‘How unfortunate. So Valerius had to die, that Leontes—and you—could rule?’
‘I . . . thought that was it, yes.’
He opened his mouth, closed it. ‘You thought?’
Her mouth twisted again. She winced this time, brought a hand up towards her wounded face, then put it down without touching. ‘After the tunnel, it didn’t seem important any more.’
‘I don’t . . .’
‘I could have killed him years ago. A foolish girl, I was. I thought the thing to do was take power, the way my father ought to have been given power. Leontes ruling, but only needing his soldiers’ love and his piety to be content, my brothers and I . . .’ She stopped.
I could have killed him years ago.
Crispin looked at her. ‘You think Valerius killed your father?’
‘Oh, Rhodian. I know he did. What I didn’t know was that nothing else mattered. I . . . should have been wiser.’
‘And killed sooner?’
‘I was eight years old,’ she said. And stopped. The birds were loud outside. ‘I think my life ended then. In a way. The life I was . . . headed towards.’
The son of Horius Crispus the mason looked at her. ‘You think this was love, then? What you did?’
‘No, I think it was vengeance,’ she said. And then added, with no warning at all, ‘Will you kill me, please?’
No warning, except that he could see what they had done and were doing to her, in the guise of mercy. Knew how desperately she would want this to end. There weren’t even logs here for a fire. Fire could be used to kill oneself. They would probably force food into her, he thought, if she refused to eat. There were ways of doing that. Leontes intended to demonstrate his generous nature by keeping a murderous woman alive for a time, because she had been his wife in the eyes of Jad.
A pious man, everyone knew it. They might even bring her out at times, on display.
Crispin looked at her. Could not speak.
She said, softly, that the guards would not hear, ‘You have known me a little, Rhodian. We have . . . shared some things, however briefly. Will you leave this room and leave me . . . in this life?’
‘I am—’
‘Just an artisan, I know. But—’
‘No!’ He almost shouted. Then he lowered his own voice. ‘That isn’t it. I am . . . not a man . . . who kills.’
His father’s head, flying from his shoulders, blood spurting from the toppling body. Men telling the tale in a tavern in Varena. A boy overhearing them.
‘Make an exception,’ she murmured lightly, but he could hear desperation beneath the cool tone.
He closed his eyes. ‘Styliane . . . ’
She said, ‘Or see it another way. I died years ago. I told you. You are just . . . signing a deed already executed.’
He looked at her again. She was facing him directly now, eyeless, marred, exquisitely beautiful. ‘Or punish me for your lost work. Or for Valerius. Or for any reason. But please.’ She was whispering. ‘No one else will do it, Crispin.’
He looked around. Nothing remotely resembling a weapon in here, guards at all the iron-barred windows and beyond the locked door.
No one else will do it.
And then, belatedly, he remembered how he had gained admission to this isle, and something cried out within him, in his heart, and he wished that he were already gone from here, from Sarantium, for she was wrong. There was someone else who would do it.
He took out the blade and looked at it. At the ivory carving of Hildric of the Antae on the hilt. Fine work, it was.
He didn’t know, he really didn’t know, if he was being made into an instrument yet again, or was being offered, instead, a dark, particular gift, for services, and with affection, by an Empress who had declared herself in his debt. He didn’t know Gisel well enough to judge. It could be either, or both. Or something else entirely.
He did know what the woman before him wanted. Needed. As he looked at her and about this room, he realized that he also knew what was proper, for her soul and his own. Gisel of the Antae, who had carried this blade hidden against her body, sailing here, might also have known, he thought.
Sometimes dying was not the worst thing that could happen. Sometimes it was release, a gift, an offering.
Amid all the turning gyres, all the plots and counterplots and images begetting images, Crispin made them come to a stop, and he accepted the burden of doing so.
He took the ivory handle off the blade, as Gisel had done. He laid the knife down on the table-top, hiltless, so slender it was almost invisible.
Amid the glorious springtime brightness of that room, that day, he said, ‘I must go. I am leaving you something.’
‘How kind. A small mosaic, to comfort me in the dark? Another gemstone to shine for me, like the first you gave?’
He shook his head again. There was a pain in his chest now.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not those.’ And perhaps something in the difficulty with which he spoke alerted her. Even the newly blind began to learn how to listen. She lifted her head a little.
‘Where is it?’ Styliane asked, very softly.
‘The table,’ he said. He closed his eyes briefly. ‘Towards me, near the far side. Be careful.’
Be careful.
He watched her rise, come forward, reach her hands towards the table edge to find it, then move both palms haltingly across—still learning how to do this. He saw when she found the blade, which was sharp and sleek as death could sometimes be.
‘Ah,’ she said. And became very still.
He said nothing.
‘You will be blamed for this, of course.’
‘I am sailing in the morning.’
‘It would be courteous of me to wait until then, wouldn’t it?’
He said nothing to this, either.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Styliane softly, ‘if I have the patience, you know. They . . . might search and find it?’
‘They might,’ he said.
She was silent a long time. Then he saw her smile. She said, ‘I suppose this means you did love me, a little.’
He was afraid he would weep.
‘I suppose it does,’ he said quietly.
‘How very unexpected,’ said Styliane Daleina.
He fought for control. Said nothing.
‘I wish,’ she said, ‘I’d been able to find her. One thing left unfinished. I shouldn’t tell you that, I know. Do you think she’s dead?’
The heart could cry. ‘If not, I think she will be, most likely, when she learns . . . you are.’
That gave her pause. ‘Ah. I can understand that. So this gift you offer kills us both.’
A truth. In the way they seemed to see things here.
‘I suppose it might,’ Crispin said. He was looking at her, seeing her now, and as she was before, in the palace, in his room, in her own, her mouth finding his. Whatever else I do . . .
She had warned him, more than once.
She said, ‘Poor man. All you wanted to do here was leave your dead behind and make a mosaic overhead.’
‘I was . . . overly ambitious,’ he said. And heard her laugh, in delight, for the last time.
‘Thank you for that,’ she said. For wit. There was a silence. She lifted the sliver of the blade, her fingers as slim, almost as long. ‘And thank you for this, and for . . . other things, once.’ She stood very straight, unbending, no concessions to . . . anything at all. ‘A safe journey home, Rhodian.’
He was being dismissed, and not even by name at the end. He knew suddenly that she was not going to be able to wait. Her need was a hunger.
He looked at her, in the brightness she’d elected to offer here that all might see clearly where she could not, the way a host forbidden drink by his physician might order forth the very best wine he had for his friends.
‘And you, my lady,’ he said. ‘A safe journey home to the light.’
He knocked on the door. They opened it for him and let him out. He left th
e room, the glade, the woods, the stony, stony beach, the isle.
IN THE MORNING he left Sarantium, on the tide at dawn, when hues and shades of colour were just coming back into the world at the end of the god’s long voyage through the dark.
The sun rose behind them, filtered by a line of low clouds. As he stood at the stern of the ship upon which Plautus Bonosus, in kindness amid his own sorrow, had offered him passage, Crispin, with the handful of other passengers, looked back upon the City. Eye of the world, they called it. Glory of Jad’s creation.
He saw the bustle and brilliance of the deep, sheltered harbour, the iron pillars that held the chains that could be dropped across the entrance in time of war. He watched small boats cut across their wake, ferries to Deapolis, morning fishermen setting out, others coming back from a night’s harvesting on the waves, sails of many colours.
He caught a glimpse, far off, of the triple walls themselves, where they curved down to the water. Saranios himself had drawn the line for these when first he came. He saw the glint of this muted early sunlight on rooftops everywhere, watching the City climb up from the sea, chapel and sanctuary domes, patrician homes, guild-house roofs bronzed in ostentatious display. He saw the vast bulk of the Hippodrome where men raced horses.
And then, as they swept from a southwest course more towards the west, clearing the harbour, reaching the swells of the open sea where their own white sails billowed, Crispin saw the Imperial Precinct gardens and playing fields and palaces, and they filled his sight, all of his gaze, as he was carried past them and away.
West they went, on a dawn wind and tide, the mariners calling to each other, orders shouted in the brightening, the zest of something beginning. A long journey. He looked back still, as did the other passengers, all of them caught, held at the stern rail as if in a spell. But at the end, as they drew farther and farther off, Crispin was looking at one thing only, and the very last thing he saw, far distant, almost on the horizon but gleaming above all else, was Artibasos’s dome.
Then the rising sun finally burst above those low clouds east, appearing right behind the distant City, dazzlingly bright, and he had to shield his eyes, avert his gaze, and when he looked back again, blinking, Sarantium was gone, it had left him, and there was only the sea.
EPILOGUE
An old man in a chapel doorway, not far from the walls of Varena. Once he would have been engaged in considering the present colour of those walls, somewhere between honey and ochre, pondering ways of using glass and stone and light to accomplish that hue as it appeared in this particular late-spring sunshine. Not any more. Now, he is content to simply enjoy the day, the afternoon. He is aware, in the way that sometimes creeps up on the aged, that there are no assurances of another spring.
He is virtually alone here, only a few other men about, somewhere in the yard or in the unused old chapel adjacent to the expanded sanctuary. The sanctuary is not in use now, either, though a king is buried here. Since an assassination attempt in the autumn, the clerics have refused to conduct services, or even remain in their dormitory, despite substantial pressure from those currently governing in the palace. The man in the doorway has views on this, but for the moment he simply enjoys the quiet as he waits for someone to arrive. He has been coming here for some days now, feeling more impatient than an old man really should, he tells himself, if the lessons of a long life had been properly absorbed.
He tilts the stool on which he sits, leans back against the wood of the doorway (an old habit), and slides forward the remarkably shapeless hat he wears. He is irrationally fond of the hat, enduring all jests and gibes it provokes with perfect equanimity. For one thing, the headgear—absurd even when new—saved his life almost fifteen years ago when an apprentice, fearful in a darkened chapel at evening, thought he was a thief approaching without a light. The blow from a staff that the young fellow (broad-shouldered, even back then) had intended to bring crashing down on an intruder’s head was averted at the last instant when the hat was seen and known.
Martinian of Varena, at his ease in the spring light, looks off down the road just before allowing himself to fall asleep.
HE SAW THAT SAME apprentice coming. Or, more accurately, these long years later, he saw his one-time apprentice, now his colleague and partner and awaited friend, Caius Crispus, approaching along the path leading to the wide, low wooden gate that fenced in the sanctuary yard and its graves.
‘Rot you, Crispin,’ he said mildly. ‘Just as I was about to nap.’ Then he considered the fact that he was quite alone, that no one was listening to him, and he allowed himself an honest response, quickly tilting the stool back forward, aware of the sudden hard beating of his heart.
He felt wonder, anticipation, very great happiness.
Watching, shadowed in the doorway, he saw Crispin—hair and beard shorter than when he’d left, but not otherwise discernibly altered—unhook the gate latch and enter the yard. Martinian lifted his voice and called to the other men waiting. They weren’t apprentices or artisans: no work was being done here now. Two of those men came striding quickly around the corner of the building. Martinian pointed towards the gate.
‘There he is. Finally. I couldn’t tell you if he’s in a temper, but it is generally safer to assume as much.’
Both men swore, much as he had, though with more genuine feeling, and started forward. They had been in Varena nearly two weeks, waiting with increasing irritation. Martinian was the one who had suggested the odds were good that the traveller, when he did come, would stop at this chapel outside the walls. He is pleased to have been correct, though not happy about what the other man will find here.
In his doorway, he watched two strangers go forward, the first souls to greet a traveller on his return from far away. Both of them are easterners, ironically. One is an Imperial Courier, the other an officer in the army of Sarantium. The army that was supposed to have been invading this spring and wasn’t, now.
That being the largest change of all.
SOME TIME LATER, after the two Sarantines had formally conveyed whatever messages they had lingered to deliver and had gone away, along with the soldiers who had been here on guard with them, Martinian decided that Crispin had been sitting alone by the gate long enough, whatever the tidings had been. He rose slowly and walked forward, nursing the usual ache in his hip.
Crispin had his back to him, seemed immersed in the documents he’d been given. It was not good to surprise a man, Martinian had always felt, so he called the other’s name while still a distance away.
‘I saw your hat,’ Crispin said, not looking up. ‘I only came home to burn it, you understand.’
Martinian walked up to him.
Crispin, sitting on the large moss-covered boulder he’d always liked, looked over at him. His eyes were bright, remembered. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think to find you here.’
Martinian had also intended some kind of jest, but found himself incapable of one, just then. Instead, he bent forward, wordlessly, and kissed the younger man on the forehead, in benediction. Crispin stood up, and put his arms around him and they embraced.
‘My mother?’ the younger man asked, when they stepped back. His voice was gruff.
‘Is well. Awaiting you.’
‘How did you all . . . ? Oh. The courier. So you knew I was on the way?’
Martinian nodded. ‘They arrived some time ago.’
‘I had a slower boat. Walked from Mylasia.’
‘Still hate horses?’
Crispin hesitated. ‘Riding them.’ He looked at Martinian. His eyebrows met when he frowned; Martinian remembered that. The older man was trying to sort out what else he was seeing in the traveller’s face. Differences, but hard to pin down.
Crispin said, ‘They brought the tidings from Sarantium? About the changes?’
Martinian nodded. ‘You’ll tell me more?’
‘What I know.’
‘You are . . . all right?’ A ridiculous question, but in some ways the
only one that mattered.
Crispin hesitated again. ‘Mostly. A great deal happened.’
‘Of course. Your work . . . it went well?’
Another pause. As if they were fumbling their way back towards easiness. ‘It went very well, but . . .’ Crispin sat down on the rock again. ‘It is coming down. Along with others, everywhere.’
‘What?’
‘The new Emperor has . . . beliefs about renderings of Jad.’
‘Impossible. You must be wrong. That—’
Martinian stopped.
Crispin said, ‘I wish I was. Our work will be coming down here, too, I suspect. We’ll be subject to Sarantine edicts, if all goes as the Empress intends.’
The Empress. They knew about this. A miracle of the god, some had already named it. Martinian thought there might be more earthly explanations. ‘Gisel?’
‘Gisel. You heard?’
‘Word came from other couriers on the same ship.’ Martinian sat down himself now, on the facing rock. So many times, they’d sat here together, or on the tree stumps beyond the gate.
Crispin looked over his shoulder at the sanctuary. We’re going to lose this. What we did here.’
Martinian cleared his throat. Something needed to be said. ‘Some of it has been lost, already.’
‘So soon? I didn’t think . . .’
‘Not for that reason. They . . . scraped down Heladikos in the spring.’
Crispin said nothing. Martinian remembered this expression, too, however.
‘Eudric was trying to earn support from the Patriarch in Rhodias, with the invasion looming. Backing away from the heresy of the Antae.’
Heladikos and his torch had been the very last thing Crispin had done before he’d gone away. The younger man sat very still. Martinian was trying to read him, see what had changed, what had not. It felt odd not to understand Crispin intuitively, after so many years. People went away and they changed; hard on those who remained behind.
More sorrow and more life, Martinian thought. Both things. The documents from the courier were still clutched between the other man’s large hands.
Crispin said, ‘Did it work? The . . . backing away?’