Sailing to Sarantium (40 page)

'The tribune of the Fourth Sauradian is very knowledgeable, my lord.'

'Hah! The Sauradians? A country soldier.'

'Yes, my lord. Of course, he is an officer and does have an
appointment with the Supreme Strategos. I suppose that required that
he make himself aware of doings in the Imperial Precinct. As best he
could. Of course, as you say, he wouldn't really know very much.'

She looked up in time to catch an uneasy glance from the mosaicist.
She cast her eyes quickly downwards again. She could do this. It was
possible, after all.

Siroes swore again. 'I cannot wait on an ignorant westerner. There is
to be an Imperial Banquet after the chariots tonight. I have an
honoured couch there.' He paused. 'Tell him that. Tell him... I came
as a colleague to extend greetings before he was faced with the . . .
strain of a court appearance.'

She kept her eyes down.

'He will be honoured, I know it. My lord, he will be distressed to
have missed your visit.'

The mosaicist twitched his cloak up on one shoulder, adjusting the
golden brooch that pinned it. 'Don't fake proper manners or speech.
It hardly suits a bony whore. I do have enough time to fuck you. Will
a half solidus get your clothes off?'

She held back the biting retort. She wasn't afraid any more,
astonishingly. He was. She met his gaze. 'No,' she said. 'It will
not. I shall tell Martinian of Varena you were here and offered,
though.'

She moved to close the door.

'Wait!' His eyes flickered. 'A jest. I made a jest. Country folk
never understand court wit. Do you ... would you ... by chance have
any experience of Martinian's work, or, ah, his views on ... say, the
transfer method of setting tesserae?'

A terrified man. They were dangerous sometimes. 'I am neither his
whore nor his apprentice, my lord. I shall tell him, when he returns,
that this is what you came to learn.'

'No! I mean ... do not trouble yourself. I will discuss the matter
with him myself, naturally. I shall have to, ah, ascertain his
competence. Of course.'

'Of course,' Kasia said, and closed the door on the Mosaicist to the
Imperial Court.

She locked it, leaned back against the wood, and then, unable not to,
began to laugh silently, and then to weep, at the same time.

 

Had he arrived back at the inn after the racing, as he had intended,
had he spoken with Kasia and learned of her encounter with a
visitor-the details of which would have meant rather more to him than
they did to her-Crispin would almost certainly have conducted himself
differently in certain matters that followed.

This, in turn, might have occasioned a significant change in various
affairs, both personal and of much wider import. It could, in fact,
have changed his life and a number of other lives, and-arguably-the
course of events in the Empire.

This happens, more often than is sometimes suspected. Lovers first
meet at a dinner one almost failed to attend. A wine barrel falling
from a wagon breaks the leg of someone who chose an impulsive route
to his usual bathhouse. An assassin's thrown dagger fails to kill
only because the intended victim turns-randomly-and sees it coming.
The tides of fortune and the lives of men and women in the god's
created world are shaped and altered in such fashion.

Crispin didn't come back to the inn.

Or, rather, as he and Carullus and Vargos approached it at sundown
through the roiling, tumultuous festival streets, half a dozen men
detached themselves from where they were standing by the front wall
of the inn and approached them. They were clad, he noted, in subtly
patterned knee-length dark green tunics, with a vertical brown stripe
on both sides, brown trousers, dark brown belts. Each wore an
identical necklace with a medallion, a badge of office. They were
grave, composed, entirely at odds with the chaos around them.

Carullus stopped when he saw them. He looked cautious, but not
alarmed. Crispin, taking his cue from this, stood easily as the
leader of the six men came up to him. He was admiring the taste and
cut of the clothing, in fact. Just before the man spoke, he realized
he was a eunuch. 'You are the mosaicist? Martinian of Varena?'

Crispin nodded. 'May I know who asks?'

Overhead at her window Kasia was watching. She had been looking out
for the three men as soon as the cheering from the Hippodrome had
stopped. She looked down and thought of calling out. Did not. Of
course.

'We are sent from the Chancellor's Offices. Your presence is
requested in the Imperial Precinct.'

'So I understand. It is why I have journeyed to Sarantium.'

'You do not understand. You are greatly honoured. You are to come
tonight. Now. The Emperor will be hosting a banquet shortly. After
this he will receive you in the Attenine Palace. Do you comprehend?
Men of the highest rank wait weeks, months to be seen. Ambassadors
sometimes leave the city without an audience at all. You will be
presented tonight. The Emperor is greatly engaged by the progress of
the new Sanctuary. We are to bring you back with us and prepare you.'

Carullus made a small, whistling sound. One of the eunuchs looked at
him. Vargos was motionless, listening. Crispin said, 'I am honoured,
indeed. But now? I am to be presented as I am?'

The eunuch smiled briefly. 'Hardly as you are.' One of the others
sniffed audibly, with amusement.

'Then I must bathe and change my clothing. I have been in the
Hippodrome all day.'

'This is known. It is unlikely that any clothing you have brought
will be adequate to a formal court appearance. You are here by virtue
of the Chancellor's request. Gesius therefore assumes responsibility
for you before the Emperor. We will attend to your appearance. Come.'
He went. It was why he was here.

Kasia watched from the window, biting her lip. The impulse to call
after him was very strong, though she could not have said why. A
premonition. Something from the half-world? Shadows. When Carullus
and Vargos came upstairs she told them about the afternoon visitor,
about that last, strangely specific question he'd asked. Carullus
swore, deepening her fears. 'Nothing for it,' he said, after a
moment. 'No way to tell him now. There's a trap of some kind, but
there would have to be, at that court. He has quick wits, Jad knows
it. Let us hope he keeps them about him.'

'I must go,' Vargos said, after a silence. 'Sundown.' Carullus looked
at him, gave Kasia a shrewd glance, and then led them both briskly
out into the crowded, now-darkening streets to a good-sized sanctuary
some distance back towards the triple walls. Among a great many
people in the space before the altar and the sun disk on the wall
behind it they heard the sundown rites chanted by a wiry,
dark-bearded cleric. Kasia stood and knelt and stood and knelt
between the two men and tried not to think about the zubir, or Caius
Crispus, or about all the people packed so closely around her here,
and in the City.

Afterwards, they dined at a tavern not far away. Crowds again. There
were many soldiers. Carullus greeted and was saluted by a number of
them when they entered, but then, still being solicitous, chose a
booth at the very back, away from the noise. He had her sit with her
back to the tumult, so she wouldn't even have to look at anyone but
Vargos or himself. He ordered food and wine for the three of them,
jesting easily with the server. He had lost a great deal of money on
one particular race in the afternoon, Kasia gathered. It didn't seem
to have subdued him very much. He was not, she had come to realize, a
man easily subdued.

 

He felt outraged beyond words, violated and assaulted, undermined in
his very sense of who he was. He had shouted in profane rage, lashed
out in wild fury, sending fountains of water splashing from the bath,
soaking a number of them.

They had laughed. And given the wide swath already cut from him while
he'd lain back at his ease, eyes innocently closed in the wonderfully
warm, scented water, Crispin had had no real choice any more. When
he'd finished snarling and swearing and vowing obscenely violent acts
that appeared only to amuse them further, he'd had to let them
complete what they'd begun-or look like a crazed madman.

They finished shaving off his beard.

It seemed that the fashion at the court of Valerius and Alixana was
for smooth-cheeked men. Barbarians, hinterland soldiers, provincials
who couldn't know better, wore facial hair, the eunuch wielding the
scissors and then the gleaming razor said, making a moue of ineffable
distaste. They looked like bears, goats, bison, other beasts, he
opined.

'What do you know about bison?' Crispin had rasped bitterly.

'Nothing in the least! Thanks be to holy Jad in his mercy!' the
eunuch with the razor had replied fervently, making the sign of the
sun disk with the blade, eliciting laughter from his fellows.

Men at court, he explained patiently, manipulating the razor with
precision as he spoke, had a duty to the god and the Emperor to
appear as civilized as they could. For a red-headed man to wear a
beard, he'd added firmly, was as much a provocation, a sign of
ill-breeding, as ... as breaking wind during the sunrise invocation
in the Imperial Chapel.

Waiting, some time later, in an antechamber of the Attenine Palace,
clad in silk for only the second time in his life, with soft,
close-fitting leather shoes and a short, dark green cloak pinned to
his shoulder over the long, dove grey tunic bordered in textured
black, Crispin couldn't stop touching his own face. His hand kept
wandering up of its own accord. They had held up a mirror for him in
the bath: a splendid one, ivory-handled, a design of grapes and
leaves etched on the silver back, the glass wonderfully true, next to
no distortion.

A stranger had gazed back at him, wet and pale and angry-looking.
Smooth-cheeked as a child. He'd had the beard since before he met
Ilandra. Over a decade now. He hardly knew or remembered the oddly
vulnerable, truculent, square-chinned person he encountered in the
glass. His eyes showed very blue. His mouth-his entire face-felt
unguarded and exposed. He'd essayed a brief, testing smile and
stopped quickly. It did not look or feel like his own face. He'd been
... altered. He wasn't himself. Not a secure feeling, as he prepared
to be presented at the most intricate, dangerous court in the world,
bearing a false name and a secret message. Waiting, he was still
angry, taking a kind of refuge from mounting anxiety in that. He knew
the Chancellor's officials had been acting with undeniable goodwill
and a good-humoured tolerance for his water-spraying fit of temper.
The eunuchs wanted him to make a good impression. It reflected upon
them, he'd been made to understand. Gesius's signature had summoned
him and smoothed his way here on the road. He stood now in this
sumptuous, candlelit antechamber, hearing the sounds of the court
beginning to enter the throne room through doors on the far side, and
he was-in some complex way-a representative of the Chancellor, though
he'd never even seen the man.

One arrived in the Imperial Precinct, Crispin belatedly realized,
already aligned in some fashion, even before the first words or
genuflections took place. They had told him about the genuflections.
The instructions were precise and he'd been made to rehearse them.
Against his will, he'd felt his heart beginning to pound, doing so,
and that feeling resumed now as he heard the dignitaries of Valerius
II's court on the other side of the magnificent silver doors. There
was rising and falling laughter, a lightly murmurous flow of talk.
They would be in a good humour after a festival day and a banquet.

He rubbed at his naked chin again. The smoothness was appalling,
unsettling. As if a shaven, silk-clad, scented Sarantine courtier
were standing in his body, half a world away from home. He felt
dislodged from the idea of himself he'd built up over the years.

And that sensation-this imposed change of appearance and
identity-probably had much to do with what followed, he later
decided.

None of it was planned. He knew that much. He was simply a reckless,
contrary man. His mother had always said so, his wife, his friends.
He'd given up trying to deny it long ago. They used to laugh at him
when he did, so he'd stopped.

After the protracted wait, watching the blue moon rise across an
interior courtyard window, events happened quickly when they did
begin.

The silver doors swung open. Crispin and the Chancellor's
representatives turned quickly. Two guardsmen-enormously tall, in
gleaming silver tunics-stepped from within the throne room. Crispin
caught a glimpse beyond them of movement and colour. There was a
drifting fragrance of perfume: frankincense. He heard music, then
that-and the shifting movements-stopped. A man appeared behind the
guards, clad in crimson and white, carrying a ceremonial staff. One
of the eunuchs nodded to this man, and then looked at Crispin. He
smiled-a generous thing to do in that moment and murmured, 'You look
entirely suitable. You are benevolently awaited. Jad be with you.'

Crispin stepped forward hesitantly to stand beside the heraldic
figure in the doorway. The man looked over at him indifferently.
'Martinian of Varena, is it?' he asked. It really wasn't planned.

The thought was in his mind even as he spoke that he might die for
this. He rubbed his too-smooth chin. 'No,' he said, calmly enough.
'My name is Caius Crispus. Of Varena, though, yes.'

The herald's startled expression might actually have been comical had
the situation been even slightly different. One of the guards shifted
slightly beside Crispin, but made no other movement, not even turning
his head. 'Fuck yourself with a sword!' the herald whispered in the
elegant accents of the eastern aristocracy. 'You think I'm announcing
any name other than the one on the list? You do what you want in
there.'