Sailing to Sarantium (12 page)

He said, 'It is wasted on me, Majesty. I have no children to inherit
any of this.'

'You are a young man,' the queen said mildly.

Anger flared. 'Indeed? So why no offer here of a comely Antae woman
of your court, or an aristocrat of Rhodian blood for my prize? The
brood mare to fill these promised houses and spend this wealth?'

She had been a princess and was a queen and had spent her life in
palaces where judging people was a tool of survival. She said, 'I
would not insult you with such a proposal. I am told yours was a
love-match. A rare thing. I count you lucky in it, though the
allotted time was brief. You are a well-formed man, and would have
resources to commend you, as the parchment shows. I imagine you could
buy your own brood mare of high lineage, if other methods of choosing
a second wife did not present themselves.'

Much later, in his own bed, awake, with the moons long set and the
dawn not far off, Crispin was to conclude that it was this answer,
the gravity of it with the bite of irony at the end, that had decided
him. Had she offered him a mate on paper or in word, he told himself,
he would have refused outright and let her kill him if she wanted.

She would have, he was almost certain of it.

And that thought had come in the last of the darkness, even before he
learned from the apprentices as they met at the sanctuary for the
sunrise prayers that six of the Palace Guard in Varena had been found
dead in the night, their throats slit.

Crispin would walk away from the babble of noise and speculation to
stand in the sanctuary alone under his charioteer and torch on the
dome. The light was just entering through the dome's ring of windows,
striking the angled glass. The mosaic torch seemed to flicker as he
watched, a soft but unmistakable rippling, as of a muted flame. In
his mind's eye he could see it above burning lanterns and candles . .
. given enough of them it would work.

He understood something. The queen of the Antae, battling for her
life, had made something else as clear as it could be: she would not
let the secrecy of his message be endangered in any way, even by her
own most trusted guards. Six men dead. Nothing muted there at all.

He didn't know how he felt. Or no, he realized that he did know: he
felt like a too-small ship setting out from harbour far too late in
the year, undermanned, with winter winds swirling all around it.

But he was going to Sarantium. After all.

Earlier, in the depths of the night, in that room in the palace,
feeling a stillness descend upon him, Crispin had said to the woman
in the carved ivory seat, 'I am honoured by your trust, Majesty. I
would not want another war here, either among the Antae or a
Sarantine invasion. We have endured our share of dying. I will carry
your message and try to give it to the Emperor, if I survive my own
deception. It is folly, what I am about to do, but everything we do
is folly, is it not?'

'No,' she said, unexpectedly. 'But I do not expect to be the one who
persuades you of that.' She gestured to one of the doors. 'There is a
man on the other side who will escort you home. You will not see me
again, for reasons you understand. You may kiss my foot, if you feel
sufficiently well.'

He knelt before her. Touched the slender foot in its golden sandal.
Kissed the top of it. As he did, he felt long fingers brush through
his hair to the place on his skull where the blow had fallen. He
shivered. 'You have my gratitude,' he heard. 'Whatever befalls.'

The hand was withdrawn. He stood, bowed again, went out through the
indicated portal, and was escorted home by a tongueless,
smooth-shaven giant of a man through the windy night streets of his
city. He was aware of desire lingering as he walked in blackness away
from the palace, from the chamber. He was astonished by it.

In that exquisite, small receiving room, a young woman sat alone for
a time after he left. It was rare for her to be entirely solitary,
and the sensation was not disagreeable. Events had moved swiftly
since one of her sources of privy knowledge had mentioned the
spoken-aloud details of a summons conveyed by the Imperial Post to an
artisan working at her father's resting place. She'd had little time
to ponder nuances, only to realize that this was an unexpected,
slender chance-and seize it.

Now there were deaths to attend to, regrettably. This game was lost
before it began if it were known to Agila or Eudric or any of the
others hovering around her throne that the artisan had had private
converse with her in the night before journeying east. The man
escorting the mosaic worker now was the only one she fully trusted.
For one thing, he could not speak. For another, he had been hers
since she was five years old. She would give him further orders for
tonight when he returned. It would not be the first time he had
killed for her.

The queen of the Antae offered, at length, a small, quiet prayer,
asking forgiveness, among other things. She prayed to holy Jad, to
his son the Charioteer who had died bringing fire to mortal men, and
then-to be as sure as one could ever be sure-to the gods and
goddesses her people had worshipped when they were a wild cluster of
tribes in the hard lands north and east, first in the mountains, and
then by the oak forests of Sauradia, before coming down into fertile
Batiara and accepting Jad of the Sun, conquering heirs to an Empire's
homeland.

She nursed few illusions. The man, Caius Crispus, had surprised her a
little, but he was an artisan only, and of an angry, despairing
humour. Arrogant, as the Rhodians still were so much of the time. Not
a truly reliable vessel for so desperate an enterprise. This was
almost certainly doomed to failure, but there was little she could do
but try. She had let him come near to her, kiss her foot. Had brushed
his flour-smeared red hair with fingers deliberately slow . . .
perhaps longing was the gateway to this man's loyalty? She didn't
think so, but she didn't know, and she could only use what few tools,
or weapons, she had or was given.

Gisel of the Antae did not expect to see the wildflowers return in
spring, or watch the midsummer bonfires burn upon the hills. She was
nineteen years old, but queens were not, in truth, allowed to be so
young.

 

When Crispin was a boy and free for a day in the way that only boys
in summer can be free he had walked outside the city walls one
morning and, after throwing stones in a stream for a time, had passed
by a walled orchard universally reported among the young Varenans to
belong to a spirit-haunted country house where unholy things happened
after dark.

The sun was shining. In an effusion of youthful bravado, Crispin had
climbed the rough stone wall, leaped across into a tree, sat down on
a stout branch among the leaves and begun eating apples. He was
heart-poundingly proud of himself and wondering how he'd prove he'd
done this to his sure-to-be-sceptical friends. He decided to carve
his initials-a newly learned skill-on the tree trunk, and dare the
others to come see them. He received, a moment later, the deepest
fright of his young life. It used to wake him at night sometimes, the
memory having turned into a dream he'd have even as an adult, a
husband, a father. In fact, he had managed to persuade himself that
it mostly had been a dream, spun out of overly vivid childhood
anxieties, the blazing midday heat, almost-ripe apples eaten too
quickly. It had to have been a child's fantasy, breeding ground of
nightmare.

Birds did not talk.

More particularly, they did not discuss with each other from tree to
tree, in the identically bored tones and timbre of an over bred
Rhodian aristocrat, which eye of a trespassing boy should be pecked
out and consumed first, or how the emptied eye sockets might then
offer easy access to slithery morsels of brain matter within.

Caius Crispus, eight years old and blessed or cursed with an
intensely visual imagination, had not lingered to further investigate
this remarkable phenomenon of nature. There seemed to be several
birds in animated colloquy about him, half hidden in the leaves and
branches. He dropped three apples, spat out the half-chewed pulp of
another, and leaped wildly back to the wall, scraping an elbow raw,
bruising a shin, and then doing himself further damage when he landed
badly on the baked summer grass by the path.

As he sprinted back, not quite screaming, towards Varena, he heard
sardonic crowing laughter behind him. Or he did in his dreams, after,
at any rate.

Twenty-five years later, walking the same road south of the city,
Crispin was thinking about the power of memories, the way they had of
coming back so fiercely and unexpectedly. A scent could do it, the
sound of rushing water, the sight of a stone wall beside a path.

He was remembering that day in the tree, and the recollection of
terror took him a little further back, to the image of his mother's
face when the reserves of the urban militia returned from that same
year's spring campaign against the Inicii and his father was not with
them.

Horius Crispus the mason had been a vivid, well-liked man, respected
and successful in his craft and business. His only surviving son
struggled, however, to shape a clear mental picture, after all these
years, of the man who had gone marching north to the border and
beyond into Ferrieres, red-bearded, smiling, easy-striding. He'd been
too young when the militia's deputy commander had come to their door
with his father's nondescript shield and sword.

He could remember a beard that scratched when he kissed his father's
cheek, blue eyes-his own eyes, people said-and the big, capable
hands, scarred and always scratched. A big voice, too, that went soft
within the house, near Crispin or his small, scented mother. He had
these . . . fragments, these elements, but when he tried to pull them
together in his mind to create a whole it somehow slipped away, the
way the man had slipped away too soon.

He had stories to go by: from his mother, her brothers, sometimes his
own patrons, many of whom remembered Horius Crispus well. And he
could study his father's steady, incisive work in houses and chapels,
graveyards and public buildings all over Varena. But he couldn't
cling to any memory of a face that did not blur into an absence. For
a man who lived for image and colour-who flourished in the realm of
sight-this was hard.

Or it had been hard. Time passing did complex things, to deepen a
wound or to heal it. Even, sometimes, to overlay it with another that
had felt as if it would kill.

It was a beautiful morning. The wind was behind him, the coining
winter in it, but crisp rather than cold while the sun shone,
sweeping the mist from the eastern forests and hills to west and
farther south. He was alone on the road. Not always a safe thing, but
he felt no danger now, and he could see a long way in the open
country south of the city-almost to the rim of the world, it seemed.

Behind him, when he glanced back, Varena gleamed, bronze domes, red
roof-tiles, the city walls nearly white in the morning light. A hawk
circled above its own warning shadow on the stubble of the fields
east of the road. The harvested vines on the slopes ahead looked
derelict and bare, but the grapes were inside the city, being made
into wine even now. Queen Gisel, efficient in this as in many things,
had ordered that city labourers and slaves join in the grain and
grape harvests, to cover-as much as possible-the loss of so many
people to the plague. The first festivals would be beginning soon, in
Varena and in smaller villages everywhere, leading up to the wildness
of Dykania's three nights. It would be difficult, though, to shape a
truly festive mood this autumn, Crispin thought. Or perhaps he was
wrong about that. Perhaps festivals were more important after what
had happened. Perhaps they were more uninhibited in the presence of
death.

As he walked, he could see abandoned farmhouses and outbuildings on
both sides of the country path. The rich farmland and vineyards
around Varena were all very well, but they needed men to sow and reap
and tend, and too many labourers were buried in the mass graves. The
coming winter would be hard.

Even with these thoughts, it was difficult to remain grim this
morning. Light nurtured him, as did clean, sharp colours, and the day
was offering both. He wondered if he'd ever be able to create a
forest with the browns and reds and golds and the late, deep green of
the one he could see now beyond the bare fields. With tesserae worthy
of the name, and perhaps a sanctuary dome designed with windows
enough and-by the god's grace-good, clear glass for those windows, he
might. He might. In Sarantium these things were to be found, men
said. In Sarantium, everything on earth was to be found, from death
to heart's desire, men said. He was going, it seemed. Sailing to
Sarantium. Walking, actually, for it was too late in the year for a
ship, but the old saying spoke of change, not a means of travel. His
life was branching, taking him towards whatever might come on the
road or at journey's end.

His life. He had a life. The hardest thing was to accept that, it
sometimes seemed. To move out from the rooms where a woman and two
children had died in ugly pain, stripped of all inherent dignity or
grace; to allow brightness to touch him again, like this gift of the
morning sun. In that moment, he felt like a child again himself,
seeing a remembered stone wall come into view as the path curved and
approached it. Half amused, half genuinely unsettled, Crispin added a
few more inward curses to his emergent litany against Martinian, who
had insisted that he make this visit.

It seemed that Zoticus, the alchemist, much consulted by farmers, the
childless and the lovelorn, and even royalty on occasion, dwelled in
the selfsame substantial farmhouse with an attached apple orchard
where an eight-year-old boy had heard birds discussing with well-bred
anticipation the consumption of his eyeballs and brain matter.