The Emperor's Games

by The Emperor's Games (retail) (epub)

  The emperor was in the reviewing box, looking bored, but Ygerna couldn’t see Flavius. Vettius was there, with his optio beside him. His sleek face showed a bit of a smile at the corners of his mouth. Tribune Petreius lounged on a bench nearby, with a slave holding an oiled canvas parasol in case it should rain on the tribune’s armor. A fat man with oily dark hair and gold rings on the pudgy hands clasped across his paunch sat beside Petreius, with another slave arranging a rug across his lap. The benches everywhere were crowded to overflowing with soldiers and all the civilians of the vicus. Rhodope was there, like a fat, jeweled hen, with all her painted chicks around her. The German delegation turned out in wolfskin shirts and gold torques. Vettius’s woman sat eating sweetmeats on the other side of the reviewing box, and a little farther on was Julius Frontinus in his purple cloak. It was a festival hiatus in the middle of an irksome campaign, and the crowd was set to enjoy itself. For a provincial race, a great deal of money was on the books.

  The army trumpeter beside the reviewing box raised his horn, and the crowd settled in expectantly. Beside him, a race keeper with a wooden slate called out a name. The first team, a showy set of sorrels, swept through the opening at the end of the track. The driver, a blond, red-faced decurion named Rabirius, drew rein in front of the reviewing box, saluted the emperor, and took his place along the starting line chalked in the damp earth.

  The next name was Quintus, and Vettius permitted himself a slight smile as it was called. Centurion Quintus was sitting in the stands and looking surly. Vettius waited for him to stand and say his team was scratched, but Quintus didn’t twitch. The sound of ponies’ hooves made Vettius snap his head around.

  The bays frisked and swished their black tails as they came around the track to the box, and Correus held them well in. Like the other drivers, his reins were lashed around his waist, and there was a knife in his belt to cut them if necessary. He wore breeches and shirt to block the cold, which had a sharp edge in a moving chariot, and an old army-issue helmet without insignia. He saluted the emperor as he halted, and gave Vettius an evil grin. Vettius looked back, a long, cold look like a snake’s, and Correus saw his hand clench on the box rail. The race keeper announced the next entry from his slate.

  The third team was Tribune Petreius’s, four white half-Arab ponies with little pricked ears and fine-boned heads. The driver, Musa, might have been Arab too, a swarthy beak-nosed boy with a gentle hand on the reins. He lined his team up beside Correus’s bays, scanning them with a startled look.

  “Fine day for a race,” Correus said cheerfully. The Arab driver didn’t answer. The first team, on his other side, Correus gave no more than a glance. The sorrels didn’t have much to them. Even in the pole position, they wouldn’t be dangerous. But Vettius hadn’t bothered to fix the draw for position, and Correus had got lucky – he had the number-two spot. Next up were Vettius’s, a sleek, gold team that reminded Correus unnervingly of their owner. Their driver, Tubero, the reputed half ape, lined them up in a businesslike fashion, saluted the emperor, and shot a look to the Arab boy Musa that said he had better remember instructions. Then the ape gave a baleful stare at Correus. Behind Tubero and the gold ponies came a team of blacks belonging to the legate of the Claudia, with his personal slave, Brygus, driving. That was it, Correus thought. Five entries. He tightened his grip on the reins, and the bay ponies began to dance sideways. The trumpet sounded its raucous announcement a sixth time.

  Correus jerked his head up and narrowed his eyes across the track at the team coming in. Seeing their silky white hides, their red harness making a cheery splash of color, he didn’t need to hear the race keeper to know whose horses those were. The slim, straight figure driving them was a mirror image to his own – except that Flavius was wearing full dress kit, embossed cuirass, and white harness tunic. Flavius never looked at him. He saluted, turned his ponies into the outside position that a last-minute entry had to be satisfied with, and settled his helmet forward so that the ridge would cut the sun.

  Pigheaded ass! Correus shot the thought in his brother’s direction as he gathered his reins, and Flavius laughed suddenly as if he had heard him. The trumpet sounded a last fanfare, the sorrel ponies to his left jumped and reared, and the emperor’s hand dropped a white handkerchief over the edge of the box.

  The bay ponies were shooting forward as it fell, and Correus held them carefully in place. It was a short track, but the race was for eight full laps. The driver who was fool enough to give his horses their head now would have them limping home dead last at the end. Rabirius’s sorrels had taken the lead, and now Correus discounted them completely; they could take that pace for no more than three laps. On his other side, Petreius’s Arab driver, Musa, was neck and neck with him, with Tubero and Vettius’s gold beasts on his flank. Brygus and the legate’s black team had fallen slightly behind them, and out of the corner of his eye Correus saw Flavius’s ponies pull past the blacks and begin edging closer to the inside, trying to cut them off.

  They swept around the first turn and came into the straight with the sorrels still in the lead and Correus, Petreius’s team, and the gold ponies dead even. Brygus and the blacks were half a length back, still holding Flavius on the outside. The track was wet, and the ponies’ hooves were beginning to send up clods of mud. Correus could feel the cold bite into him even through the heavy woolen shirt. Flavius must be freezing. It would serve him right for peacocking about in his dress uniform, although Correus had to admit that if Flavius had wanted a rig to unnerve the other drivers, he had hit on it. He and his ponies looked expensive enough to have driven straight from the Circus Maximus in Rome. Only Correus knew that Flavius’s white team couldn’t have taken Marius Vettius’s ponies on the best day they ever had. But then Flavius wasn’t planning to win. Correus settled down to drive, and his irritation with Flavius faded when he saw Vettius’s monkey-faced driver flick his whip out: As it came back over his head, it caught Brygus full in the face and laid open his brow. If Flavius had decided to risk the emperor’s temper to give Correus an ally on the track, it was because Flavius thought his brother was going to need one.

  They careened past the reviewing box in a thunder of noise and mud, and the race keeper tugged on a rope. A bronze ball rose up to the top of the pole beside him: one lap down. The vibration came through the floorboards of the chariot like the shiver before an earthquake. In the stands, Ygerna thought that the chariots looked flimsy enough to shatter at a touch. They were not the whippy leather and wicker two-horse chariots of her home hills, built for the rough rolling roads of Britain, but thin, featherlight contraptions made for a smooth track, with the least weight possible. A child’s toy, meant to pull a doll in, not something to drive at a dead gallop against a man trying to kill you. Epona of the horses, let him win.

  As the third bronze ball went up, Rabirius’s sorrels pushed to their limits, began to slacken quickly, as Correus had thought. Correus began to edge his own team closer to the spina. As they nosed past the sorrels, he could see Vettius’s driver, Tubero, begin to pull away from Petreius’s Arabs. Correus risked just one quick look at Musa’s face, saw his mouth set in a grim line, and noted the angle of his hands and arms. He was pulling his horses. Vettius’s team would be in front of him and hanging on Correus’s flank in another minute. Correus gave the bays their heads, and they pulled past the flagging sorrels into the slot nearest the spina.

  Tubero slashed his whip across the white Arabs’ noses in a fury because Musa hadn’t pulled them back fast enough, and then he was beside Correus, with his whip back over his head again. It was blatant cheating, but it is very hard to see from the stands what is happening in the center of a flying pack of chariots and horses in a rain of spattered mud. Correus let go the reins, and the bays shot out almost out of control as he turned and tried to catch the end of the whip, aimed at him this time. It hurt like Hades, but he got hold of it a third of the way from the end and yanked on it hard. Tubero had also dropped his reins, and his ponies t
hundered beside Correus’s dangerously close. Correus pulled his knife and cut the whip rather than wrestle for it. Tubero stumbled a little, snarling as it came back in his hand. Correus looked at his piece and threw it into the spina. There had been a metal ring tied onto the end, and it had torn a gash in his hand. He grabbed the reins, gritting his teeth as the leather rubbed his torn hand, and fought with the bays until they were back under control.

  The fourth ball went up the pole. The pack began to sort itself out: Correus closest to the spina, with Rabirius’s sorrels behind him now, tiring fast; Tubero and Vettius’s gold ponies ran beside him. Tubero turned his whip in his hand and struck at Correus with the handle. Musa and Petreius’s Arabs galloped behind them, caught between the sorrels and Brygus’s blacks – as good a place as any for a man with orders not to win. Correus had seen the look on Musa’s face as he had reined his horses in, though. The Arab boy had followed his orders, but he hadn’t liked it. Beyond the blacks, Flavius’s white ponies had pulled ahead and were angling across in front of the blacks’ noses to hang on Tubero’s flank.

  They held that pattern as they careened through the fifth lap. Then Correus shook out his reins and began the familiar singsong croon that all of Appius’s ponies had learned meant the last few laps of a race and the last burst of speed. The bays flew into the curve with their black tails streaming out behind them like smoke, and the gold ponies racing beside them, so close that a man could have jumped from one to the next. Too close. The spina flashed by on the left, the scarlet cloth rippling as the far-left pony brushed it as he passed. Tubero edged the gold ponies closer, deliberately pushing Correus’s team in on the spina. The blunt ends of a tangle of sawhorses and old lumber showed ominously through the scarlet cloth.

  “Keep off!” Correus shouted furiously.

  Tubero swung his ponies hard into Correus’s. The right-hand bay screamed and bit at the gold pony, one of the center bays stumbled and righted itself, and the chariot rocked. Correus grabbed his own whip and slashed at Tubero with it, but they kept coming, pushing relentlessly. As they went into the straight, the bays were beginning to lose their stride, unnerved by the crowding. Rabirius’s sorrels were well behind, at the tail of the pack now, and Musa and the Arabs were running along the spina behind Correus. Correus looked frantically over his shoulder. He would have to chance it. They swept past the reviewing box again, and the sixth ball went up. Only two laps to go. At the next curve Correus deliberately overshot, turning wide, to put more room between himself and the spina, pushing Tubero’s gold team out with him. He was too busy watching the gold ponies and the curve to look back again, but as they swept into the straight with a team’s width between them and the spina now, he saw that Musa was still pulling his horses, ignoring the chance to push up beside Correus and box him in. Tubero shouted back at the Arabs’ driver, but the boy raised his hand and made an obscene gesture. Tubero would get no more help from him. Correus looked back at the gold team just in time. The driver had gathered all his reins into one hand and was perched like a monkey on the front rim of his chariot. He jumped and landed on the flying gold back of the pony on the left. Correus saw that he had his dagger out, and the look on his broad, ugly face said that he meant to use it.

  Correus swore and swung his whip at him, but it missed, and Tubero leaned over and grabbed at the rein of the bay pony running at his side. There was the dull gleam from the blade, and the rein snapped. The bay was running free, still hitched by the traces to the chariot. Tubero leaned down and reached for the traces.

  As the reviewing stand flashed by again, Correus wondered how Vettius and his tame ape were going to explain to the emperor the cutting of another driver’s traces. Maybe they wouldn’t have to explain it. The emperor probably wouldn’t care if he won the money. With the team unbalanced, it would be easy to run the bays in on the spina, and then Correus likely wouldn’t be around to complain. He pulled his own knife out and cut the reins that were knotted about his waist. He looped them through a ring in the chariot rim instead, the short end of the severed rein whipping in his face. There was only one way to control a pony running loose, and that was from his back. Uncontrolled, they would all be on the spina in seconds. The jagged lumber of the makeshift spina would be death if they hit it at this speed.

  Poseidon help me. He pulled himself up on the rim and hung there. He could see the ground falling sickeningly away below him through a tangle of legs and iron-shod hooves. Julius was right. He weighed too much. Half again as much maybe as Vettius’s agile driver. But it was jump or go into the spina as soon as the right-hand pony was loose. He jumped.

  He landed on the bay’s back and grabbed frantically at the bridle with one hand and pushed awkwardly at Tubero with the other, his right. The knife flashed again, and the bay pony stumbled as Tubero caught the trace and held on. Both teams lost their stride and drifted in on the spina again.

  Someone shouted something Correus couldn’t understand over the pounding hooves, and then as he turned to wrestle with Tubero again, he saw the white team coming up like ghosts on the other side. Not Musa’s ponies this time, but Flavius’s, with the red harness a bright splotch against their hide. They ran mouths open and nostrils wide, foam spattering from their bits as Flavius pushed them past the limits of their strength to catch the gold team. He’ll break their wind, Correus thought in the second before Flavius yanked on the reins and slued them around so that his chariot slammed hard into Tubero’s empty one. It rocked, and there was the sound of splintering wood as a piece flew out of the wheel. The gold ponies stumbled, and the right-hand one went down with a frantic scream. The two in the middle reared in panic, and in the next instant they were all down. Tubero disappeared with a shriek under the thrashing hooves. Flavius’s chariot also bounced on a broken wheel as he stood fighting to pull his ponies in.

  Correus looked down at the traces. The right-hand one was almost cut through. He grabbed for the next pony’s bridle with his left hand and held the one he rode with his right. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Brygus’s blacks dodging past the wreckage to come up on their right. “Run, friend,” Correus crooned into the bay’s ears, and felt a small jolt as the trace snapped in two. “Run and hold together.” With Correus on his back, the loose pony stretched out his legs and kept pace with his mates, and the eighth bronze ball rose on the pole as the finish line flashed by.

  Now how do I stop them? That hadn’t occurred to him. He could have managed the pony he was riding easily enough, but if he let go of the other three, they would probably run until they overturned the chariot. He remembered old Alan teaching him to ride: “Be remembering first that the horse is a creature of small brain.” Sound advice, he thought grimly. He tugged experimentally on the bridle in his left hand, and the pony slowed. His teammates slackened with him. Correus leaned out and tugged a little harder, forcing himself not to look at the ground rushing away under him. Ahead of him, the crowd that had poured out onto the track to cheer the winner saw him coming and dived back into the seats on the slope. Behind him the race keeper and his crew were pulling Vettius’s broken chariot away, with the gold ponies limping after it. Tubero was a still form in the mud, with a legionary surgeon bending over him.

  It took Correus a whole circuit of the track to get the bays down to a walk, and by that time the crowd had surged out around them again, yelling his name. Julius pushed his way through and hopped into the chariot to grab the reins. The race keeper came up with a sober look and Flavius at his shoulder. His eyes widened when he saw the cut trace.

  Correus had a short, sharp explanation prepared to account for the wreckage of his commander’s chariot, but no one asked for it. Flavius had got there first, and Marius Vettius was frantically denouncing Tubero’s conduct to the emperor, who wasn’t listening. Tubero was dead with a broken skull. Correus slid down from the bay’s back, hoping he wasn’t going to make a fool of himself by falling. His knees felt like soup. He stumbled, and Flavius stepped up and let hi
m lean on him. Flavius’s cuirass and face were black with mud, but there was a satisfied look in his eyes.

  “Your ponies?” Correus asked. The white team were his brother’s pets. Correus hoped they weren’t wind broken.

  “They’re all right,” Flavius said. “I think. I hope. The groom’s walking them.”

  “Good.” Correus thought of Vettius’s gold ponies, ruined and limping for their owner’s greed. He should feel as guilty about Tubero, he supposed, but he didn’t, much. The dead driver had been trying to kill him. He thought about the jump onto that loose horse, and his stomach turned over again.

  Centurion Quintus came up and pounded him on the back, grinning. Quintus seemed to have no regrets for Tubero, who had probably been the one who had doped his horses. The trumpet screeched again, trying to make a dent in the din of the crowd, and the emperor stepped to the front of the box and dropped the victory wreath down with a perfunctory gesture of congratulations. The race keeper gave it to Quintus, and Quintus hung it over the neck of the pony Correus had ridden. The pony snorted at the evergreen scent in his nose. When Correus looked up again at the box, it was empty and Domitian was stalking away up the aisle through the emptying seats, with his slaves and his staff scurrying after him. If he had bet on Vettius’s ponies on Vettius’s say-so, he would be in a temper.

  Everyone else came crowding up with loud congratulations. They had got their money’s worth for excitement, and those who had bet on Centurion Quintus’s team were going to have their faith repaid at twenty-to-one. Brygus pushed through the crowd with his master, the legate of the Claudia, behind him.