‘It is intolerable,’ said Cleander, speaking loudly over the tavern noise, ‘that a man like that should possess such a woman!’ He drank, and wiped at the moustache he was trying to grow.
‘He doesn’t possess her,’ Eutychus replied reasonably. ‘He may not even be bedding her. And he is a man of some distinction, little sprout.’
Cleander glared at him as the others laughed.
The volume of sound in The Spina was considerable. It was midday and the morning’s races were done, with the afternoon chariots slated to begin after the break. The most ambitious of the drinking places near the Hippodrome was bursting with a sweating, raucous, bipartisan crowd.
The more fervent followers of Blue and Green had made their way to less expensive taverns and cauponae dedicated to their own factions, but the shrewd managers of The Spina had offered free drinks to retired and current charioteers of all colours from the day they’d opened their doors, and the lure of hoisting a beer or a cup of wine with the drivers had made The Spina a dramatic success from that first day.
It had to be … they’d put a fortune into it. The long axis of the tavern had been designed to simulate the real spina—the central island of the Hippodrome, around which the chariots wheeled in their furious careen. Instead of thundering horses, this spina was ringed by a marble counter, and drinkers stood or leaned on both sides, eyeing scaled reproductions of the statues and monuments that decorated the real thing in the Hippodrome. Against one long wall ran the bar itself, also marbled, with patrons packed close. And for those prudent—and solvent— enough to have made arrangements ahead of time, there were booths along the opposite wall, stretching to the shadows at the back of the tavern.
Eutychus was always prudent, and Cleander and Dorus were notably solvent, or rather, their fathers were. The five young men—all Greens, of course—had a standing arrangement to prominently occupy the highly visible second booth on race days. The first booth was always reserved for charioteers or the occasional patrons from the Imperial Precinct amusing themselves among the crowds of the city.
‘No man ever truly possesses a woman, anyhow,’ said Gidas moodily. ‘He has her body for a time if he’s lucky, but only the most fleeting glimpse into her soul.’ Gidas was a poet, or wanted to be.
‘If they have souls,’ said Eutychus wryly, drinking his carefully watered wine. ‘It is, after all, a liturgical issue.’
‘Not any more,’ Pollon protested. ‘A Patriarchal Council settled that a hundred years ago, or something.’
‘By a single vote,’ Eutychus said, smiling. Eutychus knew a lot; he didn’t hide the fact. ‘Had one of the august clerics had an unfortunate experience with a whore the night before, the Council would likely have decided women have no souls.’
‘That’s probably sacrilege,’ Gidas murmured.
‘Heladikos defend me!’ Eutychus laughed.
‘That is sacrilege,’ Gidas said, with a rare, quick smile.
‘They don’t,’ Cleander muttered, ignoring this last exchange. ‘They don’t have souls. Or she doesn’t, to be permitting that grey-faced toad to court her. She sent back my gift, you know.’
‘We know, Cleander. You’ve told us. A dozen times.’ Pollon’s tone was kindly. He ruffled Cleander’s hair. ‘Forget her. She’s beyond you. Pertennius has a place in the Imperial Precinct and in the military. Toad or not, he’s the sort of man who sleeps with a woman like that … unless someone of even higher rank pushes him out of her bed.’
‘A place in the military?’ Cleander’s voice swirled upwards in indignation. ‘Jad’s cock, that’s a bad joke! Pertennius of Eubulus is a bloodless, ass-licking secretary to a pompous strategos whose courage is long behind him since he married above himself and decided he liked soft beds and gold.’
‘Lower your voice, idiot!’ Pollon gripped Cleander’s arm. ‘Eutychus, water his fucking wine before he gets us into a fight with half the army.’
‘Too late,’ Eutychus said sorrowfully. The others followed his glance towards the marble spina running down the middle of the room. A broad-shouldered man in an officer’s uniform had turned from contemplating a replica of the Greens’ second statue to the charioteer Scortius and was gazing across at them, his expression stony. The men on either side of him—neither one a soldier—had also glanced over, but then returned to their drinks at the counter.
With Pollon’s firm hand on his arm, Cleander kept silent, though he gazed truculently back at the soldier until the man at the spina bar turned away. Cleander sniffed. ‘Told you,’ he said, though quietly. ‘An army of useless fakers, boasting of imaginary battlefields.’
Eutychus shook his head in amusement. ‘You are a rash little sprout, aren’t you?’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘What, rash?’
‘No. The other. I’m seventeen now, and I don’t like it.’
‘Being seventeen?’
‘No! That name. Stop it, Eutychus. You aren’t that much older.’
‘No, but I don’t walk around like a boy with his first erection. Someone’s going to cut it off for you one day if you aren’t careful.’
Dorus winced. ‘Eutychus.’
A figure appeared suddenly at their booth. They looked up at a server. He carried a beaker of wine.
‘Compliments of the officer at the spina,’ he said, licking his lips nervously. ‘He invites you to salute the glory of the Supreme Strategos Leontes with him.’
‘I don’t take wine on conditions,’ bristled Cleander. ‘I can buy my own when I want it.’
The soldier hadn’t turned around. The server looked more unhappy. ‘He, ah, instructed me to say that if you do not drink his wine and offer his salute he will be distressed and express this by hanging the … loudest of you by his tunic from the hook by the front door.’ He paused. ‘We don’t want trouble, you know.’
‘Fuck him!’ Cleander said, loudly.
There was a moment before the soldier turned.
This time, so did the two big men on either side of him. One was red-haired and bearded, of indeterminate origin. The other was a northerner of some sort, probably a barbarian, though his hair was close-cropped. The noise of The Spina continued unabated. The server looked from the booth to the three men at the spina and made an earnest, placating gesture.
‘Boys don’t fuck me,’ the soldier said gravely. Someone farther along the spina turned at that. ‘Boys who wear their hair like barbarians they’ve never faced, and dress like Bassanids they’ve never seen, do what a working soldier tells them.’ He pushed off from the bar and walked slowly across to their booth. His expression remained mild. ‘You style your hair like the Vrachae. If Leontes’s army were not on your northern and western borders today, a Vrachae spearman might have been over the walls and up your backside by now. Do you know what they like to do with boys taken in battle? Shall I tell you?’
Eutychus lifted a hand and smiled thinly. ‘Not on a festival day, thank you. I’m sure it is unpleasant. Do you really propose to start a quarrel over Pertennius of Eubulus? Do you know him?’
‘Not at all, but I will quarrel over insults to my Strategos. I’ve given you a choice. It is good wine. Drink to Leontes and I’ll join you. Then we’ll toast some of the old Green charioteers and one of you will explain to me how the fucking Blues got Scortius away from us.’
Eutychus grinned. ‘You are, I dare take it, a follower of the glorious and exalted Greens?’
‘All my sorry life.’ The man returned the grin wryly.
Eutychus laughed aloud and made room for the soldier to sit. He poured the offered wine. They toasted Leontes; none of them really disliked him, anyhow. It was difficult, even for Cleander, to be genuinely dismissive of such a man, though he did offer an aside about being known by the secretary one kept.
They went quickly through the soldier’s beaker and then two more, saluting a long sequence of Green drivers. The soldier appeared to have a voluminous recollection of Green charioteers from citie
s all over the Empire in the reigns of the last three Emperors. The five young men had never heard of most of them. The man’s two friends watched them from the spina bar, leaning back against it, occasionally joining in the toasts across the aisle. One of them was smiling a little, the other was expressionless.
Then the manager of The Spina had the horns blown, in imitation of those that marked the chariots’ Processional in the Hippodrome, and they all began paying their reckonings and tumbling in a noisy spill of people out into the windy autumn sunshine, joining the disgorged crowds from the other taverns and baths to cross the forum for the afternoon’s chariots.
The first running after the midday break was the major race of the day and no one wanted to be late.
‘ALL FOUR COLOURS in this one,’ Carullus explained as they hurried across the open space. ‘Eight quadrigas, two of each colour, a big purse. The only purse as large is the last one of the day when the Reds and Whites stay out of it and four Greens and Blues run with bigas—two horses each. That’s a cleaner race, this one’s wilder. There’ll be blood on the track, most likely.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe someone will run over that dark-skinned bastard, Scortius.’
‘You’d like that?’ Crispin asked.
Carullus considered the question for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said finally. ‘He’s too much pleasure to watch. Though I’m sure he spends a fortune each year in wards against curse-tablets and spells. There are a good many Greens who’d cheerfully see him dragged and trampled for crossing to the Blues.’
‘Those five we drank with?’
‘One of them, anyhow. The noisy one.’
The five young men had pushed ahead of them across the Hippodrome Forum, heading for the patrician gates and their reserved seats.
‘Who was the woman he was going on about?’
‘A dancer. It’s always a dancer. Latest darling of the Greens. Name’s Shirin, apparently. A looker, it sounds like. They usually are. The young aristocrats are always elbowing each other to get in bed with the dancer or actress of the day. A long tradition. The Emperor married one, after all.’
‘Shirin?’ Crispin was amused. He had that name in his baggage, on a torn-off piece of parchment.
‘Yes, why?’
‘Interesting. If this is the same person, I’m supposed to visit her. A message to deliver from her father.’ Zoticus had said she was a prostitute, at first.
Carullus looked astonished. ‘Jad’s fire, Rhodian, you are a series of surprises. Don’t tell my new friends. The youngest one might knife you—or hire someone to do it—if he hears you have access to her.’
‘Or be my friend for life if I offer to let him come visit with me.’
Carullus laughed. ‘Wealthy lad. Useful friend.’ The two men exchanged an ironic glance.
Vargos, on Crispin’s other side, listened carefully, saying nothing. Kasia was back at the inn where they’d booked a room last night. She’d been invited to come with them—women were permitted in the Hippodrome under Valerius and Alixana—but had been showing signs of distress ever since they’d passed into the roiling chaos of the City. Vargos hadn’t been happy either, but he’d been within city walls before and had some framework for his expectations.
Sarantium dwarfed expectations, but they’d been warned it would.
The long walk from the landward walls to the inn near the Hippodrome had visibly unsettled Kasia the day before. It was a festival; the noise levels and the numbers of people in the streets were overwhelming. They had passed a half-naked ascetic perched precariously on the top of a squared-off triumphal obelisk, his long white beard streaming sideways in the breeze. He was preaching of the City’s iniquities to a gathered cluster of the City’s people. He’d been up there three years, someone said. It was best to stay upwind, they added.
A few prostitutes had been working the edges of the same crowd. Carullus had eyed one of them and then laughed as she grinned at him and slowly walked away, hips swinging. He’d pointed: the imprint of her sandals in the dust read, quite clearly, ‘Follow Me.’
Kasia hadn’t laughed, Crispin remembered.
And she had elected to remain behind at the inn today rather than deal with the streets again so soon.
‘You’d really have started a fight with them?’ Vargos asked Carullus. His first words of the afternoon.
The tribune glanced over at him. ‘Of course I would have. Leontes was maligned in my hearing by an effete little City snob who can’t even grow a proper moustache yet.’
Crispin said, ‘You’ll do a lot of fighting if that’s going to be your attitude here. I suspect the Sarantines are free with their opinions.’
Carullus snorted. ‘You are telling me about the City, Rhodian?’
‘How many times have you been here?’
Carullus looked chagrined. ‘Well, just twice in point of fact, but—’
‘Then I suspect I know rather more than you about urban ways, soldier. Varena isn’t Sarantium, and Rhodias isn’t what it was, but I do know that if you bridle at every overheard opinion the way you might in a barracks you command you’ll never survive.’
Carullus frowned. ‘He was attacking the Strategos. My commander. I fought under Leontes against the Bassanids beyond Eubulus. In the god’s name, I know what he’s like. That bedbug with his father’s money and his stupid eastern robe had no business even speaking his name. I wonder where that little boy was two years ago today, when Leontes smashed the Victory Riot? That was courage, by Jad’s blood! Yes, I would have fought them. It was … a matter of honour.’
Crispin arched an eyebrow. ‘A matter of honour,’ he repeated. ‘Indeed. Then you should have had rather less difficulty understanding what I did at the walls yesterday when we came in.’
Carullus snorted. ‘Not at all the same thing. You could have had your nose slit for declaring a name other than the one on your Permit. Using those papers was a crime. In Jad’s name, Martinian—’
‘Crispin,’ said Crispin.
An excited, not-entirely-sober cluster of Blues cut in front of them, rushing towards their gate. Vargos was jostled but kept his balance. Crispin said, ‘I chose to enter Sarantium as Caius Crispus—the name my father and mother gave me, not a false one.’ He looked at the tribune. ‘A matter of honour.’
Carullus shook his head emphatically. ‘The only reason, the only reason the guard didn’t look properly at your papers and detain you when the names didn’t match was because you were with me.’
‘I know,’ Crispin said, grinning suddenly. ‘I relied on that.’
Vargos, on his other side, snorted with an amusement he couldn’t quite control. Carullus glared. ‘Are you actually planning to give your own name at the Bronze Gates? In the Attenine Palace? Shall I introduce you to a notary first, to arrange for the final disposition of your worldly goods?’
The fabled gates to the Imperial Precinct were, as it happened, visible at one end of the Hippodrome Forum. Beyond them, the domes and walls of the Imperial palaces could be seen. Not far away, north of the forum, scaffolding and mud and masonry surrounded the building site of Valerius II’s immense new Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom. Crispin—or Martinian—had been summoned to play a part in that.
‘I haven’t decided,’ Crispin said.
It was true. He hadn’t. The declaration at the customs gate in the wall had been entirely spontaneous. Even as he was speaking his own name aloud for the first time since leaving home, he’d realized that being in the company— virtually the custody—of half a dozen soldiers would probably mean his papers would not be examined by an overworked guard at festival time, and that is what had happened. Carullus’s blistering, obscene interrogation of him the moment they were out of earshot of the guardhouse had been a predictable consequence.
Crispin had delayed explaining until they’d taken rooms at an inn Carullus knew near the Hippodrome and the new Great Sanctuary. The soldiers of the Fourth Sauradian were sent to a barracks to report, with one of them dispatched
to the Imperial Precinct to announce that the Rhodian mosaicist had arrived in Sarantium as requested.
At the inn, over boiled fish and soft cheese with figs and melon after, Crispin had explained to the two men and the woman how he’d come to be travelling with an Imperial Permit belonging to another man. Or, more properly, he’d explained the obvious aspects of that. The rest, having to do with the dead and a barbarian queen, belonged to himself.
Carullus, stunned into unwonted silence through all of this, had eaten and listened without interrupting. When Crispin was done, he’d said only, ‘I’m a betting man not afraid of odds, but I’d not wager a copper folles on your surviving a day in the Imperial Precinct as Caius Crispus when someone named Martinian was invited on behalf of the Emperor. They don’t like … surprises at this court. Think about it.’
Crispin had promised to do so. An easy promise. He’d been thinking about it, without any answer emerging, since he’d left Varena.
As they crossed the Hippodrome Forum now, the Sanctuary behind them, the Imperial Precinct to their right, a squat, balding man behind a folding, hastily assembled counter was rattling off a sequence of names and numbers as people passed. Carullus stopped in front of him.
‘Positions for the first race?’ he demanded.
‘Everyone?’
‘Of course not. Crescens and Scortius.’
The tout grinned, showing black, erratic teeth. ‘Interesting times today. Sixth and eighth, Scortius is outside.’
‘He won’t win from eighth. What are you giving on Crescens of the Greens?’
‘For an honest officer? Three to two.’
‘Copulate with your grandmother. Two to one.’
‘At two to one I am doing that, in her grave, but all right. At least a silver solidus, though. I won’t do those odds for beer money.’
‘A solidus? I’m a soldier not a greedy race tout.’
‘And I run a bet shop, not a military dispensary. You have silver, wager it. Otherwise, stop blocking my booth.’
The Sarantine Mosaic Page 26
