Sailing to Sarantium (31 page)

'What?'

'Your village. I'm going to free you, you know. I have not the least
need for a girl in Sarantium, and after what... happened to us today
I do not propose to tempt any gods at all by making a profit on you.'
A Rhodian voice, a firelit room. Night, the edge of winter. The world
being remade.

He said, 'I don't think that. . . whatever we saw today . . . spared
your life to clean house or heat bath water on a fire for me. Not
that I have any notion why it spared my life. So, do you want to go
back to your... oh. Jad. Jad's blood. Stop that, woman!'

She tried, biting her lip, wiping with the sooty backs of her hands
at her streaming face. But how did one not weep, confronted with
this? Last night she had known she would be dead today.

'Kasia, I mean it. I will throw you downstairs and let Carullus's men
take turns with you! I detest crying women!'

She didn't think he really did. She thought he was pretending to be
angry and fierce. She wasn't sure of what else she thought. Sometimes
things happened too quickly. How does the riven tree explain the
lightning bolt?

The girl had fallen asleep, close to what remained of the fire's
warmth. She was still in her tunic, wrapped in one cloak, pillowed on
the other, under one of his blankets. He could have had her come into
the bed, but the habit of sleeping alone since Ilandra died was
entrenched by now, had become something mystical, talismanic. It was
morbid and spirit-ridden, Crispin thought sleepily, but he wasn't
about to try to break free of it this night with a slave girl bought
for him the night before.

Though slave girl was unfair, really. She'd been as free as he was a
year ago, a victim of the same plague summer that had smashed his
own. There were, he thought, any number of ways a life could be
ruined.

Linon would have declared him an imbecile for having the girl sleep
by the fire, he knew. Linon wasn't here. He had laid her down on wet
grass; by wet leaves in a forest this morning and walked away.
Remember me
.

What happens to an unhoused soul when a body and its heart are
sacrificed to a god? Did Zoticus know the answer to that? What
happens to the soul when the god comes to claim it, after all? Could
an alchemist know? He had a difficult letter to write. Tell him
goodbye.

A shutter was banging along the wall. Windy tonight; would be cold on
the road tomorrow. The girl was coming east with him. It seemed, both
of these Inicii were. So odd, really, the circles and patterns one's
life made. Or seemed to make. Patterns men tried to impose on their
lives, for the comforting illusion of order?

He'd overheard men talking in a cookshop one day when he was still a
boy. His father's head, he'd learned, had been completely severed
from his shoulders. By an axe blow. Had landed some distance away,
blood spraying from the toppling, headless body. Like a red fountain,
one of the men told the other in an awed voice. It was dramatic
enough, unsetding enough even for soldiers, to have become a tale:
the death of the stonemason, Horius Crispus.

Crispin had been ten years old when he'd heard that. An Inicii axe.
The tribes that went west to Ferrieres had been wilder. Everyone said
that. The girl had said it tonight. They'd pressed south into Batiara
constantly, harrying the northern farms and villages. The Antae sent
armies, including the urban militia, into Ferrieres just about every
year. Usually they were successful campaigns, bringing back needed
slaves. There were casualties, however. Always. The Inicii, even
outnumbered, knew how to fight. A red fountain. He ought not to have
heard such a thing. Not at ten years of age. He'd had dreams after,
for a long time, had been unable to tell them to his mother. He was
certain, even then, that the men in that cookshop would have been
appalled had they known Horius's boy had been listening to them.

When her tears had stopped, Kasia's explanation tonight had been
clear enough: there was no place for her at home any more. Once sold,
once a slave, sent up or down a hall to any man's room, she had no
hope of a life among her own people. There was no going back,
marrying, raising a family, sharing in the traditions of a tribe.
Those traditions did not allow space for what she'd been forced to
become, whatever she had been in the time before the plague when she
had a father and brother for shelter.

A man captured and enslaved might escape and return to his village
with honour and status-a living emblem of defiant courage. Not a girl
sold to the traders for winter grain. The village of her childhood
was barred to her now, on the far side of a doorway to the past and
there was no key. One could feel some sorrow for other's griefs,
Crispin thought, awake and listening to the wind.

In the crowded, roiling streets of Sarantium, amid the arcades and
workshops and sanctuaries and so many people from so many lands she
could-perhaps-create a life for herself. Not an easy or a sure thing
for a woman, but she was young, had intelligence and spirit. No one
need learn she had been an inn girl in Sauradia, and if they did . .
. well, the Empress Alixana herself had been little better in her
day. More expensive, but not different in kind, if any of the rumours
were true.

Crispin supposed they slit your nose, or worse, for saying that. It
was blowing hard outside. He could hear that shutter banging and the
high keening of the wind. The Day of the Dead. Was it the wind?

The fire had taken the edge off the chill in the room, and he was
under two good blankets. He thought, unexpectedly, of the queen of
the Antae, young and afraid, her fingers in his hair as he knelt
before her. The last time his head had been cracked like this. He was
tired and his jaw hurt. He really shouldn't have been drinking with
the soldiers tonight. Extremely stupid. Imbecilic, someone would have
said. Decent man, though, Carullus of the Fourth. A surprise. Liked
to hear himself talk. That image of the god, on the chapel dome.
Mosaicists had made it, artisans, like himself. But not. Something
else. He wished he knew their names, wished someone did. Would write
to Martinian about that; try to order his thoughts. He could see the
god's eyes in his mind right now.

As vividly as he had ever seen anything. That fog this morning,
nothing to see at all, all colours leached from the world. Voices
pursuing, the dogs the dead man. The forest and what took them into
it. He had feared those woods at first sight, all the way back at the
border, and yet he had walked in the Aldwood, after all, black, dense
trees, leaves falling, a sacrifice in the glade. No. Not quite. The
completion of a sacrifice.

How did one deal with so much? By drinking wine with soldiers?
Perhaps. Oldest refuge, one of the oldest. By pulling blankets up to
one's bruised face in bed, and falling asleep, sheltered from the
knife of wind and the night? Though not the night that was always
there now.

Caius Crispus, too, had a dream in that cold dark, though in his he
did not fly. He saw himself walking the echoing corridors of an empty
palace and he knew what it was, where he was. Had been there with
Martinian years ago: the Patriarchal Palace in Rhodias, most
glittering emblem of religious power-and wealth-in the Empire. Once,
at any rate. In its day.

Crispin had seen it in dusty, emptied-out decay, long after the Antae
sack and conquest: most of the rooms looted and empty, closed up. He
and Martinian had been walking through it-a cadaverous, coughing
cleric as their guide-to view a celebrated old wall mosaic a patron
wanted copied for his summer house in Baiana by the sea. The two of
them had been admitted, reluctantly, by virtue of a letter-and
probably a sum of money-from their wealthy patron, to walk through
echoing emptiness and dust.

The High Patriarch lived, worshipped, schemed, dictated his ceaseless
flow of correspondence to all quarters of the known world on the two
upper floors, seldom venturing from there save on holy days, when he
crossed the covered bridge over the street to the Great Sanctuary and
led services in the name of Jad, bright gold in glory on the dome.

The three men had walked endless empty ground-level corridors-their
resonating footsteps a kind of reproach-and had finally come to the
room with the to-be-copied work. A reception hall, the cleric
muttered, fumbling through a ring of keys on his belt. He tried
several, coughing, before finding the correct one. The mosaicists
walked in, paused, and then set about opening shutters, though from
the first glance they had both seen there was little point.

The mosaic-running the length and full height of a wall-was a rum,
though not from the wearing of time or the effects of inadequate
technique. Hammers and axes had been taken to this, daggers, sword
hilts, maces, staves, boot heels to the lower parts, scrabbling
fingers. It had been a marinescape-they knew that much. They knew the
studio that had been commissioned, though not the names of those who
had actually done the work: mosaicists names, like those of other
decorative artisans, were not deemed worth preserving.

Hues of dark blue and a splendid green were still there as evidence
of the original scheme near the wood-panelled ceiling. There would
have been precious stones used here: for the eyes of a squid or
sea-horse, the shining scales offish, coral, shells, the gleam of
eels or undersea vegetation. They had all been looted, the mosaic
hacked apart in the process. One would feel ill, Crispin thought,
were this not so much the expected thing in Rhodias after the fall.
There had been a fire set in the room at some point. The charred
walls bore black, silent witness.

They stood gazing a while in silence, noses tickled by stirred dust
in streaming sunlight, then methodically closed all the shutters
again and walked with the afflicted cleric back down the same
branching corridors and out into the vast, nearly empty spaces of the
city once the centre of the world, of an Empire, once thronged with
teeming, vibrant, brutal existence.

In his dream, Crispin was alone in that palace, and it was even
darker, emptier than he had known it that one time in a life that
seemed fright-endingly remote now. Then, he'd been a newly married
man, rising in his guild, acquiring some wealth, the beginnings of a
reputation, flush with the wondrous, improbable reality that he
adored the woman he'd wed the year before and she loved him. In the
corridors of dream he walked a palace looking for Ilandra, knowing
she was dead.

Door after locked door opened somehow to the one heavy iron key he
carried, and room after empty room showed dust and the charred black
evidence of fire and nothing more. He seemed to hear a wind outside,
saw a blue slant of moonlight once through broken slats in shutters.
There were noises. A celebration far away? The sacking of the city?
From a sufficient distance, he thought, dreaming, the sounds were
much the same.

Room after room, his footprints showing behind him in the
long-settled dust where he walked. No one to be seen, all sounds
outside, from somewhere else. The palace unspeakably vast, unbearably
abandoned. Ghosts and memories and sounds from somewhere else. ‘I
m is my life, he thought as he walked. Rooms, corridors, random
movement, no one who could be said to matter, who could put life,
light, even the idea of laughter into these hollow spaces, so much
larger than they had ever needed to be.

He opened another door, no different from any of the others, and
walked into yet another room, and in his dream he stopped, seeing the
zubir.

Behind it, dressed as for a banquet in a straight, ivory-coloured
gown banded at collar and hem with deep blue, her hair swept back and
adorned with gems, her mothers necklace about her throat, was his
wife.

Even dreaming, Crispin understood.

It wasn't difficult; it wasn't subdue or obscure the way dream
messages could be, requiring a cheiromancer to explain them for a
fee. She was barred to him. He was to understand she was gone. As
much as his youth was, his father, the glory of this ruined palace,
Rhodias itself. Gone away. Somewhere else. The zubir of the Aldwood
proclaimed as much, an appalling, interposed wildness here, bulking
savage and absolute between the two of them, all black, tangled fur,
the massive head and horns, and the eyes of however many thousand
thousand years teaching this truth. He could not be passed. You came
from him and came back to him, and he claimed you or he let you go
for a time you could not measure or foretell.

Then, just as Crispin was thinking so, struggling to make a dream's
peace with these apprehended truths, beginning to lift a hand in
farewell to the loved woman behind the forest god, the zubir was
gone, confounding him again.

It disappeared as it had in the road in fog, and did not reappear.
Crispin stopped breathing in his dream, felt a hammer pounding within
him, and did not know that he cried aloud in a cold room in a
Sauradian night.

Ilandra smiled in the palace. They were alone. No barriers. Her smile
cut the heart from him. He might have been a body lying on a road
then, his chest torn open. He wasn't. In his dream he saw her step
lightly forward: nothing between, nothing to bar her now. 'There are
birds in the trees,' his dead wife said, coming into his arms,' and
we are young.' She rose up on her toes and kissed him on the mouth.
He tasted salt, heard himself say something terribly, hugely
important, couldn't make out his words. His own words. Couldn't.

Woke to the wild wind outside and a dead fire and the Inicii girl-a
shadow, a weight-sitting on his bed beside him wrapped in his cloak.
Her hands clutched her own elbows.

'What? What is it?' he cried, confused, aching, his heart pounding.
She had kissed .. .

'You were shouting,' the girl whispered.