The death of Heladikos in a falling chariot, bearing fire from his father, cannot compete in significance with the theft of a sheep. The drama by Sophenidos (later banned by the clerics as heretical) moves from this beginning to treat matters of faith and power and majesty, and contains the celebrated Messenger's speech about dolphins and Heladikos. But it begins on that hillside, and it ends there, with the sacrifice of the disputed sheep-employing the new gift of fire.
Nonetheless, for all the human truth of Sophenidos's observation that the world's major events might not seem so to those living through a given time, it remains equally true that there are moments and places that may properly be seen as lying at the heart of an age.
That day, in the early spring of the year, there were two such places on the earth, far apart. One was in the desert of Soriyya, where a man in a hood, with a cloak drawn over his mouth, preserved a silence among the drifting sands, having remained awake all the night before, fasting, and looking up at the stars.
The other was a tunnel in Sarantium, between palaces.
He stands in a curve of the walls and floor, looking up at torches and a painted ceiling of the night sky, down at a mosaic of hares and pheasants and other creatures in a forest glade: an artisan's illusion of the natural world here underground within city walls. The pagan faiths tell of dark powers in the earth, he knows, and the dead lie underground, when they are not burned.
There are people in wait ahead of him, people who ought not to be here. He has deciphered that from the measured, unhurried footsteps behind. They have no fear that he will flee from them.
The curiosity he feels might be considered a defining trait of the Emperor of Sarantium, whose mind is endlessly engaged by the challenges and enigmas of the world the god has made. The anger he experiences is less characteristic but equally intense just now, and the repeated pulsing of grief, like a heavy heartbeat, is very rare for him.
There were-there are-so many things he has intended to do.
What he does do after a moment, rather than continue to wait like one of the hares, frozen in the mosaic glade, is turn and walk back towards those behind him. One may sometimes control the moment and place of one's dying, thinks the man whose mother had named him Petrus, in Trakesia, almost half a century ago, and whose uncle-a soldier-had summoned him to Sarantium in early manhood.
He is not, however, reconciled to his death. Jad waits for every living man and woman, but can wait a little longer for an Emperor, surely. Surely.
He deems himself equal even to this, whatever it turns out to be. Has nothing with which to defend himself, unless one counts a simple, unsharpened blade at his belt used for breaking the seal on correspondence. It is not a weapon. He is not a warrior.
He is fairly certain he knows who is here, is rapidly deploying his thoughts (which are weapons) even as he goes back down the tunnel and comes around the curve and sees-with brief, trivial satisfaction-the startled reaction of those coming after him. They stop.
Four of them. Two soldiers, helmed to be unknown but he knows them, and they are the two who were on guard. There is another cloaked man-all these hidden assassins, even with no one to see-and there is one who walks in front, unshielded, eager, almost alight with what Valerius perceives to be desire. He does not see the man he has feared-quite intensely-might be here.
Some relief at that, though he may be among those in wait at the other end of the corridor. Anger, and grief.
"Anxious for an ending?" asks the tall woman, stopping before him. Her surprise was brief, swiftly controlled. Her eyes are blue flames, uncanny. She is dressed in crimson, a gold belt, her hair bound in a net of black. The gold of it shows through in the torchlight.
Valerius smiles. "Not as anxious as you, I daresay. Why are you doing this, Styliane?"
She blinks, genuinely startled. She had been a child when it all happened. He has always been conscious of that, guided by it, much more so than Aliana.
He thinks of his wife. In his heart, in the pure silence of the heart, he is speaking to her now, wherever she might be under the sun overhead. She had always told him it was a mistake to bring this woman-this girl when the dance began-to court, even to let her live. Her father's daughter. Flavius. In silence the Emperor of Sarantium is telling the dancer he married that she was right and he was wrong and he knows she will know, soon enough, even if his thoughts do not-cannot-travel through walls and space to where she is.
"Why am I doing this? Why else am I alive?" the daughter of Flavius Daleinus says.
"To live your life," he says crisply. A philosopher of the Schools, admonishing a pupil. (He closed the Schools himself. A regret, but the Patriarch needed it done. Too many pagans.) "Your own life, with the gifts you have, and have been given. Easy enough, Styliane." He looks past her as fury kindles in her eyes. Deliberately ignores that. Says to the two soldiers, "You are aware that they will kill you here?"
"I told them you would say that," Styliane says.
"Did you also tell them it was true?"
She is clever, knows too much of hatred. The rage of the one who survived? He had thought-gambled-the intelligence might win out in the end, saw a genuine need, a place for her. Aliana said it would not, accused him of trying to control too much. A known flaw.
She is still so young, the Emperor thinks, looking again at the tall woman who has come to kill him here under the still-cold ground of spring. He doesn't want to die.
"I told them what was-and is-more obviously true: any new court will need Excubitors in the highest ranks who have proven their loyalty."
"By betraying their oath and Emperor? You expect trained soldiers to believe that?"
"They are here with us."
"And you will kill them. What does murder say about-"
"Yes," says the cloaked man, finally speaking, face still hooded, his voice thick with excitement. "Really. What does murder say? Even after years?"
He doesn't remove the hood. It doesn't matter. Valerius shakes his head.
"Tertius Dalemus, you are forbidden the City and know it. Guards, arrest this man. He is banned from Sarantium as a traitor." His voice crackles with vigour; they all know this tone of command in him.
It is Styliane, of course, who breaks the spell with her laughter. I'm sorry, the Emperor is thinking. My love, you will never know how sorry.
They hear footsteps approaching from the other end. He turns, apprehensive again. A pain in his heart, a premonition.
Then he sees who has come-and who has not-and that pain slips away. It matters to him that someone is not here. Odd, perhaps, but it does matter. And replacing fear, swiftly, is something else.
This time it is the Emperor of Sarantium, surrounded by his enemies and far as his own childhood from the surface world and the mild light of the god, who laughs aloud.
"Jad's blood, you have grown fatter, Lysippus!" he says. "I'd have wagered it was impossible. You aren't supposed to be in Sarantium yet. I intended to call you back after the fleet had sailed."
"What? Even now you play games? Oh, stop being clever, Petrus," says the gross, green-eyed man who had been his Quaestor of Revenue, exiled in the smouldering, bloody aftermath of riot two years and more ago.
Histories, thinks the Emperor. We all have our histories and they do not leave us. Only a handful of men and women in the world call him by his birth name. This hulking figure, the familiar, too-sweet scent surrounding him, his fleshy face round as a moon, is one of them. There is another figure behind him, mostly hidden by the spilling shape of Lysippus: it is not the one he feared, though, because this one, too, is hooded.