He had to be careful, extremely careful. If he fouled either of the others now, any Blue victory would be erased. That was always the constraint on those riding Second or carrying the lesser colours. The yellow-garbed officials were all along the track, watching them.

In addition, he was acutely aware that although he might just manage to roll through seven laps and stay upright, he didn't have much left for manoeuvres. Every shallow breath was a struggle against pain. The very idea of having to pull the team hard again was enough to make him wish he were already dead.

There was, he knew, a pool of blood, dangerously slippery, about his feet. He didn't look down.

He watched the Greens" Second team, instead, as it came back towards them-as he'd known it would. Crescens frightened his teammates. In doubt, they'd come to his aid. Not a bad practice, on the whole, but there were moments when it might be. He intended to make this one such moment.

He had pictured this from the moment he'd walked onto the track and seen that the new right-side trace horse on Crescens's team in the sixth lane wasn't blinkered.

He knew the horse they'd traded. Knew it very well. Had slotted a bit of information in his mind back in the winter. It obviously hadn't come up in last week's races or this morning: the Greens" lead team would rarely find itself all the way to the outside.

It was about to do so, any moment now.

The Second team came right back to them, staying in front, but not by much, which gave it licence to drift wider, forcing Scortius to do the same. Crescens was also slightly ahead of him to the outside, which raised the risk of foul if he drifted too much and clipped the other team. The Greens were trying to make him rein up. The moment he did so, the Second team in front of him would do exactly the same thing and Crescens would go to his whip and spring free of both of them like a prisoner from an unlocked cell-then he'd cut down. They knew how to do this. It was delicate, precise work, done at speed, but these were veteran drivers who had worked together for a full year.

It didn't matter.

He let his team drift up, just a little. Crescens looked over quickly, snarling an oath. If the other Green team could be said to have pushed Scortius over then no foul would be called. Especially against the returning champion: all three of them knew that was also a part of the game today.

Crescens went a little higher, nearer the rail.

Scortius and the other Greens went with him. They were most of the way down the back straight now. Scortius slid right again, the smallest amount. Had to be very cautious: these horses were not his usual team. All three chariots were terrifyingly close now. Had the wheels been spiked as sometimes in the old days, in Rhodias, someone would have been flying from a smashed-up chariot by now.

Crescens roared another oath at his teammate and went a little higher yet. As high as he could go, in fact, racing along the outermost lane, right against the rail and the screaming, on-its-feet, fist-waving, thunderous crowd.

The new right-side trace horse for the Greens didn't like screaming thunderous fist-waving beside him. At all. He was, in fact, a horse that needed a right-side blinker. It hadn't come up. Crescens had never run him so wide, and this was only the second meeting of the year. They hadn't figured that out yet, the Greens.

A mistake.

Scortius held steady, watched for the moment. Crescens had a tight, grim smile on his face as the quadrigas pelted along. Now that he was at the rail, any further movement towards him by Scortius would have to be seen as a foul. The other Green chariot, still ahead, could safely slide a bit farther over and slow, and Scortius would have to pull up hard.

Experienced strategy, sound reasoning. Might well have worked, if the right-sider hadn't jerked its head just then, in blind panic right beside the howling crowd, and broken stride, pulling the other three horses hopelessly out of their own pace, just as the Greens" number two performed the entirely correct tactical movement of moving a little more right and slowing a shade.

Scortius did pull up, as hard as they'd ever have wanted him to, even a little sooner than they'd expected, as if he was afraid, or weak.

Doing so, he had an exceptionally vivid, close view of the crash. Crescens's quadriga slewed back inwards, pushed by their panicked, undeniably powerful new right-sider, while the other team was still committed to angling out. They met, unfortunately.

Two wheels flew, instantly. One stayed in the air like a discus, spinning halfway to the spina. A horse screamed and stumbled, dragging the others down with it. A chariot skidded sideways, banged the rail, and then came back the other way, and Scortius, pulling sharply left (and crying aloud with the pain of it this time) saw Crescens's knife flash as he cut his reins and leaped desperately free.

He was past them, then, didn't see what happened to the other Green driver, or the horses, but he knew they were down.

He dealt with the turn then looked back. Saw the Reds and Whites toiling behind him now, four of them, closely bunched, labouring. Had a new idea. There was that odd, crimson hue to his vision again, but he suddenly decided it might be within him to bring one last element into this day's aspiring towards immortality.

Ahead of him, the boy, Taras, was slowing for him, looking back. He lifted his whip hand, waved Scortius forward, offering him the lead and the victory.

Not what he wanted, for more than one reason. He shook his head, and as he came up towards the other driver he shouted, in Inici, "I'll castrate you with a dull knife if you don't win this race. Keep moving!"

The boy grinned. He knew what they had just done. The glory of it. He was a chariot-racer, wasn't he? He kept moving. Crossed the line six laps later to win the first major race of his life.

The first of what would be one thousand, six hundred and forty-five triumphs for the Blues. By the time the boy in that chariot retired eighteen years later only two names in the long history of the Sarantium Hippodrome would have won more races, and no one who followed him would do so. There would be three statues to Taras of Megarium in the spina to be torn down with all the others, seven hundred years after, when the great changes came.

The First of the Whites came second in that race, the Second of the Whites came third. The track record of the day, meticulously kept by the stewards, as ever, would show that Scortius of the Blues came a wretched distance behind during his only race that afternoon.

The records can miss everything, of course. So much depends on what else is preserved, in writing, in art, in memory, false or true or blurred.

The Blues faction, with their White partners, came first and second and third. And fourth. Fourth, in what was, all things considered, very likely the most spectacularly triumphant race of his entire career on the sands, was Scortius of Soriyya, who had shepherded the White teams through and past him while blocking, with precision, the two hapless Red charioteers, who were all that was left on the track running for the Green faction.

He ought to have died when that race was over. In some ways he should have died, he was later to think during some long nights, setting a seal of perfection on a racing life.

Those who came running over saw the pool of blood about his soaked sandals when the race ended. The chariot platform was slippery with it. The Ninth Driver had been beside him for those last laps, running very near from the time the fifth sea-horse dived, and closer yet down the final backstretch as he kept on swinging back and forth, almost unable to breathe, holding the Reds before pulling away at the end- alone on the track, in fact, his teammates having finished already, a lap ahead, the Red quadrigas slipping back.