The Sarantine Mosaic (123 page)

He ought to hate the man who was readying this fleet, these soldiers. Instead, he was remembering Valerius one night in the Sanctuary, running his hand through the hair of a rumpled architect, like a mother, telling him—ordering him—to go home and sleep.

Were the Antae
better
than what Sarantium might bring to the peninsula? Especially the Antae as they would be now, civil war savagely portended. There were more deaths coming, whether Valerius's army sailed or not.

And assassination attempts were not confined to barbarians like the Antae, Crispin thought, looking at the proud glory of those bronze gates. He wondered if Valerius was dead; thought again of Alixana. On the beach just now, the surf-washed stones:
When your wife died … how did you go on living?

How had she known to ask that?

He ought not to care so much. He ought to still be a stranger here, detached from these glittering, deadly figures and whatever was happening today. These people—women and men—were so far beyond him they moved through an entirely different space in Jad's creation. He was an artisan. A layer of glass and stone. Whoever ruled, he had told Martinian once, in his anger, there would be work for mosaicists, why should they be concerned with what intrigues happened in palaces?

He was marginal, incidental … and burdened with images. He looked at the Bronze Gates, still hesitating, still imagining an approach, but then he turned away.

He went to a chapel. Randomly chosen, the first one he came to along a lane running down and east. Not a street he knew. The chapel was small, quiet, nearly empty, a handful of women, mostly older, shapes in shadow, murmuring, no cleric at this hour. The chariots taking the people away. An old, old battle. Here the sunlight almost disappeared into a pallid half-light filtering through too-small windows ringing a low dome. No decorations. Mosaics were expensive, so were frescoes. It was obvious no wealthy people attended here, salving their souls with gifts to the clerics. There
were lamps suspended from overhead in a single line from altar to doors, a handful of others at the side altars, but only a few of them were lit: they would be frugal with oil, at winter's end.

Crispin stood for a time facing the altar and the disk, and then he knelt—no cushions here—on the hard floor and closed his eyes. Among women at prayer he thought of his mother: small and brave and exquisite, scent of lavender always about her, alone for so long, since his father died. He felt very far away.

Someone rose, signed the disk, and walked out. An old woman, bent with her years. Crispin heard the door open and swing shut behind him. It was very quiet. And then, in that stillness, he heard someone begin to sing.

He looked up. No one else seemed to stir. The voice, delicate and plaintive, was off to his left. He seemed to see a shadowy figure there, at one of the side altars where the lamp was not burning. There were a handful of candles lit by the altar but he couldn't even tell if the singer was a girl or an older woman, the light was so subdued.

He did realize, after a moment, collecting his meandering thoughts, that the voice was singing in Trakesian, which was entirely strange. The liturgy here was always chanted in Sarantine.

His command of Trakesian—the old tongue of those who had ruled much of the world before Rhodias—was precarious, but as he listened it came to Crispin that what he was hearing was a lament.

No one else moved. No one entered. He knelt among praying women in a dim, holy place and listened to a voice sing of sorrow in an ancient tongue, and it occurred to him that music was one of the things that had not been in his life since Ilandra died. Her night
songs for the girls had been for him, as well, listening in the house.

Who knows love?

Who says he knows love?

This singer, a shape and barely that, a voice without a body, was not singing a Kindath lullaby. She was offering— Crispin finally understood—an entirely pagan sorrow: the corn maiden and the antlered god, the Sacrifice and the Hunted One. In a chapel of Jad. Images that had already been ancient when Trakesia was great.

Crispin shivered, kneeling on stone. Looked again to his left, eyes straining to pierce the gloom. Only a shadow. Candles. Only a voice. No one moved.

And it came to him then, feeling unseen spirits hovering in the dimness, that Valerius the Emperor had been Petrus of Trakesia before he came south to his uncle from the northern fields, and that he would have known this song.

And with that, there came another thought and Crispin closed his eyes again and named himself a fool. For if this were true—and of course it was—then Valerius would also have known
exactly
what the bison in Crispin's sketches for the Sanctuary was. He was from northern Trakesia, the forests and grainlands, places where pagan roots had been in the soil for centuries.

Valerius would have recognized the
zubir
as soon as he'd seen it in the drawings.

And he had said nothing. Had given the sketches to the Eastern Patriarch, had approved them for the dome of his own legacy, his Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom. Awareness entered Crispin like a wind. Overwhelmed, he pushed his hands through his hair.

What man dared try to reconcile so many things in the span of a single life, he thought. East and west brought
together again, north coming down to south, a faction dancer becoming an Empress. The daughter of one's enemy and … victim, married to one's own friend and Strategos. The
zubir
of the Aldwood, huge and wild—the
essence
of the wild—on a dome consecrated to Jad in the heart of the triple-walled City.

Valerius. Valerius had tried. There was … a pattern here. Crispin felt he could nearly see it, almost understand. He was a maker of patterns himself, working in tesserae and light. The Emperor had worked with human souls and the world.

There was a voice here, mourning.

Shall the maiden never walk the bright fields again
,

Her hair as yellow as the grain?

The horns of the god can hold the blue moon.

When the Huntress shoots him he dies.

How can we, the children of time, ever live

If these two must die?

How can we, the children of loss, ever learn

What we may leave behind?

When the sound of roaring is heard in the wood

The children of earth will cry.

When the beast that was roaring comes into the fields

The children of blood must die.

He struggled to understand the Trakesian words, and yet he understood so much, bypassing thought: the way he'd looked up in that chapel in Sauradia on the Day of the Dead and grasped a truth about Jad and the world on the dome. His heart was full, aching. Mysteries swept
through him. He felt small, mortal, and alone, pierced by a song as by a sword.

After a time he became aware that the solitary voice had ended. He looked over again. No sign of the singer. No one there. At all. He turned quickly to the doors. No one was walking out. No movement anywhere in the chapel, no footsteps. None of the others in the dim, filtered light had even stirred, during the song or now. As if they hadn't even heard it.

Crispin shivered again, uncontrollably, a feeling of something unseen brushing against him, against his life. His hands were shaking. He stared at them as if they belonged to someone else. Who was it who had sung that lament? What was being mourned with pagan words in a chapel of Jad? He thought of Linon, in grey mist on the cold grass.
Remember me
. Did the half-world linger forever, once you entered it? He didn't know. He didn't know.

He clasped his hands together, staring at them— scratches, cuts, old scars—until they grew steady again. He spoke the Invocation to Jad into shadow and silence and he made the sign of the sun disk and then he asked the god for mercy and for light, for the dead and the living he knew, here and far away. And then he rose and went back out into the day, walking home along streets and lanes, through squares, under covered colonnades, hearing the noise from the Hippodrome behind him as he went—very loud now, something happening. He saw men running, appearing from all directions, carrying sticks and knives. He saw a sword. His heart was still hammering like a drum, painful in his breast.

It was beginning. Or, seen another way, it was ending. He ought not to care so much. He did, though, more than words could tell. It was a truth, not to be denied. But there was no role left for him to play.

He was wrong, in the event.

Shirin was waiting when he arrived at his home. She had Danis about her neck.

The riot boiled up with unbelievable speed. One moment the Blues were running their Victory Lap, the next, the screaming had changed, turned ugly, and there was savage violence in the Hippodrome.

Cleander, in the tunnel where Scortius lay, looked back out through the Processional Gates and saw men battling with fists and then knives as the factions fought through the neutral stands to get at each other. People were being trampled in their efforts to get out of the way. He saw someone lifted bodily and thrown through the air, landing on heads several rows below. As he watched, a woman, twisting to get out of the way of a cluster of antagonists, fell to her knees and Cleander imagined—even at this distance and with the uproar all around—that he could hear her screams as they trampled her. People were milling desperately towards the exits in a brutal crush of bodies.

He looked at his stepmother, then at the kathisma at the far end of the long straight. His father was up there, too far away to be of any help to them at all. He didn't even know they'd come today. Cleander drew a deep breath. He took a last quick look at the doctors labouring over the prone body of Scortius and then he left. He took his stepmother gently by the elbow and led her further into the tunnel. She came obediently, saying nothing at all. He knew this place extremely well. They came at length to a small, locked door. Cleander picked the lock (it wasn't difficult, and he'd done it before) and then unhooked the latch and they emerged at the very eastern end of the Hippodrome.

Thenaïs was compliant, eerily detached, seemingly oblivious to the panic all around them. Cleander looked
around the corner for her litter, back near the main gates through which they'd entered, but immediately realized there was no point trying to get to it: the fighting had already spilled out of the Hippodrome. The factions were brawling in the forum now. Men were coming, at a run. The noise from inside was huge, ugly. He took his stepmother's elbow again and they started the other way, as quickly as he could make her go.

He had an image in his mind, couldn't shake it: the expression on Astorgus's face when the yellow-clad gate attendant had stepped forward and reported what Cleander himself had seen but had determined not to tell. Astorgus had gone rigid, his face a mask. After a frozen moment, the Blues' factionarius had turned on his heel without a word and gone back out onto the sands.

On the track, the Blues had still been celebrating, the young rider who'd won the race doing victory laps with the two White riders. Scortius had been unconscious in the tunnel. His Bassanid physician, assisted by the Blues' own doctor, desperately trying to stanch the flow of blood and keep him breathing, among the living. They were covered with blood themselves by then.

A few moments later those in the tunnel had heard the cheering in the stands turn to something else, a deep, terrifying sound, and then the fighting had begun. At that point they didn't know why, or what Astorgus had done.

Cleander hurried his stepmother up onto a colonnade, letting a swarm of young men sprint past in the street, shouting, waving cudgels and knives. He saw someone with a sword. Two weeks ago he could have been
that
man, racing towards bloodshed with a weapon in his hand. Now he saw all of them as threats, wild-eyed and uncontrolled. Something had happened to him. He kept a hand on his stepmother's arm.

He heard himself hailed by name. Turned swiftly to the loud voice and felt a surge of relief. It was the soldier, Carullus: the one he'd met in The Spina last autumn, the one whose wedding feast Shirin had just hosted. Carullus had his left arm around his wife and a knife in his right hand. They came quickly up the steps to the colonnade.

‘In stride with me, lad,' he said, his manner brisk but entirely calm. ‘We'll get the women home so they can have a quiet cup of something warm on a pleasant day in spring.
Isn't
it a beautiful day? I love this time of year.'

Cleander was unspeakably grateful. Carullus was a big, intimidating man, and he moved like a soldier. No one disturbed them as they went, though they saw one man crack a staff over the head of another right beside them in the street. The staff broke; the struck man fell, awkwardly.

Carullus winced. ‘Broken neck,' he said matter-of-factly, looking back, keeping them moving. ‘He won't get up.'