Sailing to Sarantium (22 page)

He looked around. The revived Karchites and several of the other
guests-including a cheerful, grey-clad courier-were quaffing
Candarian red wine unwatered, downing it like beer. He managed not to
wince at the sight, raising his own glass in a genial salute. He felt
very far from his own world. Ordinary circumstances had been left a
long way or, at home, behind city walls. Where he ought to have
stayed, shaping images of beauty with such materials as came to hand.
There was no beauty here.

It occurred to him that he ought not to leave his new slave alone for
too long, even with a lock on the door. There wasn't much he could do
if she went missing now and never turned up. He went upstairs.

'Are
you going to stick it in her?'
Linon
cackled suddenly. The crudeness and the patrician voice and Crispin's
mood were all janglingly at odds with each other. He made no reply.

The girl had the key. He knocked softly and called to her. She
unbolted to his voice and opened the door. He stepped inside and
closed and bolted it again. It was very dark in the room. She had lit
no candles, had closed the shutters again and latched them. He could
hear the rain outside. She stood very near to him, not speaking. He
was embarrassed, surprisingly aware of her, still wondering why he
had done what he had done tonight. She knelt with a rustle, a blurred
female shape, and then bent her head to kiss his foot before he could
withdraw. He stepped quickly back, clearing his throat, uncertain
what to say.

He gave her the topmost blanket from the bed and bade her sleep on
the servants pallet by the far wall. She never spoke. Aside from that
instruction, neither did he. He lay in the bed listening to the rain
for a long time. He thought of the queen of the Antae, whose foot he
himself had kissed, before this journey had begun. He remembered a
Senator's wife, tapping at his door. Another inn. Another country. He
finally fell asleep. He dreamt of Sarantium, of making a mosaic
there, with brilliant tesserae and all the shining jewels he needed:
images on a towering dome of an oak tree in a grove, lightning bolts
in a livid sky.

They would burn him in the City for such an impiety, but this was
only a dream. No one died for his dreams.

He woke in the darkness before dawn. After a moment of
disorientation, he swung out of bed and crossed the cold floor to the
window. He opened the shutters. The rain had stopped again, though
water was still dripping off the roof. A heavy fog had drifted in; he
could scarcely see the courtyard below. There were men stirring down
there-Vargos would be among them, readying the mule-but sounds were
muted and distant. The girl was awake, standing beside her pallet, a
pale, thin figure, ghostlike, silently watching him.

'Let's go,' he said, after a moment.

Not long afterwards they were on the road, three of them walking east
a mist-shrouded half-world as dawn came without a sunrise on the pay
of the Dead.

 

Vargos of the Inicii was not a slave.

Many of the Posting Inns' servants-for-hire along the main Imperial
roads were, of course, but Vargos had chosen this job of his own
will, as he was quick to point out to those who erred in addressing
him. He'd signed his second five-year indenture with the Imperial
Post three years ago, carried his copy of the paper on his person,
though he couldn't read it, and collected a payment twice a year, in
addition to his guaranteed room and board. It wasn't much, but over
the years he'd bought new boots twice, a woollen cloak, several
tunics, an Esperanan knife, and he could offer a copper folles or two
to a whore. The Imperial Post preferred slaves, naturally, but there
weren't enough of them, since the Emperor Apius had elected to pacify
the northern barbarians rather than subdue them, and stout men were
badly needed for parties on the roads. Some of those stout men,
including Vargos, were northern barbarians.

At home, Vargos's father had often expressed-generally with spilled
ale and a table-thumping fist-his views on working or soldiering for
Sarantium's fat-rumped catamites, but Vargos had been of the habit of
disagreeing with his parent on occasion. Indeed, it had been after
the last such discussion that he had left their village one night and
begun his journey south.

He couldn't remember the details of the argument any more-something
to do with a superstition about ploughing beneath a blue full
moon-but it had ended with the old man, blood dripping from his
scalp, deliberately branding his youngest son on the cheek with a
hunting knife while Vargos's brothers and uncles enthusiastically
held him down. Vargos, for all his violent, injurious struggling at
the time, had had to concede to himself afterwards that the scarring
had probably been deserved. It was not really acceptable among the
Inicii for a son to hammer his father half to death with a stick of
firewood in the course of an agrarian dispute.

He'd chosen not to linger for further debate or familial
chastisement, however. There was a world beyond their village, and
precious little within it for a youngest son. He had walked out of
the house that same spring night, the two nearly full moons high
above the newly planted fields and the dense, well-known forests, and
had set his marred face to the far south, never looking back.

He'd expected, of course, to join the Imperial army, but someone in a
roadside caupona had mentioned positions on offer at the Posting
Inns, and Vargos had thought he might try that for a season or two.

That had been eight summers ago. Amazing, when you thought about it:
how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived. He'd his share
of newer scars since then, for the roads were dangerous and hungry
men turned outlaw easily enough in Sauradia, but the work suited
Vargos. He liked open spaces, had no single master to knuckle his
forehead to, and didn't share his father's bone-deep hatred of the
Empires-either Sarantine or the old one in Batiara.

Even though he was known as a keep-to-himself man, he had
acquaintances at every Posting Inn and roadside tavern from the
Batiaran border to Trakesia by now. That meant decently clean
sleeping straw or pallets, a fireside sometimes in winter, food and
beer, and some of the girls could be soft enough on the occasions
when they weren't commanded elsewhere. It helped that he was one of
the freemen, and had a coin or two to spend. He had never been out of
Sauradia. Most of the Imperial Post servants stayed in their
province, and Vargos had never had the least desire to wander farther
than he already had eight years ago, cheek dripping blood, from the
north.

Until this morning, on the Day of the Dead, when the red-haired
Rhodian who'd hired him at Lauzen's inn by the border set out in fog
from Morax's with a slave girl marked for the oak god.

Vargos had converted to the Jaddite faith years ago, but that didn't
mean a man from the northern reaches of the Aldwood couldn't
recognize one who'd been named to the tree. She was of the Inicii
herself, sold off to a slave trader, perhaps even from a village or
farm near his own. In her eyes, and in the looks given her by some of
the men and women at Morax's, Vargos had read the signs the night
before. No one had said a word, but no one had to. He knew what day
was coming.

Vargos's conversion to the sun god's faith-along with a contentious
belief in the holiness of Heladikos, the god's mortal son-had been a
real one, as it happened. He prayed each dawn and at sunset, lit
candles at chapels for the Blessed Victims, fasted on the days that
called for fasts. And he disapproved now, deeply, of the old ways
he'd left behind: the oak god, the corn maiden, the seemingly endless
thirst for blood and human hearts eaten raw. But he'd never have
dreamt of interfering, and certainly hadn't done so, the two other
times he'd been here at Morax's, close to the southern godtree on
this day.

None of his business, he'd have said, if the thought had even
occurred to him or been raised by anyone else. A servant didn't
summon the Imperial army or clergy to halt a pagan sacrifice. Not if
he wanted to go on living and working on this road. And what was one
girl a year, among all of them? There had been plagues two summers in
a row. Death was everywhere in the midst of them.

The red-headed Batiaran hadn't raised anything at all with Vargos.
He'd simply bought the girl-or had her bought for him-and was taking
her away to save her life. His choice of her could have been an
accident, chance, but it wasn't, and Vargos knew it.

They'd been planning to stay here two nights, in order not to be
travel on this day.

That intention had been in line with what every halfway prudent man
on the roads of Sauradia was doing on the Day of the Dead. But late
last night, before going up the stairs to his room after the
extremely strange capture of the thief, Martinian of Varena had
summoned Vargos out to the hallway from his pallet in the servants'
room and told him they'd be leaving tomorrow after all, before
sunrise, with the girl.

Vargos, taciturn as he was, had been unable not to repeat,
'Tomorrow?'

The Rhodian, unexpectedly sober despite all the wine they'd been
noisily drinking in the other room, had looked at Vargos for a long
moment in the dimly lit corridor. It was difficult to make out his
expression behind the full beard, in the shadows. 'I don't think it
is safe to stay here,' was all he'd said, speaking Rhodian. 'After
what has happened.'

It wasn't in the least safe outside, Vargos thought but did not say.
He'd considered that the other man might be testing him, or trying to
say something without putting it into words. But he hadn't been
prepared for what came next.

'It is the Day of the Dead tomorrow,' said Martinian, speaking
carefully. 'I will not make you go with us. You do not owe me that.
If you prefer to stay, I will release you freely and hire another man
when I can.'

That wouldn't be tomorrow, Vargos knew. There would be expressions of
regret but no one would be free to travel with the artisan tomorrow.
Not for a fistful of silver solidi.

No one would have to.

Vargos had made a swift decision or two in his day. He shook his
head. 'You asked for a man to come to the Trakesian border, I
recollect. I'll be ready with the mule before the sun-up prayers.
Jad's light will see us through the day.'

The Batiaran was not a fellow with an easy smile, but he'd smiled
briefly then and placed a hand on Vargos's shoulder before heading up
the stairs. He said, 'Thank you, friend,' before he went.

In eight years, no one had ever offered to release him from duty in
that way before, or offered a thank-you to a short-term hired servant
for simply performing-or continuing-his contracted service.

This meant two things, Vargos had finally decided, back on his narrow
pallet, elbowing away a too-close, snoring Trakesian. One was that
Martinian had known exactly what he was doing-somehow-when he'd had
the merchant buy him that girl. And the other was that Vargos was his
man now.

Courage spoke to him. The courage of Jad in his chariot battling cold
and darkness each long night under the world, of Heladikos driving
his horses far too high to bring back fire from his father, and of a
single traveller risking his own death for a girl who had been named
to a savage ending on the morrow.

Vargos had seen some celebrated men in his time on this road.
Merchant princes, aristocrats from the far-off City itself, clad in
gold and white, soldiers in bronze armour and regimental colours,
austere, immensely powerful figures in the clergy of the god. Some
years ago, memorably, Leontes himself, Supreme Strategos of all the
Empire's armies, had passed with a company of his own picked guard on
their way back east from Megarium. They'd been riding to the military
camp near Trakesia, then heading north and east against the restive
Moskav tribes. Vargos, in a dense press of men and women, had caught
only a flashing glimpse of golden hair, helmetless, as people
screamed in ecstasy beside the road. That had been in the year after
the great victory against the Bassanids beyond Eubulus, and after the
Triumph the Emperor had granted Leontes in the Hippodrome. Even in
Sauradia they had heard about that. Not since Rhodias had an Emperor
granted a strategos such a processional.

It was this artisan from Varena, though, a descendant of the legions,
the Rhodians, the blood Vargos had been raised to hate, who had done
the bravest thing he knew, last night and now. And Vargos was going
to follow him.

They were unlikely to get far, he thought grimly. Jad's light will
see us through, he'd said in the hallway the night before. There was
no light to speak of as they led the mule out of the courtyard in a
black, blanketing thickness of pre-dawn fog. The pale autumn sun
would be rising ahead of them soon-and they would have no way of even
knowing.

The three of them walked from the yard in an unnatural, muffled
stillness. Men-or the blurred outlines of men-stood and watched them
pass. No one offered to help, though Vargos knew every man there.
They had tasted no food or drink, on Martinian's instructions. Vargos
knew why. He still wasn't sure how Martinian knew.

The girl was barefoot, wrapped in the artisan's second cloak, the
hood hiding her face. No other travellers were moving, though the
Megarian merchants had left earlier, in full darkness, carrying the
wounded man in a litter. Vargos, awake and loading the mule by
torchlight, had seen them go. They wouldn't travel far today, but
they had little choice but to move on. Where Vargos came from, the
apprehended thief would have been an obvious candidate to be hanged
from Ludan's Tree.

Here, he wasn't sure. The girl had been named. They might choose
another, or they might not relinquish her, fearing a year's bad luck
if they did. Things were different in the south. Different tribes had
settled here, different histories had set their stamp. Would they
kill him and the Batiaran to take her back? Almost certainly, if they
wanted her and the two men resisted. This sacrifice was the holiest
rite of the year in the old religion; men interfered at absolute
peril of their lives.