Lord of Emperors (23 page)

"And it doesn't work," Crispin added.

"You
know
this?" the other man asked. His eyes were briefly clear.

Aware, suddenly, of a need for caution, Crispin said, "We are taught by the clerics that it doesn't, friend. "Irritated again, he added, "In any case, have you ever seen Shirin wandering the streets before dawn against her will and desire, her hair unbound, compelled to where some man waits in his open doorway?"

"Oh, Jad!" said Pertennius, with feeling. He groaned. Illness and desire, an unholy mix.

Crispin suppressed a smile. Looked out the partly open window again. The air was cool. The street below was empty and silent. He decided to leave, considered asking for an escort. It was not particularly safe to cross the City at night alone and his own house was a distance away.

He said, "You'd do well to get some sleep. We can talk another-"

"Do you know that they
worship
bison in Sauradia?" said Pertennius abruptly. "It is in Metractes's
History of the Rhodian Wars.

Again, Crispin felt a flicker of alarm. His regret at being here grew more intense. "I remember Metractes," he said casually. "I was made to memorize him as a child. Dismally dull."

Pertennius looked offended. "Hardly so, Rhodian! A fine historian. A model for my own histories."

"I beg your pardon," Crispin said quickly. "He is, ah, voluminous, certainly."

"Comprehensive," said Pertennius. He closed his eyes again. The hand came back up to rest over them. "Will this feeling pass?" he asked plaintively.

"In the morning," Crispin said. "With sleep. There is little else to be done for it."

"Am I going to be sick?"

"It is certainly possible," Crispin said. "Do you want to stand by the window?"

"Too far. Tell me about the bison."

Crispin drew a breath. Pertennius's eyes had opened again, were on him. "There is nothing to tell. And everything. How does one
explain
these things? If words would do, I wouldn't be a mosaicist. It is as the roebuck and the rabbits and the birds and the fish and the foxes and the grain in the fields. I wanted them all on my dome. You have the sketches here, secretary, you can see the design. Jad created the world of animals as well as mortal man. That world lies between walls and walls, west and east, under the hand and eye of the god."

All true, not the truth.

Pertennius made a vague sign of the sun disk. He was visibly struggling to stay awake. "You made it very big."

"They
are
big," Crispin said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.

"Ah? You've seen one? And Rhodias is up there too?
My dome,
you said. Is that pious? Is it… proper in a sanctuary?"

Crispin had his back to the window now, leaning against the ledge. He was about to answer, or try, when he realized there was no need any more. The secretary was asleep on the green couch, still in his sandals and the white garb of a wedding guest.

He took a deep breath, felt an undeniable sense of relief, escape. It was time to go, escort or not, before the other man awoke and asked further questions of this disconcertingly sharp nature.
He's harmless,
Shirin had said to Crispin on that first day they met. Crispin had disagreed. He still did. He crossed from the window, making for the door. He would send the servant up, to attend to his master.

If he hadn't seen scribbled handwriting across his own sketch on the table, he would have walked out. The temptation was irresistible, however. He paused, glanced quickly again at the sleeping man. Pertennius's mouth had fallen open. Crispin bent over the sketches.

Pertennius-it had to be him-had written a series of cryptic notes all over Crispin's drawings of the dome and wall decorations. The writing was crabbed, almost illegible. These were his notes for himself-not worth bothering with. There was nothing privileged about sketched proposals.

Crispin straightened to go. And as he did his eye fell across another page half-hidden under one of the sketches, written in the same hand, but more carefully, even elegantly, and this time he could read the words.

Crispin found that he was having trouble breathing. Very carefully, with another glance at the couch, he shifted the paper a little and read on, in disbelief.

Crispin swallowed hard. He felt a pulse throbbing in his temple. He looked over at the sleeping man. Pertennius was snoring now. He looked ill and grey and helpless. Crispin became aware that his hands were shaking. He released the sheet of paper when it began to rattle in his grasp. He felt rage and fear and-beneath them both like a sounding drum- a growing horror. He thought he might be sick.

He ought to go, he knew. He
needed
to go from here. But there was a power to this exquisitely phrased vituperation, this venom, that caused him-almost without volition, as if he'd been rendered subject to a dark spell-to leaf to another page.

Crispin crammed the papers back together. It was enough. It was more than enough. He did feel ill now. This unctuous, watchful, so-discreet secretary of the Strategos, this official chronicler of the wars of Valerius's reign and his building projects, with his honoured place in the Imperial Precinct, had been spewing forth in this room the accumulated filth and bile of hatred.

Crispin wondered if these words were ever meant to be read. And when? Would people
believe
them? Could they shape, in years to come, an impression of truth for those who had never actually known the people of whom these ugly words were written? Was it possible?

It occurred to him that if he but walked from here with a randomly chosen sheaf of these papers in his hand Pertennius of Eubulus would be disgraced, exiled.

Or, very possibly, executed. A death to Crispin's name. Even so, it stayed in his mind to do it, standing there over the cluttered table, breathing hard, imagining these pages as crimson-hued with their hatred, listening to the sleeping man's snores and the snap of the fire and the faint, distant sounds of the night city.

He remembered Valerius, that first night, standing under the stupendous dome Artibasos had achieved. The intelligence and the courtesy of the Emperor as he patiently watched Crispin come to terms with the surface he was being given for his own craft.

He remembered Alixana in her rooms. A rose in gold on a table. The terrible impermanence of beauty. Everything transitory.
Make me some-thing that will last,
she had said.

Mosaic: a striving after the eternal. He'd realized that she understood that. And had understood even then, that first night, that this woman would be with him always, in some way. That had been before the man now sleeping gape-mouthed on his couch had knocked and entered, bearing a gift from Styliane Daleina.

Crispin remembered-and now understood in a very different way- the devouring glance Pertennius had cast about Alixana's small, rich, fire-lit chamber, and the expression in his eyes when he'd seen the Empress with her hair unbound and seemingly alone with Crispin late at night.
The unspeakable whore who is now our Empress.

Abruptly, Crispin left the room.

He went quickly down the stairs. The servant was dozing on a stool in the hallway under an iron wall sconce. He snapped suddenly awake at the sound of footsteps. Sprang up.

"Your master is asleep in his clothing," Crispin said brusquely. "See to him."

He unlocked the front door and went out to where there was cold air and a darkness that appalled him so much less than what he had just read by firelight. He stopped in the middle of the street, looked up, saw stars: so remote, so detached from mortal life, no one could invoke them. He welcomed the cold, rubbing hard at his face with both hands as if to cleanse it.

He suddenly wanted, very much, to be home. Not in the house he'd been given here, but half a world away. Truly home. Beyond Trakesia, Sauradia, the black forests and empty spaces, in Varena again. He wanted Martinian, his mother, other friends too much neglected these past two years, the comfort of the lifelong-known.

False shelter, that. He knew it, even as he shaped the thought. Varena was a cesspool now, as much or more than Sarantium was, a place of murder and civil violence and black suspicions in the palace: without even the possibility of redemption that lay overhead here on the Sanctuary dome.

There was, really, nowhere to hide from what the world seemed to be, unless one played Holy Fool and fled into a desert somewhere, or climbed a crag. And, really, in the great scale and scheme of things-he took another deep breath of the cold night air-how did a fearful, bitter scribe's malevolence and lecherous dishonesty measure against… the death of children? It didn't. It didn't at all.

It occurred to him that sometimes you didn't really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had. He wasn't about to flee from all this, let his hair grow wild and his garments stink of unwashed sweat and excrement in the desert while his skin blistered and burned. One lived in the world. Sought what slender grace was to be found, however one defined such things, and accepted that Jad's creation-or Ludan's, the
zubir's,
or that of any other worshipped power- was not a place where mortal men and women were meant to find tranquil ease. There might be other worlds-some taught as much- better than this, where such harmonies were possible, but he didn't live in one and was not ever going to live in one.

And thinking so, Crispin turned and looked down the street a little way and he saw the torchlit wall of the enormous house adjacent to Pertennius's and the gated courtyard into which an elegant litter had been carried a little time ago, and in the starlit dark he saw that the front door of that house now stood open to the night and a servant woman was there, robed against the chill, a candle in her hand, looking at him.

The woman saw that he had noticed her. Wordlessly, she lifted the candle and gestured with her other hand towards the open doorway.

Crispin had actually wheeled around to face the other way before he'd even realized he was doing so, the movement entirely involuntary. His back to the dark invitation of that light, he stood very still again in the street, but all was changed now, changed utterly, by that open door. To his left, above the handsome stone and brick facades of the houses here, the arc of the starlit dome rose, a serene curve above all these jagged, wounding mortal lines and edges, disdainful of them in its purity.

But
made
by a mortal man. A man named Artibasos, one of those who lived down here among all the cutting, human interactions of wife, children, friends, patrons, enemies, the angry, indifferent, bitter, blind, dying. Crispin felt the wind rise, imagined the slim serving girl shielding her candle in the open doorway behind him. Visualized his own tread approaching her, passing through that door. Became aware that his heart was pounding.
I am not ready for this,
he thought, and knew that in one way it was simply untrue, and in another he would
never
be ready for what lay beyond that door, so the thought was meaningless. But he also understood, alone on a starlit night in Sarantium, that he needed to enter that house.

Need had many guises, and desire was one of them. The jagged edges of mortality. A door his life had brought him to, after all. He turned around.

The girl was still there, waiting. Her task was to wait. He went towards her. No supernatural fires flitted or sparked in the night street now. No human voices came to him, of watchman's cry or night walker's song or faction partisans careening from a distant tavern, heard over the rooftops. There were four torches spaced evenly in iron brackets along the beautifully fashioned stone wall of the great house. The stars were bright above him, the sea behind now, almost as far away. The woman in the doorway was very young, Crispin saw, no more than a girl, fear in her dark eyes as he came up to her.