‘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.’
Those five we drank with?’
‘One of them, anyhow. The noisy one.’
The five young men had pushed ahead of them across the Hippodrome Forum, heading for the patrician gates and their reserved seats.
‘Who was the woman he was going on about?’
‘A dancer. It’s always a dancer. Latest darling of the Greens. Name’s Shirin, apparendy. A looker, it sounds like. They usually are. The young aristocrats are always elbowing each other to get in bed with the dancer or actress of the day. A long tradition. The Emperor married one, after all.’
‘Shirin?’ Crispin was amused. He had that name in his baggage, on a torn-off piece of parchment.
‘Yes, why?’
‘Interesting. If this is the same person, I’m supposed to visit her. A message to deliver from her father.’ Zoticus had said she was a prostitute, at first.
Carullus looked astonished. ‘Jad’s fire, Rhodian, you are a series of surprises. Don’t tell my new friends. The youngest one might knife you- or hire someone to do it-if he hears you have access to her.’
‘Or be my friend for life if I offer to let him come visit with me.’
Carullus laughed. ‘Wealthy lad. Useful friend.’ The two men exchanged an ironic glance.
Vargos, on Crispin’s other side, listened carefully, saying nothing. Kasia was back at the inn where they’d booked a room last night. She’d been invited to come with them-women were permitted in the Hippodrome under Valerius and Alixana-but had been showing signs of distress ever since they’d passed into the roiling chaos of the City. Vargos hadn’t been happy either, but he’d been within city walls before and had some framework for his expectations.
Sarantium dwarfed expectations, but they’d been warned it would.
The long walk from the landward walls to the inn near the Hippodrome had visibly unsettled Kasia the day before. It was a festival; the noise levels and the numbers of people in the streets were overwhelming. They had passed a half-naked ascetic perched precariously on the top of a squared-off triumphal obelisk, his long white beard streaming sideways in the breeze. He was preaching of the City’s iniquities to a gathered cluster of the City’s people. He’d been up there three years, someone said. It was best to stay upwind, they added.
A few prostitutes had been working the edges of the same crowd. Carullus had eyed one of them and then laughed as she grinned at him and slowly walked away, hips swinging. He’d pointed: the imprint of her sandals in the dust read, quite clearly, ‘Follow Me.’
Kasia hadn’t laughed, Crispin remembered.
And she had elected to remain behind at the inn today rather than deal with the streets again so soon.
‘You’d really have started a fight with them?’ Vargos asked Carullus. His first words of the afternoon.
The tribune glanced over at him. ‘Of course I would have. Leontes was maligned in my hearing by an effete little City snob who can’t even grow a proper moustache yet.’
Crispin said, ‘You’ll do a lot of fighting if that’s going to be your attitude here. I suspect the Sarantines are free with their opinions.’
Carullus snorted. ‘You are telling me about the City, Rhodian?’
‘How many times have you been here?’
Carullus looked chagrined. ‘Well, just twice in point of fact, but-‘
‘Then I suspect I know rather more than you about urban ways, soldier. Varena isn’t Sarantium, and Rhodias isn’t what it was, but I do know that if you bridle at every overheard opinion the way you might in a barracks you command you’ll never survive.’