Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

Then the manager of The Spina had the horns blown, in imitation of those that marked the chariots" Processional in the Hippodrome, and they all began paying their reckonings and tumbling in a noisy spill of people out into the windy autumn sunshine, joining the disgorged crowds from the other taverns and baths to cross the forum for the afternoon's chariots.

The first running after the midday break was the major race of the day and no one wanted to be late.

"All four colours in this one," Carullus explained as they hurried across the open space. "Eight quadrigas, two of each colour, a big purse. The only purse as large is the last one of the day when the Reds and Whites stay out of it and four Greens and Blues run with bigas-two horses each. That's a cleaner race, this one's wilder. There'll be blood on the track, most likely." He grinned. "Maybe someone will run over that dark-skinned bastard, Scortius."

"You'd like that?" Crispin asked.

Carullus considered the question for a moment. "I wouldn't," he said finally. "He's too much pleasure to watch. Though I'm sure he spends a fortune each year in wards against curse-tablets and spells. There are a good many Greens who'd cheerfully see him dragged and trampled for crossing to the Blues."

Those five we drank with?"

"One of them, anyhow. The noisy one."

The five young men had pushed ahead of them across the Hippodrome Forum, heading for the patrician gates and their reserved seats.

"Who was the woman he was going on about?"

"A dancer. It's always a dancer. Latest darling of the Greens. Name's Shirin, apparendy. A looker, it sounds like. They usually are. The young aristocrats are always elbowing each other to get in bed with the dancer or actress of the day. A long tradition. The Emperor married one, after all."

"Shirin?" Crispin was amused. He had that name in his baggage, on a torn-off piece of parchment.

"Yes, why?"

"Interesting. If this is the same person, I'm supposed to visit her. A message to deliver from her father." Zoticus had said she was a prostitute, at first.

Carullus looked astonished. "Jad's fire, Rhodian, you are a series of surprises. Don't tell my new friends. The youngest one might knife you- or hire someone to do it-if he hears you have access to her."

"Or be my friend for life if I offer to let him come visit with me."

Carullus laughed. "Wealthy lad. Useful friend." The two men exchanged an ironic glance.

Vargos, on Crispin's other side, listened carefully, saying nothing. Kasia was back at the inn where they'd booked a room last night. She'd been invited to come with them-women were permitted in the Hippodrome under Valerius and Alixana-but had been showing signs of distress ever since they'd passed into the roiling chaos of the City. Vargos hadn't been happy either, but he'd been within city walls before and had some framework for his expectations.

Sarantium dwarfed expectations, but they'd been warned it would.

The long walk from the landward walls to the inn near the Hippodrome had visibly unsettled Kasia the day before. It was a festival; the noise levels and the numbers of people in the streets were overwhelming. They had passed a half-naked ascetic perched precariously on the top of a squared-off triumphal obelisk, his long white beard streaming sideways in the breeze. He was preaching of the City's iniquities to a gathered cluster of the City's people. He'd been up there three years, someone said. It was best to stay upwind, they added.

A few prostitutes had been working the edges of the same crowd. Carullus had eyed one of them and then laughed as she grinned at him and slowly walked away, hips swinging. He'd pointed: the imprint of her sandals in the dust read, quite clearly, "Follow Me."

Kasia hadn't laughed, Crispin remembered.

And she had elected to remain behind at the inn today rather than deal with the streets again so soon.

"You'd really have started a fight with them?" Vargos asked Carullus. His first words of the afternoon.

The tribune glanced over at him. "Of course I would have. Leontes was maligned in my hearing by an effete little City snob who can't even grow a proper moustache yet."

Crispin said, "You'll do a lot of fighting if that's going to be your attitude here. I suspect the Sarantines are free with their opinions."

Carullus snorted. "You are telling me about the City, Rhodian?"

"How many times have you been here?"

Carullus looked chagrined. "Well, just twice in point of fact, but-"

"Then I suspect I know rather more than you about urban ways, soldier. Varena isn't Sarantium, and Rhodias isn't what it was, but I do know that if you bridle at every overheard opinion the way you might in a barracks you command you'll never survive."

Carullus frowned. "He was attacking the Strategos. My commander. I fought under Leontes against the Bassanids beyond Eubulus. In the god's name, I know what he's like. That bedbug with his father's money and his stupid eastern robe had no business even speaking his name. I wonder where that little boy was two years ago today, when Leontes smashed the Victory Riot? That was courage, by Jad's blood! Yes, I would have fought them. It was… a matter of honour."

Crispin arched an eyebrow. "A matter of honour," he repeated. "Indeed. Then you should have had rather less difficulty understanding what I did at the walls yesterday when we came in."

Carullus snorted. "Not at all the same thing. You could have had your nose slit for declaring a name other than the one on your Permit. Using those papers was a crime. In Jad's name, Martmian-"

"Crispin," said Crispin.

An excited, not-entirely-sober cluster of Blues cut in front of them, rushing towards their gate. Vargos was jostled but kept his balance. Crispin said, "I chose to enter Sarantium as Cams Crispus-the name my father and mother gave me, not a false one." He looked at the tribune. "A matter of honour."

Carullus shook his head emphatically. "The only reason, the only reason the guard didn't look properly at your papers and detain you when the names didn't match was because you were with me."

"I know," Crispin said, grinning suddenly. "I relied on that."

Vargos, on his other side, snorted with an amusement he couldn't quite control. Carullus glared. "Are you actually planning to give your own name at the Bronze Gates? In the Attenine Palace? Shall I introduce you to a notary first, to arrange for the final disposition of your worldly goods?"

The fabled gates to the Imperial Precinct were, as it happened, visible at one end of the Hippodrome Forum. Beyond them, the domes and walls of the Imperial palaces could be seen. Not far away, north of the forum, scaffolding and mud and masonry surrounded the building site of Valerius immense new Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom. Crispin-or Martinian-had been summoned to play a part in that.

"I haven't decided," Crispin said.

It was true. He hadn't. The declaration at the customs gate in the wall had been entirely spontaneous. Even as he was speaking his own name aloud for the first time since leaving home, he'd realized that being in the company-virtually the custody-of half a dozen soldiers would probably mean his papers would not be examined by an overworked guard at festival time, and that is what had happened. Carullus's blistering, obscene interrogation of him the moment they were out of earshot of the guardhouse had been a predictable consequence.

Crispin had delayed explaining until they'd taken rooms at an inn Carullus knew near the Hippodrome and the new Great Sanctuary. The soldiers of the Fourth Sauradian were sent to a barracks to report, with one of them dispatched to the Imperial Precinct to announce that the Rhodian mosaicist had arrived in Sarantium as requested.

At the inn, over boiled fish and soft cheese with figs and melon after, Crispin had explained to the two men and the woman how he'd come to be travelling with an Imperial Permit belonging to another man. Or, more properly, he'd explained the obvious aspects of that. The rest, having to do with the dead and a barbarian queen, belonged to himself.