Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

Valerius did smile then, but not with his eyes. "Of course he has. A cautious young man."

"Or a coward, thrice-exalted lord," said Auxilius. Valerius's Count of the Excubitors was a Soriyyan, a sour-faced, often angry man. Not a disadvantage, given his office.

"It might be he's simply loyal," Leontes said mildly, with a glance at the other soldier.

It was possible but unlikely, Bonosus thought privately. The pious Strategos was known for offering benign interpretations of other men's actions, as if everyone might be measured by his own virtues. But the youngest son of the murdered Flavius Dalemus would not have any more loyalty towards this Emperor than he'd had for the first Valerius. He would have ambitions, but would be unlikely to reach for the dice cup so early in a game this large. From the Daleinoi's nearest country estate he could gauge the mood of the City and return very swiftly.

Bonosus, in the tight grip of his own fear, was unable not to look over and glare at the man sitting near him: Lysippus the Calysian, Quaestor of Imperial Revenue, who had caused all of this.

The Empire's chief taxation officer had been silent throughout the discussions, his prodigious bulk spilling over the edges of the carved bench on which he sat, threatening to bring it crashing down. His face was blotchy with strain and fear. Perspiration stained his dark robe. His distinctive green eyes shifted uneasily from one speaker to another. He had to know that his public execution-or even throwing him through the Bronze Gates to the enraged mob-was a perfectly viable option at this moment, though no one had yet spoken it aloud. It would not be the first time an Imperial Revenue officer had been sacrificed to the people.

Valerius II had shown no signs of such an intent. His loyalty to the fat, gross man who had so efficiently and incorruptibly funded his building schemes and the expensive co-opting of various barbarian tribes had always been firm. It was said that Lysippus had been a part of the machinations that brought the first Valerius to the throne. Whether that was true or not, an ambitious Emperor needed a ruthless taxation officer as much as he needed an honest one: Valerius had said that once to Bonosus, in the most matter-of-fact way-and the enormous Calysian might be depraved in his personal habits, but no one had ever been known to bribe or suborn him, or quarrel with his results.

Plautus Bonosus, at prayer beside his wife and daughters two years after, could still recall the chaotic intermingling of admiration and terror he'd felt that day. The sound of the mob at the Precinct doors had penetrated even into the room where they were gathered around a golden throne, amid artifacts of sandalwood and ivory and birds crafted of gold and semiprecious stones.

Bonosus knew that he himself would have offered the Quaestor to the factions without a second thought. With taxation levels rising each quarter for the past year and a half, continuing even after the debilitating effects of a plague, Lysippus ought to have known better than to arrest and torture who well-liked clerics for sheltering a tax-evading aristocrat he was seeking. It was one thing to pursue the wealthy (though Bonosus did have his thoughts on that). It was another to go after the clerics who ministered to the people.

Surely any sane official would have made allowance for the unrest of the City, how volatile it was on the eve of the Autumn Festival. The Dykania was always a dangerous time for authority. Emperors walked carefully then, placating the City with games and largess, knowing how many of their predecessors had lost sight, limbs, life in those turbulent days at autumn's end when Sarantium celebrated-or went dangerously wild.

Two years later Bonosus lifted his strong voice, intoning, "Let there be Light for us, and for our dead, and for us when we die, lord. Holy Jad, let us find shelter with you and never lie lost in the dark."

Winter was coming again. The months of long, damp, windy darkness. There had been light that afternoon two years ago… the red light of the Great Sanctuary uncontrollably afire. A loss so great it was almost unimaginable.

"The northern army can be here from Trakesia in fourteen days," Faustmus had murmured that day, dry and efficient. "The Supreme Strategos will confirm that. This mob has no leadership, no clear purpose. Any puppet they acclaim in the Hippodrome will be hopelessly weak. Symeonis as Emperor? It is laughable. Leave now and you will re-enter the City in triumph before full winter comes."

Valerius, a hand laid across the back of his throne, had looked at Gesius, the aged Chancellor, first, and then at Leontes. Both the Chancellor and the golden-haired Strategos, long-time companion, hesitated.

Bonosus knew why. Faustinus might be right, but he might be perilously wrong: no Emperor who had fled from the people he ruled had ever returned to govern them. Symeonis might be a terrified figurehead, but what would stop others from emerging once Valerius was known to have left Sarantium? What if the Dalemus scion found his courage, or had it handed to him?

On the other hand, in the most obvious way, no Emperor torn apart by a howling throng intoxicated by its own power had ever governed after that either. Bonosus wanted to say as much, but kept silent. He wondered if the mob, should they come this far, would understand that the Master of the Senate was here for purely formal reasons, that he had no authority, posed no danger, had done them no harm? That he was even, financially, as much a victim of the evil Quaestor of Imperial Revenue as any of them?

He doubted it.

No man spoke a word in that moment fraught with choice and destiny. They saw leaping flames and black smoke through the open windows-the Great Sanctuary burning. They could hear the dull, heavy roar of the mob at the gates and inside the Hippodrome. Leontes and Auxilius had reported at least eighty thousand people gathered in and around the Hippodrome, spilling into the forum there. As many more seemed to be running wild through the rest of the city, from the triple walls down, and had been for much of the night just past. Taverns and cauponae had been overrun and looted, they'd said. Wine was still being found and passed out from the cellars and then from hand to hand in the reeling, smoky streets.

There was a smell of fear in the throne room.

Plautus Bonosus, chanting gravely in his neighbourhood sanctuary two years later, knew he would never forget that moment.

No man spoke. The one woman in the room did.

"I would sooner die clothed in porphyry in this palace," the Empress Alixana said quietly, "than of old age in any place of exile on earth." She had been standing by the eastern window while the men debated, gazing out at the burning city beyond the gardens and the palaces. Now she turned and looked only at Valerius. "All Jad's children are born to die. The vestments of Empire are seemly for a shroud, my lord. Are they not?"

Bonosus remembered watching Faustinus's face go white. Gesius opening his mouth, and then closing it, looking old suddenly, wrinkles deep in pale parchment flesh. And he remembered something else he thought he would never lose in his life: the Emperor, from near his throne, smiling suddenly at the small, exquisite woman by the window.

Among many other things, Plautus Bonosus had realized, with a queer kind of pain, that he had never in all his days looked at another man or woman in that way, or received a gaze remotely like the one that the dancer who had become their Empress bestowed upon Valerius in return.

"It is intolerable," said Cleander, speaking loudly over the tavern noise, "that a man like that should possess such a woman!" He drank, and wiped at the moustache he was trying to grow.

"He doesn't possess her, "Eutychus replied reasonably." He may not even be bedding her. And he is a man of some distinction, little sprout."