Children of Earth and Sky

  But in the dream it was quiet and their mother was telling them a story of Esperaña long ago: about the brave horsemen who had conquered the Asharites of Al-Rassan and reclaimed the western world for Jad and light. Taking cities back one by one until they had them all, led by their great hero, Fernan Belmonte, son of a great father.

  Danica could hear her mother’s voice in the dream, see her face, hands gesturing, though shadowed, as it was growing dark but was still too early to light a fire. Firewood was precious and would wait on the three men. Their own heroes.

  When she woke, Rasca was still asleep beside her. He badly needed rest. They’d had a violent few days. Danica lay waiting for the light, and remembering. Memories, she thought, were tangling things. They brought you ease and they brought you sorrow, and the same images and people could do both.

  They had burned a village the night before. Twenty-five of them were riding with Skandir now. The raid had been partly a test for the newest recruits. Here in the eastern part of Trakesia the Osmanlis had been settling people, building temples to Ashar and the stars or converting sanctuaries, to achieve a long-term change.

  Jaddites were still allowed to live among them, paying the head tax for their faith, but it had been judged by the Osmanlis that security was better when good star-worshippers occupied the best land.

  Unless it should happen that security was undermined, or destroyed, by the demon Skandir and his band ranging, swift and unseen, to attack them.

  Danica and three new archers (she’d been training them in their usual tactics) had been stationed at the edge of the village to shoot those fleeing the fires. Skandir never took hostages to ransom. That wasn’t his way. It wasn’t why he did this, why he lived.

  It had been a savage, brilliantly successful raid. The night had been smoky and red behind them when they left.

  They had ridden swiftly, so that little trace of their presence would remain—that they might be seen as avenging spirits who could appear anywhere under the stars, and kill.

  He had spoken to her here, in a room together, before they slept. He was a watchful man, in the way leaders of men needed to be, Danica had decided some time ago. Hrant Bunic in Senjan had been like that.

  “You are all right?” he’d asked. “First time we fired a village like that.”

  She knew what he meant. She’d told him her story, hadn’t she?

  “This is what I joined you to do.”

  “Is it? Not for a life of pleasure and ease?”

  “No.” She hadn’t felt like jesting.

  He’d looked at her. “What will you say to the god when you go to him for judgment?”

  Well, that wasn’t a jest.

  She thought about it. His face looked drawn after three days of hard riding either side of the night raid.

  She said, “I’ll ask Jad why my family and village had to suffer and die, and depending on the answer I’ll accept his judgment of my soul.”

  “Accept? That isn’t very pious.”

  “No. But I believe I am, in my way.”

  He really was tired. His expression was odd. “Maybe so. We live a certain kind of life, Danica.”

  “I know it,” she said. “I don’t expect to live very long.”

  He had offered a small, wry smile she could picture now, lying beside him. “Neither did I,” he’d said.

  He slept, heavily. She was awake in the dark before dawn. Of course she’d dreamed of her own village tonight, after what they’d done.

  A certain kind of life.

  He had been born in Seressa, hadn’t he? Amid sophistication and music by the canals, and the muscular presence of power, even if they had never been wealthy themselves. Pero had also seen Rhodias—several times!—taken there first as an apprentice by his father to view the palaces and ruins and the art. They had met with aristocrats and important clerics who’d treated his father with some respect (not overmuch, but some). He knew great cities. He had even felt a little superior, walking the smaller elegance of Dubrava before beginning the journey overland.

  He didn’t feel superior now. He understood that they wanted him afraid, daunted, awed—and he was. He was prone on a green-and-yellow tiled floor, hands extended before him in urgent supplication. And the khalif was not even in the room yet.

  He was an infidel, permitted unprecedented entry into the Palace of Silence. Such a one awaited the supreme ruler of the Osmanli people in a position of uttermost submission. If the khalif never came, the Jaddite could remain like this all day, all night. Hostility was in the air around him like a vibration.

  Some of the men in this room would, Pero understood, be delighted to kill him. Some of them—the djanni guards with their tall hats—had swords with which to do so.

  He had been briefly happy, even excited, following the vizier through an unlocked gold-and-silver gate and along the pathways of a perfected garden to this room—to begin his work.

  He had entered through an open pair of doors, and had been immediately struck hard across the back of his knees by the flat of a sword, so that he fell forward to the floor. Anger, briefly. He had already been told the rituals here, he had been prepared for them, they hadn’t needed to strike him.

  On the other hand, he thought, the guard had likely not wished to deprive himself of the pleasure.

  So Pero lay face down, heart beating fast. He couldn’t really see anything. Only booted or slippered feet. He tried to calm himself, to think about the green leaves on the orange trees in the garden, how he might use them in the background of a portrait, but as they waited, in silence, his mind kept going further back.

  This impossible city of present and past did that to you: it sent the mind back in time. He had discovered this over the past days, ever since they’d passed through the triple walls.

  He had tried to grasp Asharias as it now was, superimposed upon what had been Sarantium. There was immense richness here for an artist, a colourful, cacophonous splendour to the Osmanli city, from the canvas-roofed markets to the harbour food stalls and shops, to the gardens everywhere. Asharites loved gardens, because of their faith’s origin in desert sands—or so it was said.

  But all these had been, for Pero, like an overlay on an already painted canvas: added to, superimposed upon the City of Cities that the Emperor Saranios had built long ago, and named for himself.

  In those first days, waiting for an audience so his commission could begin, Pero had walked the city, leaving the palace complex. He’d been assigned quarters among other artisans in a cluster of buildings and workshops but he was allowed to wander freely outside. There was no fear among the Osmanli lords of this city, certainly not of a Jaddite painter. He saw that they hadn’t even entirely repaired the walls by the harbour, the ones they’d shattered with their cannons. What danger was there, truly, under the holy stars, for Asharites here?

  Well, they might fear each other, and defend their khalif with ferocity. There was extreme caution exercised within the palace grounds. Pero was housed in the outermost part of the complex, near the gates to the square outside. Tomo had not been permitted to attend him or even to enter when they’d arrived. Pero had protested politely; he had been rebuffed (politely).

  In the palace complex, only those they had chosen and trained (and usually gelded) could attend and serve. It was not a matter for discussion with a Jaddite. Besides, the official assigned to him had said, Signore Villani’s man, he of the name Agosta, was not an art apprentice, not a necessary assistant for the portrait, he was only a servant. They had much better servants, Pero was assured. Women would also be made available, of course, at his request.

  Pero hadn’t requested. He’d wondered how they knew these things about his servant. And what else they knew. Tomo had been escorted to make his way by ferry across the strait, to where the Jaddite merchants had their rooms and space to trade. All, except those from Dubrav
a. The Dubravae were allowed a residence, trade halls, and warehouses within Asharias itself—a gesture of extreme favour. (Their lowered tariff rates were an even more valued gesture.)

  Pero had met Marin Djivo outside the palace gates one morning after receiving a message from him. They walked across the square to the vast Temple of Ashar’s Stars—which had been, until twenty-five years ago, the Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom, built for Emperor Valerius nine hundred years ago to be a wonder of the world.

  It was. Djivo had been inside before. He actually warned Pero as they approached the colossal doors, looking at the side domes and up at the one great golden dome above them all.

  Even with the warning he had been overwhelmed. It was as if something had begun squeezing his heart like a fist, making it difficult to think, even to breathe. He had known this was here, of course he had. He had read of how travellers were undone, shaken by its grandeur. He had just this moment been warned . . . and none of that mattered. Some things you could not be ready for, Pero Villani thought, and wished, with a hard inward ache, that his father had lived to come here with him and see this.

  Pity and sorrow and wonder were threaded in him: as a worshipper of Jad (the god now lost here), as a man who aspired to make art that mattered, and simply as someone living in the world, moving through his days until they ended. How did one deal with what this place was—now and before?

  It was quiet at the hour they entered. The morning call for prayer had come and been answered and the prayers were done before they walked in, two unbelievers in what had been a sanctuary built at the peak of Sarantium’s glory to the glory of their god.

  The architect had been a man named Artibasos. Pero knew that much. The only name left from all those who had devised and laboured here.

  Glory, Pero thought, and it was as if the word kept echoing in his head amid actual echoes of distant sounds in the dim light that ran off into darkness. The Asharites kept their holy places softly lit, to sustain the illusion of a protecting night when the killing desert sun had gone.

  Stars hung above them, thousands and thousands of metal stars swaying from chains at varying heights through the immensity of the temple. Some far overhead, some just out of reach. They were beautiful and strange, and only a man walled off in his own faith would deny there was something holy about this place, even so greatly changed.

  The colossal marble columns and the marble floor were from the first construction, Pero knew. The doors were new (the original ones had honoured Jad), and there were no mosaics now—or only fragments. But he also knew that most of the mosaic work had been destroyed long before the Asharites, in the years when Sarantium was riven by battles of doctrine. The winners of that fight, for a time, had been those who saw art rendering the god inside a sanctuary (or rendering anything else, according to some) as a heresy worthy of fire.

  Men were very eager, Pero Villani thought, looking about, to burn each other.

  The faith of Jad had moved on in the centuries between then and now. But the work of the nameless craftsmen on these side domes, these walls, or on the impossibly high dome at the centre, above where they stood just then . . . their art and craft hadn’t moved on, not through time, not to be seen today by Viero Villani’s son, or by anyone.

  They would have been works of the heart, Pero thought, with certainty: of training and skill and faith and love, born of the desire to do something well in the eyes of the god and mankind in a place of majesty. Such things could be, they were, so often lost.

  His father and mother lay in a cemetery in Seressa under a single carved headstone with a distant view of the lagoon. I am very far away, he thought.

  He looked up at the high curve of the great dome, itself so far away, receding into darkness, beyond him, and he thought of his own destroyed portrait of Mara Citrani, and he thought, I am among those greater than me in that.

  There was, strangely, comfort in the awareness.

  He walked under the hanging, swaying stars, thinking of mosaics and his father. After a time he said to the other man, who had stayed in stride with him, courteously silent, “Thank you for warning me.”

  “Did it even help?” Marin Djivo asked.

  Pero shrugged. He didn’t know the answer. He remembered something, though, a request made, and standing there he prayed in silence for the Empress Eudoxia, and the souls of her husband and son, as he had promised he would do if he came into this place.

  They walked out. Djivo took him diagonally across the huge square to see the smashed and looted remains of what had been the Hippodrome, where fifty thousand men and women would gather to watch men race chariots in the presence of the emperors of Sarantium long ago.

  Truly long ago. And here as well the centuries had had their way with the works of man. One needed to enter carefully under crumbling arches, over jumbled paving stones, through a dark, covered space that led from twisted metal gates to open, grassy ground. Wildflowers and weeds grew, untended.

  No Asharite garden here. The Osmanlis seemed to be leaving it a ruin, perhaps in memory of conquest, what they could do.

  What time could do, Pero thought.

  The stands of the arena were crumbling stone all the way around, pale amber in the morning’s light, beautiful in their ruin, he thought. He wondered if he could paint that colour, the one just there, where the sunlight was falling.

  There were toppled statues in the long inner oval around which the chariots would have run. He tried to imagine a race day, the loud, excited crowd, the emperor and his court up in that box—Djivo was pointing to it now—come to watch men and horses wheel and run like thunder amid the thunder of their cheering. He couldn’t. He couldn’t picture it. He had nothing to draw upon. He looked at sunlight falling warm on stone, halfway to gold.

  They strolled through a late-spring morning and they were, astonishingly to Pero, nearly alone in there. On the far side, he saw a lightly garbed woman lead a man by the hand from this open space into the covered arcade and out of sight. A transaction would now take place, Pero knew. Probably one that had happened here ever since the racing and the cheering stopped. There had been riots here, too, at times, he knew that.

  Birdsong, flutter of wings, bees among the flowers, distant sounds of the city. Pero stopped at one point and tried to read the words on a monument in the infield. It was fallen, broken, and the Trakesian letters were faded where they remained. Someone named Taral . . . or perhaps Taras . . . had won some (unreadable) number of races and been . . . honoured? . . . and . . . a word that looked like exalted . . . with this everlasting . . .

  Everlasting.

  There was a bas-relief carving on another fallen stone. He looked at this for a long time, unexpectedly drawn to it. A man in profile, long straight nose, curled short hair, beardless chin. A charioteer, doubtless. Handsome, subtle in the details, a craftsman’s work, an artist’s, and it was lying here broken, lost. No name to this subject that he could see. It might be on another fragment nearby. He didn’t look for it. He did look at the sculpted face.

  He wouldn’t know it for some time, but his life changed in that looking. That can happen to us, too.

  They’d gone out the same way they’d come in. The two of them had a companionable glass of wine nearby, with lamb cooked over an open grill on skewers. Then Djivo returned to waiting for his goods to be assessed by the customs officials, so that he could bring them to the marketplace, and sell them, and do his buying, and start home. And Pero had gone back to be searched and readmitted into the palace compound.

  A man was waiting for him there to say he was to make his formal abasement and begin work the next day.

  The khalif would give him time early each morning and would stop the sitting whenever it pleased him to do so each day, and the sessions would conclude entirely whenever he chose. How long would that be? It was not for the Jaddite to ask questions.

  Pero was
to understand that if he spoke a single word aloud in the presence of Gurçu the Destroyer in the Palace of Silence his tongue would be ripped out before he was killed.

  The khalif valued silence greatly. Everyone knew.

  —

  HE HAD BROUGHT ultramarine blue (derived from lapis), which was the most precious. He also had azurite, less expensive, less intense, a green-grey shade of blue, for parts of a work that required less assertion. He had discovered (and was pleased with himself for doing so) an effect that occurred when you used an undercoat of azurite and put ultramarine over it. Expensive, yes, but extremely beautiful.

  Pero loved blue, almost a weakness. Smalt was the most affordable undercoat hue, and he’d brought that with him, too.

  His principal red was what artists in Seressa called red lake, from the kermes beetle—which was found here in the east, of course, but he hadn’t been certain they’d have it waiting for him, so he’d brought his own, along with hematite to grind and make into porphyry, the red-purple of emperors, once.

  He had verdigris which, handled carefully, offered a dark, rich green.

  He’d brought no yellow he entirely liked, hoped to find a good one here, because his preferred yellow orpiment required arsenic to mix, and he’d dared not carry poison into the palaces of the khalif.

  Well, in truth, he’d been daring to do so, a different, hidden vial, until Marin Djivo said it would surely kill him since it would be found. He had a memory of himself by a stream west of here, pouring it out into rushing water.

  He had gold leaf, most expensive of all, and assumed he could obtain more if he needed it—this was Asharias and a portrait of the khalif, after all.