The Sarantine Mosaic (66 page)

She had not been, it seemed, born into the world for peace or joy or any sure power—or even to keep those very few who loved her by her side.

AND SO IT WAS THAT
the queen of the Antae was nearly alone when she walked forth in disguise on the second night of Dykania, out from the palace and through her city, past bonfires in the squares and moving torchlight and out the open gates amid a riotous, drunken crowd and then, two mornings later, under grey skies with a threat of rain,
leaving behind the only land she had ever known for the seas of late autumn and the world, sailing east.

The alchemist who had come to her summons and had devised her escape had been waiting in Mylasia. Before leaving her chambers ten days ago he had requested passage to Sauradia on the Imperial ship. Transactions of his own, he had explained. Business left unfinished long ago.

He doubted she would ever know how deeply she had touched him.

Child-queen, alone and preternaturally serious, mistrustful of shadows, of words, of the very wind. And what man could blame her for it? Besieged and threatened on all sides, wagers taken openly in her city as to the season of her death. And yet wise enough—alone of all in that palace, it seemed—to understand how the Antae's tribal feuds
had
to be altered now in a greater world or they would revert to being only a tribe again, driven from the peninsula they'd claimed, hacking each other to pieces, scrabbling for forage space among the other barbarian federations. He stood now on a slip in the harbour of Megarium, cloaked against the slant, cold rain, and watched the Sarantine ship move back out through the water, bearing the queen of the Antae to a world that would—some truths were hard—almost certainly prove too dangerous and duplicitous even for her own fierce intelligence.

She would get there, he thought; he had taken the measure of that ship and its captain. He had travelled in his day, knew roads and the sea. A commercial ship, wide, clumsy, deep-bellied, would have been at gravest risk this late in the year. A commercial ship would not have sailed. But this was a craft sent especially for a queen.

She would reach Sarantium, he judged—see the City, as he himself never had—but he could see no joy in her doing so. There had been only death waiting at home, though, the certainty of it, and she was young enough— she was terribly young enough—to cling to life, and whatever hope it might offer in the face of the waiting dark, or the light of her god that might follow.

His gods were different. He was so much older. The long darkness was not always to be feared, he thought. Living on was not an absolute good. There were balances, harmonies to be sought. Things had their season. The same journey in a different cloak, he thought. It was autumn now, in more ways than the one.

There had been a moment on board, watching Batiara disappear in greyness off the stern, when he had seen her weighing whether or not to try seducing him. It had wrung his heart. For Gisel in that moment, for this young queen of a people not his own, he might even have surmounted all the inward matters of his own, truths apprehended in his soul, and sailed on to Sarantium.

But there were powers greater than royalty in the world, and he was travelling to meet one now in a place he knew. His affairs were in order. Martinian and a notary had the necessary papers. His heart had quailed at times once the decision had come to him—only a fool, vainglorious, would have denied that—but there was no least shadow of doubt in him as to what he had to do.

He had heard an inward cry earlier this autumn, a known voice from the distant east, unimaginably far. And then, some time after, a letter had arrived from Martinian's friend, the artisan to whom he had given a bird. Linon. And reading the careful words, discerning the meaning beneath their ambiguous, veiled phrasing,
he had understood the cry. Linon. First one, little one. It
had
been a farewell, and more than that.

No sleep had come to him the night that letter came. He had moved from bed to high-backed chair to farmhouse doorway, where he stood wrapped in a blanket looking out upon the mingled autumn moonlight and the stars in a clear night. All things in the shaped world—his rooms, his garden, the orchard beyond, the stone wall, the fields and forests across the ribbon of road, the two moons rising higher and then setting as he stood in his open doorway, the pale sunrise when it came at last—all things had seemed to him to be almost unbearably precious then, numinous and transcendent, awash in the glory of the gods and goddesses that were, that still were.

By dawn he had made his decision, or, more properly, realized it had been made for him. He would have to go, would fill his old travelling pack again—the worn, stained canvas, Esperanan leather strap, bought thirty years since—with gear for the road and with the other things he would have to carry, and begin the long walk to Sauradia for the first time in almost twenty years.

But that very same morning—in the way the unseen powers of the half-world sometimes had of showing a man when he had arrived at the correct place, the proper understanding—a messenger had come from Varena, from the palace, from the young queen, and he had gone to her.

He had listened to what she told him, unsurprised, then briefly surprised. Had taken thought as carefully as he could for Gisel—younger than his never-seen daughters and sons, but also older than any of them might ever have to be, he mused—and pitying her, mastering his own grave meditations and fear, his growing awareness of what it was he had done long ago and was now to do, he gave her, as a kind of gift, the plan for her escape.

Then he asked if he might sail with her, as far as Megarium.

AND HERE
,
NOW
,
HE
was, the watched ship heeling already away to the south across the line of the wind and the white waves, the driven rain cold in his face. He kept the pack between his feet on the stone jetty, wise to the ways of harbours. He wasn't a young man; waterfronts were hard places everywhere. He didn't feel afraid, though; not of the world.

The world was all around him even in autumn rain: seamen, seabirds, food vendors, uniformed customs officers, beggars, morning whores sheltering on the porticos, men dropping lines by the jetty for octopus, wharf children tying ship ropes for a tossed coin. In summer they would dive. It was too cold now. He had been here before, many times. Had been a different man then. Young, proud, chasing immortality in mysteries and secrets that might be opened like an oyster for its pearl.

It occurred to him that he almost certainly had children living here. It did not occur to him to look for them. No point, not now. That would be a failure of integrity, he thought. Rank sentimentality. Aged father on last long journey, come to embrace his dear children.

Not him. Never that sort of man. It was the half-world he had embraced, instead.

‘Is it gone?'
Tiresa said, from inside the pack. All seven of them were in there, unseeing but not silenced. He never silenced them.

‘The ship? Yes, it is gone. Away south.'

‘And we?'
Tiresa usually spoke for the others when they were being orderly: falcon's privilege.

‘We are away as well, my dears. We are, even now.'

‘In the rain?'

‘We have walked in rain before.'

He bent and shouldered the pack, the smooth, supple leather strap sitting easily across his shoulder. It didn't feel heavy, even with his years. It shouldn't, he thought. He had one change of clothing in it, some food and drink, a knife, one book, and the birds. All the birds, all the claimed and crafted birdsouls of his life's bright courage and dark achievement.

There was a boy, perhaps eight years old, sitting on a post, watching him watch the ship. Zoticus smiled and, reaching into the purse at his belt, tossed him a silver piece. The boy caught it deftly, then noted the silver, eyes wide.

‘Why?' he asked.

‘For luck. Light a candle for me, child.'

He strode off, swinging his staff as he walked through the rain, head high, back straight, north-east through the city to pick up the spur of the Imperial road at the landward gate as he had so many times long and long ago, but here now to do something very different: to end the thirty years' tale, a life's untellable story, to carry the birds home that their called and gathered souls might be released.

That cry in the distance had been a message sent. He had thought, when he was young, reading in the Ancients, shaping a prodigious, terrifying exercise of alchemy, that the
sacrifice
in the Sauradian wood was what mattered there, the act of homage to the power they worshipped in the forest. That the souls of those given to the wood god might be dross, unimportant, free to be claimed, if dark craft and art were equal to that.

Not so. It was otherwise. He had indeed discovered he possessed that knowledge, the appalling and then exhilarating capacity to achieve a transference of souls, but earlier this autumn, standing in his own farmyard of a morning, he had heard a voice in his mind cry out
from the Aldwood. Linon, in her own woman's voice— that he had heard only once, from hiding, when they killed her in the wood—and he had understood, an old man now, wherein he had been wrong, long ago.

Whatever it was that was in the forest had laid claim to the souls, after all. They were not for the having.

A sleepless night had followed then, too, and a burgeoning awareness like a slow sunrise. He was no longer young. Who knew how many seasons or years the blessed gods would have him see? And with the letter, after, had come certainty. He knew what was asked of him, and he would not go down into whatever travelling followed the dropped cloak of mortal life with these wrongly taken souls charged against his name.

One was still gone from him; one—his first—had been given back. The others were in his pack now as he walked in rain, carrying them home.

What lay waiting for
him
among the trees he did not know, though he had taken something not meant for him, and balancings and redress were embedded at the core of his own art and the teachings he had studied. Only a fool denied his fear. What was, would be. Time was running, it was always running. The gift of foretelling was not a part of his craft. There were powers greater than royalty in the world.

He thought of the young queen, sailing. He thought of Linon: that very first time, bowel-gripping terror, and power and awe. So long ago. The cold rain on his face now was a leash that tethered him to the world. He passed through Megarium and reached the walls and saw the road ahead of him through the open gates, and had his first glimpse of the Aldwood in the grey distance beyond.

He paused then, just for a moment, looking, felt the hard, mortal banging of his heart. Someone bumped him from behind, swore in Sarantine, moved on.

‘What is it?'
Tiresa asked. Quick one. A falcon.

‘Nothing, love. A memory.'

‘Why is a memory nothing?'

Why, indeed? He made no reply, went on, staff in hand, through the gates. He waited by the ditch for a company of horsed merchants to pass, and their laden mules, and then began walking again. So many autumn mornings here, remembered in a blur, striding alone in search of fame, of knowledge, the hidden secrets of the world. Of the half-world.

By midday he was on the main road, running due east, and the great wood marched with him, north and very near.

It remained there through the days of walking that followed, in rain, in pale, brief sunlight, the leaves wet and heavy, almost all fallen, many-coloured, smoke rising from charcoal pits, a distant sound of axes, a stream heard but not seen, sheep and goats to the south, a solitary shepherd. A wild boar ran from the woods once, and then—astonished in the sudden light as a cloud unsheathed the sun—darted back into dark and disappeared.

The forest remained there in the nights, too, beyond shuttered windows in inns where he was remembered by no one in the common rooms and recognized no one after so long, where he ate and drank alone and took no girls upstairs as once he had, and was walking again with the day's first eastward breaking.

And it was there, a boy's stonethrow from the road, towards evening of a last day, when an afternoon drizzle had passed and the westering sun lay red and low behind him, throwing his own long shadow forward as he went through a hamlet he remembered—shuttered at day's end now in the cold, no one at all in the single street— and came, not far beyond, his shadow leading him, to the inn where he had always stayed before going out in
the dark before sunrise to do what he did on the Day of the Dead.

He stopped on the road outside the inn, irresolute. He could hear sounds from the enclosed yard. Horses, the creak of a cart being shifted, a hammering in the smithy, stablehands. A dog barked. Someone laughed. The foothills of the mountains that barred access to the coast and the sea rose up behind the inn, goats dotting the twilit meadow. The wind had died. He looked back behind him at the red sun and the reddened clouds along the horizon. A better day tomorrow, they promised. There would be fires lit inside the inn, mulled wine for warmth.