Sailing to Sarantium (10 page)

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 rushing 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 Hildnc.

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.