Sailing to Sarantium (59 page)

Shirin smiled suddenly, visibly pleased. 'You noticed? She saw me
dance in the spring. Sent a private message with a note and a flask.
It was made public that, in appreciation of my dancing, the Empress
had permitted me to use the scent that was otherwise hers alone. Even
though she's known to favour the Blues.'

Crispin looked down at her. A small, quick, dark-eyed woman, quite
young. 'A great honour.' He hesitated. 'It suits you as much as it
does her.'

She looked ironic. She would be used to compliments, he realized.
'The association with power is attractive, isn't it?' she murmured
dryly.

Crispin laughed aloud. 'Jad's blood! If all the women in Sarantium
are as clever as the ones I've already met. '

'Yes?' she said, looking up at him slantwise. 'What follows, Caius
Crispus?' Her tone was deliberately arch, teasing again. It was
effective, he had to concede.

He couldn't think of a reply. She laughed. 'You'll have to tell me
about the others, of course. One must know one's rivals in this
city.'

Crispin looked at her. He could imagine what her bird would have said
to that. He was grateful it was silent. Otherwise-

'Oh, gods! You are a disgrace! You bring shame upon . . .
everything!'

Crispin winced, covering it with a quick hand to his mouth. Not
silenced, obviously. It was evident that Zoticus's daughter had her
own methods of controlling her bird. She'd been toying with both of
them, he thought. Shirin turned, smiling privately to herself, and
led the way back down the corridor to the front door.

'I'll call again,' Crispin murmured, turning there. 'If I may?'

'Of course. You must. I'll assemble a small dinner party for you.
Where are you staying?'

He named the inn. I’ll be looking for a house, though. I
believe the Chancellor's officials are to find me one.'

'Gesius? Really? And Leontes met with you at the baths? You have
powerful friends, Rhodian. My father was wrong. You couldn't possibly
need someone like me for . . . anything.' She smiled again, the
clever expression belying the words. 'Come and see me dance. The
chariots are finished, it is theatre season now.'

He nodded. She opened the door and stood back to let him pass.

'Thank you again for the greeting,' he said. He wasn't sure why he'd
said that. Teasing. Mostly. She'd done enough of it, herself.

'Oh, dear,' Shirin of the Greens murmured. 'I'm not to be allowed to
forget that, am I? My beloved father would be so ashamed. It isn't
how he raised me, of course. Good day, Caius Crispus,' she added,
keeping a small but discernible distance this time. After her own
gibes at him, he was pleased to see that she had reacted a little,
however.

'Don't kiss him! Don't! Is the door open?'

A brief pause, then,
'No I do not know that, Shirin! With you I am
never certain.'
Another silence, as Shirin said whatever she
said, and then in a very different tone Crispin heard the bird say,
'Very well. Yes, dear. Yes, I know. I do know that.'

There was a tenderness there that took him straight back to the
Aldwood. Linon.
Remember me
.

Crispin bowed, feeling a sudden wave of grief pass over him.
Zoticus's daughter smiled and the door closed. He stood on the
portico thinking, though not very coherently. Carullus's soldiers
waited, watching him, eyeing the street . . . which was empty now. A
wind blew. It was cold, the late-afternoon sun hidden by the roofs of
houses west.

Crispin took a deep breath then he knocked on the door again.

A moment later it swung open. Shirin's eyes were wide. She opened her
mouth but, seeing his expression, said nothing at all. Crispin
stepped inside. He himself closed the door on the street.

She looked up at him.

'Shirin, I'm sorry, but I can hear your bird,' he said. 'We have a
few things to talk about.'

 

The Urban Prefecture in the reign of the Emperor Valerius II fell
under the auspices of Faustinus the Master of Offices, as did all of
the civil service and, accordingly, it was run with his well-known
efficiency and attention to detail.

These traits were much in evidence when the former courier and
suspected assassin, Pronobius Tilliticus, was brought to questioning
in the notorious, windowless building near the Mezaros Forum. The new
legal protocols established by Valerius's Quaestor of the Judiciary,
Marcellinus, were painstakingly followed: a scribe and a notary were
both present as the Questioner set out his array of implements.

In the event, none of the hanging weights or metal probes or the more
elaborate contrivances proved necessary. The man Tilliticus offered a
complete and detailed confession as soon as the Questioner, gauging
his subject with an experienced eye, elected to suddenly clutch and
shear off a hank of the man's hair with a curved, serrated blade. As
his locks fell to the stone floor, Tilliticus screamed as if he'd
been pierced by the jagged blade. Then he began to babble forth far
more than they needed to hear. The secretary recorded; the notary
witnessed and affixed his seal when it was done. The Questioner,
showing no signs of disappointment, withdrew. There were other
subjects waiting in other chambers.

The detailed revelations made it unnecessary to interrogate formally
the soldier from Amoria who had been interrupted and personally
halted by the Supreme Strategos while apparently attempting a further
assault on the Rhodian artisan in a public bathhouse.

In accordance with the new protocols, a member of the judiciary was
requested to attend immediately at the Urban Prefecture. Upon
arrival, the judge was presented with the one-time courier's
confession and such further details as had been assembled regarding
the events of the night before and that afternoon.

The judge had some latitude under Marcellinus's new Code of Laws. The
death penalty had been largely eliminated as contrary to the spirit
of Jad's creation and as a benign Imperial gesture in the aftermath
of the Victory Riots, but the possible fines, dismemberments,
mutilations, and terms of exile or incarceration were wide-ranging.

The judge on duty that evening happened to be a Green supporter. The
deaths of two common soldiers and a Blue partisan was a grave matter,
to be sure, but the Rhodian involved-the only important figure in the
story, it seemed-had been unharmed, and the courier had confessed his
crimes freely. Six perpetrators had been killed. The judge had barely
divested himself of his heavy cloak and sipped once or twice from the
wine cup they brought him before ruling that the gouging of one eye
and a slit nose, to label Tilliticus as a punished criminal, would be
a proper and sufficient judicial response. Along with a lifetime's
exile, of course. Such a figure could not possibly be allowed to
remain in the City. He might corrupt the pious inhabitants.

The Amorianite soldier was routinely branded on the forehead with a
hot iron as a would-be assassin and-of course-thereby forfeited his
place in the army and his pension. He too was exiled.

It all unfolded with satisfying efficiency, and the judge even had
time to finish his wine and exchange some salacious gossip with the
notary about a young pantomime actor and a very prominent Senator. He
was home in time for his evening meal.

That same evening, a surgeon on contract to the Urban Prefecture was
called in and Pronobius Tilliticus lost his left eye and had his nose
carved open with a heated blade. He would lie in the Prefecture's
infirmary for that night and the next and then be taken in chains
across the harbour to Deapolis port and released there, to make his
one-eyed, marked way in exile through the god's world and the
Empire-or wherever he chose to go beyond it.

He went, in fact, as most of the god's world would come to know one
day, south through Amoria into Soriyya. He quickly exhausted the
meagre sum his father had been able to put together for him on short
notice and was reduced to begging for scraps at chapel doors with the
other maimed and mutilated, the orphans, and the women too old to
sell their bodies for sustenance.

From these depths he was rescued the next autumn-as the story was to
tell-by a virtuous cleric in a village near the desert wastes of
Ammuz. Smitten with divine illumination, Pronobius Tilliticus went
forth a distance alone into the desert the next spring carrying only
a sun disk, and found a precipitate tooth of rock to climb. It was a
difficult ascent, but he did it only once.

He lived there forty years in all, sustained at first by supplies
sent out by the humble cleric who had brought him to Jad, and later
by the pilgrims who began to seek out his needle-like crag in the
sands, bearing baskets of food and wine which were hauled up on a
rope-and-pulley arrangement and then lowered-empty-by the one-eyed
hermit with his long, filthy beard and rotting clothes.

A number of people, carried out to the site in litters, unable to
walk or gravely ill, and not a few women afflicted with barren wombs,
were afterwards to claim in carefully witnessed testaments that their
conditions had been cured when they ate of the half-masticated pieces
of food the Jad-possessed anchorite was wont to hurl down from his
precarious perch. Besought by the people below for prophecies and
holy instruction, Pronobius Tilliticus would declaim terse parables
and grim, strident warnings of dire futures.

He was, of course, correct in large measure, achieving his
immortality by being the first holy man slain by the heathen fanatics
of the sands when they swept out of the south into Soriyya following
their own star-enraptured visionary and his ascetic new teachings.

When a vanguard of this desert army reached the stiletto of rock upon
which the hermit-an old man by then, incoherent in his convictions
and fierce rhetoric-still perched, seemingly impervious to the winds
and the broiling sun, they listened to him fulminate for a time,
amused. When he began coarsely spitting food down upon them, their
amusement faded. Archers filled him with arrows like some grotesque,
spiny animal. He fell from his perch, a long way. After routinely
cutting off his genitalia they left him in the sand for the
scavengers.

He would be formally declared holy and among the Blessed Victims
gathered to Immortal Light, a performer of attested miracles and a
sage, two generations later by the great Patriarch Eumedius.

In the official Life commissioned by the Patriarch it was chronicled
how Tilliticus had spent hard and courageous years in the Imperial
Post, loyally serving his Emperor, before hearing and heeding the
summons of a far greater power. Movingly, the tale was told of how
the holy man lost his eye to a wild lion of the desert while saving a
lost child in peril.

'One sees Holy Jad within, not with the eyes of this world,' he was
reported to have said to the weeping child and her mother, whose own
garment, stained by the blood that dripped from the sage's wounds,
came to be included among the sacred treasures of the Great Sanctuary
in Sarantium itself.

At the time the Life of the Blessed Tilliticus was written, it was
either forgotten or deemed inconsequential by the recording clerics
what role a minor Rhodian artisan might have played in the journey of
the holy man to the god's eternal Light. Military slang also comes
and goes, changes and evolves. No coarse, ribald associations at all
would attach to the name of Jad's dearly beloved Pronobius by then.

 

On the same day that the mosaicist Caius Crispus of Varena survived
two attempts on his life, first saw the domed Sanctuary of Jad's Holy
Wisdom in Sarantium, and met the men and women who would shape and
define his living days to come under the god's sun, far to the west a
ceremony took place outside the walls of his home town in the much
smaller sanctuary he had been commissioned with his partner and their
craftsmen and apprentices to decorate.

Amid the forests of Sauradia the people of the Antae had-along with
the Vrachae and Inicii and the other pagan tribes in that wild
land-honoured their ancestors on the Day of the Dead with rites of
blood. But after forcing their way west and south into Batiara as the
Rhodian Empire crumbled inwards, they had adopted the faith of Jad
and many of the customs and rituals of those they conquered. King
Hildric, in particular, during a long and shrewd reign, had made
considerable strides towards consolidating his people in the
peninsula and achieving a measure of harmony with the subjugated but
still haughty Rhodians.

It was considered unfortunate in the extreme that Hildric the Great
had left no surviving heir save a daughter.

The Antae might worship Jad and gallant Heladikos now, might carry
sun disks, build and restore chapels, attend at bathhouses and even
theatres, treat with the mighty Sarantine Empire as a sovereign state
and not a gathering of tribes... but they remained a people known for
the precarious tenure of their leaders and utterly unaccustomed to a
woman's rule. It was a matter of ongoing surprise in certain quarters
that Queen Gisel hadn't been forced to marry or been murdered before
now.

In the judgement of thoughtful observers, only the tenuous balance of
power among rival factions had caused a clearly unacceptable
condition to endure until the long-awaited consecration of Hildric's
memorial outside the walls of Varena.

The ceremony took place late in the autumn, immediately after the
three days of Dykania ended, when the Rhodians were accustomed to
honour their own ancestors. Theirs was a civilized faith and society:
candles were lit, prayers articulated, no blood was shed.

A significant number of those close-packed in the expanded and
impressively decorated sanctuary did feel sufficiently unwell in the
aftermath of Dykania's excesses to half wish that they themselves
were dead, however. Among the many Rhodian festivals and holy days
that dotted the round of the year, Dykania's inebriate debaucheries
had been adopted by the Antae with an entirely predictable
enthusiasm.