‘She says to be careful. And to be fair.’
Crispin wanted to snarl an oath. He did not. Danis was right, or Shirin was. He gestured with one hand. ‘Search the house, have them search.’
Carullus cleared his throat and nodded. Crispin looked at him, then added, ‘And thank you for doing this yourself. Do you need me to come somewhere for questioning?’
‘Not that fair!’ Danis exclaimed sharply.
Carullus hesitated another moment, then shook his head. He returned to the hallway and opened the outside door. They heard him giving orders. Six men came in. Two went upstairs, the others went towards the back, on the ground floor.
Carullus came back into the front room. ‘You might be questioned later. I have no orders about that now. You went to the isle with her, saw Lecanus, then he was gone, and then she left. How?’
‘I told you. With one Excubitor. I don’t know his name. I don’t even know that she left. She may still be on the isle, Carullus. They will kill her when they find her, won’t they?’
His friend swallowed. Looked quite miserable.
‘I have no idea,’ he said.
‘Of course you do,’ Shirin snapped. ‘It just isn’t your fault, you want to say. Or Leontes’s, of course. Nothing’s his fault.’
‘I don’t . . . I truly don’t think he had anything to do with this,’ the big soldier said.
Crispin looked at the other man. His closest friend here. Kasia’s husband. As honest and decent a person as he knew. ‘No, I don’t think he knew anything about it.’
‘Poor helpless man. It must have been Styliane, then,’ said Shirin, still furious. ‘She is the Daleinoi in our day. One brother blind and imprisoned, the other a complete fool.’
Crispin looked at her. So did Carullus. The two men exchanged glances. Crispin said, ‘My dear, please leave that thought in this room. You told me not to be stupid, earlier. Let me say the same to you.’
‘He’s right,’ Carullus said soberly.
‘Jad rot you both!’ Danis said in silence, and Crispin heard the pain in the bird that could not be spoken by the woman.
‘We are all unhappy tonight,’ Carullus added. ‘These are not easy times.’
‘Unhappy? I could laugh! The man is in his glory!’ Danis said, with a savagery unknown for her.
It wasn’t true, or not entirely true, but Crispin had no way to say so aloud. He looked at Shirin, and belatedly, in the lamplight, he realized that she was weeping.
‘You will hunt her down like some beast,’ she said bitterly. ‘All of you. An army of soldiers after one woman whose husband has just been killed, whose life died with him. And then what? Send her back to a hovel in the Hippodrome? Make her dance naked for their amusement? Or are you to quietly kill her when you find her? Spare poor, virtuous Leontes the details?’
It was a woman speaking, and a performer, Crispin understood finally. Fear and this unexpected depth of rage, thinking of the other dancer who had defined, for all of them, the City and the world.
But even here there were layers, because if Leontes was oblivious to what had happened, Styliane was not. It wasn’t just about men pursuing a helpless woman. It was also about two women at war, and only one of them could live now.
‘I don’t know what they will do,’ said Carullus, and even Shirin, lifting her face, not hiding her tears, had to have heard the distress in his voice.
There were footsteps. A soldier at the arched entrance to the room. He reported no one hiding in the house or the courtyard within. The others filed past him and outside again.
Carullus looked at Crispin. Seemed about to say something more but did not. He turned to Shirin. ‘May we escort you home, my lady?’
‘No,’ she said.
He swallowed. ‘There are orders, everyone to remain inside. There are many soldiers in the streets . . . some of them . . . unused to the city. It will be safer if—’
‘No,’ she said.
Carullus stopped. After another moment he bowed to her and left the room.
Crispin walked him to the door. Carullus stopped there. ‘They are . . . anxious to find her tonight, as you say. There will be some unpleasantness, I suspect, as they search.’
Crispin nodded. Unpleasantness. A courtier’s masking word. Changes were taking place, even as the night passed, the moons rose. But none of this was Carullus’s fault. ‘I . . . understand. I am grateful that it was you at my door. Jad guard you.’
‘And you, my friend. Stay inside.’
‘I will.’
HE HAD TRULY INTENDED to. Who can know what will come, however, overtaking a life?
Last autumn, at home, it had been an Imperial Courier bearing a summons to Sarantium. Tonight it was something else, but still a summons, for there came another knocking, a quieter one, not long after the soldiers left.
Crispin answered it himself again. No flaring of torches this time, no sight of armed men. This was someone cloaked and hooded, and alone. A woman, breathless with running and fear. She asked his name. He gave it, without thinking, stepped aside, she entered, hurriedly, a glance over her shoulder into the night. He closed the door. In the entrance to his home, she wordlessly extended a written note, and then fumbled in her cloak and produced a ring.
He took both. Her hands were trembling. He recognized the ring, and felt his heart thump once, very hard.
He had forgotten someone.
The sealed note, when torn open, contained a command, not a request, and from someone whom—as he stood there, and felt his heart begin to beat properly again—Crispin realized he did have a duty to obey, however bitter the confusions and torn loyalties shaping a terrible day and night.
It also meant going out into the streets again.
Shirin appeared in the arched doorway.
‘What is it?’
He told her. He wasn’t sure why, but he told her.
‘I’m taking you,’ she said.
He tried to say no. A waste of time.
She had a litter and guards, she pointed out. Was known, had the protection that came with that. Could plausibly be heading home with a friend, even with the streets forbidden. He didn’t have the force to refuse her. What was she going to do? Stay in his house while he went out?
Shirin had a two-person litter. Crispin ordered the messenger to be attended to, given food, a bed for the night if she wanted. The woman’s eyes betrayed her relief: she’d clearly been terrified she’d have to go back out. Crispin put on his own cloak and then, Shirin beside him, opened the door, waiting for a moment when the street was quiet before they stepped out. The darkness was laden with aura and menace, clear as the stars, heavy as the weight of earth on the dead. Valerius had died in a tunnel, Carullus had said.
Her litter-bearers came for them from the shadows at the end of the portico. Shirin gave them instructions to take her home. They started down the street. Peering through the drawn curtains as they moved, they both saw the strange, small flames flitting at corners, unlit by any visible source, darting and vanishing. Souls, spirits, echoes of Heladikos’s fire, inexplicable.
But one always saw those flames in Sarantium at night.
What was new were the noises, and the torches everywhere, smoking, casting orange, erratic light. From all around came the sound of booted feet. Running, not marching. A sense of speed, urgency, the night spinning with it. A banging upon doors, shouted commands to open. Searchers. For one woman. They heard two horses gallop past, orders barked, curses. It occurred to Crispin suddenly that most of these soldiers wouldn’t have the least idea what Alixana looked like. He thought again of the Imperial robe, discarded on the island. She wasn’t about to be adorned and garbed like an Empress. It wouldn’t be so easy to find her: unless she was betrayed. That, of course, was a possibility.
They made no attempt at concealment as they went, were stopped twice. The Urban Prefect’s men both times, which was fortunate, for these troops knew the Principal Dancer of the Greens immediately, and th
ey were allowed to continue on their way to her house.
They didn’t go to her house. As they neared her street, Shirin leaned out and changed her orders, instructing her bearers to continue east, towards the walls. From here on the danger grew, was real, for she couldn’t claim to be going home now, but they were not stopped again. The search hadn’t come this far yet, it seemed; it was fanning out from the Imperial Precinct and up from the harbour, house to house, street to street in the dark.
In time, they came to a dwelling, not far from the triple walls. Shirin ordered the bearers to stop. In the litter there was a silence.
‘Thank you,’ Crispin said, at length. She stared at him. Danis was silent, on the chain about her throat.
He got out. Looked at the closed doorway in front of him, and then up at the night stars. Then he turned back to her. She still hadn’t spoken. He leaned into the litter and kissed her gently on the lips. He remembered the first day they’d met, that passionate embrace in the doorway, Danis protesting urgently, Pertennius of Eubulus appearing behind her.
There was a man who would be happy tonight, Crispin thought suddenly, with bitterness.
Then he turned away and knocked—one more knocking in Sarantium that night—on the door of the person who had summoned him. A servant opened instantly; had been waiting, he realized. He went in.
The servant gestured nervously. Crispin stepped forward.
The queen of the Antae was waiting in the first room on the right, branching off the hallway.
He saw her standing before the fire, glittering, jewellery at ears and throat and on her fingers and in her hair, garbed in a silken robe of porphyry and gold. Purple, for royalty tonight. Tall and fair and . . . entirely, dazzlingly regal. There was a fierce brilliance to her, a kind of shining like the jewels she wore. It caught at your breath to look at her. Crispin bowed, and then, a little bit overwhelmed, he knelt on the wooden floor.
‘No flour sack this time, artisan. I’m using gentler methods, you see.’
‘I am grateful, my lady.’ He could think of nothing else to say. She had seemed able to read his thoughts back then, too.
‘They say the Emperor is dead.’ Direct, as always. Antae, not Sarantine. A different world. West for east, forest and field by origin, not these triple walls and gates of bronze and golden trees in the palaces. ‘Is it true? Valerius is dead?’
This was his own queen asking. ‘I believe he is,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘I have no actual—’
‘Murdered?’
Crispin swallowed. Nodded.
‘The Daleinoi?’
He nodded again. Kneeling, looking at her where she stood before the fire, he thought he had never seen her like this. Had never seen anyone look as Gisel did just now. A creature almost alight, like the flames behind her, not entirely human.
She gazed at him, the famously wide-set blue eyes. Crispin’s mouth was dry. She said, ‘In that case, Caius Crispus, you must get us into the Imperial Precinct. Tonight.’
‘Me?’ said Crispin, eloquently.
Gisel smiled thinly. ‘There is no one else I could think of,’ she said. ‘Or trust. I am a helpless woman and alone, far from my home.’
He swallowed again, painfully, could find nothing to say. He was thinking suddenly that he might die tonight, and that he had erred, earlier, seeing this terrible day and night as a clash of two women. He’d been wrong. Saw it now. There were three, not two.
IN FACT, THEY HAD ALL forgotten about her. The sort of overlooking that could matter greatly, change many things about the world—although perhaps not in any immediate, obvious way for some, such as the family on its farm in the northern grainlands, the one whose best labourer had just died, suddenly and too young, with the seeds all to be sown.
CHAPTER XIII
There was a level of fear in the Blues’ compound that Kyros had never known before. It was as if they were all horses, not yet broken, sweating with apprehension, trembling with it.
Scortius wasn’t the only wounded man. Members of the faction had been coming into the compound with injuries ranging from minor to hideously mortal all afternoon. There was considerable chaos. The wounded were receiving attention from Ampliarus, the new, pale-featured physician of the faction, and from Columella, who was properly their horse doctor but inspired more confidence in most of them than Ampliarus did. There was also a grey-bearded Bassanid doctor no one knew, but who had apparently been treating Scortius somewhere during the time of his absence. A mystery, but no time to consider it.
Beyond the gates at sunset there still came the sounds of running and shouting men, the tread of marching soldiers, clash of metal, horses’ hooves, screaming sometimes. Those inside were under ferociously strict orders not to go out.
Adding to the anxiety was the fact that even so late in the day—the sky crimson now in the west above a line of clouds—Astorgus had not returned.
He’d been seized by the Urban Prefect’s men as the rioting began, borne off by them for questioning. And they all knew what could happen to men interrogated in that windowless building on the far side of the Hippodrome.
In the absence of the factionarius, control of the compound normally fell to Columella, but he was entirely engaged in treating the wounded. Instead it was the small, rotund cook, Strumosus, who asserted himself, giving calm, brisk instructions, arranging for a steady supply of clean linen and bedding for the injured, assigning anyone healthy—grooms, servants, jugglers, dancers, stableboys—to give assistance to the three doctors, posting additional guards at the compound gates. He was listened to. There was real need for a sense of control.
Strumosus had his own people—the undercooks and kitchen boys and servers—furiously busy preparing soups and grilled meats and cooked vegetables, carrying well-watered wine to the injured and the frantic. Men and women needed food at such a time, the cook told them in the kitchen, astonishingly composed for a man notoriously volatile. Both the nourishment and the illusion of ordinariness had roles to play, he’d observed, as if delivering a lecture on a quiet afternoon.
That last was true, Kyros thought. The act of preparing food had a calming effect. He felt his own fear receding in the mundane, unthinking routine of selecting and chopping and dicing vegetables for his soup, adding spices and salt, tasting and adjusting, aware of the others at their own tasks all around him in the kitchen.
One might almost imagine it was a banquet day, all of them caught up in the usual bustle of preparation.
Almost, but not quite. They could hear men crying in anger and pain as they were helped into the courtyard from the frenzied streets beyond the gates. Kyros had already heard the names of a dozen men he knew who had died today in the Hippodrome or the fighting outside it.
Rasic, at his station beside Kyros, was swearing steadily, chopping with barely controlled fury, treating onions and potatoes as if they were members of the Greens or the military. He’d been at the races in the morning but not when violence exploded in the afternoon: the kitchen workers who drew the lucky straws and were allowed to go to the first races were under standing orders to return before the last morning running, to help prepare the midday meal.
Kyros tried to ignore his friend. His own heart was heavy and fearful, not angry. There was great violence outside. People were being badly hurt, killed. He was worried about his mother and father, about Scortius, Astorgus.
And the Emperor was dead.
The Emperor was dead. Kyros had been a child when Apius died, barely more than that when the first Valerius went to the god. And both of them had passed from the world in their beds, in peace. The talk today was of black murder, the assassination of Jad’s anointed one, the god’s regent upon earth.
It was the shadow over everything, Kyros thought, like a ghost half glimpsed out of the edge of one’s eye, hovering above a colonnade or chapel dome, changing the fall of sunlight, defining the day, and the night to come.
At darkfall the torches and lamps were lit. The comp
ound took on the altered look of a night camp by a battlefield. The barracks were filled by now with the wounded, and Strumosus had ordered the tables of the dining hall to be covered with sheets and used as makeshift beds for those who needed them. He himself was everywhere, moving quickly, concentrating, unruffled.
Passing through the kitchen, he stopped and looked around. He gestured at Kyros and Rasic and two of the others. ‘Take a short rest,’ he said. ‘Eat something yourselves, or lie down, or stretch your legs. Whatever you like.’ Kyros wiped perspiration from his forehead. They had been working almost without pause since the midday meal and it was night now, full dark.
He didn’t feel like eating or lying down. Neither did Rasic. They went out of the hot kitchen into the chilly, torchlit shadows of the courtyard. Kyros felt the cold, which was unusual for him. He wished he’d put on a cloak over his sweaty tunic. Rasic wanted to go down to the gates, so they went there, Kyros dragging his foot along, trying to keep up with his friend. Stars were visible overhead. Neither moon was up yet. There was a lull, a hushed feeling out here now. No one crying at this moment, no one being carried in or sprinting past on some errand for the doctors in the barracks or the dining hall.
They came to the gates, to the guards there. Kyros saw that these men were armed, swords and spears and chest-plates. They wore helmets, like soldiers. Weapons and armour were forbidden to citizens in the streets, but the faction compounds had been given their own laws and they were allowed to defend themselves.
It was quiet here, too. They looked through the iron gates down the dark lane. There were occasional movements in the street beyond: distant sounds, a single voice calling, a carried torch passing at the head of their laneway. Rasic asked for news. One of the guards said that the Senate had been summoned into session.
‘Why?’ Rasic snapped. ‘Useless fat farts. Voting themselves another ration of wine and Karchite boys?’
‘Voting an Emperor,’ the guard said. ‘If your brain’s small, kitchen boy, keep your mouth shut to hide the fact.’
‘Fuck you,’ Rasic snarled.