‘The other Green’s coming back to them,’ said the Master of Horse in his raspy voice. Bonosus glanced over, saw it was true. The Greens’ Second driver, faced with a miserable choice—to chase the Blues’ young leader or come back to aid his own First team—had opted for the latter. Among other things, Crescens of Sarnica was reported to have a vicious, whip-wielding temper with lesser drivers who forgot who was First of the Greens.
‘They’ll try for second and third now,’ said Bonosus, to no one in particular.
‘He can catch the lad if he’s sprung free quickly enough. We haven’t even done a lap.’ The Master of Horse was excited. It showed. So was Bonosus. Even with all that was yet to come today, a war that would change their world, the drama below was overwhelming.
The Greens’ number two was slowing, drifting back, looking over his right shoulder to judge his angle. As the two celebrated drivers came out of the turn, still wide, still right next to each other, the Second Green team floated out towards Scortius. He was ahead of him. Could, with impunity, move right in front of him. It was delicate—he had to arrest the progress of the Blue quadriga while finding a way to get his own leader free to come sharply down to the rail and take flight after the young boy leading the race. This, however, was what Second teams did here, it was what they were trained to achieve.
The three quadrigas began to merge, coming together into one six-wheeled, twelve-horsed figure in the swirling dust and noise.
‘I believe,’ said Bonosus suddenly, ‘that Scortius expected this to happen, too.’
‘What? Impossible,’ said the Master of Horse, just in time to be proven wrong.
HE HAD TO BE CAREFUL, extremely careful. If he fouled either of the others now, any Blue victory would be erased. That was always the constraint on those riding Second or carrying the lesser colours. The yellow-garbed officials were all along the track, watching them.
In addition, he was acutely aware that although he might just manage to roll through seven laps and stay upright, he didn’t have much left for manœuvres. Every shallow breath was a struggle against pain. The very idea of having to pull the team hard again was enough to make him wish he were already dead.
There was, he knew, a pool of blood, dangerously slippery, about his feet. He didn’t look down.
He watched the Greens’ Second team, instead, as it came back towards them—as he’d known it would. Crescens frightened his teammates. In doubt, they’d come to his aid. Not a bad practice, on the whole, but there were moments when it might be. He intended to make this one such moment.
He had pictured this from the moment he’d walked onto the track and seen that the new right-side trace horse on Crescens’s team in the sixth lane wasn’t blinkered.
He knew the horse they’d traded. Knew it very well. Had slotted a bit of information in his mind back in the winter. It obviously hadn’t come up in last week’s races or this morning: the Greens’ lead team would rarely find itself all the way to the outside.
It was about to do so, any moment now.
The Second team came right back to them, staying in front, but not by much, which gave it licence to drift wider, forcing Scortius to do the same. Crescens was also slightly ahead of him to the outside, which raised the risk of foul if he drifted too much and clipped the other team. The Greens were trying to make him rein up. The moment he did so, the Second team in front of him would do exactly the same thing and Crescens would go to his whip and spring free of both of them like a prisoner from an unlocked cell—then he’d cut down. They knew how to do this. It was delicate, precise work, done at speed, but these were veteran drivers who had worked together for a full year.
It didn’t matter.
He let his team drift up, just a little. Crescens looked over quickly, snarling an oath. If the other Green team could be said to have pushed Scortius over then no foul would be called. Especially against the returning champion: all three of them knew that was also a part of the game today.
Crescens went a little higher, nearer the rail.
Scortius and the other Greens went with him. They were most of the way down the back straight now. Scortius slid right again, the smallest amount. Had to be very cautious: these horses were not his usual team. All three chariots were terrifyingly close now. Had the wheels been spiked as sometimes in the old days, in Rhodias, someone would have been flying from a smashed-up chariot by now.
Crescens roared another oath at his teammate and went a little higher yet. As high as he could go, in fact, racing along the outermost lane, right against the rail and the screaming, on-its-feet, fist-waving, thunderous crowd.
The new right-side trace horse for the Greens didn’t like screaming thunderous fist-waving beside him. At all.
He was, in fact, a horse that needed a right-side blinker. It hadn’t come up. Crescens had never run him so wide, and this was only the second meeting of the year. They hadn’t figured that out yet, the Greens.
A mistake.
Scortius held steady, watched for the moment. Crescens had a tight, grim smile on his face as the quadrigas pelted along. Now that he was at the rail, any further movement towards him by Scortius would have to be seen as a foul. The other Green chariot, still ahead, could safely slide a bit farther over and slow, and Scortius would have to pull up hard.
Experienced strategy, sound reasoning. Might well have worked, if the right-sider hadn’t jerked its head just then, in blind panic right beside the howling crowd, and broken stride, pulling the other three horses hopelessly out of their own pace, just as the Greens’ number two performed the entirely correct tactical movement of moving a little more right and slowing a shade.
Scortius did pull up, as hard as they’d ever have wanted him to, even a little sooner than they’d expected, as if he was afraid, or weak.
Doing so, he had an exceptionally vivid, close view of the crash. Crescens’s quadriga slewed back inwards, pushed by their panicked, undeniably powerful new right-sider, while the other team was still committed to angling out. They met, unfortunately.
Two wheels flew, instantly. One stayed in the air like a discus, spinning halfway to the spina. A horse screamed and stumbled, dragging the others down with it. A chariot skidded sideways, banged the rail, and then came back the other way, and Scortius, pulling sharply left (and crying aloud with the pain of it this time) saw Crescens’s knife flash as he cut his reins and leaped desperately free.
He was past them, then, didn’t see what happened to the other Green driver, or the horses, but he knew they were down.
He dealt with the turn then looked back. Saw the Reds and Whites toiling behind him now, four of them, closely bunched, labouring. Had a new idea. There was that odd, crimson hue to his vision again, but he suddenly decided it might be within him to bring one last element into this day’s aspiring towards immortality.
Ahead of him, the boy, Taras, was slowing for him, looking back. He lifted his whip hand, waved Scortius forward, offering him the lead and the victory.
Not what he wanted, for more than one reason. He shook his head, and as he came up towards the other driver he shouted, in Inici, ‘I’ll castrate you with a dull knife if you don’t win this race. Keep moving!’
The boy grinned. He knew what they had just done. The glory of it. He was a chariot-racer, wasn’t he? He kept moving. Crossed the line six laps later to win the first major race of his life.
The first of what would be one thousand, six hundred and forty-five triumphs for the Blues. By the time the boy in that chariot retired eighteen years later only two names in the long history of the Sarantium Hippodrome would have won more races, and no one who followed him would do so. There would be three statues to Taras of Megarium in the spina to be torn down with all the others, seven hundred years after, when the great changes came.
THE FIRST OF THE WHITES came second in that race, the Second of the Whites came third. The track record of the day, meticulously kept by the stewards, as ever, would show that Scortius of
the Blues came a wretched distance behind during his only race that afternoon.
The records can miss everything, of course. So much depends on what else is preserved, in writing, in art, in memory, false or true or blurred.
The Blues faction, with their White partners, came first and second and third. And fourth. Fourth, in what was, all things considered, very likely the most spectacularly triumphant race of his entire career on the sands, was Scortius of Soriyya, who had shepherded the White teams through and past him while blocking, with precision, the two hapless Red charioteers, who were all that was left on the track running for the Green faction.
HE OUGHT TO HAVE DIED when that race was over. In some ways he should have died, he was later to think during some long nights, setting a seal of perfection on a racing life.
Those who came running over saw the pool of blood about his soaked sandals when the race ended. The chariot platform was slippery with it. The Ninth Driver had been beside him for those last laps, running very near from the time the fifth seahorse dived, and closer yet down the final backstretch as he kept on swinging back and forth, almost unable to breathe, holding the Reds before pulling away at the end—alone on the track, in fact, his teammates having finished already, a lap ahead, the Red quadrigas slipping back.
Alone, save for that unseen Ninth beside him, brushing wheels, dark as superstition had him, and crimson, too, like the day. But then, unaccountably, he drifted away, let this reckless mortal go on beneath the streaming sunlight, gathered and held in the enormous cauldron of sound that was the Hippodrome.
No one knew it then, no one could have known, among eighty thousand and more in that place, but there was richer blood for the claiming in Sarantium that day.
There would be time yet to take a charioteer.
Scortius slowed, just across the finish line, swayed where he stood as the quadriga drifted to an awkward halt. He was unable to even begin unwrapping his reins, which were also soaked through with blood by then. He was alone, motionless, done.
They came to help him, sprinting across the track, leaving the victory lap to the boy and the two White teams. Astorgus and two others cut him free, tenderly, as if he were a babe. He saw, with some surprise, that all three of them were weeping, and others who came up behind them, even the stewards. He tried to say something about that, a jest, but couldn’t seem to speak just yet. It was very hard to breathe. He suffered them to help him back under the stands, a redness in the air.
They went past Crescens, in the Greens’ space along the spina. He seemed to be all right, and the other Green rider was there as well. There was something odd about their faces, a working of emotion being fought. There really did seem to be a lot of noise. More, even, than usual. They took him—carried him, mostly—back through the Processional Gates to the dimly lit atrium. It was a little quieter here, but not very much.
The Bassanid was there. Another surprise. There was a pallet next to him.
‘Lay him down,’ he snapped. ‘On his back.’
‘I thought . . . you had disowned me,’ he managed to say. First words. There was so much pain. They were laying him down.
‘So did I,’ said the grey-haired physician from the east. He threw aside his stick, angrily. ‘Makes two fools here, doesn’t it?’
‘Oh, at least,’ said Scortius, and then he did, finally, by the very great mercy of Heladikos, lose consciousness.
CHAPTER XI
It is true, undeniably, that the central moments of an age occur on the margins of the lives of most people. A celebrated play from the early years of the eastern empire in Sarantium begins with shepherds quarrelling over their entangled flocks when one of them notices a flare of light in the east as something falls from the sky. There is a brief pause in the dispute as the men on the hill slope consider the event; then they return to the matter at hand.
The death of Heladikos in a falling chariot, bearing fire from his father, cannot compete in significance with the theft of a sheep. The drama by Sophenidos (later banned by the clerics as heretical) moves from this beginning to treat matters of faith and power and majesty, and contains the celebrated Messenger’s speech about dolphins and Heladikos. But it begins on that hillside, and it ends there, with the sacrifice of the disputed sheep—employing the new gift of fire.
Nonetheless, for all the human truth of Sophenidos’s observation that the world’s major events might not seem so to those living through a given time, it remains equally true that there are, moments and places that may properly be seen as lying at the heart of an age.
That day, in the early spring of the year, there were two such places on the earth, far apart. One was in the desert of Soriyya, where a man in a hood, with a cloak drawn over his mouth, preserved a silence among the driftingsands, having remained awake all the night before, fasting, and looking up at the stars.
The other was a tunnel in Sarantium, between palaces.
HE STANDS IN A CURVE of the walls and floor, looking up at torches and a painted ceiling of the night sky, down at a mosaic of hares and pheasants and other creatures in a forest glade: an artisan’s illusion of the natural world here underground within city walls. The pagan faiths tell of dark powers in the earth, he knows, and the dead lie underground, when they are not burned.
There are people in wait ahead of him, people who ought not to be here. He has deciphered that from the measured, unhurried footsteps behind. They have no fear that he will flee from them.
The curiosity he feels might be considered a defining trait of the Emperor of Sarantium, whose mind is endlessly engaged by the challenges and enigmas of the world the god has made. The anger he experiences is less characteristic but equally intense just now, and the repeated pulsing of grief, like a heavy heartbeat, is very rare for him.
There were—there are—so many things he has intended to do.
What he does do after a moment, rather than continue to wait like one of the hares, frozen in the mosaic glade, is turn and walk back towards those behind him. One may sometimes control the moment and place of one’s dying, thinks the man whose mother had named him Petrus, in Trakesia, almost half a century ago, and whose uncle—a soldier—had summoned him to Sarantium in early manhood.
He is not, however, reconciled to his death. Jad waits for every living man and woman, but can wait a little longer for an Emperor, surely. Surely.
He deems himself equal even to this, whatever it turns out to be. Has nothing with which to defend himself, unless one counts a simple, unsharpened blade at his belt used for breaking the seal on correspondence. It is not a weapon. He is not a warrior.
He is fairly certain he knows who is here, is rapidly deploying his thoughts (which are, weapons) even as he goes back down the tunnel and comes around the curve and sees—with brief, trivial satisfaction—the startled reaction of those coming after him. They stop.
Four of them. Two soldiers, helmed to be unknown but he knows them, and they are the two who were on guard. There is another cloaked man—all these hidden assassins, even with no one to see—and there is one who walks in front, unshielded, eager, almost alight with what Valerius perceives to be desire. He does not see the man he has feared—quite intensely—might be here.
Some relief at that, though he may be among those in wait at the other end of the corridor. Anger, and grief.
‘Anxious for an ending?’ asks the tall woman, stopping before him. Her surprise was brief, swiftly controlled. Her eyes are blue flames, uncanny. She is dressed in crimson, a gold belt, her hair bound in a net of black. The gold of it shows through in the torchlight.
Valerius smiles. ‘Not as anxious as you, I daresay. Why are you doing this, Styliane?’
She blinks, genuinely startled. She had been a child when it all happened. He has always been conscious of that, guided by it, much more so than Aliana.
He thinks of his wife. In his heart, in the pure silence of the heart, he is speaking to her now, wherever she might be under the sun overhead. She had
always told him it was a mistake to bring this woman—this girl when the dance began—to court, even to let her live. Her father’s daughter. Flavius. In silence the Emperor of Sarantium is telling the dancer he married that she was right and he was wrong and he knows she will know, soon enough, even if his thoughts do not— cannot—travel through walls and space to where she is.
‘Why am I doing this? Why else am I alive?’ the daughter of Flavius Daleinus says.
‘To live your life,’ he says crisply. A philosopher of the Schools, admonishing a pupil. (He closed the Schools himself. A regret, but the Patriarch needed it done. Too many pagans.) ‘Your own life, with the gifts you have, and have been given. Easy enough, Styliane.’ He looks past her as fury kindles in her eyes. Deliberately ignores that. Says to the two soldiers, ‘You are aware that they will kill you here?’
‘I told them you would say that,’ Styliane says.
‘Did you also tell them it was true?’
She is clever, knows too much of hatred. The rage of the one who survived? He had thought—gambled—the intelligence might win out in the end, saw a genuine need, a place for her. Aliana said it would not, accused him of trying to control too much. A known flaw.
She is still so young, the Emperor thinks, looking again at the tall woman who has come to kill him here under the still-cold ground of spring. He doesn’t want to die.
‘I told them what was—and is—more obviously true: any new court will need Excubitors in the highest ranks who have proven their loyalty.’
‘By betraying their oath and Emperor? You expect trained soldiers to believe that?’
‘They are here with us.’
‘And you will kill them. What does murder say about—’
‘Yes,’ says the cloaked man, finally speaking, face still hooded, his voice thick with excitement. ‘Really. What does murder say? Even after years?’
He doesn’t remove the hood. It doesn’t matter. Valerius shakes his head.