Sailing to Sarantium (26 page)

 

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.

'Not the same,' Tiresa had said briskly. 'You know it isn't.'

Which was true, but he still didn't like it.

He'd tried to read-Archilochus, as it happened-but his concentration
was precarious and he gave it up, venturing out for a walk in the
orchard instead. He felt extremely strange, a kind of hollowness.
Linon was gone. Somehow. She'd been gone, of course, since he'd given
her away, but this was... different. He'd never quite stopped
regretting the impulse that had led him to offer a bird to the
mosaicist travelling east. Or not just east: to Sarantium. City he'd
never seen, never would see now. He'd found a power in his life,
claimed a gift, his birds. There were other things he would not be
allowed, it seemed.

And the birds weren't really his, were they? But if they weren't,
then what could they be said to be? And where was Linon, and how had
he heard her voice this morning from so far?

And what was he doing shivering in his orchard without a cloak or his
stick on a windy, cold autumn day? At least he had his boots on.

He'd gone back inside, sent Clovis off, complaining, with a request
to Silavin the farmer down the road, and had taken the birds'
collective counsel after all.

He couldn't talk to his friends about what was troubling him, but
sometimes talking about other things, any other things, the very
timbre of human voices, Carissa's smile, Martinian's gentle wit, the
shared warmth of a fire, the bed they'd offer him for the night, a
morning visit to the busde of the market...

Philosophy could be a consolation, an attempt to explain and
understand the place of man in the gods' creation. It couldn't always
succeed, though. There were times when comfort could only be found in
a woman's laughter, a friend's known face and voice, shared rumours
about the Antae court, even something so simple as a steaming bowl of
pea soup at a table with others.

Sometimes, when the shadows of the half-world pressed too near, one
needed the world.

He left Silavin at the city gates, with thanks, and made his way to
Martinian's home late in the day. He was welcomed there, as he'd
known he would be. His visits were rare; he lived a life outside the
walls. He was invited to spend a night, and his friends made it seem
as if he was doing them a great honour by accepting. They could see
he was disturbed by something but-being friends-they never pressed
him to speak, only offered what they could, which was a good deal
just then.

In the night he woke in a strange bed, in darkness, and went to the
window. There were rights burning in the palace, on the upper floors
where the beleaguered young queen would be. Someone else awake, it
seemed. Not his grief. His gaze went beyond, to the east. There were
stars above Varena in the clear night. They blurred in his sight as
he stood there, holding memory to himself like a child.

 

They walked for a long time, moving through a world becoming
gradually more familiar as the mist continued to lift. And yet, for
all the re-emergence of the ordinary, Crispin thought, it had also
become a landscape changed beyond his capacity of description. Where
the bird had been about his neck there was an absence that felt oddly
like a weight. There were crows in the field again, towards the
woods, and they heard a songbird in a thicket south of the road. A
flash of russet was a fox, though they never saw the hare it pursued.

At what must have been mid-afternoon they stopped. Vargos unwrapped
the food again. Bread, cheese, ale for each of them. Crispin drank
deeply. He looked away to the south. The mountains were visible
again, rifts in the clouds above them showed blue and there was snow
on the peaks. Light, shafts of colour, coming back into the world. He
became aware that Kasia was looking at him. 'She . . . the bird
spoke,' she said. Apprehension in her face, though there had not been
in the forest, in the grey mist of the field.

He nodded. He had made himself ready for this during the silent
walking. He had guessed it would come, that it had to come.

'I heard,' he said. 'She did.'

'How? My lord?'

Vargos watched them, holding his flask.

'I don't know,' he lied. 'The bird was a talisman given me by a man
said to be an alchemist. My friends wanted me to have such a thing
for protection. They believe in forces I do not. Did not. I...
understand next to nothing of what happened today.'

And that was not a lie. Already the morning felt to be a recollection
of being wrapped in mist, with a creature in the Aldwood larger than
the world, than his comprehension of the world. Thinking back, the
only vivid colour he could remember was the red blood on the bison's
horns.

'He took her, instead of... me.'

'He took Pharus, as well,' said Vargos quietly, pushing the stopper
back into his flask. 'We saw Ludan, or his shadow today.' There was
something near to anger in the scarred face. 'How do we worship Jad
and his son after this?'

Real anguish here, Crispin thought, and was moved. They had lived
through something together this morning. Wildly different paths to
that glade seemed to matter less than one might have expected.

He drew a breath. 'We worship them as the powers that speak to our
souls, if it seems they do.' He surprised himself. 'We do so knowing
there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds
beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can't even stop
children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of
things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another?'
It was posed as a rhetorical question, a flourish, but the words hung
in the brightening air. A blackbird lifted from the stubble of the
field and flew away west in a low, sweeping arc, wings beating.

'I do not know,' said Vargos, finally. 'I have no learning. Twice,
when I was younger, I thought I saw the zubir, the bison. I was never
sure. Was I being marked? For today, in some way?'

'I am not the man to answer that,' said Crispin.

'Are we ... safe now?' the girl asked.

'Until the next thing comes,' Crispin said, and then, more kindly,
'Safe from those who followed, yes, I believe so. From whatever was
in the wood? I ... also believe so.'
He doesn't want the girl. He
came for me.

It took a certain act of will, but he kept his mind from calling out
again to the silence. Linon had been with him for so little
time-abrasive, unyielding-but no one else, not even Ilandra, had ever
been within him in that way.
My dear
, she had said, at the
end.
Remember me
.

If he understood any of this rightly, Linon had been a woman, named
as Kasia had been named to the forest god, but she had died in that
grove a long time ago. Heart cut out, body hanging from a sacred
tree. And soul...? Soul claimed by a mortal man who had been
watching, insanely daring, and drawing upon some arcane power
Crispin's mind could not compass.

He remembered, unexpectedly, the look on Zoticus's face when it had
emerged that of all his birds it was Linon whose inward voice Crispin
had heard. She was his first, Crispin thought, and knew it was true.

Tell him goodbye, the bird had said silently at the end, in what
would once have been her own voice. Crispin shook his head. He had
thought once, in his arrogance, that he knew something of the world
of men and women.

'There is a chapel we will come to soon,' Vargos said. Crispin pulled
his thoughts back, and realized they had both been watching him.
'Before sunset. A real one, not just a roadside shrine.'

'Then we will enter it and pray,' said Crispin.

There would be comfort in the well-worn rituals, he realized. A
returning to the customary, where people lived out their lives. Where
they had to live their lives. The day, he thought, had done all it
could do, the world had revealed all it would just now. They would
calm themselves, he would order his thoughts, begin adjusting to the
absence about his throat and in his mind, begin thinking of what to
say in a difficult letter to Zoticus, perhaps even begin looking
forward to wine and a meal at tonight's inn. A returning to the
customary, indeed, as if coming home from a very long journey. Men,
when they think in this way-that the crisis, the moment of revealed
power, has passed-are as vulnerable as they will ever be. Good
leaders of armies at war know this. Any skilled actor or writer for
the stage knows it. So do clerics, priests, perhaps cheiromancers.
When people have been very deeply shaken in certain ways they are, in
fact, wide open to the next bright falling from the air. It is not
the moment of birth-the bursting through a shell into the world-that
imprints the newborn gosling, but the next thing, the sighting that
comes after and marks the soul.

They went on, two men and a woman, through an opening world. No one
else was on the road. It was the Day of the Dead. The autumn light
became mild as the sun swung west, palely veiled. A cool breeze moved
the clouds. More rifts of blue could be seen overhead. Crows in the
fields, jays, and another small bird Crispin didn't know,
swift-flying on their right, with a bright tail red as blood. Snow
far off, on the distant mountain peaks emerging one by one. The sea
beyond. He could have sailed, if the courier . ..

They came to the place of which Vargos had spoken. It was set behind
iron gates, some distance back from the road on the south side. It
faced the forest. The chapel was much larger than the usual roadside
places of prayer. A real one, as Vargos had put it: a grey stone
octagon with a dome above, neatly cropped grass around it, a
dormitory beside, outbuildings behind, a graveyard. It was very
peaceful here. Crispin saw cows and a goat in the meadow beyond the
graves.

Had he been more aware of time and place, had his mind not been
wrestling with unseen things, he might have realized where they were
and been prepared. He did not, and he was not.

They tied the mule by the low wall, went through the unlocked iron
gate and up the stone path. There were late-season flowers growing
beside it, lovingly tended. Crispin saw an herb garden to the left,
back towards the meadow. They opened the heavy wooden door of the
chapel and the three of them went in and Crispin looked at the walls,
as his eyes slowly adjusted to the muted light, and then, stepping
forward, he looked up at the dome.

Divisions of faith in the worship of Jad had led to burnings and
torture and war almost from the beginning. The doctrine and liturgy
of the sun god, emerging from the promiscuous gods and goddesses of
Trakesia during the early years of the Empire of Rhodias, had not
evolved without their share of schisms and heresies and the
frequently savage responses to these. The god was in the sun, or he
was behind the sun. The world had been born in light, or it had been
released from ice and darkness by holy light. At one time the god was
thought to die in winter and be reborn in the spring, but the gentle
cleric who had expounded this had been ordered torn apart between
cavalry horses by a High Patriarch in Rhodias. For a brief time,
elsewhere, it had been taught that the two moons were Jad's
offspring-a belief more than halfway to the doctrines of the Kindath,
who named them sisters of the god and equal to him in disturbing
ways. This unfortunate fallacy, too, had required a number of deaths
to extirpate.

The varying forms of belief in Heladikos-as mortal son, as
half-mortal child, as god-were only the most obdurate and enduring of
these conflicts waged in the holy name of Jad. Emperors and
Patriarchs, first in Rhodias and then Sarantium, wavered and grew
firm and then reversed their positions and tolerance, and Heladikos
the Charioteer moved in and out of acceptance and fashion, much as
the sun moved in and out of cloud on a windy day.

In the same way, amongst all these bitter wars, fought with words and
iron and flame, the rendered image of Jad himself had become a line
of demarcation over the years, a battlefield of art and belief, of
ways of imagining the god who sent life-bringing light and battled
darkness every night beneath his world while men slept their
precarious sleep.