It was unexpected to see it in a woman, mind you.
Also unexpected was the fact that she seemed to be coming with them to the Hippodrome.
Cleander’s extreme discomfort changed—in the overheated manner of youth—to a stunned elation as he understood that his stepmother was undertaking to waive a part of his punishment in favour of the duties owed a guest and Rustem’s own professed obligations as a physician. She would accompany them, she said, to ensure Cleander’s good behaviour and swift return home, and to assist the doctor if he needed any intervention. The Hippodrome could be a dangerous place for a foreigner, she said.
Cleander would go ahead of them, immediately, taking the steward and using his mother’s name for any outlays required, employing whatever unsavoury contacts he undoubtedly had in and around the Hippodrome Forum to secure proper seating after the midday interval—not standing places, and most certainly not in any area containing faction partisans or anyone whose conduct might be disagreeable. And he would not, under any circumstances, wear green. Did Cleander understand?
Cleander did.
Would Rustem of Kerakek be pleased to take a modest midday meal with her while Cleander attended to these matters of seating and admission?
Rustem would.
They had ample time to dine, and then she would need more suitable clothing for a public appearance, she said, putting aside her writing and rising from her backless chair. Her manner was impeccably calm, precise, superbly efficient, her posture flawless. She put him in mind of those fabled matrons of Rhodias, in the days before it declined into Imperial decadence and then fell.
He wondered abruptly—startling himself, in fact—if either Katyun or Jarita could have grown into this poise and authority had they been raised in a different world. There were no women like this in Ispahani and certainly none in Bassania. Palace intrigues among the cloistered wives of the King of Kings were something else entirely. He thought, then, of his baby, his girl—and made himself stop doing that. Inissa was being taken from him, was gone, in the wake of his great good fortune.
Perun and Anahita guided the world, Azal needed to be kept constantly at bay. No man could say where his footsteps might lead him. Generosity needed to be embraced, even if there was a price to be paid. Certain gifts were not offered twice. He could not let himself dwell upon Issa, or her mother.
He could think about Shaski and Katyun, for he would see them in Kabadh, soon enough. If the Lady wills it, he added hastily in his mind and turned quickly to face east, on the thought. He had been instructed to try to kill someone here. Generosity might now have conditions attached to it.
The wife of Plautus Bonosus was looking at him, eyebrows slightly arched. She was too well bred to say anything, however.
Hesitantly, Rustem murmured, ‘In my faith . . . the east . . . I was averting bad fortune. I had a reckless thought.’
‘Ah,’ said Thenaïs Sistina, nodding her head as if this were entirely clear to her. ‘We all have those, from time to time.’ She walked out of the room and he followed her.
In the kathisma, a very well-turned-out cluster of court figures was busily performing its assigned task. Gesius had been explicit and had ensured that many of the more decorative members of the Imperial Precinct were on hand this morning, dressed flamboyantly, glittering with jewellery and colour.
They managed—with polished ease—to both enjoy themselves and blur, with their highly visible and audible reactions to events below, the absence of the Empress, the Supreme Strategos, the Chancellor, and the Master of Offices. They also masked the steady, low-voiced dictation of the Emperor to the secretaries crouched against the front railing of the box, invisible to the stands.
Valerius had dropped the white handkerchief to start the program, had acknowledged his people’s cheers with the ancient gesture of Emperors, and had taken his cushioned seat and immediately set to work, ignoring the chariots below and the noise all around. Whenever the Mandator, schooled to this, murmured discreetly at his elbow Valerius would stand up and salute whoever was currently doing a victory lap. For much of the morning it had been Crescens of the Greens. The Emperor didn’t seem to notice, or care.
The mosaic image on the roof of the kathisma above them was of Saranios, who had founded this city and named it for himself, driving a quadriga and crowned not with gold but with a charioteer’s victory laurel. The links in the symbolic chain were immensely powerful: Jad in his chariot, the Emperor as mortal servant and holy symbol of the god, the charioteers on the Hippodrome sands as the most dearly beloved of the people. But, thought Bonosus, this particular successor in the long chain of Emperors was . . . detached from the power of that association.
Or he tried to be. The people brought him back to it. He was here, after all, watching the chariots run, even today. Bonosus had a theory about the attraction of the racing, actually. He was prepared to bore people with it if asked, or even if not. In essence, he’d argue, the Hippodrome stood in perfectly balanced counterpoint to the rituals of the Imperial Precinct. Courtly life was entirely structured around ritual, predictable as anything on earth could be. An ordained practice for everything from the Emperor’s first greeting when awakened (and by whom and in what order), to the sequence of lighting the lamps in the Audience Chamber, to the procession for presenting gifts to him on the first of the New Year. Words and gestures, set and recorded, known and rehearsed, never varying.
The Hippodrome, by contrast, Bonosus would say, and shrug . . . as though the rest of the thought ought to be transparently clear to anyone. The Hippodrome was all uncertainty. The unknown was . . . the very essence of it, he would say.
Bonosus, chattering and cheering this morning with the others in the Imperial Box, prided himself on detached perspectives of this sort. But jaded as he might be, he was unable to entirely control the excitement he was feeling today, and it had nothing to do with the uncertainty of horses, or even the younger riders down below.
He had never seen Valerius like this.
The Emperor was always intense when engaged by matters of state, and always irritably distracted when forced to attend at the Hippodrome, but this morning the ferocity of his concentration and the endless stream of notes and instructions aimed in a low voice at the secretaries—there were two, alternating, to keep up with him—had a rhythm, a compelling pace, that seemed, in the mind of the Master of the Senate, to be as poundingly urgent as the horses and quadrigas below.
On the sands the Greens were proving wildly triumphant, as they had been a week before. Scortius of the Blues was still absent, and Bonosus was one of the handful of people in the City who knew where he was and that it would be weeks before he reappeared in the Hippodrome. The man had insisted on secrecy and he had more than enough stature in Sarantium to have his wishes obeyed in this.
There was probably a woman involved, the Senator decided—with Scortius, never a difficult surmise. Bonosus didn’t at all begrudge the charioteer the use of his own smaller city home while he recovered. He rather enjoyed being privy to cloaked affairs. It wasn’t as if being Master of the Senate conferred any real significance, after all. His second home wasn’t available for his own diversions in any case, with the bone-dry Bassanid physician staying there. That part of the current situation he owed to Cleander, who was a problem that would need attention soon. Barbarian hair-styling and outlandish garb in the cause of faction identity was one thing, murdering people in the street was . . . another.
The factions could become dangerous today, he realized. He wondered if Valerius was aware of it. The Greens in full rapture, the Blues seething with humiliation and anxiety. He decided he was going to have to speak with Scortius after all, this evening perhaps. Secrecy in one’s own causes was something that might have to give way to order in the City, especially given what else was awesomely afoot. If both factions knew that the man was all right, would be returning at some named date, some of this tension could be dissipated.
As it was, Bonosus f
elt sorry for the youngster riding First for the Blues. The boy was clearly a charioteer, had instincts and courage, but he also had three problems that Bonosus could see—and the god knew he ought to be able to see things down there on the sands, given the number of years he’d been coming here.
First problem was Crescens of the Greens. The muscular fellow from Sarnica was superbly confident, had had a year to settle in to Sarantium now, and had his new team under perfect control. Nor was he the sort to show any mercy to the disorganized Blues.
That disorganization was the other part of the difficulty. Not only was the youngster—Taras was his name, a Sauradian apparently—unfamiliar with riding First chariot, he didn’t even know the horses of the lead team. Magnificent as a stallion such as Servator was, any horse needed a hand on the reins that knew what it could do. And besides, young Taras, wearing the silver helmet for the Blues, wasn’t getting any adequate back-up at all, because he was the one who’d been training to ride Second and knew those horses.
Given all this, the Blues’ temporary leader had been doing well to come in second place, three times beating back aggressively coordinated attacks from both Green riders. Jad alone knew what the mood would be if the Greens succeeded in sweeping the board once or twice. Such sweeps of the first and second placings gave rise to the most exultant of faction celebrations—and sullen despair on the other side. It could yet happen before the day was out. The Blues’ rider might have the stamina of youth, but they could wear him down. Bonosus thought they would, in the afternoon. On another day he might have considered some wagers.
There was, one might say in a literary mode, a grand slaughter building down below. Being the man he was, Bonosus was inclined to perceive it this way, to see it as an ironic foretaste of the Imperial announcement of war, still to come at the end of the day.
The morning’s last race came to an end—as usual, a minor, chaotic endeavour among the Reds and Whites, driving two-horse bigas. The Whites’ lead driver emerged triumphant in a typically sloppy affair, but the victory was treated by the Blues and Whites with an enthusiasm (more than slightly forced, to Bonosus’s ear) that was almost certainly unique in the experience of the White charioteer. Surprised or not, he appeared to greatly enjoy his victory lap.
The Emperor stopped dictating and rose at the Mandator’s murmured hint. He briskly saluted the fellow passing beneath him just then and turned to go. An Excubitor had already unbarred the door at the rear of the kathisma. Valerius would go back down the corridor to the Imperial Precinct for final consultations before the afternoon’s proclamation: the Attenine Palace for the Chancellor, the Master of Offices, and the Quaestor of Revenue, then across through the old tunnel under the gardens to the Traversite to meet Leontes and the generals. Everyone knew his routines. Some people—Bonosus among them—believed they had by now discerned the thinking behind this separation of advisers. It was dangerous, however, to assume you understood what this Emperor was thinking. As everyone else rose and stood gracefully aside, Valerius paused by Bonosus.
‘Do our honours for the afternoon, Senator. Barring the unforeseen, we shall return with the others before the last race.’ He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘And have the Urban Prefect find out where Scortius is. A bad time for this sort of thing, don’t you think? We may have been remiss, ignoring it.’
He didn’t miss anything, Bonosus thought.
‘I know where he is,’ he said quietly, breaking a promise without compunction. This was the Emperor.
Valerius didn’t even raise an eyebrow. ‘Good. Inform the Urban Prefect, and tell us about it after.’
And while eighty thousand of his people were still reacting in a variety of ways to the White rider’s last lap, and just beginning to rise and stretch and think about a midday meal and wine, the Emperor left his kathisma and that thronged place where the announcements and events that defined the Empire had so often been witnessed.
Even before he passed through the opened door, Valerius had begun removing the ornate ceremonial garb he had to wear in public.
The servants began spreading a meal on large side tables and smaller round ones beside the seats. Some of those in the kathisma preferred to go back to the palaces to dine, while the younger ones might venture into the City itself, tasting the excitement of the taverns, but it was pleasant to linger here if the weather was fine, and today it was.
Bonosus discovered, to his surprise, that he had both an appetite and a thirst. He stretched his legs—there was room now—and held out his cup for wine.
It occurred to him that the next time he ate a meal he would be a Senator of an empire at war. And not just the usual skirmishing of springtime. This was a reconquest. Rhodias. Valerius’s long dream.
No question, it was an exciting thought, stirring up all sorts of . . . feelings. Bonosus wished, suddenly, that he didn’t have a Bassanid physician and a recuperating charioteer both staying at his little house near the walls tonight, after all. Guests could be, undeniably, a complication.
‘He was allowed to retire to the Daleinus estate at first. He was only brought to this isle—it has been used as a prison for a long time—after trying to have the first Valerius assassinated in his bath.’
Crispin looked at the Empress beside him. They stood alone in the clearing. Her Excubitors were behind them and four guards stood waiting before the doorways of the smaller huts. The larger house was dark, the door barred on the outside, all the windows shuttered against the mild light of the sun. Crispin had an odd difficulty even looking at it. There was an oppressiveness, a weight, something clinging here. There was little wind now, in the midst of the encircling pines.
He said, ‘I thought people were killed for doing that.’
‘He should have been,’ Alixana said.
He looked back at her. She never took her eyes off the house in front of them.
‘Petrus, who was his uncle’s adviser then, wouldn’t allow it. Said the Daleinoi and their followers needed to be handled carefully. The Emperor listened. He usually did. They brought Lecanus here. Punished but not executed. The youngest one, Tertius, was still a child. He was allowed to stay on the estate and eventually to manage the family affairs. Styliane was permitted to remain in the City, to come to court when she grew older, was even allowed to visit here, though the visits were observed. Lecanus continued plotting, even from this island, kept trying to persuade her. Eventually her visits were stopped.’ She paused, looked at him, then back at the cabin. ‘I did that, actually. I was the one having them secretly observed. Then I had the Emperor stop her from coming at all, a little before she was married.’
‘So no one comes here now?’ Crispin saw hearthsmoke rising from the huts and the larger house, straight as the trees, going up then blowing away when it reached the height of the wind.
‘I do,’ said Alixana. ‘After a fashion. You’ll see.’
‘And I’ll be killed if I tell anyone. I know.’
She looked up at him then. He could still see the strain in her. ‘I have heard you on that. Leave it be, Crispin. You are trusted. You are with me here.’
The first time she had ever used his name like that.
She went forward without giving him any chance to reply. He couldn’t think of any response in any case.
One of the four guards bowed low, then approached the closed door of the house, unlocked it ahead of them. The door swung outward silently. It was almost completely dark inside. The guard went in, and a moment later there was light within as he lit a lamp, and then another. Another man followed the first. He coughed loudly on the threshold.
‘Are you dressed, Daleinus? She’s here to see you.’
A snuffling sound, almost unintelligible, more an animal noise than speech, came from inside. The guard said nothing, entered the house behind the first one. He push opened the wooden shutters on two ironbarred windows, letting in air and more light. Both guards went out.
The Empress nodded at them. They bowed again
and withdrew, back towards the huts. There was no one in hearing distance now, or no one that Crispin could see. Alixana met Crispin’s eye briefly, then she straightened her shoulders like a performer going on stage and walked into that house.
Crispin followed, silently, out of the bright sun. There was a constriction in his chest. His heart was hammering. He couldn’t have said why. This had so little do with him. But he was thinking of Styliane, the last night he’d seen her, what he’d seen in her. And trying to recall what he knew about the death of Flavius Daleinus on the day the first Valerius was acclaimed Emperor in Sarantium.
He stopped just inside the doorway. A fair-sized front room. Two doors opening off it, one at the back to a bedchamber, one on the right side, he couldn’t see to where. A fireplace against the left-hand wall, two chairs, a couch at the back, a bench, a table, a closed and locked chest, nothing on the walls at all, not even a sun disk. The snuffling sound, he realized, was a man, breathing oddly.
Then Crispin’s eyes slowly adjusted to the subdued light and he saw a shape move on the couch, sitting up from a reclining position, turning towards them. And so he saw the person who lived—who was imprisoned—within this house, on this island, in his own body, and he did remember something, as a sickening, convulsive horror overmastered him. He leaned back against the wall beside the door, a hand going up to shield his face, involuntarily.
Sarantine Fire did bad things to men, even when they survived it.
The father had been killed. A cousin too, Crispin seemed to recall. Lecanus Daleinus had lived. After a fashion. Looking at the blind man before him, at the burned-away ruin of what had been his face, the charred, maimed hands, imagining the burned body beneath the non-descript brown tunic, Crispin wondered, truly, how this man was still alive, and why, what purpose, desire, need could possibly have kept him from ending his own life long ago. He didn’t think it was piety. There was no least hint of the god here. Of any god at all.