The Sarantine Mosaic (132 page)

She stopped on the threshold and looked at them. Leontes stood up. Gisel did not, clasping her sun disk, her head cast down in what might have been thought to be humility.

‘You asked for me? What is it?' said Styliane Daleina briskly to the man she had today brought to the Golden Throne. ‘I have much to do tonight.'

‘No, you don't,' said Leontes, blunt and final as a judge. And was watching her as she registered—quickly, always quickly—the import of his tone.

If he had hoped (or feared) to see terror or fury in her eyes then he was disappointed (or relieved). He did see something flicker there. A different man might have known it for irony, a vast, black amusement, but the man who could have read her that way lay dead on the bier.

Gisel stood up. And of the three of them living, she was the one wearing the colours of royalty in this room. Styliane looked at her for a moment, and what might perhaps have been unexpected was the measure of her calm, approaching indifference.

She looked away from the other woman, as if dismissing her. She said to her husband, ‘You have discerned a way to claim Batiara. How clever of you. Did you do it all by yourself?' She glanced at Gisel, and the queen of the Antae lowered her eyes to the marble floor again, not in apprehension or intimidation, but so that exultation might be secret a little longer.

Leontes said, ‘I have discerned murder and impiety and will not live with them under Jad.'

Styliane laughed.

Even here, even now, she could laugh. He looked at her. How could a soldier, who judged so much of the world in terms of courage, not admire this, whatever else he felt?

She said, ‘Ah. You will not live with them? You renounce the throne? The court? Will join an order of clerics? Perch on a rock in the mountains with your beard to your knees? I
would
never have imagined it! Jad's ways are mighty.'

‘They are,' said Gisel, speaking for the first time, and the mood was changed, effortlessly. ‘They are, indeed.'

Styliane looked at her again, and this time Gisel lifted her eyes and met that gaze. It was simply too difficult, after all, to be secret. She had sailed here utterly alone, fleeing death, without allies of any kind, those who loved her dying in her stead. And now …

The man did not speak. He was staring at the aristocratic wife Valerius had given him in great honour, for shining conquests in the field. He had summoned her here intending to pull back the cloth again from the dead man and force her to look upon the hideous ruin of him, but in that moment he understood that such gestures held no meaning, or not any meaning one might expect.

He had never really understood her in any case, the daughter of Flavius Daleinus.

He gestured to Gesius, standing behind her in the doorway. His wife saw his movement and she looked at him, and she smiled. She smiled. And then they took her away. She was blinded before dawn by men whose vocation that was, in an underground room from which no sounds could escape to trouble the world above.

Through the moonlit streets of the city, past troops of foot-soldiers and mounted men galloping, boarded-up taverns and cauponae and the unlit fronts of houses, past chapels dark and the banked fires of the bakeries, under scudding clouds and stars hidden and revealed, Rustem of Kerakek, the physician, was escorted late that night by men of the Urban Prefect's guard from the Blues' compound to the house near the walls he'd been given for his use.

They had offered him a bed in the compound, but he had been taught long ago that a physician did better to sleep away from where his patients were. It preserved dignity, detachment, privacy. Even bone-weary as he was (he had done three more procedures after cleaning and closing the wound of the boy stabbed from behind), Rustem followed the habits of training and, after turning to the east and praying in silence to Perun and the Lady that his efforts be found acceptable, had asked for the escort promised earlier that night. They'd walked him to the gates again and called for the guards. He'd promised to return in the morning.

The soldiers in the streets gave them no trouble as they went, though there was clearly an agitation among them and the night was raucous with their cries and hammerings upon doors and the horses passing were like drums on the cobblestones. Rustem, in his exhaustion, paid them no attention, moving in the midst of his
escort, placing one foot in front of another, using his stick tonight, not just carrying it for effect, hardly seeing where he was going.

At length they came to his door. The door of Bonosus's small house by the walls. One of the guards knocked for him and it was opened quickly. They were probably expecting the soldiers, Rustem thought. The searchers. The steward was there, his expression concerned, and Rustem saw the girl, Elita, standing behind him, still awake at this hour. He stepped over the threshold, left foot first, mumbled a thanks to those who'd walked him here, nodded briefly to the steward and the girl, and went up the stairs to his room. There seemed to be many stairs tonight. He opened the door and went in, left foot first.

Inside, Alixana of Sarantium was sitting by the open window, looking down at the courtyard below.

CHAPTER XIV

H
e didn't know it was her, of course. Not until she spoke. In his dazed, stumbling state Rustem hadn't the least idea why this unknown woman was in his bedchamber. His first, incoherent thought was that she might be someone Bonosus knew. But that ought to have been a boy, surely?

Then he did believe he recognized her—as a patient, one of those who had come to see him the very first morning. But that made no sense. What was she doing here now? Did the Sarantines know nothing of proper conduct?

Then she stood up beside the window and she said, ‘Good evening, physician. My name is Aliana. It was Alixana this morning.'

Rustem fell back against the door, pushing it shut. His legs felt weak. There was a horror in him. He couldn't even speak. She was ragged, dirty, visibly exhausted, looking like nothing so much as a street beggar, and it never for a moment occurred to him to doubt the truth of what she said. The voice, he thought afterwards. It was the voice.

She said, ‘They are looking for me. I have no right to place you at risk, but I am doing so. I must rely on your compassion for someone you have treated as a patient— however briefly—and I must tell you I … I have nowhere else to go. I have been avoiding soldiers all night. I was even in the sewers, but they are looking there now.'

Rustem crossed the room. It seemed to take a long time. He sat down on the edge of his bed. Then it crossed his mind that he ought not to sit in the presence of an Empress and he stood up. He put a hand on one of the bedposts for support.

‘How did you … why are … how
here?'

She smiled at him. There was nothing resembling amusement in her face, however. Rustem had been trained to look at people carefully, and now he did. This woman was at the end of whatever reserves of strength she had. He glanced down. She was unshod; there was blood on one foot, and he thought it might be from a bite. She had mentioned the sewers. Her hair had been cropped off, raggedly. A disguise, he thought, as his brain began to work again. Her garment had also been cut, just above the knees. Her eyes looked hollow, dark, as if one could see into the sockets, into the bone behind.

But she smiled at his fumbling incoherence. ‘You were much more articulate the last time, doctor, explaining why I might hope one day to bear a child. Why am I here? Desperation, I confess. Elita is one of my women, one of those I trust. I used her to report on Bonosus. It was useful, in obvious ways, to know what the Master of the Senate was doing that he might prefer … not be known.'

‘Elita? One of … ?'

He was having a good deal of trouble. She nodded. There was a smear of mud across her forehead and on one cheek. This was a hunted woman. Her husband was dead. All those soldiers in the streets tonight, mounted, on foot, pounding at doors, they were there for her. She said, ‘She has reported generously of your nature, doctor. And of course I know myself that you refused to follow orders from Kabadh and kill the Antae queen.'

‘What?
I … You
know that
I … ?' He sat down again.

‘Doctor, we'd have been remiss if we didn't know such things, wouldn't we? In our own City? The merchant who brought you that message … have you seen him since?'

Rustem swallowed hard, shook his head.

‘It didn't take long to have him offer the details. Of course you were closely watched from then on. Elita said you were unhappy after that merchant left. You don't like the idea of killing, do you?'

They'd been watching him, all along. And what
had
happened to the man who'd brought him the message? He didn't want to ask.

‘Killing? Of course I don't,' Rustem said. ‘I am a healer.'

‘Will you shield me, then?' asked the woman. ‘They will be here soon enough.'

‘How can I … ?'

‘They will not know me. Their weakness tonight is that most of the men searching have no idea what the Empress looks like. Unless I am betrayed, they will only be able to find women who don't appear to belong where they are and take them for questioning. They will not know me. Not as I am now.'

She smiled again. That bleakness. Hollow-eyed.

‘You understand,' the woman by the window said quietly, ‘that Styliane will have my eyes and tongue put out and my nose slit and then she will give me to any men who still want me, in certain rooms underground, and then she will have me burned alive. There is … nothing else that matters to her so much.'

Rustem thought of the aristocratic, fair-haired woman standing beside the Strategos at the wedding he'd attended on his first day here. ‘She is Empress now?' he said.

The woman said, ‘Tonight, or tomorrow. Until I kill her, and her brother. Then I can die and let the god judge my life and deeds as he will.'

Rustem looked at her a long time. He was remembering more clearly now, rational thought coming back, some small measure of composure. She had indeed come to him that first morning, when he and the household had hastened to arrange the ground floor into treatment rooms. A woman of the common sort, he'd thought, had prudently made certain she could afford his fee before admitting and examining her. Her voice … had been different then. Of course it had.

The westerners, like his own people, had a limited understanding of conception and childbirth. Only in Ispahani had Rustem learned certain things: enough to understand that a failure to bear might sometimes arise in the husband, not the wife. Men in the west, in his own country, were disinclined to listen to that, of course.

But Rustem was not uncomfortable explaining this to the women who came to him. What they did with the information was not his burden or responsibility.

That woman of the common sort—who turned out to have been the Empress of Sarantium—had been one of those. And had seemed not at all surprised, after his questions and his examination, when he'd said what he said to her.

Looking closely, the physician in Rustem was shaken anew by what he saw: the absolute, clenched rigidity with which the woman was holding herself together, set against the flat, matter-of-fact way in which she spoke of killing and her own death. She was not far from breaking, he thought.

He said, ‘Who knows you are here?'

‘Elita. I entered over the courtyard wall, and then up into this room. She found me here when she came to make up your fire. I knew she was sleeping here, of course. Forgive me for that. I had to hope she would do the fire in this room. I'd be captured by now if anyone
else had come. They will take me right now if you call out, you understand?'

‘You climbed the wall?'

That smile that was not a smile. ‘Physician, you don't want to know the things I have done or where I've been today and tonight.'

And then after a moment she said, for the first time,
‘Please?'

Empresses never had to say that, Rustem thought, but in the moment just before she'd spoken it they'd both heard, even up here, a pounding at the front door, and through the window Rustem saw a flaring of torches in the garden and heard voices down below.