Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay

Author:Guy Gavriel Kay [Kay, Guy Gavriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Byzantine Empire
ISBN: 9780743450096
Publisher: Earthlight
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

‘It is intolerable,’ said Cleander, speaking loudly over the tavern noise, ‘that a man like that should possess such a woman!’ He drank, and wiped at the moustache he was trying to grow.

‘He doesn’t possess her,’ Eutychus replied reasonably. ‘He may not even be bedding her. And he is a man of some distinction, little sprout.’

Cleander glared at him as the others laughed.

The volume of sound in The Spina was considerable. It was midday and the morning’s races were done, with the afternoon chariots slated to begin after the break. The most ambitious of the drinking places near the Hippodrome was bursting with a sweating, raucous, bipartisan crowd.

The more fervent followers of Blue and Green had made their way to less expensive taverns and cauponae dedicated to their own factions, but the shrewd managers of The Spina had offered free drinks to retired and current charioteers of all colours from the day they’d opened their doors, and the lure of hoisting a beer or a cup of wine with the drivers had made The Spina a dramatic success from that first day.

It had to be . . . they’d put a fortune into it. The long axis of the tavern had been designed to simulate the real spina—the central island of the Hippodrome, around which the chariots wheeled in their furious careen. Instead of thundering horses, this spina was ringed by a marble counter, and drinkers stood or leaned on both sides, eyeing scaled reproductions of the statues and monuments that decorated the real thing in the Hippodrome. Against one long wall ran the bar itself, also marbled, with patrons packed close. And for those prudent—and solvent—enough to have made arrangements ahead of time, there were booths along the opposite wall, stretching to the shadows at the back of the tavern.

Eutychus was always prudent, and Cleander and Dorus were notably solvent, or rather, their fathers were. The five young men—all Greens, of course—had a standing arrangement to prominently occupy the highly visible second booth on race days. The first booth was always reserved for charioteers or the occasional patrons from the Imperial Precinct amusing themselves among the crowds of the city.

‘No man ever truly possesses a woman, anyhow,’ said Gidas moodily. ‘He has her body for a time if he’s lucky, but only the most fleeting glimpse into her soul.’ Gidas was a poet, or wanted to be.

‘If they have souls,’ said Eutychus wryly, drinking his carefully watered wine. ‘It is, after all, a liturgical issue.’

‘Not any more,’ Pollon protested. ‘A Patriarchal Council settled that a hundred years ago, or something.’

‘By a single vote,’ Eutychus said, smiling. Eutychus knew a lot; he didn’t hide the fact. ‘Had one of the august clerics had an unfortunate experience with a whore the night before, the Council would likely have decided women have no souls.’

‘That’s probably sacrilege,’ Gidas murmured.

‘Heladikos defend me!’ Eutychus laughed.

‘That is sacrilege,’ Gidas said, with a rare, quick smile.

‘They don’t,’ Cleander muttered, ignoring this last exchange. ‘They don’t have souls. Or she doesn’t, to be permitting that grey-faced toad to court her.

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