Sailing to Sarantium (4 page)

But here in Sarantium issues of faith were endlessly debated
everywhere, in dockfront cauponae, whorehouses, cookshops, the
Hippodrome, the theatres. You couldn't buy a brooch to pin your cloak
without hearing the vendor's views on Heladikos or the proper liturgy
for the sunrise invocations.

There were too many in the Empire-and especially in the City
itself-who had thought and worshipped in their own way for too long
for the Patriarchs and clerics to persecute aggressively, but the
signs of a deepening division were everywhere, and unrest was always
present.

In Soriyya, to the south between desert and sea, where Jaddites dwelt
perilously near to the Bassanid frontier, and among the Kindath and
the grimly silent, nomadic peoples of Ammuz and the deserts beyond,
whose faith was fragmented from tribe to tribe and inexplicable,
shrines to Heladikos were as common as sanctuaries or chapels built
for the god. The courage of the son, his willingness to sacrifice,
were virtues exalted by clerics and secular leaders both in lands
bordering enemies. The City, behind its massive triple walls and the
guarding sea, could afford to think differently, they said in the
desert lands. And Rhodias in the far-off west had long since been
sacked, so what true guidance could its High Patriarch offer now?

Scortius of Soriyya, youngest lead racer ever to ride for the Greens
of Sarantium, who only wanted to drive a chariot and think of nothing
but speed and stallions, prayed to Heladikos and his golden chariot
in the silence of his soul, being a contained, private young man-half
a son of the desert himself. How, he had decided in childhood, could
any charioteer do otherwise than honour the Charioteer? Indeed, he
was inwardly of the belief-untutored though he might be in such
matters-that those he raced against who followed the Patriarchal
Pronouncement and denied the god's son were cutting themselves off
from a vital source of intervention when they wheeled through the
arches onto the dangerous, proving sands of the Hippodrome before
eighty thousand screaming citizens.

Their problem, not his.

He was nineteen years old, riding First Chariot for the Greens in the
largest stadium in the world, and he had a genuine chance to be the
first rider since Ormaez the Esperanan to win his hundred in the City
before his twentieth birthday, at the end of the summer.

But the Emperor was dead. There would be no racing today, and for the
god knew how many days during the mourning rites. There were twenty
thousand people or more in the Hippodrome this morning, spilling out
onto the track, but they were murmuring anxiously among themselves,
or listening to yellow-robed clerics intone the liturgy, not watching
the chariots wheeled out in the Procession. He'd lost half a race day
last week to a shoulder injury, and now today was gone, and next
week? The week after?

Scortius knew he ought not to be so concerned with his own affairs at
a time such as this. The clerics-whether Heladikian or Orthodox-would
all castigate him for it. On some things the religious agreed.

He saw men weeping in the stands and on the track, others gesturing
too broadly, speaking too loudly, fear in their eyes. He had seen
that fear when the chariots were running, in other drivers' faces. He
couldn't say he had ever felt it himself, except when the Bassanid
armies had come raiding across the sands and, standing on their city
ramparts, he had looked up and seen his father's eyes. They had
surrendered that time, lost their city, their homes-only to regain
them four years later in a treaty, following victories on the
northern border. Conquests were traded back and forth all the time.

He understood that the Empire might be in danger now. Horses needed a
firm hand, and so did an Empire. His problem was that, growing up
where he had, he'd seen the eastern armies of Shirvan, King of Kings,
too many times to feel remotely as anxious as those he watched now.
Life was too rich, too new, too impossibly exciting for his spirits
to be dragged downwards, even today.

He was nineteen, and a charioteer. In Sarantium.

Horses were his life, as he had dreamed once they might be. These
affairs of the larger world... Scortius could let others sort them
out. Someone would be named Emperor. Someone would sit in the
kathisma-the Imperial Box-midway along the Hippodrome's western side
one day soon-the god willing!-and drop the white handkerchief to
signal the Procession, and the chariots would parade and then run. It
didn't much matter to a charioteer, Scortius of Soriyya thought, who
the man with the handkerchief was.

He was truly young, in the City less than half a year, recruited by
the Greens' factionarius from the small hippodrome in Sarnica, where
he'd been driving broken-down horses for the lowly Reds-and winning
races. He had a deal of growing up to do and much to learn. He would
do it, in fact, and fairly quickly. Men change, sometimes.

Scortius leaned against an archway, shadowed, watching the crowd from
a vantage point that led back along a runway to the interior
workrooms and animal stalls and the tiny apartments of the Hippodrome
staff beneath the stands. A locked door partway along the tunnel led
down to the cavernous cisterns where much of the City's water supply
was stored. On idle days, the younger riders and grooms sometimes
raced small boats among the thousand pillars there in the echoing,
watery spaces and faint light.

Scortius wondered if he ought to go outside and across the forum to
the Green stables to check on his best team of horses, leaving the
clerics to their chanting and the more unruly elements of the
citizenry hurling names of Imperial candidates back and forth, even
through the holy services.

He recognized, if vaguely, one or two of the names loudly invoked. He
hadn't made himself familiar with all the army officers and
aristocrats, let alone the stupefying number of palace functionaries
in Sarantium. Who could, and still concentrate on what mattered? He
had eighty-three wins, and his birthday was the last day of summer.
It could be done. He rubbed his bruised shoulder, glancing up. No
clouds, the threat of rain had passed away east. It would be a very
hot day. Heat was good for him out on the track. Coming from Soriyya,
burnt dark by the god's sun, he could cope with the white blazing of
summer better than most of the others. This would have been a good
day for him, he was sure of it. Lost, now. The Emperor had died.

He suspected that more than words and names would be flying in the
Hippodrome before the morning was out. Crowds of this sort were
rarely calm for long, and today's circumstances had Greens and Blues
mingling much more than was safe. When the weather heated up so did
tempers. A hippodrome riot in Sarnica, just before he left, had ended
up with half the Kindath quarter of that city burning as the mob
boiled out into the streets.

The Excubitors were here this morning, though, armed and watchful,
and the mood was more apprehensive than angry. He might be wrong
about the violence. Scortius would have been the first to admit he
didn't know much about anything but horses. A woman had told him that
only two nights ago, but she had sounded languorous as a cat and not
displeased. He had discovered, actually, that the same gentling voice
that worked with skittish horses was sometimes effective with the
women who waited for him after a race day, or sent their servants to
wait.

It didn't always work, mind you. He'd had an odd sense, part way
through the night with that catlike woman, that she might have
preferred to be driven or handled the way he drove a quadriga in the
hard, lashing run to the finish line. That had been an unsettling
thought. He hadn't acted on it, of course. Women were proving
difficult to sort out; worth thinking about, though, he had to admit
that.

Not nearly so much as horses were, mind you. Nothing was.

'Shoulder mending?'

Scortius glanced back quickly, barely masking surprise. The compact,
well-made man who'd asked, who came now to stand companionably beside
him in the archway, was not someone he'd have expected to make polite
inquiry of him.

'Pretty much,' he said briefly to Astorgus of the Blues, the
pre-eminent driver of the day-the man he'd been brought north from
Sarnica to challenge. Scortius felt awkward, inept beside the older
man. He'd no idea how to handle a moment such as this. Astorgus had
not one but two statues raised in his name already, among the
monuments in the spina of the Hippodrome, and one of them was bronze.
He had dined in the Attenine Palace half a dozen times, it was
reported. The powers of the Imperial Precinct solicited his views on
matters within the City.

Astorgus laughed, his features revealing easy amusement. 'I mean you
no harm, lad. No poisons, no curse-tablets, no footpads in the dark
outside a lady's home.'

Scortius felt himself flush. 'I know that,' he mumbled.

Astorgus, his gaze on the crowded track and stands, added, 'A
rivalry's good for all of us. Keeps people talking about the races.
Even when they aren't here. Makes them wager.' He leaned against one
of the pillars supporting the arch. 'Makes them want more race days.
They petition the Emperors. Emperors want the citizens happy. They
add races to the calendar. That means more purses for all of us, lad.
You'll help me retire that much sooner.' He turned to Scortius and
smiled. He had an amazingly scarred face.

'You want to retire?' Scortius said, astonished.

'I am,' said Astorgus, mildly, 'thirty-nine years old. Yes, I want to
retire.'

'They won't let you. The Blue partisans will demand your return.'

'And I'll return. Once. Twice. For a price. Then I'll let my old
bones have their reward and leave the fractures and scars and the
tumbling falls to you, or even younger men. Any idea how many riders
I've seen die on the track since I started?'

Scortius had seen enough deaths in his own short time not to need an
answer to that. Whichever colour they raced for, the frenzied
partisans of the other faction wished them dead, maimed, broken.
People came to the hippodromes to see blood and hear screaming as
much as to admire speed. Deadly curses were dropped on wax tablets
into graves, wells, cisterns, were buried at crossroads, hurled into
the sea by moonlight from the City walls. Alchemists and
cheiromancers-real ones and charlatans-were paid to cast ruinous
spells against named riders and horses. In the hippodromes of the
Empire the charioteers raced with Death-the Ninth Driver-as much as
with each other. Heladikos, son of Jad, had died in his chariot, and
they were his followers. Or some of them were.

The two racers stood in silence a moment, watching the tumult from
the shadowed arch. If the crowd spotted them, Scortius knew, they'd
be besieged, on the spot.

They weren't seen. Instead, Astorgus said very softly, after a
silence, 'That man. The group just there. All the Blues? He isn't. He
isn't a Blue. I know him. I wonder what he's doing?'

Scortius, only mildly interested, glanced over in time to see the man
idicated cup hands to mouth and shout, in a patrician, carrying
voice: 'Daleinus to the Golden Throne! The Blues for Flavius
Daleinus!'

'Oh, my,' said Astorgus, First Chariot of the Blues, almost to
himself. 'Here too? What a clever, clever bastard he is.' Scortius
had no idea what the other man was talking about.

Only long afterwards, looking back, piecing things together, would he
understand.

Fotius the sandalmaker had actually been eyeing the heavy-set,
smooth-shaven man in the perfectly pressed blue tunic for some time.

Standing in an unusually mixed cluster of faction partisans and
citizens of no evident affiliation, Fotius mopped at his forehead
with a damp sleeve and tried to ignore the sweat trickling down his
ribs and back. His own tunic was stained and splotched. So was
Pappio's green one, beside him. The glassblower's balding head was
covered with a cap that might once have been handsome but was now a
wilted object of general mirth. It was brutally hot already. The
breeze had died with the sunrise.

The big, too-stylish man bothered him. He was standing confidently in
a group of Blue partisans, including a number of the leaders, the
ones who led the unison cries when the Processions began and after
victories. But Fotius had never seen him before, either in the Blue
stands or at any of the banquets or ceremonies.

He nudged Pappio, on impulse. 'You know him?' He gestured at the man
he meant. Pappio, dabbing at his upper lip, squinted in the light. He
nodded suddenly. 'One of us. Or he was, last year.'

Fotius felt triumphant. He was about to stride over to the group of
Blues when the man he'd been watching brought his hands up to his
mouth and cried the name of Flavius Daleinus aloud, acclaiming that
extremely well-known aristocrat for Emperor, in the name of the
Blues.

Nothing unique in that, though he wasn't a Blue. But when, a
heartbeat later, the same cry echoed from various sections of the
Hippodrome-in the name of the Greens, the Blues again, even the
lesser colours of Red and White, and then on behalf of one craft
guild, and another, and another, Fotius the sandalmaker actually
laughed aloud.

'In Jad's holy name!' he heard Pappio exclaim bitterly. 'Does he
think we are all fools?'

The factions were no strangers to the technique of 'spontaneous
acclamations.' Indeed, the Accredited Musician of each colour was,
among other things, responsible for selecting and training men to
pick up and carry the cries at critical moments in a race day. It was
part of the pleasure of belonging to a faction, hearing 'All glory to
the glorious Blues!' or Victory forever to conquering Astorgus!'
resound through the Hippodrome, perfectly timed, the mighty cry
sweeping from the northern stands, around the curved end, and along
the other side as the triumphant charioteer did his victory lap past
the silent, beaten Green supporters.