‘Not necessary,’ said Leontes. Brisk, businesslike. ‘I can observe for myself what is currently done, and Pertennius and Maximius both saw the original drawings, I understand.’
Crispin felt, for the first time, a faint thrill of fear. Tried to master it. Said, ‘Then, if my guidance is not needed, and I am requested for later in the day, might I have the Emperor’s leave to withdraw to my labours? The setting bed for today’s section has just been laid for me up above. It will dry if I delay over-long.’
Leontes returned his gaze from overhead. And Crispin saw a flicker of something that might—just—have been called sympathy in the man’s face.
The Emperor said, ‘I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t go up, were I you, artisan.’
Simple words, one could even say they had been gently spoken.
It was possible for the world, the sensual evidence of it—sounds, smells, texture, sight—to recede far away, to dwindle down, as if perceived through a keyhole, to one single thing.
All else fell away. The keyhole showed the face of Leontes.
‘Why so, my lord?’ Crispin said.
He heard his own voice, on the words, crack a little. But he knew. Before the other man replied, he finally understood why these three had come, what was happening, and he cried out then, in silence, within his heart, as at another death.
I have been a better friend than you know. I did tell you not to become attached to any work on that dome.
Styliane. Had said that. The very first time she’d been waiting in his room, and then again, again, that night in her own chamber two weeks ago. A warning. Twice. He hadn’t heard it, or heeded.
But what could he have done? Being what he was?
And so Crispin, standing under Artibasos’s dome in the Great Sanctuary, heard Leontes, Emperor of Sarantium, Jad’s regent upon earth, the god’s beloved, say quietly, ‘The Sanctuary is to be holy, truly so, but these decorations are not, Rhodian. It is not proper for the pious to render or worship images of the god or show mortal figures in a holy place.’ The voice calm, confident, absolute. ‘They will come down, here and elsewhere in the lands we rule.’
The Emperor paused, tall and golden, handsome as a figure from legend. His voice became mild, almost kindly. ‘It is difficult to see one’s work undone, come to naught. It has happened to me many times. Peace treaties and such. I am sorry if this is unpleasant for you.’
Unpleasant.
An unpleasantness was a cart rumbling through the street below one’s bedroom too early in the morning. It was water in one’s boots on winter roads, a chest cough on a cold day, a bitter wind finding a chink in walls; it was sour wine, stringy meat, a tedious sermon in chapel, a ceremony running long in summer heat.
Unpleasantness was not the plague and burying children, it was not Sarantine Fire, not the Day of the Dead, or the zubir of the Aldwood appearing out of fog with blood dripping from its horns, it was not . . . this. It was not this.
Crispin looked up, away from the men before him. Saw Jad, saw Ilandra, triple-walled Sarantium, fallen Rhodias, the wood, the world as he knew it and could bring it forth. They will come down.
This was not an unpleasantness. This was death.
He looked back at those standing before him. He must have looked quite ghastly in that moment, he realized after, for even the cleric seemed alarmed, and Pertennius’s newly smug expression altered somewhat. Leontes himself added quickly, ‘You understand, Rhodian, that you are accused of no impiety at all. That would be unjust and we will not be unjust. You acted in accord with faith as it was understood . . . before. Understandings may change, but we will not visit consequences on those who proceeded faithfully in . . . good faith . . .’
He trailed off.
It was astonishingly difficult to speak. Crispin tried. He opened his mouth, but before he could even try to shape words another voice was heard.
‘Are you barbarians? Are you entirely mad? Do you even know what you are saying? Can someone be so ignorant? You lump-witted military imbecile!’
Imbecile. Someone used to use that word. But this time it was not an alchemist’s stolen bird-soul addressing Crispin. It was a small, rumpled, barefoot architect, exploding from the shadows, his hair in alarming disarray, his voice high, strident, bristling with rage, carrying through the Sanctuary, and he was addressing the Emperor of Sarantium.
Artibasos, no! Stop!’ Crispin rasped, finding his voice. They would kill the little man for this. Too many people had heard. This was the Emperor.
‘I will not stop. This is an abomination, an act of evil! Barbarians do this, not Sarantines! Will you destroy this glory? Leave the Sanctuary naked?’
‘There is no fault found with the building itself,’ Leontes said. He was exerting real self-restraint, Crispin realized, but the celebrated blue eyes were flinty now.
‘How very good of you to say so.’ Artibasos was out of control, his arms waving like windmills. ‘Have you any idea, can you have any idea of what this man has achieved? No fault? No fault? Shall I tell you how grievous a fault there will be if the dome and walls are stripped?’
The Emperor looked down at him, still controlling himself. ‘There is no suggestion of that. Proper doctrine allows them to be decorated . . . with . . . I don’t care . . . flowers, fruit, even birds and animals.’
‘Ah! There is a solution! Of course! The Emperor’s wisdom is vast!’ The architect was still enraged, wild. ‘You will turn a holy place decorated with a vision and grandeur that honours the god and exalts the visitor into a place covered with . . . vegetation and little rabbits? An aviary? A fruit storehouse? By the god! How pious, my lord!’
‘Curb your tongue, man!’ snapped the cleric.
Leontes himself said nothing for a long moment. And under that silent gaze the little man finally stopped. His furiously waving arms fell to his sides. He did not back down, though. Staring at his Emperor, he drew himself up. Crispin held his breath.
‘It would be best,’ Leontes murmured, speaking through thin lips, his own colour high, ‘if your friends removed you now from us, architect. You have our permission to depart. We do not wish to begin our reign by appearing harsh in our treatment of those who have done service, but this manner before your Imperial lord demands you be branded or executed.’
‘Then kill me! I do not wish to live to see—’
‘Stop!’ Crispin cried. Leontes would give the order, he knew it.
He looked around frantically and saw, with desperate relief, that Vargos had come down from the scaffolding. He nodded urgently at the big man and Vargos came quickly forward. He bowed. Then, expressionlessly, without warning, he simply picked up the small architect, threw him over his shoulder, and carried the struggling, loudly protesting Artibasos off into the dimness of the Sanctuary.
Sound carried extremely well in this space—the building had been brilliantly designed. They could hear the architect cursing and shouting for a long time. Then a door was opened and closed, in the shadows of some recess, and there was silence. No one moved. Morning sunlight fell through high windows.
Crispin was remembering the bathhouse again. His first conversation with this man, in the drifting steam. He ought to have known, he thought. Ought to have been prepared for this. He’d been warned by Styliane and even by Leontes himself that afternoon, half a year ago: I’m interested in your views on images of the god.
‘As I told you, we attach no consequences to those things done before our time.’ The Emperor was explaining again. ‘But there have been . . . lapses in the true faith, failures of proper observance. Images of the god are not to be created. Jad is ineffable and mysterious, entirely beyond our grasp. For a mortal man to dare picture the god behind the sun is a heresy. And to exalt mortal men in a holy place is arrogant presumption. It always has been, but those . . . before us simply did not understand it.’
They will come down, here and elsewhere, in the lands we rule.
‘You are . . . changing our faith, my
lord.’
It was, barely, possible to shape words.
‘An error, artisan. We change nothing. With the wisdom of the Eastern Patriarch and his advisers to guide us—and we expect the Patriarch in Rhodias to agree—we will restore a proper understanding. We must worship Jad, not an image of the god. Otherwise we are no better than the pagans before us with their offerings to statues in the temples.’
‘No one . . . worships this image above us, my lord. They are only made mindful of the power and majesty of the god.’
‘You would instruct us in matters of faith, Rhodian?’ It was the dark-bearded cleric this time. The Patriarch’s assistant.
It was all without meaning, these words. One could argue against this as easily as one fought against plague. It was as final. The heart could cry. There was nothing at all to be done.
Or, almost nothing.
Martinian used to say that there was always some kind of choice. And here, now, one might yet try to do a single thing. Crispin drew a deep breath, for this would go against everything in his nature: pride and rage, the deep sense of himself as above all such pleading. But there was something too large at stake now.
He swallowed hard and said, ignoring the cleric, looking directly at Leontes, ‘My lord Emperor, you were good enough to say you . . . owed me greatly, for services?’
Leontes returned his gaze. His heightened colour was receding. ‘I did.’
‘Then I have a request, my lord.’ The heart could cry. He kept his eyes on the man in front of him. If he looked overhead he was afraid he would shame himself and weep.
Leontes’s expression was benign. A man accustomed to dealing with requests. He lifted a hand. ‘Artisan, do not ask for this to be saved . . . it cannot be.’
Crispin nodded. He knew. He knew. He would not look up above.
He shook his head. ‘It is . . . something else.’
‘Then ask,’ the Emperor said, with an expansive gesture. ‘We are aware of your services to our beloved predecessor, and that you have performed honourably by your own understanding.’
By his own understanding.
Crispin said, speaking slowly, ‘There is a chapel of the Sleepless Ones, in Sauradia, on the Imperial Road. Not far from the eastern military camp.’ He heard his own voice as if from far away. Carefully, carefully, he did not look overhead.
‘I know it,’ said the man who had commanded armies there.
Crispin swallowed again. Control. It was necessary to keep one’s control. ‘It is a small chapel, inhabited by holy men of great piety. There is . . .’ He took a breath. ‘There is a . . . decoration there, on the dome, a rendering of Jad done long ago by artisans of a piety as . . . as they understood it . . . almost unimaginable.’
‘I believe I have seen it.’ Leontes was frowning.
‘It is . . . it is falling down, my lord. They were gifted and devout beyond words, but their . . . understanding of . . . technique was imperfect, so long ago.’
‘And so?’
‘And so I . . . my request of you, thrice-exalted lord, is that this image of the god be allowed to fall down in its own time. That the holy men who live there in peace and offer their night-long prayers for all of us, and travellers on the road, not be forced to see their chapel dome stripped bare.’
The cleric quickly began to speak, but Leontes held up a hand. Pertennius of Eubulus had said nothing the entire time, Crispin realized. He seldom did. An observer, a chronicler of wars and buildings. Crispin knew what else the man chronicled. He wished he’d hit him harder the night before. He wished he’d killed him, in fact.
‘It is falling, this . . . rendering?’ The Emperor’s voice was precise.
‘Piece by piece,’ Crispin said. ‘They know it, the holy ones. It grieves them, but they see it as the will of the god. Perhaps . . . it is, my lord.’ He could hate himself for saying that last, but he wanted this to happen. He needed it to happen. He did not speak of Pardos and a winter spent in restoration. It was not a lie, any of what he said.
‘Perhaps it is,’ the Emperor agreed, nodding his head. ‘The will of Jad. A sign for all of us of the virtue of what we are doing now.’ He looked back at the cleric, who dutifully nodded as well.
Crispin lowered his eyes. Looked at the floor. Waited.
‘This is your request of us?’
‘It is, my lord.’
‘Then it shall be so.’ The soldier’s voice, crisp with command. ‘Pertennius, you will have documents prepared and filed appropriately. One to be delivered above our own seal for the clerics there to keep in their possession. The decoration in that chapel shall be permitted to come down by itself, as a holy sign of the error of all such things. And you will record it as such in your chronicle of our reign.’
Crispin looked up.
He was gazing at the Emperor of Sarantium, golden and magnificent—looking very much the way the god of the sun was rendered in the west, in fact—but he was really seeing the image of Jad in that chapel by the road in the wilderness, the god pale and dark, suffering and maimed in the terrible defence of his children.
‘Thank you, my lord,’ he said.
He looked upwards then, after all. Despite everything. Couldn’t help himself. A death. Another death. She had warned him. Styliane. He looked, but did not weep. He had wept for Ilandra. For the girls.
And thinking so, he realized that there was one last small thing—terribly small, a gesture, no more—that he could still do, after all.
He cleared his throat. ‘Have I leave to withdraw, my lord?’
Leontes nodded. ‘You have. You do understand we are very well disposed towards you, Caius Crispus?’
Using Crispin’s name, even. Crispin nodded. ‘I am honoured, my lord.’ He bowed formally.
And then he turned and walked to the scaffolding, which was not far away.
‘What are you doing?’ It was Pertennius, as Crispin reached the ladder and placed a foot upon it.
Crispin didn’t turn around.
‘I have work to do. Up there.’ His daughters. Today’s task, memory and craft and light.
‘They will only bring it down!’ The secretary’s voice was uncomprehending.
Crispin did turn then, to look back over his shoulder. They were staring at him, the three of them, so were the others in the Sanctuary.
He said, ‘I understand. But they will have to do that. Bring it down. I will make what I make, in this civilized, holy place. Others will have to give the orders to destroy. As barbarians destroyed Rhodias . . . since it could not defend itself.’
He was looking at the Emperor, who had spoken to him of exactly this in the wet, drifting steam half a year before.
He could see that Leontes, too, remembered. The Emperor, who was not Valerius, not at all Valerius, but who had his own intelligence, said quietly, ‘You will waste your labour?’
And Crispin said, as softly, ‘It is not waste,’ and turned again and began to climb, as he had so many times, up to the scaffolding and the dome.
On the way up, before he reached the place where the setting bed for the tesserae had been smoothly laid and awaited him, he realized something else.
It wasn’t a waste, there was meaning to this, as much as he could bring to bear on any single action in his life, but it was an ending.
Another journey lay ahead, home at the end of it.
It was time to leave.
Fotius the sandalmaker, in his very best blue tunic, was telling everyone who would listen about the events that had occurred in this same place all those years ago when Apius died and the first Valerius came to the Golden Throne.
There had been a murder then, too, he said sagely, and he, Fotius, had seen a ghost on his way to the Hippodrome that morning, presaging it. Just as he, Fotius, had seen another one three days ago, in broad daylight, crouched on top of a colonnade, on the very morning the Emperor had been so foully slain by the Daleinoi.
There was more, he added, and he did have listeners, which w
as always gratifying. They were waiting for the Mandator to appear in the kathisma—the Patriarch would follow, and then the officials of the court and then those who were to be crowned today. It would be impossible to talk then, of course, with the noise of better than eighty thousand people.
In those days, Fotius expounded to some of the younger craftsmen in the Blues’ section, there had been a corrupt, evil attempt to subvert the will of the people right here in the Hippodrome—and it had been engineered by the Daleinoi back then, too! And what’s more, one of those working to achieve that had been the very same Lysippus the Calysian who had just been part of the murder in the palace!
And it had been Fotius himself, the sandalmaker declared proudly, who had unmasked the slimy Calysian as an imposter when he’d tried to pretend he was a follower of the Blues and incite the faction to acclaim Flavius Daleinus down there on the sands.
He pointed to the exact spot. He remembered it well. Thirteen, fourteen years, and as yesterday. As yesterday.
Everything came around in circles, he said piously, making the sign of the disk. Just as the sun rose and then set and then rose again, so did the patterns and fates of mortal men. Evil would be found out. (He had heard his chapel’s cleric say all this, just a week ago.) Flavius Daleinus had paid for his sins in fire that day long ago, and now his children and the Calysian had also paid.
But, someone objected, why did Valerius II die of the same fire, if it was all a matter of justice?
Fotius looked scornfully at the young man, a clothmaker. Would you, he said, seek to understand the ways of the god?
Not really, the clothmaker said. Only those of men here in the City. If the Calysian had been part of the Daleinus conspiracy to claim the throne back then, why did he end up as Quaestor of Revenue for Valerius I and then his nephew? For both of them? He wasn’t exiled till we demanded it, the man said, as others turned to him. Remember? Less than three years ago.
A cheap debating trick, Fotius thought indignantly. It wasn’t as if anyone would forget. Thirty thousand people had died.