recognized that there was something special about this place. Maybe the boundaries between man and the supernatural were especially thin here. Whatever it was, something was making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He looked around. There was nothing to be seen or heard except the water and the trees, the cooing of doves high up on the pediment of the temple.
When Ballista had seen all that he wanted to see, he gave the priests some money to make sacrifice and left the grove. The urchins looking after the horses led the party to an inn, which they said would serve them a good lunch even at this late hour. Ballista thought they were probably relatives of the innkeeper or that he paid them a small fee for every customer they produced. But the inn was fine. Vines were trained over trellises to make a pleasant out-of-doors dining room with a view over the distant plain of the Orontes. Having checked with the others, Ballista ordered their meal, a salad of artichoke hearts and black pudding followed by suckling pig.
Ballista thought that his reunion with his son was going as well as one could hope. At first Isangrim had been silent and resentful. I waited for you. I sat on the stairs all the time. I did not think you were coming back. But the boy had an affectionate nature, and soon it was as if there was nothing to forgive.
'I love sausages, Pappa.' Isangrim ate hungrily, with both hands. None of the men told him off for eating with the left hand, which was impolite. Maximus asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up.
'When I get as big as you I will be a forester.' Isangrim looked round at the famous cpyresses. 'I chop all these trees down.' He turned to his father, his earnestness unshakeable. 'I have to get up very early in the morning to do all the work.' The three adults laughed.
The laughter carried clear across the terrace to where, eating chickpea broth, the cheapest choice, the assassin sat watching them. The assassin had been watching for them all day. The client had led him to the house in the Epiphania district at first light. The assassin had given the client a threadbare old cloak and a tattered, broad-brimmed travelling hat. He had told the client to sit with him under the wide eaves on the far side of the street, leaning against the wall close by the closed wine shop, just like the vagrants did. There they had waited, the assassin occasionally scratching the jagged scar on the back of his right hand.
It had been a long wait; time enough for the assassin to begin to really dislike his client. They had not spoken, but that was not necessary. There was something about these smooth, rich young men, an assurance and a swagger that simply putting on some old clothes could not disguise. They looked life in the eye in a way that a pleb down on his luck would have had beaten out of him. The assassin felt nothing about the man he was going to kill. If he was a bad man, so much the better. If, on the other hand, he was a good man, let the judges of the underworld send him to the islands of the blessed. But the client – him he would very much like to kill. But a man has to eat.
Eventually they had come out. The client had actually raised his hand to point. The assassin had grabbed his wrist and dragged it down. He had thought that the young nobleman was going to hit him. The moment had passed, but neither was likely to forget it.
The assassin had studied them. There were four of them. Two mattered. The target was, as the client had described, a big, blond barbarian. Then there was the bodyguard, a vicious-looking brute with the end of his nose missing. The other two were of no consequence, a delicate-looking youth and a handsome small boy.
'Do you want me to kill the son as well?'
Again the nobleman's eyes blazed with anger. 'What do you think I am? A barbarian like him?'
The assassin had said nothing.
When the horses had been led out, the barbarian and his party had mounted and ridden off to the south. Shortly afterwards, the assassin and his client had got up and walked away. Around the corner, money had changed hands and they had gone their separate ways.
The assassin had walked to the alley, where he had tethered his donkey. He rolled up the disguises and strapped them to the saddle then set off to follow the target. As he knew the town like the back of his hand, there had been no need to hurry. He had killed many men. He was good at killing men. He just needed an opportunity – the barbarian distracted, the bodyguard at a distance. Then he would strike. It might not happen today, but the opportunity would come. Then he would collect the other half of the money, and it would be a good winter.
III
The day of the circus dawned, the twenty-fifth day of October, the fourth day since Ballista had told the emperor's consilium the fate of Arete. But for most of the inhabitants of Antioch on the Orontes, any city on the Euphrates was a long way away, its fate an irrelevance. Only three years had passed since the Persians had sacked Antioch, but to the average Antiochene that was as distant as the Trojan War.
The day of the circus started well. Long before sunrise the vault of the sky was a delicate blue, cloudless and bright. Even at that hour the six bridges to the island in the Orontes were already thronged. Of all the inhabitants of the imperium none took their pleasures with quite the deadly seriousness of the people of Antioch. Thousands of Antiochenes could be found who loved the theatre – the thousands who gazed with wonder at the turn of a pantomime dancer's leg. Then there were tens of thousands of devotees of the amphitheatre, their hearts in their mouths when the gladiators clashed and the blood splashed on the sand. But possibly even the gods themselves could not hope to number the inhabitants of Antioch-on-Orontes who lost their heads to the chariot races.
And it was not any run-of-the-mill races that they were thronging towards. This was no regular, local, Greek- style meeting, the teams funded more or less willingly by a member of the town council. This was racing in the grand Roman manner, truly metropolitan, complete with the four factions from the eternal city, the Greens, Blues, Reds and Whites, racing in the imperial style, directly commanded by the emperor, the most pious Augustus Valerian himself. The old emperor's reputation for being tight-fisted was obviously false. The ever-confident Diocles was driving for the Greens. He genuinely believed that he was by far the best; others held him arrogant. Calpurnianus was up for the Whites – if ever a man was on form, it was him. The legendary Spanish horse Candidus, as white as his name suggested, with his driver, Musclosus, and the venerable Mauretanian charioteer Scorpus had been coaxed out of retirement for the Blues and Reds respectively. It was not just politicians who were prepared to follow wherever the emperor travelled.
In the half-light, the queues, as noisy and jocose as only Antiochenes could be at such an hour, stretched back from the great red-brick hippodrome. Tickets were free, and no one could doubt that the racing arena would be full to its eighty thousand capacity, or beyond. When finally the chariot of the sun appeared over the jagged crest of Mount Silpius, almost all those waiting turned to the east and either performed complete proskynesis, prostrating themselves full length on the road, or at least the minor version of bowing slightly and blowing a kiss. The people of Antioch might or might not be considered god-fearing, but no race crowd was ever anything less than superstitious.
As the sun was coming up over the mountain, Maximus stepped out of house in the Epiphania district. There was nothing much to see in the street – a couple of men driving three laden camels, another adjusting some sacks on a donkey and, over the way, just like the day before, a vagrant sitting under the eaves close up to the still- shuttered wine shop. The litter that Maximus had hired was late. He crossed over. The beggar was asleep. Maximus stopped himself from throwing a handful of low-denomination coins. Instead he crouched down and quietly placed the coppers under the man's hand. The man did not move. Maximus noticed a long, dog-legged scar on the man's right hand. He stood up and turned his back. He looked away down the street, waiting.
The litter, a sturdy affair in light blue, rounded the corner. Maximus called to one of the houseboys to tell the dominus that it had arrived.
As the litter reached the house, Ballista emerged. His body servant Calgacus was fussing around him. Ballista was clad in a gleaming white toga with the narrow purple band of the equestrian order. The golden ring of that order that flashed on his finger was eclipsed by the blaze of the golden crown on his head. The crown, about three inches high, was in the stylized shape of the walls of a city. Very few men had the right to wear the corona muralis, the mural crown that proclaimed that its wearer had been the first to scale enemy battlements. Few men lived to tell the tale and receive the honour. As a youth serving in North Africa, Ballista had been desperate for distinction, and he had been very, very lucky.
Julia emerged, dignified and demure in the stola of a Roman matron. She held Isangrim by the hand. The boy's long hair, so carefully brushed, to its owner's fury, shone in the sunlight. He regarded the litter solemnly
