Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, the garrison commander of Kerakek, said, softly, ‘If your intention is to stay here, or go elsewhere, I humbly ask permission to journey with you for a time. Our paths may part later, but we will offer our assistance now. I believe . . . I accept what the child sees. It happens, in the desert, that some people have this . . . knowing.’
Rustem swallowed. ‘We? You speak for the other three?’
‘They share my thought about the boy. We have journeyed with him. Things may be seen.’
As simple as that.
Rustem still had his hand across Shaski’s too-thin shoulders. ‘You are deserting the army.’ Harsh word. Needed to be used, brought into the open here.
Vinaszh winced. Then straightened, his gaze direct. ‘I have promised to properly discharge my men, which is in my power as their commander. The formal letters will be sent back.’
‘And for yourself?’
There was no one who could write such a letter for the commander. The other man drew a breath. ‘I will not go back.’ He looked down at Shaski, and he smiled a little. Said nothing more.
A life changed, changed utterly.
Rustem looked around the room, at his wives, his infant daughter, the man who had just thrown in his lot with them, and in that very moment—he would say as much long afterwards, telling the tale—the thought came to him where they would go.
He had already been in the distant east, he’d tell guests, over wine in another land, why not journey as far to the west?
Beyond Batiara, well beyond it, was a country still taking shape, defining itself, a frontier, open spaces, the sea on three sides, it was said. A place where they might begin anew, have a chance to see what Shaski was, among other things.
They would need physicians in Esperana, wouldn’t they?
THEY WERE ESCORTED down through the city, the streets quiet, unnaturally so, to the Blues’ compound just before midday. On orders from the factionarius Astorgus— released only that morning from the Urban Prefecture— half a dozen men were sent across the straits with a note from Vinaszh to fetch his other two men from their inn in Deapolis.
On his arrival in the compound, after they were welcomed (respectfully) and given rooms, and just before he went to see his patients, Rustem learned from the small chef who had been in charge last night that the search for the missing Empress had been called off just before dawn.
It seemed that there had been further changes in the Imperial Precinct during the night.
SHASKI LIKED THE HORSES. So did little Issa. A smiling groom with straw in his hair carried her as he rode on one of them and they walked a slow circle around the open yard, the baby’s whoops of laughter filling the compound, making people smile as they went about the tasks of a brightening day.
CHAPTER XV
In the morning the eunuchs, almost invariably the first to hear tidings in the palaces, told Crispin what had happened in the night.
Their collective mood was entirely different from the subdued apprehension of the evening before. You could have called it exhilarated. A colour of sunrise, unlooked for, if one’s mind worked that way. Crispin felt his dreams slipping away in the fierce, hard brightness of what they said, the sudden swirl of activity all around, like cloths unfurling.
He had one of them escort him back to the Porphyry Room. He didn’t expect to be able to enter again, but the eunuch simply gestured and the guards opened the doors for them. There were changes here, too. Four of the Excubitors, garbed and helmed for ceremony, were stationed in the four corners of the room, rigidly at attention. Someone had laid flowers about the room, and the traditional plate of food for the dead soul’s journey was in place on a side table. The plate was gold, with jewels set around the rim. Torches still burned near the raised bier that held the shrouded body.
It was very early still. No one else was here. The eunuch waited politely by the door. Crispin walked forward and knelt beside Valerius for a second time, making the sign of the sun disk. This time he spoke the Rites, offering a prayer for the journeying soul of the man who’d brought him here. He wished he had more to say, but his own thoughts were still tumbled and chaotic. He rose again and the eunuch took him outside and through the gardens to the Bronze Gates, and he was allowed to exit there into the Hippodrome Forum.
Signs of life here. A normal kind of life. He saw the Holy Fool, standing in his customary place, offering an entirely predictable litany of the follies of earthly wealth and power. Two food stalls were set up already, one selling grilled lamb on sticks, the other roasted chestnuts. People were buying from each of them. As Crispin watched, the yogurt vendor arrived and a juggler set up not far from the Holy Fool.
The beginnings of a new beginning. Slowly, almost hesitantly, as if the dance of the ordinary, the rhythm of it, had been forgotten in the violence of yesterday and needed to be learned again. There were no marching clusters of soldiers now, and Crispin knew that, men and women being what they were, the City would be itself again very soon, past events receding like the memory of a night when one has drunk too much and done things best forgotten.
He took a deep breath. The Bronze Gates were behind him, the equestrian statue of Valerius I rising to his right, the City itself unfurling before him like a banner. Everything possible, as it so often felt in the morning. The air was crisp, the sky bright. He smelled the roasting chestnuts, heard all those here being sternly admonished to forsake the pursuits of the world and turn to the holiness of Jad. Knew it would not happen. Could not. The world was what it was. He saw an apprentice approach two serving girls on their way to the well with pitchers and say something that made them laugh.
The hunt for Alixana had been called off. It was being proclaimed, the eunuchs had said. They still wanted to find her, but for a different reason, now. Leontes wished to honour her and honour the memory of Valerius. Newly anointed, a pious man, wishing to begin a reign in all proper ways. She hadn’t reappeared, however. No one knew where she was. Crispin had a sudden memory from the night: that stony moonlit beach in his dream, silver and black the colours.
Gisel of Batiara was to be married to Leontes later today in a ceremony in the Attenine Palace, becoming Empress of Sarantium. The world had changed.
He remembered her in her own palace, back in the autumn with the leaves falling, a young queen sending him east with a message, offering herself to an Emperor far away. There had been wagers throughout Varena that summer and fall on how long she had to live before someone found her with poison or a blade.
She would be presented to the people in the Hippodrome tomorrow or the next day, and she and Leontes would be crowned. There was so much to be done, the eunuchs had told him, hurrying about, an impossible number of details to be attended to.
In a real way, he had caused this to happen. Crispin had been the one to bring her into the palace, passing through the streets of the City to the Porphyry Room through the wild night. It might—there was a chance it might—mean that Varena, Rhodias, the whole of Batiara would be saved now from assault. Valerius had been about to wage war; the fleet would have sailed any day now, carrying death with it. Leontes, with Gisel beside him, might do things differently. She offered him that chance. This was altogether good.
Styliane had been blinded in the night, they had told him.
She had been put aside by Leontes, their marriage formally renounced for the horror of her crime. You could do these things more quickly, the eunuchs said, if
you were an Emperor. Her brother Tertius was dead, they told him, strangled in one of those rooms under the palace no one liked to talk about. His body would be displayed later today, hanging from the triple walls. Gesius was in charge of that, too. No, they’d said, when he asked, Styliane herself had not been reported killed. No one knew where she was.
Crispin looked up at the statue rising before him. A man on a horse, a martial sword, image of power and majesty, a dominant figure. But it was the women, he thought, who had shaped the story he
re, not the men with their armies and blades. He had no idea what to make of that. He wished he could dispel the heaviness, the tangled, confusing mire of all of this, blood and fury and memory.
The juggler was very good. He had five balls in the air, of different sizes, and a dagger in there with them, spinning and glinting in the light. Most people were ignoring him, hurrying past. It was early in the day, tasks and errands to be done. Morning in Sarantium was not a time for lingering.
Crispin looked over to his left at Valerius’s Sanctuary, the dome rising serenely, almost disdainfully above it, above all of this. He gazed at it for a time, taking an almost physical pleasure in the grace of what Artibasos had achieved, and then he went there. He had his own work waiting to be done. A man needed to work.
OTHERS, HE WAS unsurprised to see, were of the same view. Silano and Sosio, the twins, were at work in the small, fenced, temporary yard beside the Sanctuary, tending to the quicklime for the setting bed at the ovens. One of them (he could never tell them apart) waved hesitantly and Crispin nodded back.
Inside, he looked up and saw that Vargos was already overhead on the scaffolding, laying the thinnest, fine . layer where Crispin had been about to work the day before. His Inici friend from the Imperial Road had emerged, unexpectedly, as an entirely competent mosaic labourer. Another man who had sailed to Sarantium and changed his life. Vargos never said as much, but Crispin thought that for him—as for Pardos—a good portion of his pleasure in this work came from piety, from working in a place of the god. Neither man would achieve as much satisfaction, Crispin thought, doing private commissions for dining rooms or bedchambers.
Pardos was also overhead, on his own scaffolding, doing the wall design Crispin had assigned him above the double row of arches along the eastern side of the space beneath the dome. Two of the other guild artisans on the team he’d assembled were also here and at work.
Artibasos would be around somewhere as well, though his own labours were essentially done. Valerius’s Sanctuary was complete in its execution. It was, in fact, ready for him: to house the ruined body. Only the mosaics and the altars and whatever tomb or memorial they now needed remained to be achieved. Then the clerics would come in and they would hang the sun disks in their proper locations and consecrate this as a holy place.
Crispin gazed at what he had journeyed here to achieve, and it seemed to him as if, in some deep, ultimately inexplicable fashion, just to look was enough to steady him. He felt the images of the day before recede—Lecanus Daleinus in his hut, men dying in that clearing, Alixana dropping her cloak on the beach, the screaming in the streets and the burning fires, Gisel of the Antae in her carried litter, eyes alight as they went through the dark, and then in a purpledraped room where Valerius lay dead—all the whirling visions fell away, leaving him gazing up at what he had made here. The apex of what he could do, being a fallible mortal under Jad.
You had to live, Crispin thought, in order to have anything to say about living, but you needed to find a way to withdraw to accomplish that saying. A scaffolding overhead, he thought, was as good a place as any for that and better, perhaps, than most.
He went forward, surrounded and eased by the familiar sounds of work, thinking about his girls now, reclaiming their faces, which he would try to render today, next to Ilandra and not far from where Linon lay on the grass.
But before he reached the ladder, before he began to climb to his place above the world, someone spoke from behind one of the vast pillars.
Crispin turned quickly, knowing the voice. And then he knelt, and lowered his head to touch the perfect marble floor.
One knelt before Emperors in Sarantium.
‘Rise, artisan,’ said Leontes, in the brisk tone of a soldier. ‘We owe you greatly, it seems, for services last night.’
Crispin stood up slowly and looked at the other man. All around the Sanctuary the noises were coming to a halt. The others were watching them, had now seen who was here. Leontes wore boots and a dark green tunic with a leather belt. His cloak was pinned at his shoulder with a golden ornament, but the effect was unassuming. Another man at work. Behind the Emperor, Crispin saw a cleric he vaguely recognized, and a secretary he knew very well. Pertennius had a bruised and swollen jaw. His eyes were icy cold as he looked at Crispin. Not surprisingly.
Crispin didn’t care.
He said, ‘The Emperor is gracious beyond my deserving. I simply tried to assist my queen in her desire to pay homage to the dead. What came of it has nothing to do with me, my lord. It would be a presumption to claim otherwise.’
Leontes shook his head. ‘What came of it would not have happened without you. The presumption is to pretend otherwise. Do you always deny your own role in events?’
‘I deny that I had any intended role in . . . events. If people make use of me it is a price I pay to have the chance to do my work.’ He wasn’t sure why he was saying this.
Leontes looked at him. Crispin was remembering another conversation with this man, amid the steam of a bathhouse half a year ago, both of them naked under sheets. What we build—even the Emperor’s Sanctuary— we hold precariously and must defend. A man had come in to kill Crispin that day.
The Emperor said, ‘And was this true yesterday morning, as well? When you went to the isle?’
They knew about that. Of course they did. It was hardly likely to have been kept secret. Alixana had warned him.
Crispin met the other man’s blue gaze. ‘It is exactly the same, my lord. The Empress Alixana asked me to accompany her.’
‘Why?’
He didn’t think they would do anything to him now. He wasn’t certain (how could one be?), but he didn’t think so. He said, ‘She wished to show me dolphins in the sea.’
‘Why?’ Blunt and assured. Crispin remembered that immense self-confidence. A man never defeated in the field, they said.
‘I do not know, my lord. Other things happened, it was never explained.’
A lie. To Jad’s anointed Emperor. He would lie for her, however. Dolphins were a heresy. He would not be the one to betray her. She was gone, had not reappeared. Would have no power at all now even if she did trust them and come from hiding. Valerius was dead, she might never be seen again. But he would not, he would not betray her. A small thing, really, but in another way it wasn’t. A man lived with his words and actions.
‘What other things? What happened on the isle?’
This he could answer, though he didn’t know why she had wanted him to see Lecanus Daleinus and hear her pretend to be his sister.
‘I saw the . . . prisoner there. We were on the isle, elsewhere, when he escaped.’
‘And then?’
‘As you must know, my lord, there was an attempt on her life. It was . . . repelled by the Excubitors. The Empress left us then and made her own way back to Sarantium.’
‘Why so?’
Some men asked questions when they knew the answers. Leontes seemed to be one of those. Crispin said, ‘They had tried to kill her, my lord. Daleinus had escaped. She was of the belief that an assassination plot might be unfolding.’
Leontes nodded. ‘It was, of course.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ Crispin said.
‘The participants have been punished.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
One of the participants, the leader, had been this man’s wife, golden as he was. He was Emperor of Sarantium now, because of her plot. Styliane. A child when it had all begun, the burning that had begotten a burning. Crispin had lain with her in a tangled, desperate darkness so little time ago. Remember this room. Whatever else I do. The words came to him again. He suspected he could recall every word she’d ever spoken to him, if he tried. She was in a different kind of darkness now, if she was alive. He didn’t ask. He didn’t dare ask.
There was a silence. Behind the Emperor, the cleric cleared his throat, and Crispin suddenly recollected him: the adviser to the Eastern Patriarch. A fussy, officious man. They had met when Crispin had
first submitted the sketches for the dome.
‘My secretary . . . has complained of you,’ the Emperor said, looking briefly back over his shoulder. A hint of amusement in his voice, almost a smile. A minor disagreement among the troops.
‘He has cause,’ Crispin said mildly. ‘I struck him a blow last night. An unworthy action.’
That much was true. He could say that much.
Leontes made a dismissive movement with one hand. ‘I’m sure Pertennius will accept that apology. Everyone was under great strain yesterday. I . . . felt it myself, I must say. A terrible day and night. The Emperor Valerius was like . . . an older brother to me.’ He looked Crispin in the eye.
‘Yes, my lord.’ Crispin lowered his gaze.
There was another brief silence. ‘Queen Gisel has requested your presence in the palace this afternoon. She would like one of her countrymen present when we wed, and given your role—denied though it may be—in the events of last night, you are easily the most appropriate witness from Batiara.’
‘I am honoured,’ Crispin said. He should have been, but there was, still, this slow, deep coil of rage within him. He couldn’t define it or place it, but it was there. Everything was so brutally entangled here. He said, ‘The more so since the thrice-exalted Emperor came to extend the invitation himself.’
A flirting with insolence. His anger had gotten him in trouble before.
Leontes smiled, however. The brilliant, remembered smile. ‘I fear I have rather too many affairs to attend to, to have come only for that, artisan. No. No, I wanted to see this Sanctuary and the dome here. I’ve not been inside before.’
Few people had, and the Supreme Strategos would have been an unlikely man to petition for an early glimpse at architecture or mosaic work. This had been Valerius’s dream, and Artibasos’s, and it had become Crispin’s.
The cleric, behind Leontes, was looking up. The Emperor did the same.
Crispin said, ‘I should be honoured to walk you about, my lord, though Artibasos—who will be somewhere in here—is far better able to guide you.’