Sailing to Sarantium (33 page)

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.

 

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins.

 

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 head 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 sour-faced, 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 semiprecious 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-the
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.

 

'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.