It was not to be. Both Carullus and the governor appeared anxious to get the red-bearded Rhodian and his party on their way. Imperial papers signed by Chancellor Gesius himself could have that sort of effect, the centurion supposed. The governor was near enough to his retirement to have an extreme disinclination to ruffle feathers in the City.
Carullus, for his own part, was apparently going with the artisan to Sarantium, leading an escort himself. The centurion had no idea why.
IN FACT, there were several reasons, the tribune of the Fourth Sauradian cavalry thought, during the days of travelling east and then, in Trakesia, curving gradually down south. A tribune commanded five hundred men, was much more significant than any messenger bearing yet another letter of complaint. He could have a legitimate expectation of at least being received and obtaining a formal answer as to the arrears for the Sauradian troops. The Master of Offices might not give him more than platitudes, but Carullus had hopes of seeing either Leontes himself or one of his personal cadre of officers and getting a clearer picture.
In addition, he hadn’t been to Sarantium in years, and the chance to visit the City was too appealing to be passed up. He’d calculated that they could arrive—even moving slowly—before the season-ending races in the Hippodrome during the Dykania Festival. Carullus had a lifelong passion for the chariots and his beloved Greens that found little satisfaction in Sauradia.
Beyond this, he had developed an unanticipated but quite genuine liking for the red-bearded Rhodian he’d clipped with his helmet. Martinian of Varena was not an especially genial man—not that Carullus really needed other people to keep a conversation going—but the artisan could hold his wine almost as well as a soldier, knew a number of startlingly obscene western songs, and showed none of the arrogance most Rhodians displayed when confronting an honest Imperial soldier. He also swore with an inventiveness of phrase worth copying.
In addition, Carullus had reluctantly come to acknowledge to himself—looking around to determine the whereabouts of certain others in the party as they rode—that he was being continually assailed by an entirely new emotion.
It was the most unexpected thing.
For centuries, the journals and correspondence of seasoned travellers had made it clear that the most imposing way to first see Sarantium was from the deck of a ship at sunset.
Sailing east, the god’s sun behind you lighting the domes and towers, gleaming on the seaward walls and the cliffs that lined the infamous channel—the Serpent’s Tooth—into the celebrated harbour, there was no way, all travellers reported, to escape the awe and majesty Saranios’s city evoked. Eye of the world, ornament of Jad.
The gardens of the Imperial Precinct and the flat churkar ground where the Emperors played or watched the imported Bassanid game of horses and mallets, could be seen from far out at sea, amid the gold- and bronzeroofed palaces—the Traversite, Attenine, Baracian, all of them. The mighty Hippodrome could be descried, just beyond: and across the forum from it—in this year of the reign of the great and glorious beloved of Jad, the thrice-exalted Valerius II, Emperor of Sarantium, heir of Rhodias—could be seen the tremendous golden dome, the latest wonder of the world, stretching across the new Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom.
From out at sea, sailing to Sarantium, all of this and more would spread itself out for the traveller like a feast for the famished eye, too dazzling, too manifold and vividly manifest to be compassed. Men had been known to cover their faces with their cloaks in awe, to close their eyes, turn away, to kneel in prayer on the ship’s deck, to weep. Oh City, City, my eyes are never dry when I remember you. My heart is a bird, winging home.
Then the ships would be met by the small harbour boats, officials would board, papers would be cleared, customs documents affirmed, cargoes examined and duly taxed, and finally they would be permitted to sail up the curve of the Serpent’s Tooth—the great chains drawn back in this time of peace—passing between the narrow cliffs, looking up at walls and guards on each side, thinking of Sarantine Fire unleashed on hapless foes who thought to take Jad’s holy and defended City. Awe would give way to—or be joined by—a proper measure of fear. Sarantium was no harbour or haven for the weak.
To port, as instructed by the Harbour Master with shouts and signal horns and flares, and then, papers examined and cleared yet again, the traveller could at last set foot on land, upon the thronged, noisy docks and quays of Sarantium. One could stride unsteadily away from the water after so long at sea and come into the City that was, and had been for more than two hundred years, both the crowning glory of Jad and the eastern Empire and the most squalid, dangerous, overcrowded, turbulent place on earth.
That was if you came by sea.
If you first approached by land down through Trakesia—as the Emperor himself was known to have done thirty years ago—what you saw before anything else were the Triple Walls.
There were those dissenters, as there always are among travellers—a segment of mankind inclined to have, and voice, strong opinions—who urged that the might and scale of Sarantium were made most evident and overwhelming by these titanic walls, seen gleaming at a sunrise. And this was how Caius Crispus of Varena saw them on a morning exactly six weeks after he had set out from his home to answer an invitation from the Emperor addressed to another man, and seeking to discover a reason to live—if they didn’t kill him as an imposter first.
There was a paradox embedded in that, he thought, gazing at the brutal sweep of the walls that guarded the landward access to the City on its promontory. He didn’t have the frame of mind just then to deal with paradoxes. He was here. On the threshold. Whatever was to begin could now begin.
PART TWO
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
CHAPTER VI
It was with uncharacteristic intensity of thought and feeling for such an early hour that Plautus Bonosus, Master of the Senate, walked with his wife and unmarried daughters towards the small, elite Sanctuary of the Blessed Victims near their home to offer the dawn invocation on the second anniversary of the Victory Riot in Sarantium.
Having arrived home discreetly in chilly darkness, he had washed off the scent of his young lover—the boy insisted on wearing a particularly distinctive herbal concoction—and changed his clothes in time to meet his womenfolk in the foyer at sunrise. It was when he noticed the sprig of evergreen each of the three women was wearing in her hair for Dykania that Bonosus suddenly and vividly recalled doing exactly this same thing (having left a different boy) two years before on the morning of the day the City exploded in blood and fire.
Standing in the exquisitely decorated sanctuary, actively participating, as a man of his position was expected to, in the antiphonal chants of the liturgy, Bonosus allowed his mind to wander back—not to the sulky sleekness of his lover, but to the inferno of two years before.
Whatever anyone said, whatever the historians might one day write—or had already written—Bonosus had been there: in the Attenine Palace, in the throne room with the Emperor, with Gesius the Chancellor, with the Strategos, the Master of Offices, all the others, and he knew which person had spoken the words that turned the two days’ tide that had already swamped the Hippodrome and the Great Sanctuary, and had been lapping even then at the Bronze Gates of the Imperial Precinct.
Faustinus, the Master of Offices, had been urgently proposing the Emperor withdraw from the City, take to sea from the hidden wharf below the gardens, across the straits to Deapolis or even farther, to wait out the chaos engulfing the capital.
They had been trapped within the Precinct since the morning before. The Emperor’s appearance in the Hippodrome to drop the handkerchief at the outset of the Dykania Festival’s racing had led not to cheering but to a steadily growing rumble of rage, and then men boiling out of the stands to stand below the kathisma shouting and gesticulating. They wanted the hea
d of Lysippus the Calysian, the Empire’s chief taxation officer, and they were making certain Jad’s anointed Emperor knew it.
The Hippodrome Prefect’s guards, routinely sent down to disperse the crowd, had been swallowed up and killed, savagely. Anything resembling the routine had disappeared with that.
‘Victory!’ someone shouted, hoisting aloft the severed arm of a guardsman like a banner. Bonosus remembered the moment; he dreamt of it, at times. ‘Victory to the glorious Blues and Greens!’
Both factions had joined together in the cry. Unheard of. And the shout was picked up until it echoed through the Hippodrome. The killings took place directly below the Emperor. It was judged prudent that Valerius II and his Empress withdraw through the back of the kathisma at that point and return down the enclosed, elevated corridor to the Imperial Precinct.
The first deaths are always the hardest for a mob. After that, they are in a different country, they have crossed a threshold, and things become truly dangerous. More blood will follow, and fire. Both had, for a day and a brutal night already, and this was the second day.
Leontes had just returned, sword bloodied, from a reconnoitre through the city with Auxilius of the Excubitors. They reported entire streets and the Great Sanctuary burning. Blues and Greens were marching side by side in the smoke, chanting together as they brought Sarantium to its knees. Several names were being declaimed, the tall Strategos said quietly, as replacements for the Emperor.
‘Any of them in the Hippodrome yet?’ Valerius was standing beside his throne, listening attentively. His soft, smooth-cheeked features and grey eyes betrayed no immediate distress, only an intensity of concentration as he wrestled with a problem. His city is on fire, Bonosus remembered thinking, and he looks like an academic in one of the ancient Schools, considering a problem of volumes and solids.
‘It appears so, my lord. One of the Senators. Symeonis.’ Leontes, ever courteous, refrained from looking over at Bonosus. ‘Some of the faction leaders have draped him in purple and crowned him with a necklace of some sort in the kathisma. I believe it is against his will. He was found outside his doors and seized by the mob.’
‘He is an old, frightened man,’ Bonosus said. His first words in that room. ‘He has no ambitions. They are using him.’
‘I know that,’ Valerius said quietly.
Auxilius of the Excubitors said, ‘They are trying to get Tertius Daleinus to come out to them. They broke into his house, but word is, he’s already left the city.’
Valerius did smile then, but not with his eyes. ‘Of course he has. A cautious young man.’
‘Or a coward, thrice-exalted lord,’ said Auxilius. Valerius’s Count of the Excubitors was a Soriyyan, a sourfaced, often angry man. Not a disadvantage, given his office.
‘It might be he’s simply loyal,’ Leontes said mildly, with a glance at the other soldier.
It was possible but unlikely, Bonosus thought privately. The pious Strategos was known for offering benign interpretations of other men’s actions, as if everyone might be measured by his own virtues. But the youngest son of the murdered Flavius Daleinus would not have any more loyalty towards this Emperor than he’d had for the first Valerius. He would have ambitions, but would be unlikely to reach for the dice cup so early in a game this large. From the Daleinoi’s nearest country estate he could gauge the mood of the City and return very swiftly.
Bonosus, in the tight grip of his own fear, was unable not to look over and glare at the man sitting near him: Lysippus the Calysian, Quaestor of Imperial Revenue, who had caused all of this.
The Empire’s chief taxation officer had been silent throughout the discussions, his prodigious bulk spilling over the edges of the carved bench on which he sat, threatening to bring it crashing down. His face was blotchy with strain and fear. Perspiration stained his dark robe. His distinctive green eyes shifted uneasily from one speaker to another. He had to know that his public execution—or even throwing him through the Bronze Gates to the enraged mob—was a perfectly viable option at this moment, though no one had yet spoken it aloud. It would not be the first time an Imperial Revenue officer had been sacrificed to the people.
Valerius II had shown no signs of such an intent. His loyalty to the fat, gross man who had so efficiently and incorruptibly funded his building schemes and the expensive co-opting of various barbarian tribes had always been firm. It was said that Lysippus had been a part of the machinations that brought the first Valerius to the throne. Whether that was true or not, an ambitious Emperor needed a ruthless taxation officer as much as he needed an honest one: Valerius had said that once to Bonosus, in the most matter-of-fact way—and the enormous Calysian might be depraved in his personal habits, but no one had ever been known to bribe or suborn him, or quarrel with his results.
Plautus Bonosus, at prayer beside his wife and daughters two years after, could still recall the chaotic intermingling of admiration and terror he’d felt that day. The sound of the mob at the Precinct doors had penetrated even into the room where they were gathered around a golden throne, amid artifacts of sandalwood and ivory and birds crafted of gold and semi-precious stones.
Bonosus knew that he himself would have offered the Quaestor to the factions without a second thought. With taxation levels rising each quarter for the past year and a half, continuing even after the debilitating effects of a plague, Lysippus ought to have known better than to arrest and torture two well-liked clerics for sheltering a tax-evading aristocrat he was seeking. It was one thing to pursue the wealthy (though Bonosus did have his thoughts on that). It was another to go after the clerics who ministered to the people.
Surely any sane official would have made allowance for the unrest of the City, how volatile it was on the eve of the Autumn Festival. The Dykania was always a dangerous time for authority. Emperors walked carefully then, placating the City with games and largess, knowing how many of their predecessors had lost sight, limbs, life in those turbulent days at autumn’s end when Sarantium celebrated—or went dangerously wild.
Two years later Bonosus lifted his strong voice, intoning, ‘Let there be Light for us, and for our dead, and for us when we die, lord. Holy Jad, let us find shelter with you and never lie lost in the dark.’
Winter was coming again. The months of long, damp, windy darkness. There had been light that afternoon two years ago … the red light of the Great Sanctuary uncontrollably afire. A loss so great it was almost unimaginable.
‘The northern army can be here from Trakesia in fourteen days,’ Faustinus had murmured that day, dry and efficient. ‘The Supreme Strategos will confirm that. This mob has no leadership, no clear purpose. Any puppet they acclaim in the Hippodrome will be hopelessly weak. Symeonis as Emperor? It is laughable. Leave now and you will re-enter the City in triumph before full winter comes.’
Valerius, a hand laid across the back of his throne, had looked at Gesius, the aged Chancellor, first, and then at Leontes. Both the Chancellor and the golden-haired Strategos, long-time companion, hesitated.
Bonosus knew why. Faustinus might be right, but he might be perilously wrong: no Emperor who had fled from the people he ruled had ever returned to govern them. Symeonis might be a terrified figurehead, but what would stop others from emerging once Valerius was known to have left Sarantium? What if the Daleinus scion found his courage, or had it handed to him?
On the other hand, in the most obvious way, no Emperor torn apart by a howling throng intoxicated by its own power had ever governed after that either. Bonosus wanted to say as much, but kept silent. He wondered if the mob, should they come this far, would understand that the Master of the Senate was here for purely formal reasons, that he had no authority, posed no danger, had done them no harm? That he was even, financially, as much a victim of the evil Quaestor of Imperial Revenue as any of them?
He doubted it.
No man spoke a word in that moment fraught with choice and destiny. They saw leaping flames and black smoke through the open windows—t
he Great Sanctuary burning. They could hear the dull, heavy roar of the mob at the gates and inside the Hippodrome. Leontes and Auxilius had reported at least eighty thousand people gathered in and around the Hippodrome, spilling into the forum there. As many more seemed to be running wild through the rest of the city, from the triple walls down, and had been for much of the night just past. Taverns and cauponae had been overrun and looted, they’d said. Wine was still being found and passed out from the cellars and then from hand to hand in the reeling, smoky streets.
There was a smell of fear in the throne room. Plautus Bonosus, chanting gravely in his neighbourhood sanctuary two years later, knew he would never forget that moment.
No man spoke. The one woman in the room did.
‘I would sooner die clothed in porphyry in this palace,’ the Empress Alixana said quietly, ‘than of old age in any place of exile on earth.’ She had been standing by the eastern window while the men debated, gazing out at the burning city beyond the gardens and the palaces. Now she turned and looked only at Valerius. ‘All Jad’s children are born to die. The vestments of Empire are seemly for a shroud, my lord. Are they not?’
Bonosus remembered watching Faustinus’s face go white. Gesius opening his mouth, and then closing it, looking old suddenly, wrinkles deep in pale parchment flesh. And he remembered something else he thought he would never lose in his life: the Emperor, from near his throne, smiling suddenly at the small, exquisite woman by the window.
Among many other things, Plautus Bonosus had realized, with a queer kind of pain, that he had never in all his days looked at another man or woman in that way, or received a gaze remotely like the one that the dancer who had become their Empress bestowed upon Valerius in return.
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