Daughters of Rome (38 page)

“You don’t need it,” she said coldly. “Not to win a race like this one.”

“Don’t be sharp, Lady. Let’s have a smile.”

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” she glared. “A charioteer of your stature, driving in
fixed
races?”

His smile disappeared. “Maybe I don’t like it much, Lady, but a win’s a win. A purse is a purse. And some of us do this for a living, not just dabbling in between banquets.”

If she stayed a moment longer she’d fly at him, so she stamped out of the Blues yard. She was shaking with too much fury to go up to the Emperor’s box yet, or she’d fly at Fabius Valens too. He’d recovered from his bout of food poisoning and was conducting Vitellius’s business in Rome, though he made noises about going north to take over the army now that there were so many rumors flying about a battle. Diana hoped he left soon and she hoped he died, but for today he was here, dragging Lollia with him. Everyone else would be there too: Marcella, Gaius and Tullia, even Cornelia, who hadn’t been to a public function in weeks. Diana couldn’t bear to face them, and she trailed back to the Reds yard to watch the Anemoi being harnessed.

They were being led out one by one, her four winds. Zephyrus, dancing on his toes with excitement, outside runner and fastest of them all, named for the fleet West Wind . . . Eurus, running just inside Zephyrus, nearly as fast but not so wild and named for the ever-constant East Wind . . . Notus, second inside runner, steady as the strong-blowing South Wind . . . and Boreas, the implacable North Wind, her favorite. Diana curved an arm around Boreas’s stocky neck, crooning wordlessly. He was the oldest of them, the innermost runner, scarred and savage-tempered and solid as a rock around a turn. He didn’t bite Diana quite as often as he bit everyone else, which she counted for affection.

Her Anemoi were gazing about with pricked ears and bright eyes, stamping restlessly as the grooms bustled about with the harness, Boreas swiping his teeth at any groom who got too close. Like any good team they knew it was race day; they knew what harness and bustle and cheering meant, and they chuffed through flared nostrils as they were harnessed to the chariot. Diana could hardly bear to look at them. They hadn’t learned yet that their speed wasn’t required; they didn’t know they were supposed to lose for an emperor’s pleasure.

Xerxes stood scowling to one side with the charioteer, a lean Greek named Siculus. “Keep them in front till the end.” The directions came halfheartedly. “Ease them off gradual, though. That Boreas gets the bit in his teeth if you’re not careful.”

“Of course.”

“Ah, damn it.” Xerxes stumped off. “Just get it over with. I’m going to get drunk.”

“Hey, you.” Siculus collared a groom, pressing a purse into his hand. “Take this to the bettor under the statue of Nero and put it all on the Blues, will you?”

“Blues?” The groom blinked.

“Why not? They’re making me money hand over fist, and I don’t even have to drive for it.”

The groom gave Siculus a disgusted look, and two more traded glances behind his back. “Get on with it,” Siculus ordered, and that was when Diana snapped.

“Lady Diana.” The charioteer bowed as she approached, looking surprised when she stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear.

“Siculus,” she breathed, “I will hump you silly if you win this race.”

He pulled back. “Lady, the orders . . . Fabius Valens said—”

“Fabius Valens is leaving Rome soon, and the Emperor is so drunk and happy today, no one will retaliate. Win this race,” she repeated, “and you can have me any way you want. Backward, sideways, upside-down—”

Siculus looked to the side, gnawing his lip. “I don’t know, Lady—” He’d looked at her in the past; Diana knew that. Plenty of the drivers did.

“Want something in advance? Come with me.” She took his hand and led him back to the small shed where they kept the chariots. It was empty now—the chariots had already been rolled out—and Diana was already dragging his head down to kiss him before they reached the shadows inside. “Just close that door,” she breathed against his mouth as he started fumbling at her dress. He turned to bar it, and she picked up one of the heavy blocks they wedged under the chariot wheels to keep them from rolling and banged him over the head with it. Siculus went down like an ox on an altar; she banged him one more time to make sure he wouldn’t wake up for a while and then got to work. There wasn’t much time.

She stripped off his leather shin guards and buckled them around her own legs, kilting her red dress up to the knees. Another few moments dragging at the limp limbs and she had the leather breastplate off—too big for her but that was good; it would hide the shape of her breasts. She had her own gauntlets with her and pulled them on as she reached down for the red-plumed helmet. She crammed her hair under it, wishing the helmet hid more of her face, but it would have to do. Siculus was slim and lightly built, like most charioteers; the height difference wasn’t too bad. Anyone who took a close look would realize something was wrong, but she didn’t plan on giving anyone a close look.

“Where’s that bloody Siculus?” A groom’s voice came from outside, annoyed. “They’re rolling out!”

Diana waited as they looked for him. Waited.

“Drat it, the Greens and Whites just went—look in the yard.”

She came running out of the chariot shed at the last minute, dropping the bar on the door in case Siculus woke up, and dashed to where the grooms were waiting with the Anemoi. Her four winds, bright-eyed and flame-bright, eager to run with the light chariot behind them crowned by its flaming fire god. “Sorry,” she said as gruffly as possible, and vaulted up into the chariot.

“You’re late,” the groom said, handing her the red leather reins to knot around her waist. “You’ll be last, but—” He paused, and Diana pulled feverishly at the knots. If she could just get out to the track before he raised the alarm—

“Siculus,” the groom said finally. “You shrank.” He handed her the red-beaded driving whip. “Fortuna be with you.”

Diana was already urging her team forward, toward the track.

 

“
W
ATCH
it,” the Greens charioteer hissed at her, and she edged the Anemoi back in line. Quite a trick, keeping the four teams exactly even as they paraded in their preparatory lap around the track before the race. On the turn, the inside team had to nearly step in place and the outside team had to speed to a trot in order to keep all sixteen noses exactly in line. Taking a turn at a walk wasn’t something Diana had ever practiced, and she’d drawn the outside position. Her hands were already sweating inside their gauntlets, and she could feel the tug of the knotted reins against her waist. Her mouth was tinder-dry, and somewhere inside she could hear her family shrieking in dismay and even her own voice telling her she would crash the team and kill the Anemoi, and then she’d never forgive herself. But the voice she heard most clearly was Llyn’s, and he sounded as mild as ever.

You’re a fool
, he told her as the four teams reached the final turn.
If I’d led my first attack against Rome when I was as green a leader as you are a driver, then I’d never have lived long enough for us to meet.

“No,” she gritted out between concentration-clenched teeth.

“But at least I’ll lose honestly,” she said aloud. The Anemoi deserved a charioteer, however poor, who would at least try. She managed the last turn quite neatly, and the four teams began lining up. Somewhere overhead was the Imperial box, where Vitellius sat watching, doubtless pouring wine from his second flagon of the day and wondering where his little pet was.

“Yes.” She could sense the Anemoi stretching on the other end of the reins, feeling her out. An unfamiliar pair of hands, and they were cautious. But they wanted to run, and that would take over once the signal came.

The four teams were poised to start. Adoring women still shrieked in the stands for Derricus. Through the slit of her helmet, Diana saw a figure in purple step forward in the Imperial box.

Good luck
, said Llyn inside her head, and that was it. He was gone, and she was alone. Diana pulled a Reds medallion out from under her breastplate and kissed it for luck.

A scrap of cloth fluttered, caught the autumn breeze, drifted down . . . and sixteen horses surged off the line.

 

T
HE
Reds lunge off the drop a second late, trailing last before the wheels are even in motion. But Diana doesn’t mind that. She doesn’t want to get caught in the jockeying for the inside space against the
spina
; she doesn’t have the experience to bull her way through a crush. All she has is the raw speed of her four winds. The chariot rocks under her feet, the air blurs her eyes through the slit in her helmet, the reins are taut sawing lines in her hands, and oh gods, she never dreamed that even the four winds could run so fast. She braces her arms, adjusts her weight against the front of the chariot, tucks her chin into her chest to cant the streaming airflow away from her eyes; minuscule adjustments that are second nature now after months of Llyn’s nitpicking, and she realizes that under the helmet she’s grinning like a fiend. “Slowly, beauties,” she sings out to the Anemoi, who are fighting her grip. “Slowly.”

They’re fourth and last coming into the turn, but Diana doesn’t want to rush. Her first turn in the Circus Maximus—gods’ wheels, if she clips it wrong out of nerves she’ll wreck the chariot and likely kill the horses. She grips her lip in her teeth, heart hammering as she gathers the reins on the inside—and Boreas lowers his head into the harness like a bull and the chariot wheels around neat as a pin and they’re thundering into the straightaway again. One more turn, pretty as the one before, and the first lap is done. In a flash of gold overhead she sees the dolphin tilt its carved nose down.

She hears a dull roar somewhere behind the rush of wind in her ears, and knows the crowd is shouting. The Greens have the lead, the Blues on the rail behind, the Whites somewhere on the outside. If she were watching from her usual place in the stands she’d be screaming now, begging the charioteer to pick up the pace, but she wants another lap or two to feel out her team. After months of watching from the stands she knows them inside and out—knows exactly how much speed Zephyrus can produce in the stretch, knows how Eurus and Notus can match their strides so perfectly they look like one eight-legged horse, knows how Boreas can lean nearly horizontal into a turn to bring a chariot around—but she’s never driven them before, and she has exactly six laps left to get to know them. No, four laps—two more have come and gone in a flash, and maybe seven laps isn’t so long as all that, because the race is almost half done.

She lets an inch of rein through her fingers, and the Anemoi leap ahead. They’re terrifyingly strong, much stronger than the placid geldings she usually drives under Llyn, and the reins are already cutting into her waist where she stands braced against the pull, but she leans back and only gives them an inch. Just enough, they’re moving up—she steers them wide to pass the Whites, and it takes a whole lap, but when the next gold dolphin tips down, the Reds are in third.

The Blues have settled into the lead, a nose ahead of the Greens, who will pretend for another lap or two to make a fight of it. Diana settles behind them, and the Anemoi hate her for it; they want to run and as they fight for their heads she can feel her hands blistering inside the gauntlets, but it isn’t time yet. “Not yet!” she shouts to them, words whipped away on the wind. Her arms are screaming pain, and she remembers Marcella saying once—scornfully—that Diana is too small to hold four horses.

Fifth lap. The Greens drop back. Diana can see the charioteer leaning on the reins, holding his team in. For a while they run side by side, then the Greens are behind her and only the Blues block the view in front. Derricus is whipping up his bays, sending them easily ahead as the dolphin drops. He takes a moment as he flashes past the Imperial box to flourish his beaded driving whip, and Diana brings the reins down in a crack.

The Anemoi lunge forward so hard her vision slips, slamming her forward against the front of the chariot. Her whip flies out of her hand, gone in a flash, and she clutches the reins as the Reds come lunging out from behind the Blues and into the middle of the track. Three long strides and the straining chestnut noses pull even with the blue-enameled wheels. Derricus looks back and sees her; he gives his whip a casual crack over the heads of his blood bays.

I could win.
The thought comes suddenly, and her hands tighten on the reins, blistered and fiery inside her gauntlets. Of course she’d wanted to win the minute she stepped into the chariot, but she hadn’t thought it would be possible. Raw charioteers never win their first race . . . but Derricus still thinks the Reds will pull up at the end. He’s barely stirring his team, and the Greens and the Whites have already given up.

Sixth lap. Diana lets the reins through her fingers another few precious inches and the Anemoi respond like a sixteen-legged machine, flying up alongside the Blues. Eight horses, nose to nose, and then Diana abandons all caution and opens them up. They flick past the Blues in an instant, and before Derricus can stir up his own team the turn is on them. The Blues are hugging the
spina
and have to slow down or crash, but Diana takes the turn at reckless speed in the middle of the track, sawing ruthlessly on Boreas, and he hunches his broad neck and scrabbles almost horizontally at the sand to give her the speed she wants. She loses ground on the turn but the Reds are still ahead by a nose as they flash past the Imperial box, the blood bays in their blue harness clawing grimly on the inside.