He accepted, with real gratitude. She took his cloak and laid it on a bench against the wall by the fire. Then she smiled at him sidelong and withdrew through an inner door. Crispin stood alone and looked around in the light of myriad candles. A room in sumptuous good taste; a little ornate to a western eye, but the Sarantines tended to be. Then he caught his breath.
There was a golden rose on a long table by the wall to his left. Slender as a living flower, seemingly as pliant, four buds on the long stem, thorns among the small, perfect leaves, all of gold, all four buds rendered in stages of unfolding, and a fifth, at the crown, fully opened, achieved, each thin, exquisite petal a marvel of the goldsmith’s craft, with a ruby at the centre of it, red as a fire in the candlelight.
The beauty caught at his heart, and the terrible fragility. If one were merely to take that long stem between two fingers and twist it would bend, distort, fall awry. The flower seemed almost to sway in a breeze that wasn’t there. So much perfection and so transient, so vulnerable. Crispin ached for the mastery of it—the time and care and craft brought to this accomplishment—and for the simultaneous perception that this artifice, this art, was as precarious as . . . as any joy in mortal life.
As a rose, perhaps, that died in a wind or at summer’s end.
He thought suddenly of the young queen of the Antae then, and of the message he carried, and he was aware of pity and fear within himself, a very long way from home.
A silver branching of candles wavered on the table by the rose. There was no sound, but the flicker of movement made him turn.
She had been on the stage in her youth, knew very well—even now—how to move with silence and a dancer’s grace. She was small, slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed, exquisite as the rose. She brought thorns to mind, the drawing of blood, the danger at the heart of beauty.
She had changed to a night robe of deep red, had had her women remove the spectacular headdress and the jewels at wrist and throat. Her hair was down now for the night, thick and long and dark, unsettling. There were diamonds still hanging at her ears, her only ornament, catching the light. Her scent was about her, drifting towards him through a space she defined, and surrounding her, also, was an aura: of power, and of amused intelligence, and of something else he could not name but knew he feared and was right to fear.
‘How deeply acquainted might you be, Rhodian, with the private chambers of royalty?’ Her voice was low, wry, shockingly intimate.
Careful, oh careful, he told himself, setting down his wine cup and bowing low, hiding a surging anxiety with the slowness of the movements. He straightened. Cleared his throat. ‘Not at all, my lady. I am honoured and out of my element.’
‘A Batiaran far from his peninsula? A fish netted from water? How would you taste, Caius Crispus of Varena?’ She did not move. The firelight was caught in her dark eyes and in the diamonds beside them. It flashed from the diamonds, was drowned in her eyes. She smiled.
She was toying with him. He knew this, but his throat was still dry. He coughed again, and said, ‘I have no idea. I am at your service in all things, thrice-exalted.’
‘You did say that. They shaved your beard, I understand. Poor man.’ She laughed, came forward then, straight towards him and then past, as he caught his breath. She stood by the long table, looking at the rose. ‘You were admiring my flower?’ Her voice was honey, or silk.
‘Very much, my lady. A work of great beauty and sadness.’
‘Sadness?’ She turned her head, looked at him.
He hesitated. ‘Roses die. An artifice so delicate reminds us of the . . . impermanence of all things. All beautiful things.’
Alixana said nothing for a time. Not a young woman any more. Her dark, accentuated eyes held his until he looked away and down. Her scent, this near, was intoxicating, eastern, it made him think of colours, many things did: this was near to the red of her robe, but deeper, darker, porphyry, in fact. The purple of royalty. He looked down and wondered: could that be intentional, or was it only him—turning scent, sound, taste into colour? There were hidden arts here in Sarantium of which he would know nothing. He was in the City of Cities, ornament of the world, eye of the universe. There were mysteries.
‘The impermanence of the beautiful. Well said. That,’ the Empress murmured, looking at the rose, ‘is why it is here, of course. Clever man. Could you, Rhodian, make me something in mosaic that suggests the opposite: a hint of what endures beyond the transitory?’
She had asked him here for a reason, after all. He looked up. ‘What would suggest that for you, Empress?’
‘Dolphins,’ she said, without any warning at all.
He felt himself go white.
She turned fully around and watched him, leaning against the ivory of the table, hands braced on either side of her, fingers spread. Her expression was thoughtful, evaluating; that disconcerted him more than irony would have done.
‘Drink your wine,’ the Empress said. ‘It is very good.’ He did. It was.
It didn’t help him. Not with this.
Dolphins were deadly at this point in the story of the world. Much more than simply marine creatures, leaping between water and air, graceful and decorative—the sort any woman might enjoy seeing on the walls of her rooms. Dolphins were entangled in paganism, or trammelled in the nets of Heladikian heresies, or both.
They carried souls from the mortal realm of the living through the echoing chambers of the sea to the realms of the Dead, and judgement. So the Ancients had believed in Trakesia long ago—and in Rhodias before Jad’s teachings came. Dolphins had served the many-named god of the Afterworld, conduits of the spirits of the dead, traversing the blurred space between life and what came after.
And some of that old, enduring paganism had crossed—through a different sort of blurred space—into the faith of Jad, and his son Heladikos, who died in his chariot bringing fire to men. When Heladikos’s chariot plunged, burning like a torch, into the sea—so the dark tale ran—it was the dolphins who came and bore his ruined beauty upon their backs. Making of themselves a living bier, they carried it to the ends of the uttermost sea of the world to meet his father, sinking low at dusk. And Jad had claimed the body of his child and taken it into his own chariot, and carried it down—as every night—into the dark. A deeper, colder dark that night, for Heladikos had died.
And so the dolphins were said to be the last creatures of the living world to see and touch beloved Heladikos, and for their service to him they were holy in the teachings of those who believed in Jad’s mortal son.
One might choose one’s deadly sacrilege. The dolphins carried souls to the dark god of Death in the pagans’ ancient pantheon, or they bore the body of the one god’s only son in a now-forbidden heresy.
Either way, either meaning, an artisan who placed dolphins on a ceiling or wall was inviting mortal consequences from an increasingly vigilant clergy. There had been dolphins once in the Hippodrome, diving to number the laps run. They were gone, melted down. Sea-horses counted the running now.
It was this Emperor, Valerius II, who had urged the joint Pronouncement of Athan, the High Patriarch in Rhodias, and Zakarios, the Eastern one here in the City. Valerius had worked very hard to achieve that rare agreement. Two hundred years of bitter, deadly dispute in the schismatic faith of Jad had been papered over with that document, but the price for whatever gains an ambitious Emperor and superficially united clergy might enjoy had been the casting of all Heladikians into heresy: at risk of denunciation, ritual cursing in chapels and sanctuaries, fire. It was rare to be executed in Valerius’s Empire for breaking the laws of man, but men were burned for heresy.
And it was Valerius’s Empress who was asking him now, scented and gleaming in red and threaded gold by late-night candlelight, for dolphins in her rooms.
He felt much too drained by all that had happened tonight to properly sort through this. He temporized, carefully. ‘They are handsome creatures, indeed, especially when they leap from the waves.’
>
Alixana smiled at him. ‘Of course they are.’ Her smile deepened. ‘They are also the bearers of Heladikos to the place where sea meets sky at twilight.’
So much for temporizing. At least he knew which sin he might be burned for committing.
She was making it easier for him, however. He met her eyes, which had not left his face. ‘Both Patriarchs have banned such teachings, Empress. The Emperor swore an oath in the old Sanctuary of Jad’s Wisdom to uphold their will in this.’
‘You heard of that? Even in Batiara? Under the Antae?’
‘Of course we did. The High Patriarch is in Rhodias, my lady.’
‘And did the king of the Antae . . . or his daughter after . . . swear a similar oath to uphold?’
A stunningly dangerous woman. ‘You know they did not, my lady. The Antae came to Jad by way of the Heladikian teachings.’
‘And have not changed their doctrines, alas.’
Crispin spun around.
The Empress merely turned her head and smiled at the man who had entered—as silently as she had—and had just spoken from the farthest door of the room.
For the second time, his heart racing, Crispin set down his wine and bowed to conceal a mounting unease. Valerius had changed neither his clothing nor his manner. He crossed to the wall himself and poured his own cup of wine. The three of them were alone, no servants in the room.
The Emperor sipped from his cup and looked at Crispin, waiting. An answer seemed to be expected.
It was very late; an utterly unanticipated mood seized Crispin, though it was one his mother and friends would all have claimed they knew. He murmured, ‘One of the Antae’s most venerated clerics has written that heresies are not like clothing styles or beards, my lord, to go in and out of fashion by the season or the year.’
Alixana laughed aloud. Valerius smiled a little, though the grey eyes remained attentive in the round, soft face. ‘I read that,’ he said. ‘Sybard of Varena. A Reply to a Pronouncement. An intelligent man. I wrote to him, saying as much, invited him here.’
Crispin hadn’t known that. Of course he hadn’t known that.
What he did know—what everyone seemed to know—was that Valerius’s manifest ambitions in the Batiaran peninsula derived much of their credibility from the religious schisms and the declared need to rescue the peninsula from ‘error.’ It was odd, and at the same time of a piece with what he was already learning about the man, that the Emperor might anchor a possible reconquest of Rhodias and the west in religion, and at the same time praise the Antae cleric whose work challenged, point by point, the document that gave him that anchor.
‘He declined the invitation,’ said Alixana softly, ‘with some unkind words. Your partner Martinian also declined our invitation. Why, Rhodian, do none of you want to come to us?’
‘Unfair, my heart. Caius Crispus has come, on cold autumn roads, braving a barber’s razor and our court . . . only to find himself beset by a mischievous Empress with an impious request.’
‘Better my mischief than Styliane’s malice,’ said Alixana crisply, still leaning back against the table. Her tone changed, slyly. It was interesting: Crispin knew the shadings of this voice, already. He felt as if he always had. ‘If heresies change by the season,’ she murmured, ‘may not the decorations of my walls, my lord Emperor? You have already conquered here, in any case.’
She smiled sweetly, at both of them. There was a brief silence.
‘What poor man,’ said the Emperor finally, shaking his head, his expression bemused, ‘may hope to be wise enough to have rejoinders for you?’
His Empress’s smile deepened. ‘Good. I may do it, then? I do want dolphins here. I shall make arrangements for our Rhodian to—’
She stopped. An Imperial hand was uplifted across the room, straight as a judge’s, halting her. ‘After,’ said Valerius sternly. ‘After the Sanctuary. If he chooses to do so. It is a heresy, seasonal or otherwise, and the weight of it, discovered, would fall on the artisan not the Empress. Consider. And decide after.’
‘After,’ said Alixana, ‘is likely to be a long time from now. You have built a very large Sanctuary, my lord. My chambers here are lamentably small.’ She made a moue of displeasure.
Crispin had an emerging sense that this was both a normal byplay for the two of them and something contrived to divert him. Why the latter, he wasn’t sure, but the thought produced an opposite effect: he remained uneasy and alert.
And there came, just then, a knocking at the outer door.
The Emperor of Sarantium looked over quickly, and then he smiled. He looked younger when he did, almost boyish. ‘Ah! Perhaps I am wise enough, after all. An encouraging thought. It appears,’ he murmured, ‘that I am about to win a wager. My lady, I shall look forward to your promised payment.’
Alixana looked put out. ‘I cannot believe she would do this. It must be something else. Something . . .’ She trailed off, biting at her lower lip. The lady-in-waiting had appeared at the inner doorway, eyebrows raised in inquiry. The Emperor set down his drink and silently withdrew past her, out of sight into the interior room. He was smiling as he went, Crispin saw.
Alixana nodded to her woman. The lady-in-waiting hesitated, and gestured towards her mistress and then at her own hair. ‘My lady . . . ? ’
The Empress shrugged, impatience flitting across her face. ‘People have seen more than my unbound hair, Crysomallo. Leave it be.’
Crispin stepped reflexively back towards the table with the rose as the door opened. Alixana stood not far away, imperious, for all the intimacy of her appearance. It did occur to him that whoever this was it could hardly be an intruder, else they’d not have gained entry into this palace, let alone caused the guards to tap on the door so late at night.
The woman stepped back a little and a man entered the room behind her, though only a pace or two. He cradled a small ivory box in both hands. He handed it to Crysomallo, and then, turning towards the Empress, performed a full court obeisance, head touching the floor three times. Crispin wasn’t certain, but he had a sense that such ceremony was excessive here, exaggerated. When the visitor finally straightened and then stood at Alixana’s gesture, Crispin recognized him: the lean, narrow-faced man who’d been standing behind the Strategos Leontes in the audience chamber.
‘You are a late visitor, secretary. Could this be a personal gift from you, or has Leontes something private he wishes said?’ The Empress’s tone was difficult to read: perfectly courteous, but no more than that.
‘His lady wife does, thrice-exalted. I bring a small gift from Styliane Daleina to her thrice-revered and beloved Empress. She would be honoured beyond her worth should you deign to accept it.’ The man looked quickly around as he finished speaking, and Crispin had the distinct sense that the secretary was memorizing the room. He could not miss the Empress’s unbound hair, or the privacy of this situation. Clearly, Alixana did not care in the least. Crispin wondered, again, what game he’d become a small piece in, how he was being deployed now and to what end.
The Empress nodded at Crysomallo, who unclasped a golden latch on the box and opened it. The woman was unable to hide her astonishment. She held up the object within. The small gift. There was a silence.
‘Oh, dear,’ said the Empress of Sarantium softly. ‘I have lost a wager.’
‘My lady?’ The secretary’s brow furrowed. It was not what he’d expected to hear.
‘Never mind. Tell the Lady Styliane we are pleased with her gesture and by the . . . celerity with which she chose to send it to us, keeping a hard-working scribe awake so late at night as a messenger. You may go.’
That was all. Courtesy, crispness, a dismissal. Crispin was still trying to absorb the fact that the staggeringly opulent pearl necklace he’d seen on Styliane Daleina—the one he’d drawn unwanted attention to—had just been presented to the Empress. The worth of it was past his ability even to imagine. He had a certainty, though—an absolute conviction—that had he not spoken as he had,
earlier, this would not have happened.
‘Thank you, most gracious lady. I shall hasten to relay your kind words. Had I known I might be interrupting . . .’
‘Come, Pertennius. She knew you would interrupt and so did you. You both heard me summon the Rhodian in the throne room.’
The man fell silent, his eyes dropped to the floor. He swallowed awkwardly. It was oddly pleasant, Crispin realized, to see someone else being discomfited by Alixana of Sarantium.
‘I thought . . . my lady. She thought . . . you might . . .’
‘Pertennius, poor man. You’ll do better going with Leontes to battlefields and writing about cavalry charges. Go to bed. Tell Styliane I am happy to accept her gift and that the Rhodian was indeed still with me, as she wished him to be, to see her make a gift that outstripped the one he offered her. You may also tell her,’ added the Empress, ‘that my hair still reaches the small of my back, unbound.’ She turned deliberately, as if to let the secretary see, and walked over to the table where the wine flask stood. She picked up the cup Valerius had set down.
Crysomallo opened the door. In the instant before the man named Pertennius—where had he heard that name today?—turned to leave, Crispin saw something flash in his eyes and as quickly disappear as the man repeated his full obeisance and then withdrew.
Alixana did not turn around until the door closed.
‘Jad curse you with cataracts and baldness,’ she said furiously, in that low, utterly magnificent voice.
The Emperor of Sarantium, so addressed by his wife as he came back into the room, was laughing with delight. ‘I am balding,’ he said. ‘A wasted curse. And if I develop cataracts you’ll have to surrender me to the physicians for treatment, or guide me through life with a tongue to my ear.’
Alixana’s expression, seen in profile, arrested Crispin for a moment. He was pretty certain it was an unguarded look, something disturbingly intimate. Something caught in his own heart, the past snagging on the present.