The Sarantine Mosaic (124 page)

They came down into the road again at the end of the colonnade. Someone hurled a cookpot from a window overhead, narrowly missing them. Carullus stooped and picked it up. ‘A wedding gift! How unexpected! Is this better than the one we have, love?' he asked his wife, grinning.

The woman shook her head, managed a smile. Her eyes were terrified. Carullus tossed the pot over his shoulder. Cleander glanced at his stepmother. No terror there.
Nothing
there. It was as if she hadn't even heard or seen any of this: the arrival of companions, the man struck down—killed—right beside them. She seemed in another world entirely.

They continued without further incident, though the streets were crowded with running, shouting figures and Cleander saw shopkeepers hastily closing their shop
fronts and doors, boarding up. They reached their house. The servants were watching for them. Well trained, they had already set about barricading the courtyard gates, and those waiting at the door were holding heavy sticks. This was hardly the first riot in memory.

Cleander's mother entered the house without speaking. She hadn't spoken since they'd left the Hippodrome. Since the race had begun, he suddenly realized. It fell to him to offer thanks to the soldier. He stammered his gratitude, invited them in. Carullus declined with a smile. ‘I'd best report to the Strategos, soon as I get my wife home. A small word of advice: stay indoors tonight, lad. The Excubitors will be out, for certain, and not choosing with any great care where they strike in the dark.'

‘I will,' said Cleander. He thought about his father, but decided that wasn't a cause of concern: from the kathisma they could get back into the Imperial Precinct. His father could wait there or get a soldiers' escort home. His own duty was to his mother and his sisters here. Keeping them safe.

Dictating his celebrated
Reflections
forty years afterwards, Cleander Bonosus would describe the day the Emperor Valerius II was assassinated by the Daleinoi, the day his own stepmother killed herself in her bath— opening her wrists with a small blade no one knew she had—as the day he became a man. Schoolboys would learn and copy the well-known phrases, or memorize them for recitation:
Just as it is adversity that hardens the spirit of a people, so can adversity strengthen the soul of a man. What we master becomes ours to use.

Sorting through complex and sometimes distant events to determine the causes of a riot is not an easy task, but it fell squarely within the responsibilities of the Urban
Prefect, under the direction of the Master of Offices, and he was not unfamiliar with the process.

He also had, of course, access to some acknowledged professionals—and their tools—when it came time to ask significant questions.

As it happened, the more rigorous methods were not required (to the disappointment of some) in the case of the riot that occurred on the day the Emperor Valerius II was murdered.

The disturbance in the Hippodrome began
before
anyone knew of that death. This much was certain. It was an attack on a charioteer that started it, and this time the Blues and Greens were not united as they had been two years before in the Victory Riot. Rather the contrary, in fact.

The inquiry established that it was one of the Hippodrome staff who'd revealed that the Blues' champion, Scortius, had been viciously struck by Crescens of the Greens just before the first race of the afternoon. Crescens, apparently, had been the first to note the reappearance of his rival.

The attendant, on duty at the Processional Gates, later swore on oath to what he'd seen. Corroboration was provided, reluctantly, by the young son of Senator Plautus Bonosus. The lad, to his credit, had kept quiet at the time, though he confirmed afterwards that he'd seen Crescens elbow the other driver in what he personally knew to be already broken ribs. He explained his silence at the time by saying that he had a sense of what the consequences of pointing out the incident might be.

The lad was given a formal commendation in the official report. It was regrettable that the Hippodrome staffer had not had as much good sense, but he couldn't actually be
punished
for what he'd done. The race-track staff were supposed to be resolutely neutral, but that was fiction, not
reality. The gatekeeper, it emerged, was a partisan of the Blues. Neutrality was not a Sarantine trait in the Hippodrome.

It was established, accordingly, to the Urban Prefect's satisfaction—and so recorded in his report to the Master of Offices—that Crescens of the Greens had delivered what he'd intended to be an unseen assault on the other driver, a wounded man. Clearly, he had been trying to undermine the impact of Scortius's dramatic return.

This afforded a measure of explanation, though hardly a complete mitigation, for what had apparently happened next. Astorgus, the Blues' factionarius, a man of experience and probity, a man who
ought
to have known better, had walked across the sands to the spina, where Crescens was still standing after suffering an unfortunate fall in his last race, and had struck him in the face and body, breaking his nose and dislocating the rider's shoulder in full view of eighty thousand highly excited people.

He'd had provocation, undeniably—was later to say that he believed that Scortius was about to die—but it was still an irresponsible act. If you wanted to have someone beaten, you did it at night, if you had any sense at all.

Crescens wouldn't race again for almost two months, but didn't die. Neither did Scortius.

About three thousand people did go to the god, however, in the Hippodrome and the streets that day and night. Precise numbers were always demanded by the Master of Offices, always difficult to produce. The toll was a significant but not an outrageous number for a riot that included burning and looting after darkfall. Compared to the last major conflagration, where thirty thousand had been slain, this one was a much more trivial event. Some Kindath homes were set afire in their quarter, as usual,
and a few foreigners—Bassanid merchants for the most part—were killed, but this latter development was to be expected, given the perfidious breaching of the Eternal Peace that had, by twilight, been reported in the City, along with the death of the Emperor. Frightened people did unpleasant things.

Most of the killings came after dark, when the Excubitors, carrying torches and swords, marched out of the Imperial Precinct to quiet the streets. By then the soldiers were all aware that they had a new Emperor, and that Sarantine territory had been attacked in the northeast. It was undoubtedly an excess of zeal occasioned by these facts that led to some of the civilian fatalities and a few of the Bassanid deaths.

It was hardly worth noting, really. One couldn't expect the army to be patient with brawling civilians. No blame at all was attached to them. Indeed, another commendation was offered to the Count of the Excubitors, for the swift quelling of the night's violence.

Much later, Astorgus and Crescens would both be tried by the judiciary for their assaults: the first prominent trials conducted under the new Imperial regime. Both men behaved themselves with dignity, declaring extreme remorse for their actions. Both would receive reprimands and fines: identical ones, of course. The matter would then be closed. They were important men in the scheme of things. Sarantium needed them both alive and well and at the Hippodrome, keeping the citizens happy.

The last time an Emperor died without an heir, Plautus Bonosus was thinking, there had been a mob smashing on the doors of the Senate Chamber, battering its way in. This time there was a
real
riot outside, and the people in the streets didn't even
know
the Emperor had died. An
aphorism in there somewhere, Bonosus thought ironically, a paradox worth recording.

Paradoxes have layers, irony can be double-edged. He didn't yet know of his wife's death.

In the Senate Chambers they were waiting for others of their number to arrive through the unruly streets. The Excubitors were out and about, collecting Senators, escorting them as quickly as possible. Not surprising, that speed. Most of the City was unaware of the Emperor's death, so far. That ignorance wouldn't last long, not in Sarantium, even in the midst of a riot. Perhaps especially, Bonosus thought, reclining in his seat, in the midst of a riot.

Many levels of memory were competing in his mind and he was also trying—unsuccessfully—to come to terms with the fact that Valerius was dead. An Emperor murdered. It hadn't happened in a very long time. Bonosus had known better than to ask questions.

The soldiers had reason to want the Senate assembled expeditiously. Whatever the story of the death of Valerius turned out to be—the exiled Lysippus had been declared to be back in the City, and involved, as was the banished and imprisoned Lecanus Daleinus—there was no real question as to who should succeed the slain Emperor.

Or, putting it a little differently, thought Bonosus, there were reasons for Leontes to proceed swiftly,
before
such questions might arise.

The Supreme Strategos was, after all, married to a Daleinus, and there might be those who took a reflective view of assassinating one's predecessor on the Golden Throne. Especially when the murdered man had been one's own mentor and friend. And when the deed was done on the eve of war. It could be called—by someone
much
more reckless than Plautus Bonosus—a vile and contemptible act of treachery.

Bonosus's thoughts kept whirling about. Too many shocks in one day. The return of Scortius, that astonishing race that had turned from glory into riot in a heartbeat. And then, just as the fighting began, there had been the voice of Leontes's grey secretary in his ear:
‘Your presence is immediately requested in the palace.'

He hadn't said by whom. It didn't matter. Senators did what they were told. Bonosus had risen to go just as he realized something had happened in the spina—he would learn the details afterwards—and he heard a deepthroated roar as the Hippodrome erupted.

He suspected, looking back, that Leontes (or his wife?) had wanted him to come to them alone, as Master of the Senate, to learn the tidings before anyone else did. That would give them time to quietly summon the Senate, control the release of the terrible news.

It didn't work out that way.

As the stands exploded into fury and a rush for the exits, the inhabitants of the Imperial Box rose to their feet and made a collective rush of their own for the doors leading back to the Attenine Palace. Bonosus remembered the expression on the pallid secretary's face: startled and displeased, and afraid.

When Bonosus and Pertennius did make it back through the long walkway to the palace's audience chamber, it was crowded with noisy, frightened courtiers who'd fled the kathisma ahead of them. Others were arriving. In the centre of the room—near the thrones and the silver tree—stood Leontes and Styliane.

The Strategos lifted a hand for silence. Not the Master of Offices, not the Chancellor. Gesius had just entered the room, in fact, through the small door behind the two thrones. He stopped there, brow furrowed in perplexity. In the stillness his gesture shaped
it was Leontes, blunt and grave, who said, ‘I am sorry, but this must be told. We have lost our father today. Jad's most holy Emperor is dead.'

There was a babble of disbelief. A woman cried out. Someone near Bonosus made the sign of the sun disk, then others did. Someone knelt, then all of them did, the sound like a murmuring of the sea. All of them except Styliane and Leontes. And Gesius, Bonosus saw. The Chancellor didn't looked perplexed now. His expression was otherwise. He put out a hand to steady himself on a table and said, from directly behind those tall, golden figures and the thrones, ‘How? How did this happen? And how is it that you know?'

The thin, precise voice cut hard through the room. This was Sarantium. The Imperial Precinct. Not a place where certain things could be easily controlled. Not with so many competing interests and clever men.