Sailing to Sarantium (65 page)

'Thank you,' said Valerius. His nod was brief, formal. 'We had relied
upon you to say as much. This is a vision worthy of the Sanctuary, we
judge.'

'If it can be done,' said Zakarios.

'There is always that,' said Valerius. 'Much that men strive to
achieve fails in the doing. Will you take more wine?'

 

It was really very late. It was later still when the two clerics and
the architect and historian took their leave, to be escorted from the
Precinct by Excubitors. As they left the room, Zakarios saw Valerius
signalling one of his secretaries. The man stumbled forward from the
shadows along the wall. The Emperor had begun dictating to him, even
before the door was closed. Zakarios was to remember that image, and
also the sensation he had, in the depths of the same night, waking
from a dream.

He seldom dreamed, but in this one he was standing under the dome the
Rhodian had made. It was done, achieved, and looking up by the
blazing of suspended chandeliers and oil lamps and the massed
candles, Zakarios had understood it wholly, as one thing, and had
grasped what was happening on the western side, where nothing but a
sunset lay opposite the god. A sunset, while Jad was rising? Opposite
the god? There was a heresy, he thought, sitting suddenly up in his
bed, awake and disoriented. But he couldn't remember what sort it
was, and he fell fitfully asleep again. By morning he had forgotten
all but the moment, bolt upright in darkness, a dream of candlelit
mosaics gone from him in the night like water in a rushing stream,
like falling summer stars, like the touch of loved ones who have died
and gone away.

It came down to seeing, Martinian had always said, and Crispin had
taught the same thing to all their apprentices over the years,
believing it with passion. You saw in the eye of your mind, you
looked with fierce attention at the world and what it showed you, you
chose carefully among the tesserae and the stones and-if they were on
offer-the semi-precious gems you were given. You stood or sat in the
palace chamber or chapel or the bedroom or dining hall you were to
work within, and you watched what happened through a day as the light
changed, and then again at night, lighting candles or lanterns,
paying for them yourself if you had to. You went up close to the
surface where you would work, touching it-as he was doing now, on a
scaffold dizzyingly high above the polished marble floors of
Artibasos's Sanctuary in Sarantium-and you ran your eyes and your
fingers over and across the surface that had been given to you. No
wall would ever be utterly smooth, no arc of a dome could attain
perfection. Jad's children were not made for perfection. But you
could use imperfections. You could compensate for them, and even turn
them into strengths. . . if you knew them, and where they were.

Crispin intended to have the curve of this dome memorized, sight and
touch, before he allowed even the bottom layer of rough plaster to be
laid down. He'd won his first argument with Artibasos already, with
unexpected support from the head of the bricklayers' guild. Moisture
was the enemy of mosaic. They were to spread a shielding coat of
resin over all the bricks, beginning it as soon as he was done with
this traverse. Then the team of carpenters would hammer thousands of
flat-headed nails through that coat and between the bricks, leaving
the heads protruding slightly, to help the first coarse layer of
plaster-rough-textured sand and pounded brick-adhere. It was almost
always done in Batiara, virtually unknown here in the east, and
Crispin had been vehement in his assurance that the nails would go a
long way to helping the plaster bind firmly, especially on the curves
of the dome. He was going to have them do it on the walls, too,
though he hadn't told Artibasos or the carpenters yet. He had some
further ideas for the walls as well. He hadn't talked about those
yet, either.

There would be two more layers of plaster after the first, they had
agreed, fine and then finer yet. And on the last of these he would do
his work, with the craftsmen and apprentices he chose, following the
design he had submitted and which had now been approved by court and
clerics. And in the doing would seek to render here as much of the
world as he knew and could compass in one work. No less than that.

For the truth was, he and Martinian had been wrong all these years,
or not wholly right.

This was one of the hard things Crispin had learned on his journey,
leaving home in bitterness and arriving in another state he could not
yet define. Seeing was indeed at the heart of this craft of light and
colour-it had to be-but it was not all. One had to look, but also to
have a desire, a need, a vision at the base of that seeing. If he was
ever to achieve anything even approaching the unforgettable image of
Jad he'd seen in that small chapel on the road, he would have to find
within himself a depth of feeling that came-somehow-near to what had
been felt by the unknown, fervently pious men who had rendered the
god there.

He would never have their pure, unwavering certainty, but it seemed
to him that something that might be equal to it was within him now,
miraculously. He had come out from behind city walls in the fading
west, carrying three dead souls in his walled heart and a birdsoul
about his neck, and had journeyed to greater walls here in the east.
From a city to the City, passing through wilderness and mist and into
a wood that terrified-that could not but terrify-and out alive.
Granted life, or-more truly, perhaps-with his life and Vargos's and
Kasia's bought by Linon's soul left there on the grass at her own
command.

He had seen a creature in the Aldwood he would have in him all his
days. Just as Ilandra would be with him, and the heartbreak of his
girls. You moved through time and things were left behind and yet
stayed with you. The nature of how men lived. He had thought to avoid
that, to hide from it, after they'd died. It could not be done.

'You do not honour them by living as if you, too, have died,'
Martinian had said to him, eliciting an anger near to rage. Crispin
felt a deep rush of affection for his distant friend. Just now, high
above the chaos of Sarantium, it seemed as if there were so many
things he wanted to honour or exalt-or take to task, if it came to
that, for there was no need for, no justice in, children dying of
plague, or young girls being cut into pieces in the forest, or sold
in grief for winter grain.

If this was the world as the god-or gods-had made it, then mortal
man, this mortal man, could acknowledge that and honour the power and
infinite majesty that lay within it, but he would not say it was
right, or bow down as if he were only dust or a brittle leaf blown
from an autumn tree, helpless in the wind.

He might be, all men and women might be as helpless as that leaf, but
he would not admit it, and he would do something here on the dome
that said-or aspired to say-these things, and more.

He had journeyed here to do this. Had done his sailing and was still
sailing, perhaps, and would put into the mosaics of this Sanctuary as
much of the living journey and what lay within it and behind it as
his craft and desire could encompass.

He would even have-though he knew they might maim or blind him for
it-Heladikos here. Even if only veiled, hinted at, in a sunset shaft
of light and an absence. Someone looking up, someone tuned to images
in a certain way, could place Jad's son himself where the design
demanded he be, falling into the fallen west, a torch in his hand.
The torch would be there, a spear of light from the low sunset clouds
shooting up into the sky, or from heaven descending to earth where
mortals dwelled.

He would have Ilandra here, and the girls, his mother, faces of his
life, for there was room to place such images and they belonged, they
were part of the sailing, his own and all men's journey. The figures
of men's lives were the essence of those lives. What you found,
loved, left behind, had taken away from you.

His Jad would be the bearded eastern god of that chapel in Sauradia,
but the pagan zubir would be here on the dome, an animal hidden among
the other animals he would render. And yet not quite so: only this
one would be done in black and white stone, after the old Rhodian
fashion of the first mosaics. And Crispin knew-if those approving his
charcoal drawing could not-how that image of a Sauradiari bison would
show amid all the colours he was using here. And Linon, shining
jewels for her eyes, would lie in the grass nearby-and let men wonder
at it. Let them call the zubir a bull if they would, let them puzzle
at a bird on the grass. Wonder and mystery were a part of faith, were
they not? He would say that, if asked.

On the scaffold, he stood alone and apart, eyes to the brickwork,
running his hands across and across like someone blind-and aware of
that irony, as ever when he did this-gesturing below at intervals for
the apprentices to wheel the scaffold for him. It swayed when it
moved, he had to grip the railing, but he had spent much of his
working life on platforms such as this and had no fear of the height.
It was a refuge, in fact. High above the world, above the living and
the dying, the intrigues of courts and men and women, of nations and
tribes and factions and the human heart trapped in time and yearning
for more than it was allowed, Crispin strove not to be drawn back
down into the confusing fury of those things, desiring now to live-as
Martinian had urged him-but away from the blurring strife, to achieve
this vision of a world on a dome. All else was transitory, ephemeral.
He was a mosaicist, as he had told people and told people, and this
distanced elevation was his haven and his source and destination, all
in one. And with fortune and the god's blessing he might do something
here that could last, and leave a name.

So he thought, was thinking, in the moment he glanced down from so
far above the world to check if the apprentices had locked the
scaffold wheels again, and saw a woman come through the silver doors
into the sanctuary.

She moved forward, walking over the gleaming marble stones, graceful,
even as seen from so high, and she stopped under the dome and looked
up.

She looked up for him and, without a word spoken or a gesture made,
Crispin felt a tugging back of the world as something fierce and
physical, imperative, commanding, making a mockery of illusions of
remote asceticism. He was not made to live his life like a holy man
in an untouchable place. Best he acknowledge it now. Perfection, he
had just been thinking, was not attainable by men. Imperfections
could be turned into strengths. Perhaps.

Standing on the scaffold, he laid both hands flat for a moment more
against the cold bricks of the dome and closed his eyes. It was
extremely quiet this high up, serene, solitary. A world to himself, a
creation to enact. It ought to have been enough. Why was it not? He
let his hands fall to his sides. Then he shrugged-a gesture his
mother knew, and his friends, and his dead wife-and motioning for
those below to hold the platform steady, he began the long climb
down.

He was in the world, neither above it nor walled off from it any
more. If he had sailed to anything, it was to that truth. He would do
this work or would fail in it as a man living in his time, among
friends, enemies, perhaps lovers, and perhaps with love, in Varena
under the Antae or here in Sarantium, City of Cities, eye of the
world, in the reign of the great and glorious, thrice-exalted Emperor
Valerius II, Jad's Regent upon earth, and the Empress Alixana.

It was a long, slow descent, hand and foot, the familiar movements,
over and again. Out of careful habit he emptied his mind as he came
down: men died if they were careless here, and this dome was higher
than any he had known. He felt the pull, though, even as he moved:
the world drawing him back down to itself.

He reached the wooden base of the rolling platform, set on wheels
upon the marble floor. He swung around and stood on the base a
moment, that little distance yet above the ground. Then he nodded his
head to the woman standing there, who had neither spoken nor gestured
but who had come here and had claimed him for them all. He wondered
if, somehow, she had known she was doing that. She might have. It
would sort with what he knew about her, already.

He drew a breath and stepped down off the scaffolding. She smiled.