Crescens said, "I don't believe I can allow you that entrance. I'm sorry. Saving your fucking life's one thing. Trivial. But giving you that kind of a return's another. Very bad for Green morale."
One had to smile. One was back in the Hippodrome. The world it made within the world. "I can see that. Let's go together, then."
They went together, just as the first dancers began emerging from the darkness of the tunnel to their left.
"Thank you, by the way," Scortius added, as they approached the two yellow-clad guards at the doors.
I expect you to win this race, she had said. After the doctor had formally disclaimed responsibility if he killed himself. She had come under the stands with a knife. She had come to the Hippodrome with one. She knew what she was saying. You can't imagine I'd be long behind you. He had long thought, before ever really knowing her, that there was something extraordinary beneath her celebrated reserve. Then he'd thought, arrogantly, that he'd found it, defined it. He'd been wrong. There was so much more. Should he have known?
"Thank you? Not at all," said Crescens. "Too boring here without you, winning against children. Mind you, I do want to keep winning."
And as they passed the two guards, just before they walked out on the bright sands together, into the sight of eighty thousand people, he hammered an elbow entirely without warning into the injured man's left side.
Scortius gasped, staggered. The world reeled, went red in his sight.
"Oh! Sorry!" the other man exclaimed. "Are you all right?"
Scortius had doubled over, clutching his side. They were in the entrance now. Would be seen in a stride or two. With a shuddering, racking effort he forced himself to straighten, started moving again, an act of will more than anything else. Was still desperately fighting for breath. Heard, as in a fever, the first roars of the crowd nearest to them.
It began. The volume of noise growing, and growing, rolling along the first straightway like a wave, the sound of his name. Crescens was beside him but it was a mistake on his part, really, for only one name was heard, over and again. A screaming. He struggled to breathe without passing out, to keep moving, not to double over again, not put a hand to his wound.
"I am a terrible man," said Crescens cheerfully beside him, waving to the crowd as if he'd personally fetched the other rider back from the dead like some hero of the ancient tales. "By Heladikos, I really am."
He wanted to kill, and to laugh at the same time. Laughing would probably kill him. He was back in the Hippodrome. The world of it. Out on the sands. Saw the horses up ahead. Wondered how one walked so far.
Knew he was going to do it, somehow.
And in that same moment, seeing the drivers ahead of them swivelling to look back and stare, looking at the teams and their positions, and at one in particular, he had his idea, swift as horses, a gift. He actually smiled, baring his teeth, through breathing was very difficult. There was more than one wolf here, he thought. By Heladikos, there was.
"Watch me," he said then, to the other charioteer, to himself, to the boy he'd been once on that stallion in Soriyya, to all of them, the god and his son and the world. He saw Crescens look quickly over at him. Was aware, triumphantly, through the red, stabbing pain, of sudden anxiety in the other man's features.
He was Scortius. He was still Scortius. The Hippodrome belonged to him. They built monuments to him in this place. Whatever might happen elsewhere, in darkness, with the sun below the world.
"Watch me," he said again.
West of them, not all that far, as the two charioteers are leaving their tunnel, the Emperor of Sarantium is heading towards his own, to pass under the Imperial Precinct gardens from one palace to another where he is about to make the final dispositions for a war he has thought about from the time he placed his uncle on the Golden Throne.
The Empire had been whole once, and then sundered, and then half of it had been lost, like a child might be lost. Or, better put, a father. He has no children. His father died when he was very young. Did these things matter? Had they ever? Did they now? Now that he was an adult, growing old, shaping nations under holy Jad?
Aliana thinks so, or wonders about it. She'd put it to him directly one night not long ago. Was he risking so much, seeking to leave so bright and fierce a mark on the world, because he had no heir for whom to guard what they already had?
He didn't know. He didn't think this was so. He'd been dreaming of Rhodias for so long-a dream of something made whole again. And made so by him. He knew too much about the past, perhaps. There had been three Emperors once for a short, savage time, and then two, here and in Rhodias, for a long, divisive span of years, then only one, here in the City Saranios made, with the west lost and fallen.
It felt wrong to him. Surely it would to any man who knew the glory of what had been.
Though that, he thinks, walking through the lower level of the Attenine Palace with a courtly retinue hurrying to keep pace with him, is a trick of rhetoric. Of course there are those who know the past as well as he and see things differently. And there are those-such as his wife-who see a greater glory here in the east, in the present world, under Jad.
None of them, even Aliana, rules Sarantium. He does. He has guided them all to this point, has strings in his hand and a very clear vision of the elements in play. He expects to succeed. He usually does.
He comes to the tunnel. The two helmed Excubitors stand rigidly at attention. At a nod, one swiftly unlocks and opens the door. Behind Valerius, the Chancellor and the Master of Offices and the wretchedly inadequate Quaestor of Imperial Revenue all bow. He has dealt with them here in the Attenine over a rapid midday meal. Given orders, heard reports.
Has been awaiting one particular dispatch, from the north-east, but it hasn't yet come. He is, in fact, disappointed in the King of Kings.
He has been expecting Shirvan of Bassania to attack in Calysium by now, to set in motion the other part of this vast undertaking. The part no one knows about, unless Aliana has divined it, or perhaps Gesius, whose subtlety is extreme.
But there has come no word yet of an incursion across the border. It's not as if he hasn't given them enough signals as to his intentions, or even his timing. Shirvan ought to have sent an army over the border by now, breaching the bought peace in an attempt to undermine a western campaign.
He will have to deal with Leontes and the generals differently, as a consequence. Not an insurmountable problem, but he'd have preferred the elegance of things had there been a Bassanid attack already launched, appearing to force his hand and divert troops before the fleet sailed.
He is, after all, pursuing more than one goal here.
It is, one might say, a character flaw. He always has more than one goal, entwines so many threads and designs into everything he does. Even this long-awaited war of reconquest in the west is not a thing that stands entirely alone.
Aliana would understand, even be amused. But she doesn't want this campaign, and he has made things easier for both of them-or so he judges-by not discussing it. He suspects that she is aware of what he is doing. He also knows her unease, and the sources of it. A regret, for him.
He can say, with uncomplicated truth, that he loves her more than his god and needs her at least as much.