The Sarantine Mosaic (135 page)

There came a knock then, softly at the door. Four times swiftly, twice slow. Rustem stood up quickly, his eyes darting around the room. There was really nowhere for her to hide.

But Alixana said, ‘That will be Elita. It is all right. They'll expect her to come here. She's bedding you, isn't she? I wonder if she'll be upset with me.'

He crossed the room, opened the door. Elita entered hurriedly, closed the door behind her. Took one quick, frightened look at the bed, saw that Alixana was there. She dropped to her knees before Rustem and seized one of his hands in both of hers and kissed it. Then turned towards the bed, still on her knees, looking at the ragged, dirty, crop-haired woman sitting there.

‘Oh, my lady,' she whispered. ‘What are we to do?'

And she took a dagger from her belt, laying it on the floor. Then she wept.

SHE HAD LONG BEEN
one of the most trusted women of the Empress Alixana. Took a pleasure in that fact that was almost certainly reprehensible in the eyes of Jad and his clerics. Mortals, especially women, were not to puff themselves up with the sin of pride.

But there it was.

She had been the last person awake in the house, having offered to tend the downstairs fire and put out the lamps before going up to the doctor's bed. She had sat in the front room alone for a time in the dark, watching white moonlight through the high window. Had heard footsteps in the other ground-floor rooms, heard them cease as the others went to their beds. She had remained where she was for a time, anxiously. She had to wait, but feared to wait too long. Finally, she had walked down the main-floor hallway and opened a bedroom door, silently.

She had prepared an excuse—not a good one—if he was still awake.

The steward who ran this house for Plautus Bonosus was an efficient but not an especially clever man. Still, something had been said when the soldiers left—a misunderstanding that could have been amusing but wasn't, at all, with so desperately much at stake. An exchange that might be fatal, if he put the pieces together.

There was a huge reward on offer, incomprehensibly large, in fact, proclaimed by heralds throughout the City all day. What if the steward woke in the night with a blinding thought? If a daemon or ghost came to him carrying a dream? If he realized under the late moons that the soldier at the door hadn't been calling the grey-bearded doctor a whore but had been referring to a woman upstairs? A woman. The steward might wake, wonder, feel the slow licking of curiosity and greed, rise up in the dark house, go down the hallway with a lamp lit from his fire. Open the front door. Call for a guard of the Urban Prefecture, or a soldier.

It was a risk. It was a risk.

She had walked into his room, silent as a ghost herself, looked down upon him where he lay sleeping on his back. Sought a way to make her heart grow hard.

Loyalty, real loyalty, sometimes required a death. The Empress (she would always call her that) was still in the house. It was not a night to take chances. They might trace the steward's murder to her but sometimes the death required was one's own.

‘
MY LADY
, I could not kill him. I tried, I went to do it, but … '

The girl was weeping. The blade on the floor before her was innocent of blood, Rustem saw. He looked at Alixana.

‘I ought to have known better,' Alixana murmured, still wrapped in the bed linens, ‘than to make you a soldier in the Excubitors.' And she smiled, faintly.

Elita looked up, biting at her lower lip.

‘I don't think we need his death, my dear. If the man somehow wakes in the night with a vision and goes for the door and a guard … you can run them through with a sword.'

‘My lady. I don't have …'

‘I know, child. I am telling you we need not murder to defend against this chance. If he were going to rethink that conversation, he'd have done it by now.'

Rustem, who knew a little of sleep and dreams, was less sure, but said nothing.

Alixana looked at him. ‘Doctor, will you let two women share your bed? I fear it will be less exciting than the words suggest.'

Rustem cleared his throat. ‘You must sleep, my lady. Lie in the bed. I will take a chair, and Elita can have a pillow by the fire.'

‘You need rest as well, physician. People's lives will depend on you in the morning.'

‘And I will do what I can do. I have spent nights in chairs before.'

It was true. Chairs, worse places. Stony ground with an army in Ispahani. He was bone-weary. Saw that she was, as well.

‘I am taking your bed from you,' she murmured, lying down. ‘I ought not to do that.'

She was asleep when she finished the sentence.

Rustem looked at the servant who had been on the edge of murdering for her. Neither of them spoke. He gestured at one of the pillows and she took it and went to the hearth and lay down. He looked at the bed, and crossed there and covered the sleeping woman with
one blanket, then took another and carried it to the girl by the fire. She looked up at him. He draped it over her.

He went back to the window. Looked out, saw the trees in the garden below made silver by the white moon. He closed the window, drew the curtains. The breeze was strong now, the night colder. He sank down in the chair.

It came to him, with finality, that he was going to have to change his life again, what he had thought was to be his life.

HE SLEPT
. When he woke, both women were gone.

A greyness was filtering palely through the curtains. He drew them back and looked out. It was almost day, but not quite, the hovering hour before dawn. There was a knocking at the door. He realized that was what had awakened him. He looked over, saw that the door was unlocked, as was usual.

He was about to call for whoever it was to come in when he remembered where he was.

He rose quickly. Elita had replaced her pillow and blanket on the bed. Rustem crossed there. Climbed in and under the sheets. There was a scent, faint as a dream receding, of the woman who was gone.

‘Yes?' he called. He had no idea where she was, or if he ever would know.

Bonosus's steward opened the door, impeccably dressed already, composed and calm as ever, dry in his manner as a bone. Rustem had seen a knife in this room last night, meant for this man's heart while he slept. He had been that close to dying. So had Rustem, a different way—if a deception had failed.

The steward paused deferentially on the threshold, hands clasped before him. There was an odd look in his
eye, however. ‘My deepest apologies, but some people are at the door, doctor.' His voice was practised, murmurous. ‘They say they are your family.'

HE BROKE STRIDE
only long enough to throw on a robe. Dishevelled, unshaven, still bleary-eyed, he bolted past the startled man and tore down the hallway and then the stairs in a manner worlds removed from anything resembling dignity.

He saw them from the first landing, where the stairway doubled back, and he stopped, looking down.

They were all in the front hallway. Katyun and Jarita, one visibly anxious, the other hiding the same apprehension. Issa in her mother's arms. Shaski was a little ahead of the others. He was gazing up fixedly, eyes wide, an intent, frightening expression on his features that only changed, only melted away—Rustem saw it—when his father appeared on the stairs. And Rustem knew, in that moment he knew as surely as he knew anything on earth, that Shaski was the reason, the
only
reason, the four of them were here and the knowledge hit him in the heart like nothing ever had.

He went the rest of the way down to the ground floor and stood gravely before the boy, hands clasped in front of himself, very like the steward, in fact.

Shaski looked up at him, his face white as a flag of surrender, the small, thin body taut as a bowstring. (
We must bend, my little one, we must learn to bend or we break.
) He said, his voice quivering, ‘Hello, Papa. Papa, we can't go home.'

‘I know,' said Rustem softly.

Shaski bit his lip. Stared at him. Huge eyes. Hadn't expected this. Had expected punishment, very likely. (
We must learn to be easier, little one.
) ‘Or … or to Kabadh? We can't go there.'

‘I know,' said Rustem again.

He did know. He also understood, after what he'd learned in the night, that Perun and the Lady had intervened here beyond any possible measure of his worthiness. There was something constricting in his chest, a pressure needing release. He knelt down on the floor and he opened his arms.

‘Come to me,' he said. ‘It is all right, child. It will be all right.'

Shaski made a sound—a wail, a heart's cry—and ran to his father then, a small bundle of spent force, to be gathered and held. He began to weep, desperately, like the child he still was, despite everything else he was and would be.

Clutching the boy to him, lifting him, not letting go, Rustem stood up and went forward and drew both his wives into that embrace and his infant daughter, as the morning came.

IT SEEMED THEY HAD INQUIRED
of Bassanid mercantile agents on the other bank, and one of them had known where Rustem the physician was staying. Their escorts, the two soldiers who had crossed with them from Deapolis on a fishing boat before daylight (two others remaining behind), were waiting outside in front of the house.

Rustem had them admitted. Given what he now knew, it was not a time for Bassanids to be on the streets of Sarantium. One of them, he saw with astonishment (he had thought himself to have reached a place beyond surprise now), was Vinaszh, the garrison commander of Kerakek.

‘Commander? How does this come to be?' It was strange to be speaking his own tongue again.

Vinaszh, wearing Sarantine trousers and a belted tunic and not a uniform, thank the Lady, smiled a little before
answering: the weary but satisfied expression of a man who has achieved a difficult task.

‘Your son,' he said, ‘is a persuasive child.'

Rustem was still holding Shaski. The boy's arms were around his neck, his head on his father's shoulder. He had stopped crying. Rustem looked over at the steward and said, in Sarantine, ‘Is it possible to offer a morning meal to my family, and to these men who have escorted them?'

‘Of course it is,' said Elita, before the steward could answer. She was smiling at Issa. ‘I will arrange it.'

The steward looked briefly irritated by the woman's presumption. Rustem had a sudden, vivid image of Elita standing over the man's body in the night, a blade in her hand.

‘I would also like a message taken to the Senator, as soon as possible. Conveying my respects and requesting an opportunity to attend upon him later this morning.'

The steward's expression became grave. ‘There is a difficulty,' he murmured.

‘How so?'

‘The Senator and his family will not be receiving visitors today, or for the next few days. They are in mourning. The lady Thenaïs is dead.'

‘What?
I was with her yesterday!'

‘I know that, doctor. It seems she went to the god in the afternoon, at home.'

‘How?' Rustem was genuinely shocked. He felt Shaski stiffen.

The steward hesitated. ‘I am given to understand there was … a self-inflicted injury.'

Images again. From the day that yesterday had been. A shadowy, high-ceilinged interior space within the Hippodrome, motes of dust drifting where light fell, a
woman more rigid than even he himself was, confronting a chariot-racer. Another drawn blade.

We must learn to bend, or we break.

Rustem took a deep breath. He was thinking very hard. Bonosus could not be intruded upon, but the need for protection was real. Either the steward would have to make arrangements here himself for guards, or else …

It was an answer. It was an obvious answer.

He looked back at the man. ‘I am deeply saddened to hear of this. She was a woman of dignity and grace. I will need a different message sent now. Please have someone inform the acting leader of the Blue faction that I and my family and our two companions request admission into the compound. We will need an escort, of course.'

‘You are leaving us, doctor?'

The man's expression was impeccable. He had been very nearly killed in his sleep last night. He'd never have awakened. Someone might have been knocking at the steward's bedroom door, finding his body even now, raising a terrible cry.

The world was a place beyond man's capacity to ever fully grasp. It had been made that way.

‘I believe we must leave,' he said. ‘It appears our countries might be at war again. Sarantium will be dangerous for Bassanids, however innocent we might be. If the Blues are willing, we might be better defended within the compound.' He looked at the man. ‘We pose a danger here to all of you now, of course.'

The steward—not a subtle thinker—had not considered that. It showed in his face.

‘I will have your message sent.'

‘Tell them,' added Rustem, setting Shaski down beside him, a hand across the boy's shoulders, ‘that I will,
of course, offer my professional assistance for the duration of any stay.'

He looked over at Vinaszh, the man who had set all of this in motion one afternoon in winter when the wind had been blowing from the desert. The commander spoke Sarantine, it appeared: he had followed this. ‘I left two men on the other shore,' he murmured.

‘It might be unsafe for you to go back to them. Wait and see. I have asked for you to be admitted with us. This place is a guarded compound, and they have reason to be well disposed towards me.'

‘I heard. I understand.'

‘But I have no right to act for you, it occurs to me. You have brought me my family, unlooked for. For many reasons I want them with me now. I owe you more than I can ever repay, but I do not know your wishes. Will you return home? Does duty demand as much? Did you … I don't know if you have heard about a possible war in the north.'