Читать книгу Sailing to Sarantium - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 8

Chapter I

The Imperial Post, along with most of the civil positions in the Sarantine Empire after Valerius I died and his nephew, having renamed himself appropriately, took the Golden Throne, was under the hegemony of the Master of Offices.

The immensely complex running of the mails—from the recently conquered Majriti deserts and Esperana in the far west to the long, always-shifting Bassanid border in the east, and from the northern wildernesses of Karch and Moskav to the deserts of Soriyya and beyond—required a substantial investment of manpower and resources, and no little requisitioning of labour and horses from those rural communities dubiously honoured by having an Imperial Posting Inn located in or near them.

The position of Imperial Courier, charged with the actual carrying of the public mails and court documents, paid only modestly well and involved an almost endless regimen of hard travelling, sometimes through uncertain territory, depending on barbarian or Bassanid activity in a given season. The fact that such positions were avidly solicited, with all the associated bribes, was a reflection of where the position might lead after a few years more than anything else.

The couriers of the Imperial Post were expected to be part-time spies for the Quaestor of Imperial Intelligence, and diligent labour in this unspoken part of the job— coupled with rather more of the associated bribes—might see a man appointed to the intelligence service directly, with more risks, less far-ranging travel, and significantly higher recompense. Along with a chance to be on the receiving end, at last, of some of the bribes changing hands.

As one’s declining years approached, an appointment from Intelligence back to, say, running a substantial Posting Inn could actually lead to a respectable retirement—especially if one was clever, and the Inn far enough from the City to permit rather more watering of wine and an enhancing of revenues by accepting travellers without the required Permits.

The position of courier was, in short, a legitimate career path for a man with sufficient means to make a start but not enough to be launched by his family in anything more promising.

This, as it happened, was a fair description of the competence and background of Pronobius Tilliticus. Born with an unfortunately amusing name (a frequently cursed legacy of his mother’s grandfather and his mother’s unfamiliarity with current army vernacular), with limited skill at law or numbers, and only a modest paternal niche in Sarantine hierarchies, Tilliticus had been told over and again how fortunate he was to have had his mother’s cousin’s aid in securing a courier’s position. His obese cousin, soft rump securely spread on a bench among the clerks in the Imperial Revenue office, had been foremost of those to make this observation at family gatherings.

Tilliticus had been obliged to smile and agree. Many times. He had a gathering-prone family.

In such an oppressive context—his mother was now constantly demanding he choose a useful wife—it was sometimes a relief to leave Sarantium. And now he was on the roads again with a packet of letters, bound for the barbarian Antae’s capital city of Varena in Batiara and points en route. He also carried one particular Imperial Packet that came—unusually—directly from the Chancellor himself, with the elaborate Seal of that office, and instructions from the eunuchs to make this delivery with some ceremony.

An important artisan of some kind, he was given to understand. The Emperor was rebuilding the Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom. Artisans were being summoned to the City from all over the Empire and beyond. It irked Tilliticus: barbarians and rustic provincials were receiving formal invitations and remuneration on a level three or four times his own to participate in this latest Imperial folly.

In early autumn on the good roads north and then west through Trakesia it was hard to preserve an angry mien, however. Even Tilliticus found the weather lifting his spirits. The sun shone mildly overhead. The northern grain had been harvested, and on the slopes as he turned west the vineyards were purple with ripening grapes. Just looking at them gave him a thirst. The Posting Inns on this road were well known to him and they seldom cheated couriers. He lingered a few days at one of them (Let the damned paint-dauber wait for his summons a little!) and feasted on spit-roasted fox, stuffed fat with grapes. A girl he remembered seemed also to enthusiastically remember him. The innkeeper did charge double the price for her exclusive services, but Tilliticus knew he was doing it and saw that as one of the perquisites of a position he dreamed of for himself.

On the last night, however, the girl asked him to take her away, which was simply ridiculous.

Tilliticus refused indignantly and—abetted by a quantity of scarcely watered wine—offered her a lecture about his mother’s family’s lineage. He exaggerated only slightly; with a country prostitute it was hardly required. She didn’t seem to take the chiding with particular good grace and in the morning, riding away, Tilliticus considered whether his affections had been misplaced.

A few days later he was certain they had been. Urgent medical circumstances dictated a short detour north and a further delay of several days at a well-known Hospice of Galinus, where he was treated for the genital infection she had given him.

They bled him, purged him with something that emptied his bowels and stomach violently, made him ingest various unpleasant liquids, shaved his groin, and daubed on a burning, foul-smelling black ointment twice a day. He was instructed to eat only bland foods and to refrain from sexual congress and wine for an unnatural length of time.

Hospices were expensive, and this one, being celebrated, was particularly so. Tilliticus was forced to bribe the chief administrator to record his stay as being for injuries incurred in the course of duties—or else he’d have had to pay for the visit out of his own pocket.

Well, a crab-infested chit in a Posting Inn was an injury incurred in the Emperor’s service, wasn’t it? This way, the administrator could bill the Imperial Post directly—and he would no doubt add to the tally half a dozen treatments Tilliticus hadn’t received and designate those sums for his own purse.

Tilliticus left a stiff letter addressed to the innkeeper four days’ ride back, to be delivered by the next eastbound courier. Let the bitch hump for slaves and farmhands in an alley back of a caupona if she wasn’t going to keep herself clean. The Posting Inns on the roads of the Empire were the finest in the world, and Pronobius Tilliticus regarded it as a positive duty to make sure she was gone when next he rode through.

He was in the service of the Sarantine Emperor. These things re flected directly upon the majesty and prestige of Valerius II and his glorious Empress Alixana. The fact that the Empress had been bought and used in her youth in exactly the same way as the chit in the inn was not a matter for open discussion at this stage in the world’s progression. A man was allowed his thoughts, however. They couldn’t kill you for thinking things.

He lasted a part of the prescribed period of abstinence, but a tavern he knew too well in Megarium, the port city and administrative centre of western Sauradia, proved predictably tempting. He didn’t remember any of the girls this time round but they were all lively enough, and the wine was good. Megarium had a reputation for decent wine, however barbaric the rest of Sauradia might be.

An unfortunate incident involving jests about his name—made one night by a loutish apprentice and a trader in Heladikian icons—left him with a gashed chin and a twisted shoulder that called for further medical treatment and a longer stay than anticipated in the tavern. The stay became less than pleasant after the first few days because it appeared that two of the once-willing girls had contracted an affliction unfortunately similar to the one he was to have been cured of by now, and they made no secret about blaming Tilliticus.

They didn’t throw him out, of course—he was an Imperial Courier, and the girls were bodies-for-sale, one of them a slave—but his food tended to arrive cold or overcooked after that, and no one rushed to help a man with an awkward shoulder manage his plates and flasks. Tilliticus was feeling seriously hard done by when he finally decided he was well enough to resume his journey. The tavern-keeper, a Rhodian by birth, gave him mail for relatives in Varena. Tilliticus tossed it in a midden-heap by the harbour.

It was much later in the autumn than it should have been by then and the rains had come. He caught one of the last of the small ships tacking west across the bay to the Batiaran port of Mylasia and docked in a cold, driving rain, having emptied his guts over the ship’s railing several times. Tilliticus had little love for the sea.

The city of Varena—where the barbaric, still half-pagan Antae who had sacked Rhodias a hundred years ago and conquered all Batiara held their wretched little court— was three days’ ride farther west, two if he hurried. He had not the least interest in hurrying. Tilliticus waited out the rain, drinking morosely by the harbour. His injuries allowed him to do that, he decided. This had been a very difficult run. His shoulder still hurt.

And he had liked that girl in Trakesia.

In the good weather Pardos was outside at the oven making quicklime for the setting bed. The heat of the fire was pleasant when the wind picked up, and he liked being in the sanctuary yard. The presence of the dead under their headstones didn’t frighten him, or not in daylight at any rate. Jad had ordained that man would die. War and plague were part of the world the god had made. Pardos didn’t understand why, but he had no expectation of understanding. The clerics, even when they disagreed about doctrine or burned each other over Heladikos, all taught submission and faith, not a vainglorious attempt to comprehend. Pardos knew he wasn’t wise enough to be vain or to comprehend.

Beyond the graven, sculpted headstones of the named dead, a dark earth mound rose—no grass there yet—at the northern end of the yard. Beneath it lay bodies claimed by the plague. It had come two years ago and then again last summer, killing in numbers too great for anything but mass burial by slaves taken in war. There was lime ash in there, too, and some other elements mixed in. They were said to help contain the bitter spirits of the dead and what had killed them. It was certainly keeping the grass from coming back. The queen had ordered three court cheiromancers and an old alchemist who lived outside the walls to cast binding spells as well. One did all the things one could think to do in the aftermath of plague, whatever the clerics or the High Patriarch might say about pagan magics.

Pardos fumbled for his sun disk and gave thanks for being alive. He watched the black smoke of the lime kiln rise up towards the white, swift clouds, and noted the autumn reds and golds of the forest to the east. Birds were singing in the blue sky and the grass was green, though shading to brown near the sanctuary building itself where the afternoon light failed in the shadow of the new walls.

Colours, all around him in the world. Crispin had told him, over and over, to make himself see the colours. To think about them, how they played against each other and with each other; to consider what happened when a cloud crossed the sun—as now—and the grass darkened beneath him. What would he name that hue in his mind? How would he use it? In a marinescape? A hunting scene? A mosaic of Heladikos rising above an autumn forest towards the sun? Look at the grass—now!—before the light returned. Picture that colour in glass and stone tesserae. Embed it in memory, so you could embed it in lime and make a mosaic world on a wall or a dome.

Assuming, of course, there ever emerged a glassworks again in conquered Batiara where they made reds and blues and greens worthy of a name, instead of the muddied, bubbled, streaked excrescences they’d received in the morning shipment from Rhodias.

Martinian, a calm man and perhaps prepared for this, had only sighed when the urgently awaited sheets of new glass were unwrapped. Crispin had foamed into one of his notorious, blasphemous rages and smashed the topmost dirty brown sheet of what was supposed to be red, cutting one hand. ‘This is red! Not that dungheap colour!’ he had shouted, letting drops of his blood fall on the brownish sheet.

He could be entertaining in his fury, actually, unless you happened to be the one who had given him cause to lose his temper. When they had their beer and crusts of bread at lunch, or walking back towards Varena’s walls at sunset after work, the labourers and apprentices would trade stories of things Crispin had said and done when angry. Martinian had told the apprentices that Crispin was brilliant and a great man; Pardos wondered if a temper came with that.

He’d had some shockingly inventive ideas this morning for how to deal with the glassworks steward. Pardos himself would never have been able to even conceive of broken shards being inserted and applied in the ways Crispin had proposed, swearing violently even though they were on consecrated ground.

Martinian, ignoring his younger partner, had set about accepting and discarding sheets, eyeing them with care, sighing now and again. They simply couldn’t reject them all. For one thing, there was little chance of better quality in replacements. For another, they were working against time, with a formal re-burial and a ceremony for King Hildric planned by his daughter the queen for the first day after the Dykania Festival. It would take place here in the newly expanded sanctuary they were decorating now. It was already mid-autumn, the grapes harvested. The roads south were muddy after last week’s rains. The chances of getting new glass sent up from Rhodias in time were too slim even to be considered.

Martinian was, as usual, visibly resigned to the situation. They would have to make do. Pardos knew that Crispin was as aware of this as his partner. He just had his temper. And getting things right mattered to him. Perhaps too much so, in the imperfect world Jad had made as his mortal children’s dwelling place. Pardos the apprentice made a quick sign of the sun disk again and stoked the kiln, keeping it as hot as he could. He stirred the mixture inside with a long shovel. This would not be a good day to become distracted and let the setting lime emerge faulty.

Crispin had imaginative uses for broken glass on his mind.

So attentive was he to the lime mixture cooking in the oven that Pardos actually jumped when a voice— speaking awkwardly accented Rhodian—addressed him. He turned quickly, and saw a lean, red-faced man in the grey and white colours of the Imperial Post. The courier’s horse grazed behind him near the gate. Belatedly, Pardos became aware that the other apprentices and labourers working outside the sanctuary had stopped and were looking over this way. Imperial Couriers from Sarantium did not appear in their midst with any frequency at all.

‘Are you hard of hearing?’ the man said waspishly. He had a recent wound on his chin. The eastern accent was pronounced. ‘I said my name is Tilliticus. Sarantine Imperial Post. I’m looking for a man named Martinian. An artisan. They said he’d be here.’

Pardos, intimidated, could only gesture towards the sanctuary. Martinian, as it happened, was asleep on his stool in the doorway, his much-abused hat pulled over his eyes to block the afternoon sunlight.

‘Deaf and mute. I see,’ said the courier. He clumped off through the grass towards the building.

‘I’m not,’ said Pardos, but so softly he wasn’t heard. Behind the courier’s back, he flapped urgently at two of the other apprentices, trying to signal them to wake Martinian before this unpleasant man appeared in front of him.

HE HAD NOT BEEN ASLEEP. From his favourite position— on a pleasant day, at any rate—in the sanctuary entrance, Martinian of Varena had noticed the courier riding up from a distance. Grey and white showed clearly against green and blue in sunlight.

He and Crispin had used that concept, in fact, for a row of Blessed Victims on the long walls of a private chapel in Baiana years ago. It had been only a partial success—at night, by candlelight, the effect was not what Crispin had hoped it would be—but they’d learned a fair bit, and learning from errors was what mosaic work was about, as Martinian was fond of telling the apprentices. If the patrons had had enough money to light the chapel properly at night, it might have been different, but they’d known the resources when they made their design. It was their own fault. One always had to work within the constraints of time and money. That, too, was a lesson to be learned—and taught.

He watched the courier stop by Pardos at the lime kiln and he tipped his hat forward over his eyes, feigning sleep. He felt a peculiar apprehension. No idea why. And he was never able to give an adequate explanation afterwards, even to himself, as to why he did what he did next that autumn afternoon, altering so many lives forever. Sometimes the god entered a man, the clerics taught. And sometimes daemons or spirits did. There were powers in the half-world, beyond the grasp of mortal men.

He was to tell his learned friend Zoticus, over a mint infusion some days later, that it had had to do with feeling old that day. A week of steady rain had caused his finger joints to swell painfully. That wasn’t really it, however. He was hardly so weak as to let such a thing lead him into so much folly. But he truly didn’t know why he’d chosen— with no premeditation whatsoever—to deny being himself.

Did a man always understand his own actions? He would ask Zoticus that as they sat together in the alchemist’s farmhouse. His friend would give him a predictable reply and refill his cup with the infusion, mixed with something to ease the ache in his hands. The unpleasant courier would be long gone by then, to wherever his postings had taken him. And Crispin, too, would be gone.

Martinian of Varena feigned sleep as the easterner with the nose and cheekbones of a drinker approached him and rasped, ‘You! Wake! I’m looking for a man named Martinian. An Imperial Summons to Sarantium!’

He was loud, arrogant as all Sarantines seemed to be when they came to Batiara, his words thick with the accent. Everyone heard him. He meant for them to hear him. Work stopped inside the sanctuary being expanded to properly house the bones of King Hildric of the Antae, dead of the plague a little more than a year ago.

Martinian pretended to rouse himself from an afternoon doze in the autumn light. He blinked owlishly up at the Imperial Courier, and then pointed a stiff finger into the sanctuary—and up towards his longtime friend and colleague Caius Crispus. Crispin was just then attempting the task of making muddy brown tesserae appear like the brilliant glowing of Heladikos’s sacred fire, high up on a scaffold under the dome.

Even as he pointed, Martinian wondered at himself. A summons? To the City? And he was playing the games of a boy? No one here would give him away to an arrogant Sarantine, but even so . . .

In the stillness that ensued, a voice they all knew was suddenly heard overhead with unfortunate clarity. The resonance of sound happened to be very good in this sanctuary.

‘By Heladikos’s cock, I will carve slices from his rump with his useless glass and force feed him his own buttocks in segments, I swear by holy Jad!’

The courier looked affronted.

‘That’s Martinian,’ said Martinian helpfully. ‘Up there. He’s in a temper.’

IN FACT, HE REALLY wasn’t any more. The blasphemous vulgarity was almost reflexive. Sometimes he said things, and wasn’t even aware he was speaking aloud, when a technical challenge engaged him entirely. At the moment, he was obsessed, in spite of himself, with the problem of how to make the torch of Heladikos gleam red when he had nothing that was red with which to work. If he’d had some gold he could have sandwiched the glass against a gold backing and warmed the hue that way, but gold for mosaic was a fatuous dream here in Batiara after the wars and the plague.

He’d had an idea, however. Up on the high scaffold, Caius Crispus of Varena was setting reddish-veined marble from Pezzelana flat into the soft, sticky lime coat on the dome, interspersed with the best of the tesserae they’d managed to salvage from the miserable sheets of glass. The glass pieces he laid at angles in the setting bed, to catch and reflect the light.

If he was right, the effect would be a shimmer and dance along the tall shape of the flame, the flat stones mingled with the tilted, glinting tesserae. Seen from below, it ought to have that result in sunlight through the windows around the base of the dome, or by the light of the wall candles and the suspended iron lanterns running the length of the sanctuary. The young queen had assured Martinian that her bequest to the clerics here would ensure evening and winter lighting. Crispin had no reason to disbelieve her—it was her father’s tomb, and the Antae had had a cult of ancestor-worship, only thinly masked by their conversion to the Jaddite faith.

He had a cloth knotted around the cut in his left hand, and that made him awkward. He dropped a good stone, watched it fall a long way and swore again, reaching for another one. The setting bed was beginning to harden beneath the flame and torch he was filling in. He would have to work faster. The torch was silver. They were using whitish marble and some river-smooth stones for that—it ought to work. He’d heard that in the east they had a way of frosting glass to make an almost pure white tessera like snow, and that mother-of-pearl was available, for crowns and jewellery. He didn’t even like thinking about such things. It only frustrated him, here in the west amid ruins.

As it happened, these were his thoughts in the precise moment when the irritated, carrying eastern voice from below penetrated his concentration and his life. A coincidence, or the heard accents of Sarantium carrying his mind sailing that way towards the celebrated channel and the inner sea and the gold and silver and silk of the Emperor?

He looked down.

Someone, short as a snail from this height, was addressing him as Martinian. This would have been merely vexing had Martinian himself—by the doorway, as was usual at this hour—not also been gazing up at Crispin as the easterner barked the wrong name, disturbing all the work in the sanctuary.

Crispin bit back two obscene retorts and then a third response which was to direct the imbecile in the right direction. Something was afoot. It might only be a jibe directed at the courier—though that would be unlike his partner—or it might be something else.

He’d deal with it later.

‘I’ll be down when I’m done,’ he called, much more politely than the circumstances warranted. ‘Go pray for someone’s immortal soul in the meantime. Do it quietly.’

The red-faced man shouted, ‘Imperial Couriers are not kept waiting, you vulgar provincial! There is a letter for you!’

Interesting as this undoubtedly was, Crispin found it easy to ignore him. He wished he had some red vivid as the courier’s cheeks, mind you. Even from this height they showed crimson. It occurred to him that he’d never tried to achieve that effect on a face in mosaic. He slotted the idea among all the others and returned to creating the holy flame given as a gift to mankind, working with what he had.

HAD HIS INSTRUCTIONS NOT been unfortunately specific, Tilliticus would simply have dropped the packet on the dusty, debris-strewn floor of the shabby little sanctuary, reeking with the worst Heladikian heresy, and stormed out.

Men did not come—even here in Batiara—in their own slow time to receive an invitation from the Imperial Precinct in Sarantium. They raced over, ecstatic. They knelt. They embraced the knees of the courier. Once, someone had kissed his muddy, dung-smeared boots, weeping for joy.

And they most certainly offered the courier largess for being the bearer of such exalted, dazzling tidings.

Watching the ginger-haired man named Martinian finally descend from his scaffolding and walk deliberately across the floor towards him, Pronobius Tilliticus understood that his boots were not about to be kissed. Nor was any sum of money likely to be proffered him in gratitude.

It only confirmed his opinion of Batiara under the Antae. They might be Jad-worshippers, if barely, and they might be formal tributary allies of the Empire in a relationship brokered by the High Patriarch in Rhodias, and they might have conquered this peninsula a century ago and rebuilt some of the walls they had levelled then, but they were still barbarians.

And they had infected with their uncouth manners and heresies even those native-born descendants of the Rhodian Empire who had a claim to honour.

The man Martinian’s hair was actually an offensively bright red, Tilliticus saw. Only the dust and lime in it and in his untidy beard softened the hue. His eyes, unsoftened, were a hard, extremely unpleasant blue. He wore a nondescript, stained tunic over wrinkled brown leggings. He was a big man, and he carried himself in a coiled, angry way that was quite unappealing. His hands were large, and there was a bloodstained bandage wrapped around one of them.

He’s in a temper, the fool by the doorway had said. The fool was still on his stool, watching the two of them from beneath something misshapen that might once have been a hat. The deaf and mute apprentice had wandered in by now, along with all the others from outside. It ought to have been a splendid, resonant moment for Tilliticus to make his proclamation, to graciously accept the artisan’s stammering gratitude on behalf of the Chancellor and the Imperial Post, and then head for the best inn Varena could offer with some coins to spend on mulled wine and a woman.

‘And so? I’m here. What is it you want?’

The mosaicist’s voice was as hard as his eyes. His glance, when it left Tilliticus’s face and sought that of the older man in the doorway, did not grow any less inimical. An unpleasant character, entirely.

Tilliticus was genuinely shocked by the rudeness. ‘In truth? I want nothing whatever with you.’ He reached into his bag, found the fat Imperial Packet and threw it scornfully at the artisan. The man, moving quickly, caught it in one hand.

Tilliticus said, almost spitting the words, ‘You are Martinian of Varena, obviously. Unworthy as you are, I am charged with declaring that the Thrice Exalted Beloved of Jad, the Emperor Valerius II, requests you to attend upon him in Sarantium with all possible speed. The packet you hold contains a sum of money to aid you in your travels, a sealed Permit signed by the Chancellor himself that allows you to use Imperial Posting Inns for lodging and services, and a letter that I am sure you will be able to find someone to read to you. It indicates that your services are requested to aid in the decoration of the new Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom that the Emperor, in his own great wisdom, is even now constructing.’

There was a mollifying buzz of sound in the sanctuary as the apprentices and lesser artisans, at least, appeared to grasp the significance of what Tilliticus had just said. It occurred to him that he might consider, at future times, relaying the formal words in this blunt tone. It had an effectiveness of its own.

‘What happened to the old one?’ The red-haired artisan seemed unmoved. Was he mentally deficient? Tilliticus wondered.

‘What old one, you primitive barbarian?’

‘Sheathe the insults or you’ll crawl from here. The old sanctuary.’

Tilliticus blinked. The man was deranged. ‘You threaten an Imperial Courier? Your nose will be slit for you if you so much as lift a hand to me. The old sanctuary burned two years ago, in the riot. Are you ignorant of events in the world?’

‘We had plague here,’ the man said, his voice flat. ‘Twice. And then a civil war. Fires halfway across the world are unimportant at such times. Thank you for delivering this. I will read it and decide what to do.’

‘Decide?’ Tilliticus squeaked. He hated the way his voice rose when he was caught by surprise. The same thing had happened when that accursed girl in Trakesia had asked him to take her away. It had made it difficult to impart the proper tone to the needed dissertation upon his mother’s family.

‘Why, yes,’ the mosaicist said. ‘Dare I assume this is an offer and an invitation, not a command, as to a slave?’

Tilliticus was too stupefied to speak for a moment.

He drew himself up. Pleased to note that his voice was under control, he snapped, ‘Only a slave would fail to grasp what this means. It seems you are craven and without aspiration in the world. In which case, like a slave, you may burrow back down into your little hovel here and do what you will in the dirt and Sarantium suffers no loss at all. I have no time for further talk. You have your letter. In the Emperor’s thrice-glorious name, I bid you good day.’

‘Good day,’ said the man, dismissively. He turned away. ‘Pardos,’ he said, ‘the setting lime was well done today. And properly laid on, Radulf, Couvry. I’m pleased.’

Tilliticus stomped out.

The Empire, civilization, the glories of the Holy City . . . all wasted on some people, he thought. In the doorway he stopped in front of the older man, who sat regarding him with a mild gaze.

‘Your hat,’ Tilliticus said, glaring at him, ‘is the most ridiculous head-covering I have ever seen.’

‘I know,’ said the man, cheerfully. ‘They all tell me that.’

Pronobius Tilliticus, aggrieved, unassuaged, reclaimed his horse and galloped off, dust rising behind him on the road to Varena’s walls.

‘WE HAD BETTER TALK,’ Crispin said, looking down at the man who had taught him most of what he knew.

Martinian’s expression was rueful. He stood up, adjusted the eccentric hat on his head—only Crispin among those there knew that it had saved his life, once— and led the way outside. The Imperial Courier, dudgeon lending him speed, was racing towards town. The sanctuary lay in its own enclosure just east of the city walls.

They watched him for a moment, then Martinian began walking south towards a copse of beech trees outside the yard at the opposite end from the burial mound. The sun was low now and the wind had picked up. Crispin squinted a little, emerging from the muted light of the sanctuary. A cow looked up from grazing and regarded them as they went. Crispin carried the Imperial Packet. The name ‘Martinian of Varena’ was writ large upon it in cursive script, quite elegantly. The seal was crimson and elaborate.

Martinian stopped short of the trees, just past the gate that led out from the yard to the road. He sat down on a stump there. They were quite alone. A blackbird swooped from their left, curved into the woods and was lost in leaves. It was cold now at the end of day with the sun going down. The blue moon was already up, above the forest. Crispin, glancing over as he leaned back against the wooden gate, realized that it was full.

Ilandra had died at sunset on a day when the blue moon was full, and the girls—sores ruptured, bodies fouled, their features hideously distorted—had followed her to the god that night. Crispin had walked outside and seen that moon, a wound in the sky.

He handed the heavy packet to Martinian, who accepted it without speaking. The older mosaicist looked down at his name for a moment, then tore open the Chancellor of Sarantium’s seal. In silence he began taking out what was within. The weight turned out to be silver and copper coins in a filigreed purse, as promised. A letter explained, as the courier had said, that the Great Sanctuary was being rebuilt and mosaic work was much a part of that. Some compliments upon the reputation of Martinian of Varena. There was a formal-looking document on superb paper which turned out to be the Permit for the Posting Inns. Martinian whistled softly and showed the parchment to Crispin: it was signed by the Chancellor himself, no lesser figure. They were both sufficiently familiar with high circles—if only here in Batiara among the Antae—to know that this was an honour.

Another document proved, when unfolded three times, to be a map showing the location of the Posting Inns and lesser stopping places on the Imperial road through Sauradia and Trakesia to the City. Yet another folded sheet named certain ships calling at Mylasia on the coast as reliable for sea transport if they happened to be in harbour.

‘Too late in the year by now for commercial ships,’ Martinian said thoughtfully, looking at this last. He took out the letter again, opened it. Pointed to a date at the top. ‘This was issued at the very beginning of autumn. Our red-cheeked friend took his time getting here. I think you were meant to sail.’

‘I was meant to sail?’

‘Well, you, pretending to be me.’

‘Martinian. What in Jad’s—?’

‘I don’t want to go. I’m old. My hands hurt. I want to drink mulled wine this winter with friends and hope there are no wars for a while. I have no desire to sail to Sarantium. This is your summons, Crispin.’

‘Not my name.’

‘It ought to be. You’ve done most of the work for years now.’ Martinian grinned. ‘About time, too.’

Crispin did not return the smile. ‘Think about this. This Emperor is said to be a patron. A builder. What more could you ask for in life than a chance to see the City and work there in honour? Make something that will last, and be known?’

‘Warm wine and a seat by the fire in Galdera’s tavern.’ And my wife beside me in the night until I die, he thought, but did not say.

The other man made a disbelieving sound.

Martinian shook his head. ‘Crispin, this is your summons. Don’t let their mistake confuse things. They want a master mosaicist. We are known for our work in the tradition of Rhodian mosaic. It makes sense for them to have someone from Batiara be a part of this, east-west tensions notwithstanding, and you know which of the two of us ought to make the journey.’

‘I know that I have not been asked. You have. By name. Even if I wanted to go, which I don’t.’

Martinian, uncharacteristically, said something obscene involving Crispin’s anatomy, the thunder god of the Bassanids, and a lightning bolt.

Crispin blinked. ‘You will now practise speaking like me?’ he asked, not smiling. ‘That will have things even further reversed, won’t it?’

The older man was flushed. ‘Do not even pretend that you don’t want to go. Why did you pretend not to know about their sanctuary? Everyone knows about the Victory Riot and the burning in Sarantium.’

‘Why did you pretend not to be yourself?’ There was a little silence. The other man looked away, towards the distant woods. Crispin said, ‘Martinian, I don’t want to go. It isn’t pretending. I don’t want to do anything. You know that.’

His friend turned back to him. ‘Then that’s why you must go. Caius, you are too young to stop living.’

‘They were younger and they weren’t. They stopped.’

He said it quickly, harshly. He hadn’t been ready for Martinian’s words. He needed to be ready when such things came up.

It was quiet here. The god’s sun going down red in the west, preparing to journey through the long dark. In sanctuaries throughout Batiara the sunset rites would soon begin. The blue moon was above the eastern trees. No stars yet. Ilandra had died vomiting blood, black sores covering her, bursting. Like wounds. The girls. His girls had died in the dark.

Martinian took off his shapeless hat. His hair was grey, and he had lost most of it in the centre. He said, quite gently, ‘And you honour the three of them by doing the same? Shall I blaspheme some more? Don’t make me. I don’t like it. This packet from Sarantium is a gift.’

‘Then accept it. We’re nearly done here. Most of what’s left is border work and polishing, and then the masons can finish.’

Martinian shook his head. ‘Are you afraid?’

Crispin’s eyebrows met when he frowned. ‘We have been friends a long time. Please do not talk to me that way.’

‘We have been friends a long time. No one else will,’ said Martinian implacably. ‘One in four people died here last summer, following the same numbers the summer before. More than that, they say, elsewhere. The Antae used to worship their own dead, with candles and invocations. I suppose they still do, in Jad’s sanctuaries instead of oak groves or crossroads, but not . . . Caius, not by following them into a living death.’

Martinian looked down as he finished at the twisted hat in his hands.

One in four. Two summers in succession. Crispin knew it. The burial mound behind them was only one among many. Houses, whole quarters of Varena and other cities of Batiara still lay deserted. Rhodias itself, which had never really recovered from the Antae sack, was a hollow place, forums and colonnades echoing with emptiness. The High Patriarch in his palace there was said to walk the corridors alone of a night, speaking to spirits unseen by men. Madness came with the plague. And a brief, savage war had come among the Antae, as well, when King Hildric died, leaving only a daughter after him. Farms and fields everywhere had been abandoned, too large to be worked by those left alive. There had been tales of children sold into slavery by their parents for want of food or firewood as winter came.

One in four. And not only here in Batiara. North among the barbarians in Ferrieres, west in Esperana, east in Sauradia and Trakesia, indeed all through the Sarantine Empire and into Bassania and probably beyond, though tales didn’t run that far. Sarantium itself hard hit, by report. The whole world dredged deep by Death’s hunger.

But Crispin had had three souls in Jad’s creation to live with and love, and all three were gone. Was the knowledge of other losses to assuage his own? Sometimes, half asleep at night in the house, a wine flask empty by his bed, he would lie in the dark and think he heard breathing, a voice, one of the girls crying aloud in her dreams in the next room. He would want to rise to comfort her. Sometimes he would rise, and only come fully awake as he stood up, naked, and became aware of the appalling depth of stillness around him in the world.

His mother had suggested he come live with her. Martinian and his wife had invited him to do the same. They said it was unhealthy for him to stay alone with only the servants in a house full of memories. There were rooms he could take above taverns or inns where he would hear the sounds of life from below or along hallways. He had been urged, actively solicited, to marry again after most of the year had passed. Jad knew, enough widows had been left with too-wide beds, and enough young girls needed a decent, successful man. Friends told him this. He still seemed to have friends, despite his best efforts. They told him he was gifted, celebrated, had a life in front of him yet. How could people not understand the irrelevance of such things? He told them that, tried to tell them.

‘Good night,’ Martinian said.

Not to him. Crispin looked over. The others were leaving, following the road the courier had taken back to the city. End of day. Sun going down. It was quite cold now.

‘Good night,’ he echoed, lifting a hand absently to the men who worked for them and to the others engaged in finishing the building itself. Cheerful replies followed. Why should they not be cheerful? A day’s work done, the rains had passed for a time, the harvest was in with winter not yet here, and there was splendid new gossip now to trade in the taverns and around hearth fires tonight. An Imperial Summons for Martinian to the City, an amusing game played with a pompous eastern courier.

The stuff of life, bright coinage of talk and shared conjecture, laughter, argument. Something to drink on, to regale a spouse, a sibling, a longtime servant. A friend, a parent, an innkeeper. A child.

Two children.

Who knows love?

Who says he knows love?

What is love, tell me.

‘I know love,’

says the littlest one . . .

A Kindath song, that one. Ilandra had had a nurse from among the moon-worshippers, growing up in the wine country south of Rhodias where many of the Kindath had settled. A tradition in her family, to be nursed by them, and to choose among the Kindath for their physicians. A better family than his own, though his mother had connections and dignity. He’d married well, people had said, understanding nothing. People didn’t know. How could they know? Ilandra used to sing the tune to the girls at night. If he closed his eyes he could have her voice with him now.

If he died he might join her in the god’s Light. All three of them.

‘You are afraid,’ Martinian said again, a human voice in the world’s twilight, intruding. Crispin heard anger this time. Rare, in a kindly man. ‘You are afraid to accept that you have been allowed to live, and must do something with that grace.’

‘It is no grace,’ he said. And immediately regretted the sour, self- pitying tone in the words. Lifted a quick hand to forestall a rebuke. ‘What must I do to make everyone happy, Martinian? Sell the house for a pittance to one of the land speculators? Move in with you? And with my mother? Marry a fifteen-year-old ready to whelp children? Or a widow with land and sons already? Both? Take Jad’s vows and join the clerics? Turn pagan? Become a Holy Fool?’

‘Go to Sarantium,’ said his friend.

‘No.’

They looked at each other. Crispin realized that he was breathing hard. The older man said, his voice soft now in the lengthening shadows, ‘That is too final for something so large. Say it again in the morning and I’ll never speak of this again. On my oath.’

Crispin, after a silence, only nodded. He needed a drink, he realized. An unseen bird called, clear and far from towards the woods. Martinian rose, clapped his hat on his head against the sundown wind. They walked together back into Varena before the night curfew sounded and the gates were locked against whatever lay outside in the wild forests, the night fields and lawless roads, in the moonlit, starlit air where daemons and spirits assuredly were.

Men lived behind walls, when they could.

IN THE LAST OF the light, Crispin went to his favourite baths, nearly deserted at this hour. Most men visited the baths in the afternoon, but mosaicists needed light for their work and Crispin preferred the quiet at the end of day now. A few men were taking exercise with the heavy ball, ponderously lobbing it back and forth, naked and sweating with exertion. He nodded to them in passing, without stopping. He took some steam first, and then the hot and cold waters, and had himself oiled and rubbed down—his autumn regimen, against the chill. He spoke to no one beyond civil greetings in the public rooms at the end, where he had a beaker of wine brought to him at his usual couch. After, he reclaimed the Imperial Packet from the attendant with whom he had checked it and, declining an escort, walked home to drop the packet and change for dinner. He intended not to discuss the matter tonight, at all.

‘YOU ARE GOING TO GO, then. To Sarantium?’

Certain intentions, in the presence of his mother, remained largely meaningless. That much was unchanged. Avita Crispina signalled, and the servant ladled out more of the fish soup for her son. In the light of the candles, he watched the girl withdraw gracefully to the kitchen. She had the classic Karchite colouring. Their women were prized as house slaves by both the Antae and the native Rhodians.

‘Who told you?’ They were alone at dinner, reclining on facing couches. His mother had always preferred the formal old fashions.

‘Does it matter?’

Crispin shrugged. ‘I suppose not.’ A sanctuary full of men had heard that courier. ‘Why am I going to go, Mother, do tell me?’

‘Because you don’t want to. You do the opposite of what you think you should. A perversity of behaviour. I have no idea where you derived it.’

She had the audacity to smile, saying that. Her colour was good tonight, or else the candles were being kind. He had no tesserae so white as her hair, none even close. In Sarantium the Imperial Glassworks had, rumour told, a method of making . . .

He halted that line of thought.

‘I don’t do any such thing. I refuse to be so obvious. I may— sometimes—be a little imprudent when provoked. The courier today was a complete and utter fool.’

‘And you told him so, of course.’

Against his will, Crispin smiled. ‘He told me I was, actually.’

‘That means he isn’t, to be so perceptive.’

‘You mean it isn’t obvious?’

Her turn to smile. ‘My mistake.’

He poured himself another cup of the pale wine and mixed it half-and-half with water. In his mother’s house he always did.

‘I’m not going,’ he said. ‘Why would I want to go so far, with winter coming?’

‘Because,’ said Avita Crispina, ‘you aren’t entirely a fool, my child. We’re talking about Sarantium, Caius, dear.’

‘I know what we are talking about. You sound like Martinian.’

‘He sounds like me.’ An old jest. Crispin didn’t smile this time. He ate some more of the fish soup, which was very good.

‘I’m not going,’ he repeated later, at the doorway, bending to salute her on the cheek. ‘Your cook is too skilful for me to bear the thought of leaving.’ She smelled, as always, of lavender. His first memory was of that scent. It ought to have been a colour, he thought. Scents, tastes, sounds often attained hues in his mind, but this one didn’t. The flower might be violet, almost porphyry, in fact—the royal colour—but the scent wasn’t. It was his mother’s scent, simply that.

Two servants, holding cudgels, were waiting to walk him home in the dark.

‘There are better cooks than mine in the east. I shall miss you, child,’ she replied calmly. ‘I expect regular letters.’

Crispin was used to this. It still made him snort with exasperation as he walked away. He glanced back once and saw her in the spill of light, clad in a dark green robe. She lifted a hand to him and went within. He turned the corner, one of her men on either side of him, and walked the short distance to his home. He dismissed his mother’s servants and stood a moment outside, cloaked against the chill, looking up.

Blue moon westering now in the autumn sky. Full as his heart once had been. The white moon, rising from the eastern end of his street, framed on both sides and below by the last houses and the city walls, was a pale, waning crescent. The cheiromancers attached meaning to such things. They attached meaning to everything overhead.

Crispin wondered if he could find a meaning to attach to himself. To whatever he seemed to have become in the year since a second plague summer had left him alive to bury a wife and two daughters himself. In the family plot, beside his father and grandfather. Not in a lime-strewn mound. Some things were not to be endured.

He thought about the torch of Heladikos he had contrived today on the small dome. There still remained, like a muted shadow of colour, this pride in his craft, this love for it. Love. Was that still the word?

He did want to see this latest artifice by candlelight: an extravagant blazing of candles and oil lanterns all through the sanctuary, lifting fire to light the fire he’d shaped in stone and glass. He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted.

That, Martinian had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect.

He would see it, Crispin knew, at the dedication of the sanctuary at autumn’s end, when the young queen and her clerics and pompous emissaries from the High Patriarch in Rhodias—if not the Patriarch himself—laid King Hildric’s bones formally to rest. They would not stint on candles or oil then. He’d be able to judge his work that day, harshly or otherwise.

He never did, as events unfolded. He never did see his mosaic torch on that sanctuary dome outside the walls of Varena.

As he turned to enter his own house, key to hand—the servants having been told, as usual, not to wait up—a rustling gave him warning, but not enough.

Crispin managed to lash out with a fist and catch a man in the chest, hard. He heard a thick grunt, drew breath to cry out, then felt a sack dropped over his head and tightened expertly at his throat, blinding and choking him at once. He coughed, smelled flour, tasted it. He kicked out violently, felt his foot meet a knee or shin and heard another muffled cry of pain. Lashing and twisting, Crispin clawed at the choking hold on his throat. He couldn’t bite, from inside the bag. His assailants were silent, invisible. Three of them? Four? They had almost certainly come for the money that accursed courier had declared to the whole world was in the packet. He wondered if they’d kill him when they found he didn’t have it. Decided it was probable. Pondered, with a far part of his mind, why he was struggling so hard.

He remembered his knife, reached for it with one hand, while raking for the arm at his throat with the other. He scratched, like a cat or a woman, drew blood with his fingernails. Found the knife hilt as he twisted and writhed. Jerked his blade free.

HE CAME TO, slowly, and gradually became aware of painful, flickering light and the scent of perfume. Not lavender. His head hurt, not altogether unexpectedly. The flour sack had been removed—obviously: he could see blurred candles, shapes behind them and around, vague as yet. His hands appeared to be free. He reached up and very gingerly felt around the egg-shaped lump at the back of his skull.

At the edge of his vision, which was not, under the circumstances, especially acute, someone moved then, rising from a couch or a chair. He had an impression of gold, of a lapis hue.

The awareness of scent—more than one, in fact, he now realized—intensified. He turned his head. The movement made him gasp. He closed his eyes. He felt extremely ill.

Someone—a woman—said, ‘They were instructed to be solicitous. It appears you resisted.’

‘Very . . . sorry,’ Crispin managed. ‘Tedious of me.’

He heard her laughter. Opened his eyes again. He had no idea where he was.

‘Welcome to the palace, Caius Crispus,’ she said. ‘We are alone, as it happens. Ought I to fear you and summon guards?’

Fighting a particularly determined wave of nausea, Crispin propelled himself to a sitting position. An instant later he staggered upright, his heart pounding. He tried, much too quickly, to bow. He had to clutch urgently at a table top to keep himself from toppling. His vision swirled and his stomach did the same.

‘You are excused the more extreme rituals of ceremony,’ said the only living child of the late King Hildric.

Gisel, queen of the Antae and of Batiara and his own most holy ruler under Jad, who paid a symbolic allegiance to the Sarantine Emperor and offered spiritual devotion to the High Patriarch and to no one else alive, looked gravely at him with wide-set eyes.

‘Very . . . extremely . . . kind of you. Your Majesty,’ Crispin mumbled. He was trying, with limited success, to make his eyes stop blurring and become useful in the candlelight. There seemed to be random objects swimming in the air. He was also having some difficulty breathing. He was alone in a room with the queen. He had never even seen her, except at a distance. Artisans, however successful or celebrated, did not hold nocturnal, private converse with their sovereign. Not in the world as Crispin knew it.

His head felt as if a small but insistent hammer inside it were trying to pound its way out. His confusion was extreme, disorienting. Had she captured him or rescued him? And why, in either case? He didn’t dare ask. Amid the perfumes he smelled flour again suddenly. That would be himself. From the sack. He looked down at his dinner tunic and made a sour face. The blue was streaked and smeared a greyish-white. Which meant that his hair and beard . . .

‘You were attended to, somewhat, while you slept,’ said the queen, graciously enough. ‘I had my own physician summoned. He said bleeding was not immediately necessary. Would a glass of wine be of help?’

Crispin made a sound that he trusted to convey restrained, well-bred assent. She did not laugh again, or smile. It occurred to him that this was a woman not unused to observing the effects of violence upon men. A number of well-known incidents, unbidden, came into his head. Some were quite recent. The thought of them did nothing to ease him at all.

The queen made no movement, and a moment later Crispin realized that she had meant what she said quite literally. They were alone in this room. No servants, not even slaves. Which was simply astonishing. And he could hardly expect her to serve him wine. He looked around and, more by luck than any effective process of observation, encountered a flask and cups on the table by his elbow. He poured, carefully, and watered two cups, unsure whether that was a presumption. He was not conversant with the Antae court. Martinian had taken all their commissions from King Hildric and then his daughter, and had delivered the reports.

Crispin looked up. His eyesight seemed to be improving as the hammer subsided a little and the room elected to stabilize. He saw her shake her head at the cup he had poured for her. He set it down. Waited. Looked at her again.

The queen of Batiara was tall for a woman and unsettlingly young. Seen this closely, she had the straight Antae nose and her father’s strong cheekbones. The wide-set eyes were a much-celebrated blue, he knew, though he couldn’t see that clearly in the candlelight. Her hair was golden, bound up, of course, held by a golden circlet studded with rubies.

The Antae had worn bear grease in their hair when they’d first come to settle in the peninsula. This woman was not, manifestly, an exponent of such traditions. He imagined those rubies—he couldn’t help himself—set in his mosaic torch on the sanctuary dome. He imagined them gleaming by candlelight there.

The queen wore a golden sun disk about her throat, an image of Heladikos upon it. Her robe was blue silk, threaded with fine gold wire, and there was a purple band running down the left side, from high collar to ankle. Only royalty wore purple, in keeping with a tradition going back to the Rhodian Empire at its own beginnings six hundred years ago.

He was alone in a palace room at night with the headache of his life and a queen—his queen—regarding him with a mild, steady appraisal.

It was common opinion, all through the Batiaran peninsula, that the queen was unlikely to live through the winter. Crispin had heard wagers offered and taken, at odds.

The Antae might have moved beyond bear grease and pagan rituals in a hundred years but they were most emphatically not accustomed to being ruled by a woman, and any choice of a mate—and king—for Gisel was fraught with an almost inconceivable complexity of tribal hierarchies and feuds. In a way, it was only due to these that she was still alive and reigning a year and more after her father’s death and the savage, inconclusive civil war that had followed. Martinian had put it that way one night over dinner. The factions of the Antae were locked in balance around her; if she died, that balance spiralled away and war came. Again.

Crispin had shrugged. Whoever reigned would commission sanctuaries to their own glory in the god’s name. Mosaicists would work. He and Martinian were extremely well known, with a reputation among the upper classes and reliable employees and apprentices. Did it matter so much, he’d asked the older man, what happened in the palace in Varena? Did any such things signify greatly after the plague?

The queen was still gazing at him beneath level brows, waiting. Crispin, belatedly realizing what was expected, saluted her with his cup and drank. It was magnificent wine. The very best Sarnican. He’d never tasted anything so complex. Under any normal circumstances, he would . . .

He put it down, quickly. After the blow to his head, this drink could undo him completely.

‘A careful man, I see,’ she murmured.

Crispin shook his head. ‘Not really, Majesty.’ He had no idea what was expected of him here, or what to expect. It occurred to him that he ought to feel outraged . . . he’d been assaulted and abducted outside his own home. Instead, he felt curious, intrigued, and he was sufficiently self-aware to recognize that these feelings had been absent from his life for some time.

‘May I assume,’ he said, ‘that the footpads who clapped a flour sack on my head and dented my braincase were from the palace? Or did your loyal guards rescue me from common thieves?’

She smiled at that. She couldn’t be older than her early twenties, Crispin thought, remembering a royal betrothal and a husband-to-be dying of some mischance a few years ago.

‘They were my guards. I told you, their orders were to be courteous, while ensuring you came with them. Apparently you did some injuries to them.’

‘I am delighted to hear it. They did some to me.’

‘In loyalty to their queen and in her cause. Do you have the same loyalties?’

Direct, very direct.

Crispin watched as she moved to an ivory and rose-wood bench and sat down, her back very straight. He saw that there were three doors to the room and imagined guards poised on the other side of each of them. He pushed his hands through his hair—a characteristic motion, leaving it randomly scattered—and said quietly, ‘I am engaged, to the best of my skill, and using deficient materials, in decorating a sanctuary to honour your father. Is that answer enough, Majesty?’

‘Not at all, Rhodian. That is self-interest. You are extremely well paid, and the materials are the best we can offer right now. We’ve had a plague and a war, Caius Crispus.’

‘Oh, really,’ he said. Couldn’t help himself.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Insolence?’

Her voice and expression made him abruptly aware that whatever the proper court manners might be, he was not displaying them, and the Antae had never been known for patience.

He shook his head. ‘I lived through both,’ he murmured. ‘I need no reminders.’

She regarded him in silence another long moment. Crispin felt an unexplained prickling along his back up to the hairs of his neck. The silence stretched. Then the queen drew a breath and said without preamble: ‘I need an extremely private message carried to the Emperor in Sarantium. No man—or woman—may know the contents of this, or that it is even being carried. That is why you are here alone, and were brought by night.’

Crispin’s mouth went dry. He felt his heart begin to hammer again. ‘I am an artisan, Majesty. No more than that. I have no place in the intrigues of courts.’ He wished he hadn’t put down the wine glass. ‘And,’ he added, too tardily, ‘I am not going to Sarantium.’

‘Of course you are,’ she said dismissively. ‘What man would not accept that invitation.’ She knew about it. Of course she did. His mother knew about it.

‘It is not my invitation,’ he said pointedly. ‘And Martinian, my partner, has indicated he will not go.’

‘He is an old man. You aren’t. And you have nothing to keep you in Varena at all.’

He had nothing to keep him. At all.

‘He isn’t old,’ he said.

She ignored that. ‘I have made inquiries into your family, your circumstances, your disposition. I am told you are choleric and of dark humour, and not inclined to be properly respectful. Also that you are skilled at your craft and have attained a measure of renown and some wealth thereby. None of this concerns me. But no one has reported you to be cowardly or without ambition. Of course you will go to Sarantium. Will you carry my message for me?’

Crispin said, before he had really thought about the implications at all, ‘What message?’

Which meant—he realized much later, thinking about it, reliving this dialogue again and again on the long road east—that the moment she told him he had no real choice, unless he did decide to die and seek Ilandra and the girls with Jad behind the sun.

The young queen of the Antae and of Batiara, surrounded by mortal danger and fighting it with whatever tools came to hand, however unexpectedly, said softly, ‘You will tell the Emperor Valerius II and no one else that should he wish to regain this country and Rhodias within it, and not merely have a meaningless claim to them, there is an unmarried queen here who has heard of his prowess and his glory and honours them.’

Crispin’s jaw dropped. The queen did not flush, nor did her gaze flicker at all. His reaction was being closely watched, he realized. He said, stammering, ‘The Emperor is married. Has been for years. He changed the laws to wed the Empress Alixana.’

Calm and very still on her ivory seat, she said, ‘Alas, husbands or wives may be put aside. Or die, Caius Crispus.’

He knew this.

‘Empires,’ she murmured, ‘live after us. So does a name. For good or ill. Valerius II, who was once Petrus of Trakesia, has wanted to regain Rhodias and this peninsula since he brought his uncle to the Golden Throne twelve summers ago. He purchased his truce with the King of Kings in Bassania for that reason alone. King Shirvan is bribed so Valerius may assemble an army for the west when the time ripens. There are no mysteries here. But if he tries to take this land in war, he will not hold it. This peninsula is too far away from him, and we Antae know how to make war. And his enemies east and north—the Bassanids and the northern barbarians—will never sit quiet and watch, no matter how much he pays them. There will be men around Valerius who know this, and they may even tell him as much. There is another way to achieve his . . . desire. I am offering it to him.’ She paused. ‘You may tell him, too, that you have seen the queen of Batiara very near, in blue and gold and porphyry, and may . . . give him an honest description, should he ask for one.’

This time, though she continued to hold his gaze and even lifted her chin a little, she did flush. Crispin became aware that his hands were perspiring at his sides. He pressed them against his tunic. He felt the stirrings, astonishingly, of a long-dormant desire. A kind of madness, that, though desire often was. The queen of Batiara was not, in any possible sense, someone who could be thought of in this way. She was offering her face and exquisitely garbed body to his recording gaze, only that he might tell an Emperor about her, halfway around the world. He had never dreamed of moving—never wanted to move—in this world of royal shadows and intrigue, but his puzzle-solving mind was racing now, with his pulse, and he could begin to see the pieces of this picture.

No man—or woman—may know.

No woman. Clear as it could be. He was being asked to carry an overture of marriage to the Emperor, who was very much married, and to the most powerful and dangerous woman in the known world.

‘The Emperor and his low-born actress-wife have no children, alas,’ said Gisel softly. Crispin realized his thoughts must have been in his face. He was not good at this. ‘A sad legacy, one might imagine, of her . . . profession. And she is no longer young.’

I am, was the message beneath the message he was to bring. Save my life, my throne, and I offer you the homeland of the Rhodian Empire that you yearn for. I give you back the west to your east, and the sons to your need. I am fair, and young . . . ask the man who carries my words to you. He will say as much. Only ask.

‘You believe . . .’ he began. Stopped. Composed himself with an effort. ‘You believe this can be kept secret? Majesty, if I am even known to have been brought to you . . .’

‘Trust me in this. You can do me no service if you are killed on the way or when you arrive.’

‘You reassure me greatly,’ he murmured.

Surprisingly, she laughed again. He wondered what those on the other side of the doors would think, hearing that. He wondered what else they might have heard.

‘You could send no formal envoy with this?’

He knew the answer before she gave it. ‘No such messenger from me would have a chance to bespeak the Emperor in . . . privacy.’

‘And I will?’

‘You might. You have pure Rhodian blood on both sides. They acknowledge that, still, in Sarantium, though they complain about you. Valerius is said to be interested in ivory, frescoes . . . such things as you do with stones and glass. He is known to hold conversation with his artisans.’

‘How commendable of him. And when he finds that I am not Martinian of Varena? What sort of conversation will then ensue?’

The queen smiled. ‘That will depend on your wits, will it not?’

Crispin drew another breath. Before he could speak, she added, ‘You have not asked what return a grateful, newly-crowned Empress might make to the man who conveyed this message for her and had success follow upon it. You can read?’ He nodded. She reached into a sleeve of her robe and withdrew a parchment scroll. She extended it a little towards him. He walked nearer, inhaled her scent, saw that her eyelashes were accented and extended subtly. He took the parchment from her hand.

She nodded permission. He broke the seal. Uncurled the scroll. Read.

He felt the colour leave his face as he did so. And hard upon astonishment came bitterness, the core of pain that walked with him in the world.

He said, ‘It is wasted on me, Majesty. I have no children to inherit any of this.’

‘You are a young man,’ the queen said mildly.

Anger flared. ‘Indeed? So why no offer here of a comely Antae woman of your court, or an aristocrat of Rhodian blood for my prize? The brood mare to fill these promised houses and spend this wealth?’

She had been a princess and was a queen and had spent her life in palaces where judging people was a tool of survival. She said, ‘I would not insult you with such a proposal. I am told yours was a love-match. A rare thing. I count you lucky in it, though the allotted time was brief. You are a well-formed man, and would have resources to commend you, as the parchment shows. I imagine you could buy your own brood mare of high lineage, if other methods of choosing a second wife did not present themselves.’

MUCH LATER, IN HIS own bed, awake, with the moons long set and the dawn not far off, Crispin was to conclude that it was this answer, the gravity of it with the bite of irony at the end, that had decided him. Had she offered him a mate on paper or in word, he told himself, he would have refused outright and let her kill him if she wanted.

She would have, he was almost certain of it.

And that thought had come in the last of the darkness, even before he learned from the apprentices as they met at the sanctuary for the sunrise prayers that six of the Palace Guard in Varena had been found dead in the night, their throats slit.

Crispin would walk away from the babble of noise and speculation to stand in the sanctuary alone under his charioteer and torch on the dome. The light was just entering through the dome’s ring of windows, striking the angled glass. The mosaic torch seemed to flicker as he watched, a soft but unmistakable rippling, as of a muted flame. In his mind’s eye he could see it above burning lanterns and candles . . . given enough of them it would work.

He understood something. The queen of the Antae, battling for her life, had made something else as clear as it could be: she would not let the secrecy of his message be endangered in any way, even by her own most trusted guards. Six men dead. Nothing muted there at all.

He didn’t know how he felt. Or no, he realized that he did know: he felt like a too-small ship setting out from harbour far too late in the year, undermanned, with winter winds swirling all around it.

But he was going to Sarantium. After all.

EARLIER, IN THE DEPTHS of the night, in that room in the palace, feeling a stillness descend upon him, Crispin had said to the woman in the carved ivory seat, ‘I am honoured by your trust, Majesty. I would not want another war here, either among the Antae or a Sarantine invasion. We have endured our share of dying. I will carry your message and try to give it to the Emperor, if I survive my own deception. It is folly, what I am about to do, but everything we do is folly, is it not?’

‘No,’ she said, unexpectedly. ‘But I do not expect to be the one who persuades you of that.’ She gestured to one of the doors. ‘There is a man on the other side who will escort you home. You will not see me again, for reasons you understand. You may kiss my foot, if you feel sufficiently well.’

He knelt before her. Touched the slender foot in its golden sandal. Kissed the top of it. As he did, he felt long fingers brush through his hair to the place on his skull where the blow had fallen. He shivered. ‘You have my gratitude,’ he heard. ‘Whatever befalls.’

The hand was withdrawn. He stood, bowed again, went out through the indicated portal, and was escorted home by a tongueless, smooth-shaven giant of a man through the windy night streets of his city. He was aware of desire lingering as he walked in blackness away from the palace, from the chamber. He was astonished by it.

In that exquisite, small receiving room, a young woman sat alone for a time after he left. It was rare for her to be entirely solitary, and the sensation was not disagreeable. Events had moved swiftly since one of her sources of privy knowledge had mentioned the spoken-aloud details of a summons conveyed by the Imperial Post to an artisan working at her father’s resting place. She’d had little time to ponder nuances, only to realize that this was an unexpected, slender chance—and seize it.

Now there were deaths to attend to, regrettably. This game was lost before it began if it were known to Agila or Eudric or any of the others hovering around her throne that the artisan had had private converse with her in the night before journeying east. The man escorting the mosaic worker now was the only one she fully trusted. For one thing, he could not speak. For another, he had been hers since she was five years old. She would give him further orders for tonight when he returned. It would not be the first time he had killed for her.

The queen of the Antae offered, at length, a small, quiet prayer, asking forgiveness, among other things. She prayed to holy Jad, to his son the Charioteer who had died bringing fire to mortal men, and then—to be as sure as one could ever be sure—to the gods and goddesses her people had worshipped when they were a wild cluster of tribes in the hard lands north and east, first in the mountains, and then by the oak forests of Sauradia, before coming down into fertile Batiara and accepting Jad of the Sun, conquering heirs to an Empire’s homeland.

She nursed few illusions. The man, Caius Crispus, had surprised her a little, but he was an artisan only, and of an angry, despairing humour. Arrogant, as the Rhodians still were so much of the time. Not a truly reliable vessel for so desperate an enterprise. This was almost certainly doomed to failure, but there was little she could do but try. She had let him come near to her, kiss her foot. Had brushed his flour-smeared red hair with fingers deliberately slow . . . perhaps longing was the gateway to this man’s loyalty? She didn’t think so, but she didn’t know, and she could only use what few tools, or weapons, she had or was given.

Gisel of the Antae did not expect to see the wildflowers return in spring, or watch the midsummer bonfires burn upon the hills. She was nineteen years old, but queens were not, in truth, allowed to be so young.