Crispin’s eyebrows met when he frowned. ‘We have been friends a long time. Please do not talk to me that way.’
‘We have been friends a long time. No one else will,’ said Martinian implacably. ‘One in four people died here last summer, following the same numbers the summer before. More than that, they say, elsewhere. The Antae used to worship their own dead, with candles and invocations. I suppose they still do, in Jad’s sanctuaries instead of oak groves or crossroads, but not . . . Caius, not by following them into a living death.’
Martinian looked down as he finished at the twisted hat in his hands.
One in four. Two summers in succession. Crispin knew it. The burial mound behind them was only one among many. Houses, whole quarters of Varena and other cities of Batiara still lay deserted. Rhodias itself, which had never really recovered from the Antae sack, was a hollow place, forums and colonnades echoing with emptiness. The High Patriarch in his palace there was said to walk the corridors alone of a night, speaking to spirits unseen by men. Madness came with the plague. And a brief, savage war had come among the Antae, as well, when King Hildric died, leaving only a daughter after him. Farms and fields everywhere had been abandoned, too large to be worked by those left alive. There had been tales of children sold into slavery by their parents for want of food or firewood as winter came.
One in four. And not only here in Batiara. North among the barbarians in Ferrieres, west in Esperana, east in Sauradia and Trakesia, indeed all through the Sarantine Empire and into Bassania and probably beyond, though tales didn’t run that far. Sarantium itself hard hit, by report. The whole world dredged deep by Death’s hunger.
But Crispin had had three souls in Jad’s creation to live with and love, and all three were gone. Was the knowledge of other losses to assuage his own? Sometimes, half asleep at night in the house, a wine flask empty by his bed, he would lie in the dark and think he heard breathing, a voice, one of the girls crying aloud in her dreams in the next room. He would want to rise to comfort her. Sometimes he would rise, and only come fully awake as he stood up, naked, and became aware of the appalling depth of stillness around him in the world.
His mother had suggested he come live with her. Martinian and his wife had invited him to do the same. They said it was unhealthy for him to stay alone with only the servants in a house full of memories. There were rooms he could take above taverns or inns where he would hear the sounds of life from below or along hallways. He had been urged, actively solicited, to marry again after most of the year had passed. Jad knew, enough widows had been left with too-wide beds, and enough young girls needed a decent, successful man. Friends told him this. He still seemed to have friends, despite his best efforts. They told him he was gifted, celebrated, had a life in front of him yet. How could people not understand the irrelevance of such things? He told them that, tried to tell them.
‘Good night,’ Martinian said.
Not to him. Crispin looked over. The others were leaving, following the road the courier had taken back to the city. End of day. Sun going down. It was quite cold now.
‘Good night,’ he echoed, lifting a hand absently to the men who worked for them and to the others engaged in finishing the building itself. Cheerful replies followed. Why should they not be cheerful? A day’s work done, the rains had passed for a time, the harvest was in with winter not yet here, and there was splendid new gossip now to trade in the taverns and around hearth fires tonight. An Imperial Summons for Martinian to the City, an amusing game played with a pompous eastern courier.
The stuff of life, bright coinage of talk and shared conjecture, laughter, argument. Something to drink on, to regale a spouse, a sibling, a longtime servant. A friend, a parent, an innkeeper. A child.
Two children.
Who knows love?
Who says he knows love?
What is love, tell me.
‘I know love,’
says the littlest one . . .
A Kindath song, that one. Ilandra had had a nurse from among the moon-worshippers, growing up in the wine country south of Rhodias where many of the Kindath had settled. A tradition in her family, to be nursed by them, and to choose among the Kindath for their physicians. A better family than his own, though his mother had connections and dignity. He’d married well, people had said, understanding nothing. People didn’t know. How could they know? Ilandra used to sing the tune to the girls at night. If he closed his eyes he could have her voice with him now.
If he died he might join her in the god’s Light. All three of them.
‘You are afraid,’ Martinian said again, a human voice in the world’s twilight, intruding. Crispin heard anger this time. Rare, in a kindly man. ‘You are afraid to accept that you have been allowed to live, and must do something with that grace.’
‘It is no grace,’ he said. And immediately regretted the sour, self-pitying tone in the words. Lifted a quick hand to forestall a rebuke. ‘What must I do to make everyone happy, Martinian? Sell the house for a pittance to one of the land speculators? Move in with you? And with my mother? Marry a fifteen-year-old ready to whelp children? Or a widow with land and sons already? Both? Take Jad’s vows and join the clerics? Turn pagan? Become a Holy Fool?’
‘Go to Sarantium,’ said his friend.
‘No.’
They looked at each other. Crispin realized that he was breathing hard. The older man said, his voice soft now in the lengthening shadows, ‘That is too final for something so large. Say it again in the morning and I’ll never speak of this again. On my oath.’
Crispin, after a silence, only nodded. He needed a drink, he realized. An unseen bird called, clear and far from towards the woods. Martinian rose, clapped his hat on his head against the sundown wind. They walked together back into Varena before the night curfew sounded and the gates were locked against whatever lay outside in the wild forests, the night fields and lawless roads, in the moonlit, starlit air where daemons and spirits assuredly were.
Men lived behind walls, when they could.
IN THE LAST OF the light, Crispin went to his favourite baths, nearly deserted at this hour. Most men visited the baths in the afternoon, but mosaicists needed light for their work and Crispin preferred the quiet at the end of day now. A few men were taking exercise with the heavy ball, ponderously lobbing it back and forth, naked and sweating with exertion. He nodded to them in passing, without stopping. He took some steam first, and then the hot and cold waters, and had himself oiled and rubbed down—his autumn regimen, against the chill. He spoke to no one beyond civil greetings in the public rooms at the end, where he had a beaker of wine brought to him at his usual couch. After, he reclaimed the Imperial Packet from the attendant with whom he had checked it and, declining an escort, walked home to drop the packet and change for dinner. He intended not to discuss the matter tonight, at all.
‘YOU ARE GOING TO GO, then. To Sarantium?’
Certain intentions, in the presence of his mother, remained largely meaningless. That much was unchanged. Avita Crispina signalled, and the servant ladled out more of the fish soup for her son. In the light of the candles, he watched the girl withdraw gracefully to the kitchen. She had the classic Karchite colouring. Their women were prized as house slaves by both the Antae and the native Rhodians.
‘Who told you?’ They were alone at dinner, reclining on facing couches. His mother had always preferred the formal old fashions.
‘Does it matter?’
Crispin shrugged. ‘I suppose not.’ A sanctuary full of men had heard that courier. ‘Why am I going to go, Mother, do tell me?’
‘Because you don’t want to. You do the opposite of what you think you should. A perversity of behaviour. I have no idea where you derived it.’
She had the audacity to smile, saying that. Her colour was good tonight, or else the candles were being kind. He had no tesserae so white as her hair, none even close. In Sarantium the Imperial Glassworks had, rumour told, a method of making . . .
&n
bsp; He halted that line of thought.
‘I don’t do any such thing. I refuse to be so obvious. I may—sometimes—be a little imprudent when provoked. The courier today was a complete and utter fool.’
‘And you told him so, of course.’
Against his will, Crispin smiled. ‘He told me I was, actually.’
‘That means he isn’t, to be so perceptive.’
‘You mean it isn’t obvious?’
Her turn to smile. ‘My mistake.’
He poured himself another cup of the pale wine and mixed it half-and-half with water. In his mother’s house he always did.
‘I’m not going,’ he said. ‘Why would I want to go so far, with winter coming?’
‘Because,’ said Avita Crispina, ‘you aren’t entirely a fool, my child. We’re talking about Sarantium, Caius, dear.’
‘I know what we are talking about. You sound like Martinian.’
‘He sounds like me.’ An old jest. Crispin didn’t smile this time. He ate some more of the fish soup, which was very good.
‘I’m not going,’ he repeated later, at the doorway, bending to salute her on the cheek. ‘Your cook is too skilful for me to bear the thought of leaving.’ She smelled, as always, of lavender. His first memory was of that scent. It ought to have been a colour, he thought. Scents, tastes, sounds often attained hues in his mind, but this one didn’t. The flower might be violet, almost porphyry, in fact—the royal colour—but the scent wasn’t. It was his mother’s scent, simply that.
Two servants, holding cudgels, were waiting to walk him home in the dark.
‘There are better cooks than mine in the east. I shall miss you, child,’ she replied calmly. ‘I expect regular letters.’
Crispin was used to this. It still made him snort with exasperation as he walked away. He glanced back once and saw her in the spill of light, clad in a dark green robe. She lifted a hand to him and went within. He turned the corner, one of her men on either side of him, and walked the short distance to his home. He dismissed his mother’s servants and stood a moment outside, cloaked against the chill, looking up.
Blue moon westering now in the autumn sky. Full as his heart once had been. The white moon, rising from the eastern end of his street, framed on both sides and below by the last houses and the city walls, was a pale, waning crescent. The cheiromancers attached meaning to such things. They attached meaning to everything overhead.
Crispin wondered if he could find a meaning to attach to himself. To whatever he seemed to have become in the year since a second plague summer had left him alive to bury a wife and two daughters himself. In the family plot, beside his father and grandfather. Not in a lime-strewn mound. Some things were not to be endured.
He thought about the torch of Heladikos he had contrived today on the small dome. There still remained, like a muted shadow of colour, this pride in his craft, this love for it. Love. Was that still the word?
He did want to see this latest artifice by candlelight: an extravagant blazing of candles and oil lanterns all through the sanctuary, lifting fire to light the fire he’d shaped in stone and glass. He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted.
That, Martinian had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect.
He would see it, Crispin knew, at the dedication of the sanctuary at autumn’s end, when the young queen and her clerics and pompous emissaries from the High Patriarch in Rhodias—if not the Patriarch himself—laid King Hildric’s bones formally to rest. They would not stint on candles or oil then. He’d be able to judge his work that day, harshly or otherwise.
He never did, as events unfolded. He never did see his mosaic torch on that sanctuary dome outside the walls of Varena.
As he turned to enter his own house, key to hand—the servants having been told, as usual, not to wait up—a rustling gave him warning, but not enough.
Crispin managed to lash out with a fist and catch a man in the chest, hard. He heard a thick grunt, drew breath to cry out, then felt a sack dropped over his head and tightened expertly at his throat, blinding and choking him at once. He coughed, smelled flour, tasted it. He kicked out violently, felt his foot meet a knee or shin and heard another muffled cry of pain. Lashing and twisting, Crispin clawed at the choking hold on his throat. He couldn’t bite, from inside the bag. His assailants were silent, invisible. Three of them? Four? They had almost certainly come for the money that accursed courier had declared to the whole world was in the packet. He wondered if they’d kill him when they found he didn’t have it. Decided it was probable. Pondered, with a far part of his mind, why he was struggling so hard.
He remembered his knife, reached for it with one hand, while raking for the arm at his throat with the other. He scratched, like a cat or a woman, drew blood with his fingernails. Found the knife hilt as he twisted and writhed. Jerked his blade free.
HE CAME TO, slowly, and gradually became aware of painful, flickering light and the scent of perfume. Not lavender. His head hurt, not altogether unexpectedly. The flour sack had been removed—obviously: he could see blurred candles, shapes behind them and around, vague as yet. His hands appeared to be free. He reached up and very gingerly felt around the egg-shaped lump at the back of his skull.
At the edge of his vision, which was not, under the circumstances, especially acute, someone moved then, rising from a couch or a chair. He had an impression of gold, of a lapis hue.
The awareness of scent—more than one, in fact, he now realized—intensified. He turned his head. The movement made him gasp. He closed his eyes. He felt extremely ill.
Someone—a woman—said, ‘They were instructed to be solicitous. It appears you resisted.’
‘Very . . . sorry,’ Crispin managed. ‘Tedious of me.’
He heard her laughter. Opened his eyes again. He had no idea where he was.
‘Welcome to the palace, Caius Crispus,’ she said. ‘We are alone, as it happens. Ought I to fear you and summon guards?’
Fighting a particularly determined wave of nausea, Crispin propelled himself to a sitting position. An instant later he staggered upright, his heart pounding. He tried, much too quickly, to bow. He had to clutch urgently at a table top to keep himself from toppling. His vision swirled and his stomach did the same.
‘You are excused the more extreme rituals of ceremony,’ said the only living child of the late King Hildric.
Gisel, queen of the Antae and of Batiara and his own most holy ruler under Jad, who paid a symbolic allegiance to the Sarantine Emperor and offered spiritual devotion to the High Patriarch and to no one else alive, looked gravely at him with wide-set eyes.
‘Very . . . extremely . . . kind of you. Your Majesty,’ Crispin mumbled. He was trying, with limited success, to make his eyes stop blurring and become useful in the candlelight. There seemed to be random objects swimming in the air. He was also having some difficulty breathing. He was alone in a room with the queen. He had never even seen her, except at a distance. Artisans, however successful or celebrated, did not hold nocturnal, private converse with their sovereign. Not in the world as Crispin knew it.
His head felt as if a small but insistent hammer inside it were trying to pound its way out. His confusion was extreme, disorienting. Had she captured him or rescued him? And why, in either case? He didn’t dare ask. Amid the perfumes he smelled flour again suddenly. That would be himself. From the sack. He looked down at his dinner tunic and made a sour face. The blue was streaked and smeared a greyish-white. Which meant that his hair and beard . . .
‘You were attended to, somewhat, while you slept,’ said the queen, graciously enough. ‘I had my own physician summoned. He said bleeding was not immediately necessary. Would a glass of wine be of help?’
Crispin made a sound that he trusted to convey restrained, well-bred assent. She did not laugh again, or smile. It occurred to him that this was a woman not unused to observing the effects of
violence upon men. A number of well-known incidents, unbidden, came into his head. Some were quite recent. The thought of them did nothing to ease him at all.
The queen made no movement, and a moment later Crispin realized that she had meant what she said quite literally. They were alone in this room. No servants, not even slaves. Which was simply astonishing. And he could hardly expect her to serve him wine. He looked around and, more by luck than any effective process of observation, encountered a flask and cups on the table by his elbow. He poured, carefully, and watered two cups, unsure whether that was a presumption. He was not conversant with the Antae court. Martinian had taken all their commissions from King Hildric and then his daughter, and had delivered the reports.
Crispin looked up. His eyesight seemed to be improving as the hammer subsided a little and the room elected to stabilize. He saw her shake her head at the cup he had poured for her. He set it down. Waited. Looked at her again.
The queen of Batiara was tall for a woman and unsettlingly young. Seen this closely, she had the straight Antae nose and her father’s strong cheekbones. The wide-set eyes were a much-celebrated blue, he knew, though he couldn’t see that clearly in the candlelight. Her hair was golden, bound up, of course, held by a golden circlet studded with rubies.
The Antae had worn bear grease in their hair when they’d first come to settle in the peninsula. This woman was not, manifestly, an exponent of such traditions. He imagined those rubies—he couldn’t help himself—set in his mosaic torch on the sanctuary dome. He imagined them gleaming by candlelight there.
The queen wore a golden sun disk about her throat, an image of Heladikos upon it. Her robe was blue silk, threaded with fine gold wire, and there was a purple band running down the left side, from high collar to ankle. Only royalty wore purple, in keeping with a tradition going back to the Rhodian Empire at its own beginnings six hundred years ago.
He was alone in a palace room at night with the headache of his life and a queen—his queen—regarding him with a mild, steady appraisal.
It was common opinion, all through the Batiaran peninsula, that the queen was unlikely to live through the winter. Crispin had heard wagers offered and taken, at odds.