And being careful in his recollections, tracking back along the arc of his feelings, Cleander would finally decide that this was the true moment when allegiance and partisanship gave way to something else in him: a desire that never left him, all his life, to see that level of skill and grace and courage again, garbed in whatever colours they might choose to wear for a moment's bright, sunlit glory on the sands.
In a way, his childhood ended when Scortius went up the track and not down.
His stepmother saw only the same initial confusion of dust and fury that Kasia observed from her similar vantage point farther along. There was a roiling tumult inside her, making it quite impossible for her to sort out the chaos below from the chaos within. She felt unwell, thought she might be physically sick, a humiliation in this public place. She was aware of the Bassanid physician on her other side, was half inclined to curse him for being the agent of her presence here, and for seeing what he… might have seen in the dim light under the stands.
If he spoke a single word, Thena'i's decided, if he but asked after her health, she would… she didn't know what she would do.
And that was such appalling, unknown terrain for her-not being sure of exactly what to do. He didn't speak. A blessing. Stick at his side-that ridiculous affectation, as bad as the dyed beard-he seemed intent on the chariots with all the others. It was why they were all here, wasn't it? Well, it was, for everyone but her, perhaps.
I expect you to win this race, she had said. In that strange, filtered half-light. After trying to kill him. Had no idea why she'd said that, it had just come out, from the tumult inside her. She never did things like that.
It was declared and taught in the holy chapels of Jad that daemons of the half-world hovered, always, intimately close to mortal men and women, and they could enter into you, making you other than what you were, had always been. The knife was in her cloak again. He had given it back to her. She shivered in the sunlight.
The doctor looked over then. Said nothing. Blessedly. Turned back to the track.
"Which one is he?" she asked Cleander. He answered, pointing, never taking his eyes from the impossible confusion below. "He's riding Second chariot, not First!" he shouted.
That obviously meant something, but she hadn't the least notion what. Or that it was partly directed at her, and what she had said about winning the race.
Rustem found and began watching his patient from the very start, as soon as he'd sat down again, just as a trumpet sounded. Saw him controlling four racing horses with his left hand, his injured side, while whipping with his right and leaning absurdly far forward on the precarious, bouncing platform on which the racers stood. Then he saw Scortius tilt his body hard to the right, and it seemed to Rustem as if the charioteer was pulling his team that way, with his own damaged body above the flashing, spinning wheels.
He felt suddenly and inexplicably moved. The knife he'd seen flash and fall under the stands had been, in fact, quite unnecessary, he now judged.
The man intended to kill himself before them all.
He had been, in his own day, as celebrated as any racer who'd ever driven a quadriga in this place.
There were three monuments to him in the spina, and one of them was silver. The first Emperor Valerius-this one's uncle-had been forced to summon him from retirement twice, so impassioned had been the beseechings of the Hippodrome crowd. The third time-the last time- he'd left the track they'd made a procession for him from the Hippodrome Forum to the landward walls, and there had been people lining the streets several bodies deep all the way there. Two hundred thousand souls, or so the Urban Prefecture had reported.
Astorgus of the Blues (once a Green) had no false modesty at all, no diffidence about his own achievements on these sands where he had duelled and won, and won again, against a succession of challengers and the Ninth Driver, always, for two decades.
It was the very last of those young challengers-the one he'd retired from-who was before him now, riding Second chariot, with broken ribs and an open wound and no longer young. And of all those watching in those first moments of the race, it was Astorgus the factionarius-blunt and scarred, immensely knowledgeable and famously undemonstrative-who first grasped what was happening, reading eight quadrigas in a single capacious glance, their speeds and angles and drivers and capacities, and who then offered a savage, swift prayer aloud to banned, blasphemous, necessary Heladikos, son of the god.
He was along the outside wall, standing for the start where he usually did, two-thirds of the way down the straight, past the chalk line, in a safety zone carved out for the track officials between the outer railing and the first row of seats, which were set back here. As a consequence, he had the illusion that Scortius was driving straight towards him when he took that absurd, unprecedented careen towards the outside, not the rail.
He heard the Glory of the Blues (he who had once been the Glory here, himself) screaming over the crashing din, and he was near enough to realize that the words were in Inici, which only a few of them knew. Astorgus was one. The boy, Taras, from Megarium, would be another. Astorgus saw the lad jerk his head swiftly left and immediately, splendidly react, without an instant to think what he was doing. Astorgus stopped breathing, cut off his prayer, watched.
The boy screamed in turn-howling the name of Servator-and went hard to his whip on the horse's right side. It happened at a breakneck, utterly insane speed, destructively close to the jammed, crowded start in a madness of thirty-two pounding stallions.
In a precisely simultaneous pulsebeat of time, with no margin at all, none, cut so near there was no space to be seen between the chariot wheels as they crossed each other, Scortius and the boy, Taras, both hurled their bodies left, bringing their teams and chariots with them. The sound was deafening, the dust a choking cloud.
And through that dust, right in front of him, as if done for his private, intimate entertainment-dancers hired for a night by an aristocrat- Astorgus saw what happened next and his soul was moved and his spirit shaken and overawed, for he knew that for all he had ever done out there, in a career acclaimed by two hundred thousand souls crying his name, he could not have even conceived, in his prime, in his own glory, what Scortius had just implemented.
Taras was angling down, Scortius up. Straight for each other. When the boy pulled violently left, the magnificent Servator pulled the other three horses and the chariot across the track in exactly the same manoeuvre the Hippodrome crowd would still remember from the last day of autumn, when Scortius had done it to him. And that was-oh, it was- part of the humbling elegance of this, the perfection. A remembered text being echoed, used again in a new way.
And Scortius threw his team as hard to the left in the exact same needful instant-else the two chariots would have smashed each other to bits
of wood, sending screaming horses crashing, riders flying into shattered bones and death. His team slewed, the wheels sliding, then biting up the track, straightening out with a terrifying precision right beside Crescens and his Green team. In full flight.
Meanwhile, the third and fourth lane teams had been slicing down.
Of course they had. There was room made for them when Scortius bolted from the start and cut up. They'd slowed, seized the startling invitation-and so opened the way, like double doors in a palace, for Taras to make his own violent cut left and straighten back up, and so discover a clean, clear, glorious sweep of open track in front of him near the rail.