A short time later Crispin found himself in a long, sleek Imperial craft cutting through the crowded harbour, past a cacophony of construction and the loading and unloading of barrels and crates of goods, out to where the noise receded and a clean wind was there to be caught by the white and purple sails.
On the deck, at the railing, Alixana was looking back at the harbour. Sarantium rose beyond it, brilliant in sunlight, domes and towers and the piled houses of wood and stone. They could hear another sound now: the chariots were in the Hippodrome today. Crispin looked up at the sun. They were probably up to the sixth or seventh race by now, the midday break to come, then the afternoon’s running. Scortius of the Blues had still been missing as of last night. The City spoke of that as much as it talked of war.
He stood uncertainly a little behind the Empress. He didn’t like boats, but this one was moving easily through the sea, expertly handled, and the wind was not yet strong. They were the only passengers, he realized. He made a concerted effort to bring his mind, his thinking, back from the scaffolding and his daughters, what he had expected would be the nature of today’s demands upon him.
Without turning her head, Alixana said, ‘Have you sent to Varena to advise them what is coming? Your friends, family?’
Today’s demands were evidently going to be otherwise.
He remembered this from before: she used directness as a weapon when she chose. He swallowed. What use dissembling? ‘I wrote two letters, to my mother and my dearest friend . . . but there isn’t much point. They all know there is a threat.’
‘Of course they do. That’s why the lovely young queen sent you here with a message, and then followed herself. What does she have to say about all . . . this?’ The Empress gestured at the ships massed behind them in the harbour. Gulls wheeled in the sky, cutting across the line of their own wake in the sea.
‘I have no idea,’ Crispin said truthfully. ‘I would assume you’d know that far better than I, thrice-exalted.’
She looked over her shoulder at him then. Smiled a little. ‘You’ll see better at the rail, unless it makes you unwell to look down at the waves. I ought to have asked before . . . ’
He shook his head and came resolutely forward to stand beside her. White water streamed away from the sides of the ship. The sun was high, glinting on the spray, making rainbows as he watched. He heard a snapping sound and looked up to see a sail fill. They picked up speed. Crispin put both hands on the railing.
Alixana murmured, ‘You warned them, I assume? In the two letters?’
He said, not fighting the bitterness, ‘Why should it matter? Whether I’ve sent warnings? Empress, what could ordinary people do if an invasion came? These are not people with any power, any ability to influence the world. They are my mother and my dearest friend.’
She looked at him again for a moment, without speaking. She was hooded now, her dark hair bound up in a golden net. The severity of the look accented her features, the high cheekbones, perfect skin, enormous dark eyes. He thought suddenly of the slender, crafted rose he had seen in her room. She had asked him for something more permanent, the golden rose speaking to the fragility of beautiful things, a mosaic hinting at that which might last. A craft that aspired to endure.
He thought of Jad, slowly crumbling on a dome in a Sauradian chapel bordering the Aldwood, tesserae falling in the filtered light.
She said, ‘The world can be . . . influenced in unexpected ways, Caius Crispus. The Emperor has been hoping that letters were being sent, actually. That’s why I asked. He is of the belief that the native Rhodians might welcome our arrival, given the chaos in Varena. And since we are sailing in the name of your queen, there is some hope that many of the Antae themselves might not fight. He wants them to have time to consider possible . . . interventions.’
It suddenly occurred to him that she was speaking as if he knew an invasion had been announced. It hadn’t been. Crispin looked at her, his emotions roiling again. ‘I see. So even letters home to loved ones are a part of the design?’
Her gaze met his. ‘Why should they not be? He thinks in that way. If we are unable to do so, does that make him wrong? The Emperor is trying to change the world as we know it. Is it a transgression to bring all the elements one can to something as large as this?’
Crispin shook his head and looked away, at the sea again. ‘I told you half a year ago, Majesty, I am an artisan. I can’t even guess at these things.’
‘I wasn’t asking you to,’ she said, mildly enough. Crispin felt himself flush. She hesitated. Looked out at the waves as well. Said, a little stiffly, ‘It is to be formally proclaimed this afternoon. In the Hippodrome by the Mandator after the last race of the day. An invasion of Batiara in the name of Queen Gisel, to reclaim Rhodias and remake a sundered Empire. Does it not sound glorious?’
Crispin shivered in the mild sunlight of that day, then felt a burning sensation, as if something had touched him, like a brand. He closed his eyes on a sudden, vivid image: flames ravaging Varena, taking the wooden houses like so much kindling for a summer bonfire.
They had all known, but . . .
But there was a tone in the voice of the woman beside him, something to be read in her profile now, even within the dark hood. He swallowed again, and said, ‘Glorious? Why do I imagine you don’t find it so?’
No visible response, though he was watching for it. She said, ‘Because I am allowing you to see that, Caius Crispus. Though, to be entirely truthful, I’m not certain why. I confess that you . . . Look!’
She never finished that thought for him.
Broke off, instead, pointing. He had time to recollect that she was an actress, above all things, and then he looked. Saw dolphins breach the sea, tearing it sharply, their bodies arcing like the perfect curve of a dome, racing the ship through the ruffled water. Half a dozen of them, surfacing in sequences, as if choreographed in a theatre, one, then two, then a pause, then again, the sleek, exultant leap and splash of it.
Playful as . . . children? Exquisite as dancers, as the dancer beside him. Carriers of the souls of the dead, bearers of drowned Heladikos when he fell burning into the sea with the chariot of the sun. The paradox and the mystery of them. Laughter and darkness. Grace and death. She wanted dolphins for her rooms.
They watched for a long time, then there came a point when the dolphins did not leap with them any more and the sea rolled beneath and beside the ship, untorn, hiding things, as it always did.
‘They do not like to come too near the island,’ said the Empress Alixana, turning her head to look towards the bow.
Crispin turned as well. ‘Island?’ he said.
He saw land, unexpectedly near, densely forested with evergreen trees. A stony beach, a wooden dock for mooring the boat, two men waiting in Imperial livery. No other signs of human life. Gulls crying all about them in the morning.
‘I had another reason for coming out this morning,’ said the woman beside him, not smiling now. She had lowered her hood. ‘The Emperor doesn’t like my doing this. He believes it is . . . wrong. But there is someone I want to see before the army sails. A . . . reassurance. You and the dolphins were my excuse today. I believed you could be trusted, Caius Crispus. Do you mind?’
She didn’t wait for an answer, of course, was simply giving him as much as she thought he needed to know. Grains doled out from the guarded storehouse of their knowledge. Valerius and Alixana. He wanted to be angry, but there was something in her manner, and in the mood from which she’d claimed him. She’d thought he could be trusted but hadn’t said why she wanted to trust him.
He wasn’t about to ask. She had turned away in any case, walked across to the other side of the ship, where men were readying them for docking.
He followed, his heart beating too fast again, the inward image of a great burning in Varena cutting against the memories he had awakened this morning intending to try to shape. Two girls in their youth, a part of the world the god had made. Their youth and their dying.
He had been going there. And now before him, instead, was this deceptive, mild placidity of blue sea and sky and dark green trees in morning light. You and the dolphins were my excuse today.
For what?
The mooring of the craft was flawless, nearly silent. The slap of waves and the calling birds in the sky. A ramp was lowered, a crimson carpet unrolled for the Empress’s feet. Formalities: she was what she was. It was never to be forgotten. You were not to think of her as anything else.
They went down the landing ramp. Four soldiers followed at a little distance. They were armed, Crispin saw, looking over his shoulder.
The Empress, not looking back at all, led him from the sea along a path that went from the white, round stones into pine trees that soon hid the sun. Crispin drew his cloak around himself as the day’s light failed.
There was no god here, no emblem, symbol, incarnation thereof. There was a single mortal woman, straight-backed, not tall, to be followed over pine needles and amid the scent of pine, and after a little time—it wasn’t a large island— there was an ending to the path and the woods and Crispin saw a cluster of buildings. One house, three or four smaller huts, a tiny chapel with a sun disk carved above the door. The Empress stopped a little distance into that open space between the trees and the houses men had made and she turned to him as he came up beside her.
‘I dislike speaking in this manner,’ she said, ‘but I must say that if you tell of what you see here now you will be killed.’
Crispin’s hands clenched. Anger again, despite everything. He, too, was what he was, what the god and loss had made of him.
‘You contradict yourself, thrice-exalted.’
‘How so?’ The voice brittle. He could see that there was some strain within her now that they had reached this place. He didn’t understand it, or any of this, and he didn’t care. Had thought to spend today on a scaffolding alone with his craft and memories of his girls.
‘You just said you were of the belief I could be trusted. Obviously this is not so. Why not leave me on the ship? Empress, why am I here, to face such a threat? To be such a threat? What am I in this?’
She was silent, looking at him. Her face was very white. The Excubitors had halted, discreetly, some distance behind them at the edge of the trees. There were other soldiers, Crispin now saw, appearing at the doorways of the smaller houses. Four of them, wearing the livery of the Urban Prefecture. No one moved by the largest house. Smoke rose from chimneys, drifted.
‘I don’t know,’ said the Empress Alixana finally. She was staring up at him. ‘A fair question, but I do not know the answer. I know that I . . . do not like to come here any more. He frightens me, makes me dream. That’s one reason Petrus . . . why the Emperor doesn’t want me coming.’
The stillness of the clearing, of that single larger house, had something uncanny about it. Crispin realized all the shutters were closed. There would be no sunlight there.
‘In Jad’s name, who is here?’ he asked, too loudly. His voice seemed an abrasion in the waiting air.
Alixana’s dark eyes were enormous. ‘Jad has little enough to do with him,’ she said. ‘Daleinus is here. Styliane’s brother. The oldest child.’
Rustem would have preferred to deny it, but both of his wives and all of his teachers had characterized him (sometimes with amusement) as a stubborn, willful man. An idea in his head was unlikely to be readily dislodged.
Accordingly, when the servant of Plautus Bonosus returned to the house near the walls and reported that the Senator was already among the crowd gathered at the Hippodrome and could not be of any assistance, Rustem shrugged his shoulders, turned to attend to a revision of the lecture he was soon to give, and—a short while after—put it aside and impatiently put on boots and a cloak to venture forth with two guards to attend at the house of Bonosus himself.
The streets were deserted, eerily so. Many shops were boarded up, the markets almost silent, taverns and cookshops empty. From a distance as they went Rustem heard a dull, punishing sound, a steady roar, rising at intervals into something more than that. It would be frightening if you didn’t know what it was, he thought. In fact, it could be frightening even if you did know.
He wanted to see these races now. To know what his patient was doing. He even saw himself as having some responsibility to be present. And if this Jaddite charioteer was going to kill himself—and past a certain point no physician could do anything about that—Rustem felt a measure of curiosity as to the ways and means. He was in the west, after all, to try to understand these people. Or, that was why he had come here, what he had thought his role would be. His more recent task was one he tried to avoid considering. He had some vague hope that circumstances might make the whole thing . . . go away.
It was obviously impossible for a visiting Bassanid to simply walk up to the Hippodrome and gain admission. The physicians’ guild might have helped, given notice, but Rustem had had no warning at all that his patient would leave his room via a window, a tree, and the courtyard wall, trailing blood behind him as he went.
In a case of this sort, one needed to invoke more powerful connections of a personal nature. Rustem was looking for Cleander.
He knew from the boy himself that Bonosus had forbidden his son to attend the first five meetings of the race season, as punishment for the incident that had killed Nishik. One might quarrel with equating the death of a man (even a foreigner, even a servant) with five lost days of amusement, but that wasn’t Rustem’s concern today.
Today he wanted to persuade Cleander’s mother to override her husband’s dictate. He was well aware, from glosses in the texts of the western physicians, that in ancient Rhodias a man’s will was utterly binding, even to death, upon wives and children. A father had once been able to have his son executed by the state for simple disobedience.
There had been a brief time in the old days in the west when this had been seen as demonstrating virtue, the exemplary discipline and rectitude that could forge an empire. Rustem was of the view that in the modern Sarantium of Valerius and the Empress Alixana, women might have a greater degree of authority in the home. He had cause to know that the boy was an intensely partisan follower of the chariots. If someone knew how to get into the Hippodrome—for the afternoon at least, as the morning was well advanced by now—it would be Cleander. But he would need his stepmother’s consent.
The Senator’s steward was swift to alert his mistress when Rustem presented himself at the door. Thenaïs Sistina, quite unruffled, coolly elegant, greeted him in her morning room with a gracious smile, setting aside pen and paper. Rustem noted that she appeared to be literate.
He apologized, discussed the mild weather, explained that he wished to attend the races.
She did show surprise, the merest flicker and blink of her eyes. ‘Really?’ she murmured. ‘I hadn’t expected the games to appeal to you. They don’t hold much allure for me, I confess. Noise and dirt, and there is often violence in the stands.’
‘None of which would draw me,’ Rustem agreed.
‘But I suppose there is an element of spectacle. Well, I shall be certain to inform my husband that you’d like to accompany him to the next games day . . . it ought to be within a week or two if I understand the process rightly.’
Rustem shook his head. ‘I’d really like to attend this afternoon.’
Thenaïs Sistina assumed a distressed expression. ‘I don’t see any way to get a message to my husband in time. He’s with the Imperial party, in the kathisma.’
‘I understand as much. I was wondering if Cleander might . . . ? As a courtesy and great favour to me?’
The Senator’s wife looked at him for a long moment. ‘Why today, so urgently, if I might ask?’
Which compelled an indiscretion. In light of the morning’s open window and the fact that this was Bonosus’s wife and Bonosus already knew, Rustem felt justified. The man’s physician ought to be in attendance, in fact. No one else could possibly know the precise nature of his pa
tient’s injuries. It could be said he had duties and would be remiss in them did he not make his best effort to be present.
So he told the wife of Plautus Bonosus, in formal confidence, that his patient, Scortius of Soriyya, had violated medical advice and left his bed in the Senator’s city home, where he had been recovering from wounds. Given the fact that there was racing today, it was not difficult to deduce why he had done so and where he would be.
The woman showed no reaction to learning this. The whole of Sarantium might be talking of this missing man, but either she’d already known where he was from her husband, or she was truly indifferent to the fate of these athletic sorts. She did, however, summon her stepson.
Cleander appeared sullenly in the doorway a short time later. It had occurred to Rustem that the boy might have breached this parental order already and been gone from the house, but it appeared that Bonosus’s son had been sufficiently chastened by two violent incidents in one day and night to obey his father, for now.
His stepmother, with a few impressively precise questions, succeeded in unearthing from the flushed young man the fact that it was Cleander who had conveyed the charioteer to Rustem in the middle of the night, and from where and under what circumstances. Rustem hadn’t expected this. She had made an impressive leap of reasoning.
He could not help but note the boy’s discomfiture, but he also knew that he himself had betrayed no secret in this regard. He hadn’t even known that the incident had taken place in front of the dancer’s home. He hadn’t asked, or cared.
The woman was disconcertingly clever, that was all. It came with her detachment and composure, he decided. Those able to modulate and control their inner passions, to view the world with a cold eye, were best equipped to think things through in this way. Of course that same coldness might also be a reason why the husband had a chest with certain implements and toys in another house in a distant part of town. On the whole, though, Rustem decided he approved of the Senator’s wife. He had, in fact, attempted to structure his own professional demeanour in this same fashion.