Sailing to Sarantium (47 page)

His fervent hope-and inadequate plan-was that the third man had not
bolted the door to the Sanctuary, that they could get inside before
the assassins closed in. It struck him-rather late-that he could have
shouted the same warning and not come charging like a schoolboy into
the midst of things himself. He was the toast of Sarantium, the
Emperor's dinner companion, Glory of the Blues, wealthy beyond all
youthful dreams.

Pretty much the same person he'd been fifteen years ago, it seemed.
Unfortunately, perhaps.

He bounded up onto the porch, wincing as he landed on the bruised
ankle, went straight past the two men and grabbed at the handle of
the massive door. Gripped, turned.

Locked. He rattled and jerked the handle uselessly, pounded once on
the door, then wheeled around. Saw the two men clearly for the first
time. Knew them both. Neither had made any intelligently responsive
move. Paralysed with fear, both of them. Scortius swore again.

The soldiers had encircled them. Predictably. The leader, a big,
rangy man, stood directly in front of the portico steps between
cloth-covered mounds of something or other and looked up at the three
of them. His eyes were dark in the darkness. He held his heavy sword
lightly, as if it weighed nothing at all.

'Scortius of the Blues!' he said, his voice odd.

There was a silence. Scortius said nothing, thinking fast.

The soldier went on, still in that bemused tone, 'You cost me a
fortune this afternoon, you know.' A Trakesian voice. He'd guessed
this might be it: soldiers on city leave, hired in a caupona to kill
and disappear.

'These men are both under the protection of the Emperor,' Scortius
snapped icily. 'You touch either of them, or me, at absolute cost of
your lives. No one will be able to protect you. Anywhere in the
Empire or beyond. Do you understand me?'

The man's sword did not move. His voice did, however, shifting
upwards in surprise. 'What? You thought we were here to harm them?'

Scortius swallowed. His knife hand fell to his side. The other two
men on the portico were looking at him with curiosity. So were the
soldiers below. The wind blew, stirring the coverings on the mounds
of bricks and tools. Leaves skittered across the square. Scortius
opened his mouth, then closed it, finding nothing to say.

He had made several different, very swift assumptions since emerging
from the Imperial Precinct and seeing men waiting in the dark. None
of them appeared to have been correct.

'Um, charioteer, may I present to you Carullus, tribune of the Fourth
Sauradian cavalry,' said the red-headed mosaicist-for it was he who
stood on the portico. 'My escort on the last part of the journey
here, and my guardian in the City. He did lose a lot of money on the
first race this afternoon, as it happens.'

'I am sorry to hear it,' said Scortius, reflexively. He looked at
Caius Crispus of Varena, and then at the celebrated architect,
Artibasos, standing beside him, rumpled and observant. The builder of
this new Sanctuary.

And he was now fairly certain who it was they'd been bowing to while
he watched from across the way. He was attaining understanding late
here, it seemed. The Bassanids had a philosophic phrase about that,
in their own tongue; he'd heard it often from their traders in
Soriyya in the seasons when there hadn't been a war. He didn't much
feel like being philosophic at the moment.

There was another silence. The north wind whistled through the
pillars, flapping the covers over the brick and masonry again. No
movement from by the Bronze Gates: they would have heard him shouting
but hadn't bothered to do anything about it. Events outside the
Imperial Precinct rarely disturbed the guards; their concern was in
keeping those events outside. He had careened across the open square,
roaring like a madman, waving a dagger, banging his ankle ... to no
effect whatsoever. Standing in darkness on the still-unfinished
portico of the Great Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom, Scortius
received a swift, unsettling image of the elegant woman he'd lately
left. The scent and the touch of her.

He imagined her observing his conduct just now. He winced at the
thought of her arched eyebrows, the quirked, amused mouth, and
then-failing to see any obvious alternatives-he began to laugh.

 

Earlier that same night, walking with an escort from the Attenine
towards the Traversite Palace, where the Empress of Sarantium had her
favoured autumn and winter quarters, Crispin had found himself
thinking of his wife.

This happened all the time, but the difference-and he was aware of
it-was that in his mind the image of Ilandra appeared now as a
shield, a defence, though he remained unsure what it was he feared.
It was windy and cold crossing the gardens; he wrapped himself in the
cloak they'd given him.

Guarded by the dead, hiding behind the memory of love, he was
conducted to the smaller of the two main palaces under swiftly moving
clouds and the westered, sunken moons and entered, and walked marble
corridors with lanterns burning on the walls and paused before
soldiers at the doorway of an Empress who had summoned him, so late
at night, to her private quarters.

He was expected. The nearest soldier nodded, expressionless, and
opened the door. Crispin passed into a space of firelight,
candlelight, and gold. The eunuchs and soldiers remained outside. The
door was closed behind him. Ilandra's image slowly faded as a
lady-in-waiting approached, silk-clad, light on slippered feet, and
offered him a silver cup of wine.

He accepted, with real gratitude. She took his cloak and laid it on a
bench against the wall by the fire. Then she smiled at him sidelong
and withdrew through an inner door. Crispin stood alone and looked
around in the light of myriad candles. A room in sumptuous good
taste; a little ornate to a western eye, but the Sarantines tended to
be. Then he caught his breath.

There was a golden rose on a long table by the wall to his left.
Slender as a living flower, seemingly as pliant, four buds on the
long stem, thorns among the small, perfect leaves, all of gold, all
four buds rendered in stages of unfolding, and a fifth, at the crown,
fully opened, achieved, each thin, exquisite petal a marvel of the
goldsmith's craft, with a ruby at the centre of it, red as a fire in
the candlelight.

The beauty caught at his heart, and the terrible fragility. If one
were merely to take that long stem between two fingers and twist it
would bend, distort, fall awry. The flower seemed almost to sway in a
breeze that wasn't there. So much perfection and so transient, so
vulnerable. Crispin ached for the mastery of it-the time and care and
craft brought to this accomplishment-and for the simultaneous
perception that this artifice, this art, was as precarious as... as
any joy in mortal life.

As a rose, perhaps, that died in a wind or at summer's end.

He thought suddenly of the young queen of the Antae then, and of the
message he carried, and he was aware of pity and fear within himself,
a very long way from home.

A silver branching of candles wavered on the table by the rose. There
was no sound, but the flicker of movement made him turn.

She had been on the stage in her youth, knew very well-even now-how
to move with silence and a dancer's grace. She was small, slender,
dark-haired, dark-eyed, exquisite as the rose. She brought thorns to
mind, the drawing of blood, the danger at the heart of beauty.

She had changed to a night robe of deep red, had had her women remove
the spectacular headdress and the jewels at wrist and throat. Her
hair was down now for the night, thick and long and dark, unsettling.
There were diamonds still hanging at her ears, her only ornament,
catching the light. Her scent was about her, drifting towards him
through a space she defined, and surrounding her, also, was an aura:
of power, and of amused intelligence, and of something else he could
not name but knew he feared and was right to fear.

'How deeply acquainted might you be, Rhodian, with the private
chambers of royalty?' Her voice was low, wry, shockingly intimate.

Careful, oh careful, he told himself, setting down his wine cup and
bowing low, hiding a surging anxiety with the slowness of the
movements. He straightened. Cleared his throat. 'Not at all, my lady.
I am honoured and out of my element.'

'A Batiaran far from his peninsula? A fish netted from water? How
would you taste, Caius Crispus of Varena?' She did not move. The
firelight was caught in her dark eyes and in the diamonds beside
them. It flashed from the diamonds, was drowned in her eyes. She
smiled.

She was toying with him. He knew this, but his throat was still dry.
He coughed again, and said, 'I have no idea. I am at your service in
all things, thrice-exalted.'

'You did say that. They shaved your beard, I understand. Poor man.'
She laughed, came forward then, straight towards him and then past,
as he caught his breath. She stood by the long table, looking at the
rose. 'You were admiring my flower?' Her voice was honey, or silk.

'Very much, my lady. A work of great beauty and sadness.'

'Sadness?' She turned her head, looked at him.

He hesitated. 'Roses die. An artifice so delicate reminds us of the .
.. impermanence of all things. All beautiful things.'

Alixana said nothing for a time. Not a young woman any more. Her
dark, accentuated eyes held his until he looked away and down. Her
scent, this near, was intoxicating, eastern, it made him think of
colours, many things did: this was near to the red of her robe, but
deeper, darker, porphyry, in fact. The purple of royalty. He looked
down and wondered: could that be intentional, or was it only
him-turning scent, sound, taste into colour? There were hidden arts
here in Sarantiurn of which he would know nothing. He was in the City
of Cities, ornament of the world, eye of the universe. There were
mysteries.

'The impermanence of the beautiful. Well said. That,' the Empress
murmured, looking at the rose, 'is why it is here, of course. Clever
man. Could you, Rhodian, make me something in mosaic that suggests
the opposite: a hint of what endures beyond the transitory?'

She had asked him here for a reason, after all. He looked up. 'What
would suggest that for you, Empress?'

'Dolphins,' she said, without any warning at all.

He felt himself go white.

She turned fully around and watched him, leaning against the ivory of
the table, hands braced on either side of her, fingers spread. Her
expression was thoughtful, evaluating; that disconcerted him more
than irony would have done.

'Drink your wine,' the Empress said. 'It is very good.' He did. It
was.

It didn't help him. Not with this.

Dolphins were deadly at this point in the story of the world. Much
more than simply marine creatures, leaping between water and air,
graceful and decorative-the sort any woman might enjoy seeing on the
walls of her rooms. Dolphins were entangled in paganism, or
trammelled in the nets of Heladikian heresies, or both.

They carried souls from the mortal realm of the living through the
echoing chambers of the sea to the realms of the Dead, and judgement.
So the Ancients had believed in Trakesia long ago-and in Rhodias
before Jad's teachings came. Dolphins had served the many-named god
of the Afterworld, conduits of the spirits of the dead, traversing
the blurred space between life and what came after.

And some of that old, enduring paganism had crossed-through a
different sort of blurred space-into the faith of Jad, and his son
Heladikos, who died in his chariot bringing fire to men. When
Heladikos's chariot plunged, burning like a torch, into the sea-so
the dark tale ran-it was the dolphins who came and bore his ruined
beauty upon their backs. Making of themselves a living bier, they
carried it to the ends of the uttermost sea of the world to meet his
father, sinking low at dusk. And Jad had claimed the body of his
child and taken it into his own chariot, and carried it down-as every
night-into the dark. A deeper, colder dark that night, for Heladikos
had died.

And so the dolphins were said to be the last creatures of the living
world to see and touch beloved Heladikos, and for their service to
him they were holy in the teachings of those who believed in Jad's
mortal son.

One might choose one's deadly sacrilege. The dolphins carried souls
to the dark god of Death in the pagans' ancient pantheon, or they
bore the body of the one god's only son in a now-forbidden heresy.

Either way, either meaning, an artisan who placed dolphins on a
ceiling or wall was inviting mortal consequences from an increasingly
vigilant clergy. There had been dolphins once in the Hippodrome,
diving to number the laps run. They were gone, melted down.
Sea-horses counted the running now.

It was this Emperor, Valerius II, who had urged the joint
Pronouncement of Athan, the High Patriarch in Rhodias, and Zakarios,
the Eastern one here in the City. Valerius had worked very hard to
achieve that rare agreement. Two hundred years of bitter, deadly
dispute in the schismatic faith of Jad had been papered over with
that document, but the price for whatever gains an ambitious Emperor
and superficially united clergy might enjoy had been the casting of
all Heladikians into heresy: at risk of denunciation, ritual cursing
in chapels and sanctuaries, fire. It was rare to be executed in
Valerius's Empire for breaking the laws of man, but men were burned
for heresy.

And it was Valerius's Empress who was asking him now, scented and
gleaming in red and threaded gold by late-night candlelight, for
dolphins in her rooms.

He felt much too drained by all that had happened tonight to properly
sort through this. He temporized, carefully. 'They are handsome
creatures, indeed, especially when they leap from the waves.'