‘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. Then he saw something else.
Scortius of the Blues, in the worst position, farthest outside, with a fiercely determined Red driver lashing his horses into a frenzy to get ahead of him, let that chariot go by.
Then the Blue driver suddenly leaned over, so far left his upper body was outside the platform of his chariot, and from that position he sent his whip forward-for the first time-and lashed his right trace horse. At the same time the big bay on the left side of the team, the one called Servator, pulled sharply left and the Blue chariot almost pivoted on the sands as Scortius hurled his body back to the right to balance it. It seemed impossible it could remain upright, keep rolling, as the four horses passed behind the still accelerating Red driver at an unbelievably sharp angle straight across the open track and right up to the back of Crescens’s chariot.
‘Jad rot the soul of the man!’ Carullus screamed, as if in mortal agony. ‘I don’t believe it! I do not believe it! It was a trick! That start was deliberate! He wanted to do this!’ He shook both fists in the air, a man in the grip of a vast passion. ‘Oh, Scortius, my heart, why did you leave us?’
All around them, even in the stands of those not formally aligned with one faction or another, men and women were screaming as Carullus was, so startling and spectacular had that angled, careening move been. Crispin heard Vargos and he heard himself shouting with all of them as if his own spirit were down there in the chariot with the man in the blue tunic and leather straps. The horses thundered into the first turn passing beneath the Imperial Box. Dust swirled, the noise was colossal. Scortius was right behind his rival, his four horses almost trampling on the back of the other man’s chariot. None of Crescens’s allies could block him without also impeding the Green driver or fouling so flagrantly from the side as to disqualify their colour from victory.
The chariots whipped along the far stands as Crispin and the others strained to see across the spina and its monuments. The Blues’ second driver had used his inside position to seize and hold the lead and he was first into the second turning, straining to keep his horses from drifting outside. Right behind him, surprisingly, was the young Red driver from the seventh lane. Having failed to block Scortius, he had done the only thing he could and pressed downwards himself, taking advantage of his spectacular-and spectacularly unsuccessful-start from the barriers.
The first of the seven bronze sea-horses tilted and dived from above, down into the silver tank of water at one end of the spina. An egg-shaped counter flipped over at the opposite end. One lap done. Six to go.