Bonosus saw the faction colours again, too many guilds to count, shopkeepers, street vendors, tavern-masters, bathhouse workers, animal-keepers, beggars, whores, artisans, slaves. And soldiers. There were soldiers this time.
And the same name on all their lips. The people of Sarantium, making known their will. Bonosus turned, on some instinct, in time to see the Chancellor suddenly drain his cup of wine. Gesius took a deep, steadying breath. He stood up, unaided, and moved towards the marble speaker’s circle again. His colour had come back.
Holy Jad, thought Bonosus, his mind spinning like the wheel of a toppled chariot, can he be this swift?
‘Most noble members of the Imperial Senate,’ the Chancellor said, lifting his thin, exquisitely modulated voice. ‘See! Sarantium has come to us! Shall we hear the voice of our people?’
The people heard him, and their voice—responding— became a roar that shook the chamber. One name, again and again. Echoing among marble and mosaic and precious stones and gold, spiralling upwards to the dome where doomed Heladikos drove his chariot, carrying fire. One name. An absurd choice in a way, but in another, Plautus Bonosus thought, it might not be so absurd. He surprised himself. It was not a thought he’d ever had before.
Behind the Chancellor, Adrastus, the suave, polished Master of Offices—the most powerful man in the City, in the Empire—still looked stunned, bewildered by the speed of things. He had not moved or reacted. Gesius had. In the end, that hesitation, missing the moment when everything changed, was to cost Adrastus his office. And his eyes.
The Golden Throne had been lost to him already. Perhaps that dawning awareness was what froze him there on a marble bench while the crowd roared and thundered as if they were in the Hippodrome or a theatre, not the Senate Chamber. His dreams shattered— subtle, intricate designs slashed apart—as a beefy, toothless smith howled the City’s chosen name right in his well-bred face.
Perhaps what Adrastus was hearing then, unmoving, was another sound entirely: the jewelled birds of the Emperor, singing for a different dancer now.
‘Valerius to the Golden Throne!’
The cry had run through the Hippodrome, exactly as he’d been told it would. He’d refused them, had shaken his head decisively, turned his horse to leave, seen a company of the Urban Prefect’s guardsmen running towards him—not his own men—and watched as they knelt before his mount, blocking his way with their bodies.
Then they, too, raised his name in a loud shout, begging that he accept the throne. Again he refused, shaking his head, making a sweeping gesture of denial. But the crowd was already wild. The cry that had begun when he brought them word of Daleinus’s death reverberated through the huge space where the chariots ran and people cheered. There were thirty, perhaps forty thousand people there by then, even with no racing this day.
A different contest was proceeding towards its orchestrated end.
Petrus had told him what would happen and what he had to do at every step. That his reporting of the second death would bring shock and fear, but no grief, and even some vindication following hard upon the too-contrived acclamations of Daleinus. He hadn’t asked his nephew how he’d known those acclamations would come. Some things he didn’t need to know. He had enough to remember, more than enough to keep clearly in sequence this day.
But it had developed precisely as Petrus had said it would, exact as a heavy cavalry charge on open ground, and here he was astride his horse, the Urban Prefect’s men blocking his way and the Hippodrome crowd screaming his name to the god’s bright sun. His name and his alone. He had refused twice, as instructed. They were pleading with him now. He saw men weeping as they roared his name. The noise was deafening, a wall, punishingly loud, as the Excubitors— his own men this time—moved closer, and then completely surrounded him, making it impossible for a humble, loyal, unambitious man to ride from this place, to escape the people’s declared will in their time of great danger and need.
He stepped down from his horse.
His men were around him, pressing close, screening him from the crowd where Blues and Greens stood mingled together, joined in a fierce, shared desire they had not known they even had, where all those gathered in this white, blazing light were calling upon him to be theirs. To save them now.
And so, in the Hippodrome of Sarantium, under the brilliant summer sun, Valerius, Count of the Excubitors, yielded to his fate and suffered his loyal guards to clothe him in the purple-lined mantle Leontes happened to have brought with him.
‘Will they not wonder at that?’ he had asked Petrus.
‘It won’t matter by then,’ his nephew had replied. ‘Trust me in this.’
And the Excubitors made way, the outer ring of them parting slowly, like a curtain, so that the innermost ones could be seen holding an enormous round shield. And standing upon that shield as they raised it to their shoulders—in the ancient way soldiers proclaimed an Emperor—Valerius the Trakesian lifted his hands towards his people. He turned to all corners of the thundering Hippodrome—for here was the true thunder that day—and accepted, humbly and gracio usly, the spontaneous will of the Sarantine people that he be their Imperial Lord, Regent of Holy Jad upon earth.
Valerius! Valerius! Valerius!
All glory to the Emperor Valerius!
Valerius the Golden, to the Golden Throne!
His hair had been golden once, long ago, when he had left the grainlands of Trakesia with two other boys, poor as stony earth, but strong for a lad, willing to work, to fight, walking barefoot through a cold, wet autumn, the north wind behind them bringing winter, all the way to the Sarantine military camp, to offer their services as soldiers to a distant Emperor in the unimaginable City, long, long ago.
‘Petrus, stay and dine with me?’
Night. A western sea breeze cooling the room through the open windows over the courtyard below. The sound of falling water drifted up from the fountains, and from farther away came the susurration of wind in the leaves of the trees in the Imperial gardens.
Two men stood in a room in the Traversite Palace. One was an Emperor, the other had made him so. In the larger, more formal Attenine Palace, a little way across the gardens, Apius lay in state in the Porphyry Room, coins on his eyes, a golden sun disk clasped between folded hands: payment and passport for his journey.
‘I cannot, Uncle. I have promises to be kept.’
‘Tonight? Where?’
‘Among the factions. The Blues were very useful today.’
‘Ah. The Blues. And their most favoured actress? Was she very useful?’ The old soldier’s voice was sly now. ‘Or is she to be useful later this evening?’
Petrus looked unabashed. ‘Aliana? A fine dancer, and I always laugh during her comic turns upon the stage.’ He grinned, the round, smooth face free of guile.
The Emperor’s gaze was shrewd, undeceived. After a moment he said, quietly, ‘Love is dangerous, nephew.’
The younger man’s expression changed. He was silent a moment, by one of the doorways. Eventually he nodded his head. ‘It can be. I know that. Do you . . . disapprove?’
It was a well-timed question. How could his uncle’s disapproval attach to anything he did tonight? After the events of the day?
Valerius shook his head. ‘Not really. You will move into the Imperial Precinct? One of the palaces?’ There were six of them scattered on these grounds. They were all his now. He would have to learn to know them.
Petrus nodded. ‘Of course, if you honour me so. But not until after the Mourning Rites and the Investiture, and the Hippodrome ceremony in your honour.’
‘You will bring her here with you?’
Petrus’s expression, directly confronted, was equally direct. ‘Only