The Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay Page A

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.

    â€˜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.
    â€˜ Will they not wonder at that ?’ he had asked Petrus.
    â€˜ 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,