Читать книгу Sailing to Sarantium - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 9

Chapter II

When Crispin was a boy and free for a day in the way that only boys in summer can be free he had walked outside the city walls one morning and, after throwing stones in a stream for a time, had passed by a walled orchard universally reported among the young Varenans to belong to a spirit-haunted country house where unholy things happened after dark.

The sun was shining. In an effusion of youthful bravado, Crispin had climbed the rough stone wall, leaped across into a tree, sat down on a stout branch among the leaves and begun eating apples. He was heart-poundingly proud of himself and wondering how he’d prove he’d done this to his sure-to-be-sceptical friends. He decided to carve his initials—a newly learned skill—on the tree trunk, and dare the others to come see them.

He received, a moment later, the deepest fright of his young life.

It used to wake him at night sometimes, the memory having turned into a dream he’d have even as an adult, a husband, a father. In fact, he had managed to persuade himself that it mostly had been a dream, spun out of overly vivid childhood anxieties, the blazing midday heat, almost-ripe apples eaten too quickly. It had to have been a child’s fantasy, breeding ground of nightmare.

Birds did not talk.

More particularly, they did not discuss with each other from tree to tree, in the identically bored tones and timbre of an overbred Rhodian aristocrat, which eye of a trespassing boy should be pecked out and consumed first, or how the emptied eye sockets might then offer easy access to slithery morsels of brain matter within.

Caius Crispus, eight years old and blessed or cursed with an intensely visual imagination, had not lingered to further investigate this remarkable phenomenon of nature. There seemed to be several birds in animated colloquy about him, half hidden in the leaves and branches. He dropped three apples, spat out the half-chewed pulp of another, and leaped wildly back to the wall, scraping an elbow raw, bruising a shin, and then doing himself further damage when he landed badly on the baked summer grass by the path.

As he sprinted back, not quite screaming, towards Varena, he heard sardonic crowing laughter behind him.

Or he did in his dreams, after, at any rate.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, walking the same road south of the city, Crispin was thinking about the power of memories, the way they had of coming back so fiercely and unexpectedly. A scent could do it, the sound of rushing water, the sight of a stone wall beside a path.

He was remembering that day in the tree, and the recollection of terror took him a little further back, to the image of his mother’s face when the reserves of the urban militia returned from that same year’s spring campaign against the Inicii and his father was not with them.

Horius Crispus the mason had been a vivid, well-liked man, respected and successful in his craft and business. His only surviving son struggled, however, to shape a clear mental picture, after all these years, of the man who had gone marching north to the border and beyond into Ferrieres, red-bearded, smiling, easy-striding. He’d been too young when the militia’s deputy commander had come to their door with his father’s nondescript shield and sword.

He could remember a beard that scratched when he kissed his father’s cheek, blue eyes—his own eyes, people said—and the big, capable hands, scarred and always scratched. A big voice, too, that went soft within the house, near Crispin or his small, scented mother. He had these . . . fragments, these elements, but when he tried to pull them together in his mind to create a whole it somehow slipped away, the way the man had slipped away too soon.

He had stories to go by: from his mother, her brothers, sometimes his own patrons, many of whom remembered Horius Crispus well. And he could study his father’s steady, incisive work in houses and chapels, graveyards and public buildings all over Varena. But he couldn’t cling to any memory of a face that did not blur into an absence. For a man who lived for image and colour—who flourished in the realm of sight—this was hard.

Or it had been hard. Time passing did complex things, to deepen a wound or to heal it. Even, sometimes, to overlay it with another that had felt as if it would kill.

It was a beautiful morning. The wind was behind him, the coming winter in it, but crisp rather than cold while the sun shone, sweeping the mist from the eastern forests and hills to west and farther south. He was alone on the road. Not always a safe thing, but he felt no danger now, and he could see a long way in the open country south of the city—almost to the rim of the world, it seemed.

Behind him, when he glanced back, Varena gleamed, bronze domes, red roof-tiles, the city walls nearly white in the morning light. A hawk circled above its own warning shadow on the stubble of the fields east of the road. The harvested vines on the slopes ahead looked derelict and bare, but the grapes were inside the city, being made into wine even now. Queen Gisel, efficient in this as in many things, had ordered that city labourers and slaves join in the grain and grape harvests, to cover—as much as possible—the loss of so many people to the plague. The first festivals would be beginning soon, in Varena and in smaller villages everywhere, leading up to the wildness of Dykania’s three nights. It would be difficult, though, to shape a truly festive mood this autumn, Crispin thought. Or perhaps he was wrong about that. Perhaps festivals were more important after what had happened. Perhaps they were more uninhibited in the presence of death.

As he walked, he could see abandoned farmhouses and outbuildings on both sides of the country path. The rich farmland and vineyards around Varena were all very well, but they needed men to sow and reap and tend, and too many labourers were buried in the mass graves. The coming winter would be hard.

Even with these thoughts, it was difficult to remain grim this morning. Light nurtured him, as did clean, sharp colours, and the day was offering both. He wondered if he’d ever be able to create a forest with the browns and reds and golds and the late, deep green of the one he could see now beyond the bare fields. With tesserae worthy of the name, and perhaps a sanctuary dome designed with windows enough and—by the god’s grace—good, clear glass for those windows, he might. He might.

In Sarantium these things were to be found, men said. In Sarantium, everything on earth was to be found, from death to heart’s desire, men said.

He was going, it seemed. Sailing to Sarantium. Walking, actually, for it was too late in the year for a ship, but the old saying spoke of change, not a means of travel. His life was branching, taking him towards whatever might come on the road or at journey’s end.

His life. He had a life. The hardest thing was to accept that, it sometimes seemed. To move out from the rooms where a woman and two children had died in ugly pain, stripped of all inherent dignity or grace; to allow brightness to touch him again, like this gift of the morning sun.

In that moment, he felt like a child again himself, seeing a remembered stone wall come into view as the path curved and approached it. Half amused, half genuinely unsettled, Crispin added a few more inward curses to his emergent litany against Martinian, who had insisted that he make this visit.

It seemed that Zoticus, the alchemist, much consulted by farmers, the childless and the lovelorn, and even royalty on occasion, dwelled in the selfsame substantial farmhouse with an attached apple orchard where an eight-year-old boy had heard birds discussing with well-bred anticipation the consumption of his eyeballs and brain matter.

‘I will send to tell him to expect you,’ Martinian had said with firmness. ‘He knows more useful things than any man I know, and you are a fool if you undertake a journey like this without first speaking with Zoticus. Besides, he makes wonderful herbal infusions.’

‘I don’t like herbal infusions.’

‘Crispin,’ Martinian had said warningly. And had given directions.

And so here he was, cloaked against the wind, pacing alongside the rough stones of the wall, booted feet tracing the vanished, long-ago bare footsteps of a child who had gone out from the city alone one summer’s day to escape the sorrow in his house.

He was alone now, too. Birds flitted from branch to bough on both sides of the road. He watched them. The hawk was gone. A brown hare, too exposed, made swift, deliberately jerky progress across the field on his left. A cloud swept across the sun and its elongated shadow raced over the same field. The hare froze when the shadow reached it and then hurtled erratically forward again as light returned.

On the other side of the road the wall marched beside him, well built, well maintained, of heavy grey stones. Ahead, he could see the gateway to the farmyard, a marker stone opposite it. Unused though it now was, this had been a road laid down in the great days of the Rhodian Empire. In no great distance—a morning’s steady walking—it met the high road that ran all the way to Rhodias itself and beyond, to the southern sea at the end of the peninsula. As a child, Crispin used to enjoy the sensation of being on the same road as someone gazing into those distant ocean waters.

He stopped for a moment, looking at the wall. He had climbed it easily that morning long ago. There were still apples in the trees beyond. Crispin pursed his lips, weighing a thought. This was not a time to be duelling with childhood memories, he told himself sternly, repressively. He was a grown man, a respected, well-known artisan, a widower. Sailing to Sarantium.

With a small, resolute shrug of his shoulders, Crispin dropped the package he was carrying—a gift from Martinian’s wife for the alchemist—onto the brown grass beside the path. Then he stepped across the small ditch, pushed a hand through his hair, and proceeded to climb the wall again.

Not all skills were lost to the years, and it seemed he wasn’t so old after all. Pleased with his own agility, he swung one knee up, then the other, stood on the wide, uneven top of the wall, balanced, and then stepped—only boys leaped—across to a good branch. He found a comfortable spot, sat down and, pausing to be judicious, reached up and picked an apple.

He was surprised to find his heart was racing.

He knew that if they saw this, his mother and Martinian and half a dozen others would be performing a collective rueful headshake like the Chorus in one of those seldom-performed tragedies of the ancient Trakesian poets. Everyone said Crispin did things merely because he knew that he shouldn’t do them. A perversity of behaviour, his mother called it.

Perhaps. He didn’t think so, himself. The apple was ripe. Tasty, he decided.

He dropped it onto the grass among fallen ones for the small animals and stood up to cross back to the wall. No need to be greedy or childish. He’d proven his point, felt curiously pleased with himself. Settled a score with his youth, in a way.

‘Some people never learn, do they?’

One foot on a branch, one on top of the wall, Crispin looked down very quickly. Not a bird, not an animal, not a spirit of the half-world of air and shadow. A man with a full beard and unfashionably long grey hair stood in the orchard below, gazing up at him, leaning on a staff, foreshortened by the angle.

Flushing, acutely embarrassed, Crispin mumbled, ‘They used to say this orchard was haunted. I . . . wanted to test myself.’

‘And did you pass your test?’ the old man—Zoticus, beyond doubt—queried gently.

‘I suppose.’ Crispin stepped across to the wall. ‘The apple was good.’

‘As good as they were all those years ago?’

‘Hard to remember. I really don’t—’

Crispin stopped. A prickling of fear.

‘How do . . . how did you know I was here? Back then?’ ‘You are Caius Crispus, I presume? Martinian’s friend.’

Crispin decided to sit down on the wall. His legs felt oddly weak. ‘I am. I have a gift for you. From his wife.’

‘Carissa. Splendid woman! A neckwarmer, I do hope. I find I need them now, as winter comes. Old age. A terrible thing, let me tell you. How did I know you were here before? Silly question. Come down. Do you like mint leaves in an infusion?’

It didn’t seem in the least silly to Crispin. For the moment he deferred a reply. ‘I’ll get the gift,’ he said, and climbed down—jumping would lack all dignity—on the outside of the wall. He reclaimed the parcel from the grass, brushed some ants from it, and walked up the road towards the farmyard gate, breathing deeply to calm himself.

Zoticus was waiting, leaning on his staff, two large dogs beside him. He opened the gate and Crispin walked in. The dogs sniffed at him but heeled to a command. Zoticus led the way towards the house through a neat, small yard. The door was open, Crispin saw.

‘Why don’t we just eat him now?’

Crispin stopped. Childhood terror. The very worst kind, that made nightmares for life. He looked up. The voice was lazy, aristocratic, remembered. It belonged to a bird perched on the branch of an ash tree, not far from the doorway.

‘Manners, manners, Linon. This is a guest.’ Zoticus’s tone was reproving.

‘A guest? Climbing the wall? Stealing apples?’

‘Well, eating him would hardly be a proportionate response, and the philosophers teach that proportion is the essence of the virtuous life, do they not?’

Crispin, stupefied, fighting fear, heard the bird give an elaborate sniff of disapproval. Looking more closely, he abruptly realized, with a further shock, that it was not a real bird. It was an artifice. Crafted.

And it was talking. Or else . . .

‘You are speaking for it!’ he said quickly. ‘Casting your voice? The way the actors do, on stage sometimes?’

‘Mice and blood! Now he insults us!’

‘He is bringing a neckwarmer from Carissa. Behave, Linon.’

‘Take the neck thing, then let us eat him.’

Crispin, his own choler rising suddenly, said bluntly, ‘You are a construct of leather and metal. You can’t eat anything. Don’t bluster.’

Zoticus glanced quickly over at him, surprised, and then laughed aloud, the sound unexpectedly robust, filling the space before his doorway.

‘And that,’ he said, ‘will teach you, Linon! If anything can.’

‘It will teach me that we have an ill-bred guest this morning.’

‘You did propose eating him. Remember?’

‘I am only a bird. Remember? Indeed, I am less than that, it seems. I am a construct of leather and metal.’

Crispin had the distinct sense that if the small grey and brown thing with the glass eyes could have moved it would have turned its back on him, or flown away in disgust and wounded pride.

Zoticus walked over to the tree, turned a screw on each of the tiny legs of the bird, loosening their grip on the branch, and picked it up. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘The water is boiled and the mint was picked this morning.’

The mechanical bird said nothing, nestled in his free hand. It looked like a child’s toy. Crispin followed into the house. The dogs lay down in the yard.

THE INFUSION WAS GOOD, actually. Crispin, more calm than he’d expected to be, wondered if the old alchemist might have added something besides mint to it, but he didn’t ask. Zoticus was standing at a table examining the courier’s map Crispin had produced from the inner pocket of his cloak.

Crispin looked around. The front room was comfortably furnished, much as any prosperous farmhouse might be. No dissected bats or pots with green or black liquids boiling in them, no pentagrams chalked on the wooden floor. There were books and scrolls, to mark a learned and an unexpectedly well-off man, but little else to suggest magics or cheiromancy. Still, he saw half a dozen of the crafted birds, made of various materials, perched on shelves or the backs of chairs, and they gave him pause. None of these had spoken yet, and the small one called Linon lay silently on its side on a table by the fire. Crispin had little doubt, however, that any and all of them could address him if they chose.

It amazed him how calmly he accepted this. On the other hand, he’d had twenty-five years to live with the knowledge.

‘The Imperial Posting Inns, whenever you can,’ Zoticus was murmuring, head lowered still to the map, a curved, polished glass in one hand to magnify it. ‘Comforts and food are unreliable elsewhere.’

Crispin nodded, still distracted. ‘Dog meat instead of horse or swine, I know.’

Zoticus glanced up, his expression wry. ‘Dog is good,’ he said. ‘The risk is getting human flesh in a sausage.’

Crispin kept a composed face with some effort. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well spiced, I’m sure.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Zoticus, turning back to the map. ‘Be especially careful through Sauradia, which can be unstable in autumn.’

Crispin watched him. Zoticus had taken a quill now and was making notations on the map. ‘Tribal rites?’

The alchemist glanced up briefly, eyebrows arched. His features were strong, the blue eyes deep-set, and he wasn’t as old as the grey hair and the staff might have suggested. ‘Yes, that. And knowing they will be mostly on their own again until spring, even with the big army camp near Trakesia and soldiers at Megarium. Notorious winter brigands, the Sauradi tribes. Lively women, as I recall, mind you.’ He smiled a little, to himself, and returned to his annotations.

Crispin shrugged. Sipped his tea. Resolutely tried to put his mind away from sausages.

Some might have seen this long autumn journey as an adventure in itself. Caius Crispus did not. He liked his own city walls, and good roofs against rain, and cooks he knew, and his bathhouse. For him, broaching a new cask of wine from Megarium or the vineyards south of Rhodias had always been a preferred form of excitement. Designing and executing a mosaic was an adventure . . . or had been once. Walking the wet, windswept roads of Sauradia or Trakesia with an eye out for predators—human or otherwise—in a struggle to avoid becoming someone else’s sausage was not an adventure, and a greybeard’s cackling about lively women did not make it one.

He said, ‘I’d still like an answer, by the way, silly question or not. How did you know I was here all those years ago?’

Zoticus put down the quill and sat in a heavy chair. One of the mechanical birds—a falcon with a silver and bronze body and yellow jewelled eyes, quite unlike the drab, sparrow-like Linon—was fixed to the high back of the chair, screws adjusted so its claws held fast. It gazed inimically at Crispin with a pale glitter.

‘You do know I am an alchemist.’

‘Martinian said as much. I also know that most who use that name are frauds, hooking coins and goods from innocents.’

Crispin heard a sound from the direction of the fire. It might have been a log shifting, or not.

‘Entirely true,’ said Zoticus, unperturbed. ‘Most are. Some are not. I am one of those who are not.’

‘Ah. Meaning you know the future, can induce passionate love, cure the plague, and find water?’ He sounded truculent, Crispin knew. He couldn’t help it.

Zoticus gazed at him levelly. ‘Only the last, actually, and not invariably. No. Meaning I can sometimes see and do things most men cannot, with frustratingly erratic success. And meaning I can see things in men and women that others cannot. You asked how I knew you? Men have an aura, a presence to them. It changes little, from childhood to death. Very few people dare my orchard, which is useful—as you might guess—for a man living alone in the countryside. You were there once. I knew your presence again this morning. The anger in you was not present in the child, though there was a loss then, too. The rest is little enough altered. It is not,’ he said kindly, ‘so complicated an explanation, is it?’

Crispin looked at him, cupping his drink in both hands. His glance shifted to the jewelled falcon gripping the back of the alchemist’s heavy chair. ‘And these?’ he asked, ignoring the observations about himself.

‘Oh. Well. That’s the whole point of alchemy, isn’t it? To transmute one substance into another, proving certain things about the nature of the world. Metals to gold. The dead to life. I have learned to make inanimate substance think and speak, and retain a soul.’ He said it much as he might have described learning how to make the mint tea they were drinking.

Crispin looked around the room at the birds. ‘Why . . . birds?’ he asked, the first of fully a dozen questions that occurred. The dead to life.

Zoticus looked down, that private smile on his face again. After a moment, he said, ‘I wanted to go to Sarantium myself once. I had ambitions in the world, and wished to see the Emperor and be honoured by him with wealth and women and world’s glory. Apius, some time after he took the Golden Throne, initiated a fashion for mechanical animals. Roaring lions in the throne room. Bears that rose on their hind legs. And birds. He wanted birds everywhere. Singing birds in all his palaces. The mechanical artisans of the world were sending him their best contrivances: wind them up and they warbled an offkey paean to Jad or a rustic folk ditty, over and over again until you were minded to throw them against a wall and watch the little wheels spill out. You’ve heard them? Beautiful to look at, sometimes. And the sound can be appealing—at first.’

Crispin nodded. He and Martinian had done a Senator’s house in Rhodias.

‘I decided,’ said Zoticus, ‘I might do better. Far better. Create birds that had their own power of speech. And thought. And that these, the fruits of long study and labour and . . . some danger, would be my conduits to fame in the world.’

‘What happened?’

‘You don’t remember? No, you wouldn’t. Apius, under the influence of his Eastern Patriarch, began blinding alchemists and cheiromancers, even simple astrologers for a while. The clerics of the sun god have always feared any other avenues to power or understanding in the world. It became evident that arriving in the City with birds that had souls and spoke their own minds was a swift path to blinding if not death.’ The tone was wry.

‘So you stayed here?’

‘I stayed. After . . . some extended travels. Mostly in autumn, as it happened. This season makes me restless even now. I did learn on those journeys how to do what I wanted. As you can see. I never did get to Sarantium. A mild regret. I’m too old now.’

Crispin, hearing the alchemist’s words in his mind again, realized something. The clerics of the sun god. ‘You aren’t a Jaddite, are you?’

Zoticus smiled, and shook his head.

‘Odd,’ said Crispin dryly, ‘you don’t look Kindath.’

Zoticus laughed. There came that sound again, from towards the fire. A log, almost certainly. ‘I have been told I do,’ he said. ‘But no, why would I exchange one fallacy for another?’

Crispin nodded. This was not a surprise, all things considered. ‘Pagan?’

‘I honour the old gods, yes. And their philosophers. And believe with them that it is a mistake to attempt to circumscribe the infinite range of divinity into one—or even two or three—images, however potent they might be on a dome or a disk.’

Crispin sat down on the stool opposite the other man. He sipped from his cup again. Pagans were not all that rare in Batiara among the Antae—which might well explain why Zoticus had lingered safely in this countryside—but this was still an extraordinarily frank conversation to be having. ‘I’d imagine,’ he said, ‘that the Jaddite teachers—or the Kindath, from what little I know—would simply say that all modes of divinity may be encompassed in one if the one is powerful enough.’

‘They would,’ Zoticus agreed equably. ‘Or two for the pure Heladikians, three with the Kindath moons and sun. They would all be wrong, to my mind, but that is what they’d say. Are we about to debate the nature of the divine, Caius Crispus? We’ll need more than a mint infusion in that case.’

Crispin almost laughed. ‘And more time. I leave in two days and have a great deal to attend to.’

‘Of course you do. And an old man’s philosophizing can hardly appeal just now, if ever. I have marked your map with the hostelries I understand to be acceptable, and those to be particularly avoided. My last travels were twenty years and more ago, but I do have my sources. Let me also give you two names in the City. Both may be trusted, I suspect, though not with everything you know or do.’

His expression was direct. Crispin thought of a young queen in a candlelit room, and wondered. He said nothing. Zoticus crossed to the table, took a sheet of parchment and wrote upon it. He folded the parchment twice and handed it to Crispin.

‘Be careful around the last of this month and the first day of the next. It would be wise not to travel those days, if you can arrange to be staying at an Imperial Inn. Sauradia will be a . . . changed place.’

Crispin looked his inquiry.

‘The Day of the Dead. Not a prudent time for strangers to be abroad in that province. Once you are in Trakesia you’ll be safer. Until you get to the City itself and have to explain why you aren’t Martinian. That ought to be amusing.’

‘Oh, very,’ said Crispin. He had been avoiding thinking about that. Time enough. It was a long journey by land. He unfolded the paper, read the names.

‘The first is a doctor,’ said Zoticus. ‘Always useful. The second is my daughter.’

‘Your what?’ Crispin blinked.

‘Daughter. Seed of my loins. Girl child.’ Zoticus laughed. ‘One of them. I told you: I did travel a fair bit in my youth.’

They heard a barking from the yard. From farther within the house a long-faced, slope-shouldered servant appeared and made his unhurried way to the door and out. He silenced the dogs. They heard voices outside. A moment later he reappeared, carrying two jars.

‘Silavin came, master. He says his swine is recovered. He brought honey. Promises a ham.’

‘Splendid!’ said Zoticus. ‘Store the honey in the cellar.’

‘We have thirty jars there, master,’ said the servant lugubriously.

‘Thirty? So many? Oh dear. Well . . . our friend here will take two back for Carissa and Martinian.’

‘That still leaves twenty-six,’ said the glum-faced servant.

‘At least,’ agreed Zoticus. ‘We shall have a sweet winter. The fire is all right, Clovis, you may go.’

Clovis withdrew through the inner doorway—Crispin caught a glimpse of a hallway and a kitchen at the end before the door closed again.

‘Your daughter lives in Sarantium?’ he asked.

‘One of them. Yes. She’s a prostitute.’

Crispin blinked again.

Zoticus looked wry. ‘Well. Not quite. A dancer. Much the same, if I understand the theatre there. I don’t really know. I’ve never seen her. She writes me, at times. Knows her letters.’

Crispin looked at the name on the paper again. Shirin. There was a street name, as well. He glanced up. ‘Trakesian?’

‘Her mother was. I was travelling, as I say. Some of my children write to me.’

‘Some?’

‘Many are indifferent to their poor father, struggling in his aged loneliness among the barbarians.’

The eyes were amused, the tone a long way from what the words implied. Crispin, out of habit, resisted an impulse to laugh, then stopped fighting it.

‘You had an adventurous past.’

‘Middling so. In truth, I find more excitement now in my studies. Women were a great distraction. I am mostly freed of that now, thank the high gods. I actually believe I have a proper understanding of some of the philosophers now, and that is an adventure of the spirit. You will take one of the birds? As my gift to you?’

Crispin put his drink down abruptly, spilling some on the table. He snatched at the map to keep it dry. ‘What? Why would you—?’

‘Martinian is a dear friend. You are his colleague, his almost-son. You are going a long way to a dangerous place. If you are careful to keep it private, one of the birds will be of assistance. They can see, and hear. And offer companionship, if nothing else.’ The alchemist hesitated. ‘It . . . pleases me to think one of my creations will go with you to Sarantium, after all.’

‘Oh, splendid. I am to walk the arcades of the City conversing with a companionable jewelled falcon? You want me blinded in your stead?’

Zoticus smiled faintly. ‘Not a choice gift, were that so. No. Discretion will be called for, but there are other ways of speaking with them. With whichever of them you can hear inwardly. You have no training. It is not certain, Caius Crispus. Nothing is in my art, I fear. But if you can hear one of the birds, it may become yours. In the act of hearing, a transference can be achieved. We will know soon enough.’ His voice changed. ‘All of you, shape a thought for our guest.’

‘Don’t be absurd!’ snapped an owl screwed onto a perch by the front door.

‘A fatuous notion!’ said the yellow-eyed falcon on the high back of Zoticus’s chair. Crispin could imagine it glaring at him.

‘Quite so,’ said a hawk Crispin hadn’t noticed, from the far side of the room. ‘The very idea is indecent.’ He remembered this jaded voice. From twenty-five years ago. They sounded utterly identical, all of them. He shivered, unable to help himself. The hawk added, ‘This is a petty thief. Unworthy of being addressed. I refuse to dignify him so.’

‘That is enough! It is commanded,’ said Zoticus. His voice remained soft but there was iron in it. ‘Speak to him, within. Do it now.’

For the first time Crispin had a sense that this was a man to be feared. There was a change in the alchemist’s hard-worn, craggy features when he spoke this way, a look, a manner that suggested— inescapably—that he had seen and done dark things in his day. And he had made these birds. These crafted things that could see and hear. And speak to him. It came to Crispin, in a rush, exactly what was being proposed. He discovered that his hands were clenched together.

It was silent in the room. Unsure of what to do, Crispin eyed the alchemist and waited.

He heard something. Or thought he did.

Zoticus calmly sipped his drink. ‘And so? Anything?’ His voice was mild again.

There had been no actual sound.

Crispin said, wonderingly, fighting a chill fear, ‘I thought . . . well, I believe I did hear . . . something.’

‘Which was?’

‘I think . . . it sounded as if someone said, Mice and blood.’

There came a shriek of purest outrage from the table by the fire.

‘No! No, no, no! By the chewed bones of a water rat, I am not going with him! Throw me in the fire! I’d rather die!’

Linon, of course. The small brown and dark grey sparrow, not the hawk or owl or the imperious yellow-eyed falcon, or even one of the oracular-looking ravens on the untidy bookshelf.

‘You aren’t even properly alive, Linon, don’t be dramatic. A little travel again will be good for you. Teach you manners, perhaps.’

‘Manners? He sloughs me off to a stranger after all these years and speaks of manners?’

Crispin swallowed and, genuinely afraid of what underlay this exercise, he sent a thought, without speaking: ‘I did not ask for this. Shall I refuse the gift?’

‘Pah! Imbecile.’

Which did, at least, confirm something.

He looked at the alchemist. ‘Do you . . . did you hear what it said to me?’

Zoticus shook his head. His expression was odd. ‘It feels strangely, I confess. I’ve only done this once before and it was different then.’

‘I’m . . . honoured, I think. I mean, of course I am. But I’m still confused. This was not asked for.’

‘Go ahead. Humiliate me!’

‘I daresay,’ said Zoticus. He didn’t smile now. Nor did he seem to have heard the bird. He toyed with his earthenware cup. From the chairback, the falcon’s harsh eyes seemed fixed on Crispin, malevolent and glittering. ‘You could hardly ask for what you do not comprehend. Nor steal it, like another apple.’

‘Unkind,’ Crispin said, controlling his own quick anger.

Zoticus drew a breath. ‘It was. Forgive me.’

‘We can undo this, can we not? I have no desire to become enmeshed in the half-world. Do the cheiromancers of Sarantium all have creatures like this? I am a mosaicist. That is all I want to be. It is all I want to do, when I get there. If they let me live.’

It was almost all. He had a message to convey if he could. He had undertaken as much.

‘I know this. Forgive me. And no, the charlatans at the Imperial Court, or those casting maledictions on chariot racers for the Hippodrome mob cannot do this. I am more or less certain of it.’

‘None of them? Not a single one? You, alone, of Jad’s mortal children on earth can . . . make creatures such as these birds? If you can do it—’

‘—why can no one else? Of course. The obvious question.’

‘And the obvious answer is?’ Sarcasm, an old friend, never far away of late.

‘That it is possible someone has learned this, but unlikely, and I do not believe it has happened this way. I have discovered . . . what I believe to be the only access to a certain kind of power. Found in my travels, in a . . . profoundly guarded place and at some risk.’

Crispin crossed his arms. ‘I see. A scroll of chants and pentagrams? Boiled blood of a hanged thief and running around a tree seven times by double moonlight? And if you do the least thing wrong you turn into a frog?’

Zoticus ignored this. He simply looked at Crispin from beneath thick, level brows, saying nothing. After a moment, Crispin began to feel ashamed. He might be unsettled here, this staggering imposition of magic might be unlooked-for and frightening, but it was an offered gift, generous beyond words, and the implications of what the alchemist had actually achieved here . . .

‘If you can do this . . . if these birds are thinking and speaking with their own . . . will . . . you ought to be the most celebrated man of our age!’

‘Fame? A lasting name to echo gloriously down the ages? That would be pleasant, I suppose, a comfort in old age, but no, it couldn’t happen . . . think about it.’

‘I am. Why not?’

‘Power tends to be co-opted by greater power. This magic isn’t particularly . . . intimidating. No half-worlds-pawned fireballs or death spells. No walking through walls or flying over them, invisible. Merely fabricated birds with . . . souls and voices. A small thing, but how could I defend myself, or them, if it was known they were here?’

‘But why should —?’

‘How would the Patriarch in Rhodias, or even the clerics in the sanctuary you are rebuilding outside Varena, take to the idea of pagan magic vesting a soul in crafted birds? Would they burn me or stone me, do you think? A difficult doctrinal decision, that. Or the queen? Would Gisel, rising above piety, not see merit in the idea of hidden birds listening to her enemies? Or the Emperor in Sarantium: Valerius II has the most sophisticated network of spies in the history of the Empire, east or west, they say. What would be my chances of dwelling here in peace, or even surviving, if word of these birds went out?’ Zoticus shook his head. ‘No, I have had years to ponder this. Some kinds of achievement or knowledge seem destined to emerge and then disappear, unknown.’

Thoughtful now, Crispin looked at the other man. ‘Is it difficult?’

‘What? Creating the birds? Yes, it was.’

‘I’m certain of that. No, I meant being aware that the world cannot know what you have done.’

Zoticus sipped his tea. ‘Of course it is difficult,’ he said at length. Then he shrugged, his expression ironic. ‘But alchemy always was a secret art, I knew that when I began to study it. I am . . . reconciled to this. I shall exult in my own soul, secretly.’

Crispin could think of nothing to say. Men were born and died, wanted something, somehow, to live after them—beyond the mass burial mound or even the chiselled, too-soon-fading inscription on the headstone of a grave. An honourable name, candles lit in memory, children to light those candles. The mighty pursued fame. An artisan could dream of achieving a work that would endure, and be known to have been one’s own. Of what did an alchemist dream?

Zoticus was watching him. ‘Linon is . . . a good consequence, now I think on it. Not conspicuous at all, drab, in fact. No jewels to attract attention, small enough to pass for a keepsake, a family talisman. You will arouse no comment. Can easily make up a story.’

‘Drab? Drab? By the gods! It is enough! I formally request,’ said Linon, speaking aloud, ‘to be thrown into the fire. I have no desire to hear more of this. Or of anything. My heart is broken.’

Several of the other birds were, in fact, making sounds of aristocratic amusement.

Hesitantly, testing himself, Crispin sent a thought: ‘I don’t think he meant any insult. I believe he is . . . unhappy that this happened.’

‘You shut up,’ the bird that could speak in his mind replied bluntly.

Zoticus did indeed look unsettled, notwithstanding his practical words: visibly trying to come to terms with which of the birds his guest seemed to have inwardly heard in the room’s deep silence.

Crispin—here only because Martinian had first denied being himself to an Imperial Courier, and then demanded Crispin come to learn about the roads to Sarantium— who had asked for no gift at all, now found himself conversing in his mind with a hostile, ludicrously sensitive bird made of leather and—what?—tin, or iron. He was unsure whether what he most felt was anger or anxiety.

‘More of the mint?’ the alchemist asked, after a silence.

‘I think not, thank you,’ said Crispin.

‘I had best explain a few matters to you.

To clarify.’ ‘To clarify. Yes. Please,’ Crispin said.

‘My heart,’ Linon repeated, in his mind this time, ‘is broken.’

‘You shut up,’ Crispin replied swiftly, with undeniable satisfaction.

Linon did not address him again. Crispin was aware of the bird, though, could almost feel an affronted presence at the edge of his thoughts like a night animal beyond a spill of torchlight. He waited while Zoticus poured himself a fresh cup. Then he listened to the alchemist in careful silence while the sun reached its zenith on an autumn day in Batiara and began its descent towards the cold dark. Metals to gold, the dead to life . . .

The old pagan who could breathe into crafted birds patrician voice, sight without eyes, hearing without ears, and the presence of a soul, told him a number of things deemed needful, in the wake of the gift he’d given.

Certain other understandings Crispin obtained only afterwards.

‘She wants you, the shameless whore! Are you going to? Are you?’

Keeping his expression bland, Crispin walked beside the carried litter of the Lady Massina Baladia of Rhodias, sleekly well-bred wife of a Senator, and decided it had been a mistake to wear Linon on a thong around his neck like an ornament. The bird was going into one of his travelling bags tomorrow, on the back of the mule plodding along behind them.

‘You must be so fatigued,’ the Senator’s wife was saying, her voice honeyed with commiseration. Crispin had explained that he enjoyed walking in the open country and didn’t like horses. The first was entirely untrue, the second was not. ‘If only I had thought to bring a litter large enough to carry both of us. And one of my girls, of course . . . we couldn’t possibly ride just alone!’ The Senator’s wife tittered. Amazingly.

Her white linen chiton, wildly inappropriate for travelling, had—quite unnoticed by the lady, of course— slipped upward sufficiently to reveal a well-turned ankle. She wore a gold anklet, Crispin saw. Her feet, resting on lambswool throws within the litter, were bare this mild afternoon. The toenails were painted a deep red, almost purple. They hadn’t been yesterday, in their sandals. She’d been busy last night at the inn, or her servant had been.

‘Mice and blood, I’ll wager she reeks of scent! Does she? Crispin, does she?’

Linon had no sense of smell. Crispin elected not to reply. The lady did, as it happened, have a heady aroma of spice about her today. Her litter was sumptuous, and even the slaves carrying it and accompanying her were appreciably better garbed—in pale blue tunics and dark blue dyed sandals—than was Crispin. The rest of their party—Massina’s young female attendants, three wine merchants and their servants journeying the short distance to Mylasia and then down the coast road, a cleric continuing towards Sauradia, and two other travellers heading for the same healing medicinal waters as the lady—walked or rode mules a little ahead or behind them on the wide, well-paved road. Massina Baladia’s armed and mounted escort, also clad in that delicately pale blue—which looked significantly less appropriate on them—rode at the front and back of the column.

None of the party was from Varena itself. None had any reason to know who Crispin was. They were three days out from Varena’s walls, still in Batiara and on a busy stretch of road. They had already been forced to step onto the gravel side-path several times as companies of archers and infantry passed them on manoeuvres. There was some need for caution on this road, but not the most extreme sort. The leader of the lady’s escort gave every indication of regarding a red-bearded mosaicist as the most dangerous figure in the vicinity.

Crispin and the lady had dined together the night before, in the Imperial Posting Inn.

As a part of their careful dance with the Empire, the Antae had permitted the placement of three such inns along their own road from Sauradia’s border to the capital city of Varena, and there were others running down the coast and on the main road to Rhodias. In return, the Empire paid a certain sum of money into the Antae coffers and undertook the smooth carriage of the mails all the way to the Bassanid border in the east. The inns represented a small, subtle presence of Sarantium in the peninsula. Commerce necessitated accommodations, always.

The others in their company, lacking the necessary Imperial Permits, had made do with a rancid hostel a short distance farther back. The Lady Massina’s distant attitude to the artisan who had been trudging along in their party, lacking even a mount, had undergone a wondrous change when the Senator’s wife understood that Martinian of Varena was en titled to use the Imperial Inns, and by virtue of a Permit signed by Chancellor Gesius in Sarantium itself—where, it seemed, he was presently journeying in response to an Imperial request.

He had been invited to dine with her.

When it had also become clear to the lady, over spit-roasted capons and an acceptable local wine, that this artisan was not unfamiliar with a number of the better people in Rhodias and in the elegant coastal resort of Baiana, having done some pretty work for them, she grew positively warm in manner, going so far as to confide that her journey to the medical sanctuary was for childbearing reasons.

It was quite common, of course, she had added with a toss of her head. Indeed, some silly young things regarded it as fashionable to attend at warm springs or hospices if they were wed a season and not yet expecting. Did Martinian know that the Empress Alixana herself had made several journeys to healing shrines near Sarantium? It was hardly a secret. It had started the fashion. Of course, given the Empress’s earlier life— did he know she had changed her name, among . . . other things?—it was easy enough to speculate what bloody doings in some alley long ago had led her to be unable to give the Emperor an heir. Was it true that she dyed her hair now? Did Martinian actually know the luminaries in the Imperial Precinct? How exciting that must be.

He did not. Her disappointment was palpable, but short-lived. She seemed to have some degree of difficulty finding a place for her sandalled foot that did not encounter his ankle under the table. The capons were followed by an overly sauced fish plate with olives and a pale wine. Over the sweet cheese, figs and grapes, the lady, grown even further confiding, informed her dinner companion that it was her privy belief that the unexpected difficulties she and her august spouse were experiencing had little to do with her.

It was, she added, eyeing him in the firelight of the common room, difficult to test this, of course. She had been willing, however, to make the trip north out of too-boring Rhodias amid the colours of autumn to the well-known hospice and healing waters near Mylasia. One sometimes met—only sometimes, of course—the most interesting people when one travelled.

Did not Martinian find this to be so?

‘CHECK FOR BEDBUGS.’

‘I know that, you officious lump of metal.’ He had dined a second time tonight with the lady; they had had a third flask of wine this time. Crispin was aware of the effect of it on himself.

‘And talk to me in your head, unless you want people to assume you are mad.’

Crispin had been having difficulty with this. It was good advice. So, as it happened, was the first suggestion. Crispin held a candle over the sheets, with the blanket pulled back and managed to squash a dozen of the evil little creatures with his other hand.

‘And they call this an Imperial Posting Inn. Hah!’

Linon, Crispin had learned quite early in their journeying together, was not short of opinions or shy with regard to their expression. He could still bring himself up short in a quiet moment with the realization that he was holding extended conversations in his mind with a temperamental sparrow-like bird made of faded brown leather and tin, with eyes fashioned from blue glass, and an incongruously patrician Rhodian voice both in his head and when speaking aloud.

He had entered a different world.

He had never really stopped to consider his attitude to what men called the half-world: that space where cheiromancers and alchemists and wisewomen and astrologers claimed to be able to walk. He knew— everyone knew—that Jad’s mortal children lived in a world that they shared, dangerously, with spirits and daemons that might be indifferent to them, or malevolent, or sometimes even benign, but he had never been one of those who let his every waking moment be suffused with that awareness. He spoke his prayers at dawn, and at sunset when he remembered, though he seldom bothered to attend at a sanctuary. He lit candles on the holy days when he was near a chapel. He paid all due respect to clerics—when the respect was deserved. He believed, some of the time, that when he died his soul would be judged by Jad of the Sun and his fate in the afterlife would be determined by that judgement.

The rest of the time, of late, very privately, he remembered the unholy ugliness of the two plague summers and was deeply, even angrily unsure of such spiritual things. He would have said, if asked a few days ago, that all alchemists were frauds and that a bird such as Linon was a deception to gull rustic fools.

That, in turn, meant denying his own memories of the apple orchard, but it had been easy enough to explain away childhood terrors as trickery, an actor’s voice projection. Hadn’t they all spoken with the same voice?

They had, but it wasn’t a deception after all.

He had Zoticus’s crafted bird with him as a companion and—in principle, at least—a guardian for his journey. It sometimes seemed to him that this irascible, ludicrously touchy creature—or creation—had been with him forever.

‘I certainly didn’t end up with a mild spirit, did I?’ he remembered saying to Zoticus as he took his leave from the farmhouse that day.

‘None of them are,’ the alchemist had murmured, a little ruefully. ‘A constant regret, I assure you. Just remember the command for silence and use it when you must.’ He’d paused, then added wryly, ‘You aren’t particularly mild yourself. It may be a match.’

Crispin had said nothing to that.

He had already used the command several times. In a way it was hardly worth it . . . Linon was almost intolerably waspish after being released from darkness and silence.

‘Another wager,’ the bird said now, inwardly, ‘leave the door unlocked and you won’t sleep alone tonight.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Crispin snapped aloud. Then, recollecting himself, added silently, ‘This is a crowded Imperial Inn, she’s a Rhodian aristocrat. And,’ he added peevishly, ‘you have nothing to wager in any case, you lump of stuff.’

‘A figure of speech, imbecile. Just leave the door unbolted. You’ll see. I’ll watch for thieves.’

This, of course, was one of the benefits of having the bird, Crispin had already learned. Sleep was meaningless to Zoticus’s creation, and as long as he hadn’t silenced Linon he could be alerted to anything untoward approaching while he slept. He was irked, though, and the more so because a fabricated bird had roused his temper.

‘Why would you possibly assume you have the least understanding of a woman like that? Listen to me: she plays little games during the day or over dinner out of sheer boredom. Only a fool would regard them as more.’ He wasn’t sure why he was so irritated about this, but he was.

‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’ Linon replied. Crispin couldn’t sort out the tone this time. ‘You think boredom stops with the meal? A stable boy understands women better than you. Just keep playing with your little glass chips, imbecile, and leave these judgements to me!’

Crispin spoke the silencing command with some satisfaction, blew out his candle and went to bed, resigned to being night food for the predatory insects he’d missed. It would be much worse, he knew, at the common hostel the others in the party had been forced to continue on towards for the night. An extremely small consolation. He didn’t like travelling.

He tossed, turned, scratched where he imagined things biting him, then felt something doing so and swore. After a few moments, surprised at his own irresolution, he got up again, walked quickly across the cold floor, and slid home the bolt on the door. Then he crawled back into the bed.

He had not made love to a woman since Ilandra died.

He was still awake some time later, watching the shape of the waning blue moon slide across the window, when he heard the handle tried, then a very soft tapping at the door.

He didn’t move, or speak. The tapping came again, twice more—light, teasing. Then it stopped, and there was silence again in the autumn night. Remembering many things, Crispin watched the moon leave the window, trailing stars, and finally fell asleep.

HE WOKE TO MORNING noises in the yard below. In the moment he opened his eyes, surfacing from some lost dream, he had a swift, sure realization about Zoticus’s bird, and some wonder that it had taken him so long.

He was not greatly surprised to discover, when he went downstairs for watered ale and a morning meal, that the Lady Massina Baladia of Rhodias, the Senator’s wife, and her mounted escorts and her servants had already left, at first daybreak.

There was a mild, unexpected regret here, but it had been almost intolerable to envisage his re-entry into this sphere of mortal life as a coupling with a jaded Rhodian aristocrat playing bed games on a country night—not even knowing his true name. In another way, it might have been easier that way, but he wasn’t . . . detached enough for that.

On the road again in the chill early-morning breeze, he soon caught up with the merchants and the cleric who had waited for him at the inn up the road. Settling into the long day’s striding, he remembered his realization upon first awakening. He drew a breath, released Linon from silence in the bag on the mule’s back, and asked a question.

‘How dazzlingly brilliant of you,’ the bird snapped icily. ‘She did come last night, didn’t she? I was right, wasn’t I?’

White clouds were overhead, swift before the north wind. The sky was a light, far blue. The sun, safe returned from its dark journey under the icy cold rim of the world, was rising directly in front of them, bright as a promise. Black crows dotted the stubble of the fields. A pale frost glinted on the brown grass beside the road. Crispin looked at it all in the early light, wondering how he’d achieve that rainbow brilliance of colour and gleaming with glass and stone. Had anyone ever done frost-tipped autumn grass on a dome?

He sighed, hesitated, then replied honestly, ‘She did. You were right. I locked the door.’

‘Pah! Imbecile. Zoticus would have kept her busy all night long and sent her back to her own room exhausted.’

‘I’m not Zoticus.’

A feeble answer and he knew it. The bird only laughed sardonically. But he wasn’t really up to sparring this morning. Memories were too much with him.

It was colder today, especially when the clouds passed in front of the rising sun. His feet were cold in their sandals; boots tomorrow, he thought. The fields and the vineyards on the north side of the road were bare now, of course, and did nothing to stay the wind. He could see the first dark smudge of forests in the far distance now, north-east: the wild, legendary woods that led to the border and then Sauradia. The road would fork today, south towards Mylasia, where he could have caught a ship earlier in the year for a swift sailing to Sarantium. His slow course overland would angle north, towards that untamed forest, and then east again, the long Imperial road marching along its southernmost edgings.

He slowed a little, opened one of his bags as the mule paced stolidly along over the flawlessly fitted stone slabs of the road, and took out his brown woollen cloak. After a moment, he reached into the bag again and withdrew the bird on its leather thong, dropping it around his neck again. An apology, of sorts.

He’d expected Linon’s brittle, waspish tone after the inflicted silence and blindness. He was already growing used to that. What he needed to do now, Crispin thought, closing and retying the bag and then wrapping himself in the cloak, was come to terms with a few other aspects of this journey east under an assumed name, bearing a message from the queen of the Antae for the Emperor in his head, and a creature of the half-world around his neck. And among the things now to be dealt with was the newly apprehended fact that the crafted bird he was carrying with him was undeniably and emphatically female.

TOWARDS MIDDAY, they came to a tiny roadside chapel. In Memory of Clodius Paresis, an inscription over the arched doorway said. With Jad now, in Light.

The merchants and the cleric wanted to pray. Crispin, surprising himself, went in with them while the servants watched the mules and goods outside. No mosaics here. Mosaic was expensive, a luxury. He made the sign of the sun disk before the peeling, nondescript fresco of fair-haired, smooth-cheeked Jad on the wall behind the altar stone, and knelt behind the cleric on the stone floor, joining the others in the sunrise rites.

It was rather late in the day, perhaps, but there were those who believed the god was tolerant.