The Sarantine Mosaic (101 page)

There is no one watching him. There are guards at the entrance, as always, even in the cold, and a small, rumpled architect is asleep somewhere in this vastness of lamplight and shadow, but Crispin works in silence, as alone as a man can be in Sarantium.

If anyone
were
watching him, and knew what it was he was doing, they would need a true understanding of his craft (of all such crafts, really) not to conclude that this was a hard, cold man, indifferent in life to the woman he is so serenely rendering. His eyes are clear, his hands steady, meticulously choosing tesserae from the trays beside him. His expression is detached,
austere: addressing technical dilemmas of glass and stone, no more.

No more? The heart cannot say, sometimes, but the hand and eye—if steady enough and clear enough—may shape a window for those who come after. Someone might look up one day, when all those awake or asleep in Sarantium tonight are long dead, and know that this woman was fair, and very greatly loved by the unknown man who placed her overhead, the way the ancient Trakesian gods were said to have set their mortal loves in the sky, as stars.

EVENTUALLY, MORNING CAME.
Morning always comes. There are always losses in the night, a price paid for light.

P
ART
  
T
WO

THE NINTH DRIVER

CHAPTER VII

M
en and women were always dreaming in the dark. Most of the night's images fell away with sunrise, or before if they harried the sleeper awake. Dreams were longings, or warnings, or prophecies. They were gifts or curses, from powers benevolent or malign, for all knew— whatever the faith into which they had been born—that mortal men and women shared the world with forces they didn't understand.

There were many who plied a trade in city or countryside telling those troubled by visions what they might signify. A small number saw certain kinds of dream as actual memories of a world other than the one into which the dreamer and the listener had been born to live and die, but this was treated in most faiths as a black heresy.

As winter turned towards spring that year, a great many people had dreams they were to remember.

A moonless night, late in winter. At a watering place in the far south, where camel routes met in Ammuz, near to where men had decreed a border with Soriyya—as if the shifting, blowing sands knew of such things—a man, a leader of his tribe, a merchant, awoke in his tent and dressed himself and went out into the dark.

He walked past tents where his wives and children and his brothers and their wives and children slept, and he came, still half asleep but strangely disturbed, to the edge
of the oasis, a place where the last of the green gave way to the endless sands.

He stood there under the arc of the heavens. Under so many stars it seemed impossible to him, suddenly, to comprehend their number in the sky above men and the world. His heart, for no reason he could understand, was beating rapidly. He had been in a deep sleep moments ago. Was still uncertain how and why he had come to be out here now. A dream. He had had a dream.

He looked up again. It was a mild night, generous, spring coming. Summer to follow: the burning, killing sun, water a longing and a prayer. A trace of a breeze flicked and eddied in the soft darkness, cool and reviving on his face. He heard the camels and the goats behind him, and the horses. His herds were large; he was a fortune-favoured man.

He turned and saw a young boy, one of the camel herders, standing not far away: on watch, for the moonless nights were dangerous. The boy's name was Tarif. It was a name that would be remembered, become known to chroniclers of generations yet unborn because of the exchange of words that followed.

The merchant drew a breath, adjusting the drape of his white robes. Then he gestured for the boy to approach and he instructed him, speaking carefully, to find the merchant's full-brother Musafa in his tent. To wake him, with apologies, and advise him that as of the sun's rising Musafa was to take command of and responsibility for their people. That he was particularly charged, in the name and memory of their father, to be mindful of the well-being of his absent brother's wives and children.

‘Where are you going, lord?' Tarif asked, becoming immortal with a handful of words. A hundred thousand children would bear his name in years to come.

‘Into the sands,' said the man, whose name was Ashar ibn Ashar. ‘I may be some time.'

He touched the boy on the forehead, and then turned his back on him, on the palm trees and night flowers and water, the tents and animals and movable goods of his people, and he walked out alone under the stars.

So many of them, he thought again. How could there be so many? What could it
mean
that there were so many stars? His heart was full as a water gourd with their presence overhead. He felt, in fact, like speaking a prayer, but something stopped him. He made a decision that he would be silent, instead: open to what lay all about him and above, not imposing himself upon it. He took a fold of the garment he wore and drew it deliberately across his mouth as he went.

He was gone a very long time, had been given up for dead by the time he returned to his people. He was greatly changed by then.

So, too, not long after, was the world.

The third time Shaski ran away from home that winter he was found on the road west out of Kerakek, moving slowly but with resolution, carrying a pack much too large for him.

The patrolling soldier from the fortress who brought him back volunteered, amused, to beat the child properly for his mothers, in the obvious absence of a paternal hand.

The two women, anxious and flustered, hastily declined, but did agree that some measure of real chastisement was required. Doing this once was a boy's adventure, three times was something else. They'd attend to it themselves, they promised the soldier, and apologized again for the trouble he'd been caused.

No trouble, the man said, and meant it. It was winter, a bought peace silencing the long border all the way from
Ammuz and Soriyya to Moskav in the freezing north. The garrison in Kerakek was bored. Drinking and gambling could only amuse one so much in a place as hopelessly remote as this was. You weren't even allowed to ride out and chase nomads or find a woman or two in one of their camps. The desert people were important to Bassania, it had been made explicitly, endlessly clear. More important, it seemed, than the soldiers themselves. Pay was late, again.

The younger of the two women was dark-eyed, quite pretty, if distraught at the moment. The husband, as noted, was away. It seemed reasonable to contemplate a return visit, just to make sure everything was all right. He could bring a toy for the lad. One learned these tricks with the young mothers.

Shaski, standing between his two mothers just inside the fence around their small front yard, looked up stonily at the man on the horse. Earlier that morning, laughing, the soldier had held him by his ankles upside-down in the road until—blood rushing dizzily to his head—Shaski had named the house where he lived. Told to say thank you now, he did so, his voice flat. The soldier left, though not before smiling at his mother Jarita in a way Shaski didn't like.

When questioned by his mothers in the house after— a catechism that included a vigorous shaking and many tears (from them, not him)—he simply repeated what he'd said the other times: he wanted his father. He was having dreams. His father needed them. They needed to go to where his father was.

‘Do you know how
far
that is?' his mother Katyun shrieked, rounding upon him. This was the worst part, actually: she was normally so calm. He didn't like it at all when she was upset. It was also a difficult question. He didn't really know how far away his father was.

‘I took clothes,' he said, pointing at his pack on the floor. ‘And my second warm vest you made me. And some apples. And my knife in case I met someone bad.'

‘Perun defend us!' his mother Jarita exclaimed. She was dabbing at her eyes. ‘What are we to do? The boy isn't eight years old!'

Shaski wasn't sure what that had to do with anything.

His mother Katyun knelt down on the carpet before him. She took his hands between her own. ‘Shaski, my love, little love, listen to me. It is too far away. We do not have flying creatures to carry us, we have no spells or magic or anything to take us there.'

‘We can walk.'

‘We
can't
,
Shaski, not in this world.' She was still holding his hands. ‘He doesn't need us now. He is helping the Kings of Kings in a place in the west. He will meet us in Kabadh in the summer. You will see him then.'

They still didn't understand. It was strange how grown people could fail to understand things, even though adults were supposed to know more than children and kept telling you that.

He said, ‘Summer is too long from now, and we mustn't go to Kabadh. That is the thing we have to tell father. And if he is too far to walk, let's get horses. Or mules. My father got a mule. I can ride one. We all can. You can take turns holding the baby when we ride.'

‘Holding the baby?' his mother Jarita exclaimed. ‘In the Lady's holy name, you want us
all
to do this mad thing?'

Shaski looked at her. ‘I said that. Before.'

Really. Mothers. Did they ever listen? Did they think he
wanted
to do this alone? He didn't even have any idea where he was going. Only that his father had gone one way on the road out of town, so he had gone that way himself, and the place he was at was called Sarantum, or nearly that, and it was far. Everyone kept saying that. He
had
understood
that he might not be there by nightfall, walking alone, and he didn't like the dark now, when his dreams came.

There was a silence. His mother Jarita slowly dried her eyes. His mother Katyun was looking at him strangely. She had let go of his hands. ‘Shaski,' she said finally, ‘tell me why we mustn't go to Kabadh.'

She had never asked him that before.

What he learned, as he explained to his mothers about the dreams and how he
felt
certain things, was that other people
didn't.
It confused him, that the pull to go away, and the other feeling—the shape of a black cloud hovering whenever they said the name
Kabadh
—was not something either of his mothers shared, or even understood.

It frightened them, Shaski saw, and that scared him. Looking at their rigid expressions when he finished speaking, he finally began to cry, his face crumpling, knuckles rubbing at his eyes. ‘I'm— I'm sorry,' he said. ‘For run— running away. I'm sorry.'

It was seeing her son in tears—her son who never cried—that made Katyun realize, finally, that there was something very large at work here, even if it was beyond her grasp. It was possible that the Lady Anahita had come to Kerakek, to this insignificant fortress town at the desert's edge, and had laid her finger on Shaghir, their darling child, Shaski. And the Lady's touch could mark a human being. It was known.

‘Perun guard us all,' Jarita murmured. Her face was white. ‘May Azal never know this house.'

But he did, if what Shaski had told them was in any way the truth. The Enemy knew Kerakek already. And even Kabadh. A cloud, a shadow, Shaski had said. How should a child know of shadows like that? And Rustem, her husband, needed them in the west. More north than west, actually. Among the infidels in Sarantium, who
worshipped a burning god in the sun. Something no one who knew the desert could ever do.

Katyun drew a breath. She knew there was a trap here for her, something seductive and dangerous. She didn't want to go to Kabadh. She had
never
wanted to go there. How could she survive in a court? Among the sort of women who were there? Even the idea kept her up at night, trembling, sick to her stomach, or brought dreams, shadows of her own.