Robert Fabbri: The Racing Factions

ROME, FEBRUARY AD 32

The stallions’ eyes rolled; specks of foam flew from their mouths as they answered their charioteer’s call and accelerated down the track. Barrel chests sucked dusty air into their straining lungs whilst pounding hearts pumped blood to the muscles in their legs, which were working to the very limit of their power as they pulled a light chariot seven times around the track. They felt the reins tug back; they slowed, their current sprint over and another corner to be rounded. The inside horse wheeled left in response to a sharp pull on the reins and led his three stable mates, at a speed at which they could just keep their footing, around the turning post at the far end of the spina , the central barrier of the Circus Maximus. Feeling another bite of the four-lash whip, they looked up the 350 paces of the dust-clouded straight and they were away again, inciting each other to greater effort in the fury of the race in which they were leading.

Their driver, in the colours of the Green Racing Faction, risked a quick glance over his shoulder to one of the three White chariots, just four paces behind, but gaining; beyond it his Green team-mate drew out into the track in an attempt to pull level with the chasing White. The leading Green driver snatched a small skin of water thrown at him by a boy from his team stationed on the spina; he squirted its contents over his dirt-encrusted face and into his parched mouth, discarded it and pulled his team to the right to avoid the mangled wreckage of two chariots, a Blue and a Red. A couple of well-aimed curses, written on folded lead sheets and studded with nails, flew past him as he neared the spectators; pulling back to the right, closer to the spina and out of range of the hurled missiles, he sped on, showering grit all over the crash. Within it, public slaves struggled to cut loose writhing horses entangled in the debris, whose screeches were lost in the tumult of a quarter of a million voices roaring on the ten remaining chariots. Waving the flags of their favoured faction, the citizens of Rome screamed themselves hoarse, stamping their feet on the stepped-stone seating, urging on the teams upon whom over a million sesterces was riding in bets.

The Green driver pulled on the reins wrapped about his waist and slid his team, in a spray of sand, around the turning post closest to the twelve starting boxes positioned next to the towering wood and iron arched gates of the circus; the next lap began. High on a column above the spina the fifth of seven bronze dolphins, marking the progress of the race, tilted down and noise of the crowd escalated even more, echoing around the Palatine and Aventine Hills, overlooking the Circus Maximus on either side, and on to the rest of the Seven Hills of Rome.

‘Come on, you Greens! This one has to be ours, lads!’ Marcus Salvius Magnus bawled in excitement to his two companions as the second-placed White chariot misjudged the corner, losing crucial ground and allowing the second Green team to come alongside. Magnus’ breath steamed as the temperature fell with the sun. The baying, sweat-reeking crowd around him, on the Aventine side of the main gates, sported Green colours and had worked themselves up into a frenzied celebration at the prospect of their team’s first win of the day.

‘Twenty-five denarii at eight to one! That’s two hundred, or eight hundred sesterces; Ignatius ain’t going to like that, Magnus,’ the huge bald man next to him shouted, punching the stump of his left wrist in the air.

‘Too right, Marius, we’ve finally got that bastard bookmaker this time, and with our biggest bet of the day.’ Magnus’ scarred, ex-boxer’s face creased into a grin; he looked down at the wooden receipt for the bet, signed by the bookmaker Ignatius, grasped in a massive fist of his other companion. ‘Two hundred denarii – that’s almost as much as a legionary earns in a year! It’ll make Ignatius’ eyes water and swell the brotherhood’s coffers nicely. Fancy a couple of whores tonight, Sextus?’

‘A couple of whores?’ Sextus ruminated, slowly digesting the thought whilst keeping his eyes fixed on the action down on the track far below, where the second Green driver was drawing a small knife from the protective leather strapping around his chest. ‘Right you are, Magnus, if you’re sure we can afford it after what we’ve lost today.’

‘We’ve lost five denarii in nine races, my slow friend, that’s forty-five; we’re one hundred and fifty-five denarii up. We could afford five hundred whores.’

Sextus’ ox-like face creased with strained concentration as he tried – but failed – to get to grips with such advanced arithmetic. ‘With learning like that, brother, I can understand how you got to be the patronus of our Crossroads Brotherhood.’

‘If the leader of the Brotherhood can’t count, Sextus, then how is he going to be able to check that everyone in the South Quirinal has paid their rightful dues to us in order to enjoy our continued protection?’

‘Then that rules me out of ever becoming leader.’

‘Yes, that and the fact that you’d have to kill me first.’

The crowd’s thrilled roar drew Magnus’ attention back to the race as the White and Green chariots touched wheels, shattering the eight spokes in both of them in a hail of splintering wood. The Green immediately slashed at the reins tied around his waist with his knife and, severing them, bailed out as the wheels of both vehicles fragmented. At a speed of more than thirty miles per hour, the chariots’ unsupported sides juddered down on to the sand, their naked axles gouging deep furrows, abruptly slowing them and jerking the traces of the two teams of horses, causing them to slew into each other and rebound. With the weight of its driver gone, the Green chariot twisted up into the air, its remaining wheel spinning freely, and arced, with delicious inevitability, over on to the White charioteer. The fast-rotating iron tyre scraped through the skin of his neck with a spray of blood as it knocked him sideways off the chariot to crunch down, unconscious, on to the track with the reins still wrapped about his waist; his team ran on, dragging him along the scouring sand as his vehicle disintegrated around him.

The leading Green was clear.

‘A selfless act, and the best way to deal with the favourite,’ Magnus pronounced at the top of his voice, watching with approval the downed Green charioteer scrabble to his feet and leap on to the spina, narrowly avoiding a trampled death beneath the hooves of three chasing teams. ‘One and a half laps to go and nobody near our man; we’ll collect the money, brothers, and then go and wait outside the senators’ enclosure to escort Senator Pollo home.’

With the result of the race now a foregone conclusion most of the crowd sat back down and amused themselves by watching the attempts of the crashed White’s hortator – the single horsemen attached to each of the twelve racers for exactly this purpose – to pull up the bolting team before their charioteer had all the skin scraped from his limbs. Only the Green faction stayed standing to cheer on the progress of their hero of the moment.

Sure of victory and uninterested in the White charioteer’s fate, Magnus looked around for one of the bookmakers’ slaves who patrolled the crowd with leather bags around their waists, taking bets on behalf of their owners. ‘You, boy!’ he shouted, spotting one of Ignatius’ many slaves circulating amongst the spectators. ‘Over here.’

The elderly slave gave a deferential nod and made his way through the celebrating Green supporters, who had begun pointing and droning crude chants at the White faction on the Palatine side of the gates; they replied with obscene gestures and jeering.