Sailing to Sarantium Read online

  He watches her, smiling slightly. He has a smoothshaven, round face with a soft chin and grey, observant eyes. Not a handsome or an arresting man, he projects a genial, uncontentious, open manner. This is, of course, useful.

  Her dark brown hair, he notes, has become tinged with red through the course of the summer. He wonders when she’s had occasion to be outside enough for that to happen, then realizes the colour might be artificial. He doesn’t ask. He is not inclined to probe the details of what she does when they are not together in this apartment he has bought for her on a carefully chosen street.

  That reminds him of why he is here just now. He looks away from the woman on the bed—her name is Aliana—and back out through the beaded curtains over the street. Some movement, for the morning is advanced and the news will have run through Sarantium by now.

  The doorway he is watching remains closed. There are two guards outside it, but there always are. He knows the names of these two, and the others, and their backgrounds. Details of this sort can sometimes matter. Indeed, they tend to matter. He is careful in such things, and less genial than might appear to the unsubtle.

  A man had entered through that doorway, his bearing urgent with tidings, just before sunrise. He had watched this by the light of the exterior torches, and had noted the livery. He had smiled then. Gesius the Chancellor had chosen to make his move. The game was begun, indeed. The man in the solarium expects to win it but is experienced enough in the ways of power in the world, already, to know that he might not. His name is Petrus.

  ‘You are tired of me,’ the woman says, ending a silence. Her voice is low, amused. The careful movements of her arms, attending to her hair, do not cease. ‘Alas, the day has come.’

  ‘That day will never come,’ the man says calmly, also amused. This is a game they play, from within the entirely improbable certainty of their relationship. He does not turn from watching the doorway now, however.

  ‘I will be on the street again, at the mercy of the factions. A toy for the wildest partisans with their barbarian ways. A cast-aside actress, disgraced and abandoned, past my best years.’

  She was twenty in the year when the Emperor Apius died. The man has seen thirty-one summers; not young, but it was said of him—before and after that year—that he was one of those who had never been young.

  ‘I’d give it two days,’ he murmurs, ‘before some infatuated scion of the Names, or a rising merchant in silk or Ispahani spice won your fickle heart with jewellery and a private bathhouse.’

  ‘A private bathhouse,’ she agrees, ‘would be a considerable lure.’

  He glances over, smiling. She’d known he would, and has managed, not at all by chance, to be posed in profile, both arms uplifted in her hair, her head turned towards him, dark eyes wide. She has been on the stage since she was seven years old. She holds the pose a moment, then laughs.

  The soft-featured man, clad only in a dove-grey tunic with no undergarments in the aftermath of lovemaking, shakes his head. His own sand-coloured hair is thinning a little but not yet grey. ‘Our beloved Emperor is dead, no heir in sight, Sarantium in mortal peril, and you idly torment a grieving and troubled man.’

  ‘May I come and do it some more?’ she asks.

  She sees him actually hesitate. That surprises and even excites her, in truth: a measure of his need of her, that even on this morning . . .

  But in that instant there comes a sequence of sounds from the street below. A lock turning, a heavy door opening and closing, hurried voices, too loud, and then another, flat with command. The man by the beaded curtain turns quickly and looks out again.

  The woman pauses then, weighing many things at this moment in her life. But the real decision, in truth, has been made some time ago. She trusts him, and herself, amazingly. She drapes her body—a kind of defending—in the bed linen before saying to his nowintent profile, from which the customary genial expression has entirely gone, ‘What is he wearing?’

  He ought not to have been, the man will decide much later, nearly so surprised by the question and what she—very deliberately—revealed with it. Her attraction for him, from the beginning, has resided at least as much in wit and perception as in her beauty and the gifts that drew Sarantines to the theatre every night she performed, alternately aroused and then driven to shouts of laughter and applause.

  He is astonished, though, and surprise is rare for him. He is not a man accustomed to allowing things to disconcert him. This happens to be one matter he has not confided in her, however. And, as it turns out, what the silver-haired man in the still-shaded street has elected to wear as he steps from his home into the view of the world, on a morning fraught with magnitude, matters very much.

  Petrus looks back at the woman. Even now he turns away from the street to her, and both of them will remember that, after. He sees that she’s covered herself, that she is a little bit afraid, though would surely deny it. Very little escapes him. He is moved, both by the implications of her voicing the question and by the presence of her fear.

  ‘You knew?’ he asks quietly.

  ‘You were extremely specific about this apartment,’ she murmurs, ‘the requirement of a solarium over this particular street. It was not hard to note which doorways could be watched from here. And the theatre or the Blues’ banqueting hall are sources of information on Imperial manoeuvrings as much as the palaces or the barracks are. What is he wearing, Petrus?’

  She has a habit of lowering her voice for emphasis, not raising it: training on the stage. It is very effective. Many things about her are. He looks out again, and down, through the screening curtain at the cluster of men before the one doorway that matters.

  ‘White,’ he says, and pauses before adding softly, no more than a breath of his own, ‘bordered, shoulder to knee, with purple.’

  ‘Ah,’ she says. And rises then, bringing the bedsheet to cover herself as she walks towards him, trailing it behind her. She is not tall but moves as if she were. ‘He wears porphyry. This morning. And so?’

  ‘And so,’ he echoes. But not as a question.

  Reaching through the beads of the curtain with one hand, he makes a brief, utterly unexceptionable sign of the sun disk for the benefit of the men who have been waiting in the street-level apartment across the way for a long time now. He waits only to see the sign returned from a small, iron-barred guard’s portal and then he rises to cross towards the small, quite magnificent woman in the space between room and solarium.

  ‘What happens, Petrus?’ she asks. ‘What happens now?’

  He is not a physically impressive man, which makes the sense of composed mastery he can display all the more impressive—and unsettling—at times.

  ‘Idle torment was offered,’ he murmurs. ‘Was it not? We have some little leisure now.’

  She hesitates, then smiles, and the bedsheet, briefly a garment, slips to the floor.

  There is a very great tumult in the street below not long after. Screaming, desperately wild shouts, running footsteps. They do not leave the bed this time. At one point, in the midst of lovemaking, he reminds her, a whisper at one ear, of a promise made a little more than a year ago. She has remembered it, of course, but has never quite let herself believe it. Today—this morning—taking his lips with her own, his body within hers again, thinking of an Imperial death in the night just past, and another death now, and the uttermost unlikeliness of love, she does. She actually does believe him now.

  Nothing has ever frightened her more, and this is a woman who has already lived a life, young as she is, where great fear has been known and appropriate. But what she says to him, a little later, when space to speak returns to them, as movement and the conjoined spasms pass, is: ‘Remember, Petrus. A private bath, cold and hot water, with steam, or I find myself a spice merchant who knows how to treat a high-born lady.’

  All he’d ever wanted to do was race horses.

  From first awareness of being in the world, it seemed to him, his desire had been to move
among horses, watch them canter, walk, run; talk to them, talk about them, and about chariots and drivers all the god’s day and into starlight. He wanted to tend them, feed them, help them into life, train them to harness, reins, whip, chariot, noise of crowd. And then—by Jad’s grace, and in honour of Heladikos, the god’s gallant son who died in his chariot bringing fire to men—stand in his own quadriga behind four of them, leaning far forward over their tails, reins wrapped about his body lest they slip through sweaty fingers, knife in belt for a desperate cutting free if he fell, and urge them on to speeds and a taut grace in the turnings that no other man could even imagine.

  But hippodromes and chariots were in the wider world and of the world, and nothing in the Sarantine Empire—not even worship of the god—was clean and uncomplicated. It had even become dangerous here in the City to speak too easily of Heladikos. Some years ago the High Patriarch in what remained of ruined Rhodias and the Eastern Patriarch here in Sarantium had issued a rare joint Pronouncement that Holy Jad, the god in the Sun and behind the Sun, had no born children, mortal or otherwise—that all men were, in spirit, the sons of the god. That Jad’s essence was above and beyond propagation. That to worship, or even honour the idea of a begotten son was paganism, assailing the pure divinity of the god.

  But how else, clerics back in Soriyya and elsewhere had preached in opposition, had the ineffable, blindingly bright Golden Lord of Worlds made himself accessible to lowly mankind? If Jad loved his mortal creation, the sons of his spirit, did it not hold that he would embody a part of himself in mortal guise, to seal the covenant of that love? And that seal was Heladikos, the Charioteer, his child.

  Then there were the Antae, who had conquered in Batiara and accepted the worship of Jad—embracing Heladikos with him, but as a demi-god himself, not merely a mortal child. Barbaric paganism, the orthodox clerics now thundered—except those who lived in Batiara under the Antae. And since the High Patriarch himself lived there at their sufferance in Rhodias, the fulminations against Heladikian heresies were muted in the west.

  But here in Sarantium issues of faith were endlessly debated everywhere, in dockfront cauponae, whorehouses, cookshops, the Hippodrome, the theatres. You couldn’t buy a brooch to pin your cloak without hearing the vendor’s views on Heladikos or the proper liturgy for the sunrise invocations.

  There were too many in the Empire—and especially in the City itself—who had thought and worshipped in their own way for too long for the Patriarchs and clerics to persecute aggressively, but the signs of a deepening division were everywhere, and unrest was always present.

  In Soriyya, to the south between desert and sea, where Jaddites dwelt perilously near to the Bassanid frontier, and among the Kindath and the grimly silent, nomadic peoples of Ammuz and the deserts beyond, whose faith was fragmented from tribe to tribe and inexplicable, shrines to Heladikos were as common as sanctuaries or chapels built for the god. The courage of the son, his willingness to sacrifice, were virtues exalted by clerics and secular leaders both in lands bordering enemies. The City, behind its massive triple walls and the guarding sea, could afford to think differently, they said in the desert lands. And Rhodias in the far-off west had long since been sacked, so what true guidance could its High Patriarch offer now?

  Scortius of Soriyya, youngest lead racer ever to ride for the Greens of Sarantium, who only wanted to drive a chariot and think of nothing but speed and stallions, prayed to Heladikos and his golden chariot in the silence of his soul, being a contained, private young man—half a son of the desert himself. How, he had decided in childhood, could any charioteer do otherwise than honour the Charioteer? Indeed, he was inwardly of the belief—untutored though he might be in such matters—that those he raced against who followed the Patriarchal Pronouncement and denied the god’s son were cutting themselves off from a vital source of intervention when they wheeled through the arches onto the dangerous, proving sands of the Hippodrome before eighty thousand screaming citizens.

  Their problem, not his.

  He was nineteen years old, riding First Chariot for the Greens in the largest stadium in the world, and he had a genuine chance to be the first rider since Ormaez the Esperanan to win his hundred in the City before his twentieth birthday, at the end of the summer.

  But the Emperor was dead. There would be no racing today, and for the god knew how many days during the mourning rites. There were twenty thousand people or more in the Hippodrome this morning, spilling out onto the track, but they were murmuring anxiously among themselves, or listening to yellow-robed clerics intone the liturgy, not watching the chariots wheeled out in the Procession. He’d lost half a race day last week to a shoulder injury, and now today was gone, and next week? The week after?

  Scortius knew he ought not to be so concerned with his own affairs at a time such as this. The clerics—whether Heladikian or Orthodox—would all castigate him for it. On some things the religious agreed.

  He saw men weeping in the stands and on the track, others gesturing too broadly, speaking too loudly, fear in their eyes. He had seen that fear when the chariots were running, in other drivers’ faces. He couldn’t say he had ever felt it himself, except when the Bassanid armies had come raiding across the sands and, standing on their city ramparts, he had looked up and seen his father’s eyes. They had surrendered that time, lost their city, their homes—only to regain them four years later in a treaty, following victories on the northern border. Conquests were traded back and forth all the time.

  He understood that the Empire might be in danger now. Horses needed a firm hand, and so did an Empire. His problem was that, growing up where he had, he’d seen the eastern armies of Shirvan, King of Kings, too many times to feel remotely as anxious as those he watched now. Life was too rich, too new, too impossibly exciting for his spirits to be dragged downwards, even today.

  He was nineteen, and a charioteer. In Sarantium.

  Horses were his life, as he had dreamed once they might be. These affairs of the larger world . . . Scortius could let others sort them out. Someone would be named Emperor. Someone would sit in the kathisma—the Imperial Box—midway along the Hippodrome’s western side one day soon—the god willing!—and drop the white handkerchief to signal the Procession, and the chariots would parade and then run. It didn’t much matter to a charioteer, Scortius of Soriyya thought, who the man with the handkerchief was.

  He was truly young, in the City less than half a year, recruited by the Greens’ factionarius from the small hippodrome in Sarnica, where he’d been driving broken-down horses for the lowly Reds—and winning races. He had a deal of growing up to do and much to learn. He would do it, in fact, and fairly quickly. Men change, sometimes.

  Scortius leaned against an archway, shadowed, watching the crowd from a vantage point that led back along a runway to the interior workrooms and animal stalls and the tiny apartments of the Hippodrome staff beneath the stands. A locked door partway along the tunnel led down to the cavernous cisterns where much of the City’s water supply was stored. On idle days, the younger riders and grooms sometimes raced small boats among the thousand pillars there in the echoing, watery spaces and faint light.

  Scortius wondered if he ought to go outside and across the forum to the Green stables to check on his best team of horses, leaving the clerics to their chanting and the more unruly elements of the citizenry hurling names of Imperial candidates back and forth, even through the holy services.

  He recognized, if vaguely, one or two of the names loudly invoked. He hadn’t made himself familiar with all the army officers and aristocrats, let alone the stupefying number of palace functionaries in Sarantium. Who could, and still concentrate on what mattered? He had eighty-three wins, and his birthday was the last day of summer. It could be done. He rubbed his bruised shoulder, glancing up. No clouds, the threat of rain had passed away east. It would be a very hot day. Heat was good for him out on the track. Coming from Soriyya, burnt dark by the god’s sun, he could cope with the white
blazing of summer better than most of the others. This would have been a good day for him, he was sure of it. Lost, now. The Emperor had died.

  He suspected that more than words and names would be flying in the Hippodrome before the morning was out. Crowds of this sort were rarely calm for long, and today’s circumstances had Greens and Blues mingling much more than was safe. When the weather heated up so did tempers. A hippodrome riot in Sarnica, just before he left, had ended up with half the Kindath quarter of that city burning as the mob boiled out into the streets.

  The Excubitors were here this morning, though, armed and watchful, and the mood was more apprehensive than angry. He might be wrong about the violence. Scortius would have been the first to admit he didn’t know much about anything but horses. A woman had told him that only two nights ago, but she had sounded languorous as a cat and not displeased. He had discovered, actually, that the same gentling voice that worked with skittish horses was sometimes effective with the women who waited for him after a race day, or sent their servants to wait.

  It didn’t always work, mind you. He’d had an odd sense, part way through the night with that catlike woman, that she might have preferred to be driven or handled the way he drove a quadriga in the hard, lashing run to the finish line. That had been an unsettling thought. He hadn’t acted on it, of course. Women were proving difficult to sort out; worth thinking about, though, he had to admit that.

  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.