Kay, Guy Gavriel – Sarantine Mosaic 01 – Sailing to Sarantium

Not nearly so much as horses were, mind you. Nothing was.

‘Shoulder mending?’

Scortius glanced back quickly, barely masking surprise. The compact, well-made man who’d asked, who came now to stand companionably beside him in the archway, was not someone he’d have expected to make polite inquiry of him.

‘Pretty much,’ he said briefly to Astorgus of the Blues, the pre-eminent driver of the day-the man he’d been brought north from Sarnica to chal­lenge. Scortius felt awkward, inept beside the older man. He’d no idea how to handle a moment such as this. Astorgus had not one but two stat­ues raised in his name already, among the monuments in the spina of the Hippodrome, and one of them was bronze. He had dined in the Attenine Palace half a dozen times, it was reported. The powers of the Imperial Precinct solicited his views on matters within the City.

Astorgus laughed, his features revealing easy amusement. ‘I mean you no harm, lad. No poisons, no curse-tablets, no footpads in the dark out­side a lady’s home.’

Scortius felt himself flush. ‘I know that,’ he mumbled.

Astorgus, his gaze on the crowded track and stands, added, ‘A rivalry’s good for all of us. Keeps people talking about the races. Even when they aren’t here. Makes them wager.’ He leaned against one of the pillars sup­porting the arch. ‘Makes them want more race days. They petition the Emperors. Emperors want the citizens happy. They add races to the cal­endar. That means more purses for all of us, lad. You’ll help me retire that much sooner.’ He turned to Scortius and smiled. He had an amazingly scarred face.

‘You want to retire?’ Scortius said, astonished.

‘I am,’ said Astorgus, mildly, ‘thirty-nine years old. Yes, I want to retire.’

‘They won’t let you. The Blue partisans will demand your return.’

‘And I’ll return. Once. Twice. For a price. Then I’ll let my old bones have their reward and leave the fractures and scars and the tumbling falls to you, or even younger men. Any idea how many riders I’ve seen die on the track since I started?’

Scortius had seen enough deaths in his own short time not to need an answer to that. Whichever colour they raced for, the frenzied parti­sans of the other faction wished them dead, maimed, broken. People came to the hippodromes to see blood and hear screaming as much as to admire speed. Deadly curses were dropped on wax tablets into graves, wells, cisterns, were buried at crossroads, hurled into the sea by moon­light from the City walls. Alchemists and cheiromancers-real ones and charlatans-were paid to cast ruinous spells against named riders and horses. In the hippodromes of the Empire the charioteers raced with Death-the Ninth Driver-as much as with each other. Heladikos, son of Jad, had died in his chariot, and they were his followers. Or some of them were.

The two racers stood in silence a moment, watching the tumult from the shadowed arch. If the crowd spotted them, Scortius knew, they’d be besieged, on the spot.

They weren’t seen. Instead, Astorgus said very softly, after a silence, ‘That man. The group just there. All the Blues? He isn’t. He isn’t a Blue. I know him. I wonder what he’s doing?’

Scortius, only mildly interested, glanced over in time to see the man idicated cup hands to mouth and shout, in a patrician, carrying voice: ‘Daleinus to the Golden Throne! The Blues for Flavius Daleinus!’

‘Oh, my,’ said Astorgus, First Chariot of the Blues, almost to himself. ‘Here too? What a clever, clever bastard he is.’ Scortius had no idea what the other man was talking about.

Only long afterwards, looking back, piecing things together, would he understand.

Fotius the sandalmaker had actually been eyeing the heavy-set, smooth-shaven man in the perfectly pressed blue tunic for some time.

Standing in an unusually mixed cluster of faction partisans and citi­zens of no evident affiliation, Fotius mopped at his forehead with a damp sleeve and tried to ignore the sweat trickling down his ribs and back. His own tunic was stained and splotched. So was Pappio’s green one, beside him. The glassblower’s balding head was covered with a cap that might once have been handsome but was now a wilted object of general mirth. It was brutally hot already. The breeze had died with the sunrise.