Acasius, “but if their wheels touch the stone kerb, they’ll shatter, and the chariot will be done for.”
Round and round they stormed, the magnificent horses and the fragile chariots driven by men who looked slim and slight and almost disappeared amid the churning dust. She cheered their champion, together with the screaming supporters of the Greens who were dressed in shades of the appropriate colour, facing the tiered ranks of blue-clad supporters on the opposite side. But the foremost chariot was Blue and its driver clung grimly to the lead; never did he allow the Green driver a single chance to pass him by.
Five eggs had dropped.
“Two laps left,” said Acasius, watching intently. “Go, Green! Go, go!”
Now one of the less able charioteers drove too close to the kerb and a wheel shattered into matchwood. He was flung from his perch onto the tracks, a second chariot cannoned into his disabled one and both broke up. The second driver had managed to free himself from the traces with swift slashes of his knife and leapt onto the spina, but the unfortunate first driver was dragged among the frantically lunging, whinnying horses and was trampled by slashing hooves.
The child screamed with dread. Her father held her tightly. “They’ll get him out,” he said. “They’ll save him, don’t worry.”
The ground staff dashed across the track, risking their lives among the rest of the chariots that raced on. Clouds of dust partially obscured the chaos. Yet it was all too clear that the figure they carried off on a stretcher was broken like a pottery statue dashed to the ground, and stained from head to foot with red.
“Come on, come on, get it clear!” Acasius muttered.
The men worked at a frenzied pace to remove the debris and the wildly thrashing horses, but there was too little time to clear the track altogether before the last egg slotted home and the leading chariots tore around to battle it out in the final lap. The Blue driver, still in the lead, lost some speed as he dexterously avoided the obstacles in his path, going out wide. The Green tried to sneak past on the inside, but there was still some wreckage near the kerb and his left wheel struck it. This resulted in wild swings from side to side as he struggled to regain control. The supporters of both groups were beside themselves: they jumped up on their seats, waved their arms, and bellowed encouragement. The noise grew deafening.
The child thrilled to the roar of the crowd. She felt as if she could float on the noise. As if it might lift her up, might float her out of her father’s arms, right up to the Kathisma where the Emperor sat.
The Green driver had to haul his team almost to a standstill to avoid another disaster. The Blue charioteer had speeded up again and swept triumphantly ahead. She almost wept when he charged past the winning post. Around them some people hugged each other rapturously, while others howled in dismay.
“Father, we lost! We lost!”
“Never mind, we’ll win another time. Now come along. We must get out quickly, I’m not supposed to bring you here.” He strode back the way they had come, through passages now thronged with rowdy, excited punters. He held her tightly under the cloak. When they reached the main exit, he set her down.
“Can we go home now?” Her short legs were shaky.
“I must go and check on Bruno. He’s been a bit grumpy lately. If he’s not better by tomorrow, I’ll have to get the vet to see to him. I think it may be an abscess in a tooth, he’s been off his food.”
“Father … the driver … will he … Did he die?”
“He wasn’t carried out through the Nekra Gate,” her father said, “so he must have been alive. They’ll do their best for him. The Hippodrome has good physicians. I’m sorry you saw that. You go along home, sweetheart, you’re all right on your own, aren’t you? You’ll run all the way?”
“I’m fine, Father,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “I can do it.” She would thread a path among the cleaners, stableboys, grooms, animal trainers, food vendors, loafers, beggars, pickpockets and the many bettors, who would wager not only on the outcome of the races, but on the outcome of the marble game. Marble balls with the colours of the competing teams would roll down slightly sloping marble tables, towards the holes at the bottom. This game, her father said, required no skill and was a good way of wasting money. Still, she thought she would like to try her luck, only she never had any money to waste. You had to pay to make a bet.
Once outside, she did as her father said and ran all the way, her small sandalled feet kicking up the dust, which was largely dry animal manure pounded fine by the traffic. A cart would have watered it early that morning, but already the sun had baked it dry again. She liked the smell of it – together with the salt tang of the sea it smelled of home. On she dashed, past the grand buildings that lined the important middle road (the Mesê, it was called), past the huge bronze doors of the Imperial Palace where smart guards in fancy uniforms held their swords at the ready and winked when she sped by, past the Baths of Zeuxippus with the tall disapproving statues. She skirted the square in front of the Church of the Holy Wisdom with its towers as high as God. Ran on past rows and rows of pillars in front of shops that sold all kinds of wonderful things.
When she reached the Forum of Constantine she turned off the middle road onto lesser roads towards the Golden Horn where ships rode at anchor. Here rich people’s villas and simpler wooden houses stood side by side, all of them with tall crosses on their roofs. When she was smaller, she had found the forest of crosses frightening. But her father, who had been a priest in that other country where he had learned to tame bears, said they meant that Jesus was watching over her, over them all, and the crosses should rather make her feel safe. But she had seen some nasty things happen to people, in spite of the crosses. It was a world full of scary things, and she reasoned that Jesus couldn’t be watching everybody all of the time. So she trotted on as fast as she could, breathless now. She dodged vegetable carts, bleating herds of goats and sheep, porters, slaves on missions, off-duty soldiers in their green tunics, raggedy beggars, washerwomen with bundles, and sedan chairs in which rich people rode.
Nearer home the streets grew narrower, often no more than crooked alleys, more crowded and also darker, because the high tenement buildings blocked out the sun. She knew it was important to sidestep the piles of rotting garbage, not to breathe deeply, to watch out for peels that might make her slip, and to avoid being drenched by stinking slops emptied by housewives from windows above her head.
She stopped only once, to greet the blacksmith on the corner near their rooms, a man almost as big as a bear, who fascinated her because of his great strength and the way he casually handled red-hot metal, which he bent and hammered into any shape he wanted. She loved watching the horseshoes he fashioned sputter and hiss when he plunged them into water to cool them off.
“Afternoon, Tertius,” she called out in a pause between hammer blows.
He grinned at her, his teeth white in his swarthy face. “Afternoon, Princess,” he replied in his deep voice, with a mock bow.
She giggled happily. It was their joke, but she stepped more proudly after this greeting, skirting the buckets of pee standing outside Fat Rosa’s laundry, which took up all of the ground floor. Passersby were encouraged to fill the buckets up, because, Fat Rosa said, there was nothing like pee to get white stuff really clean. Theodora tilted her small nose as she avoided the disgustingly smelly area – many men had a poor aim – and finally reached the entrance to the stairs. Even if they did live on the top floor of an old building, she thought, even if they weren’t rich and didn’t travel in sedan chairs and had no slaves to look after them, the big blacksmith thought she was special. She knew that. She liked it. And she
