He settled back into his cushioned seat in the third row of the kathisma and lifted a hand for a cup of wine, waiting for the afternoon’s program to begin. Even as he signalled, he heard a telltale rap behind him and rose, very swiftly. The carefully barred door at the back of the Imperial Box was unlocked and swung open by the Excubitors on guard, and Valerius and Alixana, with the Master of Offices, Leontes and his tall new bride, and a dozen other court attendants appeared in the box. Bonosus sank to his knees beside the other early arrivals and performed the triple obeisance.
Valerius, clearly not in good humour, moved briskly past them and stood beside his elevated throne at the front, in full view of the crowd. He hadn’t been present in the morning, but he dared not stay away all day. Not today. Not at the end of the festival, the last running of the year, and not, especially, with the memory only two years old of what had happened in this place. He needed to be seen here.
In a way it was perverse, but the all-powerful, godlike Emperors of Sarantium were enslaved by the Hippodrome tradition and the almost mythic force residing within it. The Emperor was the beloved servant and the mortal regent of Holy Jad. The god drove his fiery chariot through the daytime sky and then down through darkness under the world every night in battle. The charioteers in the Hippodrome did battle in mortal homage to the god’s glory and his wars.
The connection between the Emperor of Sarantium and the men racing quadrigas and bigas on the sand below had been made by mosaicists and poets and even clerics for hundreds of years-though the clerics also minted against the people’s passion for chariot-drivers and their ensuing failure to attend at the chapels. That, Bonosus thought wryly, had been an issue-one way or another-for much longer than a few hundred years, even before the faith of Jad had emerged in Rhodias.
But this underlying link between the throne and the chariots embedded deep in the Sarantine soul, and much as Valerius might resent time lost from paperwork and planning, his presence here went beyond the diplomatic and entered the holy. The mosaic on the roof of the kathisma showed Saranios the Founder in a chariot behind four horses, a victor’s wreath on his head, not a crown. There was a message in that and Valerius knew it. He might complain, but he was here, amongst his people, watching the chariots run in the god’s name.
The Mandator-the Emperor’s herald-lifted his staff of office from’, the right side of the box. A deafening roar immediately went up from eighty thousand throats. They had been watching the kathisma, waiting for this moment.
‘Valerius!’ cried the Greens, the Blues, all those gathered there: men, women, aristocrats, artisans, labourers, apprentices, shopkeepers, even slaves granted a day to themselves at Dykania. The notoriously changeable people of Sarantium had decided in the past two years that they loved their Emperor again. The evil Lysippus was gone, golden Leontes had won a war and conquered lands all the way to the deserts of the Majriti far to the south and west, restoring memories of Rhodias in its grandeur. ‘All hail the thrice-exalted! All hail our thrice-glorious Emperor! All hail the Empress Alixana.’
And well the people should hail her, Bonosus thought. She was one of them in a way that no one else here in the kathisma was. A living symbol of how high someone might rise, even from a rat-infested hovel of an apartment in the bowels of the Hippodrome.
With a wide gesture of encompassing benevolence, Valerius II of Sarantium greeted his welcoming citizens and signalled for a handkerchief for the Empress to drop that the Processional might commence the afternoon races begin. A secretary was already crouched down- hidden from the crowd by the railing of the kathisma-preparing to deal with the Emperor’s flow of dictation that would proceed even while the horses ran. Valerius might accede to the demands imposed by the day and appear before his people, joined to them here in the Hippodrome, united by the sport and the courage down below-mirrors of Jad in his godly chariot-but he would certainly not waste an entire afternoon.