‘You are Jaddite, girl?’
She hesitated. ‘I was brought to the Light last year.’
By the slave trader, no doubt. ‘And Sauradia is Jaddite, is it not?’
Another hesitation. ‘Yes, my lord. Of course, my lord.’
‘But these pagans still take young girls and . . . do whatever they do to them? In a province of the Empire?’
‘Crispin. You are better not knowing this.’
‘Not in the north, my lord,’ said the girl. She scrubbed the cloth across his ribs. ‘In the north a thief or a woman taken in adultery . . . someone who has already forfeited their life is hanged on the god’s tree. Only hanged. Nothing . . . worse.’
‘Ah. A milder barbarism. I see. And why is it different here? No thieves or adulterous women to be had?’
‘I don’t know.’ She did not react to his sarcasm. He was being unfair, he knew. ‘I’m sure it isn’t that, my lord. But . . . it may be that Morax uses this to keep peace with the village. He . . . allows travellers without Permits to stay, especially in autumn and winter. He’s wealthy because of it. The village inns suffer. Perhaps this is his way of making it up to them? He gives one of his slaves. For Ludan?’
‘Enough. It is blindingly obvious no one has ever taught you how to give a rubdown. Jad’s blood! An Imperial Inn without a strigil? Disgraceful. Get me a dry towel, girl.’ Crispin was aware of a familiar, hard anger within him and struggled to keep his voice down. ‘A fine reason to kill a slave, of course. Relations with the neighbours.’
She rose and hurriedly fetched a towel from the bed—the excuse for a towel they had sent up. This was not his bathhouse in Varena. The room itself was nondescript but of decent size, and some warmth did seem to be rising from the kitchen below. He had already noted that the door had one of the newer iron locks, opened with a copper key. The merchants would like that. Morax knew his business, it seemed, both the licit and the illicit sides of it. He was probably wealthy, or on the way to it.
Crispin controlled his anger, thinking hard. ‘I was correct down below? There are people here tonight without Permits?’
He stood up and stepped, dripping, out of the small tub. She was flushed from his rebuke, anxious, visibly afraid. It only made him more angry. He took the towel, rubbed his hair and beard, then wrapped himself against the cold. Then he swore, bitten by some crawling creature in the towel.
She stood by, hands awkwardly at her sides, eyes downcast. ‘Well?’ he demanded again. ‘Answer. Was I correct?’
‘Yes, my lord.’ Speaking Sarantine, which she clearly understood more readily, she sounded intelligent for her station, and there was life in the blue eyes when the terror was at bay. ‘Most of them are illegal. Autumn is a quiet time. If the taxing officers or soldiers come he bribes them, and the Imperial Couriers are back and forth too often to complain . . . so long as they are not put out by the other patrons. Morax takes good care of the couriers.’
‘I’m sure he does. I know that kind of man. All for a price.’
Absently, Crispin nodded his agreement with the bird and then collected himself. He began to dress. Dry clothes from the satchel they had brought up for him. His wet outer garments had been left to dry by a downstairs fire.
‘Quiet, Linon. I’m thinking!’
‘May all the powers gather to protect us!’
It had grown gradually easier to ignore this sort of thing over the past little while. Something in Linon was peculiar today, however. Crispin put that away for later, along with the rather deeper question of why he was involving himself in this. Slaves died all over the Empire every day, were abused, whipped, sold—made into sausages. Crispin shook his head: was he really so simple that the ridiculous association of a terrified girl with his daughter was drawing him into a world that had no safe place for him at all? Another hard question. For later.
Back in the days when he still enjoyed things, Crispin had always had a puzzle-solving mind. In work, in play. Designing a wall mosaic, gambling at his bathhouse. Now, as he dressed quickly in the twilight chill, he found himself engaged in slotting pieces of information like tesserae within his mind to make a picture. He turned it, tilted it like glass to catch angles of light.
‘What will they do to her?’ He asked it impulsively.
Linon was still for so long this time he thought the bird was ignoring him. He put on his sandals, waiting. The voice in his mind when it came was cold, uninflected, unlike anything he had heard before from her.
‘She will have the juice of poppies in the morning, with whatever she drinks. She will be given to whoever comes for her. From the village, probably. They will take her away. Sometimes they mate them with an animal, for the sake of the fields and the hunters, sometimes the men do it themselves, one after another. They wear masks then, of animals. After, a priest of Ludan cuts out her heart. He may be a smith, a baker in the village. The innkeeper downstairs. We would not know. It is considered a good omen if she lives until the heart is removed. It is buried in the fields. They peel her skin from her and burn it, as the dross of life. Then she is hanged by her hair from the holy oak at the moment the sun sets, for Ludan to take as his own.’
‘Holy Jad! You can’t be—’
‘Be silent! Imbecile! I told you you were better off not knowing!’
The girl had looked up, startled. Crispin glared at her and her glance instantly dropped away, a different sort of fear in her now.
Sickened, unbelieving, Crispin began worrying the puzzle again with a part of his mind, struggling for calm. Turning pieces of glass to find the light. Even a dim, precarious light, like candles in a breeze or a slant of winter sun through an arrow slit.
‘I can’t let them do this to her,’ he said inwardly to Linon.
‘Ah! Let sound the soldiers’ drums! Caius Crispus of Varena, bold hero of a later age! You can’t? I don’t see why not. They will only find someone else. And kill you for trying to interfere. Who are you, artisan, to step between a god and his sacrifice?’
Crispin had finished dressing. He sat down on the bed again. It creaked.
‘I don’t know how to answer that.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ said Linon.
The girl whispered, ‘My lord. I will do anything you like, always.’
‘What else does a slave do?’ he snapped, distracted. She flinched, as if struck. He drew a breath.
‘I need your help,’he said again to the bird. The puzzle had taken a shape, poor though it might be. He rocked back and forth a little, creaking the bed. ‘Here’s what I want to happen . . .’
A few moments later he explained to the girl what steps she, in her turn, had to take if she wanted to live through the day to come. He made it sound as if he knew what he was doing. What became almost intolerable was the look that entered her eyes as he spoke and she understood that he was going to try to save her. She wanted to survive, so much. It burned in her, this desire to live.
He had told Martinian, back home, that he felt no real desire for anything, not even life. Perhaps, Crispin thought, that made him the perfect man for the folly of this.
He sent the girl downstairs. She knelt in front of him first, looked as if she wanted to say something, but he quelled that with a glance and gestured to the door. After she left he sat for another moment, then stood up and began attending to what needed to be prepared in the room.
‘Are you angry?’ he asked Linon suddenly, surprising himself.
‘Yes,’said the bird, after a moment.
‘Will you tell me why?’
‘No.’
‘Will you help me?’
‘I am a lump of leather and metal, as someone once said. You can render me blind, deaf, and silent with a thought. What else can I do?’
Going down the stairs towards the noise and warmth of the common room, Crispin glanced outside. It was full dark outside, the forest lost to sight in the black. Clouds again, no moons or stars to be seen. He ought to have been going down with no mo
re on his mind than the anticipation of a good red wine from Candaria and some modest hopes for the stew. Instead, every shadow, every movement in the shadows beyond the streaked windows, carried an aura of dread. It is considered a good omen if she lives until the heart is removed.
He was committed, just about. He carried the copper key at his belt, but he had left the door to his room ajar, like an ineffectual Rhodian fool unused to the harsh realities of travel, the real dangers of the road.
It had become clear that the red-bearded Rhodian drinking and even sharing a steadily replenished quantity of expensive wine was travelling all the way to Sarantium with a Permit signed by the Imperial Chancellor himself. The entire common room knew it by now. The man kept dropping the name of Gesius into every third sentence. It would have been irritating, had he not been so genial . . . and generous. It appeared he was an artisan of some sort, a soft, city fellow summoned to help with one of the Emperor’s projects.
Thelon of Megarium considered himself adept at sizing up such men, and the opportunity they represented.
For one thing, the artisan—Martinian, he’d named himself—was quite evidently not carrying his purse. Which meant that the Permit, and whatever moneys he had been advanced or had carried with him from Batiara—obviously a sufficient sum to allow the real indulgence of Candarian wine—were not on his person, unless he’d stuffed them in his underclothes. Thelon grinned behind his hands at the thought of a crumpled, shit-smeared paper being presented at the next Posting Inn. No, the Imperial Permit was not in Martinian’s clothing, he’d wager a good deal.
Or if he’d had a good deal to wager, he would have. Thelon was without resources and attached to his uncle’s mercantile party only out of the goodness of his uncle’s heart—as his uncle was prone to remind him. They were on their way home to Megarium, having made some useful transactions at the military camp towards Trakesia where the Fourth and the First Sauradian legions were based. Useful for Uncle Erytus, that is. Thelon had no direct interest in any profits. He wasn’t even being paid. He was here merely to learn the route, his uncle had said, and the people to be dealt with, and to show he could conduct himself properly among a class of folk better than waterfront rabble.
If he proved a decently quick study, Uncle Erytus had allowed, he might be permitted to come into the business at a fair salary and lead some minor trading expeditions himself. Eventually, perhaps, after time had run and maturity had demonstrated itself, he might become a partner with his uncle and cousins.
Thelon’s mother and father had showered Uncle Erytus with abject, embarrassing gratitude. Thelon’s creditors, including several shit-faced dice players in a certain caupona by the harbour, had declined to express similar enthusiasm.
All things considered, Thelon had to admit that this had been a usefully timed journey away from home, though the weather was ghastly and his pious uncle and bloodless cousins took the sunrise invocations too seriously by more than half and frowned at the very mention of whores. Thelon had been actively pondering how to arrange a quick tension-relieving encounter with their pretty blond serving girl tonight, when the artisan’s voluble indiscretions at the next table had steered his thoughts in another direction entirely.
Certain hard facts were unfortunately inescapable. He was going to be home in a few too-short days. There had been an intimation from some parties that if he wished to continue enjoying the use and comfort of his legs he had best be prepared to make a significant payment towards eliminating his dicing debt. Thelon’s uncle, as mulishly stupid about a little gambling as he was about girls, was not about to advance him any sums. That much had become obvious, despite Uncle Erytus’s almost reluctant good humour after his successful transactions in boots and cloaks and whatever for the soldiers, and the purchase of crudely carved religious artifacts in a town east of the army camp. Trakesian wooden sun disks, he’d informed Thelon, were much in demand in Megarium, and even more so across the bay in Batiara. There was a good profit to be made, as much as fifteen per cent, after all expenses. Thelon had heroically refrained from yawning.
He had also decided, long before this, not to point out that his uncle’s piety and scruples appeared not to make him averse to bribing innkeepers—all of whom appeared to know Erytus well—to allow them to stay illicitly at a sequence of Imperial Inns along the road. Not that he was complaining, mind you, but there was a principle here, somewhere.
‘Would it be a very great presumption,’ Uncle Erytus was now saying, leaning towards the red-bearded man, ‘to ask to be honoured with a glimpse of the illustrious Permit you are honoured with?’ Thelon cringed at the fawning, unctuous language. His uncle, licking someone’s boots, was an ugly sight.
The artisan’s face darkened. ‘You don’t think I have it?’ he growled, affronted.
Thelon lifted a hand quickly, to hide another smirk. His uncle, drinking a polite cup of the other man’s Candarian, flushed red as the wine. ‘No, no, not at all! I am sure you . . . of course you . . . it is just that I’ve never actually seen the Seal or the signature of the august Chancellor Gesius. So celebrated a man. Three Emperors served! You would be honouring me, good sir! A glimpse . . . the handwriting of so glorious a figure . . . an example for my sons.’
His uncle, Thelon reflected sourly, had all the social-climbing traits one might expect in a modestly successful provincial merchant. He would endlessly regale his family with the unspeakably trivial story of this Permit if he saw it, and would probably find a religious moral to impose upon them, too. Virtue, the rewards thereof. Thelon diverted himself by imagining just what sort of example a eunuch was for his cousins.
‘S’all right,’ the Batiaran artisan was saying with a lordly gesture that nearly toppled his latest flask of wine. ‘Show you tomorrow. Permit’s up’n the room. The best room. Over the kitchen. Thash mush too far away t’night!’ He laughed, finding himself extremely amusing, it seemed. Uncle Erytus, visibly relieved, also laughed loudly. He had a terrible, unconvincing laugh, Thelon decided. The red-bearded man stood up, swayed towards their table, poured again for Erytus. He lifted the flask in unsteady inquiry; Thelon’s cousins hastily covered their glasses and so he, of necessity, had to do the same.
It was, quite abruptly, too much to endure. Candarian on offer and he was forced to decline? And here he was, in the midst of some utterly unholy nowhere, without any funds at all and only a few days from an encounter that placed his legs—and Jad knew what else—at more than some risk. Thelon made his decision. He’d just had a confirmation of his earlier guess in any case. The man was such a fool.
‘My excuses, Uncle,’ Thelon said, standing, a hand at his belly. ‘Too much of the sausage. Must purge myself, I fear.’
‘Moderation,’ said his uncle predictably, a finger lifted in admonition, ‘is a virtue at table, as elsewhere.’
‘I agree!’ said the fatuous artisan, sloshing his wine.
This, Thelon decided, heading towards the archway to the shadowed front room, was actually going to be a pleasure. He didn’t go to the latrine across the hall. He went up the stairway, quietly. He was quite good with locks, as it happened.
As it happened, he didn’t even need to be.
‘BE READY,’ Crispin said inwardly, ‘I believe we have landed our fish.’
‘How very nautical of you,’Linon replied sardonically. ‘Do we eat him in salt or sauce?’
‘No wit, please. I need you.’
‘Witless?’
Crispin ignored this. ‘I’m sending the girl up now.’
‘Kitten!’ he called out, his voice slurred, too loud. ‘Kitten!’
The girl who had called herself Kasia came over quickly, blue eyes anxious, wiping her hands on the sides of her tunic. Crispin gave her a brief, very direct look, then tilted sideways, spilling some more of his wine, as he pulled the room key from his belt.
He’d had, truly, no idea who might fall for the baits he was offering . . . the unlocked door, the garrulous drunkenness, crude hin
ts dropped over dinner and wine. Indeed, it had been entirely possible no one would succumb. He had no fall-back plan. No brilliant constellations of tesserae. A door left foolishly open, careless words about a purse upstairs . . . all he’d been able to devise.
But it seemed someone had risen to his lure. Crispin refused to let himself ponder the ethics of what he was doing when the sullen nephew he’d been watching gave him a too-naked glance and excused himself.
He squinted owlishly up at the girl and pointed an unsteady finger at Erytus of Megarium. ‘Thish very good friend of mine wants to see my Permit. Gesius’s Seal. S’in the leather purse. On the bed. You know the room, ’bove the kitchen. Go get it. And Kitten . . .’ He paused, waggled a finger at her. ‘I know ’xactly how much money’s in the purse, Kitten.’
The Megarian merchant was protesting faintly, but Crispin winked at him and squeezed the girl’s rump as she took the key. ‘Room’s not too far for young legs,’ he laughed. ‘Might let her wrap ’em round me, later, too.’ One of the merchant’s sons let out an alarming giggle before blushing ferociously under his father’s swift gaze.
A Karchite at a table across the room laughed loudly, waving his beer at them. Crispin had thought, when he’d first entered the common room, that one of that group might slip away and up. He’d spoken loudly enough for them to hear . . . but they’d been drinking steadily since mid-afternoon, it seemed, and two of them were fast asleep, heads on the table among the food. The others weren’t moving anywhere quickly.
Erytus’s bored, angry nephew with the thin mouth and long, fidgety hands had said he was going to the latrine. He wasn’t. Crispin was sure of it. He was the fish, and hooked.
If he goes into a room intending to steal, he told himself, he deserves whatever happens. Crispin was utterly sober, however—having spilled, or shared, almost all of his wine—and he didn’t really convince himself. It occurred to him, suddenly, before he could push the thought away, that it was possible that a mother, somewhere, loved that young man.