Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

Astorgus laughed, his features revealing easy amusement. "I mean you no harm, lad. No poisons, no curse-tablets, no footpads in the dark outside a lady's home."

Scortius felt himself flush. "I know that," he mumbled.

Astorgus, his gaze on the crowded track and stands, added, "A rivalry's good for all of us. Keeps people talking about the races. Even when they aren't here. Makes them wager." He leaned against one of the pillars supporting the arch. "Makes them want more race days. They petition the Emperors. Emperors want the citizens happy. They add races to the calendar. That means more purses for all of us, lad. You'll help me retire that much sooner." He turned to Scortius and smiled. He had an amazingly scarred face.

"You want to retire?" Scortius said, astonished.

"I am," said Astorgus, mildly, "thirty-nine years old. Yes, I want to retire."

"They won't let you. The Blue partisans will demand your return."

"And I'll return. Once. Twice. For a price. Then I'll let my old bones have their reward and leave the fractures and scars and the tumbling falls to you, or even younger men. Any idea how many riders I've seen die on the track since I started?"

Scortius had seen enough deaths in his own short time not to need an answer to that. Whichever colour they raced for, the frenzied partisans of the other faction wished them dead, maimed, broken. People came to the hippodromes to see blood and hear screaming as much as to admire speed. Deadly curses were dropped on wax tablets into graves, wells, cisterns, were buried at crossroads, hurled into the sea by moonlight from the City walls. Alchemists and cheiromancers-real ones and charlatans-were paid to cast ruinous spells against named riders and horses. In the hippodromes of the Empire the charioteers raced with Death-the Ninth Driver-as much as with each other. Heladikos, son of Jad, had died in his chariot, and they were his followers. Or some of them were.

The two racers stood in silence a moment, watching the tumult from the shadowed arch. If the crowd spotted them, Scortius knew, they'd be besieged, on the spot.

They weren't seen. Instead, Astorgus said very softly, after a silence, "That man. The group just there. All the Blues? He isn't. He isn't a Blue. I know him. I wonder what he's doing?"

Scortius, only mildly interested, glanced over in time to see the man idicated cup hands to mouth and shout, in a patrician, carrying voice: "Daleinus to the Golden Throne! The Blues for Flavius Daleinus!"

"Oh, my," said Astorgus, First Chariot of the Blues, almost to himself. "Here too? What a clever, clever bastard he is." Scortius had no idea what the other man was talking about.

Only long afterwards, looking back, piecing things together, would he understand.

Fotius the sandalmaker had actually been eyeing the heavy-set, smooth-shaven man in the perfectly pressed blue tunic for some time.

Standing in an unusually mixed cluster of faction partisans and citizens of no evident affiliation, Fotius mopped at his forehead with a damp sleeve and tried to ignore the sweat trickling down his ribs and back. His own tunic was stained and splotched. So was Pappio's green one, beside him. The glassblower's balding head was covered with a cap that might once have been handsome but was now a wilted object of general mirth. It was brutally hot already. The breeze had died with the sunrise.

The big, too-stylish man bothered him. He was standing confidently in a group of Blue partisans, including a number of the leaders, the ones who led the unison cries when the Processions began and after victories. But Fotius had never seen him before, either in the Blue stands or at any of the banquets or ceremonies.

He nudged Pappio, on impulse. "You know him?" He gestured at the man he meant. Pappio, dabbing at his upper lip, squinted in the light. He nodded suddenly. "One of us. Or he was, last year."

Fotius felt triumphant. He was about to stride over to the group of Blues when the man he'd been watching brought his hands up to his mouth and cried the name of Flavius Daleinus aloud, acclaiming that extremely well-known aristocrat for Emperor, in the name of the Blues.

Nothing unique in that, though he wasn't a Blue. But when, a heartbeat later, the same cry echoed from various sections of the Hippodrome- in the name of the Greens, the Blues again, even the lesser colours of Red and White, and then on behalf of one craft guild, and another, and another, Fotius the sandalmaker actually laughed aloud.

"In Jad's holy name!" he heard Pappio exclaim bitterly. "Does he think we are all fools?"

The factions were no strangers to the technique of "spontaneous acclamations." Indeed, the Accredited Musician of each colour was, among other things, responsible for selecting and training men to pick up and carry the cries at critical moments in a race day. It was part of the pleasure of belonging to a faction, hearing "All glory to the glorious Blues!" or Victory forever to conquering Astorgus!" resound through the Hippodrome, perfectly timed, the mighty cry sweeping from the northern stands, around the curved end, and along the other side as the triumphant charioteer did his victory lap past the silent, beaten Green supporters.

"Probably does," a man beside Fotius said sourly. "What would the Daleinoi know of any of us?"

"They are an honourable family!" someone else interjected.

Fotius left them to debate. He crossed the ground towards the cluster of Blues. He felt angry and hot. He struck the imposter on one shoulder. This close, he could smell a scent on the man. Perfume? In the Hippodrome?

"By Jad's Light, who are you?" he demanded. "You aren't a Blue, how dare you speak in our name?"

The man turned. He was bulky, but not fat. He had odd, pale green eyes, which now regarded Fotius as if he were some form of insect that had crawled out of a wine flask. Fotius actually wondered, amid his own turbulent thoughts, how anyone's tunic could remain so crisp and clean here this morning.

The others had overheard. They looked at Fotius and the man who said, contemptuously, in a clipped, precise voice, "And you are the Accredited Record Keeper of the Blues in Sarantium, dare I suppose? Hah. You probably can't even read."

"Maybe he can't," said Pappio, striding up boldly, "but you wore a Green tunic last fall to our end-of-season banquet. I remember you there. You even made a toast. You were drunk!"

The man seemed, clearly, to classify Pappio as close kin to whatever crashing thing Fotius was. He wrinkled his nose. "And men are forbidden by some new ordinance to change their allegiance now? I am not allowed to enjoy and celebrate the triumphs of the mighty Asportus?"

"Who?" Fotius said.

"Astorgus," the man said quickly. "Astorgus of the Blues."

"Get out of here," said Daccilio, who had been one of the Blue faction leaders for as long as Fotius could remember, and who had carried the banner at this year's Hippodrome opening ceremonies. "Get out, now!"

"Take off that blue tunic first!" someone else rasped angrily. Voices were raised. Heads turned in their direction. From all over the Hippodrome the too-synchronized frauds were still crying the name of Flavius Daleinus. With a roiling, hot anger that was actually a kind of joy, Fotius grabbed a fistful of the imposter's crisp blue tunic in his sweaty hands.

Asportus, indeed.

He jerked hard and felt the tunic tear at the shoulder. The jewelled brooch holding it fell onto the sand. He laughed-and then let out a scream as something smashed him across the back of the knees. He staggered, collapsed in the dust. Just as the charioteers fall, he thought.

He looked up, tears in his eyes, pain taking his breath away. Excubitors. Of course. Three of them had come. Armed, impersonal, merciless. They could kill him as easily as crack him across the knees, and with as much impunity. This was Sarantium. Commoners died to make an example every day. A spear point was leveled at his breast.