Guy Gavriel Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

Their problem, not his.

He was nineteen years old, riding First Chariot for the Greens in the largest stadium in the world, and he had a genuine chance to be the first rider since Ormaez the Esperanan to win his hundred in the City before his twentieth birthday, at the end of the summer.

But the Emperor was dead. There would be no racing today, and for the god knew how many days during the mourning rites. There were twenty thousand people or more in the Hippodrome this morning, spilling out onto the track, but they were murmuring anxiously among themselves, or listening to yellow-robed clerics intone the liturgy, not watching the chariots wheeled out in the Procession. He’d lost half a race day last week to a shoulder injury, and now today was gone, and next week? The week after?

Scortius knew he ought not to be so concerned with his own affairs at a time such as this. The clerics— whether Heladikian or Orthodox—would all castigate him for it. On some things the religious agreed.

He saw men weeping in the stands and on the track, others gesturing too broadly, speaking too loudly, fear in their eyes. He had seen that fear when the chariots were running, in other drivers’ faces. He couldn’t say he had ever felt it himself, except when the Bassanid armies had come raiding across the sands and, standing on their city ramparts, he had looked up and seen his father’s eyes. They had surrendered that time, lost their city, their homes—only to regain them four years later in a treaty, following victories on the northern border. Conquests were traded back and forth all the time.

He understood that the Empire might be in danger now. Horses needed a firm hand, and so did an Empire. His problem was that, growing up where he had, he’d seen the eastern armies of Shirvan, King of Kings, too many times to feel remotely as anxious as those he watched now. Life was too rich, too new, too impossibly exciting for his spirits to be dragged downwards, even today.

He was nineteen, and a charioteer. In Sarantium.

Horses were his life, as he had dreamed once they might be. These affairs of the larger world . . . Scortius could let others sort them out. Someone would be named Emperor. Someone would sit in the kathisma—the Imperial Box—midway along the Hippodrome’s western side one day soon—the god willing!—and drop the white handkerchief to signal the Procession, and the chariots would parade and then run. It didn’t much matter to a charioteer, Scortius of Soriyya thought, who the man with the handkerchief was.

He was truly young, in the City less than half a year, recruited by the Greens’ factionarius from the small hippodrome in Sarnica, where he’d been driving broken-down horses for the lowly Reds—and winning races. He had a deal of growing up to do and much to learn. He would do it, in fact, and fairly quickly. Men change, sometimes.

Scortius leaned against an archway, shadowed, watching the crowd from a vantage point that led back along a runway to the interior workrooms and animal stalls and the tiny apartments of the Hippodrome staff beneath the stands. A locked door partway along the tunnel led down to the cavernous cisterns where much of the City’s water supply was stored. On idle days, the younger riders and grooms sometimes raced small boats among the thousand pillars there in the echoing, watery spaces and faint light.

Scortius wondered if he ought to go outside and across the forum to the Green stables to check on his best team of horses, leaving the clerics to their chanting and the more unruly elements of the citizenry hurling names of Imperial candidates back and forth, even through the holy services.

He recognized, if vaguely, one or two of the names loudly invoked. He hadn’t made himself familiar with all the army officers and aristocrats, let alone the stupefying number of palace functionaries in Sarantium. Who could, and still concentrate on what mattered? He had eighty-three wins, and his birthday was the last day of summer. It could be done. He rubbed his bruised shoulder, glancing up. No clouds, the threat of rain had passed away east. It would be a very hot day. Heat was good for him out on the track. Coming from Soriyya, burnt dark by the god’s sun, he could cope with the white blazing of summer better than most of the others. This would have been a good day for him, he was sure of it. Lost, now. The Emperor had died.

He suspected that more than words and names would be flying in the Hippodrome before the morning was out. Crowds of this sort were rarely calm for long, and today’s circumstances had Greens and Blues mingling much more than was safe. When the weather heated up so did tempers. A hippodrome riot in Sarnica, just before he left, had ended up with half the Kindath quarter of that city burning as the mob boiled out into the streets.

The Excubitors were here this morning, though, armed and watchful, and the mood was more apprehensive than angry. He might be wrong about the violence. Scortius would have been the first to admit he didn’t know much about anything but horses. A woman had told him that only two nights ago, but she had sounded languorous as a cat and not displeased. He had discovered, actually, that the same gentling voice that worked with skittish horses was sometimes effective with the women who waited for him after a race day, or sent their servants to wait.

It didn’t always work, mind you. He’d had an odd sense, part way through the night with that catlike woman, that she might have preferred to be driven or handled the way he drove a quadriga in the hard, lashing run to the finish line. That had been an unsettling thought. He hadn’t acted on it, of course. Women were proving difficult to sort out; worth thinking about, though, he had to admit that.

Not nearly so much as horses were, mind you. Nothing was.

‘Shoulder mending?’

Scortius glanced back quickly, barely masking surprise. The compact, well-made man who’d asked, who came now to stand companionably beside him in the archway, was not someone he’d have expected to make polite inquiry of him.

‘Pretty much,’ he said briefly to Astorgus of the Blues, the pre- eminent driver of the day—the man he’d been brought north from Sarnica to challenge. Scortius felt awkward, inept beside the older man. He’d no idea how to handle a moment such as this. Astorgus had not one but two statues raised in his name already, among the monuments in the spina of the Hippodrome, and one of them was bronze. He had dined in the Attenine Palace half a dozen times, it was reported. The powers of the Imperial Precinct solicited his views on matters within the City.

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?’