Читать книгу Sailing to Sarantium - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 6

Prologue

Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights, sufficiently so to make plausible the oft-repeated tale that the Emperor Apius passed to the god in the midst of a towering storm, with lightning flashing and rolls of thunder besieging the Holy City. Even Pertennius of Eubulus, writing only twenty years after, told the story this way, adding a statue of the Emperor toppling before the bronze gates to the Imperial Precinct and an oak tree split asunder just outside the landward walls. Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth. It is a failing of the profession.

In fact, on the night Apius breathed his last in the Porphyry Room of the Attenine Palace there was no rain in the City. An occasional flash of lightning had been seen and one or two growls of thunder heard earlier in the evening, well north of Sarantium, towards the grain-lands of Trakesia. Given the events that followed, that northern direction might have been seen as portent enough.

The Emperor had no living sons, and his three nephews had rather spectacularly failed a test of their worthiness less than a year before and had suffered appropriate consequences. There was, as a result, no Emperor Designate in Sarantium when Apius heard—or did not hear—as the last words of his long life, the inward voice of the god saying to him alone, ‘Uncrown, the Lord of Emperors awaits you now.’

The three men who entered the Porphyry Room in the still-cool hour before dawn were each acutely aware of a dangerously unstable situation. Gesius the eunuch, Chancellor of the Imperial Court, pressed his long, thin fingers together piously, and then knelt stiffly to kiss the dead Emperor’s bare feet. So, too, after him, did Adrastus, Master of Offices, who commanded the civil service and administration, and Valerius, Count of the Excubitors, the Imperial Guard.

‘The Senate must be summoned,’ murmured Gesius in his papery voice. ‘They will go into session immediately.’

‘Immediately,’ agreed Adrastus, fastidiously straightening the collar of his ankle-length tunic as he rose. ‘And the Patriarch must begin the Rites of Mourning.’

‘Order,’ said Valerius in soldier’s tones, ‘will be preserved in the City. I undertake as much.’

The other two looked at him. ‘Of course,’ said Adrastus, delicately. He smoothed his neat beard. Preserving order was the only reason Valerius had for being in the room just now, one of the first to learn the lamentable situation. His remarks were . . . a shade emphatic.

The army was primarily east and north at the time, a large element near Eubulus on the current Bassanid border, and another, mostly mercenaries, defending the open spaces of Trakesia from the barbarian incursions of the Karchites and the Vrachae, both of whom had been quiescent of late. The strategos of either military contingent could become a decisive factor—or an Emperor— if the Senate delayed.

The Senate was an ineffectual, dithering body of frightened men. It was likely to delay unless given extremely clear guidance. This, too, the three officials in the room with the dead man knew very well.

‘I shall,’ said Gesius casually, ‘make arrangements to have the noble families apprised. They will want to pay their respects.’

‘Naturally,’ said Adrastus. ‘Especially the Daleinoi. I understand Flavius Daleinus returned to the City only two days ago.’

The eunuch was too experienced a man to actually flush.

Valerius had already turned for the doorway. ‘Deal with the nobility as you see fit,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘But there are five hundred thousand people in the City who will fear the wrath of Holy Jad descending upon a leaderless Empire when they hear of this death. They are my concern. I will send word to the Urban Prefect to ready his own men. Be thankful there was no thunderstorm in the night.’

He left the room, hard-striding on the mosaic floors, burly-shouldered, still vigorous in his sixtieth year. The other two looked at each other. Adrastus broke the shared gaze, glancing away at the dead man in the magnificent bed, and at the jewelled bird on its silver bough beside that bed. Neither man spoke.

Outside the Attenine Palace, Valerius paused in the gardens of the Imperial Precinct only long enough to spit into the bushes and note that it was still some time before the sunrise invocation. The white moon was over the water. The dawn wind was west; he could hear the sea, smell salt on the breeze amid the scent of summer flowers and cedars.

He walked away from the water under the late stars, past a jumble of palaces and civil service buildings, three small chapels, the Imperial Silk Guild’s hall and workspaces, the playing fields, the goldsmiths’ workshops, and the absurdly ornate Baths of Marisian, towards the Excubitors’ barracks near the bronze gates that led out to the City.

Young Leontes was waiting outside. Valerius gave the man precise instructions, memorized carefully some time ago in preparation for this day.

His prefect withdrew into the barracks and Valerius heard, a moment later, the sounds of the Excubitors— his men for the last ten years—readying themselves. He drew a deep breath, aware that his heart was pounding, aware of how important it was to conceal any such intensities. He reminded himself to send a man running to inform Petrus, outside the Imperial Precinct, that Jad’s Holy Emperor Apius was dead, that the great game had begun. He offered silent thanks to the god that his own sister-son was a better man, by so very much, than Apius’s three nephews.

He saw Leontes and the Excubitors emerging from the barracks into the shadows of the pre-dawn hour. His features were impassive, a soldier’s.

It was to be a race day at the Hippodrome, and Astorgus of the Blues had won the last four races run at the previous meeting. Fotius the sandalmaker had wagered money he couldn’t afford to lose that the Blues’ principal chario -teer would win the first three races today, making a lucky seven in a row. Fotius had dreamt of the number twelve the night before, and three quadriga races meant Astorgus would drive twelve horses, and when the one and the two of twelve were added together . . . why, they made a three again! If he hadn’t seen a ghost on the roof of the colonnade across from his shop yesterday afternoon, Fotius would have felt entirely sure of his wager.

He had left his wife and son sleeping in their apartment above the shop and made his way cautiously—the streets of the City were dangerous at night, as he had cause to know—towards the Hippodrome. It was long before sunrise; the white moon, waning, was west towards the sea, floating above the towers and domes of the Imperial Precinct. Fotius couldn’t afford to pay for a seat every time he came to the racing, let alone one in the shaded parts of the stands. Only ten thousand places were offered free to citizens on a race day. Those who couldn’t buy, waited.

Two or three thousand others were already in the open square when he arrived under the looming dark masonry of the Hippodrome. Just being here excited Fotius, driving away a lingering sleepiness. He hastily took a blue tunic from his satchel and pulled it on in exchange for his ordinary brown one, modesty preserved by darkness and speed. He joined a group of others similarly clad. He had made this one concession to his wife after a beating by Green partisans two years before during a particularly wild summer season: he wore unobtrusive garb until he reached the relative safety of his fellow Blues. He greeted some of the others by name and was welcomed cheerfully. Someone passed him a cup of cheap wine and he took a drink and passed it along.

A tipster walked by selling a list of the day’s races and his predictions. Fotius couldn’t read, so he wasn’t tempted, though he saw others handing over two copper folles for a sheet. Out in the middle of the Hippodrome Forum a Holy Fool, half naked and stinking, had staked a place and was already haranguing the crowd about the evils of racing. The man had a good voice and offered some entertainment . . . if you didn’t stand downwind. Street vendors were already selling figs and Candaria melons and grilled lamb. Fotius had packed himself a wedge of cheese and some of the bread ration from the day before. He was too excited to be hungry, in any case.

Not far away, near their own entrance, the Greens were clustered in similar numbers. Fotius didn’t see Pappio the glassblower among them, but he knew he’d be there. He’d made his bet with Pappio. As dawn approached, Fotius began—as usual—to wonder if he’d been reckless with his wager. That spirit he’d seen, in broad daylight . . .

It was a mild night for summer, with a sea wind. It would be very hot later, when the racing began. The public baths would be crowded at the midday interval, and the taverns.

Fotius, still thinking about his wager, wondered if he ought to have stopped at a cemetery on the way with a curse-tablet against the principal Green charioteer, Scortius. It was the boy, Scortius, who was likeliest to stand—or drive—today between Astorgus and his seven straight triumphs. He’d bruised his shoulder in a fall in mid-session last time, and hadn’t been running when Astorgus won that magnificent four-in-a-row at the end of the day.

It offended Fotius that a dark-skinned, scarcely bearded upstart from the deserts of Ammuz—or wherever he was from—could be such a threat to his beloved Astorgus. He ought to have bought the curse-tablet, he thought ruefully. An apprentice in the linen guild had been knifed in a dockside caupona two days before and was newly buried: a perfect chance for those with tablets to seek intercession at the grave of the violently dead. Everyone knew that made the inscribed curses more powerful. Fotius decided he’d have only himself to blame if Astorgus failed today. He had no idea how he’d pay Pappio if he lost. He chose not to think about that, or about his wife’s reaction.

‘Up the Blues!’ he shouted suddenly. A score of men near him roused themselves to echo the cry.

‘Up the Blues in their butts!’ came the predictable reply from across the way.

‘If there were any Greens with balls!’ a man beside Fotius yelled back. Fotius laughed in the shadows. The white moon was hidden now, over behind the Imperial Palaces. Dawn was coming, Jad in his chariot riding up in the east from his dark journey under the world.

And then the mortal chariots would run, in the god’s glorious name, all through a summer’s day in the holy city of Sarantium. And the Blues, Jad willing, would triumph over the stinking Greens, who were no better than barbarians or pagan Bassanids or even Kindath, as everyone knew.

‘Look,’ someone said sharply, and pointed.

Fotius turned. He actually heard the marching footsteps before he saw the soldiers appear, shadows out of the shadows, through the Bronze Gate at the western end of the square.

The Excubitors, hundreds of them, armed and armoured beneath their gold-and-red tunics, came into the Hippodrome Forum from the Imperial Precinct. That was unusual enough at this hour to actually be terrifying. There had been two small riots in the past year, when the more rabid partisans of the two colours had come to blows. Knives had appeared, and staves, and the Excubitors had been summoned to help the Urban Prefect’s men quell them. Quelling by the Imperial Guard of Sarantium was not a mild process. A score of dead had strewn the stones afterwards both times.

Someone else said, ‘Holy Jad, the pennons!’ and Fotius saw, belatedly, that the Excubitors’ banners were lowered on their staffs. He felt a cold wind blow through his soul, from no direction in the world.

The Emperor was dead.

Their father, the god’s beloved, had left them. Sarantium was bereft, forsaken, open to enemies east and north and west, malevolent and godless. And with Jad’s Emperor gone, who knew what daemons or spirits from the half-world might now descend to wreak their havoc among helpless mortal men? Was this why he’d seen a ghost? Fotius thought of plague coming again, of war, of famine. In that moment he pictured his child lying dead. Terror pushed him to his knees on the cobbles of the square. He realized that he was weeping for the Emperor he had never seen except as a distant, hieratic figure in the Imperial Box in the Hippodrome.

Then—an ordinary man living his days in the world of ordinary men—Fotius the sandalmaker understood that there would be no racing today. That his reckless wager with the glassblower was nullified. Amid terror and grief, he felt a shaft of relief like a bright spear of sunlight. Three races in a row? It had been a fool’s wager, and he was quit of it.

There were many men kneeling now. The Holy Fool, seeing an opportunity, had raised his voice in denunciation—Fotius couldn’t make him out over the babble of noise, so he didn’t know what the man was decrying now. Godlessness, licence, a divided clergy, heretics with Heladikian beliefs. The usual litanies. One of the Excubitors strode over to him and spoke quietly. The holy man ignored the soldier, as they usually did. But then Fotius, astonished, saw the ascetic dealt a slash across the shins with a spear shaft. The ragged man let out a cry—more of surprise than anything else—and fell to his knees, silent.

Over the wailing of the crowd another voice rose then, stern and assured, compelling attention. It helped that the speaker was on horseback, the only mounted man in the forum.

‘Hear me! No harm will come to anyone here,’ he said, ‘if order is preserved. You see our banners. They tell their tale. Our glorious Emperor, Jad’s most dearly beloved, his thrice-exalted regent upon earth, has left us to join the god in glory behind the sun. There will be no chariots today, but the Hippodrome gates will be opened for you to take comfort together while the Imperial Senate assembles to proclaim our new Emperor.’

A louder murmur of sound. There was no heir; everyone knew it. Fotius saw people streaming into the forum from all directions. News of this sort would take no time at all to travel. He took a breath, struggling to hold down a renewed panic. The Emperor was dead. There was no Emperor in Sarantium.

The mounted man again lifted a hand for stillness. He sat his horse straight as a spear, clad as his soldiers were. Only the black horse and a border of silver on his over -tunic marked his rank. No pretension here. A peasant from Trakesia, a farmer’s son come south as a lad, rising in the army ranks through hard work and no little courage in battle. Everyone knew this tale. A man among men, that was the word on Valerius of Trakesia, Count of the Excubitors.

Who now said, ‘There will be clerics in all the chapels and sanctuaries of the City, and others will join you here, to lead mourning rites in the Hippodrome under Jad’s sun.’ He made the sign of the sun disk.

‘Jad guard you, Count Valerius!’ someone cried.

The man on the horse appeared not to hear. Bluff and burly, the Trakesian never courted the crowd as others in the Imperial Precinct did. His Excubitors did their duties with efficiency and no evident partisanship, even when men were crippled and sometimes killed by them. Greens and Blues were dealt with alike, and sometimes even men of rank, for many of the wilder partisans were sons of aristocracy. No one even knew which faction Valerius preferred, or what his beliefs were, in the manifold schisms of Jaddite faith, though there was the usual speculation. His nephew was a patron of the Blues, that was known, but families often divided between the factions.

Fotius thought about going home to his wife and son after morning prayers at the little chapel he liked, near the Mezaros Forum. There was a greyness in the eastern sky. He looked over at the Hippodrome and saw that the Excubitors, as promised, were opening the gates.

He hesitated, but then he saw Pappio the glass-blower standing a little apart from the other Greens, alone in an empty space. He was crying, tears running into his beard. Fotius, moved by entirely unexpected emotion, walked over to the other man. Pappio saw him and wiped at his eyes. Without a word spoken the two of them walked side by side into the vastness of the Hippodrome as the god’s sun rose from the forests and fields east of Sarantium’s triple landward walls and the day began.

Plautus Bonosus had never wanted to be a Senator. The appointment, in his fortieth year, had been an irritant more than anything else. Among other things, there was an outrageously antiquated law that Senators could not charge more than six per cent on loans. Members of the ‘Names’—the aristocratic families entered on the Imperial Records—could charge eight, and everyone else, even pagans and the Kindath, were allowed ten. The numbers were doubled for marine ventures, of course, but only a man possessed by a daemon of madness would venture moneys on a merchant voyage at twelve per cent. Bonosus was hardly a madman, but he was a frustrated businessman, of late.

Senator of the Sarantine Empire. Such an honour! Even his wife’s preening irked him, so little did she understand the way of things. The Senate did what the Emperor told it to do, or what his privy counsellors told it; no less, and certainly no more. It was not a place of power or any legitimate prestige. Perhaps once it had been, back in the west, in the earliest days after the founding of Rhodias, when that mighty city first began to grow upon its hill and proud, calm men—pagans though they might have been—debated the best way to shape a realm. But by the time Rhodias in Batiara was the heart and hearth of a world-spanning Empire—four hundred years ago, now— the Senate there was already a compliant tool of the Emperors in their tiered palace by the river.

Those fabled palace gardens were clotted with weeds now, strewn with rubble, the Great Palace sacked and charred by fire a hundred years ago. Sad, shrunken Rhodias was home to a weak High Patriarch of Jad and conquering barbarians from the north and east—the Antae, who still used bear grease in their hair, it was reliably reported.

And the Senate here in Sarantium now—the New Rhodias—was as hollow and complaisant as it had been in the western Empire. It was possible, Bonosus thought grimly, as he looked around the Senate Chamber with its elaborate mosaics on floor and walls and curving across the small, delicate dome, that those same savages who had looted Rhodias—or others worse than them—might soon do the same here where the Emperors now dwelled, the west being lost and sundered. A struggle for succession exposed any empire, considerably so.

Apius had reigned thirty-six years. It was hard to believe. Aged, tired, in the spell of his cheiromancers the last years, he had refused to name an heir after his nephews had failed the test he’d set for them. The three of them were not even a factor now—blind men could not sit the Golden Throne, nor those visibly maimed. Slit nostrils and gouged eyes ensured that Apius’s exiled sister-sons need not be considered by the Senators.

Bonosus shook his head, irked with himself. He was following lines of thought that suggested there was an actual decision to be made by the fifty men in this chamber. In reality, they were simply going to ratify whatever emerged from the intrigues taking place even now within the Imper ial Precinct. Gesius the Chancellor, or Adrastus, or Hilarinus, Count of the Imperial Bedchamber, would come soon enough and inform them what they were to wisely decide. It was a pretence, a piece of theatre.

And Flavius Daleinus had returned to Sarantium from his family estates across the straits to the south just two days before. Most opportunely.

Bonosus had no quarrel with any of the Daleinoi, or none that he knew of, at any rate. This was good. He didn’t much care for them, but that was hardly the issue when a merchant of modestly distinguished lineage considered the wealthiest and most illustrious family in the Empire.

Oradius, Master of the Senate, was signalling for the session to begin. He was having little success amid the tumult in the chamber. Bonosus made his way to his bench and sat down, bowing formally to the Master’s Seat. Others noticed and followed his example. Eventually there was order. At which point Bonosus became aware of the mob at the doors.

The pounding was heavy, frightening, rocking the doors, and with it came a wild shouting of names. The citizens of Sarantium appeared to have candidates of their own to propose to the distinguished Senators of the Empire.

It sounded as if there was fighting going on. What a surprise, Bonosus thought sardonically. As he watched, fascinated, the ornately gilded doors of the Senate Chamber—part of the illusion that matters of moment transpired here—actually began to buckle under the hammering from without. A splendid symbol, Bonosus thought: the doors looked magnificent, but yielded under the least pressure. Someone farther along the bench let out an undignified squeal. Plautus Bonosus, having a whimsical turn of mind, began to laugh.

The doors crashed open. The four guards fell backwards. A crowd of citizens—some slaves among them— thrust raucously into the chamber. Then the vanguard stopped, overawed. Mosaics and gold and gems had their uses, Bonosus thought, amused irony still claiming him. The torch-bearing image of Heladikos, riding his chariot towards his father the Sun—an image of no little controversy in the Empire today—looked down from the dome.

No one in the Senate Chamber seemed able to form a response to the intrusion. The crowd milled about, those still outside pushing forward, those in the chamber holding back, unsure of what they wanted to do now that they were here. Both factions—Blues and Greens— were present. Bonosus looked at the Master. Oradius remained bolted to his seat, making no motion at all. Suppressing his amusement, Bonosus gave an inward shrug and stood.

‘People of Sarantium,’ he said gravely, extending both hands, ‘be welcome! Your aid in our deliberations in this difficult time will be invaluable, I am certain. Will you honour us with those names that commend themselves to you as worthy to sit on the Golden Throne, before you withdraw and allow us to seek Jad’s holy guidance in our weighty task?’

It took very little time, actually.

Bonosus had the Registrar of the Senate dutifully repeat and record each one of the shouted names. There were few surprises. The obvious strategoi, equally obvious nobility. Holders of Imperial Office. A chariot racer. Bonosus, his outward manner sober and attentive, had this name recorded, as well: Astorgus of the Blues. He could laugh about that afterwards.

Oradius, evident danger past, roused himself to a fulsome speech of gratitude in his rich, round tones. It seemed to go over well enough, though Bonosus rather doubted the rabble in the chamber understood half of what was being said to them in the archaic rhetoric. Oradius asked the guards to assist the Empire’s loyal citizenry from the chamber. They went—Blues, Greens, shopkeepers, apprentices, guildsmen, beggars, the many-raced sortings of a very large city.

Sarantines weren’t especially rebellious, Bonosus thought wryly, so long as you gave them their free bread each day, let them argue about religion, and provided their beloved dancers and actors and charioteers.

Charioteers, indeed. Jad’s Most Holy Emperor Astorgus the Charioteer. A wonderful image! He might whip the people into line, Bonosus thought, briefly amusing himself again.

His flicker of initiative spent, Plautus Bonosus leaned sideways on his bench, propped on one hand, and waited for the emissaries from the Imperial Precinct to come and tell the Senators what they were about to think.

It turned out to be a little more complex than that, however. Murder, even in Sarantium, could sometimes be a surprise.

In the better neighbourhoods of the City it had become fashionable in the previous generation to add enclosed balconies to the second and third storeys of houses or apartments. Reaching out over the narrow streets, these sun rooms now had the ironic, if predictable, effect of almost completely blocking the sunlight, all in the name of status and in order to afford the womenfolk of the better families a chance to view the street life through beaded curtains or sometimes extravagant window openings, without themselves suffering the indignity of being observed.

Under the Emperor Apius, the Urban Prefect had passed an ordinance forbidding such structures to project more than a certain distance from the building walls, and had followed this up by tearing down a number of solaria that violated the new law. Needless to say, this did not happen on the streets where the genuinely wealthy and influential kept their city homes. The power of one patrician to complain tended to be offset by the ability of another to bribe or intimidate. Private measures, of course, could not be entirely forestalled, and some regrettable incidents had unfortunately taken place over the years, even in the best neigh-bourhoods.

IN ONE SUCH STREET, lined with uniformly handsome brick façades and with no shortage of lanterns set in the exterior walls to offer expensive lighting at night, a man now sits in a flagrantly oversized solarium, alternately watching the street below and the exquisitely slow, graceful movements of a woman as she plaits and coils her hair in the bedroom behind him.

Her lack of self-consciousness, he thinks, is an honour of sorts extended to him. Sitting unclothed on the edge of the bed, she displays her body in a sequence of curves and recesses: uplifted arm, smooth hollow of arm, honey-coloured amplitude of breast and hip, and the lightly downed place between her thighs where he has been welcomed in the night just past.

The night a messenger came to report an Emperor dead.

As it happens, he is wrong about one thing: her absorbed, unembarrassed nakedness has more to do with self-directed ease than any particular emotion or feeling associated with him at this moment. She is not, after all, unused to having her body seen by men. He knows this, but prefers, at times, to forget it.

He watches her, smiling slightly. He has a smooth-shaven, round face with a soft chin and grey, observant eyes. Not a handsome or an arresting man, he projects a genial, uncontentious, open manner. This is, of course, useful.

Her dark brown hair, he notes, has become tinged with red through the course of the summer. He wonders when she’s had occasion to be outside enough for that to happen, then realizes the colour might be artificial. He doesn’t ask. He is not inclined to probe the details of what she does when they are not together in this apartment he has bought for her on a carefully chosen street.

That reminds him of why he is here just now. He looks away from the woman on the bed—her name is Aliana— and back out through the beaded curtains over the street. Some movement, for the morning is advanced and the news will have run through Sarantium by now.

The doorway he is watching remains closed. There are two guards outside it, but there always are. He knows the names of these two, and the others, and their backgrounds. Details of this sort can sometimes matter. Indeed, they tend to matter. He is careful in such things, and less genial than might appear to the unsubtle.

A man had entered through that doorway, his bearing urgent with tidings, just before sunrise. He had watched this by the light of the exterior torches, and had noted the livery. He had smiled then. Gesius the Chancellor had chosen to make his move. The game was begun, indeed. The man in the solarium expects to win it but is experienced enough in the ways of power in the world, already, to know that he might not. His name is Petrus.

‘You are tired of me,’ the woman says, ending a silence. Her voice is low, amused. The careful movements of her arms, attending to her hair, do not cease. ‘Alas, the day has come.’

‘That day will never come,’ the man says calmly, also amused. This is a game they play, from within the entirely improbable certainty of their relationship. He does not turn from watching the doorway now, however.

‘I will be on the street again, at the mercy of the factions. A toy for the wildest partisans with their barbarian ways. A cast-aside actress, disgraced and abandoned, past my best years.’

She was twenty in the year when the Emperor Apius died. The man has seen thirty-one summers; not young, but it was said of him—before and after that year—that he was one of those who had never been young.

‘I’d give it two days,’ he murmurs, ‘before some infatuated scion of the Names, or a rising merchant in silk or Ispahani spice won your fickle heart with jewellery and a private bathhouse.’

‘A private bathhouse,’ she agrees, ‘would be a considerable lure.’

He glances over, smiling. She’d known he would, and has managed, not at all by chance, to be posed in profile, both arms uplifted in her hair, her head turned towards him, dark eyes wide. She has been on the stage since she was seven years old. She holds the pose a moment, then laughs.

The soft-featured man, clad only in a dove-grey tunic with no undergarments in the aftermath of lovemaking, shakes his head. His own sand-coloured hair is thinning a little but not yet grey. ‘Our beloved Emperor is dead, no heir in sight, Sarantium in mortal peril, and you idly torment a grieving and troubled man.’

‘May I come and do it some more?’ she asks.

She sees him actually hesitate. That surprises and even excites her, in truth: a measure of his need of her, that even on this morning . . .

But in that instant there comes a sequence of sounds from the street below. A lock turning, a heavy door opening and closing, hurried voices, too loud, and then another, flat with command. The man by the beaded curtain turns quickly and looks out again.

The woman pauses then, weighing many things at this moment in her life. But the real decision, in truth, has been made some time ago. She trusts him, and herself, amazingly. She drapes her body—a kind of defending—in the bed linen before saying to his now-intent profile, from which the customary genial expression has entirely gone, ‘What is he wearing?’

He ought not to have been, the man will decide much later, nearly so surprised by the question and what she—very deliberately—revealed with it. Her attraction for him, from the beginning, has resided at least as much in wit and perception as in her beauty and the gifts that drew Sarantines to the theatre every night she performed, alternately aroused and then driven to shouts of laughter and applause.

He is astonished, though, and surprise is rare for him. He is not a man accustomed to allowing things to disconcert him. This happens to be one matter he has not confided in her, however. And, as it turns out, what the silver-haired man in the still-shaded street has elected to wear as he steps from his home into the view of the world, on a morning fraught with magnitude, matters very much.

Petrus looks back at the woman. Even now he turns away from the street to her, and both of them will remember that, after. He sees that she’s covered herself, that she is a little bit afraid, though would surely deny it. Very little escapes him. He is moved, both by the implications of her voicing the question and by the presence of her fear.

‘You knew?’ he asks quietly.

‘You were extremely specific about this apartment,’ she murmurs, ‘the requirement of a solarium over this particular street. It was not hard to note which doorways could be watched from here. And the theatre or the Blues’ banqueting hall are sources of information on Imperial manoeuvrings as much as the palaces or the barracks are. What is he wearing, Petrus?’

She has a habit of lowering her voice for emphasis, not raising it: training on the stage. It is very effective. Many things about her are. He looks out again, and down, through the screening curtain at the cluster of men before the one doorway that matters.

‘White,’ he says, and pauses before adding softly, no more than a breath of his own, ‘bordered, shoulder to knee, with purple.’

‘Ah,’ she says. And rises then, bringing the bedsheet to cover herself as she walks towards him, trailing it behind her. She is not tall but moves as if she were. ‘He wears porphyry. This morning. And so?’

‘And so,’ he echoes. But not as a question.

Reaching through the beads of the curtain with one hand, he makes a brief, utterly unexceptionable sign of the sun disk for the benefit of the men who have been waiting in the street-level apartment across the way for a long time now. He waits only to see the sign returned from a small, iron-barred guard’s portal and then he rises to cross towards the small, quite magnificent woman in the space between room and solarium.

‘What happens, Petrus?’ she asks. ‘What happens now?’

He is not a physically impressive man, which makes the sense of composed mastery he can display all the more impressive—and unsettling—at times.

‘Idle torment was offered,’ he murmurs. ‘Was it not? We have some little leisure now.’

She hesitates, then smiles, and the bedsheet, briefly a garment, slips to the floor.

There is a very great tumult in the street below not long after. Screaming, desperately wild shouts, running footsteps. They do not leave the bed this time. At one point, in the midst of lovemaking, he reminds her, a whisper at one ear, of a promise made a little more than a year ago. She has remembered it, of course, but has never quite let herself believe it. Today—this morning—taking his lips with her own, his body within hers again, thinking of an Imperial death in the night just past, and another death now, and the uttermost unlikeliness of love, she does. She actually does believe him now.

Nothing has ever frightened her more, and this is a woman who has already lived a life, young as she is, where great fear has been known and appropriate. But what she says to him, a little later, when space to speak returns to them, as movement and the conjoined spasms pass, is: ‘Remember, Petrus. A private bath, cold and hot water, with steam, or I find myself a spice merchant who knows how to treat a high-born lady.’

All he’d ever wanted to do was race horses.

From first awareness of being in the world, it seemed to him, his desire had been to move among horses, watch them canter, walk, run; talk to them, talk about them, and about chariots and drivers all the god’s day and into starlight. He wanted to tend them, feed them, help them into life, train them to harness, reins, whip, chariot, noise of crowd. And then—by Jad’s grace, and in honour of Heladikos, the god’s gallant son who died in his chariot bringing fire to men—stand in his own quadriga behind four of them, leaning far forward over their tails, reins wrapped about his body lest they slip through sweaty fingers, knife in belt for a desperate cutting free if he fell, and urge them on to speeds and a taut grace in the turnings that no other man could even imagine.

But hippodromes and chariots were in the wider world and of the world, and nothing in the Sarantine Empire—not even worship of the god—was clean and uncomplicated. It had even become dangerous here in the City to speak too easily of Heladikos. Some years ago the High Patriarch in what remained of ruined Rhodias and the Eastern Patriarch here in Sarantium had issued a rare joint Pronouncement that Holy Jad, the god in the Sun and behind the Sun, had no born children, mortal or otherwise—that all men were, in spirit, the sons of the god. That Jad’s essence was above and beyond propagation. That to worship, or even honour the idea of a begotten son was paganism, assailing the pure divinity of the god.

But how else, clerics back in Soriyya and elsewhere had preached in opposition, had the ineffable, blindingly bright Golden Lord of Worlds made himself accessible to lowly mankind? If Jad loved his mortal creation, the sons of his spirit, did it not hold that he would embody a part of himself in mortal guise, to seal the covenant of that love? And that seal was Heladikos, the Charioteer, his child.

Then there were the Antae, who had conquered in Batiara and accepted the worship of Jad—embracing Heladikos with him, but as a demi-god himself, not merely a mortal child. Barbaric paganism, the orthodox clerics now thundered—except those who lived in Batiara under the Antae. And since the High Patriarch himself lived there at their sufferance in Rhodias, the fulminations against Heladikian heresies were muted in the west.

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 Pronoun cement 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 indicated 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.

‘Probably does,’ a man beside Fotius said sourly. ‘What would the Daleinoi know of any of us?’

‘They are an honourable family!’ someone else interjected.

Fotius left them to debate. He crossed the ground towards the cluster of Blues. He felt angry and hot. He struck the imposter on one shoulder. This close, he could smell a scent on the man. Perfume? In the Hippodrome?

‘By Jad’s Light, who are you?’ he demanded. ‘You aren’t a Blue, how dare you speak in our name?’

The man turned. He was bulky, but not fat. He had odd, pale green eyes, which now regarded Fotius as if he were some form of insect that had crawled out of a wine flask. Fotius actually wondered, amid his own turbulent thoughts, how anyone’s tunic could remain so crisp and clean here this morning.

The others had overheard. They looked at Fotius and the man who said, contemptuously, in a clipped, precise voice, ‘And you are the Accredited Record Keeper of the Blues in Sarantium, dare I suppose? Hah. You probably can’t even read.’

‘Maybe he can’t,’ said Pappio, striding up boldly, ‘but you wore a Green tunic last fall to our end-of-season banquet. I remember you there. You even made a toast. You were drunk!’

The man seemed, clearly, to classify Pappio as close kin to whatever crawling thing Fotius was. He wrinkled his nose. ‘And men are forbidden by some new ordinance to change their allegiance now? I am not allowed to enjoy and celebrate the triumphs of the mighty Asportus?’

‘Who?’ Fotius said.

‘Astorgus,’ the man said quickly. ‘Astorgus of the Blues.’

‘Get out of here,’ said Daccilio, who had been one of the Blue faction leaders for as long as Fotius could remember, and who had carried the banner at this year’s Hippodrome opening ceremonies. ‘Get out, now!’

‘Take off that blue tunic first!’ someone else rasped angrily. Voices were raised. Heads turned in their direction. From all over the Hippodrome the too-synchronized frauds were still crying the name of Flavius Daleinus. With a roiling, hot anger that was actually a kind of joy, Fotius grabbed a fistful of the imposter’s crisp blue tunic in his sweaty hands.

Asportus, indeed.

He jerked hard and felt the tunic tear at the shoulder. The jewelled brooch holding it fell onto the sand. He laughed—and then let out a scream as something smashed him across the back of the knees. He staggered, collapsed in the dust. Just as the charioteers fall, he thought.

He looked up, tears in his eyes, pain taking his breath away. Excubitors. Of course. Three of them had come. Armed, impersonal, merciless. They could kill him as easily as crack him across the knees, and with as much impunity. This was Sarantium. Commoners died to make an example every day. A spear point was levelled at his breast.

‘Next man who strikes another here gets a spear-point, not a shaft,’ the man holding the weapon said, his voice hollow within his helmet. He was utterly calm. The Imperial Guard were the best-trained men in the City.

‘You’ll be busy, then,’ said Daccilio bluntly, unintimidated. ‘It seems the spontaneous demonstration arranged by the illustrious Daleinoi is not achieving what might have been desired.’

The three Excubitors looked up into the stands and the one with the levelled spear swore, rather less calmly. There were fistfights breaking out now, centred around the men who had been shouting that patently contrived acclamation. Fotius lay motionless, not even daring to rub his legs, until the spear point wavered and moved away. The green-eyed imposter in the torn blue tunic was no longer among them. Fotius had no idea where he’d gone.

Pappio knelt beside him. ‘My friend, are you all right?’

Fotius managed to nod. He wiped at the tears and sweat on his face. His tunic and legs were coated with dust now, from the sacred ground where charioteers raced. He felt a sudden wave of fellow-feeling for the balding glassblower. Pappio was a Green, to be sure, but he was a decent fellow for all that. And he had helped unmask a deception.

Asportus of the Blues! Asportus? Fotius almost gagged. Trust the Daleinoi, those arrogant patricians, to have so little respect for the citizens as to imagine this shabby pantomime could get Flavius’s rump onto the Golden Throne!

The Excubitors beside them suddenly pulled themselves into a line, bristling with military precision. Fotius glanced quickly past them. A man on a horse had entered the Hippodrome, riding slowly along the spina towards the midpoint.

Others saw the rider. Someone cried his name, and then more voices did. This time it was spontaneous. A guard of Excubitors moved into place around him as he reined the horse to a stop. It was the formal array of their ranks, and the silence of them, that drew all eyes and compelled a gradual stillness of twenty thousand people.

‘Citizens of Sarantium, I have tidings,’ cried Valerius, Count of the Excubitors, in the rough, unvarnished soldier’s tones.

They couldn’t all hear him, of course, but the words were repeated by others—as was always the case here—and ran through that vast space, far up into the stands, across the spina with its obelisks and statues, through the empty kathisma where the Emperor would sit for the racing, and under the arches where some charioteers and Hippodrome staff were watching, shielded from the blazing sun.

Fotius saw the brooch on the sand beside him. He palmed it quickly. No one else seemed to notice. He would sell it, not long after, for enough money to change his life. Just now, though, he scrambled to his feet. He was dusty, grimy, sticky with sweat, but thought he should be standing when his Emperor was named.

He was wrong about what was coming, but why should he have understood the dance being danced that day?

Much later, the investigation by the Master of Offices, through the Quaestor of Imperial Intelligence, proved unexpectedly and embarrassingly incapable of determining the murderers of the most prominent Sarantine aristocrat of his day.

It was established readily enough that Flavius Daleinus—only recently returned to the City—had left his home on the morning of the death of the Emperor Apius, accompanied by his two older sons, a nephew, and a small retinue. Family members confirmed that he was on his way to the Senate Chamber to offer a formal expression of support to the Senators in their time of trial and decision. There was some suggestion—not confirmed from the Imperial Precinct—that he had arranged to meet the Chancellor there and be escorted afterwards by Gesius to the Attenine Palace to pay his last respects.

The condition of Daleinus’s body and what remained of his clothing when the dead man was carried on a bier to his home, and then later to his final resting place in the family mausoleum, was such that a widely reported rumour about his attire that morning was also not amenable to official confirmation.

The clothing had all burned—with or without the much-discussed strip of purple—and most of the elegant aristocrat’s skin had been charred black or scorched entirely away. What remained of his face was horrifying, the features beneath the once-distinguished silver hair a melted ruin. His oldest son and the nephew had also died, and four of his entourage. The surviving son, it was reported, was now blind and unfit to be seen. He was expected to take clerical vows and withdraw from the City.

Sarantine Fire did that to men.

It was one of the secrets of the Empire, shielded with ferocity, for it was the weapon that had guarded the City—thus far—from incursions over the water. Terror ran before that molten, liquid fire that set ships and men alight, burning upon the sea.

It had never, in living memory or in any of the military chronicles, been used within the walls, or indeed in any land engagement of the armies.

This, of course, directed informed suspicion upon the Strategos of the Navy and, indeed, any other military commanders who might have been able to suborn the naval engineers entrusted with the technique of training the liquid fire through a hose, or launching it through space upon the seafaring enemies of Sarantium.

In due course a number of appropriate persons were subjected to expert questioning. Their deaths did not, however, serve the ultimate goal of determining who it was who had arranged the hideous assassination of a distinguished patrician. The Strategos of the Navy, a man of the old school, elected to end his life, but left behind a letter declaring his innocence of any crimes and his mortal shame that such a weapon, entrusted to his care, had been used in this way. His death was, accordingly, not a useful one either.

It was reliably reported that three men had wielded the siphon apparatus. Or five. That they were wearing the colours and had the Bassanid-style clothing and the barbarian moustaches and long hair of the most extreme Green partisans. Or of the Blues. Further, that they wore the light brown tunics with black trim of the Urban Prefect’s men. It was recounted that they had fled east down an alley. Also west. Or through the back of a house on the exclusive, shaded street where the Daleinoi’s City mansion could be found. It was declared, with conviction, that the assassins had been Kindath in their silver robes and blue caps. No evident motive commended itself for this, but those worshippers of the two moons might well do evil for its own sake. Some ensuing, sporadic attacks in the Kindath Quarter were judged excusable by the Urban Prefect, as a way of discharging tensions in the City.

All the licensed foreign merchants in Sarantium were advised to keep to their allotted quarters of the City until further notice. Some of those who recklessly did not— curious, perhaps, to observe the unfolding events of those days—suffered predictable, unfortunate consequences.

The assassins of Flavius Daleinus were never found.

In the meticulous tally of the dead in that difficult time, ordered and executed by the Urban Prefect at the command of the Master of Offices, there was a report of three bodies found washed ashore four days later by soldiers patrolling the coast to the east of the triple walls. They were naked, skin bleached grey-white by the sea, and sea creatures had been at their faces and extremities.

No connection was ever made between this finding and the events of the terrible night the Emperor Apius went to the god, to be followed in the morning by the noble Flavius Daleinus. What connection could have been made? Bodies were found by fishermen in the water and along the stony beaches east all the time.

In the private, perhaps petty way of an intelligent man without any real power, Plautus Bonosus rather enjoyed the expression on the Imperial Chancellor’s face when the Master of Offices appeared in the Senate Chamber that morning, shortly after Gesius had arrived.

The tall, thin eunuch pressed his fingers together and inclined his head gravely, as if Adrastus’s arrival was a source of support and consolation to him. But Bonosus had been watching his face when the ornate doors— rather the worse for their earlier battering—were pried open by the guards.

Gesius had been expecting someone else.

Bonosus had a pretty good idea who that might have been. It was going to be interesting, he thought, when all the players in this morning’s pantomime were assembled. Adrastus, clearly, had arrived on his own behalf. With the two most powerful—and dangerous—strategoi and their forces each more than two weeks’ hard marching from Sarantium, the Master of Offices had a legitimate pathway to the Golden Throne—if he moved decisively. His lineage among the ‘Names’ was impeccable, his experience and rank unsurpassed, and he had the usual assortment of friends. And enemies.

Gesius, of course, could not even imagine Imperial status for himself, but the Chancellor could engineer a succession—or try to do so—that would ensure his own continuance at the heart of power in the Empire. It would be far from the first time one of the Imperial eunuchs had orchestrated affairs of succession.

Bonosus, listening to the bland shuffle of speeches from his colleagues—variations on a theme of grievous loss and momentous decisions to come—signalled a slave for a cup of chilled wine and wondered who would take a wager with him.

A charming blond boy—from Karch in the far north, by his colouring—brought his wine. Bonosus smiled at him, and idly watched the boy walk back to the near wall. He reviewed, again, the state of his own relations with the Daleinoi. No conflicts that he knew. Two shared—and profitable—backings of a spice ship to Ispahani some years ago, before his appointment. His wife reported that she greeted the lady wife of Flavius Daleinus when they met at the baths they both preferred, and that she was always responded to politely and by name. This was good.

Bonosus expected that Gesius would win this morning. That his patrician candidate would emerge as the Emperor Designate, with the eunuch retaining his position as Imperial Chancellor. The conjoined power of the Chancellor and the wealthiest family in the City were more than a match for Adrastus’s ambition, however silken might be the manner and the intricate webs of intelligence spun by the Master of Offices. Bonosus was prepared to risk a sizeable sum on the affair, if he could find a taker.

Later, he, too, would have cause to be privately grateful—amid chaos—that a wager had not taken place that day.

Watching as he sipped his wine, Bonosus saw Gesius, with the smallest, elegant gesture of his long fingers, petition Oradius to be allowed to speak. He saw the Master of the Senate bob his head up and down like a street puppet in immediate acknowledgement. He’s been bought, he decided. Adrastus would have his supporters here too. Would doubtless make his own speech soon. It was going to be interesting. Who could squeeze the hapless Senate harder? No one had tried to bribe Bonosus. He wondered if he ought to be flattered or offended.

As another rote eulogy of the dead, thrice-exalted, luminous, never-to-be-equalled Emperor came to a platitudinous close, Oradius gestured with deference towards the Chancellor. Gesius bowed graciously and moved to the white marble speaker’s circle in the centre of the mosaics on the floor.

Before the Chancellor began, however, there came another rapping at the door. Bonosus turned, expectantly. This was remarkably well timed, he noted with admiration. Flawlessly, in fact. He wondered how Gesius had done it.

But it was not Flavius Daleinus who entered the room.

Instead, an extremely agitated officer of the Urban Prefecture told the assembled Senate about Sarantine Fire loosed in the City and the death of an aristocrat.

A short time after that, with a grey-faced, visibly aged Chancellor being offered assistance on a bench by Senators and slaves, and the Master of Offices displaying either stupefied disbelief or brilliant acting skills, the august Senate of the Empire heard a mob outside its much-abused doors for the second time that day.

This time there was a difference. This time there was only one name being cried, and the voices were ferociously, defiantly assertive. The doors banged open hard, and the street life of the City spilled in. Bonosus saw the faction colours again, too many guilds to count, shopkeepers, street vendors, tavern-masters, bathhouse workers, animal-keepers, beggars, whores, artisans, slaves. And soldiers. There were soldiers this time.

And the same name on all their lips. The people of Sarantium, making known their will. Bonosus turned, on some instinct, in time to see the Chancellor suddenly drain his cup of wine. Gesius took a deep, steadying breath. He stood up, unaided, and moved towards the marble speaker’s circle again. His colour had come back.

Holy Jad, thought Bonosus, his mind spinning like the wheel of a toppled chariot, can he be this swift?

‘Most noble members of the Imperial Senate,’ the Chancellor said, lifting his thin, exquisitely modulated voice. ‘See! Sarantium has come to us! Shall we hear the voice of our people?’

The people heard him, and their voice—responding— became a roar that shook the chamber. One name, again and again. Echoing among marble and mosaic and precious stones and gold, spiralling upwards to the dome where doomed Heladikos drove his chariot, carrying fire. One name. An absurd choice in a way, but in another, Plautus Bonosus thought, it might not be so absurd. He surprised himself. It was not a thought he’d ever had before.

Behind the Chancellor, Adrastus, the suave, polished Master of Offices—the most powerful man in the City, in the Empire—still looked stunned, bewildered by the speed of things. He had not moved or reacted. Gesius had. In the end, that hesitation, missing the moment when everything changed, was to cost Adrastus his office. And his eyes.

The Golden Throne had been lost to him already. Perhaps that dawning awareness was what froze him there on a marble bench while the crowd roared and thundered as if they were in the Hippodrome or a theatre, not the Senate Chamber. His dreams shattered— subtle, intricate designs slashed apart—as a beefy, toothless smith howled the City’s chosen name right in his well-bred face.

Perhaps what Adrastus was hearing then, unmoving, was another sound entirely: the jewelled birds of the Emperor, singing for a different dancer now.

‘Valerius to the Golden Throne!’

The cry had run through the Hippodrome, exactly as he’d been told it would. He’d refused them, had shaken his head decisively, turned his horse to leave, seen a company of the Urban Prefect’s guardsmen running towards him—not his own men—and watched as they knelt before his mount, blocking his way with their bodies.

Then they, too, raised his name in a loud shout, begging that he accept the throne. Again he refused, shaking his head, making a sweeping gesture of denial. But the crowd was already wild. The cry that had begun when he brought them word of Daleinus’s death reverberated through the huge space where the chariots ran and people cheered. There were thirty, perhaps forty thousand people there by then, even with no racing this day.

A different contest was proceeding towards its orchestrated end.

Petrus had told him what would happen and what he had to do at every step. That his reporting of the second death would bring shock and fear, but no grief, and even some vindication following hard upon the too-contrived acclamations of Daleinus. He hadn’t asked his nephew how he’d known those acclamations would come. Some things he didn’t need to know. He had enough to remember, more than enough to keep clearly in sequence this day.

But it had developed precisely as Petrus had said it would, exact as a heavy cavalry charge on open ground, and here he was astride his horse, the Urban Prefect’s men blocking his way and the Hippodrome crowd screaming his name to the god’s bright sun. His name and his alone. He had refused twice, as instructed. They were pleading with him now. He saw men weeping as they roared his name. The noise was deafening, a wall, punishingly loud, as the Excubitors— his own men this time—moved closer, and then completely surrounded him, making it impossible for a humble, loyal, unambitious man to ride from this place, to escape the people’s declared will in their time of great danger and need.

He stepped down from his horse.

His men were around him, pressing close, screening him from the crowd where Blues and Greens stood mingled together, joined in a fierce, shared desire they had not known they even had, where all those gathered in this white, blazing light were calling upon him to be theirs. To save them now.

And so, in the Hippodrome of Sarantium, under the brilliant summer sun, Valerius, Count of the Excubitors, yielded to his fate and suffered his loyal guards to clothe him in the purple-lined mantle Leontes happened to have brought with him.

‘Will they not wonder at that?’ he had asked Petrus.

‘It won’t matter by then,’ his nephew had replied. ‘Trust me in this.’

And the Excubitors made way, the outer ring of them parting slowly, like a curtain, so that the innermost ones could be seen holding an enormous round shield. And standing upon that shield as they raised it to their shoulders—in the ancient way soldiers proclaimed an Emperor—Valerius the Trakesian lifted his hands towards his people. He turned to all corners of the thundering Hippodrome—for here was the true thunder that day—and accepted, humbly and gracio usly, the spontaneous will of the Sarantine people that he be their Imperial Lord, Regent of Holy Jad upon earth.

Valerius! Valerius! Valerius!

All glory to the Emperor Valerius!

Valerius the Golden, to the Golden Throne!

His hair had been golden once, long ago, when he had left the grainlands of Trakesia with two other boys, poor as stony earth, but strong for a lad, willing to work, to fight, walking barefoot through a cold, wet autumn, the north wind behind them bringing winter, all the way to the Sarantine military camp, to offer their services as soldiers to a distant Emperor in the unimaginable City, long, long ago.

‘Petrus, stay and dine with me?’

Night. A western sea breeze cooling the room through the open windows over the courtyard below. The sound of falling water drifted up from the fountains, and from farther away came the susurration of wind in the leaves of the trees in the Imperial gardens.

Two men stood in a room in the Traversite Palace. One was an Emperor, the other had made him so. In the larger, more formal Attenine Palace, a little way across the gardens, Apius lay in state in the Porphyry Room, coins on his eyes, a golden sun disk clasped between folded hands: payment and passport for his journey.

‘I cannot, Uncle. I have promises to be kept.’

‘Tonight? Where?’

‘Among the factions. The Blues were very useful today.’

‘Ah. The Blues. And their most favoured actress? Was she very useful?’ The old soldier’s voice was sly now. ‘Or is she to be useful later this evening?’

Petrus looked unabashed. ‘Aliana? A fine dancer, and I always laugh during her comic turns upon the stage.’ He grinned, the round, smooth face free of guile.

The Emperor’s gaze was shrewd, undeceived. After a moment he said, quietly, ‘Love is dangerous, nephew.’

The younger man’s expression changed. He was silent a moment, by one of the doorways. Eventually he nodded his head. ‘It can be. I know that. Do you . . . disapprove?’

It was a well-timed question. How could his uncle’s disapproval attach to anything he did tonight? After the events of the day?

Valerius shook his head. ‘Not really. You will move into the Imperial Precinct? One of the palaces?’ There were six of them scattered on these grounds. They were all his now. He would have to learn to know them.

Petrus nodded. ‘Of course, if you honour me so. But not until after the Mourning Rites and the Investiture, and the Hippodrome ceremony in your honour.’

‘You will bring her here with you?’

Petrus’s expression, directly confronted, was equally direct. ‘Only if you approve.’

The Emperor said, ‘Are there not laws? Someone said something, I recall. An actress . . .?’

‘You are the source and fount of all laws in Sarantium now, Uncle. Laws may be changed.’

Valerius sighed. ‘We need to talk further on this. And about the holders of office. Gesius. Adrastus. Hilarinus— I don’t trust him. I never did.’

‘He is gone, then. And Adrastus must also be, I fear. Gesius . . . is more complex. You know he spoke for you in the Senate?’

‘You said. Did it matter?’

‘Probably not, but if he had spoken for Adrastus— unlikely as that may sound—it might have made things . . . uglier.’

‘You trust him?’

The Emperor watched his nephew’s deceptively bland, round face as the younger man thought. Petrus wasn’t a soldier. He didn’t look like a courtier. He carried himself, more than anything else, Valerius decided, like an academician of the old pagan Schools. There was ambition there, however. Enormous ambition. There was, in fact, an Empire’s worth of it. He had cause to know, being where he was.

Petrus gestured, his soft hands spreading a little apart. ‘Truthfully? I’m not certain. I said it was complex. We will, indeed, have to talk further. But tonight you are allowed an evening of leisure, and I may permit myself the same, with your leave. I took the liberty of commanding ale for you, Uncle. It is on the sideboard beside the wine. Have I your gracious leave to depart?’

Valerius didn’t really want him to go, but what was he to do? Ask the other man to sit with him for a night and hold his hand and tell him being Emperor would be all right? Was he a child?

‘Of course. Do you want Excubitors?’

Petrus began shaking his head, then caught himself. ‘Probably a wise idea, actually. Thank you.’

‘Stop by the barracks. Tell Leontes. In fact, a rotating guard of six of them for you, from now on. Someone used Sarantine Fire here today.’

Petrus’s too-quick gaze showed he didn’t quite know how to read that comment. Good. It wouldn’t do to be utterly transparent to his nephew.

‘Jad guard and defend you all your days, my Emperor.’

‘His eternal Light upon you.’ And for the first time ever, Valerius the Trakesian made the Imperial sign of blessing over another man.

His nephew knelt, touched forehead to floor three times, palms flat beside his head, then rose and walked out, calm as ever, unchanged though all had changed.

Valerius, Emperor of Sarantium, successor to Saranios the Great who had built the City, and to a line of Emperors after him, and before him in Rhodias, stretching back almost six hundred years, stood alone in an elegant chamber where oil lanterns hung from the ceiling and were set in brackets on the walls and where half a hundred candles burned extravagantly. His bedroom for tonight was somewhere nearby. He wasn’t sure where. He wasn’t familiar with this palace. The Count of the Excubitors had never had reason to enter here. He looked around the room. There was a tree near the courtyard window, made of beaten gold, with mechanical birds in the branches. They glittered in the flickering light with jewels and semi-precious stones. He supposed they sang, if one knew the trick. The tree was gold. It was entirely of gold. He drew a breath.

He went to the sideboard and poured himself a flask of ale. He sipped, then smiled. Honest Trakesian brew. Trust Petrus. It occurred to him that he should have clapped hands for a slave or Imperial officer, but such things slowed matters down and he had a thirst. He’d a right to one. It had been a day of days, as the soldiers said. Petrus had spoken true—he was entitled to an evening without further planning or tasks. Jad knew, there would be enough to deal with in the days to come. For one thing, certain people would have to be killed—if they weren’t dead already. He didn’t know the names of the men who’d wielded that liquid fire in the City—he didn’t want to know—but they couldn’t live.

He walked from the sideboard and sank down into a deep-cushioned, high-backed chair. The fabric was silk. He’d had little experience of silk in his life. He traced the material with a calloused finger. It was soft, smooth. It was . . . silken. Valerius grinned to himself. He liked it. So many years a soldier, nights on stony ground, in bitter winter or the southern desert storms. He stretched out his booted feet, drank deeply again, wiped his lip with the back of a scarred, heavy hand. He closed his eyes, drank again. He decided he wanted his boots removed. Carefully, he placed the ale flask on an absurdly delicate three-legged ivory table. He sat up very straight, took a deep breath and then clapped his hands three times, the way Apius—Jad guard his soul!—used to do.

Three doors burst open on the instant.

A score of people sprang into the room and flung themselves prostrate on the floor in obeisance. He saw Gesius and Adrastus, then the Quaestor of the Sacred Palace, the Urban Prefect, the Count of the Imperial Bedchamber—Hilarinus, whom he didn’t trust—the Quaestor of Imperial Revenue. All the highest officers of the Empire. Flattened before him on a green and blue mosaic floor of sea creatures and sea flowers.

In the ensuing stillness, one of the mechanical birds began to sing. Valerius the Emperor laughed aloud.

Very late that same night, the sea wind having long since died to a breath, most of the City asleep, but some not so. Among these, the Holy Order of the Sleepless Ones in their austere chapels, who believed—with fierce and final devotion—that all but a handful of them had to be constantly awake and at prayer through the whole of the night while Jad in his solar chariot negotiated his perilous journey through blackness and bitter ice beneath the world.

The bakers, too, were awake and at work, preparing the bread that was the gift of the Empire to all who dwelt in glorious Sarantium. In winter the glowing ovens would draw people from the darkness seeking warmth— beggars, cripples, streetwalkers, those evicted from their homes and those too new to the Holy City to have found shelter yet. They would move on to the glassmakers and the metalsmiths when the grey, cold day came.

In broiling summer now, the nearly naked bakers worked and swore at their ovens, slick with sweat, quaffing watery beer all night, no attendants at their doors save the rats, scurrying from cast light into shadow.

Torches burning on the better streets proclaimed the houses of the wealthy, and the tread and cry of the Urban Prefect’s men warned the illicit to take a certain care elsewhere in the night city. The roaming bands of wilder partisans—Green and Blue each had their violent cadres—tended to ignore the patrols, or, more properly, a lone patrol was inclined to be prudently discreet when the flamboyantly garbed and barbered partisans careened into sight from one tavern or another.

Women, save for the ones who sold themselves or patricians in litters with armed escorts, were not abroad after dark.

This night, however, all the taverns—even the filthiest cauponae where sailors and slaves drank—were closed in response to an Imperial death and an Emperor acclaimed. The shocking events of the day seemed to have subdued even the partisans. No shouting, drunken youths in the loose, eastern clothing of Bassania and the hair-styling of western barbarians could be seen—or heard—slewing through empty streets.

A horse neighed in one of the faction stables by the Hippodrome, and a woman’s voice could be heard through an open window over a colonnade nearby, singing the refrain of a song that was not at all devout. A man laughed, and then the woman did, and then there was silence there, too. The high screech of a cat in a laneway. A child cried. Children always cried in the darkness, somewhere. The world was what it was.

The god’s sun passed in its chariot through ice and past howling daemons under the world. The two moons worshipped—perversely—as goddesses by the Kindath had both set, over west into the wide sea. Only the stars, which no one claimed as holy, shone like strewn diamonds over the city Saranios had founded to be the New Rhodias, and to be more than Rhodias had ever been.

‘Oh City, City, ornament of the earth, eye of the world, glory of Jad’s creation, will I die before I see you again?’

So, Lysurgos Matanias, posted as ambassador to the Bassanid court two hundred years past, longing in his heart for Sarantium even amid the luxurious eastern splendours of Kabadh. Oh City, City.

In all the lands ruled by that City, with its domes and its bronze and golden doors, its palaces and gardens and statues, forums and theatres and colonnades, bathhouses and shops and guildhalls, taverns and whorehouses and sanctuaries and the great Hippodrome, its triple landward walls that had never yet been breached, and its deep, sheltered harbour and the guarded and guarding seas, there was a timeworn phrase that had the same meaning in every tongue and every dialect.

To say of a man that he was sailing to Sarantium was to say that his life was on the cusp of change: poised for emergent greatness, brilliance, fortune—or else at the very precipice of a final and absolute fall as he met something too vast for his capacity.

Valerius the Trakesian had become an Emperor.

Heladikos, whom some worshipped as the son of Jad and placed in mosaic upon holy domes, had died in his chariot bringing fire back from the sun.