How I survived the first few months of this hellish existence is a mystery to me. My memories of that time are vague and mingled with the deadening pain of the loss of Caledfwlch and my mother. A large portion of my humanity had been stolen away with them, which may have been crucial to my survival. A child reduced to a beast, who is a stranger to fear and despair and most other human weaknesses, concerned only with finding enough food to live through another day, soon learns how to cling to life.
I was not completely lost to human feeling, and made a friend of a fellow savage. I first encountered him in one of the poorest quarters of the city, running for his life from a tribe of slightly older youths whom he had stolen half a loaf of mouldy bread from.
He had a rare turn of speed, which kept him out of their clutches long enough to reach the alley that I was squatting in.
“Out of my way!” he gasped, almost falling over me in his frantic haste. I hugged my knees to let him pass, and picked up the slingshot I had made from a couple of strips of leather. It had saved my skin in one more than one street-fight, and would now do so again.
There was a low wall at the end of the alley, and the brickwork was crumbling and covered with slimy lichen. I could hear the boy sobbing with fear as he tried to climb up it, with no success, while I busied myself loading a jagged stone into my sling.
His pursuers rounded the corner of the alley, a pack of gangly, dirty-faced youths, of the sort I knew well. Their courage was mostly invested in their leader. I picked him out as I whirled the sling. He was the biggest and oldest of them, with a shock of greasy black curls and a terribly hard-faced look for one so young.
What kind of man he might have become was destined to remain a mystery. My stone hit him square in his right eye, pulping the eyeball and penetrating into his brain. He fell like a puppet with its strings cut, and lay jerking in his death-throes on the filthy cobbles. His followers stopped dead, aghast, which gave me time to load another stone.
“Which of you is next?” I cried with a bravura I didn’t feel. There were five or six of them, each a head taller than me and several years older. They could have easily rushed and overpowered me, but not before I had time to loose off one more shot.
Their fragile courage evaporated, and they turned tail and ran. “That’s right, boys, run home to your mothers!” I shouted after them.
I turned to look at the boy they had been chasing. He was crouched at the end of the alley, looking rather shame-faced and trembling like a dog that had just suffered a beating.
“You saved me,” he said, “I behaved like a coward. I am sorry.”
He was short and stocky, and would grow to be a powerfully-built man, assuming he survived that long. I noticed that his fists were swollen and callused with the marks of many fights, and his eyes had the wild, hunted look about them I had come to know well.
“No harm done,” I said, rolling up my sling, “they were only a pack of sheep. Perhaps they will know better than to hunt wolves in future.”
I offered him my hand, the first time I had offered my hand in friendship to anyone, and he warily took it.
“I am Felix,” he said. “You have a strange accent. Are you a foreigner?”
“Yes. I am from Britain. My name is Coel ap Amhar ap Arthur.”
His eyes widened. “More a chant than a name,” he replied with a quick grin. There was a fellow-feeling between us, and from time on we were firm friends.
In the following days Felix told me something of himself. His Roman parents had died in a recent plague, and he had no other family save some distant relatives in Nicomedia who had no interest in his welfare. Thus he had taken to the streets.
Felix and I took care of each other, avoiding the juvenile factions that ruled the underworld of Constantinople, much as the Greens and Blues ruled respectable society. Our backgrounds could not have been more different, but poverty and starvation are great levellers. In many ways he was the brother I never had.
God knows what we might have become in the end — gallows-bait, probably — but we were rescued by the lure of the Hippodrome.
Chapter 6
As the Coliseum was to Rome, so the Hippodrome was to Rome’s heir. I pity those who have never set eyes on that marvellous U-shaped structure next to the Great Palace, big enough to contain over a hundred thousand people in the stands. Here the Romans indulged their undying love for horse and chariot racing, regardless of the disapproval of the Church, which ever desires to curb ‘indecent’ entertainment.
To understand the importance of the Hippodrome, and the influence it exerted over the people of Constantinople, you must first understand something of the factions that ruled the city. I was a member of one of those factions for a time, so they have a double bearing on my story.
The Romans were fiercely partisan in their support for racing teams. The teams were traditionally identified by colour — Reds, Whites, Greens and Blues — and had been imported to Constantinople from Rome. By the time I write of, only the Greens and Blues were still significant. They had become hugely powerful in their own right, and were responsible for staging all forms of public entertainment: not only racing, but athletics, boxing, wrestling, theatre, wild animal displays and gymnastics.
Inevitably, the Greens and the Blues had acquired a political dimension. There was hardly a Roman citizen inside Constantinople that did not belong to one faction or the other, and wore their colours to advertise the fact. The factions were often used as a mouthpiece for public opinion, and would eventually come close to pulling down an Emperor and destroying the city.
That was all in my future, one I could not have imagined during my lost years of running wild in the streets. It was Felix who first suggested that we find work at the Hippodrome. We had barely survived a bad winter and a particularly vicious beating from a butcher we had tried to steal a leg of mutton from, and were nursing our bruises in an alleyway when he raised the idea.
“I have consulted the fates, syntrophos,” he said (this means ‘companion’ in Greek, and was our name for each other). “They tell me our stars are due to rise.”
The ‘fates’ were a group of coloured pebbles that Felix carried in a little drawstring bag. He claimed to be able to read our conjoined futures in them, and to derive meanings from the pattern they formed when he cast them on the ground.
“It does not feel that way,” I replied, grimacing as I massaged my neck. The butcher had thrashed me with a heavy stick, and there was barely a patch of flesh on my meagre body that was not tender.
“The fates direct us there,” said Felix, pointing at the Hippodrome, about a quarter of a mile away. Along with the walls and towers of the Great Palace, the stadium dominated the skyline.
“If we wish to thrive, syntrophos,” he went on, “then we must join a faction, or leave the city. Do you want to leave?”
I shook my head. Since arriving in Constantinople I had not once ventured outside the walls. It was my home now, and life beyond the maze of streets, alleyways and plazas that I had come to know so well seemed unimaginable.
“Join a faction, and learn a skill,” said Felix, “or several skills. We are young enough to learn. Horse-riding, chariot racing, anything we like. What do you say?”
“They may not take us,” I pointed out.
“Nonsense,” he replied airily, “the Greens and the Blues are always looking for new recruits, especially young ones. Many of their apprentices find the training too rigorous and drop out.”
Or were seriously injured, sometimes even killed, he might have added. I let myself be persuaded, and that same day we made our way to the Hippodrome and presented ourselves at the Black Gate.
The guard lounging by the gate was a bored veteran with a missing eye and little to do. He responded to our entreaties with a growl, and threatened to whip our hides if we didn’t make ourselves scarce.
“Our hides have been whipped once today already,” said Felix, who was fearless, “see for yourself.”
He tore off his filthy jerkin to display the livid welts on his back, some of which were still bleeding. The guard, evidently not so cruel a man as he appeared, blanched at the sight.
“For God’s sake, put your jerkin back on,” he begged, “so you want to join the circus, do you? Wait here a moment.”
We sat on the steps and waited. I toyed with a loose stone and watched the people passing the Palace of Antiochos, a large hexagon-shaped building opposite the Hippodrome. There was a group of orthodox Greek priests among them, tall black-robed figures with long grey beards, marching along like so many angry crows as they furiously debated theology with a pale little monk whom I assumed to be a visitor from Rome. The churches of Constantinople and Rome were forever at each other’s throats, wrangling about the true nature of Christ and the Divinity.
The guard came back with a tall, darkly handsome young man, of noble bearing and stature, but dressed in a torn and shabby tunic.
“Well, here they are,” said the guard, stopping at the top of the steps and gesturing at us, “what do you think? Skinny little brutes. Not good for much except fetching and carrying.”
“I will be the judge of that, soldier,” replied the youth. The guard, who was at least twenty years his senior, stiffened at the sarcasm in his tone.
The youth beckoned at us. “My name is Leo,” he said, “I am one of the principal trainers here. Let me have a closer look at you.”
We obediently trotted up the steps. I noted that Leo was muscled like an acrobat, and had something of the caged animal about him, an unpredictable loose-limbed vitality. He had difficulty standing still, and shifted from one sandaled foot to the other as he spoke to us.
He snapped his fingers to dismiss the guard, who wandered away with a thunderous expression on his face. “So, boys,” he said, “I understand you wish to join the circus. Better to earn a living wage and sleep with a roof over your heads than starve in the gutter, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” we chorused.
Leo smiled crookedly and folded his muscular brown arms. “We get hundreds of little street-rats like you two,” he said, “and turn away most of them. We’re a working circus, not a bloody orphanage. Impress me.”
His voice, which always possessed a soft and musical quality, had taken on an aggressive tone that made me bristle. “I can box,” I said, taking up what I imagined to be a fighter’s stance and balling my little fists, “and ride a horse.”
This was an exaggeration. I had not backed a horse for years, ever since Clothaire’s Sarmatians let me ride one of their beasts during the journey from Paris. I didn’t care. Something about Leo’s manner irked me, and I was determined that he would not turn us away.
“You have a strange accent,” he said, cocking his head and looking me up and down, “where are you from?”
Britannia, I told him.
“Interesting. We don’t get many of your people. What about you?”
He spoke to Felix, who copied me and adopted a fighting stance. “I can also box,” he said stoutly, “and anything else I turn my mind to.”
Leo’s smile widened into a toothy grin. “We shall see,” he said, “come. You have persuaded me into giving you a trial.”
We should have turned and ran away then, and saved ourselves a world of pain and grief. But we were not to know the future, or that Felix’s fate-stones had lied to him.
Leo took us through the passage beyond the Black Gate onto the race-track. I had occasionally wormed my way into the arena and watched the races from the standing area above the cheap stalls, but never stood on the track itself. That privilege was reserved for the athletes and performers, a few scattered groups of whom were in training as Leo led us out.
Seen from the track, the vast scale of the Hippodrome stole my breath away. It was based on the old Circus Maximus in Rome, but surpassed that in size and magnificence. The southern end was formed into a curved tribune or U-shaped structure, while the northern end was occupied by the Starting Boxes, from which the chariot teams would emerge at the beginning of a race. There were twelve boxes, one for each chariot, and the roof was crowned by a statue of four gilded horses cast in bronze.
Marble seats for senators and other wealthy dignitaries were located nearest the track, with wooden benches for the poorer citizens above. Above those were the standing-room only areas that I used to squeeze into. At the eastern end of the Hippodrome was the Kathisma or imperial lodge, which the Emperor and his family accessed via a passage connecting the lodge to the Great Palace. Here the Emperor had his own private box to watch the entertainment in the arena below. It was decorated with silken hangings and tapestries worked in gold and imperial purple.
During previous visits to the Hippodrome I had beheld the Emperor Anastasius in the imperial box, and was surprised and disappointed to find that the most powerful man in the Empire was aged and ugly, bent under the weight of years and perpetual duty.
All this my eyes took in as I stood and looked around at that huge enclosed space. Leo allowed me and Felix to stare awhile, grinning at our awestruck expressions.
The spine of the track itself was lined with bronze statues of horses and chariot drivers, as well as extraordinary monuments to imperial glory and excess. One was the Tripod of Platea, a massive stone tripod cast centuries before to celebrate an age-old victory of the Greeks over the Persians. The peak of the tripod was adorned by a golden bowl supported by a trio of serpent heads. The spine and edges of the track were also decorated with statues of the various gods, emperors and heroes of Greek and Roman legend.
“They put me in mind of you two,” remarked Leo, jerking his thumb at a statue of Romulus and Remus, the infant founders of Rome, suckling from the wolf that nurtured them in the wild, “just beware of the wolf’s jaws, eh?”