The Sarantine Mosaic

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Or just before the race, perhaps, when he’d seen the man his friends had stabbed and kicked in a dark street, the man he’d heard ordered to remain at rest until summer, come walking out on the sands to claim the Second team of the Blues. Not the silver helmet which was his by right.

  Or even before that, it could be said. For Cleander, looking for his mother and the Bassanid doctor, had been peering into the tunnel, not admiring the charioteers taking their positions on the sand. He’d been low down and close enough and so he—perhaps alone of eighty thousand—had actually seen Crescens of the Greens hammer an elbow into someone’s side just as they came into the light, and then he’d seen who that someone was.

  He would always remember that. His heart had begun pounding then, and it went on hammering in his chest all the way to the start of the race, which came just as his mother and the doctor reclaimed their seats. Both of them—at a glance—seemed unexpectedly strained, but Cleander had no time to consider that. There was a race on and Scortius was back.

  The seahorse dived. Eight quadrigas burst from the staggered starting line, heading towards the white marking down the track where they could leave their lanes and the wild manœuvring would begin.

  By instinct, habit, force, Cleander’s gaze went to Crescens, as the First of the Greens whipped his team off from the sixth position. Not a good start post, but the boy leading the Blues was only in fifth, so it didn’t much matter. Scortius was much lower down the track in the second lane, but with a lesser team. Cleander didn’t understand how and why that had happened. The Greens’ second driver had the rail and would try to keep it until Crescens worked his way down.

  Or so it usually unfolded in this sort of alignment.

  But Crescens was going to have a slow route down this time, it seemed. Taras of the Blues had his own team out at least as fast. Crescens couldn’t cut him off at the chalk without fouling or spilling his own chariot. The two first teams would descend together, and then the Greens would work on the Blue rider in tandem as they had all morning. It was a long race, seven laps. Plenty of time.

  Except that everyone knew the starts mattered enormously. A race could end before the first lap was done. And Scortius was in this one.

  Cleander turned to see what was happening with the Blues’ second team, and then he never looked away. Scortius had brilliantly anticipated the handkerchief and trumpet, had a superb start, was lashing his horses furiously already. He had burst from the line, had opened a gap between himself and the Greens on the rail. He might even be able to get down, take the inside lane away as soon as they hit the white chalk. It would be close.

  ‘Which one is he?’ his stepmother said beside him.

  ‘Second lane,’ he rasped, pointing, never turning away from the track. It only occurred to him later that there had been no need to speak the name. ‘He’s riding Second chariot, not First! Watch him try for the rail.’

  The horses hit the chalk. He didn’t try for the rail.

  Instead, he went up the track, slicing sharply right, well ahead of the slower White and Red quadrigas in the third and fourth lanes. Both of them seized the entirely unexpected opening and went down and left behind him, sacrificing a moment of speed for the vital inner lanes.

  Later, Cleander would understand how that must have been part of it. They went to the left, had to slow to do it, and so space was created. It was all about space. Cleander felt, in retrospect, as if all these thundering, bunched chariots at the start, spinning wheels, thirty-two flying horses, lashing, straining men, were all like small wooden toys, the sort a boy played with, imagining a Hippodrome on his bedroom floor, and Scortius was moving them the way that boy might move his toys, godlike.

  ‘Watch out!’ someone shouted, just behind them. And with cause. The two Blue quadrigas were on a collision course, the boy in the First chariot heading down as expected with Crescens right beside him, Scortius angling straight towards them both, going entirely the wrong way, away from the rail. Scortius’s mouth was wide open, Cleander saw, and he was screaming something in that chaos of dust and speed and incoherence.

  Then it wasn’t incoherent at all, for something exquisite took place, clear as anything in the fury and mire of human life could be, if you understood enough to see it.

  And being careful in his recollections, tracking back along the arc of his feelings, Cleander would finally decide that this was the true moment when allegiance and partisanship gave way to something else in him: a desire that never left him, all his life, to see that level of skill and grace and courage again, garbed in whatever colours they might choose to wear for a moment’s bright, sunlit glory on the sands.

  In a way, his childhood ended when Scortius went up the track and not down.

  HIS STEPMOTHER SAW only the same initial confusion of dust and fury that Kasia observed from her similar vantage point farther along. There was a roiling tumult inside her, making it quite impossible for her to sort out the chaos below from the chaos within. She felt unwell, thought she might be physically sick, a humiliation in this public place. She was aware of the Bassanid physician on her other side, was half inclined to curse him for being the agent of her presence here, and for seeing what he … might have seen in the dim light under the stands.

  If he spoke a single word, Thenaïs decided, if he but asked after her health, she would … she didn’t know what she would do.

  And that was such appalling, unknown terrain for her—not being sure of exactly what to do. He didn’t speak. A blessing. Stick at his side—that ridiculous affectation, as bad as the dyed beard—he seemed intent on the chariots with all the others. It was why they were all here, wasn’t it? Well, it was, for everyone but her, perhaps.

  I expect you to win this race, she had said. In that strange, filtered half-light. After trying to kill him. Had no idea why she’d said that, it had just come out, from the tumult inside her. She never did things like that.

  It was declared and taught in the holy chapels of Jad that daemons of the half-world hovered, always, intimately close to mortal men and women, and they could enter into you, making you other than what you were, had always been. The knife was in her cloak again. He had given it back to her. She shivered in the sunlight.

  The doctor looked over then. Said nothing. Blessedly. Turned back to the track.

  ‘Which one is he?’ she asked Cleander. He answered, pointing, never taking his eyes from the impossible confusion below. ‘He’s riding Second chariot, not First!’ he shouted.

  That obviously meant something, but she hadn’t the least notion what. Or that it was partly directed at her, and what she had said about winning the race.

  RUSTEM FOUND and began watching his patient from the very start, as soon as he’d sat down again, just as a trumpet sounded. Saw him controlling four racing horses with his left hand, his injured side, while whipping with his right and leaning absurdly far forward on the precarious, bouncing platform on which the racers stood. Then he saw Scortius tilt his body hard to the right, and it seemed to Rustem as if the charioteer was pulling his team that way, with his own damaged body above the flashing, spinning wheels.

  He felt suddenly and inexplicably moved. The knife he’d seen flash and fall under the stands had been, in fact, quite unnecessary, he now judged.

  The man intended to kill himself before them all.

  HE HAD BEEN, in his own day, as celebrated as any racer who’d ever driven a quadriga in this place.

  There were three monuments to him in the spina, and one of them was silver. The first Emperor Valerius—this one’s uncle—had been forced to summon him from retirement twice, so impassioned had been the beseechings of the Hippodrome crowd. The third time—the last time—he’d left the track they’d made a procession for him from the Hippodrome Forum to the landward walls, and there had been people lining the streets several bodies deep all the way there. Two hundred thousand souls, or so the Urban Prefecture had reported.

  Astorgus of the Blues (once a Green) had no false mod
esty at all, no diffidence about his own achievements on these sands where he had dueled and won, and won again, against a succession of challengers and the Ninth Driver, always, for two decades.

  It was the very last of those young challengers—the one he’d retired from—who was before him now, riding Second chariot, with broken ribs and an open wound and no longer young. And of all those watching in those first moments of the race, it was Astorgus the factionarius— blunt and scarred, immensely knowledgeable and famously undemonstrative—who first grasped what was happening, reading eight quadrigas in a single capacious glance, their speeds and angles and drivers and capacities, and who then offered a savage, swift prayer aloud to banned, blasphemous, necessary Heladikos, son of the god.

  He was along the outside wall, standing for the start where he usually did, two-thirds of the way down the straight, past the chalk line, in a safety zone carved out for the track officials between the outer railing and the first row of seats, which were set back here. As a consequence, he had the illusion that Scortius was driving straight towards him when he took that absurd, unprecedented careen towards the outside, not the rail.

  He heard the Glory of the Blues (he who had once been the Glory here, himself) screaming over the crashing din, and he was near enough to realize that the words were in Inici, which only a few of them knew. Astorgus was one. The boy, Taras, from Megarium, would be another. Astorgus saw the lad jerk his head swiftly left and immediately, splendidly react, without an instant to think what he was doing. Astorgus stopped breathing, cut off his prayer, watched.

  The boy screamed in turn—howling the name of Servator—and went hard to his whip on the horse’s right side. It happened at a breakneck, utterly insane speed, destructively close to the jammed, crowded start in a madness of thirty-two pounding stallions.

  In a precisely simultaneous pulsebeat of time, with no margin at all, none, cut so near there was no space to be seen between the chariot wheels as they crossed each other, Scortius and the boy, Taras, both hurled their bodies left, bringing their teams and chariots with them. The sound was deafening, the dust a choking cloud.

  And through that dust, right in front of him, as if done for his private, intimate entertainment—dancers hired for a night by an aristocrat—Astorgus saw what happened next and his soul was moved and his spirit shaken and overawed, for he knew that for all he had ever done out there, in a career acclaimed by two hundred thousand souls crying his name, he could not have even conceived, in his prime, in his own glory, what Scortius had just implemented.

  Taras was angling down, Scortius up. Straight for each other. When the boy pulled violently left, the magnificent Servator pulled the other three horses and the chariot across the track in exactly the same manœuvre the Hippodrome crowd would still remember from the last day of autumn, when Scortius had done it to him. And that was—oh, it was—part of the humbling elegance of this, the perfection. A remembered text being echoed, used again in a new way.

  And Scortius threw his team as hard to the left in the exact same needful instant—else the two chariots would have smashed each other to bits of wood, sending screaming horses crashing, riders flying into shattered bones and death. His team slewed, the wheels sliding, then biting up the track, straightening out with a terrifying precision right beside Crescens and his Green team. In full flight.

  Meanwhile, the third and fourth lane teams had been slicing down.

  Of course they had. There was room made for them when Scortius bolted from the start and cut up. They’d slowed, seized the startling invitation—and so opened the way, like double doors in a palace, for Taras to make his own violent cut left and straighten back up, and so discover a clean, clear, glorious sweep of open track in front of him near the rail.

  He was just behind the Greens’ number two, and then—as the boy went to his whip again—he was beside him, entering the very first turn under the kathisma, taking the wider route but with the better team, leaning hard left still, crying the name of his magnificent lead horse, letting Servator hold them tight to the Greens, and then he was past as they came out. And then there was nothing and no one ahead of him on the proving track as they came out into the far side … and it had all been done in one single straightway.

  Astorgus was crying. Moved as if by something holy in a sanctuary, knowing he had seen a creation as perfect as any artisan had ever made: any vase, gem, poem, mosaic, wall hanging, golden bracelet, jewelled, crafted bird.

  And knowing, too, that this sort of artistry could not endure past the shaping moment, could only be spoken of after by those who recalled, or misrecalled, who had seen and half seen and not seen at all, distorted by memory and desire and ignorance, the achievement of it written as if on water or on sand.

  It mattered, terribly, and just now it didn’t matter at all. Or could the fragility, the defining impermanence actually intensify the glory? The thing lost as soon as made? In this moment, Astorgus thought, his big hands clenched on the wooden rail before him—for this one flawless, diamond moment offered to time—it was the two charioteers, the young one and the genius guiding him, who were lords of the world on the god’s earth, lords of Emperors, of all men and women, fallible and imperfect and one day to fail and die leaving nothing at all behind, lost as soon as made.

  PLAUTUS BONOSUS STOOD UP in the Imperial Box as the two lead chariots came towards them and pounded into the first turn together. He was unaccountably stirred by what was happening, felt briefly self-conscious until he became aware that half a dozen others among this overbred, jaded cluster of courtiers were also on their feet. He exchanged a fleeting, wordless glance with the Master of the Imperial Horse and turned again to the sands below.

  There was a quadriga above their heads on the elegantly arched ceiling of the kathisma: a mosaic of Saranios, crowned with victory’s wreath, driving a team. Below, the young boy for the Blues who had been courageous but overmatched last week and all this morning was now screaming like a barbarian at his team and whipping them past the Greens’ second chariot while still in the kathisma turn.

  It happened sometimes, it could be done, but not easily or often, and never without an awareness— among those who knew the track—of the risk and skill involved. Bonosus watched. The boy, Taras, was no longer overmatched, no longer diffident.

  No longer behind the Green team or beside it.

  He had started in the fifth lane. He came out of the first turn half a team in front and then a full length, and then, smooth as eastern silk on skin, he let Servator glide to the rail along the back straight.

  Bonosus, instinctively, turned back to watch Scortius and Crescens. They came up to the same turn side by side but at the widest part of the track, for Scortius was refusing to let the other man down, and showed not the least desire to do so himself. He was driving the Second team. His task was to ensure a victory for his teammate. Keeping Crescens wide as long as possible was the way to do just that.

  ‘The other Green’s coming back to them,’ said the Master of Horse in his raspy voice. Bonosus glanced over, saw it was true. The Greens’ Second driver, faced with a miserable choice—to chase the Blues’ young leader or come back to aid his own First team—had opted for the latter. Among other things, Crescens of Sarnica was reported to have a vicious, whip-wielding temper with lesser drivers who forgot who was First of the Greens.

  ‘They’ll try for second and third now,’ said Bonosus, to no one in particular.

  ‘He can catch the lad if he’s sprung free quickly enough. We haven’t even done a lap.’ The Master of Horse was excited. It showed. So was Bonosus. Even with all that was yet to come today, a war that would change their world, the drama below was overwhelming.

  The Greens’ number two was slowing, drifting back, looking over his right shoulder to judge his angle. As the two celebrated drivers came out of the turn, still wide, still right next to each other, the Second Green team floated out towards Scortius. He was ahead of him. Could, with impunity, move right
in front of him. It was delicate—he had to arrest the progress of the Blue quadriga while finding a way to get his own leader free to come sharply down to the rail and take flight after the young boy leading the race. This, however, was what Second teams did here, it was what they were trained to achieve.

  The three quadrigas began to merge, coming together into one six-wheeled, twelve-horsed figure in the swirling dust and noise.

  ‘I believe,’ said Bonosus suddenly, ‘that Scortius expected this to happen, too.’

  ‘What? Impossible,’ said the Master of Horse, just in time to be proven wrong.

  HE HAD TO BE CAREFUL, extremely careful. If he fouled either of the others now, any Blue victory would be erased. That was always the constraint on those riding Second or carrying the lesser colours. The yellow-garbed officials were all along the track, watching them.

  In addition, he was acutely aware that although he might just manage to roll through seven laps and stay upright, he didn’t have much left for manœuvres. Every shallow breath was a struggle against pain. The very idea of having to pull the team hard again was enough to make him wish he were already dead.

  There was, he knew, a pool of blood, dangerously slippery, about his feet. He didn’t look down.

  He watched the Greens’ Second team, instead, as it came back towards them—as he’d known it would. Crescens frightened his teammates. In doubt, they’d come to his aid. Not a bad practice, on the whole, but there were moments when it might be. He intended to make this one such moment.

  He had pictured this from the moment he’d walked onto the track and seen that the new right-side trace horse on Crescens’s team in the sixth lane wasn’t blinkered.

  He knew the horse they’d traded. Knew it very well. Had slotted a bit of information in his mind back in the winter. It obviously hadn’t come up in last week’s races or this morning: the Greens’ lead team would rarely find itself all the way to the outside.

  It was about to do so, any moment now.