The Sarantine Mosaic (27 page)

He surprised himself then, and began to pray, wordlessly, to Jad of the Sun—for his own soul, and his mother's and his friends', and the taken souls of Ilandra and the girls, asking Light for them, and for himself.

He had told Martinian little more than a fortnight ago that he wanted nothing in life any more, had no desires, no journeys sought, no destinations in a hollowed, riven world. He ought not to be trembling so, to be so profoundly apprehensive of the shifting textures of the forest around them and the mist clinging like fingers to his face, and of the creature that was leading them farther and farther on. He ought to be ready to die here if what he'd been saying was true. It was with a force of real discovery that Crispin
realized he wasn't, after all. And that truth, a hammer on the beating heart, smashed through the illusions he'd gathered and nourished for a year and more. He had things unfinished in his mortal house, it seemed. He did have something left.

And he knew what it was, too. Walking in a world where sight was nearly lost—tree trunks and twisted branches in the greyness, heavy wet leaves falling, the black bulk of the bison ahead of him—he could see what he wanted now, as if it were illuminated by fire. He was too clever a man, even amid fear, not to perceive the irony. All the ironies here. But he did know now what he wanted, in his heart, to make, and beyond cleverness, was wise enough not to deny it in this wood.

Upon a dome, with glass and stone and semi-precious gems and streaming and flickering light through windows and from a glory of candles below, Crispin knew he wanted to achieve something of surpassing beauty that would last.

A creation that would mean that he—the mosaicworker Caius Crispus of Varena—had been born, and lived a life, and had come to understand a portion of the nature of the world, of what ran through and beneath the deeds of women and men in their souls and in the beauty and the pain of their short living beneath the sun.

He wanted to make a mosaic that would endure, that those living in after days would know had been made by him, and would honour. And this, he thought, beneath black and dripping trees, walking over sodden, rotting leaves in the forest, would mean that he had set his mark upon the world, and had been.

It was so strange to realize how it was only at this brink of the chasm, threshold of the dark or the god's holy light, that one could grasp and accept one's own heart's yearning for more of the world. For life.

Crispin realized that his terror had gone now, with this. More strangeness. He looked around at the thick shadows of the forest and they did not frighten him. Whatever lay beyond sight could not be half so overwhelming as the creature that walked before him. Instead of fear, he felt a sadness beyond words now. As if all those born into the world to die were taking this shrouded walk with them, each one longing for something they would never know. He touched the bird again. That heat, as of life, in the damp, grey cold. No glow. Linon was as dark and drab as she had ever been. There was no shining in the Aldwood.

Only the awesome thing that led them, delicate for all its bulk, through the tall, silent trees for a measureless time until they came to a clearing and into it, one by one, and without a word spoken or a sound Crispin knew that this was the place of sacrifice. Archilochus of Arethae, he thought, had not been born when men and women were dying for Ludan in this grove.

The bison turned.

They stood facing him in a row, Kasia between the two men. Crispin drew a breath. He looked across the girl at Vargos. Their eyes met. The mist had lifted. It was grey and cold, but one could see clearly here. He saw the fear in the other man's eyes and also saw that Vargos was fighting it. He admired him then, very much.

‘I am sorry,' he said, words in the wood. It seemed important to say this. Something—an acknowledgement—from the world beyond this glade, these encircling trees where the wet leaves fell silently on the wet cold grass. Vargos nodded.

The girl sank to her knees. She seemed very small, a child almost, lost inside his second cloak. Pity twisted in Crispin. He looked at the creature before them, into the dark, huge, ancient eyes, and he said, quietly, ‘You have claimed blood and a life already on the road. Need you take hers as well? Ours?'

He had not known he was going to say that. He heard Vargos suck in his breath. Crispin prepared himself for death. The earth rumbling as before. The ripping of those horns through his flesh. He continued to look into the bison's eyes, an act as courageous as anything he'd ever done in his life.

And what he saw there, unmistakably, was not anger or menace but loss.

And it was in that moment that Linon finally spoke.

‘He doesn't want the girl,'
the bird said very gently, almost tenderly, in his mind.
‘He came for me. Lay me on the ground, Crispin.'

‘What?' He said it aloud, in bewildered astonishment.

The bison remained motionless, gazing at him. Or not, in fact, at him. At the small bird about his throat on the worn leather thong.

‘Do it, my dear. This was written long ago, it seems. You are not the first man from the west to try to take a sacrifice from Ludan.'

‘What? Zoticus? What did—'

His mind spinning, Crispin remembered something and clutched it like a spar. That long conversation in the alchemist's home, holding a cup of herbal tea, hearing the old man's voice: ‘I have the only access to certain kinds of power. Found in my travels, in a guarded place … and at some risk.'

Something began—only just began—to come clear for him. A different kind of mist beginning to rise. He felt the beating of his own heart, his life.

‘Of course, Zoticus,'
Linon said, still gently.
‘Think, my dear. How else would I have known the rites? There is no time, Crispin. This is in doubt, still. He is waiting, but it is a place of blood. Take me from your neck. Lay me down. Go. Take the others. You have brought me back. I believe you will be permitted to leave.'

Crispin's mouth was dry again. A taste like ashes. No one had moved since the girl sank to her knees. There was no wind in the clearing, he realized. Mist hung suspended about the branches of the trees. When the leaves fell, it was as if they descended from clouds. He saw puffs of white where the bison breathed in the cold.

‘And you?'
he asked silently.
‘Do I save her and leave you behind?'

He heard, within, a ripple of laughter. Amazingly.
‘Oh, my dear, thank you for that. Crispin, my body ended here when you were still a child in the world. He thought the released soul might be freely taken when the sacrifice was made. In the moment of that power. He was right and wrong, it seems. Do not pity me. But tell Zoticus. And tell him, also, for me …'

An inward silence, to match the one in the grey, still glade. And then:
‘There is no need. He will know what I would have said. Tell him goodbye. Put me down now, dear. You must leave, or never leave.'

Crispin looked at the bison. It still had not moved. Even now, his mind could not compass the vastness of it, the presence of so huge and raw a power. The brown eyes had not changed, ancient sorrow in grey light, but there was blood on the horns. He took a shaky breath and slowly reached up with both hands, removing the little bird from his neck. He knelt—it seemed proper to kneel—and laid her gently on the cold ground there. He realized she was no longer burning, but warm, warm as a living thing. A sacrifice. There was a pain in him; he had thought he was past such grief, after Ilandra, after the girls.

And as he laid her down, the bird said then, aloud, in a voice Crispin had never heard from her, the voice of a woman, grave, serene, ‘I am yours, lord, as I ever was from the time I was brought here.'

A stillness, rigid as suspended time. Then the bison's head moved, down, and up again, in acquiescence, and time began once more. The girl, Kasia, made a small, whimpering sound. Vargos, beyond her, put a hand to his mouth, an oddly childlike gesture.

‘Go quickly now. Take them and go. Remember me.'
And in his mind now Linon's voice was that same mild woman's voice. The voice of the girl who had been sacrificed here so long ago, cut open, flayed, her beating heart torn out, while an alchemist watched from hiding nearby and then performed an act or an art Crispin could not begin to comprehend. Evil? Good? What did the words mean here?
One thing to another. The dead to life. The movement of souls
. He thought of Zoticus. Of a courage he could scarcely imagine, and a presumption beyond belief.

He stood up, unsteadily. He hesitated, utterly uncertain of rules and rituals in this half-world he had entered, but then he bowed to the vast, appalling, stinking creature before him that was a forest god or the living symbol of a god. He put a hand on Kasia's arm, tugging her to her feet. She glanced at him, startled. He looked at Vargos, and nodded. The other man stared, confused.

‘Lead us,' Crispin said to Vargos, clearing his throat. His voice sounded reedy, strange. ‘To the road.' He would be lost, himself, ten paces into the forest.

The bison remained motionless. The small bird lay on the grass. Tendrils of mist drifted in the utterly still air. A leaf fell, and another.
‘Goodbye,'
Crispin said, silently.
‘I will remember.'
He was weeping. The first time in more than a year.

They left the glade, Vargos leading them. The bison slowly turned its massive head and watched them go, the dark eyes unfathomable now, the horns wet and bloody beneath the circling trees. It made no other movement at all. They stumbled away and it was lost.

Vargos found their path, and nothing in the Aldwood stayed them upon it. No predator of the forest, no daemon or spirit of the air or dark. The fog came again, and with it that sense of movement without passage of time. They came out where they had gone in, though, left the forest and crossed into the field. They reclaimed the mule, which had not moved. Crispin bent and picked up his sword from where it had fallen; Vargos took his staff. When they came to the road, over the same small bridge across the ditch, they stood above the body of the dead man there, and Crispin saw amid all the blood that his chest had been torn entirely open, both upwards from the groin and to each side, and his heart was gone. Kasia turned away and vomited into the ditch. Vargos gave her water from a flask, his own hands shaking. She drank, wiped her face. Nodded her head.

They began walking, alone on the road, in the grey world.

The fog began to lift some time afterwards. Then a pale, weak, wintry sun appeared through a thinning of the clouds for the first time that day. They stopped without a word spoken, looking up at it. And from the forest north of them in that moment there came a sound, high, clear, wordless, one sung note of music. A woman's voice.

‘Linon?'
Crispin cried urgently, in his mind, unable not to.
‘Linon?'

There was no reply. The inner silence was absolute. That long, unearthly note seemed to hang in the air between forest and field, earth and sky, and then it faded away like the mist.

Later that day, towards twilight far to the west, a grey-haired, grey-bearded man rode a jostling farmer's cart towards the city walls of Varena.

The farmer, having had more than one animal cured of an ailment by his passenger, was happy to oblige with irregular rides into the city. The passenger, at the moment, could not have been said to appear happy, or pleased, or anything but preoccupied. As they approached the walls and merged with the streaming traffic heading into and out of Varena before sunset closed the gates, the solitary passenger was recognized by a number of people. Some greeted him with deference and awe, others moved quickly to the far side of the road or fell back making a sign of the sun disk as the farmer's cart passed carrying an alchemist. Zoticus was, in fact, long accustomed to both responses and knew how to deal with each. Today he scarcely noticed them.

He'd had a shock this morning that had greatly undermined the wry detachment with which he preferred to view the world and what transpired within it. He was still dealing—not entirely successfully—with that.

‘I think you should go into the city,'
had said the falcon earlier that day. He'd named her Tiresa when he'd claimed her soul.
‘I think it would be good for you tonight.'

‘Go to Martinian and Carissa,'
little Mirelle had added, softly. ‘
You can talk with them.'
There'd been a murmur of agreement from the others, a rustling of leaves in his mind.

‘I can talk with all of you,' he'd said aloud, irritated. It offended him when the birds became solicitous and protective, as if he were growing fragile with age, needed guarding. Soon they'd be reminding him to wear his boots.