Sailing to Sarantium

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  If you thought you were good, and wanted to succeed, the Greens’ agent said, you went to Sarantium. It was as simple as that. Taras knew it was true. He was young. It was an opportunity. Sailing to Sarantium, men called it, when someone took a chance like this. His father had been proud. His mother had cried, and packed him a new cloak and two sealed amphorae of her own grandmother’s sovereign remedy for any and all ailments. The most evil-tasting concoction on earth. Taras had taken a spoonful each day since he’d arrived in the City. She’d sent two more jars in the summer, by Imperial Post.

  So here he was, healthy as a young horse, on the very last day of his first season in the capital. No bones broken on the year and barely a handful of new scars, only one bad spill that left him dizzy for a few days and hearing flute music. Not a bad season, he thought, given that the horses the Reds and Whites drove—especially their lesser drivers—were hopelessly feeble when matched on the great track with those of the Blues and Greens. Taras had an easygoing disposition, worked hard, learned quickly, and had grown more than adequate—or so his factionarius had told him, encouragingly—at the tasks of the lesser colours. They were the same at every track, after all. Blocks, slow-downs, minor fouls (major ones could cost your lead colour the race and get you a suspension and a whip across the back—or face—from a First driver in the dressing rooms), even carefully timed spills to bring down a rival team coming up behind you. The trick was to do that last without breaking a bone, or dying, of course.

  He’d even won three times in the minor races involving the lesser Green and Blue riders and the Reds and Whites—amusements for the crowd, those were, with careening chariots, reckless corners, dangerous pile-ups, hot-headed young riders lashing at each other as they strove for recognition. Three wins was perfectly decent for a youngster riding Fourth for the Reds in Sarantium.

  Problem was, perfectly decent wouldn’t suffice at this particular moment. For a veritable host of reasons, the race coming up was hugely important, and Taras cursed fortune that it was his lot to be slotted outside between ferocious Crescens and the whirlwind that was Scortius. He shouldn’t even have been in this race, but the Reds’ second driver had fallen and wrenched a shoulder earlier in the morning and the factionarius had chosen to leave his Third in the next race, where he might have a chance to win.

  As a direct result of this, seventeen-year-old Taras of Megarium was sitting here at the starting line, behind horses he didn’t know at all well, sandwiched between the two finest drivers of the day, with one of them making it clear that if he didn’t cut off the other, his brief tenure in the City might be over.

  It was all a consequence of not having enough money to buy adequate protection against the curse-tablets, Taras knew. But what could one do? What could one possibly do?

  The first trumpet sounded, warning of the start to come. The handlers withdrew. Taras leaned forward, talking to his horses. He dug his feet deeply into the metal sheaths on the chariot floor and looked nervously to his right and a bit ahead. Then he glanced quickly down again. Scortius, holding his experienced team easily in place, was smiling at him. The lithe, dark-skinned Soriyyan had an easy grin—allegedly lethal among the women of the City—and at the moment he was glancing back with amusement at Taras.

  Taras made himself look up. It would not do to appear intimidated.

  ‘Miserable position, isn’t it?’ the First of the Blues said mildly. ‘Don’t worry too much. Crescens is a sweet-natured fellow under that surface. He knows you can’t go fast enough to block me.’

  ‘The fuck I am, the fuck I do!’ Crescens barked from the other side. ‘I want this race, Scortius. I want seventy-five for the year and I want it in this one. Baras, or whatever your name is, keep him outside or get used to the smell of horse manure in your hair.’

  Scortius laughed. ‘We’re all used to that, Crescens.’ He clucked reassuringly at his four horses.

  The largest of them, the majestic bay in the leftmost position, was Servator, and Taras longed in his heart to stand in a chariot behind that magnificent animal just once in his life. Everyone knew that Scortius was brilliant, but they also knew that a goodly portion of his success—evinced by two statues in the spina before he was thirty years old—had been shaped by Servator. There had even been a bronze statue to the horse in the courtyard outside the Greens’ banquet hall, until this year. It had been melted down over the winter. When the Greens lost the driver they lost the horse, because Scortius’s last contract with them had stipulated—uniquely—that he owned Servator, not the faction.

  He’d gone over to the Blues in the winter, for a sum and on terms that no one knew for certain, though the rumours were wild. The muscular, tough-talking Crescens had come north from riding First for the Greens in the notoriously rough-and-tumble hippodrome of Sarnica—second city of the Empire—and had assuaged some of his faction’s grief by being hard and brave and ruggedly aggressive and by winning races. Seventy-five would be a splendid first season for the Greens’ new standard-bearer.

  Seventy-four would be, Taras desperately wanted to say, but didn’t.

  Didn’t have time, either. His right-side trace horse was restive and needed attention. He had only handled this team once before, back in the summer. The starter’s trumpet was up. A handler hurried back and helped Taras hold his position. He didn’t look over at Crescens, but he heard the fierce man from Amoria cry, ‘A case of red from my home if you keep the Soriyyan bastard outside for a lap, Karas!’

  ‘His name’s Taras!’ Scortius of the hated Blues called back, still laughing—in the very moment the trumpet sounded and the barriers sprang away, laying the wide track open like an ambush or a dream of glory.

  ‘Watch the start!’

  Carullus gripped Crispin’s arm, shouting over the deafening noise as thirty-two horses came up to the barriers below and the first warning trumpet blast sounded. Crispin was watching. He and Vargos had learned a great deal through the morning; Carullus was surprisingly knowledgeable and unsurprisingly talkative. The start was almost half the race, they’d come to realize, especially with the best drivers on the track, unlikely to make mistakes on the seven laps around the spina. If one of the top Blues or Greens took the lead at the first turn, it required luck and a great deal of effort to overtake him on a crowded track.

  The real drama came when—as now—the two best drivers were so far outside that it was impossible for them to win except by coming from behind, fighting through the blocks and disruptions of the lesser colours.

  Crispin kept his eyes on the outside racers. He thought that Carullus’s very large wager was a decent bet: the Blues’ Scortius was in a miserable position, flanked by a Red driver whose sole task—he had learned through the morning—would be to keep the Blue champion from cutting down for as long as possible. Running wide for a long time on this track was brutally hard on the horses. Crescens of the Greens had his own Green partner on his left, another piece of good fortune, despite his own outside start. If Crispin understood this sport at all by now, that second Green driver would go flying from the barriers as fast as he could and then begin pressing left towards the inside lanes, opening room for Crescens to angle over as well, as soon as they sped past the white chalked line that marked the beginning of the spina and the point when the chaos of manoeuvring began.

  Crispin hadn’t expected to be this engaged by the races but his heart was pounding now, and he’d found himself shouting many times through the morning. Eighty thousand screaming people could make you do that. He’d never been among so large a crowd in his life. Crowds had their own power, Crispin had begun to realize; they carried you with them.

  And now the Emperor was here: a new element to the festival excitement of the Hippodrome. That distant purple-robed figure at the western end of the stands—just where the chariots made their first turning round the spina—represented another dimension of power. The men down below them in their frail chariots, whips in hand and reins lashed around their hard, tra
ined bodies, were a third. Crispin looked up for a moment. The sun was high on a clear, windy day: the god in his own chariot, riding above Sarantium. Power above and below and all around.

  Crispin closed his eyes for a moment in the brilliance of the day, and just then—without any warning at all, like a flung spear or a sudden shaft of light—an image came to him. Whole and vast and unforgettable, completely unexpected, a gift.

  And also a burden, as such images had always been for him: the terrible distance between the art conceived in the eye of the mind and what one could actually execute in a fallible world with fallible tools and one’s own crushing limitations.

  But sitting there on the marble benches of the Sarantine Hippodrome, assailed by the tumult and the screaming of the crowd, Caius Crispus of Varena knew with appalling certainty what he would like to do on a sanctuary dome here, given the chance. He might be. They’d asked for a mosaicist. He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. His fingers were tingling. He opened his eyes and looked down at his scarred, scratched hands.

  The second trumpet sounded. Crispin lifted his head just as the barriers below were whipped away and the chariots sprang forward like a thunder of war, pushing the inner image back in his mind but not away, not away.

  ‘Come on, you cursed Red! Come on!’ Carullus was roaring at the top of his considerable voice, and Crispin knew why. He concentrated on the outside chariots and saw the Red driver burst off the line with exceptional speed—the very first team out of the barriers, it seemed to him. Crescens was almost as fast, and the Green second driver in the fifth lane was lashing his horses hard, preparing to lead his champion down and across as soon as they passed the white line. In the eighth position, it seemed to Crispin that Scortius of the Blues had actually been caught unprepared by the trumpet; he seemed to have been turned backwards, saying something.

  ‘On!’ roared Carullus. ‘Go! Lash them! Good man, you Red!’

  The Red driver had already caught Scortius’s Blues, Crispin saw, even against the advantage the outside chariot was given at the staggered start. Carullus had said it this morning: half the races were decided before the first turn. It looked like this one might be. With the Red already right beside him—and now pulling ahead with the ferocity of his start—the Blue champion had no way to cut down from his position so far outside. His cohorts in the inside lanes were going to be hard pressed to keep Crescens outside or blocked, especially with the Greens’ second driver there to clear a path.

  The first chariots reached the white line. The whip hand of the Red driver in the seventh lane seemed a blur of motion as he lashed his mounts forward, first to the line. It didn’t matter where that team finished, Crispin knew. Only that they keep Scortius outside for as long as they could.

  ‘He’s done it!’ Carullus howled, clutching Crispin’s left arm in his vise of a grip.

  Crispin saw the two Green chariots cross the line and begin an immediate angling downwards—they had room. The White chariot in the fourth lane hadn’t started fast enough to fend them off. Even if the White driver fouled the Green leading the way and they both went down, that would only open up more space for Crescens. It was wonderfully well done; even Crispin could see that.

  Then he saw something else.

  Scortius of the Blues, in the worst position, farthest outside, with a fiercely determined Red driver lashing his horses into a frenzy to get ahead of him, let that chariot go by.

  Then the Blue driver suddenly leaned over, so far left his upper body was outside the platform of his chariot, and from that position he sent his whip forward—for the first time—and lashed his right trace horse. At the same time the big bay on the left side of the team, the one called Servator, pulled sharply left and the Blue chariot almost pivoted on the sands as Scortius hurled his body back to the right to balance it. It seemed impossible it could remain upright, keep rolling, as the four horses passed behind the still accelerating Red driver at an unbelievably sharp angle, straight across the open track and right up to the back of Crescens’s chariot.

  ‘Jad rot the soul of the man!’ Carullus screamed, as if in mortal agony. ‘I don’t believe it! I do not believe it! It was a trick! That start was deliberate! He wanted to do this!’ He shook both fists in the air, a man in the grip of a vast passion. ‘Oh, Scortius, my heart, why did you leave us?’

  All around them, even in the stands of those not formally aligned with one faction or another, men and women were screaming as Carullus was, so startling and spectacular had that angled, careening move been. Crispin heard Vargos and he heard himself shouting with all of them as if his own spirit were down there in the chariot with the man in the blue tunic and leather straps. The horses thundered into the first turn passing beneath the Imperial Box. Dust swirled, the noise was colossal. Scortius was right behind his rival, his four horses almost trampling on the back of the other man’s chariot. None of Crescens’s allies could block him without also impeding the Green driver or fouling so flagrantly from the side as to disqualify their colour from victory.

  The chariots whipped along the far stands as Crispin and the others strained to see across the spina and its monuments. The Blues’ second driver had used his inside position to seize and hold the lead and he was first into the second turning, straining to keep his horses from drifting outside. Right behind him, surprisingly, was the young Red driver from the seventh lane. Having failed to block Scortius, he had done the only thing he could and pressed downwards himself, taking advantage of his spectacular—and spectacularly unsuccessful—start from the barriers.

  The first of the seven bronze sea-horses tilted and dived from above, down into the silver tank of water at one end of the spina. An egg-shaped counter flipped over at the opposite end. One lap done. Six to go.

  IT WAS PERTENNIUS OF Eubulus who had most comprehensively chronicled the events of the Victory Riot. He was Leontes’s military secretary, an obvious sycophant and flatterer, but educated, manifestly shrewd, and carefully observant, and since Bonosus had been present himself for many of the events the Eubulan recorded in his history, he could vouch for their essential accuracy. Pertennius was, in fact, the sort of man who could make himself so colourless, so unobtrusive, that you forgot he was there . . . which meant he heard and saw things others might not. He enjoyed this, a little too obviously, letting slip occasional bits of information, clearly expecting confidences in return. Bonosus didn’t like him.

  Notwithstanding this, Bonosus was inclined to credit his version of events in the Hippodrome two years ago. There were a good many corroborating sources, in any case.

  The subversive work of men strewn through the crowd by Faustinus had managed to set Blues and Greens somewhat at odds towards the end of that day. Tempers frayed with uncertainty, and the allegiance between the factions seemed to be wearing thin in places. Everyone knew the Empress favoured the Blues, having been a dancer for them herself. It had not been difficult to make the Greens in the Hippodrome anxious and suspicious that they might be the prime victims of any response to the events of the past two days. Fear could bring men together, and it could drive them apart.

  Leontes and his thirty archers of the Imperial Guard made their way silently down the enclosed corridor from the Precinct to the rear of the kathisma. There followed an ambiguous incident with a number of the Hippodrome Prefect’s men, guarding the corridor for those in the box, allegedly undecided where their immediate loyalties lay. In Pertennius’s account, the Strategos made a quietly impassioned speech in that dark corridor and swayed them back to the Emperor’s side.

  Bonosus had no obvious reason to doubt the report, though the eloquence of the speech as recorded, and its length, seemed at odds with the urgency of the moment.

  The Strategos’s men—each one armed with his bow as well as a sword—then burst in through the back door of the kathisma, joined by the Prefect’s soldiers. They discovered Symeonis actually sitting on the Emperor’s seat. This was confirmed: everyone in the Hippodrome had seen hi
m there. He was to argue plausibly, afterwards, that he’d had no choice.

  Leontes personally ripped the makeshift crown and the porphyry robe from the terrified Senator. Symeonis then dropped to his knees and embraced the booted feet of the Supreme Strategos. He was permitted to live; his abject, very public, obeisance was a useful symbol, since everything happening could be seen clearly throughout the Hippodrome.

  The soldiers made ruthlessly short work of those in the kathisma who had placed Symeonis on the Emperor’s chair. Most were popular agitators, though not all. Four or five of those in the box with Symeonis were aristocrats who saw themselves as having cause to dispense with an independent Emperor and be the powers behind the throne of a figurehead.

  Their hacked bodies were immediately thrown down to the sands, landing bloodily on the heads and shoulders of the crowd, which was so densely packed that people could scarcely move.

  This, of course, became the principal cause of the slaughter that followed.

  Leontes had the Mandator proclaim the exile of the hated taxation officer. Pertennius reported this speech at some length as well, but as Bonosus understood events, it was likely that next to no one heard it.

  This was so because, even as the Mandator was declaring the Emperor’s decision, Leontes directed his archers to begin shooting. Some arrows were fired at those directly below the kathisma; others arched high to fall like deadly rain on unprotected people far off. No one on the sands had any weapons, any armour. The arrows, randomly strewn, steadily and expertly fired, caused an immediate, panic-stricken hysteria. People fell, were trampled to death in the chaos, lashed out at each other in desperate attempts to flee the Hippodrome through one of the exits.

  It was at this point, according to Pertennius, that Auxilius and his two thousand Excubitors, divided into two groups, appeared at entrances on opposite sides. One of these—the tale would linger and gain resonance—was the Death Gate, the one through which dead and injured charioteers were carried out.