He was going to the City. Sarantium. Where the Imperial Palace was and the Emperor, the Triple Walls and the Hippodrome. A hundred holy sanctuaries, he’d heard, and half a million people. He didn’t really believe that last. He wasn’t a northern lout any more, to be gulled with gross, exaggerated tales. Men told lies in their pride.
Growing up, he had never imagined himself living anywhere but in their village. Then, after that changed one mild, bloody spring night, he’d expected to spend his days going back and forth along the Imperial road in Sauradia until he grew too old for that and took a position at the stable or the forge in one of the inns.
Life did unexpected things to you, Vargos of the Inicii thought in the darkness. You made a decision, or someone else made one, and there you were. There you were. He heard a familiar rustling sound, then a grunt and a sigh; someone had a woman with him on the far side of the room. He turned over on his side, carefully. He’d been kicked in the lower back. That was why his piss was red, why it hurt to turn.
They had a phrase along the Imperial road. He’s sailing to Sarantium, they said when some man threw himself at an obvious and extreme hazard, risking all, changing everything one way or another, like a desperate gambler at dice putting his whole stake on the table. That’s what he was doing.
Unexpected, really. Not his nature. Exciting, he had to admit. He tried to remember the last time he’d felt excited. Perhaps with a girl, but not really, that was different. Nice enough, though. Vargos wished he felt a little better. He knew two of the girls here fairly well and they liked him enough. On the other hand there were soldiers here. The girls would be busy all night. Just as well. He needed his sleep.
They were still laughing—and starting to sing now—in the common room. He felt himself drifting off. Martinian was there with the burly, smooth-faced tribune. Unexpected.
He dreamt that night that he was flying. Out of the inn and across the road under both moons and all the stars. West first, over the chapel of the Sleepless Ones, hearing their slow chanting in the night, seeing the candles burning through the windows of the dome. He flew past that image of holy Jad and turned north over the Aldwood.
League upon league he flew above the forest, north and farther north and farther, seeing the black trees touched by mingled moonlight in the iron cold. League upon league the great forest rolled, and Vargos wondered in his dream how anyone could do other than worship a power that dwelled therein.
Then west again for a time across the grass-covered ridges of soft hills and over the wide, slow river meandering south with the road beside it. Another forest on the other side of the gleaming water, as black, as vast, as Vargos flew over it, north and north in the clear, cold night. He saw where the oaks ended and the pines began, and then at last he saw by the moons a range of mountains he had always known, and he was flying lower over fields he had tilled himself in childhood, seeing a stream he had swum in during summers gone, and the first tiny outlying houses of the village, his own home near the small shrine and the Elder’s house with the branch bound above the door, and then he saw the graveyard in his dream, and his father’s grave.
It was unusual for a man to travel any distance with a female slave, but it was learned by the soldiers of the Fourth Sauradian that the artisan had taken possession of the girl only the night before—some sort of wager won, the story went—and it was not at all unusual that a man might want a body with him on a windy autumn night. Why pay for a whore when you had your own woman to do the needful? The girl was too skinny to be really warm, but she was young, and yellow-haired, and probably had other talents.
The soldiers were aware by now that the Rhodian was more important than he looked. He had also formed an unlikely bond with their tribune over dinner. This was sufficiently surprising as to elicit its own measure of respect. The girl had been escorted, untouched, to the room assigned the artisan. Orders had been explicit. Carullus, who liked to describe himself to anyone who would listen as a gentle soul, was known to have had men crippled and turned out of his company to beg for botching orders on an assignment. His principal centurion was the only one who knew that this had been done once only, soon after Carullus’s promotion to tribune and his command of five hundred. The centurion was under standing orders to make certain all new recruits knew the tale, properly embellished. It was useful for soldiers to be somewhat afraid of their officers.
Kasia, about to sleep under a different roof than Morax’s for the first time in a year, had settled beside the fire in the bedroom, feeding it the occasional log, to wait for the man who owned her now. The room was smaller than the better ones in Morax’s inn, but it did have this fire. She sat on her cloak—Martinian’s cloak—and gazed into the flames. Her grandmother had been skilled at reading futures in tongues of fire, but Kasia lacked any such gift and only found her mind drifting as she watched the fire dance. She was sleepy but there was no pallet in the room, only the one bed, and she had no idea what to expect when the Rhodian came upstairs. She could hear singing from below: Martinian and the man who had knocked him senseless. Men were very strange. She remembered the night before, in Morax’s, when she had been sent up to find a thief in Martinian’s room and everything had changed. He had saved her life twice now. At the inn and then, somehow, with a magical bird in the Aldwood.
She had been in the Aldwood today.
Had seen a power of the wood, known only in her grandmother’s tales told by another smoky northern fire. She had walked from the sacred glade and the black forest alive, unsacrificed, to see that someone else’s heart had been torn from his chest. A man she had known, had been forced to sleep with more than once. She had been violently ill, looking down at what remained of Pharus, unable not to remember him using her body, seeing what had now been done to his. She remembered the mist in the field, her hand on the mule. Voices, and the dogs hunting her. Martinian drawing his sword.
Already, curiously, the interlude in the forest itself was receding, blurring, becoming lost in a kind of fog of its own, too difficult to master or retain. Had she actually seen a zubir with those dark eyes, that dwarfing size? Had it really been that large? Kasia had the strangest sense, drowsy and half-entranced by the fire, that she was meant to have been dead by now, that her entire being was . . . unrooted, oddly light, because of that. A spark flew and landed on the cloak; she brushed it quickly away. Could the future of such a person be known? Could her grandmother have seen anything at all in this fire, or was Kasia now a blankness, unwritten from this moment forward, unknowable? A kind of living ghost? Or freed from fate because of that? We’ll talk tonight, Martinian had said in the litter, before drifting to sleep again. Need to sort out your life.
Her life. A north wind was blowing outside; a clear night tonight but very cold, winter behind the wind. She put more wood—a little wastefully—on the fire. Saw that her hands were shaking. She laid one palm against her chest, feeling for the presence, the beating of her heart. After a while she realized her cheeks were wet and she wiped away the tears.
SHE HAD FALLEN into a shallow, fitful sleep, but they made a great deal of noise coming up the stairs and one of the merchants in the room across the hall shouted at them, causing a soldier to pound truculently on the shouter’s door, eliciting further laughter from his fellows. Kasia was therefore on her feet in the middle of the room when they pushed open the unlocked door and Martinian stumbled in, supported—almost carried, in fact—by two soldiers of the Fourth Sauradian, with two more behind.
Weaving erratically, they led him over and spilled him onto the bed, good humoured and amused, despite—or because of—another furious volley of shouts from the room across. It was very late and they weren’t being quiet. Kasia knew all about this: by law, the Imperial Inns had to put up as many as twenty soldiers at a time free of charge, doubling up paying guests to make room for them. They had to do it, but no one needed to enjoy the disruption of those nights.
One of the soldiers, a Soriyyan by his colouring, ga
zed at Kasia in the flicker of the firelight. ‘He’s all yours,’ he said, gesturing to the man sprawled untidily on the bed. ‘Not much good to you. Want to come down with us? Men who c’n hold their wine then hold a girl?’
‘Shut fucking up,’ another said. Orders.’
The Soriyyan looked for a moment as if he’d object, but just then the man on the bed intoned, quite clearly, though with his eyes closed, ‘It is considered indisputable that the rhetoric of Kallimarchos was instrumental in the onset of the First Bassanid War. Given this as a proposition, ought later generations then lay the blame for so many cruel deaths at the philosopher’s tomb? A vexing question.’
There was an extreme, disconcerted silence, then two of the soldiers laughed. ‘Go to sleep, Rhodian,’ one of them said. ‘With luck, your head will be working again in the morning. Better men than you have been knocked senseless or bested in a drinking bout by the tribune.’
‘Not too many’ve had both happen,’ the Soriyyan added. ‘All hail the Rhodian!’ More laughter. The Soriyyan grinned, pleased with himself. They left, closing the door with a bang.
Kasia winced, then walked over and slid home the bolt. She heard the four of them pound, in sequence, on the merchant’s door across, then their boots sounded on the stairs descending to the ground-floor sleeping room.
She hesitated, then walked back towards the bed, looking uncertainly at the man lying there. The firelight made unstable shadows in the room. A log settled with a snapping sound. Martinian opened his eyes. ‘I begin to wonder if I was meant for the theatre,’ he said, speaking in Sarantine and in his normal voice. ‘Two nights in succession I’ve had to do this. Have I a future in the pantomime, do you think?’
Kasia blinked. ‘You aren’t . . . drunk, my lord?’
‘Not especially.’
‘But . . . ?’
‘Useful to let him best me in something. And Carullus can hold his wine. We might have been down there all night, and I need to sleep.’
‘Best you in something?’ Kasia heard herself say, in a voice her mother and others in the village would have recognized. ‘He knocked you senseless and nearly broke your jaw.’
‘Trivial. Well, for him it was.’ Martinian rubbed absently at his bearded cheek. ‘He had a weapon, no great achievement. Kasia, they carried me here. And carried a servant who struck an army officer. I made them do that. He lost a lot of prestige, Carullus did. Decent-enough man, for an Imperial soldier. And I wanted to sleep.’ He lifted a booted foot and she wrestled the boot off and then did the same with the other.
‘They said my father could drink most men down onto the tavern floor or off their couches at a banquet. Guess I inherited that from him,’ Martinian murmured vaguely, pulling his tunic over his head. Kasia said nothing. Slaves did not ask questions. ‘He’s dead,’ Martinian of Varena added. ‘On campaign against the Inicii. In Ferrieres.’ He wasn’t entirely sober, she realized, whatever he might say. The drinking had gone on a long time. He was bare-chested now, had matted curls of dark red hair on his chest. She had seen that when she bathed him yesterday.
‘I’m . . . Inici,’ she said, after a moment.
‘I know. So’s Vargos. Odd, in a way.’
‘The tribes in Sauradia are . . . different from those who went west to Ferrieres. The ones who went are . . . wilder.’
‘Wilder. I know. Why they went.’
There was a silence. He pushed himself up on an elbow and looked around the room in the wavering light. ‘A fire,’ he said. ‘Good. Build it up, Kasia.’ He didn’t call her Kitten. She went over quickly and knelt, putting on another log, pushing at it with the stick.
‘They didn’t bring you a cot,’ he said from the other side of the room. ‘They’ll assume there’s only one reason I bought you. I must tell you I was informed at great length downstairs that Inici girls, especially skinny ones, are evil-tempered and a waste of money. Is this true? Carullus did offer to spare me the duty of bedding you tonight while I was in pain. Nice of him, I thought. They should have put a cot in here.’
Kasia stayed where she was, looking at the fire. It was difficult to sort out his tone sometimes. ‘I have your cloak to sleep on,’ she said finally. ‘Over here.’
She busied herself sweeping ashes into the hearth. He probably did like boys, she decided. The pure-blooded Rhodians were said to be inclined that way, like Bassanids. It would make her nights easier.
‘Kasia, where’s home? Your home?’ he said.
She swallowed abruptly. This was not what she’d expected.
She turned, still kneeling, to look at him. ‘North, my lord. Most of the way to Karch.’ He had finished undressing himself, she saw, and was under the blanket now, sitting up, arms around his knees. The firelight moved on the wall behind him.
‘How were you captured? Or were you sold?’
She clasped her hands in her lap. ‘Sold,’ she said. ‘Last autumn. The plague took my father and brother. My mother had no choice.’
‘Not so,’ he said quickly. ‘There’s always a choice. Sold her daughter off to feed herself? How civilized.’
‘No,’ Kasia said, clenching her fists. ‘She . . . we . . . talked about it. When the slave train came. It was me or my sister, or we’d all have died in the winter. You won’t understand. There weren’t enough men to do the fields or hunt, nothing had been harvested. They bought six girls from my village, with grain, and coins for the market town. There was a plague. That . . . changes things.’
‘Oh, I know,’ he said softly. Then, after another silence, ‘Why you? Not your sister?’
She hadn’t expected that, either. No one had asked these things. ‘My mother thought she was . . . more likely to marry. With nothing to offer but herself.’
‘And you thought?’
Kasia swallowed again. Behind the beard and in the dim, uneven light it was impossible to discern his expression.
‘Why . . . how does this matter?’ she dared to ask.
He sighed. ‘You’re right. It doesn’t. Do you want to go home?’
‘ 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 life. 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, unsettling 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 Inici 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.