Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

As far as Kyros could judge, it had been a very successful banquet. Scortius hadn't been there, of course. He had been summoned to the Imperial Precinct, and so was forgiven his absence. An invitation from the Emperor brought glory to them all.

On the other hand, the brilliant charioteer was also the reason Strumosus-exhausted, dangerously irritable-and a handful of unfortunate boys and undercooks were still awake in the kitchen in the depths of an autumn night after even the most impassioned of the partisans had staggered to their homes and beds. The Blues" staff and administration were asleep by now across the courtyard in the dormitory or their private quarters, if rank had earned them such. The streets and squares beyond the gated compound were quiet at the end of the festival. Slaves under the supervision of the Urban Prefect's office would be out already, cleaning the streets. It was cold outside now; a north wind had come slicing down out of Trakesia, winter in it.

Ordinary life would resume with the sun. The parties were over.

But it seemed that Scortius had solemnly promised the master cook of the Blues that he would come to the kitchens after the Emperor's banquet and sample what had been offered tonight, comparing it to the fare in the Imperial Precinct. He was late. It was late. It was very late. No approaching footsteps could be heard outside.

They had all been enthused at the prospect of sharing the last of a glorious day and night with the charioteer, but that had been a long time ago. Kyros suppressed a yawn and eyed the low fire, stirring his fish soup, careful not to let it boil. He tasted it, and decided against adding any more sea salt. It was an extreme honour for one of the scullion boys to be entrusted with supervising a dish and there had been indignation when Kyros was given such tasks after barely a year in the kitchen. Kyros himself had been astonished; he hadn't known Strumosus was even aware of his presence.

He hadn't actually wanted to be here at the beginning. As a boy he'd planned to be a charioteer, of course: all of them did. Later, he'd expected to follow his father as an animal trainer for the Blues, but reality had descended upon that idea when Kyros was still very young. A trainer dragging a clubbed foot around with him was unlikely to survive even a season among the big cats and bears. Kyros's father had appealed to the faction administration to find another place for his son when Kyros was of age. The Blues tended to look after their own. Administrative wheels had turned, on a minor scale, and Kyros had been assigned to apprentice in the great kitchen with the newly recruited master cook. You didn't have to run, or dodge dangerous beasts there.

Other than the cook.

Strumosus reappeared in the doorway from the portico outside. Rasic, with his uncanny survival instinct, had already stopped his muttering, without turning around. The chef looked fevered and overwrought, but he often did, so that didn't signify greatly. Kyros's mother would have paled to see Strumosus walking to and from the hot kitchens and the cold courtyard at such an hour as this. If the noxious vapours didn't afflict you in the black depths of night then the spirits of the half-world would, she firmly believed.

Strumosus of Amoria had been hired by the Blues-at a cost rumoured to be outrageous-from the kitchens of the exiled Lysippus, once Quaestor of Imperial Revenue, banished in the wake of the Victory Riot. The two factions competed in the hippodromes with their chariots, in the theatres of the Empire, with their poets" declamations and group chants, and-not at all infrequently-in the streets and alleyways with cudgels and blades. Cunning Astorgus had decided to take the competition into the kitchens of the faction compounds, and recruiting Strumosus-though he was prickly as a Soriyyan desert plant-had been a brilliant stroke. The City had talked about nothing else for months; a number of patricians had discovered a hitherto unknown affiliation to the Blues and had happily fattened themselves in the faction's banquet hall while making contributions that went a long way towards fattening Astorgus's purse for the horse auctions or the wooing of dancers and charioteers. The Blues appeared to have found yet another way to fight-and defeat-the Greens.

Blues and Greens had fought side by side two years ago, in the Victory Riot, but that astonishing, almost unprecedented fact hadn't done anything to stop them from dying when the soldiers had come into the Hippodrome. Kyros remembered the riot, of course. One of his uncles had been killed by a sword in the Hippodrome Forum and his mother had taken to her bed for two weeks after that. The name of Lysippus the Calysian had been one to spit upon in Kyros's household, and in a great many others, of all ranks and classes.

The Emperor's taxation master had been ruthless, but they always were, taxation masters. It was more than that. The stories of what went on after darkfall in his city palace had been ugly and disturbing. Whenever young people of either sex went missing eyes were cast at those blank, windowless stone walls. Wayward children were threatened with the gross Calysian to frighten them into obedience.

Strumosus hadn't added anything to the rumours, being uncharacteristically reticent on the subject of his former employer. He'd arrived in the Blues" kitchens and cellars, spent a day glaring at what he found, thrown out almost all of the implements, much of the wine, dismissed all but two of the undercooks, terrified the boys, and-within days-had begun producing meals that dazzled and amazed.

He was never happy, of course: complaining endlessly, verbally and physically abusing the staff he hired, hectoring Astorgus for a larger budget, offering opinions on everything from poets to the proper diet for the horses, moaning about the impossibility of subtle cooking when one had to feed so many uneducated chewers of food. Still, Kyros had noted, for all the flow of grievances, there never did seem to be an end to the changing dishes they prepared in the great kitchen, and Strumosus didn't seem at all financially constrained in his market purchases of a morning.

That was one of Kyros's favourite tasks: accompanying the cook to market just after the invocation in chapel, watching him appraise vegetables and fish and fruit, squeezing and smelling, sometimes even listening to food, devising the day's meals on the spot in the light of what he found.

In fact, it was most likely because of his obvious attention at such times, Kyros later decided, that the cook had elevated him from washing platters and flasks to supervising some of the soups and broths. Strumosus almost never addressed Kyros directly, but the fierce, fat little man seemed always to be talking to himself at the market as he moved swiftly from stall to stall, and Kyros, keeping up as best he could with his bad foot, heard a great deal and tried to remember. He had never imagined, for example, that the difference in taste between the same fish caught across the bay near Deapolis and one netted on this side, near the cliffs east of the City, could be so great.

The day Strumosus found sea bass from Spinadia in the market was the first time Kyros saw a man actually weep at the sight of food. Strumosus's fingers as he caressed the glistening fish reminded Kyros of a Holy Fool's clasp on his sun disk. He and the others in the kitchen were permitted to sample the dish-baked lightly in salt, flavoured with herbs-after the dinner party that night was over, and Kyros, tasting, began to comprehend a certain way of living life. He would sometimes date the beginning of his adulthood to that evening.

At other times he would consider that his youth properly ended at the conclusion of Dykania later that same year, waiting for Scortius the charioteer in the depths of a cold night, when they heard a sudden, urgent cry and then running feet in the courtyard.