The Sarantine Mosaic Read Online Free PDF Page B

cauponae, whorehouses, cookshops, the Hippodrome, the theatres. You couldn’t buy a brooch to pin your cloak without hearing the vendor’s views on Heladikos or the proper liturgy for the sunrise invocations.
    There were too many in the Empire—and especially in the City itself—who had thought and worshipped in their own way for too long for the Patriarchs and clerics to persecute aggressively, but the signs of a deepening division were everywhere, and unrest was always present.
    In Soriyya, to the south between desert and sea, where Jaddites dwelt perilously near to the Bassanid frontier, and among the Kindath and the grimly silent, nomadic peoples of Ammuz and the deserts beyond,whose faith was fragmented from tribe to tribe and inexplicable, shrines to Heladikos were as common as sanctuaries or chapels built for the god. The courage of the son, his willingness to sacrifice, were virtues exalted by clerics and secular leaders both in lands bordering enemies. The City, behind its massive triple walls and the guarding sea, could afford to think differently, they said in the desert lands. And Rhodias in the far-off west had long since been sacked, so what true guidance could its High Patriarch offer now?
    Scortius of Soriyya, youngest lead racer ever to ride for the Greens of Sarantium, who only wanted to drive a chariot and think of nothing but speed and stallions, prayed to Heladikos and his golden chariot in the silence of his soul, being a contained, private young man—half a son of the desert himself. How, he had decided in childhood, could any charioteer do otherwise than honour the Charioteer? Indeed, he was inwardly of the belief—untutored though he might be in such matters— that those he raced against who followed the Patriarchal Pronouncement and denied the god’s son were cutting themselves off from a vital source of intervention when they wheeled through the arches onto the dangerous, proving sands of the Hippodrome before eighty thousand screaming citizens.
    Their problem, not his.
    He was nineteen years old, riding First Chariot for the Greens in the largest stadium in the world, and he had a genuine chance to be the first rider since Ormaez the Esperanan to win his hundred in the City before his twentieth birthday, at the end of the summer.
    But the Emperor was dead. There would be no racing today, and for the god knew how many days during the mourning rites. There were twenty thousand people or more in the Hippodrome this morning, spilling out ontothe track, but they were murmuring anxiously among themselves, or listening to yellow-robed clerics intone the liturgy, not watching the chariots wheeled out in the Procession. He’d lost half a race day last week to a shoulder injury, and now today was gone, and next week? The week after?
    Scortius knew he ought not to be so concerned with his own affairs at a time such as this. The clerics— whether Heladikian or Orthodox—would all castigate him for it. On some things the religious agreed.
    He saw men weeping in the stands and on the track, others gesturing too broadly, speaking too loudly, fear in their eyes. He had seen that fear when the chariots were running, in other drivers’ faces. He couldn’t say he had ever felt it himself, except when the Bassanid armies had come raiding across the sands and, standing on their city ramparts, he had looked up and seen his father’s eyes. They had surrendered that time, lost their city, their homes—only to regain them four years later in a treaty, following victories on the northern border. Conquests were traded back and forth all the time.
    He understood that the Empire might be in danger now. Horses needed a firm hand, and so did an Empire. His problem was that, growing up where he had, he’d seen the eastern armies of Shirvan, King of Kings, too many times to feel remotely as anxious as those he watched now. Life was too rich, too new, too impossibly