‘Shut up, Rasic,’ Kyros said quickly. ‘He’s upset,’ he explained to the guards.
‘We all are,’ the man said bluntly. Kyros didn’t know him.
They heard footsteps approaching from behind them, turned. By the torches mounted on the walls by the gate Kyros recognized a charioteer.
‘Taras!’ said another guard, and there was respect in his voice.
They’d heard, in the kitchens: Taras, their newest driver, had won the first afternoon race, working with the miraculously returned Scortius in some dazzling, amazing fashion. They’d come first, second, third and fourth, entirely obliterating the Green triumphs of the last session and the morning.
And then violence had exploded, during the victory laps.
The young driver nodded his head, came up to stand by Kyros before the gates. ‘What do we know about the factionarius?’ he asked.
‘Nothing yet,’ a third guard said. He spat somewhere into the dark beyond the lamplight. ‘Fuckers in the Urban Prefect’s office won’t say a thing, even when they come by here.’
‘They probably don’t know,’ Kyros said. A torch flared, showering sparks, and he looked away. It seemed to him he was always the one trying to be reasonable among men who didn’t feel troubled by any need to be. He wondered what it would be like to sprint through the streets waving a blade in his hand, screaming in fury. Shook his head. A different person, a different life. Different foot, for that matter.
‘How’s Scortius?’ he asked, looking at the other charioteer. Taras had a cut on his forehead and an ugly bruise on his cheek.
Taras shook his head. ‘Sleeping now, they told me. They gave him something to make him sleep. There was a lot of pain, from where his ribs were broken, before.’
‘Will he die?’ Rasic asked. Kyros quickly made the sign of the sun disk in the darkness, saw two of the guards do the same.
Taras shrugged. ‘They don’t know, or they won’t say. The Bassanid doctor is very angry.’
‘Fuck the Bassanid,’ Rasic said, predictably. ‘Who is he, anyhow?’
There came a sudden clattering sound from beyond the gates and a sharp, rasped command. They turned quickly to peer down the laneway.
‘More of ours coming back,’ the first guard said. ‘Open the gates.’
Kyros saw a group of men—perhaps a dozen—being herded roughly down the laneway by soldiers. One of the men couldn’t walk; he was being supported between two others. The soldiers had their swords out, hustling the Blues along. He saw one of them sweep his blade and hit a stumbling man with the flat of it, swearing in a northern accent.
The gates swung open. Torches and lamps flickered with the movement. The man who’d been hit tripped and fell on the cobbled laneway. The soldier cursed again and prodded him hard with the point of his blade. ‘Get up, you lump of horsedung!’
The man pushed himself awkwardly to one knee as the others hurried through the gates. Kyros, without stopping to think, limped out and knelt by the fallen man.
He draped the man’s right arm over his shoulder. There was a smell of sweat and blood and urine. Kyros staggered to his feet, swayed, supporting the other fellow. He’d no idea who it was, in the dark, but it was a Blue, they all were, and he was hurt.
‘Move, clubfoot! Unless you want a sword up your butt,’ the soldier said. Someone laughed. They’re under orders, Kyros told himself. There’s been rioting. The Emperor’s dead. They are afraid, too.
It seemed a long way, those ten steps back to the gates of the compound. He saw Rasic come running out to help him. Rasic went to lift the injured man’s other arm to put it around his own shoulders, but the man between them cried out in agony at the movement, and they realized he had a sword wound in that arm.
‘You fuckers!’ Rasic snarled, turning on the soldiers in a rage. ‘He has no weapon! You goat-fuckers! You didn’t have to—’
The nearest soldier, the one who had laughed, turned to Rasic and—expressionlessly, this time—lifted his sword. A mechanical, precise motion, like something not human.
‘No!’ Kyros shouted, and twisting violently, still supporting the wounded man, he grabbed for Rasic with his free hand. He stumbled sideways with the weight and the too-quick movement, tried to keep his balance.
And it was in that moment, some time after darkfall on the day the Emperor Valerius II died, that Kyros of the Blues, born in the Hippodrome, who had certainly never thought of himself as one of Jad’s beloved and had never even seen from close the god’s most holy regent upon earth, the thrice-exalted shepherd of his people, also felt something white and searing plunge into him from behind. He fell then, as Valerius had, and he, too, had a flashing thought of so many things yet desired and not yet done.
This may be shared, if nothing else is shared at all.
TARAS, CURSING HIMSELF as befuddled and hopelessly too slow, sprang through the gates past the guards, who would have been cut down if they’d gone into the lane with weapons.
The man called Rasic stood frozen as a statue, his mouth open as he stared down at his fallen friend. Taras seized him by the shoulders and almost threw him back towards the gates and the guards before he, too, could be chopped down. Then he knelt, lifting his hands in a quick, placating gesture to the soldiers, and picked up the man Kyros had been trying to help. The wounded man cried out again, but Taras gritted his teeth and half dragged, half carried him to the gates. He gave him to the guards and turned around again. He was going to go back, but something made him stop.
Kyros was lying face down on the cobblestones and he was motionless. Blood—black in the shadows—was pouring from the sword wound in his back.
In the laneway the soldier who had stabbed him looked indifferently down at the body, and then over at the gates where the Blues stood clustered in the wavering torchlight. ‘Wrong horsedung,’ he said lightly. ‘Don’t matter. Take a lesson. People do not speak to soldiers that way. Or someone dies.’
‘You . . . come in here, say that . . . butt-fucking . . . goatboy! Blues! Blues!’Rasic was crying helplessly even as he stammered his obscenities, his features blurred and distorted.
The soldier took a heavy step forward.
‘No!’ snapped another of them, the same thick accent, authority in the word. ‘Orders. Not inside. Let’s go.’
Rasic was still weeping, calling for aid, screaming a foul-mouthed tirade of impotent fury. Taras felt like doing the same, actually. As the soldiers turned to leave, one of them stepping right over the prone body of the slain undercook, he heard footsteps. More torches appeared behind them in the compound.
‘What is it? What happened here?’ It was Strumosus, with the Bassanid doctor, a number of other men with lights attending them.
‘Another dozen of ours brought back,’ one of the guards said. ‘At least two badly injured, probably by the soldiers. And they just—’
‘It’s Kyros!’ Rasic cried, clutching at the cook’s sleeve. ‘Strumosus, look! It’s Kyros they’ve killed now!’
‘What?’ Taras saw the small man’s expression change. ‘You! Hold!’ he shouted, and the soldiers— astonishingly—turned in the laneway. ‘Bring light!’ Strumosus snapped over his shoulder, and he went right out through the gates. Taras hesitated a moment, and then followed, stopping a little behind.
‘You foul, misbegotten offal! I want the name and rank of your leader!’ the little chef said, barely controlled rage in his voice. ‘Immediately! Tell me!’
‘Who are you to give orders to—?’
‘I speak for the accredited Blues faction and you are in our laneway at the gates of our compound, you scabrous vermin. There are regulations about this and there have been for a hundred years and more. I want your name— if you are the pustulent leader of these drunken louts who disgrace our army.’
‘Fat little man,’ said the soldier, ‘you talk too much.’ And he laughed and turned and walked away, not looking back.
‘Rasic, Taras, you will recognize them?’ Strumosus was
rigid, his fists clenched.
‘I think so,’ said Taras. He had a memory of kneeling to claim the wounded man, looking straight up into the face of the one who’d stabbed Kyros.
‘Then they will answer for this. They killed a prodigy here tonight, the foul, ignorant brutes.’
Taras saw the doctor step forward. ‘That is worse than killing an ordinary man? Or a hundred of them?’ The Bassanid’s accented voice was almost a whisper, betraying the depths of his weariness. ‘Why a prodigy?’
‘He was becoming a cook. A real one,’ said Strumosus. ‘A master.’
‘Ah,’ said the doctor. ‘A master? Young for that.’ He looked down at Kyros where he lay.
‘You’ve never seen brilliance, a gift, show itself young? Aren’t you young—for all the false dyeing of your hair, and that ridiculous stick?’
Taras saw the doctor look up then, and in the light of the carried torches and lanterns, he registered the presence of something—a memory?—in the Bassanid’s face.
The man said nothing, though. There was blood all over his clothing, a smear of it on one cheek. He didn’t look young, just now.
‘This boy was my legacy,’ Strumosus went on. ‘I have no sons, no heirs. He would have . . . outdone me in his day. Would have been remembered.’
Again the doctor hesitated. He looked down again at the body. After a moment, he sighed. ‘He may yet be,’ he murmured. ‘Who decided he was dead? He won’t survive if left here on the stones, but Columella should be able to clean the wound and pack it—he saw how I do it. And he knows how to stitch. After that . . . ’
‘He’s alive!’ Rasic cried and rushed forward, dropping beside Kyros.
‘Careful!’ the doctor snapped. ‘Get a board and lift him on it. And whatever you do, don’t let that idiot Ampliarus bleed him. If he suggests it throw him out of the room. Give him to Columella. Now where,’ he said, turning to Strumosus, ‘is my escort? I am ready to go home. I am . . . extremely tired.’ He leaned upon the stick he carried.
The chef looked at him. ‘One more patient. This one. Please? I told you, I have no sons. I believe he . . . I believe . . . Do you not have children? Do you understand what I am saying?’
‘There are doctors here. None of these people today were my patients. I shouldn’t have even come for the racer. If people insist on being fools—’
‘Then they are only being as the god has made them, or as Perun and the Lady have. Doctor, if this boy dies it will be a triumph for Azal. Stay. Honour your profession.’
‘Columella—’
‘—is a doctor to our horses. Please.’
The Bassanid stared at him a long moment, then shook his head. ‘I was promised an escort. This is not the medicine I practise, not the way I conduct my life.’
‘None of us conducts his life this way by choice,’ said Strumosus, in a voice no one there had ever heard him use. ‘Who chooses violence in the dark?’
There was a silence. The Bassanid’s face was expressionless. Strumosus looked at him a long time. When he spoke again it was almost in a whisper.
‘If you are decided, we will not hold you, of course. I regret my unkind words before. The Blues of Sarantium thank you for your aid here, today and tonight. You will not go unrequited.’ He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘Two of you go down to the street with torches. Don’t leave the laneway. Call for the Urban Prefect’s men. They won’t be far. They’ll take the doctor home. Rasic, run back in and bring four men and a table plank. Tell Columella to get ready for us.’
The frieze broke as men moved to his bidding. The doctor turned his back on them all and stood, gazing out at the street. Taras could tell from the way he stood how utterly exhausted he was. The stick didn’t look like an affectation; it looked like something he needed. Taras knew the feeling: end of a day’s racing, when the simple act of walking off the sands and down the tunnel to the changing rooms seemed to demand more strength than he had.
He looked past the Bassanid to the street as well. And in that instant he saw a sumptuous litter go by at the head of their laneway: an apparition, an astonishing evocation of gilded grace and beauty in an ugly night. The two torch-bearers had neared the end of the lane; the litter was illuminated with a brief, golden glow and then it moved on, was gone, heading towards the Hippodrome, the Imperial Precinct, the Great Sanctuary, an unreal image, swift as dreaming, an object from some other world. Taras blinked, and swallowed hard.
The two messengers began calling for men of the Urban Prefect. They were all over the streets tonight. He looked at the eastern physician again and suddenly—incongruously—had an image of his mother, a memory from his own childhood. A vision of her standing in that same way before the cooking fire, having just refused him permission to go out again and back to the stables or hippodrome at home (to watch a foal being birthed or the breaking of a stallion to the harness and chariot, or anything to do with horses)—and then taking a deep breath and, out of love, indulgence, some understanding that he himself was only just beginning to realize, turning to her son and changing her mind, saying, ‘All right. But take some of the elixir first, it is cold now, and wear your heavy cloak . . . ’
The Bassanid took a deep breath. He turned. In the darkness Taras thought of his mother, far away, long ago. The doctor looked at Strumosus.
‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘One more patient. Because I am a fool as well. Be sure they lift him onto the board face down, and with his left side first.’
Taras’s heart was pounding hard. He saw Strumosus staring back at the doctor. The torchlight was erratic, flickering. There were noises in the night now, ahead of them and coming from behind as Rasic brought aid. A cold wind blew torch smoke between the two men.
‘You do have a son, don’t you?’ Strumosus of Amoria said, so softly Taras barely heard it.
After a moment, the Bassanid said, ‘I do.’
The carriers came out then, hurrying behind Rasic, bearing a plank from the dining hall. They lifted Kyros onto it, carefully and as instructed, and then they all went back in. The Bassanid paused at the gates, crossing the threshold with his left foot first.
Taras followed, the last to go in, still thinking of his mother, who also had a son.
She had a sense that much of her life here in the city they called the centre of the world was spent at windows, in one room or another over the streets, looking out, observing, not actually doing anything. It wasn’t necessarily bad, Kasia thought—the things she’d done at the posting inn, the tasks she’d had to perform back home (especially after the men had died) weren’t in any way desirable, but there was still this odd feeling, at times, that here at the heart of where the world was supposed to be unfolding she was merely a spectator, as if the whole of Sarantium was a kind of theatre or hippodrome and she was in her seat, looking down.
On the other hand, what sort of active role was there for a woman to play here? And it certainly couldn’t be said that she had any least desire to be in the streets now. There was so much movement in the city, so little calm, so many people one didn’t know at all. No wonder people became agitated: what was there to make them feel safe, or sure? If an Emperor was their father, in some complex way, why shouldn’t they become dangerously uncontrolled when he died? At her window Kasia decided that it would be good to have a child, a household full of them, and soon. A family, they might be something to defend you—as you defended them—from the world.
It was dark now, the stars overhead between houses, torches below, soldiers marching, calling out. The white moon would be up behind the house: even in the city Kasia knew the phases of the moons. The violence of the day had mostly passed. The taverns had been closed, the whores ordered off the streets. She wondered where the beggars and the homeless would go. And she wondered when Carullus would be home. She watched; had lit no lamps in this room, could not be seen from below.
She was less fearful than she’d thought she might be. Time passing did that. One could adjust to man
y things, it seemed, given enough time: crowds, soldiers, the smells and noises, chaos of the city, the utter absence of anything green and quiet, unless one counted the silence in the chapels during the day sometimes, and she didn’t like the chapels of Jad.
It still amazed her that people here could see the fireballs that appeared at night, tumbling and flickering along the streets—the signifiers of powers entirely outside the ambit of the Jaddite god—and ignore them entirely. As if something that couldn’t be explained wasn’t to be acknowledged. It didn’t exist. People spoke freely of ghosts, spirits, and she knew that many used pagan magics to invoke spells, whatever the clerics might say—but no one ever talked about the flames in the street at night.
At her window Kasia watched them, counted them. There seemed to be more than usual. She listened to the soldiers below. She had seen them entering houses along the street earlier, heard the banging on doors in the night. Change in the air, a change in the shape of the world. Carullus had been excited. He loved Leontes, and Leontes was going to be the new Emperor. It meant good things for them, he’d said, when he’d stopped at home for a moment near sundown. She’d smiled at him. He’d kissed her and gone out again. They were looking for someone. She knew who it was.
That had been some time ago. Now, at her window in darkness, she waited, watched—and saw something entirely unexpected. Passing along their quiet, littletrafficked street Kasia saw, like Taras of the Blues a few moments before, a golden litter appear out of the dark. A kind of vision, like the fireballs, something entirely out of tune with the rest of the night.
She had no idea, of course, who might be inside, but she knew they weren’t supposed to be out there—and that they knew it, too. There were no runners with torches, as there surely ought to have been: whoever this was, they were trying to pass unseen. Kasia watched it until the bearers reached the end of the street and turned and went out of sight.
In the morning, she thought she might have fallen asleep at the window, dreamt what she saw, something golden, passing below her in a dark of booted soldiers and oaths and hammering at doors, for how could she have known it was gold, without light?