeping up as best he could with his bad foot, heard a great deal and tried to remember. He had never imagined, for example, that the difference in taste between the same fish caught across the bay near Deapolis and one netted on this side, near the cliffs east of the City, could be so great.
The day Strumosus found sea bass from Spinadia in the market was the first time Kyros saw a man actually weep at the sight of food. Strumosus’s fingers as he caressed the glistening fish reminded Kyros of a Holy Fool’s clasp on his sun disk. He and the others in the kitchen were permitted to sample the dish—baked lightly in salt, flavoured with herbs—after the dinner party that night was over, and Kyros, tasting, began to comprehend a certain way of living life. He would sometimes date the beginning of his adulthood to that evening.
At other times he would consider that his youth properly ended at the conclusion of Dykania later that same year, waiting for Scortius the charioteer in the depths of a cold night, when they heard a sudden, urgent cry and then running feet in the courtyard.
Kyros wheeled around awkwardly to look at the outside door. Strumosus quickly set down his cup and the wine flask he was holding. Three men bulked in the entranceway, then they burst inside, making the space seem suddenly small. One was Scortius. His clothing was torn, he held a knife in his hand. One of the others gripped a drawn sword: a big man, an apparition, dripping blood, with blood on the sword.
Kyros, his jaw hanging open, heard the Glory of the Blues, their own beloved Scortius, rasp harshly, ‘We’re being pursued! Get help. Quickly!’ He said it in a gasp; they had been running.
It occurred to Kyros only later that if Scortius had been a different sort of man he might have shouted for aid himself. Instead, it was Rasic who sprang for the inner doorway and sprinted across the banquet room towards the exit nearest the dormitory, screaming in a blood-chilling voice, ‘Blues! Blues! We are attacked! To the kitchen! Up, Blues!’
Strumosus of Amoria had already seized his favourite chopping knife. There was a mad glint in his eye. Kyros looked around and grabbed for a broom, pointing the shaft towards the empty doorway. There were sounds outside now, in the darkness. Men moving, and the dogs were barking.
Scortius and his two companions came farther into the room. The wounded one with the sword waited calmly, nearest the door, first target of any rush.
Then the sounds of movement in the courtyard ceased. No one could be seen for a moment. There was a frozen interval, eerie after the explosion of action. Kyros saw that the two undercooks and the other boys had each grabbed some sort of weapon. One held an iron poker from the fire. Blood from the wounded man was dripping steadily onto the floor at his feet. The dogs were still barking.
A shadow moved in the darkness of the portico. Another big man. Kyros saw the dark outline of his blade. The shadow spoke, with a northern accent: ‘We want only Rhodian. No quarrel with Blues or other two men. Lives be spared if you send him out to us.’
Strumosus laughed aloud.
‘Fool! Do you understand where you are, whoever you are? Ignorant louts! Not even the Emperor sends soldiers into this compound.’
‘We have no wish to be here. Send Rhodian and we go. I hold my men so you can—’
The man on the portico—whoever he was—never finished that sentence, or any other in his days under Jad’s sun or the two moo
ns or the stars.
‘Come, Blues!’ Kyros heard from outside. A wild, exultant cry from many throats. ‘On, Blues! We are attacked!’
A howling came from the north end of the courtyard. Not the dogs. Men. Kyros saw the big, shadowy figure with the sword break off and half turn to look. Then he staggered suddenly sideways. He fell with a sequence of clattering sounds. Other shadows sprang onto the portico. A heavy staff rose and fell, dark against the darkness, once and then again above the downed man. There was a crunching sound. Kyros turned away, swallowing hard.
‘Ignorant men, whoever they are. Or were,’ said Strumosus in a matter-of-fact voice. He set his knife down on the table, utterly unruffled.
‘Soldiers. On leave in the City. Hired for some money. It wouldn’t have taken much, if they’d been drinking with borrowed money.’ It was the bleeding man. Looking at him, Kyros saw that his wounds were in shoulder and thigh, both. He was a soldier himself. His eyes were hard now, angry. Outside, the tumult grew. The other intruders were fighting to get out of the compound. Torches were being brought at a run; they made streams of orange and smoke in the courtyard beyond the open doorway.
‘Ignorant, as I say,’ said Strumosus. ‘To have followed you in here.’
‘They killed two of my men, and your fellow at the gates,’ said the soldier. ‘He tried to stop them.’
Kyros shuffled to a stool and sat down heavily, hearing that. He knew who had been on gate duty. Short straw on a banquet night. He was beginning to feel sick.
Strumosus showed no reaction at all. He looked at the third figure in the kitchen, a smooth-shaven, very welldressed man with flaming red hair and a grim face.
‘You are the Rhodian they wanted?’
The man nodded briefly.
‘Of course you are. Do tell me, I pray you,’ said the master cook of the Blues, while men fought and died in the dark outside his kitchen, ‘have you ever tasted lamprey from the lake near Baiana?’