The Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay Read Free Book Online

Asportus?’
    â€˜Who?’ Fotius said.
    â€˜ Astorgus ,’ the man said quickly. ‘Astorgus of the Blues.’
    â€˜Get out of here,’ said Daccilio, who had been one of the Blue faction leaders for as long as Fotius could remember, and who had carried the banner at this year’s Hippodrome opening ceremonies. ‘Get out, now!’
    â€˜Take off that blue tunic first!’ someone else rasped angrily. Voices were raised. Heads turned in their direction. From all over the Hippodrome the too-synchronized frauds were still crying the name of Flavius Daleinus. With a roiling, hot anger that was actually a kind of joy, Fotius grabbed a fistful of the imposter’s crisp blue tunic in his sweaty hands.
    Asportus, indeed.
    He jerked hard and felt the tunic tear at the shoulder. The jewelled brooch holding it fell onto the sand.He laughed—and then let out a scream as something smashed him across the back of the knees. He staggered, collapsed in the dust. Just as the charioteers fall , he thought.
    He looked up, tears in his eyes, pain taking his breath away. Excubitors. Of course. Three of them had come. Armed, impersonal, merciless. They could kill him as easily as crack him across the knees, and with as much impunity. This was Sarantium. Commoners died to make an example every day. A spear point was levelled at his breast.
    â€˜Next man who strikes another here gets a spearpoint, not a shaft,’ the man holding the weapon said, his voice hollow within his helmet. He was utterly calm. The Imperial Guard were the best-trained men in the City.
    â€˜You’ll be busy, then,’ said Daccilio bluntly, unintimidated. ‘It seems the spontaneous demonstration arranged by the illustrious Daleinoi is not achieving what might have been desired.’
    The three Excubitors looked up into the stands and the one with the levelled spear swore, rather less calmly. There were fistfights breaking out now, centred around the men who had been shouting that patently contrived acclamation. Fotius lay motionless, not even daring to rub his legs, until the spear point wavered and moved away. The green-eyed imposter in the torn blue tunic was no longer among them. Fotius had no idea where he’d gone.
    Pappio knelt beside him. ‘My friend, are you all right?’
    Fotius managed to nod. He wiped at the tears and sweat on his face. His tunic and legs were coated with dust now, from the sacred ground where charioteers raced. He felt a sudden wave of fellow-feeling for the balding glassblower. Pappio was a Green, to be sure, buthe was a decent fellow for all that. And he had helped unmask a deception.
    Asportus of the Blues! Asportus ? Fotius almost gagged. Trust the Daleinoi, those arrogant patricians, to have so little respect for the citizens as to imagine this shabby pantomime could get Flavius’s rump onto the Golden Throne!
    The Excubitors beside them suddenly pulled themselves into a line, bristling with military precision. Fotius glanced quickly past them. A man on a horse had entered the Hippodrome, riding slowly along the spina towards the midpoint.
    Others saw the rider. Someone cried his name, and then more voices did. This time it was spontaneous. A guard of Excubitors moved into place around him as he reined the horse to a stop. It was the formal array of their ranks, and the silence of them, that drew all eyes and compelled a gradual stillness of twenty thousand people.
    â€˜Citizens of Sarantium, I have tidings,’ cried Valerius, Count of the Excubitors, in the rough, unvarnished soldier’s tones.
    They couldn’t all hear him, of course, but the words were repeated by others—as was always the case here—and ran through that vast space, far up into the stands, across the spina with its obelisks and statues, through the empty kathisma where the Emperor would sit for the racing, and under the arches where some charioteers and Hippodrome staff were watching,