Thinking back, the Empress is very much aware of what must have been the underlying complexities of a holy woman’s actions that afternoon, the hidden and denied impulses stirring as she cleansed and then gazed at the undeveloped, naked form of the girl in the bath. But at the time she had only been aware of apprehension slowly giving way to a remarkable sensation of luxury: the hot water and the warm room, the hands of someone else tending to her.
Five years later she was an official dancer for the Blues, growing in recognition, the child-mistress of one of the more notorious of the faction’s aristocratic patrons. And she was already known for her love of bathing.Twice a day at the bathhouse when she could, amid languorous perfumes and warmth and the drifting of steam, which meant shelter and comfort to her in a life that had known neither.
Nor has this changed, though she now knows the most extreme comforts in the world. And to her the most remarkable thing, really, about all of this is how vividly, how intensely, she can still remember being the girl in that small bath.
The next letter, read while the Empress is being powdered, dried, painted, and dressed by her ladies, is from a nomadic religious leader in the desert south of Soriyya. A certain number of these desert wanderers are now Jaddite in their beliefs, having abandoned their incomprehensible heritage built around wind spirits and sets of holy lines, invisible to sight, mapping and crisscrossing the sands, marking sacred places and correspondences.
All the desert tribes embracing Jad have also adopted a belief in the god’s son. This often happens among those converting to the faith of the sun god: Heladikos is the way to his father. Officially, the Emperor and Patriarchs have forbidden such beliefs. The Empress, usefully thought to be sympathetic to such out-of-favour doctrines, tends to conduct the exchange of letters and gifts with the tribesmen. They can be significant, often are. Even with the expensively bought peace with the Bassanids in place, in the unstable regions of the south allies are impermanent and important, valuable for hired warriors, and for gold and silphium—that extravagantly expensive spice—and for offering caravan routes for eastern goods coming around Bassania.
This letter ends without any promise of physical delight. The Empress refrains from expressing disappointment. Her current secretary has no sense of humour and her attendants become distracted when amused. The desert leader does offer a prayer for light to attend upon her soul.
Alixana, dressed now, sipping at a cup of honeyed wine, dictates replies to both communications. She has just finished the second when the door opens, without a knock. She looks up.
‘Too late,’ she murmurs. ‘My lovers have fled and I am, as you see, entirely respectable.’
‘I shall destroy forests and cities searching for them,’ the thrice-exalted Emperor, Jad’s holy regent upon earth, says as he takes a cushioned bench and accepts a cup of the wine (without honey) from one of the women. ‘I shall grind their bones into powder. May I please proclaim that I found Vertigus importuning you and have him torn apart between horses?’
The Empress laughs and then gestures, briefly. The room empties of secretary and attendants. ‘Money, again? I could sell my jewels,’ she says, when they are alone.
He smiles. His first smile of the day, which for him has gone on for some time by now. She rises, brings a plate of cheese, fresh bread, cold meats to him. It is a custom, they do this every morning when demands allow. She kisses his forehead as she sets down the plate. He touches her wrist, breathing in her scent. In a way, he thinks, a new part of his day begins when he first does so. Each morning.
‘I’d make more selling you,’ he says.
‘How exciting. Gunarch of Moskav would pay.’
‘He can’t afford you.’ Valerius looks around the bathing room, red and white marble and ivory and gold, jewelled chalices and drinking cups and alabaster caskets on the tables. Two fires are lit; oil lamps hang from the ceiling in silver-wire baskets. ‘You are a very expensive woman.’
‘Of course I am. Which reminds me. I still want my dolphins.’ She gestures towards the upper part of the wall on the far side of the room. ‘When are you done with the Rhodian? I want him to start here.’
Valerius looks at her repressively, says nothing.
She smiles, all innocence, wide-eyed. ‘Gunarch of Moskav writes that he could offer me delights such as I have only dreamt of in the dark.’
Valerius nods absently. ‘I’m sure.’
‘Speaking of dreams . . . ’ his Empress says. The Emperor catches the shift in tone—she is skilled at such changes, of course—and looks at her as she returns to her own seat.
‘I suppose we were,’ he says. There is a silence. ‘Better than talking of illicit dolphins. What is it now, love?’
She shrugs, delicately. ‘Clever you. The dream was about dolphins.’
The Emperor’s expression is wry. ‘Clever me. I have just been steered like a boat where you wanted to go.’
She smiles, but not with her eyes. ‘Not really. It was a sad dream.’
Valerius looks at her. ‘You really do want them for these walls?’
He is deliberately misunderstanding, and she knows it. They have been here before. He doesn’t like talking about her dreams. She believes in them, he does not, or says he does not.
‘I want them only on the walls,’ she says. ‘Or in the sea far from us for a long time yet.’
He sips his wine. Takes a bite of cheese with the bread. Country food, his preference at this hour. His name was Petrus, in Trakesia.
‘None of us knows where our souls travel,’ he says, at length, ‘in life, or after.’ He waits until she looks up and meets his eyes. His face is round, smooth, innocuous. No one is deceived by this, not any more. ‘But I believe I am unshakeable on this war in the west, love, proof against dreams and argument.’
After a time, she nods. Not a new conversation, or a new conclusion. The dream in the night was real, though. She has always had dreams that stay with her.
They talk of affairs of state: taxation, the two Patriarchs, the opening ceremonies for the Hippodrome, a few days off. She tells him of an amusing wedding taking place today, with a surprisingly fashionable guest list.
‘There are rumours,’ she murmurs, pouring more wine for him, ‘that Lysippus has been seen in the city.’ Her expression is suddenly mischievous.
His looks rueful, as if caught out.
She laughs aloud. ‘I knew it! You’ve been planting them?’
He nods. ‘I should sell you somewhere, far away. I have no secrets. Yes, I’m . . . testing things.’
‘You would really bring him back?’
Lysippus the Calysian, gross of body and of appetite, was nonetheless the most efficient and incorruptible Quaestor of Imperial Revenue Valerius has ever had. His association with the Emperor is said to go back a very long way and involve some details that are unlikely to ever be made known. The Empress has never even asked, in fact; not really wanting to know. She has her own memories—and dreams, sometimes—of men screaming in the street one morning below rooms he’d rented for her in an expensive district, in the days when they were young and Apius was Emperor. She is not overly delicate about such things, cannot be after that childhood in the Hippodrome and the theatre, but this memory—with the smell of charred flesh—has lingered and will not leave.
The Calysian has been exiled nearly three years now, in the wake of the Victory Riot.
‘I’d bring him back,’ the Emperor says. ‘If they let me. I’d need the Patriarch to absolve him and the accursed factions to be calm about it. Best during the racing season, when they have other things to scream about.’
She smiles a little. He doesn’t like the racing, it is an ill-guarded secret. ‘Where is he now, really?’
Valerius shrugs. ‘North still, I assume. He writes from an estate near Eubulus. Has resources enough to do whatever he likes. Is probably bored. Terrifying the countryside. Stealing children by dark of moon.’
She makes a face at that. ??
?Not a pleasant man.’
He nods. ‘Not in the least. Ugly habits. But I need money, love, and Vertigus is next to useless.’
‘Oh, I agree,’ she murmurs. ‘You can’t imagine, how useless.’ She runs a tongue across her lips. ‘I think Gunarch of Moskav will please me much more.’ She is hiding something, though. A feeling, distant intuition. Dolphins and dreams and souls.
He laughs, has to laugh, eventually takes leave after finishing his quick meal. There are reports from the military and provincial governors to be read and responded to back in the Attenine Palace. She is receiving a delegation of clerics and holy women from Amoria in her own reception rooms, will sail in the harbour after, if the winds are light. She enjoys going out to the islands in the strait or the inner sea, and with winter ending she can do so again on a mild day. There is no formal banquet tonight. They are to dine together with a small number of courtiers, listening to a musician from Candaria.
In the event, they will do this, enjoying the elusive, plangent instrumentation, but they will be joined for wine afterwards—some might think unexpectedly—by the Supreme Strategos Leontes and his tall, fair wife, and a third person, also a woman, and royal.
Pardos sprinted for all he was worth, cursing himself all the while. He had spent his entire life in the rougher quarters of Varena, a city known for drunken Antae soldiers and for brawling apprentices. He knew he was an idiot for having intervened here, but a drawn sword and a man slain in broad daylight had taken the laneway encounter past the point of the usual bruises and bangings. He’d charged in, not stopping to think, administered some blows of his own—and now found himself pelting headlong beside a greying Bassanid through a city he didn’t know at all, with a shouting band of young aristocrats in flat-out pursuit. He didn’t even have his staff.
He’d been known for a cautious young man at home, but being careful didn’t always keep you out of trouble. He knew what they had to do, prayed only that the doctor’s older legs were equal to the pace.
Pardos whipped out of the laneway, skidding left into a wider street, and knocked over the first cart—a fishmonger’s—that he saw. Couvry had done that once under similar circumstances. A shriek of outrage followed him; he didn’t look back. Crowds and chaos were what they needed, to screen their flight and to provide some deterrent to fatal violence if they were caught—though he was uncertain how easily deterred their pursuers might be.
Best not to test that.
Beside him the doctor seemed to be keeping up—he even reached over as they careened around another corner and pulled down the awning over the portico of an icon shop. Not the wisest choice for a Bassanid, perhaps, but he did succeed in spilling a table full of Blessed Victims into the muddy street, scattering the beggars gathered around it, creating further disruption behind them. Pardos glanced over; the doctor was grimfaced, his legs pumping hard.
As they ran, Pardos kept looking for one of the Urban Prefect guards—surely they would be about, in this rough neighbourhood? Weren’t swords supposed to be illegal in the City? The young patricians pursuing them appeared not to believe so, or to care. He abruptly decided to make for a chapel, a larger one than the nondescript little hole in which he’d been chanting the morning invocation after arriving in the city at sunrise and weaving his way down from the triple walls. He’d been planning to take an inexpensive room near the harbour—always the cheapest part of a city—and then head for an encounter he’d been thinking about since leaving home.
The room would have to wait.
There were heavy morning crowds now, and they had to twist and dodge as best they could, earning curses and a tardy blow aimed at Pardos from one off-duty soldier. But this meant that those chasing them would surely be stringing out by now, and might even lose sight of them if Pardos and the doctor—he really was moving quite well for a greybeard—managed to take a sufficiently erratic path.
Glancing up constantly to get his bearings, Pardos glimpsed—through a break in the multi-storied buildings— a golden dome larger than any he’d ever seen before, and he abruptly changed his thinking, even as they ran.
‘That way!’ he gasped, pointing.
‘Why are we running?’ the Bassanid burst out. ‘There are people here! They won’t dare—’
‘They will! They’ll kill us and pay a fine! Come on!’
The doctor said no more, saving his breath. He followed as Pardos cut sharply off the street they were on and angled across a wide square. They hurtled past a bedraggled Holy Fool and his small crowd, hit by a whiff of the man’s foul, unwashed odour. Pardos heard a sharp cry from behind—some of the pursuers still had them in sight. A stone whizzed past his head. He looked back.
One pursuer. Only one. That changed things.
Pardos stopped, and turned.
The doctor did the same. A fierce-looking but extremely young man in green robes, eastern-styled, with earrings and a golden necklace and long, unkempt hair— not one of the original group—slowed uncertainly, then fumbled at his belt and pulled out a short sword. Pardos looked around, swore, and then darted up to the Holy Fool. Braving the maggoty, fetid stench of the man, he seized his oak staff, snapping an apology over his shoulder. He ran directly at their young pursuer.
‘You idiot!’ he screamed, waving the staff wildly. ‘You’re alone! There’s two of us!’
The young man—belatedly apprehending this significant truth—looked quickly over his shoulder, saw no immediately arriving reinforcements, appeared suddenly less fierce.
‘Run!’ screamed the doctor at Pardos’s side, brandishing a knife.
The young man looked at the two of them and elected to follow the advice. He ran.
Pardos hurled the borrowed staff back towards the Holy Fool on his small platform. ‘Come on!’ he rasped at the doctor. ‘Head for the Sanctuary!’ He pointed. They turned together, crossed the square, and raced up another laneway on the far side
It wasn’t far now, as the lane—blessedly level now— gave suddenly onto an enormous forum with arched porticoes and shops all around it. Pardos swept past two boys playing with a hoop and a man selling roasted nuts at a brazier. He saw the looming bulk of the Hippodrome on his left and a pair of huge bronze gates in a wall that had to be the one guarding the Imperial Precinct. There was an enormous equestrian statue in front of the gates. He ignored these splendours for now, running for all he was worth diagonally across the forum towards a long, wide, covered porch with two more huge doors behind it and a dome rising above and behind that would have taken away his breath if he’d had any breath left to lose.
He and the Bassanid leaped and dodged among masons and masonry carts and brick piles and—familiar sight!—an outdoor oven for quicklime near the portico. As they reached the steps, Pardos heard the pursuing cry behind him again. He and the doctor took the steps side by side and stumbled to a stop, breathing hard, before the doors.
‘No one allowed!’ snapped a guard—there were two of them. ‘They are at work inside!’
‘Mosaicist,’ gasped Pardos. ‘Here from Batiara! Those youths are after us!’ He pointed back across the forum. ‘They killed someone already! With swords!’
The guards glanced over. Half a dozen of the young pursuers had now made it this far, running in a tight cluster. They had weapons drawn—in daylight, in the forum. Impossible to credit, or so wealthy they didn’t even care. Pardos seized one of the heavy door handles, pulled it open, pushed the doctor quickly inside. Heard the piercing, satisfying sound of a guard whistling for support. They would be safe in here for now, he was sure of it. The doctor was bent over, hands on his hips, breathing heavily. He gave Pardos a sidelong glance and a nod, obviously registering the same thing.
Later, much later, Pardos would give some thought to what the morning’s sequence of interventions and activities suggested about changes in himself, but for the moment he was only moving and reacting.
He looked up. He reacted, but he didn’t move.
In fact, he f
elt suddenly as though his boots were set into the marble floor like . . . tesserae in a setting bed, fixed for centuries to come.
He stood so, rooted, trying to deal first with the sheer size of the space encompassed here, the dim, vast aisles and bays receding into an illusion of endlessness down corridors of pale, filtered light. He saw the massive columns piled upon each other like playthings for the giants of legend from Finabar, the lost, first world of the Antae’s pagan faith, where gods walked among men.
Overwhelmed, Pardos looked down at the flawless, polished marble of the floor, and then—taking a deep breath—up again, all the way up, to see, floating, floating, the great dome itself, inconceivably immense. And upon it, taking shape even now, was what Caius Crispus of Varena, his teacher, was devising amid this holiness.
White and gold tesserae on a blue ground—blue such as Pardos had never seen in Batiara and had never expected to see in his life—defined the vault of the heavens. Pardos recognized the hand and style immediately. Whoever had been in charge of these decorations when Crispin arrived from the west was no longer the designer here.
Pardos had been taught by the man doing this, master to apprentice.
What he couldn’t yet begin to grasp—and he knew he would need to spend a long time looking to even make a start—was the colossal scale of what Crispin was doing on this dome. A design equal to the vastness of the setting.
The doctor, beside him, was leaning against a marble column now, still catching his breath. The marble was the green-blue colour, in the muted light, of the sea on a cloudy morning. The Bassanid was silent, slowly looking about. Above the grey-streaked beard his eyes were wide. Valerius’s Sanctuary was the talk and rumour of the known world, and they were standing within it now.