Sailing to Sarantium (5 page)

'Probably does,' a man beside Fotius said sourly. 'What would the
Daleinoi know of any of us?'

'They are an honourable family!' someone else interjected.

Fotius left them to debate. He crossed the ground towards the cluster
of Blues. He felt angry and hot. He struck the imposter on one
shoulder. This close, he could smell a scent on the man. Perfume? In
the Hippodrome?

'By Jad's Light, who are you?' he demanded. 'You aren't a Blue, how
dare you speak in our name?'

The man turned. He was bulky, but not fat. He had odd, pale green
eyes, which now regarded Fotius as if he were some form of insect
that had crawled out of a wine flask. Fotius actually wondered, amid
his own turbulent thoughts, how anyone's tunic could remain so crisp
and clean here this morning.

The others had overheard. They looked at Fotius and the man who said,
contemptuously, in a clipped, precise voice, 'And you are the
Accredited Record Keeper of the Blues in Sarantium, dare I suppose?
Hah. You probably can't even read.'

'Maybe he can't,' said Pappio, striding up boldly, 'but you wore a
Green tunic last fall to our end-of-season banquet. I remember you
there. You even made a toast. You were drunk!'

The man seemed, clearly, to classify Pappio as close kin to whatever
crashing thing Fotius was. He wrinkled his nose. 'And men are
forbidden by some new ordinance to change their allegiance now? I am
not allowed to enjoy and celebrate the triumphs of the mighty
Asportus?'

'Who?' Fotius said.

'Astorgus,' the man said quickly. 'Astorgus of the Blues.'

'Get out of here,' said Daccilio, who had been one of the Blue
faction leaders for as long as Fotius could remember, and who had
carried the banner at this year's Hippodrome opening ceremonies. 'Get
out, now!'

'Take off that blue tunic first!' someone else rasped angrily. Voices
were raised. Heads turned in their direction. From all over the
Hippodrome the too-synchronized frauds were still crying the name of
Flavius Daleinus. With a roiling, hot anger that was actually a kind
of joy, Fotius grabbed a fistful of the imposter's crisp blue tunic
in his sweaty hands.

Asportus, indeed.

He jerked hard and felt the tunic tear at the shoulder. The jewelled
brooch holding it fell onto the sand. He laughed-and then let out a
scream as something smashed him across the back of the knees. He
staggered, collapsed in the dust. Just as the charioteers fall, he
thought.

He looked up, tears in his eyes, pain taking his breath away.
Excubitors. Of course. Three of them had come. Armed, impersonal,
merciless. They could kill him as easily as crack him across the
knees, and with as much impunity. This was Sarantium. Commoners died
to make an example every day. A spear point was leveled at his
breast.

'Next man who strikes another here gets a spearpoint, not a shaft,'
the man holding the weapon said, his voice hollow within his helmet.
He was utterly calm. The Imperial Guard were the best-trained men in
the City.

'You'll be busy, then,' said Daccilio bluntly, unintimidated. 'It
seems the spontaneous demonstration arranged by the illustrious
Daleinoi is not achieving what might have been desired.'

The three Excubitors looked up into the stands and the one with the
levelled spear swore, rather less calmly. There were fistfights
breaking out now, centred around the men who had been shouting that
patently contrived acclamation. Fotius lay motionless, not even
daring to rub his legs, until the spear point wavered and moved away.
The green-eyed imposter in the torn blue tunic was no longer among
them. Fotius had no idea where he'd gone.

Pappio knelt beside him. 'My friend, are you all right?'

Fotius managed to nod. He wiped at the tears and sweat on his face.
His tunic and legs were coated with dust now, from the sacred ground
where charioteers raced. He felt a sudden wave of fellow-feeling for
the balding glassblower. Pappio was a Green, to be sure, but he was a
decent fellow for all that. And he had helped unmask a deception.

Asportus of the Blues! Asportus? Fotius almost gagged. Trust the
Daleinoi, those arrogant patricians, to have so little respect for
the citizens as to imagine this shabby pantomime could get Flavius's
rump onto the Golden Throne!

The Excubitors beside them suddenly pulled themselves into a line,
bristling with military precision. Fotius glanced quickly past them.
A man on a horse had entered the Hippodrome, riding slowly along the
spina towards the midpoint.

Others saw the rider. Someone cried his name, and then more voices
did. This time it was spontaneous. A guard of Excubitors moved into
place around him as he reined the horse to a stop. It was the formal
array of their ranks, and the silence of them, that drew all eyes and
compelled a gradual stillness of twenty thousand people.

'Citizens of Sarantium, I have tidings,' cried Valerius, Count of the
Excubitors, in the rough, unvarnished soldier's tones.

They couldn't all hear him, of course, but the words were repeated by
others-as was always the case here-and ran through that vast space,
far up into the stands, across the spina with its obelisks and
statues, through the empty kathisma where the Emperor would sit for
the racing, and under the arches where some charioteers and
Hippodrome staff were watching, shielded from the blazing sun.

Fotius saw the brooch on the sand beside him. He palmed it quickly.
No one else seemed to notice. He would sell it, not long after, for
enough money to change his life. Just now, though, he scrambled to
his feet. He was dusty, grimy, sticky with sweat, but thought he
should be standing when his Emperor was named.

He was wrong about what was coming, but why should he have understood
the dance being danced that day?

 

Much later, the investigation by the Master of Offices, through the
Quaestor of Imperial Intelligence, proved unexpectedly and
embarrassingly incapable of determining the murderers of the most
prominent Sarantine aristocrat of his day.

It was established readily enough that Flavius Daleinus-only recently
returned to the City, had left his home on the morning of the death
of the Emperor Apius, accompanied by his two older sons, a nephew,
and a small retinue. Family members confirmed that he was on his way
to the Senate Chamber to offer a formal expression of support to the
Senators in their time of trial and decision. There was some
suggestion-not confirmed from the Imperial Precinct-that he had
arranged to meet the Chancellor there and be escorted afterwards by
Gesius to the Attenine Palace to pay his last respects.

The condition of Daleinus's body and what remained of his clothing
when the dead man was carried on a bier to his home, and then later
to his final resting place in the family mausoleum, was such that a
widely reported rumour about his attire that morning was also not
amenable to official confirmation.

The clothing had all burned-with or without the much-discussed strip
of purple-and most of the elegant aristocrat's skin had been charred
black or scorched entirely away. What remained of his face was
horrifying, the features beneath the once-distinguished silver hair a
melted ruin. His oldest son and the nephew had also died, and four of
his entourage. The surviving son, it was reported, was now blind and
unfit to be seen. He was expected to take clerical vows and withdraw
from the City.

Sarantine Fire did that to men.

It was one of the secrets of the Empire, shielded with ferocity, for
it was the weapon that had guarded the City-thus far-from incursions
over the water. Terror ran before that molten, liquid fire that set
ships and men alight, burning upon the sea.

It had never, in living memory or in any of the military chronicles,
been used within the walls, or indeed in any land engagement of the
armies.

This, of course, directed informed suspicion upon the Strategos of
the Navy and, indeed, any other military commanders who might have
been able to suborn the naval engineers entrusted with the technique
of training the liquid fire through a hose, or launching it through
space upon the seafaring enemies of Sarantium.

In due course a number of appropriate persons were subjected to
expert questioning. Their deaths did not, however, serve the ultimate
goal of determining who it was who had arranged the hideous
assassination of a distinguished patrician. The Strategos of the
Navy, a man of the old school, elected to end his life, but left
behind a letter declaring his innocence of any crimes and his mortal
shame that such a weapon, entrusted to his care, had been used in
this way. His death was, accordingly, not a useful one either.

It was reliably reported that three men had wielded the siphon
apparatus. Or five. That they were wearing the colours and had the
Bassanid-style clothing and the barbarian moustaches and long hair of
the most extreme Green partisans. Or of the Blues. Further, that they
wore the light brown tunics with black trim of the Urban Prefect's
men. It was recounted that they had fled east down an alley. Also
west. Or through the back of a house on the exclusive, shaded street
where the Daleinoi's City mansion could be found. It was declared,
with conviction, that the assassins had been Kindath in their silver
robes and blue caps. No evident motive commended itself for this, but
those worshippers of the two moons might well do evil for its own
sake. Some ensuing, sporadic attacks in the Kindath Quarter were
judged excusable by the Urban Prefect, as a way of discharging
tensions in the City.

All the licensed foreign merchants in Sarantium were advised to keep
to their allotted quarters of the City until further notice. Some of
those who recklessly did not-curious, perhaps, to observe the
unfolding events of those days-suffered predictable, unfortunate
consequences. The assassins of Flavius Daleinus were never found. In
the meticulous tally of the dead in that difficult time, ordered and
executed by the Urban Prefect at the command of the Master of
Offices, there was a report of three bodies found washed ashore four
days later by soldiers patrolling the coast to the east of the triple
walls. They were naked, skin bleached grey-white by the sea, and sea
creatures had been at their faces and extremities.

No connection was ever made between this finding and the events of
the terrible night the Emperor Apius went to the god, to be followed
in the morning by the noble Flavius Daleinus. What connection could
have been made? Bodies were found by fishermen in the water and along
the stony beaches east all the time.

In the private, perhaps petty way of an intelligent man without any
real power, Plautus Bonosus rather enjoyed the expression on the
Imperial Chancellor's face when the Master of Offices appeared in the
Senate Chamber that morning, shortly after Gesius had arrived.

The tall, thin eunuch pressed his fingers together and inclined his
head gravely, as if Adrastus's arrival was a source of support and
consolation to him. But Bonosus had been watching his face when the
ornate doors-rather the worse for their earlier battering-were pried
open by the guards.

Gesius had been expecting someone else.

Bonosus had a pretty good idea who that might have been. It was going
to be interesting, he thought, when all the players in this morning's
pantomime were assembled. Adrastus, clearly, had arrived on his own
behalf. With the two most powerful-and dangerous-strategoi and their
forces each more than two weeks' hard marching from Sarantium, the
Master of Offices had a legitimate pathway to the Golden Throne-if he
moved decisively. His lineage among the 'Names' was impeccable, his
experience and rank unsurpassed, and he had the usual assortment of
friends. And enemies.

Gesius, of course, could not even imagine Imperial status for
himself, but the Chancellor could engineer a succession-or try to do
so-that would ensure his own continuance at the heart of power in the
Empire. It would be far from the first time one of the Imperial
eunuchs had orchestrated affairs of succession.

Bonosus, listening to the bland shuffle of speeches from his
colleagues-variations on a theme of grievous loss and momentous
decisions to come-signalled a slave for a cup of chilled wine and
wondered who would take a wager with him.

A charming blond boy-from Karch in the far north, by his
colouring-brought his wine. Bonosus smiled at him, and idly watched
the boy walk back to the near wall. He reviewed, again, the state of
his own relations with the Daleinoi. No conflicts that he knew. Two
shared-and profitable-backings of a spice ship to Ispahani some years
ago, before his appointment. His wife reported that she greeted the
lady wife of Flavius Daleinus when they met at the baths they both
preferred, and that she was always responded to politely and by name.
This was good.

Bonosus expected that Gesius would win this morning. That his
patrician candidate would emerge as the Emperor Designate, with the
eunuch retaining his position as Imperial Chancellor. The conjoined
power of the Chancellor and the wealthiest family in the City were
more than a match for Adrastus's ambition, however silken might be
the manner and the intricate webs of intelligence spun by the Master
of Offices. Bonosus was prepared to risk a sizeable sum on the
affair, if he could find a taker.

Later, he, too, would have cause to be privately grateful-amid
chaos-that a wager had not taken place that day.

Watching as he sipped his wine, Bonosus saw Gesius, with the
smallest, elegant gesture of his long fingers, petition Oradius to be
allowed to speak. He saw the Master of the Senate bob his head up and
down like a street puppet in immediate acknowledgement. He's been
bought, he decided. Adrastus would have his supporters here too.
Would doubtless make his own speech soon. It was going to be
interesting. Who could squeeze the hapless Senate harder? No one had
tried to bribe Bonosus. He wondered if he ought to be flattered or
offended.