Alone, save for that unseen Ninth beside him, brushing wheels, dark as superstition had him, and crimson, too, like the day. But then, unaccountably, he drifted away, let this reckless mortal go on beneath the streaming sunlight, gathered and held in the enormous cauldron of sound that was the Hippodrome.
No one knew it then, no one could have known, among eighty thousand and more in that place, but there was richer blood for the claiming in Sarantium that day.
There would be time yet to take a charioteer.
Scortius slowed, just across the finish line, swayed where he stood as the quadriga drifted to an awkward halt. He was unable to even begin unwrapping his reins, which were also soaked through with blood by then. He was alone, motionless, done.
They came to help him, sprinting across the track, leaving the victory lap to the boy and the two White teams. Astorgus and two others cut him free, tenderly, as if he were a babe. He saw, with some surprise, that all three of them were weeping, and others who came up behind them, even the stewards. He tried to say something about that, a jest, but couldn't seem to speak just yet. It was very hard to breathe. He suffered them to help him back under the stands, a redness in the air.
They went past Crescens, in the Greens" space along the spina. He seemed to be all right, and the other Green rider was there as well. There was something odd about their faces, a working of emotion being fought. There really did seem to be a lot of noise. More, even, than usual. They took him-carried him, mostly-back through the Processional Gates to the dimly lit atrium. It was a little quieter here, but not very much.
The Bassanid was there. Another surprise. There was a pallet next to him.
"Lay him down," he snapped. "On his back."
"I thought… you had disowned me," he managed to say. First words. There was so much pain. They were laying him down.
"So did I," said the grey-haired physician from the east. He threw aside his stick, angrily. "Makes two fools here, doesn't it?"
"Oh, at least," said Scortius, and then he did, finally, by the very great mercy of Heladikos, lose consciousness.
CHAPTER XI
It is true, undeniably, that the central moments of an age occur on the margins of the lives of most people. A celebrated play from the early years of the eastern empire in Sarantium begins with shepherds quarrelling over their entangled flocks when one of them notices a flare of light in the east as something falls from the sky. There is a brief pause in the dispute as the men on the hill slope consider the event; then they return to the matter at hand.
The death of Heladikos in a falling chariot, bearing fire from his father, cannot compete in significance with the theft of a sheep. The drama by Sophenidos (later banned by the clerics as heretical) moves from this beginning to treat matters of faith and power and majesty, and contains the celebrated Messenger's speech about dolphins and Heladikos. But it begins on that hillside, and it ends there, with the sacrifice of the disputed sheep-employing the new gift of fire.
Nonetheless, for all the human truth of Sophenidos's observation that the world's major events might not seem so to those living through a given time, it remains equally true that there are moments and places that may properly be seen as lying at the heart of an age.
That day, in the early spring of the year, there were two such places on the earth, far apart. One was in the desert of Soriyya, where a man in a hood, with a cloak drawn over his mouth, preserved a silence among the drifting sands, having remained awake all the night before, fasting, and looking up at the stars.
The other was a tunnel in Sarantium, between palaces.
He stands in a curve of the walls and floor, looking up at torches and a painted ceiling of the night sky, down at a mosaic of hares and pheasants and other creatures in a forest glade: an artisan's illusion of the natural world here underground within city walls. The pagan faiths tell of dark powers in the earth, he knows, and the dead lie underground, when they are not burned.
There are people in wait ahead of him, people who ought not to be here. He has deciphered that from the measured, unhurried footsteps behind. They have no fear that he will flee from them.
The curiosity he feels might be considered a defining trait of the Emperor of Sarantium, whose mind is endlessly engaged by the challenges and enigmas of the world the god has made. The anger he experiences is less characteristic but equally intense just now, and the repeated pulsing of grief, like a heavy heartbeat, is very rare for him.
There were-there are-so many things he has intended to do.
What he does do after a moment, rather than continue to wait like one of the hares, frozen in the mosaic glade, is turn and walk back towards those behind him. One may sometimes control the moment and place of one's dying, thinks the man whose mother had named him Petrus, in Trakesia, almost half a century ago, and whose uncle-a soldier-had summoned him to Sarantium in early manhood.
He is not, however, reconciled to his death. Jad waits for every living man and woman, but can wait a little longer for an Emperor, surely. Surely.
He deems himself equal even to this, whatever it turns out to be. Has nothing with which to defend himself, unless one counts a simple, unsharpened blade at his belt used for breaking the seal on correspondence. It is not a weapon. He is not a warrior.
He is fairly certain he knows who is here, is rapidly deploying his thoughts (which are weapons) even as he goes back down the tunnel and comes around the curve and sees-with brief, trivial satisfaction-the startled reaction of those coming after him. They stop.
Four of them. Two soldiers, helmed to be unknown but he knows them, and they are the two who were on guard. There is another cloaked man-all these hidden assassins, even with no one to see-and there is one who walks in front, unshielded, eager, almost alight with what Valerius perceives to be desire. He does not see the man he has feared-quite intensely-might be here.
Some relief at that, though he may be among those in wait at the other end of the corridor. Anger, and grief.
"Anxious for an ending?" asks the tall woman, stopping before him. Her surprise was brief, swiftly controlled. Her eyes are blue flames, uncanny. She is dressed in crimson, a gold belt, her hair bound in a net of black. The gold of it shows through in the torchlight.
Valerius smiles. "Not as anxious as you, I daresay. Why are you doing this, Styliane?"
She blinks, genuinely startled. She had been a child when it all happened. He has always been conscious of that, guided by it, much more so than Aliana.
He thinks of his wife. In his heart, in the pure silence of the heart, he is speaking to her now, wherever she might be under the sun overhead. She had always told him it was a mistake to bring this woman-this girl when the dance began-to court, even to let her live. Her father's daughter. Flavius. In silence the Emperor of Sarantium is telling the dancer he married that she was right and he was wrong and he knows she will know, soon enough, even if his thoughts do not-cannot-travel through walls and space to where she is.
"Why am I doing this? Why else am I alive?" the daughter of Flavius Daleinus says.
"To live your life," he says crisply. A philosopher of the Schools, admonishing a pupil. (He closed the Schools himself. A regret, but the Patriarch needed it done. Too many pagans.) "Your own life, with the gifts you have, and have been given. Easy enough, Styliane." He looks past her as fury kindles in her eyes. Deliberately ignores that. Says to the two soldiers, "You are aware that they will kill you here?"