Sailing to Sarantium (15 page)

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 Senior, 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 entitled 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 tempera-mental 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 wise-women 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.