The Sarantine Mosaic (36 page)

‘The northern army can be here from Trakesia in fourteen days,' Faustinus had murmured that day, dry and efficient. ‘The Supreme Strategos will confirm that. This mob has no leadership, no clear purpose. Any puppet they acclaim in the Hippodrome will be hopelessly weak. Symeonis as Emperor? It is laughable. Leave now and you will re-enter the City in triumph before full winter comes.'

Valerius, a hand laid across the back of his throne, had looked at Gesius, the aged Chancellor, first, and then at Leontes. Both the Chancellor and the golden-haired Strategos, long-time companion, hesitated.

Bonosus knew why. Faustinus might be right, but he might be perilously wrong: no Emperor who had fled from the people he ruled had ever returned to govern them. Symeonis might be a terrified figurehead, but what would stop others from emerging once Valerius was known to have left Sarantium? What if the Daleinus scion found his courage, or had it handed to him?

On the other hand, in the most obvious way, no Emperor torn apart by a howling throng intoxicated by its own power had ever governed after that either. Bonosus wanted to say as much, but kept silent. He wondered if the
mob, should they come this far, would understand that the Master of the Senate was here for purely
formal
reasons, that he had no authority, posed no danger, had done them no harm? That he was even, financially, as much a victim of the evil Quaestor of Imperial Revenue as any of them?

He doubted it.

No man spoke a word in that moment fraught with choice and destiny. They saw leaping flames and black smoke through the open windows—the Great Sanctuary burning. They could hear the dull, heavy roar of the mob at the gates and inside the Hippodrome. Leontes and Auxilius had reported at least eighty thousand people gathered in and around the Hippodrome, spilling into the forum there. As many more seemed to be running wild through the rest of the city, from the triple walls down, and had been for much of the night just past. Taverns and cauponae had been overrun and looted, they'd said. Wine was still being found and passed out from the cellars and then from hand to hand in the reeling, smoky streets.

There was a smell of fear in the throne room. Plautus Bonosus, chanting gravely in his neighbourhood sanctuary two years later, knew he would never forget that moment.

No man spoke. The one woman in the room did.

‘I would sooner die clothed in porphyry in this palace,' the Empress Alixana said quietly, ‘than of old age in any place of exile on earth.' She had been standing by the eastern window while the men debated, gazing out at the burning city beyond the gardens and the palaces. Now she turned and looked only at Valerius. ‘All Jad's children are born to die. The vestments of Empire are seemly for a shroud, my lord. Are they not?'

Bonosus remembered watching Faustinus's face go white. Gesius opening his mouth, and then closing it,
looking old suddenly, wrinkles deep in pale parchment flesh. And he remembered something else he thought he would never lose in his life: the Emperor, from near his throne, smiling suddenly at the small, exquisite woman by the window.

Among many other things, Plautus Bonosus had realized, with a queer kind of pain, that he had never in all his days looked at another man or woman in that way, or received a gaze remotely like the one that the dancer who had become their Empress bestowed upon Valerius in return.

‘It is
intolerable
,' said Cleander, speaking loudly over the tavern noise, ‘that a man like that should possess such a woman!' He drank, and wiped at the moustache he was trying to grow.

‘He doesn't possess her,' Eutychus replied reasonably. ‘He may not even be bedding her. And he
is
a man of some distinction, little sprout.'

Cleander glared at him as the others laughed.

The volume of sound in The Spina was considerable. It was midday and the morning's races were done, with the afternoon chariots slated to begin after the break. The most ambitious of the drinking places near the Hippodrome was bursting with a sweating, raucous, bipartisan crowd.

The more fervent followers of Blue and Green had made their way to less expensive taverns and cauponae dedicated to their own factions, but the shrewd managers of The Spina had offered free drinks to retired and current charioteers of all colours from the day they'd opened their doors, and the lure of hoisting a beer or a cup of wine with the drivers had made The Spina a dramatic success from that first day.

It had to be … they'd put a fortune into it. The long axis of the tavern had been designed to simulate the real
spina—the central island of the Hippodrome, around which the chariots wheeled in their furious careen. Instead of thundering horses, this spina was ringed by a marble counter, and drinkers stood or leaned on both sides, eyeing scaled reproductions of the statues and monuments that decorated the real thing in the Hippodrome. Against one long wall ran the bar itself, also marbled, with patrons packed close. And for those prudent—and solvent— enough to have made arrangements ahead of time, there were booths along the opposite wall, stretching to the shadows at the back of the tavern.

Eutychus was always prudent, and Cleander and Dorus were notably solvent, or rather, their fathers were. The five young men—all Greens, of course—had a standing arrangement to prominently occupy the highly visible second booth on race days. The first booth was always reserved for charioteers or the occasional patrons from the Imperial Precinct amusing themselves among the crowds of the city.

‘No man ever truly possesses a woman, anyhow,' said Gidas moodily. ‘He has her body for a time if he's lucky, but only the most fleeting glimpse into her soul.' Gidas was a poet, or wanted to be.

‘If they have souls,' said Eutychus wryly, drinking his carefully watered wine. ‘It is, after all, a liturgical issue.'

‘Not any more,' Pollon protested. ‘A Patriarchal Council settled that a hundred years ago, or something.'

‘By a single vote,' Eutychus said, smiling. Eutychus knew a lot; he didn't hide the fact. ‘Had one of the august clerics had an unfortunate experience with a whore the night before, the Council would likely have decided women have no souls.'

‘That's probably sacrilege,' Gidas murmured.

‘Heladikos defend me!' Eutychus laughed.

‘That
is
sacrilege,' Gidas said, with a rare, quick smile.

‘They don't,' Cleander muttered, ignoring this last exchange. ‘They
don't
have souls. Or
she
doesn't, to be permitting that grey-faced toad to court her. She sent back my gift, you know.'

‘We know, Cleander. You've told us. A dozen times.' Pollon's tone was kindly. He ruffled Cleander's hair. ‘Forget her. She's beyond you. Pertennius has a place in the Imperial Precinct
and
in the military. Toad or not, he's the sort of man who sleeps with a woman like that … unless someone of even higher rank pushes him out of her bed.'

‘A place in the military?' Cleander's voice swirled upwards in indignation. ‘Jad's cock, that's a bad joke! Pertennius of Eubulus is a bloodless, ass-licking secretary to a pompous strategos whose courage is long behind him since he married above himself and decided he liked soft beds and gold.'

‘Lower your voice, idiot!' Pollon gripped Cleander's arm. ‘Eutychus, water his fucking wine before he gets us into a fight with half the army.'

‘Too late,' Eutychus said sorrowfully. The others followed his glance towards the marble spina running down the middle of the room. A broad-shouldered man in an officer's uniform had turned from contemplating a replica of the Greens' second statue to the charioteer Scortius and was gazing across at them, his expression stony. The men on either side of him—neither one a soldier—had also glanced over, but then returned to their drinks at the counter.

With Pollon's firm hand on his arm, Cleander kept silent, though he gazed truculently back at the soldier until the man at the spina bar turned away. Cleander sniffed. ‘Told you,' he said, though quietly. ‘An army of useless fakers, boasting of imaginary battlefields.'

Eutychus shook his head in amusement. ‘You
are
a rash little sprout, aren't you?'

‘Don't call me that.'

‘What, rash?'

‘No. The other. I'm seventeen now, and I don't like it.'

‘Being seventeen?'

‘No! That name. Stop it, Eutychus. You aren't that much older.'

‘No, but I don't walk around like a boy with his first erection. Someone's going to cut it off for you one day if you aren't careful.'

Dorus winced. ‘Eutychus.'

A figure appeared suddenly at their booth. They looked up at a server. He carried a beaker of wine.

‘Compliments of the officer at the spina,' he said, licking his lips nervously. ‘He invites you to salute the glory of the Supreme Strategos Leontes with him.'

‘I don't take wine on conditions,' bristled Cleander. ‘I can buy my own when I want it.'

The soldier hadn't turned around. The server looked more unhappy. ‘He, ah, instructed me to say that if you do not drink his wine and offer his salute he will be distressed and express this by hanging the … loudest of you by his tunic from the hook by the front door.' He paused. ‘We don't want trouble, you know.'

‘Fuck him!' Cleander said, loudly.

There was a moment before the soldier turned.

This time, so did the two big men on either side of him. One was red-haired and bearded, of indeterminate origin. The other was a northerner of some sort, probably a barbarian, though his hair was close-cropped. The noise of The Spina continued unabated. The server looked from the booth to the three men at the spina and made an earnest, placating gesture.

‘Boys don't fuck me,' the soldier said gravely. Someone farther along the spina turned at that. ‘Boys who wear their hair like barbarians they've never faced, and dress like
Bassanids they've never seen, do what a working soldier tells them.' He pushed off from the bar and walked slowly across to their booth. His expression remained mild. ‘You style your hair like the Vrachae. If Leontes's army were not on your northern and western borders today, a Vrachae spearman might have been over the walls and up your backside by now. Do you know what they like to do with boys taken in battle? Shall I tell you?'

Eutychus lifted a hand and smiled thinly. ‘Not on a festival day, thank you. I'm sure it is unpleasant. Do you really propose to start a quarrel over Pertennius of Eubulus? Do you know him?'

‘Not at all, but I will quarrel over insults to my Strategos. I've given you a choice. It is good wine. Drink to Leontes and I'll join you. Then we'll toast some of the old Green charioteers and one of you will explain to me how the fucking Blues got Scortius away from us.'

Eutychus grinned. ‘You are, I dare take it, a follower of the glorious and exalted Greens?'

‘All my sorry life.' The man returned the grin wryly.

Eutychus laughed aloud and made room for the soldier to sit. He poured the offered wine. They toasted Leontes; none of them really disliked him, anyhow. It was difficult, even for Cleander, to be genuinely dismissive of such a man, though he did offer an aside about being known by the secretary one kept.

They went quickly through the soldier's beaker and then two more, saluting a long sequence of Green drivers. The soldier appeared to have a voluminous recollection of Green charioteers from cities all over the Empire in the reigns of the last three Emperors. The five young men had never heard of most of them. The man's two friends watched them from the spina bar, leaning back against it, occasionally joining in the toasts across the aisle. One of them was smiling a little, the other was expressionless.

Then the manager of The Spina had the horns blown, in imitation of those that marked the chariots' Processional in the Hippodrome, and they all began paying their reckonings and tumbling in a noisy spill of people out into the windy autumn sunshine, joining the disgorged crowds from the other taverns and baths to cross the forum for the afternoon's chariots.

The first running after the midday break was the major race of the day and no one wanted to be late.

‘
ALL FOUR COLOURS
in this one,' Carullus explained as they hurried across the open space. ‘Eight quadrigas, two of each colour, a big purse. The only purse as large is the last one of the day when the Reds and Whites stay out of it and four Greens and Blues run with bigas—two horses each. That's a cleaner race, this one's wilder. There'll be blood on the track, most likely.' He grinned. ‘Maybe someone will run over that dark-skinned bastard, Scortius.'

‘You'd like that?' Crispin asked.

Carullus considered the question for a moment. ‘I wouldn't,' he said finally. ‘He's too much pleasure to watch. Though I'm sure he spends a fortune each year in wards against curse-tablets and spells. There
are
a good many Greens who'd cheerfully see him dragged and trampled for crossing to the Blues.'