The Sarantine Mosaic (69 page)

On the scaffold, he stood alone and apart, eyes to the brickwork, running his hands across and across like someone blind—and aware of that irony, as ever when he did this—gesturing below at intervals for the apprentices to wheel the scaffold for him. It swayed when it moved, he had to grip the railing, but he had spent much of his working life on platforms such as this and had no fear of the height. It was a refuge, in fact. High above the world, above the living and the dying, the intrigues of courts and men and women, of nations and tribes and factions and the human heart trapped in time and yearning for more than it was allowed, Crispin strove not to be drawn back down into the confusing fury of those things, desiring now to live—as Martinian had urged him—but
away
from the blurring strife, to achieve this vision of a world on a dome. All else was transitory, ephemeral. He was a mosaicist, as he had told people and told people, and this distanced elevation was his haven and his source and destination, all in one. And with fortune and the god's blessing he might do something here that could last, and leave a name.

So he thought, was thinking, in the moment he glanced down from so far above the world to check if the apprentices had locked the scaffold wheels again, and saw a woman come through the silver doors into the sanctuary.

She moved forward, walking over the gleaming marble stones, graceful, even as seen from so high, and she stopped under the dome and looked up.

She looked up for him and, without a word spoken or a gesture made, Crispin felt a tugging back of the world as something fierce and physical, imperative, commanding, making a mockery of illusions of remote asceticism. He was not made to live his life like a holy man in an untouchable place. Best he acknowledge it now. Perfection, he had just been thinking, was not attainable by men. Imperfections could be turned into strengths. Perhaps.

Standing on the scaffold, he laid both hands flat for a moment more against the cold bricks of the dome and closed his eyes. It was extremely quiet this high up, serene, solitary. A world to himself, a creation to enact. It ought to have been enough. Why was it not? He let his hands fall to his sides. Then he shrugged—a gesture his mother knew, and his friends, and his dead wife— and motioning for those below to hold the platform steady, he began the long climb down.

He was in the world, neither above it nor walled off from it any more. If he had sailed to anything, it was to that truth. He would do this work or would fail in it as a man living in his time, among friends, enemies, perhaps lovers, and perhaps with love, in Varena under the Antae or here in Sarantium, City of Cities, eye of the world, in the reign of the great and glorious, thrice-exalted Emperor Valerius II, Jad's Regent upon earth, and the Empress Alixana.

It was a long, slow descent, hand and foot, the familiar movements, over and again. Out of careful habit he emptied his mind as he came down: men died if they were careless here, and this dome was higher than any he had known. He felt the pull, though, even as he moved: the world drawing him back down to itself.

He reached the wooden base of the rolling platform, set on wheels upon the marble floor. He swung around and stood on the base a moment, that little distance yet above the ground. Then he nodded his head to the woman standing there, who had neither spoken nor gestured but who had come here and had claimed him for them all. He wondered if, somehow, she had known she was doing that. She might have. It would sort with what he knew about her, already.

He drew a breath and stepped down off the scaffolding. She smiled.

Praise for
Lord of Emperors

‘Kay is a storyteller on the grandest scale … Kay has complete control of all he creates … Kay's prose is surefooted and poetic.'

—
Time
(Canada)

‘Detailed, richly textured, and endlessly fascinating …[Kay] is a magnificently talented writer …A truly splendid novel.'

—
Chronicle-Herald

‘Powerfully written and compulsively readable.'—
Maclean's

‘
Lord of Emperors
is vintage Kay—richly written, exploring themes of art and power, interweaving alternate history and high fantasy to create a strange yet familiar world.'

—
Winnipeg Free Press

‘His Sarantium (and the road to it) is an intricate and highly detailed creation populated by a legion of memorable and sharply delineated characters.'

—
Toronto Star

‘Complex and compelling … Every aspect of
Lord of Emperors
reveals a master at work … As with
Sailing to Sarantium
, Kay has constructed
Lord of Emperors
as a literary mosaic of great intricacy and delicacy, for all its adventures, its courtly intrigues, its confrontations with death and various powers … Now complete, The Sarantine Mosaic takes its place as a major historical fantasy, one which redefines the possibilities of and sets new standards for the genre … Simply not to be missed.'

—
Edmonton Journal

‘This is some of the finest writing to arise in the last decade in any genre, high culture be damned.'

—
The Vancouver Sun

‘A fantastic story, touched with magic …
Lord of Emperors
is a feast of riches … Kay has created in The Sarantine
Mosaic a world that stands on its own past and present. [Characters] are alive and vibrant and fascinating.'

—
The StarPhoenix
(Saskatoon)

‘Essential reading for all Kay fans.'—
Kirkus Reviews

‘Of breathtaking scale and accomplishment … Kay has wondrously stripped away the illusions of perception without judging, and beneath is deeper understanding.'

—
FFWD

‘Kay's books ring with authenticity. They are literate and imaginative and work on many levels. History aficionados will delight in the small and telling insights Mr. Kay brings … while other readers will simply delight in the grand sweep of the story, the rich characterization, and Mr. Kay's sheer gift with language … [
Lord of Emperors
] is very satisfying and no exception to the success of the rest of Mr. Kay's work.'

—Charles de Lint,
Ottawa Citizen

PENGUIN CANADA

LORD OF EMPERORS

GUY GAVRIEL KAY
is the author of ten novels and a volume of poetry. He won the 2008 World Fantasy Award for
Ysabel
, has been awarded the International Goliardos Prize, and is a two-time winner of the Aurora Award. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages and have appeared on bestseller lists around the world.

Visit his Canadian website at
www.guygavrielkay.ca
and his international website at
www.brightweavings.com
.

ALSO BY GUY GAVRIEL KAY

The Fionavar Tapestry:

The Summer Tree

The Wandering Fire

The Darkest Road

Tigana

A Song for Arbonne

The Lions of Al-Rassan

The Sarantine Mosaic:

Sailing to Sarantium

The Last Light of the Sun

Beyond This Dark House
(poetry)

Ysabel

Under Heaven

L
ORD
OF
E
MPERORS

BOOK 2 OF THE SARANTINE MOSAIC

GUY
GAVRIEL
KAY

PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

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First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2000

Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2000, 2003, 2005

Published in this edition, 2010

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)

Copyright © Guy Gavriel Kay, 2000

Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists
94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1G6

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
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Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

 

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Kay, Guy Gavriel
Lord of emperors / Guy Gavriel Kay.
(The Sarantine mosaic; bk. 2)

ISBN 978-0-14-317459-2

I. Title. II. Series: Kay, Guy Gavriel. Sarantine mosaic ; bk. 2.

PS8571.A935L6 2010 C813'.54 C2010-900611-9

 

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For Sam and Matthew,
‘the singing-masters of my soul.'

This belongs to them, beginning and end.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T
he Sarantine Mosaic
is animated by and in part built around a tension in the late classical world between walls and wilderness. For my own introduction to this dialectic (and how it shifts), I am indebted to Simon Schama's magisterial
Landscape and Memory.
This is also the work that introduced me to the Lithuanian bison and the symbolism surrounding it, giving rise to my own
zubir
.

The general and particular works cited in
Sailing to Sarantium
have anchored this second volume as well, and Yeats remains a presiding spirit, in the epigraph and elsewhere.

I should now add Guido Majno's quite wonderful
The Helping Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World.
On Persia and its culture, books by Richard N. Frye and Prudence Oliver Harper were immensely useful. For table matters and manners I was aided by the Wilkins and Hill text and commentary on Archistratus, along with works by Andrew Dalby and Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. Attitudes to the supernatural are explored in books by Gager, Kieckhefer, and Flint, and in a collection of essays edited by Henry Maguire for the Dumbarton Oaks research facility in Washington, D.C. Dumbarton Oaks also provided translations of Byzantine military treatises, papers presented at various symposia, and some evocative artifacts in their permanent collection.