Guy Gavriel Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

Pappio knelt beside him. ‘My friend, are you all right?’

Fotius managed to nod. He wiped at the tears and sweat on his face. His tunic and legs were coated with dust now, from the sacred ground where charioteers raced. He felt a sudden wave of fellow-feeling for the balding glassblower. Pappio was a Green, to be sure, but he was a decent fellow for all that. And he had helped unmask a deception.

Asportus of the Blues! Asportus ? Fotius almost gagged. Trust the Daleinoi, those arrogant patricians, to have so little respect for the citizens as to imagine this shabby pantomime could get Flavius’s rump onto the Golden Throne!

The Excubitors beside them suddenly pulled themselves into a line, bristling with military precision. Fotius glanced quickly past them. A man on a horse had entered the Hippodrome, riding slowly along the spina towards the midpoint.

Others saw the rider. Someone cried his name, and then more voices did. This time it was spontaneous. A guard of Excubitors moved into place around him as he reined the horse to a stop. It was the formal array of their ranks, and the silence of them, that drew all eyes and compelled a gradual stillness of twenty thousand people.

‘Citizens of Sarantium, I have tidings,’ cried Valerius, Count of the Excubitors, in the rough, unvarnished soldier’s tones.

They couldn’t all hear him, of course, but the words were repeated by others—as was always the case here—and ran through that vast space, far up into the stands, across the spina with its obelisks and statues, through the empty kathisma where the Emperor would sit for the racing, and under the arches where some charioteers and Hippodrome staff were watching, shielded from the blazing sun.

Fotius saw the brooch on the sand beside him. He palmed it quickly. No one else seemed to notice. He would sell it, not long after, for enough money to change his life. Just now, though, he scrambled to his feet. He was dusty, grimy, sticky with sweat, but thought he should be standing when his Emperor was named.

He was wrong about what was coming, but why should he have understood the dance being danced that day?

Much later, the investigation by the Master of Offices, through the Quaestor of Imperial Intelligence, proved unexpectedly and embarrassingly incapable of determining the murderers of the most prominent Sarantine aristocrat of his day.

It was established readily enough that Flavius Daleinus—only recently returned to the City—had left his home on the morning of the death of the Emperor Apius, accompanied by his two older sons, a nephew, and a small retinue. Family members confirmed that he was on his way to the Senate Chamber to offer a formal expression of support to the Senators in their time of trial and decision. There was some suggestion—not confirmed from the Imperial Precinct—that he had arranged to meet the Chancellor there and be escorted afterwards by Gesius to the Attenine Palace to pay his last respects.

The condition of Daleinus’s body and what remained of his clothing when the dead man was carried on a bier to his home, and then later to his final resting place in the family mausoleum, was such that a widely reported rumour about his attire that morning was also not amenable to official confirmation.

The clothing had all burned—with or without the much-discussed strip of purple—and most of the elegant aristocrat’s skin had been charred black or scorched entirely away. What remained of his face was horrifying, the features beneath the once-distinguished silver hair a melted ruin. His oldest son and the nephew had also died, and four of his entourage. The surviving son, it was reported, was now blind and unfit to be seen. He was expected to take clerical vows and withdraw from the City.

Sarantine Fire did that to men.

It was one of the secrets of the Empire, shielded with ferocity, for it was the weapon that had guarded the City—thus far—from incursions over the water. Terror ran before that molten, liquid fire that set ships and men alight, burning upon the sea.

It had never, in living memory or in any of the military chronicles, been used within the walls, or indeed in any land engagement of the armies.

This, of course, directed informed suspicion upon the Strategos of the Navy and, indeed, any other military commanders who might have been able to suborn the naval engineers entrusted with the technique of training the liquid fire through a hose, or launching it through space upon the seafaring enemies of Sarantium.

In due course a number of appropriate persons were subjected to expert questioning. Their deaths did not, however, serve the ultimate goal of determining who it was who had arranged the hideous assassination of a distinguished patrician. The Strategos of the Navy, a man of the old school, elected to end his life, but left behind a letter declaring his innocence of any crimes and his mortal shame that such a weapon, entrusted to his care, had been used in this way. His death was, accordingly, not a useful one either.

It was reliably reported that three men had wielded the siphon apparatus. Or five. That they were wearing the colours and had the Bassanid-style clothing and the barbarian moustaches and long hair of the most extreme Green partisans. Or of the Blues. Further, that they wore the light brown tunics with black trim of the Urban Prefect’s men. It was recounted that they had fled east down an alley. Also west. Or through the back of a house on the exclusive, shaded street where the Daleinoi’s City mansion could be found. It was declared, with conviction, that the assassins had been Kindath in their silver robes and blue caps. No evident motive commended itself for this, but those worshippers of the two moons might well do evil for its own sake. Some ensuing, sporadic attacks in the Kindath Quarter were judged excusable by the Urban Prefect, as a way of discharging tensions in the City.

All the licensed foreign merchants in Sarantium were advised to keep to their allotted quarters of the City until further notice. Some of those who recklessly did not— curious, perhaps, to observe the unfolding events of those days—suffered predictable, unfortunate consequences.

The assassins of Flavius Daleinus were never found.

In the meticulous tally of the dead in that difficult time, ordered and executed by the Urban Prefect at the command of the Master of Offices, there was a report of three bodies found washed ashore four days later by soldiers patrolling the coast to the east of the triple walls. They were naked, skin bleached grey-white by the sea, and sea creatures had been at their faces and extremities.

No connection was ever made between this finding and the events of the terrible night the Emperor Apius went to the god, to be followed in the morning by the noble Flavius Daleinus. What connection could have been made? Bodies were found by fishermen in the water and along the stony beaches east all the time.

In the private, perhaps petty way of an intelligent man without any real power, Plautus Bonosus rather enjoyed the expression on the Imperial Chancellor’s face when the Master of Offices appeared in the Senate Chamber that morning, shortly after Gesius had arrived.

The tall, thin eunuch pressed his fingers together and inclined his head gravely, as if Adrastus’s arrival was a source of support and consolation to him. But Bonosus had been watching his face when the ornate doors— rather the worse for their earlier battering—were pried open by the guards.

Gesius had been expecting someone else.

Bonosus had a pretty good idea who that might have been. It was going to be interesting, he thought, when all the players in this morning’s pantomime were assembled. Adrastus, clearly, had arrived on his own behalf. With the two most powerful—and dangerous—strategoi and their forces each more than two weeks’ hard marching from Sarantium, the Master of Offices had a legitimate pathway to the Golden Throne—if he moved decisively. His lineage among the ‘Names’ was impeccable, his experience and rank unsurpassed, and he had the usual assortment of friends. And enemies.