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 ruin, 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: mosaicist’s 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 of fish, 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 frighteningly 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. This 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 mother’s necklace about her throat, was his wife.
Even dreaming, Crispin understood.
It wasn’t difficult; it wasn’t subtle 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 Inici 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.
‘Oh, dear Jad. Oh, Jad. Go to sleep . . .’ He struggled to remember her name. He felt drugged, heavy, he wanted that palace again. Wanted it like some men want the juice of poppies, endlessly.
She was silent, motionless. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said.
‘We’re all afraid. Go to sleep.’
‘No. I mean, I would comfort you, but I’m afraid.’
‘Oh.’ It became unfairly needful to order his thoughts. To be here. His jaw hurt, his heart. ‘People I loved died. You can’t comfort me. Go to sleep.’
‘Your . . . children?’
Every word spoken was drawing him farther from that palace. ‘My daughters. Last summer.’ He took a breath. ‘I am ashamed to be here. I let them die.’ He had never said this. But it was true. He had failed them. And had survived.
‘Let them die? Of the plague?’ the Inici woman on his bed said, incredulous. ‘No one can save anyone from that.’
‘I know. Jad. I know. It doesn’t matter.’
After a moment, she said, ‘And your . . . their mother?’
He shook his head.
The god-cursed shutter was still banging. He wanted to go out into the savage night and rip it from the wall and lie down in the icy wind with Ilandra. ‘Kasia,’ he said. That was her name. ‘Go to sleep. It isn’t your duty to comfort here.’
‘Not a duty,’ she said.
So much anger in him. ‘Jad’s blood! What do you propose? That your lovemaking skills transport me to joy?’
She went rigid. Drew a breath. ‘No. No. No, I . . . have no skills. That wasn’t . . . what I meant.’
He closed his eyes. Why did he have to even address these things now? So vivid, so rich a dream: on tiptoe, within his arms, a gown he remembered, the necklace, a scent, softness of parted lips.
She was dead, a ghost, a body in a grave. I am afraid, Kasia of the Inicii had said. Crispin let out a ragged breath. That shutter still banging along the wall outside. Over and over and over. So inane. So . . . ordinary. He shifted in the bed.
‘Sleep here then,’ he said. ‘There is nothing to fear. What happened today is over now.’ A lie. It didn’t end until you died. Life was an ambush, wounds waiting for you.
He turned on his side, facing the door, making room for her. She didn’t move at first, then he felt her slide under both blankets. Her foot touched his, moved quickly away, but he realized from the icy touch how cold she must have been with the fire dead. It was the bottom of the night. Spirits in the wind? Souls? He closed his eyes. They could lie together. Share mortal warmth. Men bought tavern girls on winter nights for no more than this sometimes.
The zubir had been there in the palace and had disappeared. No obstacle. Nothing between. But there was. Of course there was. Imbecile, he could hear a voice saying. Imbecile. Crispin lay still for another long moment then, slowly, he turned.
She was lying on her back, staring up at darkness, still afraid. She had thought for a long time that she would die today, he knew. Die brutally. He tried to comprehend what such an expectation would be like. Moving as if through water, or in dream, he laid a hand to her shoulder, her throat, brushed some of the long golden hair back from her cheek. She was so young. He took another breath, deeply unsure, even now, still half lost in another place, but then he touched one small, firm breast through the thinness of her tunic. She never took her eyes from his.
‘Skills are a very small part of it,’ he said. His own voice sounded odd. Then he kissed her, as gently as he could.
He tasted salt again as he had in the dream. Drew back, looking down at her, at the tears. But she lifted a hand, touched his hair, then hesitated as if unsure what to do next, how to move—how to be—when it was by choice. The pain of others, he thought. The night so dark with the sun beneath the world. He lowered his head very slowly and kissed her again, then moved and brushed her nipple with his lips, through the tunic. Her hand stayed in his hair, tightening. Sleep was a refuge, he thought, walls were, wine, food, warmth, and this. And this. Mortal bodies in the dark.
‘You are not at Morax’s,’ he said. Her heart was so fast, he could feel it. The year she must have lived through. He intended to be careful, patient, but it had been a long time for him, and his own gathering urgency surprised and then mastered him. She held him close after, her body softer than he would have guessed, hands unexpectedly strong against his back. They slept like that for a while and later—nearer morning when they both awoke—he guided their pace more attentively, and in time he heard her begin to make her own sequence of discoveries, on a taken breath and another—like a climber reaching one ridge and then a higher one—before the god’s sun finally rose in testament to battles won again, if at cost, in the night.
The senior physician at the army base was a Bassanid, and skilful. The former was strictly against regulations, the latter so rare—and valuable—as to have caused the military governor commanding southern Sauradia to ignore all applicable bureaucratic and ecumenical rules. He wasn’t, as it happened, the only senior military official in the Empire to take this view. There were openly pagan physicians, Bassanids worshipping Perun and Anahita, Kindaths with their moon goddesses, all through the army. As between a regulation and a good doctor . . . there was no decision at all.
Unfortunately, from a practical viewpoint, the physician took a careful look at the mildly admonished Inici servant, examined a red sampling of his urine, and declared he was unable to ride a horse for a fortnight. This meant they had to commandeer a cart or a wagon for him. And since the girl was travelling east as well and women couldn’t ride horses, the wagon had to be large enough for two.
Then the artisan revealed that he had an acute dislike of riding, and since they were using wheeled transport in any case . . .
The military governor had his secretary sign the papers, wasting no more time than absolutely necessary on this distraction. The Emperor in his supreme wisdom wanted this man for something to do with the newest sanctuary in Sarantium. The newest, insanely expensive sanctuary. He had—through the lofty offices of the Chancellor—ordered good soldiers to spend their time tracking a Rhodian artisan on the road. A four-person military carriage was only one more insult.
In the prevailing circumstances the governor proved amenable to a diffident—if loquacious—suggestion from one of the tribunes of the Fourth Sauradian, the man who had found this party.
Carullus proposed that he accompany the artisan, following in the wake of a rapidly couriered letter from the governor, to add a direct personal appeal to the Master of Offices and to the Supreme Strategos, Leontes, that the arrears of pay be attended to as expeditiously as possible. The god knew, Carullus could talk, the governor thought glumly, dictating his letter for the military messenger. Might as well put his tongue to use.
It also appeared that the Rhodian had not, after all, been lax in responding to his invitation. The postal courier charged with the Imperial papers had taken an unconscionably long time to reach Varena. His name and civil service number were, as usual, on the envelope below the broken seal—the governor’s secretary had recorde
d them. Tilliticus. Pronobius Tilliticus.
The governor spent an irritated moment pondering what sort of foolish mother gave her son a name almost identical to that for female genital organs in current military slang. Then he dictated a postscript, suggesting to the Master of Offices that the courier be reprimanded. He was unable to resist adding an offer that important communications west to the Antae kingdom in Batiara might better be entrusted to the military. Despite his recently chronic stomach pains, the governor did smile sourly to himself, dictating that part of the letter. He sent off the messenger.
The artisan’s party stayed at the camp for two nights only, though the physician was unhappy about this speed. During the brief stay a notary attended upon the Rhodian to record and archive in his files—and forward copies, as requested, to the civil registry in the City—documents attesting to the freed status of the woman, Kasia of the Inicii.
At the same time, the recruiting centurion of the Fourth Sauradian cavalry dealt with the necessary protocols for the military conscription of the man, Vargos—a procedure that released him from his contract with the Imperial Post and triggered the immediate right to all moneys owing under his civil contract. Paperwork arranging the transfer of the appropriate sums to the military paymaster in the City was also processed. The centurion was entirely happy to do this, in fact . . . relations between the military and the civil service were about as cordial here as they were anywhere else. Which was to say, not at all.
The centurion was markedly less enthused about signing the release of the same fellow from his all-too-transitory military service. Had his instructions not been explicit about this, he might well have demurred. The man was strong and fit, and once he recovered from his accidental injuries would make an excellent soldier. They’d been coping with desertions—with pay more than half a year in arrears, it was not in the least surprising—and all the units were undermanned.