The Sarantine Mosaic (136 page)

‘There were rumours on the other bank last night. We obtained civilian clothing, as you see.' Vinaszh hesitated. He removed his rough cloth cap and scratched his head. ‘I … I told you your son was very persuasive.'

The steward, hearing them speak in Bassanid, turned politely away and crooked a finger at one of the younger servants: a messenger.

Rustem stared at the commander. ‘He is an unusual child.'

He was still holding the boy, not letting go. Katyun watched them, her head turning from one man to the other. Jarita had dried her tears, was making the baby be silent.

Vinaszh was still grappling with something. He cleared his throat, then did it again. ‘He said … Shaski
said … told us that an ending was coming. To Kerakek. Even … Kabadh.'

‘We can't go home, Papa.' Shaski's voice was calm now, a certainty in it that could chill you if you thought about it at all.
Perun defend you, Anahita guard us all. Azal never know your name
.

Rustem looked at his son. ‘What kind of ending?'

‘I don't know.' The admission bothered the boy, it was obvious. ‘From … the desert.'

From the desert. Rustem looked at Katyun. She shrugged, a small gesture, one he knew so well.

‘Children have dreams,' he said, but then he shook his head. That was dishonest. An evasion. They were only here with him because of Shaski's dreams, and last night Rustem had been told—quite explicitly and by someone who would know—that he was probably a dead man if he went to Kabadh now.

He had declined to try to assassinate someone. And the orders had come from the king.

Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, the garrison commander of Kerakek, said, softly, ‘If your intention is to stay here, or go elsewhere, I humbly ask permission to journey with you for a time. Our paths may part later, but we will offer our assistance now. I believe … I accept what the child sees. It happens, in the desert, that some people have this … knowing.'

Rustem swallowed. ‘We? You speak for the other three?' ‘They share my thought about the boy. We have journeyed with him. Things may be seen.'

As simple as that.

Rustem still had his hand across Shaski's too-thin shoulders. ‘You are deserting the army.' Harsh word. Needed to be used, brought into the open here.

Vinaszh winced. Then straightened, his gaze direct. ‘I have promised to properly discharge my men, which is
in my power as their commander. The formal letters will be sent back.'

‘And for yourself?'

There was no one who could write such a letter for the commander. The other man drew a breath. ‘I will not go back.' He looked down at Shaski, and he smiled a little. Said nothing more.

A life changed, changed utterly.

Rustem looked around the room, at his wives, his infant daughter, the man who had just thrown in his lot with them, and in that very moment—he would say as much long afterwards, telling the tale—the thought came to him where they would go.

He had already been in the distant east, he'd tell guests, over wine in another land, why not journey as far to the west?

Beyond Batiara, well beyond it, was a country still taking shape, defining itself, a frontier, open spaces, the sea on three sides, it was said. A place where they might begin anew, have a chance to see what Shaski was, among other things.

They would need physicians in Esperana, wouldn't they?

THEY WERE ESCORTED
down through the city, the streets quiet, unnaturally so, to the Blues' compound just before midday. On orders from the factionarius Astorgus— released only that morning from the Urban Prefecture— half a dozen men were sent across the straits with a note from Vinaszh to fetch his other two men from their inn in Deapolis.

On his arrival in the compound, after they were welcomed (respectfully) and given rooms, and just before he went to see his patients, Rustem learned from the small chef who had been in charge last night that the search for the missing Empress had been called off just before dawn.

It seemed that there had been further changes in the Imperial Precinct during the night.

SHASKI LIKED THE HORSES
. So did little Issa. A smiling groom with straw in his hair carried her as he rode on one of them and they walked a slow circle around the open yard, the baby's whoops of laughter filling the compound, making people smile as they went about the tasks of a brightening day.

CHAPTER XV

I
n the morning the eunuchs, almost invariably the first to hear tidings in the palaces, told Crispin what had happened in the night.

Their collective mood was entirely different from the subdued apprehension of the evening before. You could have called it exhilarated. A colour of sunrise, unlooked for, if one's mind worked that way. Crispin felt his dreams slipping away in the fierce, hard brightness of what they said, the sudden swirl of activity all around, like cloths unfurling.

He had one of them escort him back to the Porphyry Room. He didn't expect to be able to enter again, but the eunuch simply gestured and the guards opened the doors for them. There were changes here, too. Four of the Excubitors, garbed and helmed for ceremony, were stationed in the four corners of the room, rigidly at attention. Someone had laid flowers about the room, and the traditional plate of food for the dead soul's journey was in place on a side table. The plate was gold, with jewels set around the rim. Torches still burned near the raised bier that held the shrouded body.

It was very early still. No one else was here. The eunuch waited politely by the door. Crispin walked forward and knelt beside Valerius for a second time, making the sign of the sun disk. This time he spoke the Rites, offering a prayer for the journeying soul of the man who'd brought him here. He wished he had more
to say, but his own thoughts were still tumbled and chaotic. He rose again and the eunuch took him outside and through the gardens to the Bronze Gates, and he was allowed to exit there into the Hippodrome Forum.

Signs of life here. A normal kind of life. He saw the Holy Fool, standing in his customary place, offering an entirely predictable litany of the follies of earthly wealth and power. Two food stalls were set up already, one selling grilled lamb on sticks, the other roasted chestnuts. People were buying from each of them. As Crispin watched, the yogurt vendor arrived and a juggler set up not far from the Holy Fool.

The beginnings of a new beginning. Slowly, almost hesitantly, as if the dance of the ordinary, the rhythm of it, had been forgotten in the violence of yesterday and needed to be learned again. There were no marching clusters of soldiers now, and Crispin knew that, men and women being what they were, the City would be itself again very soon, past events receding like the memory of a night when one has drunk too much and done things best forgotten.

He took a deep breath. The Bronze Gates were behind him, the equestrian statue of Valerius I rising to his right, the City itself unfurling before him like a banner. Everything possible, as it so often felt in the morning. The air was crisp, the sky bright. He smelled the roasting chestnuts, heard all those here being sternly admonished to forsake the pursuits of the world and turn to the holiness of Jad. Knew it would not happen. Could not. The world was what it was. He saw an apprentice approach two serving girls on their way to the well with pitchers and say something that made them laugh.

The hunt for Alixana had been called off. It was being proclaimed, the eunuchs had said. They still wanted to find her, but for a different reason, now.
Leontes wished to honour her and honour the memory of Valerius. Newly anointed, a pious man, wishing to begin a reign in all proper ways. She hadn't reappeared, however. No one knew where she was. Crispin had a sudden memory from the night: that stony moonlit beach in his dream, silver and black the colours.

Gisel of Batiara was to be married to Leontes later today in a ceremony in the Attenine Palace, becoming Empress of Sarantium. The world had changed.

He remembered her in her own palace, back in the autumn with the leaves falling, a young queen sending him east with a message, offering herself to an Emperor far away. There had been wagers throughout Varena that summer and fall on how long she had to live before someone found her with poison or a blade.

She would be presented to the people in the Hippodrome tomorrow or the next day, and she and Leontes would be crowned. There was so much to be done, the eunuchs had told him, hurrying about, an
impossible
number of details to be attended to.

In a real way, he had caused this to happen. Crispin had been the one to bring her into the palace, passing through the streets of the City to the Porphyry Room through the wild night. It might—there was a
chance
it might—mean that Varena, Rhodias, the whole of Batiara would be saved now from assault. Valerius had been about to wage war; the fleet would have sailed any day now, carrying death with it. Leontes, with Gisel beside him, might do things differently. She offered him that chance. This was altogether good.

Styliane had been blinded in the night, they had told him.

She had been put aside by Leontes, their marriage formally renounced for the horror of her crime. You could do these things more quickly, the eunuchs said, if
you were an Emperor. Her brother Tertius was dead, they told him, strangled in one of those rooms under the palace no one liked to talk about. His body would be displayed later today, hanging from the triple walls. Gesius was in charge of that, too. No, they'd said, when he asked, Styliane herself had not been reported killed. No one knew where she was.

Crispin looked up at the statue rising before him. A man on a horse, a martial sword, image of power and majesty, a dominant figure. But it was the women, he thought, who had shaped the story here, not the men with their armies and blades. He had no idea what to make of that. He wished he could dispel the heaviness, the tangled, confusing mire of all of this, blood and fury and memory.

The juggler was very good. He had five balls in the air, of different sizes, and a dagger in there with them, spinning and glinting in the light. Most people were ignoring him, hurrying past. It was early in the day, tasks and errands to be done. Morning in Sarantium was not a time for lingering.

Crispin looked over to his left at Valerius's Sanctuary, the dome rising serenely, almost disdainfully above it, above all of this. He gazed at it for a time, taking an almost physical pleasure in the grace of what Artibasos had achieved, and then he went there. He had his own work waiting to be done. A man needed to work.

OTHERS,
HE WAS
unsurprised to see, were of the same view. Silano and Sosio, the twins, were at work in the small, fenced, temporary yard beside the Sanctuary, tending to the quicklime for the setting bed at the ovens. One of them (he could never tell them apart) waved hesitantly and Crispin nodded back.

Inside, he looked up and saw that Vargos was already overhead on the scaffolding, laying the thinnest, fine
layer where Crispin had been about to work the day before. His Inici friend from the Imperial Road had emerged, unexpectedly, as an entirely competent mosaic labourer. Another man who had sailed to Sarantium and changed his life. Vargos never said as much, but Crispin thought that for him—as for Pardos—a good portion of his pleasure in this work came from piety, from working in a place of the god. Neither man would achieve as much satisfaction, Crispin thought, doing private commissions for dining rooms or bedchambers.

Pardos was also overhead, on his own scaffolding, doing the wall design Crispin had assigned him above the double row of arches along the eastern side of the space beneath the dome. Two of the other guild artisans on the team he'd assembled were also here and at work.

Artibasos would be around somewhere as well, though his own labours were essentially done. Valerius's Sanctuary was complete in its execution. It was, in fact, ready for him: to house the ruined body. Only the mosaics and the altars and whatever tomb or memorial they now needed remained to be achieved. Then the clerics would come in and they would hang the sun disks in their proper locations and consecrate this as a holy place.

Crispin gazed at what he had journeyed here to achieve, and it seemed to him as if, in some deep, ultimately inexplicable fashion, just to look was enough to steady him. He felt the images of the day before recede—Lecanus Daleinus in his hut, men dying in that clearing, Alixana dropping her cloak on the beach, the screaming in the streets and the burning fires, Gisel of the Antae in her carried litter, eyes alight as they went through the dark, and then in a purpledraped room where Valerius lay dead—all the whirling visions fell away, leaving him gazing up at what he had made here. The apex of what he could do, being a fallible mortal under Jad.

You had to live, Crispin thought, in order to have anything to
say
about living, but you needed to find a way to withdraw to accomplish that saying. A scaffolding overhead, he thought, was as good a place as any for that and better, perhaps, than most.

He went forward, surrounded and eased by the familiar sounds of work, thinking about his girls now, reclaiming their faces, which he would try to render today, next to Ilandra and not far from where Linon lay on the grass.

But before he reached the ladder, before he began to climb to his place above the world, someone spoke from behind one of the vast pillars.

Crispin turned quickly, knowing the voice. And then he knelt, and lowered his head to touch the perfect marble floor.

One knelt before Emperors in Sarantium.

‘Rise, artisan,' said Leontes, in the brisk tone of a soldier.

‘We owe you greatly, it seems, for services last night.'

Crispin stood up slowly and looked at the other man. All around the Sanctuary the noises were coming to a halt. The others were watching them, had now seen who was here. Leontes wore boots and a dark green tunic with a leather belt. His cloak was pinned at his shoulder with a golden ornament, but the effect was unassuming. Another man at work. Behind the Emperor, Crispin saw a cleric he vaguely recognized, and a secretary he knew very well. Pertennius had a bruised and swollen jaw. His eyes were icy cold as he looked at Crispin. Not surprisingly.