The Hippodrome

[Ramses II CP]

The Hippodrome was a noisy, busy place. With the Senate in session every imaginable huckster had crawled out of the woodwork to try to drum up some business, and it seemed like all of them were praising their own goods at top volume. Wandering through with some care Stephen, loyal retainer of Vissarionas ek Lesvou, sought some place from which he could give a decent speech. It wasn't easy, there were stalls set up all over the place, even a few crudely constructed ones taking up space on the stairs. At last, in frustration, Stephen quietly hired on some street kids and gave them clear instructions, then climbed up on a nearby pedestal which held an especially ugly statue of an ancient racer.

From an alley one of the young men rushed out into the crowd with a streak of red running down his face, grasping in faux desperation at the shirts and clothes of passersby, 'and probably harvesting a few purses on the side,' thought Stephen. Reaching a position below Stephen he let out an amazingly loud screech, and cried, "Save me!"

Four more boys now raced out of the same alley and siezed him, prompting the victim to wail once more, "Someone save me from the Brotherhood! Protect me from the Muslims!"

The boys holding the little screamer, having attracted considerable attention from the locals, began to hoist him over their heads, but Stephen leapt down among them exactly as they'd been told to expect and they scattered. Drawing his cavalry saber Stephen brandished it at the nearest boy and said in a loud, heroic voice,

"Who sent you to carry out this dark deed child! Answer and you may yet be saved!"

The boy who had been singled out silently mouthed his line before trying a response with his voice, but the crowd watching Stephen's show hardly seemed to notice. At last he stuttered out,

"It was the Brotherhood of Secret Muslims Lord! Please Lord, take pity, they've got my Mom!"

"You need not fear my wrath, but I cannot allow you to take this child. Go now in peace and pray for God to forgive you and preserve your mother. Aid the infidel no longer boy," Stephen added in a warning tone, before thinking, 'don't let them drift off now!'

As the four boys fade away back into the alley two of them turn back and yell out, "Allar-abkar!"

'Close enough,' Stephen thinks, and then jumping back up to his perch he addresses the crowd quickly, before it can fully disperse.

"Friends, Romans, Byzantines! Hear me! There is a black threat striding our streets so openly that it no longer even hides it's evil acts! The Secret Brotherhood of Muslims, having stolen away the throne of the Empire, now abducts good Orthodox boys from our very streets for their nefarious purposes! Oh what fell fate has befallen the heirs of Rome that they do not even question the presence of a Secret Muslim on the seat of Aleksios the Bold!"

It was a calculated risk to simply resume where Isaeus left off, assuming that there would be some among them who remembered his speeches, but it would add to the cache of the speech as well. Those few who did remember could strut their knowledge before their fellows, making a sort of bragging point of it.

"Open your eyes citizens of the greatest city of the world! Does not strike you strange that the infidels, who continually attacked our Empire during the reign of Aleksios and even lay siege to this very city, have now withdrawn? Is it not strange that their armies, which once moved through our lands like they were their own, no longer threaten the core of Byzantium? Is it not worthy of note that only the false Emperor's opponents, the Order of St. John, still face assault from the vile hordes of Islam?"

"It is because they have won already! Our Empire sits peacefully under their control. Oh some few great men, some heroic few, carry on the war to destroy the enemy's distant outposts, but while the battles continue at the fringe the war itself is nearly lost here at home! Who will speak against the false Emperor? Who will reveal that an avowed Muslim heads his Privy Council! An avowed Muslim who has been granted title to a Byzantine city itself!"

Stephen notes that the buzz has reached it's pitch around him, carry on too long, explain too much, and that buzz will evaporate. Better to leave them asking questions, so he makes a subtle gesture with his hand at his side which causes two large men, dressed in an approximation of a royal guardsman's dress that would not pass any close inspection, emerge on the edge of the crowd carrying pikes.

"And that is not all noble fellows, this false Emperor, this fake King, gathers ever more power to his side. Word has come to me just today that he is plotting..."

On cue the fake soldiers raise their voices together, "Silence dog! In the name of the Emperor, take that man!"

The startled crowd turns to look at the men at the edge. Stephen cries, "God preserve me! I must flee, but hold my words close to your heart good men of Rome and be wary!" So saying Stephen leaps down from his perch once more and races for the same alley the boys vanished into previously.

The two men dressed as guards batter a way through the edge of the crowd roughly, unecessarily, slowing their path and painfully pushing aside as many people as possible. At last, as Stephen has clearly gotten away and the guards race off after him, one of them yells, "In the name of Allah, stop!"