Sailing to Sarantium. Guy Gavriel Kay

Blues’ principal chario -teer would win the first three races today, making a lucky seven in a row. Fotius had dreamt of the number twelve the night before, and three quadriga races meant Astorgus would drive twelve horses, and when the one and the two of twelve were added together . . . why, they made a three again! If he hadn’t seen a ghost on the roof of the colonnade across from his shop yesterday afternoon, Fotius would have felt entirely sure of his wager.

      He had left his wife and son sleeping in their apartment above the shop and made his way cautiously—the streets of the City were dangerous at night, as he had cause to know—towards the Hippodrome. It was long before sunrise; the white moon, waning, was west towards the sea, floating above the towers and domes of the Imperial Precinct. Fotius couldn’t afford to pay for a seat every time he came to the racing, let alone one in the shaded parts of the stands. Only ten thousand places were offered free to citizens on a race day. Those who couldn’t buy, waited.

      Two or three thousand others were already in the open square when he arrived under the looming dark masonry of the Hippodrome. Just being here excited Fotius, driving away a lingering sleepiness. He hastily took a blue tunic from his satchel and pulled it on in exchange for his ordinary brown one, modesty preserved by darkness and speed. He joined a group of others similarly clad. He had made this one concession to his wife after a beating by Green partisans two years before during a particularly wild summer season: he wore unobtrusive garb until he reached the relative safety of his fellow Blues. He greeted some of the others by name and was welcomed cheerfully. Someone passed him a cup of cheap wine and he took a drink and passed it along.

      A tipster walked by selling a list of the day’s races and his predictions. Fotius couldn’t read, so he wasn’t tempted, though he saw others handing over two copper folles for a sheet. Out in the middle of the Hippodrome Forum a Holy Fool, half naked and stinking, had staked a place and was already haranguing the crowd about the evils of racing. The man had a good voice and offered some entertainment . . . if you didn’t stand downwind. Street vendors were already selling figs and Candaria melons and grilled lamb. Fotius had packed himself a wedge of cheese and some of the bread ration from the day before. He was too excited to be hungry, in any case.

      Not far away, near their own entrance, the Greens were clustered in similar numbers. Fotius didn’t see Pappio the glassblower among them, but he knew he’d be there. He’d made his bet with Pappio. As dawn approached, Fotius began—as usual—to wonder if he’d been reckless with his wager. That spirit he’d seen, in broad daylight . . .

      It was a mild night for summer, with a sea wind. It would be very hot later, when the racing began. The public baths would be crowded at the midday interval, and the taverns.

      Fotius, still thinking about his wager, wondered if he ought to have stopped at a cemetery on the way with a curse-tablet against the principal Green charioteer, Scortius. It was the boy, Scortius, who was likeliest to stand—or drive—today between Astorgus and his seven straight triumphs. He’d bruised his shoulder in a fall in mid-session last time, and hadn’t been running when Astorgus won that magnificent four-in-a-row at the end of the day.

      It offended Fotius that a dark-skinned, scarcely bearded upstart from the deserts of Ammuz—or wherever he was from—could be such a threat to his beloved Astorgus. He ought to have bought the curse-tablet, he thought ruefully. An apprentice in the linen guild had been knifed in a dockside caupona two days before and was newly buried: a perfect chance for those with tablets to seek intercession at the grave of the violently dead. Everyone knew that made the inscribed curses more powerful. Fotius decided he’d have only himself to blame if Astorgus failed today. He had no idea how he’d pay Pappio if he lost. He chose not to think about that, or about his wife’s reaction.

      ‘Up the Blues!’ he shouted suddenly. A score of men near him roused themselves to echo the cry.

      ‘Up the Blues in their butts!’ came the predictable reply from across the way.

      ‘If there were any Greens with balls!’ a man beside Fotius yelled back. Fotius laughed in the shadows. The white moon was hidden now, over behind the Imperial Palaces. Dawn was coming, Jad in his chariot riding up in the east from his dark journey under the world.

      And then the mortal chariots would run, in the god’s glorious name, all through a summer’s day in the holy city of Sarantium. And the Blues, Jad willing, would triumph over the stinking Greens, who were no better than barbarians or pagan Bassanids or even Kindath, as everyone knew.

      ‘Look,’ someone said sharply, and pointed.

      Fotius turned. He actually heard the marching footsteps before he saw the soldiers appear, shadows out of the shadows, through the Bronze Gate at the western end of the square.

      The Excubitors, hundreds of them, armed and armoured beneath their gold-and-red tunics, came into the Hippodrome Forum from the Imperial Precinct. That was unusual enough at this hour to actually be terrifying. There had been two small riots in the past year, when the more rabid partisans of the two colours had come to blows. Knives had appeared, and staves, and the Excubitors had been summoned to help the Urban Prefect’s men quell them. Quelling by the Imperial Guard of Sarantium was not a mild process. A score of dead had strewn the stones afterwards both times.

      Someone else said, ‘Holy Jad, the pennons!’ and Fotius saw, belatedly, that the Excubitors’ banners were lowered on their staffs. He felt a cold wind blow through his soul, from no direction in the world.

       The Emperor was dead.

      Their father, the god’s beloved, had left them. Sarantium was bereft, forsaken, open to enemies east and north and west, malevolent and godless. And with Jad’s Emperor gone, who knew what daemons or spirits from the half-world might now descend to wreak their havoc among helpless mortal men? Was this why he’d seen a ghost? Fotius thought of plague coming again, of war, of famine. In that moment he pictured his child lying dead. Terror pushed him to his knees on the cobbles of the square. He realized that he was weeping for the Emperor he had never seen except as a distant, hieratic figure in the Imperial Box in the Hippodrome.

      Then—an ordinary man living his days in the world of ordinary men—Fotius the sandalmaker understood that there would be no racing today. That his reckless wager with the glassblower was nullified. Amid terror and grief, he felt a shaft of relief like a bright spear of sunlight. Three races in a row? It had been a fool’s wager, and he was quit of it.

      There were many men kneeling now. The Holy Fool, seeing an opportunity, had raised his voice in denunciation—Fotius couldn’t make him out over the babble of noise, so he didn’t know what the man was decrying now. Godlessness, licence, a divided clergy, heretics with Heladikian beliefs. The usual litanies. One of the Excubitors strode over to him and spoke quietly. The holy man ignored the soldier, as they usually did. But then Fotius, astonished, saw the ascetic dealt a slash across the shins with a spear shaft. The ragged man let out a cry—more of surprise than anything else—and fell to his knees, silent.

      Over the wailing of the crowd another voice rose then, stern and assured, compelling attention. It helped that the speaker was on horseback, the only mounted man in the forum.

      ‘Hear me! No harm will come to anyone here,’ he said, ‘if order is preserved. You see our banners. They tell their tale. Our glorious Emperor, Jad’s most dearly beloved, his thrice-exalted regent upon earth, has left us to join the god in glory behind the sun. There will be no chariots today, but the Hippodrome gates will be opened for you to take comfort together while the Imperial Senate assembles to proclaim our new Emperor.’

      A louder murmur of sound. There was no heir; everyone knew it. Fotius saw people streaming into the forum from all directions. News of this sort would take no time at all to travel. He took a breath, struggling to hold down a renewed panic. The Emperor was dead. There was no Emperor in Sarantium.

      The mounted man again lifted a hand for stillness. He sat his horse straight as a spear, clad as his soldiers were. Only the black horse and a border of silver on his over -tunic marked his rank. No pretension here. A peasant from Trakesia, a farmer’s son come south as a lad, rising in the army ranks through