The Sarantine Mosaic

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  Thenaïs was compliant, eerily detached, seemingly oblivious to the panic all around them. Cleander looked around the corner for her litter, back near the main gates through which they’d entered, but immediately realized there was no point trying to get to it: the fighting had already spilled out of the Hippodrome. The factions were brawling in the forum now. Men were coming, at a run. The noise from inside was huge, ugly. He took his stepmother’s elbow again and they started the other way, as quickly as he could make her go.

  He had an image in his mind, couldn’t shake it: the expression on Astorgus’s face when the yellow-clad gate attendant had stepped forward and reported what Cleander himself had seen but had determined not to tell. Astorgus had gone rigid, his face a mask. After a frozen moment, the Blues’ factionarius had turned on his heel without a word and gone back out onto the sands.

  On the track, the Blues had still been celebrating, the young rider who’d won the race doing victory laps with the two White riders. Scortius had been unconscious in the tunnel. His Bassanid physician, assisted by the Blues’ own doctor, desperately trying to stanch the flow of blood and keep him breathing, among the living. They were covered with blood themselves by then.

  A few moments later those in the tunnel had heard the cheering in the stands turn to something else, a deep, terrifying sound, and then the fighting had begun. At that point they didn’t know why, or what Astorgus had done.

  Cleander hurried his stepmother up onto a colonnade, letting a swarm of young men sprint past in the street, shouting, waving cudgels and knives. He saw someone with a sword. Two weeks ago he could have been that man, racing towards bloodshed with a weapon in his hand. Now he saw all of them as threats, wild-eyed and uncontrolled. Something had happened to him. He kept a hand on his stepmother’s arm.

  He heard himself hailed by name. Turned swiftly to the loud voice and felt a surge of relief. It was the soldier, Carullus: the one he’d met in The Spina last autumn, the one whose wedding feast Shirin had just hosted. Carullus had his left arm around his wife and a knife in his right hand. They came quickly up the steps to the colonnade.

  ‘In stride with me, lad,’ he said, his manner brisk but entirely calm. ‘We’ll get the women home so they can have a quiet cup of something warm on a pleasant day in spring. Isn’t it a beautiful day? I love this time of year.’

  Cleander was unspeakably grateful. Carullus was a big, intimidating man, and he moved like a soldier. No one disturbed them as they went, though they saw one man crack a staff over the head of another right beside them in the street. The staff broke; the struck man fell, awkwardly.

  Carullus winced. ‘Broken neck,’ he said matter-of-factly, looking back, keeping them moving. ‘He won’t get up.’

  They came down into the road again at the end of the colonnade. Someone hurled a cookpot from a window overhead, narrowly missing them. Carullus stooped and picked it up. ‘A wedding gift! How unexpected! Is this better than the one we have, love?’ he asked his wife, grinning.

  The woman shook her head, managed a smile. Her eyes were terrified. Carullus tossed the pot over his shoulder. Cleander glanced at his stepmother. No terror there. Nothing there. It was as if she hadn’t even heard or seen any of this: the arrival of companions, the man struck down—killed—right beside them. She seemed in another world entirely.

  They continued without further incident, though the streets were crowded with running, shouting figures and Cleander saw shopkeepers hastily closing their shop fronts and doors, boarding up. They reached their house. The servants were watching for them. Well trained, they had already set about barricading the courtyard gates, and those waiting at the door were holding heavy sticks. This was hardly the first riot in memory.

  Cleander’s mother entered the house without speaking. She hadn’t spoken since they’d left the Hippodrome. Since the race had begun, he suddenly realized. It fell to him to offer thanks to the soldier. He stammered his gratitude, invited them in. Carullus declined with a smile. ‘I’d best report to the Strategos, soon as I get my wife home. A small word of advice: stay indoors tonight, lad. The Excubitors will be out, for certain, and not choosing with any great care where they strike in the dark.’

  ‘I will,’ said Cleander. He thought about his father, but decided that wasn’t a cause of concern: from the kathisma they could get back into the Imperial Precinct. His father could wait there or get a soldiers’ escort home. His own duty was to his mother and his sisters here. Keeping them safe.

  Dictating his celebrated Reflections forty years afterwards, Cleander Bonosus would describe the day the Emperor Valerius II was assassinated by the Daleinoi, the day his own stepmother killed herself in her bath— opening her wrists with a small blade no one knew she had—as the day he became a man. Schoolboys would learn and copy the well-known phrases, or memorize them for recitation: Just as it is adversity that hardens the spirit of a people, so can adversity strengthen the soul of a man. What we master becomes ours to use.

  Sorting through complex and sometimes distant events to determine the causes of a riot is not an easy task, but it fell squarely within the responsibilities of the Urban Prefect, under the direction of the Master of Offices, and he was not unfamiliar with the process.

  He also had, of course, access to some acknowledged professionals—and their tools—when it came time to ask significant questions.

  As it happened, the more rigorous methods were not required (to the disappointment of some) in the case of the riot that occurred on the day the Emperor Valerius II was murdered.

  The disturbance in the Hippodrome began before anyone knew of that death. This much was certain. It was an attack on a charioteer that started it, and this time the Blues and Greens were not united as they had been two years before in the Victory Riot. Rather the contrary, in fact.

  The inquiry established that it was one of the Hippodrome staff who’d revealed that the Blues’ champion, Scortius, had been viciously struck by Crescens of the Greens just before the first race of the afternoon. Crescens, apparently, had been the first to note the reappearance of his rival.

  The attendant, on duty at the Processional Gates, later swore on oath to what he’d seen. Corroboration was provided, reluctantly, by the young son of Senator Plautus Bonosus. The lad, to his credit, had kept quiet at the time, though he confirmed afterwards that he’d seen Crescens elbow the other driver in what he personally knew to be already broken ribs. He explained his silence at the time by saying that he had a sense of what the consequences of pointing out the incident might be.

  The lad was given a formal commendation in the official report. It was regrettable that the Hippodrome staffer had not had as much good sense, but he couldn’t actually be punished for what he’d done. The race-track staff were supposed to be resolutely neutral, but that was fiction, not reality. The gatekeeper, it emerged, was a partisan of the Blues. Neutrality was not a Sarantine trait in the Hippodrome.

  It was established, accordingly, to the Urban Prefect’s satisfaction—and so recorded in his report to the Master of Offices—that Crescens of the Greens had delivered what he’d intended to be an unseen assault on the other driver, a wounded man. Clearly, he had been trying to undermine the impact of Scortius’s dramatic return.

  This afforded a measure of explanation, though hardly a complete mitigation, for what had apparently happened next. Astorgus, the Blues’ factionarius, a man of experience and probity, a man who ought to have known better, had walked across the sands to the spina, where Crescens was still standing after suffering an unfortunate fall in his last race, and had struck him in the face and body, breaking his nose and dislocating the rider’s shoulder in full view of eighty thousand highly excited people.

  He’d had provocation, undeniably—was later to say that he believed that Scortius was about to die—but it was still an irresponsible act. If you wanted to have someone beaten, you did it at night, if you had any sense at all.

  Crescens wouldn’t race again fo
r almost two months, but didn’t die. Neither did Scortius.

  About three thousand people did go to the god, however, in the Hippodrome and the streets that day and night. Precise numbers were always demanded by the Master of Offices, always difficult to produce. The toll was a significant but not an outrageous number for a riot that included burning and looting after darkfall. Compared to the last major conflagration, where thirty thousand had been slain, this one was a much more trivial event. Some Kindath homes were set afire in their quarter, as usual, and a few foreigners—Bassanid merchants for the most part—were killed, but this latter development was to be expected, given the perfidious breaching of the Eternal Peace that had, by twilight, been reported in the City, along with the death of the Emperor. Frightened people did unpleasant things.

  Most of the killings came after dark, when the Excubitors, carrying torches and swords, marched out of the Imperial Precinct to quiet the streets. By then the soldiers were all aware that they had a new Emperor, and that Sarantine territory had been attacked in the northeast. It was undoubtedly an excess of zeal occasioned by these facts that led to some of the civilian fatalities and a few of the Bassanid deaths.

  It was hardly worth noting, really. One couldn’t expect the army to be patient with brawling civilians. No blame at all was attached to them. Indeed, another commendation was offered to the Count of the Excubitors, for the swift quelling of the night’s violence.

  Much later, Astorgus and Crescens would both be tried by the judiciary for their assaults: the first prominent trials conducted under the new Imperial regime. Both men behaved themselves with dignity, declaring extreme remorse for their actions. Both would receive reprimands and fines: identical ones, of course. The matter would then be closed. They were important men in the scheme of things. Sarantium needed them both alive and well and at the Hippodrome, keeping the citizens happy.

  The last time an Emperor died without an heir, Plautus Bonosus was thinking, there had been a mob smashing on the doors of the Senate Chamber, battering its way in. This time there was a real riot outside, and the people in the streets didn’t even know the Emperor had died. An aphorism in there somewhere, Bonosus thought ironically, a paradox worth recording.

  Paradoxes have layers, irony can be double-edged. He didn’t yet know of his wife’s death.

  In the Senate Chambers they were waiting for others of their number to arrive through the unruly streets. The Excubitors were out and about, collecting Senators, escorting them as quickly as possible. Not surprising, that speed. Most of the City was unaware of the Emperor’s death, so far. That ignorance wouldn’t last long, not in Sarantium, even in the midst of a riot. Perhaps especially, Bonosus thought, reclining in his seat, in the midst of a riot.

  Many levels of memory were competing in his mind and he was also trying—unsuccessfully—to come to terms with the fact that Valerius was dead. An Emperor murdered. It hadn’t happened in a very long time. Bonosus had known better than to ask questions.

  The soldiers had reason to want the Senate assembled expeditiously. Whatever the story of the death of Valerius turned out to be—the exiled Lysippus had been declared to be back in the City, and involved, as was the banished and imprisoned Lecanus Daleinus—there was no real question as to who should succeed the slain Emperor.

  Or, putting it a little differently, thought Bonosus, there were reasons for Leontes to proceed swiftly, before such questions might arise.

  The Supreme Strategos was, after all, married to a Daleinus, and there might be those who took a reflective view of assassinating one’s predecessor on the Golden Throne. Especially when the murdered man had been one’s own mentor and friend. And when the deed was done on the eve of war. It could be called—by someone much more reckless than Plautus Bonosus—a vile and contemptible act of treachery.

  Bonosus’s thoughts kept whirling about. Too many shocks in one day. The return of Scortius, that astonishing race that had turned from glory into riot in a heartbeat. And then, just as the fighting began, there had been the voice of Leontes’s grey secretary in his ear: ‘Your presence is immediately requested in the palace.’

  He hadn’t said by whom. It didn’t matter. Senators did what they were told. Bonosus had risen to go just as he realized something had happened in the spina—he would learn the details afterwards—and he heard a deepthroated roar as the Hippodrome erupted.

  He suspected, looking back, that Leontes (or his wife?) had wanted him to come to them alone, as Master of the Senate, to learn the tidings before anyone else did. That would give them time to quietly summon the Senate, control the release of the terrible news.

  It didn’t work out that way.

  As the stands exploded into fury and a rush for the exits, the inhabitants of the Imperial Box rose to their feet and made a collective rush of their own for the doors leading back to the Attenine Palace. Bonosus remembered the expression on the pallid secretary’s face: startled and displeased, and afraid.

  When Bonosus and Pertennius did make it back through the long walkway to the palace’s audience chamber, it was crowded with noisy, frightened courtiers who’d fled the kathisma ahead of them. Others were arriving. In the centre of the room—near the thrones and the silver tree—stood Leontes and Styliane.

  The Strategos lifted a hand for silence. Not the Master of Offices, not the Chancellor. Gesius had just entered the room, in fact, through the small door behind the two thrones. He stopped there, brow furrowed in perplexity. In the stillness his gesture shaped it was Leontes, blunt and grave, who said, ‘I am sorry, but this must be told. We have lost our father today. Jad’s most holy Emperor is dead.’

  There was a babble of disbelief. A woman cried out. Someone near Bonosus made the sign of the sun disk, then others did. Someone knelt, then all of them did, the sound like a murmuring of the sea. All of them except Styliane and Leontes. And Gesius, Bonosus saw. The Chancellor didn’t looked perplexed now. His expression was otherwise. He put out a hand to steady himself on a table and said, from directly behind those tall, golden figures and the thrones, ‘How? How did this happen? And how is it that you know?’

  The thin, precise voice cut hard through the room. This was Sarantium. The Imperial Precinct. Not a place where certain things could be easily controlled. Not with so many competing interests and clever men.

  And women. It was Styliane who turned to face the Chancellor, Styliane who said, her voice oddly without force—as if she’d just been bled by a physician, Bonosus thought—‘He was murdered in the tunnel between palaces. He was burned, by Sarantine Fire.’

  Bonosus remembered closing his eyes at that. Past and present coming together so powerfully he felt dizzied. He opened his eyes. Pertennius, kneeling next to him, was white-faced, he saw.

  ‘By whom?’ Gesius released the table and took a step forward. He stood alone, a little apart from everyone else. A man who had served three Emperors, survived two successions.

  Was unlikely to last through a third, asking these questions in this way. It occurred to the Senator that the aged Chancellor might not care.

  Leontes looked at his wife, and again it was Styliane who replied. ‘My brother Lecanus. And the exiled Calysian, Lysippus. They seem to have suborned the guards at the tunnel door. And obviously my brother’s guards on the isle.’

  Another murmuring. Lecanus Daleinus and fire. The past here with them in the room, Bonosus thought.

  ‘I see,’ said Gesius, his papery voice so devoid of nuance it was a nuance of its own. ‘Just the two of them?’

  ‘So it would seem,’ said Leontes, calmly. ‘We will need to investigate, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Gesius, again with nothing to be discerned in his tone. ‘So good of you to point that out, Strategos. We might have neglected to think of it. I imagine the Lady Styliane was alerted by her brother of his evil intent and arrived tragically too late to forestall them?’

  There was a small silence. Too many people were hearing this, Bonosus
thought. It would be all over the City before sunset. And there was already violence in Sarantium. He felt afraid.

  The Emperor was dead.

  ‘The Chancellor is, as ever, wisest of us,’ said Styliane quietly. ‘It is as he says. I beg you to imagine my grief and shame. My brother was also dead, by the time we arrived. And the Strategos killed Lysippus when we saw him there, standing over the bodies.’

  ‘Killed him,’ Gesius murmured. He smiled thinly, a man infinitely versed in the ways of a court. ‘Indeed. And the soldiers you mentioned?’

  ‘Were already burned,’ Leontes said.

  Gesius said nothing this time, only smiled again, allowing silence to speak for him. Someone was weeping in the crowded chamber.

  ‘We must take action. There is rioting in the Hippodrome,’ Faustinus said. The Master of Offices finally asserting himself. He was rigid with tension, Bonosus saw. ‘And what about the announcement of the war?’

  ‘There will be no announcement now,’ said Leontes flatly. Calm, assured. A leader of men. ‘And the rioting is not a cause for concern.’

  ‘It isn’t? Why not?’ Faustinus eyed him.

  ‘Because the army is here,’ Leontes murmured, and looked slowly around the chamber at the assembled court.

  It was in that moment, Bonosus thought afterwards, that he himself had begun to see this differently. The Daleinoi might have planned an assassination for their own reasons. He didn’t believe for a moment that Styliane had arrived too late at that tunnel, that her blind, maimed brother had been able to plan and execute this from his island. Sarantine Fire spoke to vengeance, more than anything else. But if the Daleinus children had also assumed that Styliane’s soldier husband would be a useful figure on the throne, a gateway for their own ambition … Bonosus decided they might have been wrong.