Sailing to Sarantium (44 page)

'It taught me how a better man than I might do so. A mosaicist, as I
told you, my lord, sees the changing colours and light of Jad's world
with some . . . precision. He must, or will fail at his own tasks. I
spent a part of the afternoon watching what happened when the
chariots went past the far stands and people turned to follow their
passage.'

Valerius was leaning forward now, his brow furrowed in concentration.
He held up a hand suddenly. 'Wait! I'll hazard this. Wait. Yes... the
impression is brighter, paler when they look straight ahead-faces
towards you-and darker when their heads turn away, when you see hair
and head-coverings?'

Crispin said nothing. Only bowed. Beside him, Scortius of the Blues
wordlessly did the same.

'You have earned your own ruby, my lord,' said the charioteer.

'I have not. I still don't... You now, Scortius. Explain!'

The Soriyyan said, 'When I reached the kathisma turn, my lord
Emperor, the stands to my right were many-hued, quite dark as I drove
past Crescens to the inside. They ought not to have been, with the
Firsts of the Greens and Blues right beneath them. Their faces ought
to have been turned directly to us as we went by, offering a
brightness in the sunlight. There is never time to see actual faces
in a race, only an imprests the Rhodian said-of light or dark. The
stands before the turn were dark. Which meant the watchers were
turned away from us. Why would they turn away from us?'

'A collision behind you,' said the Emperor of Sarantium, nodding his
head slowly, his fingers steepled together now, arms on the arms of
his throne. 'Something more compelling, even more dramatic than the
two champions in their duel.'

'A violent collision, my lord. Only that would divert them, turn
their heads away. You will recall that the original accident happened
before Crescens and I moved up. It appeared a minor one, we both saw
it and avoided it. The crowd would have seen it as well. For the
Hippodrome to be turned away from the two of us, something violent
had to have happened since that first collision. And if a third-or a
fourth-chariot had smashed into the first pair, then the Hippodrome
crews were not going to be able to clear the track.'

'And the original accident was on the inside,' said the Emperor,
nodding again. He was smiling with satisfaction now, the grey eyes
keen. 'Rhodian, you understood all of this?'

Crispin shook his head quickly. 'Not so, my lord. I guessed only the
simplest part of it. I am . . . humbled to have been correct. What
Scortius says he deduced, in the midst of a race, while controlling
four horses at speed, fighting off a rival, is almost beyond my
capacity to comprehend.'

'I actually realized it too late,' Scortius said, looking rueful. 'If
I had truly been alert, I'd not have been going by Crescens on the
inside at all. I'd have stayed outside him around the turn and down
the far straight. That would have been the proper way to do it.
Sometimes,' he murmured, 'we succeed by good fortune and the god's
grace as much as anything else.'

No one said anything to this, but Crispin saw the Supreme Strategos,
Leontes, make a sign of the sun disk. After a moment, Valerius looked
over and nodded to his Chancellor. Gesius, in turn, gestured to
another man who walked forward from the single door behind the
throne. He was carrying a black silk pillow. There was a ruby on it
in a golden band. He came towards Crispin. Even at a distance Crispin
saw that this shining prize for an Emperor's idle amusement at a
banquet would be worth more money than he'd ever possessed in his
life. The attendant stopped before him. Scortius, on Crispin's right,
was smiling broadly. Good fortune and the god's grace.

Crispin said 'No man is less worthy of this gift, though I hope to
please the Emperor in other ways as I serve him.'

'Not a gift, Rhodian. A prize. Any man-or woman-here might have won
it. They all had a chance before you, earlier tonight.'

Crispin bowed his head. A sudden thought came to him, and before he
could resist it, he heard himself speaking again. 'Might I ... might
I be permitted to make of this a gift, then, my lord?' He stumbled
over the words. He was successful but not wealthy. Neither was his
mother, aging, nor Martinian and his wife.

'It is yours,' said the Emperor, after a brief, repressive silence.
'What one owns one may give.'

It was true, of course. But what did one own if life, if love, could
be taken away to darkness? Was it all not just... a loan, a
leasehold, transitory as candles?

Not the time, or the place, for that.

Crispin took a deep breath, forcing himself towards clarity, away
from shadows. He said, knowing this might be another mistake, 'I
should be honoured if the Lady Styliane would accept this from me,
then. I would, not have even had the chance to speak to this
challenge had she not, thought so kindly of my worth. And I fear my
own impolitic words earlier might have distressed a fellow artisan
she values. May this serve to make my amends?' He was aware of the
charioteer beside him, the man's drop-jawed gaze, a flurry of
incredulous sound among the courtiers.

'Nobly said!' cried Faustinus from by the two thrones.

It occurred to Crispin that the Master of Offices, powerful in his
control of the civil service, might not be an especially subtle man.
It also occurred to him in that same moment-noting Gesius's
thoughtful expression and the Emperor's suddenly wry, shrewd one-that
this might not be accidental.

He nodded at the attendant-vividly clad in silver-and the man carried
the pillow over to the golden-haired lady standing near the thrones.
Crispin saw that the Strategos, beside her, was smiling but that
Styliane Daleina herself had gone pale. This might indeed have been
an error; he had no sure instincts here at all.

She reached forward, however, and took the ruby ring, held it in an
open palm. She had no real choice. Exquisite as it was, beside the
spectacular pearl about her throat it was almost a trifle. She was
the daughter of the wealthiest family in the Empire. Even Crispin
knew this. She needed this ruby about as much as Crispin needed ... a
cup of wine.

Bad analogy, he thought. He did need one, urgently.

The lady looked across the space of the room at him for a long
moment, and then said, all icy, composed perfection, 'You do me too
much honour in your turn, and honour the memory of the Empire in
Rhodias with such generosity. I thank you.' She did not smile. She
closed her long fingers, the ruby nestled in her palm.

Crispin bowed.

'I must say, 'interjected the Empress of Sarantium, plaintively,
'that I am desolate now beyond all words. Did I, too, not urge you to
speak, Rhodian? Did I not stop our beloved Scortius to give you an
opportunity to show your cleverness? What gift will you make to me,
dare I ask?'

'Ah, you are cruel, my love,' said the Emperor beside her. He looked
amused again.

'I am cruelly scorned and overlooked,' said his wife.

Crispin swallowed hard. 'I am at the service of the Empress in all
things I may possibly do for her.'

'Good!' said Alixana of Sarantium, her voice crisp, changing on the
instant, as if this was exactly what she'd wanted to hear. 'Very
good. Gesius, have the Rhodian conducted to my rooms. I wish to
discuss a mosaic there before I retire for the night.'

There was another rustle of sound and movement. Lanterns nickered.
Crispin saw the sallow-faced man near the Strategos pinch his lips
together suddenly. The Emperor, still amused, said only, 'I have
summoned him for the Sanctuary, beloved. All other diversions must
follow our needs there.'

'I am not,' said the Empress of Sarantium, arching her magnificent
eyebrows, 'a diversion.'

She smiled, though, as she spoke, and laughter followed in the throne
room like a hound to her lead.

Valerius stood. 'Rhodian, be welcome to Sarantium. You have not
entered among us quietly.' He lifted a hand. Alixana laid hers upon
it, shimmering with rings, and she rose. Together, they waited for
their court to perform obeisance. Then they turned and went from the
room through the single door Crispin had seen behind the thrones.

Straightening, and then standing up once more, he closed his eyes
briefly, unnerved by the speed of events. He felt like a man in a
racing chariot, not at all in control of it.

When he opened his eyes again, it was to see the real charioteer,
Scortius, gazing at him. 'Be very careful,' the Soriyyan murmured
softly. 'With all of them.'

'How?' Crispin managed to say, just before the gaunt old Chancellor
swooped down upon him as upon a prize. Gesius laid thin, proprietary
fingers on Crispin's shoulder and smoothly guided him from the room,
across the tesserae of the Imperial hunt, past the silver trees and
the jewelled birds in the branches and the avidly watchful, silken
figures of the Sarantine court.

As he walked through the silver doors into the antechamber again
someone behind him clapped their hands sharply three times and then
amid a resumption of talk and languid, late-night laughter, Crispin
heard the mechanical birds of the Emperor begin to sing.

 

'Jad boil the bastard in his own fish sauce!' Rasic snarled under his
breath as he scrubbed at a stained pot. 'We might as well have joined
the Sleepless Ones and gotten some holy credit for being up all
fucking night!' Kyros, stirring his soup over the fire with a long
wooden spoon, pretended not to be listening. You didn't boil things
in the fish sauce, anyhow. Strumosus was known to have exceptionally
good hearing, and there was a rumour that once, years ago, the
eccentric cook had tossed a dozing kitchen boy into a huge iron pot
when the soup in that pot came to a boil unattended.

Kyros was pretty sure that wasn't true, but he had seen the rotund
master chef bring a chopping knife down a finger's breadth away from
the hand of an undercook who was cleaning leeks carelessly. The knife
had stuck, quivering, in the table. The undercook had looked at it,
at his own precariously adjacent fingers, and fainted. 'Toss him in
the horse trough,' Strumosus had ordered. Kyros's bad foot had
excused him from that duty, but four others had done it, carrying the
unconscious undercook out the door and down the portico steps. It had
been winter then, a bitterly cold, grey afternoon. The surface of the
water in the trough across the courtyard was frozen. The undercook
revived, spectacularly, when they dropped him in.

Working for a notoriously temperamental cook was not the easiest
employment in the City.

Still, Kyros had surprised himself over the course of a year and a
half by discovering that he enjoyed the kitchen. There were mysteries
to preparing food, and Kyros had found himself thinking about them.
It helped that this wasn't just any kitchen, or any chef. The short,
hot-tempered, ample-stomached man who supervised the food here was a
legend in the City. There were those who held the view that he was
far too aware of the fact, but if a cook could be an artist,
Strumosus was. And his kitchen was the Blues' banqueting hall in
Sarantium, where feasts for two hundred people were known to take
place some nights.

Tonight, in fact. Strumosus, in a fever of brilliance, controlled
chaos, and skin-blistering invective, had co-ordinated the
preparation of eight elaborate courses of culinary celebration,
climaxing in a parade of fifty boys-they'd recruited and cleaned up
the stablehands-carrying enormous silver platters of shrimp-stuffed
whitefish in his celebrated sauce around the wildly cheering banquet
room while trumpets sounded and blue banners were madly waved. An
overly enthused Clarus-the Blues' principal male dancer-had leaped
flamboyantly from his seat at the high table and hastened over to
plant a kiss full on the lips of the cook in the doorway to the
kitchens. Shouts and ribald laughter ensued as Strumosus pretended to
swat the little dancer away and then acknowledged the applause and
whistles.

It was the last night of Dykania, end of another racing season, and
the Glorious Blues of Great Renown had once more thrashed the hapless
whey-faced Greens, both during the long season and today. Scortius's
astonishing victory in the first afternoon race already seemed
destined to become one of those triumphs that were talked about
forever.

The wine had flowed freely all night, and so had the toasts that came
with it. The faction's poet, Khardelos, had stood up unsteadily,
propped himself with one splayed hand on the table, and improvised a
verse, flagon lifted:

Amid the thundering voices of the gathered throng Scortius flies
like an eagle across the sand beneath the eagle's nest of the
kathisma!

All glory to the glorious Emperor!

Glory to the swift Soriyyan and his steeds!

All glory to the Blues of Great Renown!

Kyros had felt prickles of sheer delight running along his spine.
Like an eagle across the sand. That was wonderful! His eyes misted
with emotion. Strumosus, beside him at the kitchen door in the
momentary lull of activity, had snorted softly. 'A feeble wordsmith,'
he'd murmured, just loudly enough for Kyros to hear. He often did
that. 'Old phrases and butchered ones. Must talk to Astorgus. The
charioteers are splendid, the kitchen is matchless, as we all know.
The dancers are good enough. The poet, however, must go. Must go.'

Kyros had looked over and blushed to see Strumosus's sharp, small
eyes on him. 'Start of your education, boy. Be not seduced by cheap
sentiment any more than by a heavy hand with spices. There's a
difference between the accolades of the masses and the approval of
those who really know.' He turned and went back into the heat of the
kitchen. Kyros quickly followed.