The Sarantine Mosaic (39 page)

‘He gets down in front of you at the Line, worm, I'll have you shovelling manure at some broken-down hippodrome on the frozen border of Karch. Fair warning.'

Taras swallowed and nodded.
Oh, very fair
, he thought bitterly but did not say. He gazed past the barrier and down the track. The Line, chalked in white across the sand, was about two hundred paces away. To that point each chariot had to hold its lane, to allow the staggered start position to have its effect and prevent crashes right at the starting gates. After they reached the white line, the outside drivers could begin cutting down. If there was room.

That was the issue, of course.

Taras actually wished, at this moment, that he was still racing in Megarium. The little hippodrome at his home in the west might not have been very important, a tenth the size of this one, but he'd been a Green there, not a lowly Red, riding a strong Second, fair hopes after a fine season of claiming the silver helmet, sleeping at home, eating his mother's food. A
good
life, tossed aside like a broken whip the day an agent of the Greens of Sarantium had come west and watched him run and recruited him. He would race for the Reds for a while, Taras had been told, starting the way almost everyone began in the City. If he did honourably … well, the lives of
all
the great drivers were there to be observed.

If you thought you were good, and wanted to succeed, the Greens' agent said, you went to Sarantium. It was as simple as that. Taras knew it was true. He was young. It was an opportunity.
Sailing to Sarantium
, men called it, when someone took a chance like this. His father had been proud. His mother had cried, and packed him a new cloak and two sealed amphorae of her own grandmother's sovereign remedy for any and all ailments. The most evil-tasting concoction on earth. Taras had taken a spoonful each day since he'd arrived in the City. She'd sent two more jars in the summer, by Imperial Post.

So here he was, healthy as a young horse, on the very last day of his first season in the capital. No bones broken on the year and barely a handful of new scars, only one bad spill that left him dizzy for a few days and hearing flute music. Not a
bad
season, he thought, given that the horses the Reds and Whites drove—especially their lesser drivers—were hopelessly feeble when matched on the great track with those of the Blues and Greens. Taras had an easygoing disposition, worked hard, learned quickly, and had grown more than adequate—or so his factionarius
had told him, encouragingly—at the tasks of the lesser colours. They were the same at every track, after all. Blocks, slow-downs, minor fouls (major ones could cost your lead colour the race and get you a suspension and a whip across the back—or face—from a First driver in the dressing rooms), even carefully timed spills to bring down a rival team coming up behind you. The trick was to do that last without breaking a bone, or dying, of course.

He'd even won three times in the minor races involving the lesser Green and Blue riders and the Reds and Whites—amusements for the crowd, those were, with careening chariots, reckless corners, dangerous pile-ups, hot-headed young riders lashing at each other as they strove for recognition. Three wins was perfectly decent for a youngster riding Fourth for the Reds in Sarantium.

Problem was,
perfectly decent
wouldn't suffice at this particular moment. For a veritable host of reasons, the race coming up was hugely important, and Taras cursed fortune that it was his lot to be slotted outside between ferocious Crescens and the whirlwind that was Scortius. He shouldn't even have
been
in this race, but the Reds' second driver had fallen and wrenched a shoulder earlier in the morning and the factionarius had chosen to leave his Third in the next race, where he might have a chance to win.

As a direct result of this, seventeen-year-old Taras of Megarium was sitting here at the starting line, behind horses he didn't know at all well, sandwiched between the two finest drivers of the day, with one of them making it clear that if he didn't cut off the other, his brief tenure in the City might be over.

It was all a consequence of not having enough money to buy adequate protection against the curse-tablets, Taras knew. But what could one do? What could one possibly do?

The first trumpet sounded, warning of the start to come. The handlers withdrew. Taras leaned forward, talking to his horses. He dug his feet deeply into the metal sheaths on the chariot floor and looked nervously to his right and a bit ahead. Then he glanced quickly down again. Scortius, holding his experienced team easily in place, was
smiling
at him. The lithe, dark-skinned Soriyyan had an easy grin— allegedly lethal among the women of the City—and at the moment he was glancing back with amusement at Taras.

Taras made himself look up. It would not do to appear intimidated.

‘Miserable position, isn't it?' the First of the Blues said mildly. ‘Don't worry too much. Crescens is a sweetnatured fellow under that surface. He knows you can't go fast enough to block me.'

‘The fuck I am, the fuck I do!' Crescens barked from the other side. ‘I want this race, Scortius. I want seventy-five for the year and I want it in this one. Baras, or whatever your name is, keep him outside or get used to the smell of horse manure in your hair.'

Scortius laughed. ‘We're
all
used to that, Crescens.' He clucked reassuringly at his four horses.

The largest of them, the majestic bay in the leftmost position, was Servator, and Taras longed in his heart to stand in a chariot behind that magnificent animal just once in his life. Everyone knew that Scortius was brilliant, but they also knew that a goodly portion of his success— evinced by two statues in the spina before he was thirty years old—had been shaped by Servator. There had even been a bronze statue to the
horse
in the courtyard outside the Greens' banquet hall, until this year. It had been melted down over the winter. When the Greens lost the driver they lost the horse, because Scortius's last contract with them had stipulated—uniquely—that
he
owned Servator, not the faction.

He'd gone over to the Blues in the winter, for a sum and on terms that no one knew for certain, though the rumours were wild. The muscular, tough-talking Crescens had come north from riding First for the Greens in the notoriously rough-and-tumble hippodrome of Sarnica— second city of the Empire—and had assuaged some of his faction's grief by being hard and brave and ruggedly aggressive and by winning races. Seventy-five would be a splendid first season for the Greens' new standard-bearer.

Seventy-
four
would be, Taras desperately wanted to say, but didn't.

Didn't have time, either. His right-side trace horse was restive and needed attention. He had only handled this team once before, back in the summer. The starter's trumpet was up. A handler hurried back and helped Taras hold his position. He didn't look over at Crescens, but he heard the fierce man from Amoria cry, ‘A case of red from my home if you keep the Soriyyan bastard outside for a lap, Karas!'

‘His name's Taras!' Scortius of the hated Blues called back, still laughing—in the very moment the trumpet sounded and the barriers sprang away, laying the wide track open like an ambush or a dream of glory.

‘Watch the start!'

Carullus gripped Crispin's arm, shouting over the deafening noise as thirty-two horses came up to the barriers below and the first warning trumpet blast sounded. Crispin was watching. He and Vargos had learned a great deal through the morning; Carullus was surprisingly knowledgeable and unsurprisingly talkative. The start was almost half the race, they'd come to realize, especially with the best drivers on the track, unlikely to make mistakes on the seven laps around the spina. If one of the top Blues or Greens took the lead
at the first turn, it required luck and a great deal of effort to overtake him on a crowded track.

The real drama came when—as now—the two best drivers were so far outside that it was impossible for them to win except by coming from behind, fighting through the blocks and disruptions of the lesser colours.

Crispin kept his eyes on the outside racers. He thought that Carullus's very large wager was a decent bet: the Blues' Scortius was in a miserable position, flanked by a Red driver whose sole task—he had learned through the morning—would be to keep the Blue champion from cutting down for as long as possible. Running wide for a long time on this track was brutally hard on the horses. Crescens of the Greens had his own Green partner on his left, another piece of good fortune, despite his own outside start. If Crispin understood this sport at all by now, that second Green driver would go flying from the barriers as fast as he could and then begin pressing left towards the inside lanes, opening room for Crescens to angle over as well, as soon as they sped past the white chalked line that marked the beginning of the spina and the point when the chaos of manoeuvring began.

Crispin hadn't expected to be this engaged by the races but his heart was pounding now, and he'd found himself shouting many times through the morning. Eighty thousand screaming people could make you do that. He'd never been among so large a crowd in his life. Crowds had their own power, Crispin had begun to realize; they carried you with them.

And now the Emperor was here: a new element to the festival excitement of the Hippodrome. That distant purple-robed figure at the western end of the stands— just where the chariots made their first turning round the spina—represented another dimension of power. The men down below them in their frail chariots, whips in
hand and reins lashed around their hard, trained bodies, were a third. Crispin looked up for a moment. The sun was high on a clear, windy day: the god in his own chariot, riding above Sarantium. Power above and below and all around.

Crispin closed his eyes for a moment in the brilliance of the day, and just then—without any warning at all, like a flung spear or a sudden shaft of light—an image came to him. Whole and vast and unforgettable, completely unexpected, a gift.

And also a burden, as such images had always been for him: the terrible distance between the art conceived in the eye of the mind and what one could actually execute in a fallible world with fallible tools and one's own crushing limitations.

But sitting there on the marble benches of the Sarantine Hippodrome, assailed by the tumult and the screaming of the crowd, Caius Crispus of Varena knew with appalling certainty what he would like to do on a sanctuary dome here, given the chance. He might be. They'd asked for a mosaicist. He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. His fingers were tingling. He opened his eyes and looked down at his scarred, scratched hands.

The second trumpet sounded. Crispin lifted his head just as the barriers below were whipped away and the chariots sprang forward like a thunder of war, pushing the inner image back in his mind but not away, not away.

‘Come on, you cursed Red!
Come on!
' Carullus was roaring at the top of his considerable voice, and Crispin knew why. He concentrated on the outside chariots and saw the Red driver burst off the line with exceptional speed— the very first team out of the barriers, it seemed to him. Crescens was almost as fast, and the Green second driver in the fifth lane was lashing his horses hard, preparing to lead his champion down and across as soon as they passed the
white line. In the eighth position, it seemed to Crispin that Scortius of the Blues had actually been caught unprepared by the trumpet; he seemed to have been turned backwards, saying something.

‘
On!
' roared Carullus. ‘Go! Lash them!
Good man, you Red!
'

The Red driver had already caught Scortius's Blues, Crispin saw, even against the advantage the outside chariot was given at the staggered start. Carullus had said it this morning: half the races were decided before the first turn. It looked like this one might be. With the Red already right beside him—and now pulling
ahead
with the ferocity of his start—the Blue champion had no way to cut down from his position so far outside. His cohorts in the inside lanes were going to be hard pressed to keep Crescens outside or blocked, especially with the Greens' second driver there to clear a path.

The first chariots reached the white line. The whip hand of the Red driver in the seventh lane seemed a blur of motion as he lashed his mounts forward, first to the line. It didn't matter where that team finished, Crispin knew. Only that they keep Scortius outside for as long as they could.

‘He's
done
it!' Carullus howled, clutching Crispin's left arm in his vise of a grip.

Crispin saw the two Green chariots cross the line and begin an immediate angling downwards—they had room. The White chariot in the fourth lane hadn't started fast enough to fend them off. Even if the White driver fouled the Green leading the way and they both went down, that would only open up more space for Crescens. It was wonderfully well done; even Crispin could see that.