Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay Page A

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 graciously, 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 assoldiers 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