The Sarantine Mosaic (146 page)

But these were tesserae such as he had never seen or ever thought to see in all his days. A lifetime of working with muddied or streaked imitations of the brilliant colours of the mind's imagining had slowly conditioned him to accept the limitations of the possible here in broken Batiara. The deficiencies of the mortal world, the constraints placed upon achievement.

Now, long past a time when he might have fiercely set forth upon some project of a grandeur equal to these dazzling, flawless pieces of glass, they had come.

It was late. It was very, very late.

There was another note, in the first trunk. Crispin looked at it and then gave it to him. Martinian wiped his eyes and read. Same hand, the language changed now, Rhodian, the style personal, not royal.

I have an undertaking from the Emperor. A promise made to me. You will not do the god, nor Heladikos. Anything else you see fit to render in the sanctuary complex housing my father shall be preserved from edict and pronouncement and any decreed harm, so far as I may be able to make it so. This, as small compensation for a mosaic in Sarantium, done with adequate materials, and taken away.

The signature was also different: nothing but her name this time. Martinian laid down the note. Put his hand, slowly, into that first heavy trunk, into the tesserae—pale gold in this one, the colour warm and even as honey.

‘Careful. They'll be sharp,' Crispin said.

‘Puppy,' said Martinian of Varena, ‘I was cutting my hands to pieces on these things before you were born.'

‘I know,' said Crispin. ‘My point.' He took back the note. And then he smiled.

Martinian said, ‘We can remake the dome in the sanctuary. Not Jad, not Heladikos, she says here. We can find a new way of doing chapels. Consult with the clerics, maybe? Here, and in Rhodias? In Sarantium, even?' Martinian's voice quavered with desire. His heart was racing. He felt an overwhelming need to keep touching these tesserae, to bury his hands in them.

It was late, but it wasn't
too
late.

Crispin smiled again, looking around the quiet, dusty room. They were utterly alone. Two men, twenty enormous, laden trunks, nothing else. No one came here any more.

They would have to hire guards, Martinian thought suddenly.

‘You will remake it,' Crispin said gently. ‘The dome.' His mouth quirked a little. ‘With whomever we have left working for us, that you haven't driven away with your tyrant nature.'

Martinian ignored that. He was reacting to the gentleness. Something lost for a long time, back again.

‘And you?' he asked.

For it occurred to him now that the younger man might not want to work at all. He'd seemed almost indifferent to the news of what had been done to his Heladikos. Martinian thought he understood. How could it even register, after what had happened in the east?

Crispin had written him a little about that dome in Sarantium, about what he was trying to accomplish there, equal to the setting. And the young woman, Zoticus's daughter, had mentioned it in one of the letters they'd exchanged. A glory of the earth, she'd called it. The dome itself and what his friend was doing upon it.

And the mosaic was coming down. Martinian could picture it happening. Soldiers and labourers. Spearbutt and axe-head and dagger, scraping implements ripping and chopping the surface. Tesserae falling and falling.

How
could
anyone want to work again, after that?

Martinian took his hands from the trunk, the golden glass. He bit his lip.
A glory of the earth.
His friend was still in mourning, he finally realized, and here he was, exulting like a child with a new toy.

But he was wrong. Or, he later realized, not entirely right.

Crispin had walked away from him by then, was gazing absently at the flat, rough walls above the creaking double doors at each end. This little chapel had been built to the oldest floor plan known: two entrances, a central altar under a low, flat dome, curved bays east and west for private prayer and reflection, candle banks at each of these for memorials. Stone floor, stone walls, no benches, no dais. There wasn't even an altar or a sun disk here now. The chapel was at least four hundred years old, dating to the beginnings of the sanctioned worship of Jad in Rhodias. The light entering was soft and mild, falling cool as pale wine on stone.

Martinian, seeing his colleague's gaze move from surface to surface, tracking the fall of sunlight through the smeared and broken windows above (windows could be cleaned, panes replaced), began to look about for himself. And then, after a time, in a silence that aspired to simple happiness, he just watched Crispin as he turned and turned about.

At the last, Crispin was looking from north to south again, at the semicircular arc of the walls directly above each of the doors. He was seeing images not yet in the world, Martinian knew.

He had done it often enough, himself. It was the way you began.

‘I'll make something here,' Crispin said.

Varena's very ancient chapel of Jad Without the Walls had not been used for holy purposes since the larger sanctuary beside it had been constructed, about two hundred years afterwards. The complex had been further expanded twice, subsequently, acquiring a dormitory, refectory, kitchen, a bakehouse, a brewery, and a small infirmary with an herbal garden behind, leaving the original chapel to function as a storehouse for a time and then not even as that, lying dusty, untended, home to rodents and other field creatures in winter.

It had a patina of age upon it, an aura of peace even in that untended state, and the stones were very beautiful, taking sunlight with serenity. It was a long time since sufficient lamps had been lit here to judge how the chapel might appear after dark, properly illuminated.

It was an unexpected place for two panels of mosaic art, but the absence of altar or disk could be seen as legitimizing the entirely secular nature of the new work, which was being done—unusually for mosaics—by one man alone.

The works were modestly sized, one above each of the double doors.

Not the god, or Heladikos. Anything else you see fit to render.

He had it as a promise. Her father had taught her to keep promises. It had once been a holy place, but not for centuries. There still clung to the space, to the stones, to the air in the slanting descent of morning or afternoon light, a quiet grace. But it was
not
holy now, so even if there were proscriptions against rendering human figures
in such places, this would be exempt, surely, over and above the promise.

He was relying on this, was aware that he ought to have learned by now not to rely on anything, that what a man could make, another man could unmake with sword or fire or decree.

He had it in writing, though, from an Empress. And the light here—never even noticed before—was a different kind of promise. And so it had come to be that he had spent a full year at work here, summer, autumn, through the winter, which had been cold. He'd done everything himself, that being a part of what this labour was, as he had conceived it from the outset, standing with Martinian on the day he'd come home. Everything: cleaning the chapel, sweeping, washing, on his knees, replacing the broken windows, removing the grime from those that had endured. Preparing the quicklime in the exterior ovens, wiping down the surfaces to take the setting bed, even assembling his own two scaffolds and ladders with hammers and nails. They didn't have to be high, could remain fixed in place. He was only working on two walls, not a dome.

Over in the larger sanctuary, Martinian and the employees and apprentices were redoing the dome. In consultation with Sybard of Varena and other clerics here and in Rhodias, they had elected to depict a landscape overhead: the progression from forest to field, farmhouse, harvest … an evocation of the progression of the Antae, in fact. No holy figures, no human figures. The Patriarch in Rhodias, as part of complex negotiations still going on with Sarantium and Varena, had agreed to reconsecrate the sanctuary when the work was done.

It was, after all, Hildric's burial place, and his daughter was Empress of Sarantium, which Empire now included Mihrbor and a large part of northern
Bassania, subject to whatever the peace treaty—also being negotiated—might stipulate.

Here in Varena, this unused former chapel wasn't a part of any discussions at all. It was an unimportant place. It might even be said that whatever was done here was a foolish labour, unlikely to be seen by many people at all.

That was all right, Crispin thought. Had thought so all through the year, feeling more peace within himself than he could ever remember.

He didn't feel peaceful today, however. He felt a strangeness, at the end of a long, private time. The others had left him almost entirely alone throughout. Martinian would occasionally come by at the end of a day and look quietly for a few moments but he never said anything and Crispin had never asked him to.

This was his own, accountable to no one living. No patron had approved the sketches, no one's dazzling architecture or worldly ambition needed to be matched or understood or harmonized. In a curious way Crispin had had a sense all year that he was speaking to the unborn, not the living, to generations who might or might not come through these doors and find two mosaics, hundreds of years and more from today, and look up, and make of them … what they would.

He had been a part, in Sarantium, of something colossal, a shared vision on the largest possible scale, aspiring towards the more-than-human—and it was not to be. His part of that would have been destroyed by now.

Here, his striving was as ambitious (he knew it, Martinian, silent each time he looked, would know it) but it was entirely, profoundly, resolutely mortal in its scale.

And because of that, perhaps, it might last.

He didn't know. (How could a man know?) But here in this soft, kind light Crispin had set stones and glass for
a year and a little more (summer again, the leaves dark green outside, bees in the wildflowers and the hedgerows) to leave something behind him when he died. Something that might tell those who came after that a certain Caius Crispus of Varena, son of Horius Crispus the mason, had lived, had been here on the god's earth for his allotted time and had known a little of human nature, and of art.

Gathered in this, he had passed a year. And there was nothing left to be done now. He had just finished the last thing, which no one had ever done in a mosaic before.

He was still on the rungs of a ladder beneath the northern wall, the one just done. He tugged at his beard, which was long again, as was his hair, not nearly as orderly as they ought to be for a man of wealth and distinction, but he'd been … occupied. He turned, a hand hooked through the ladder for balance, and looked across to the southern doors, at the arc of the wall above them, where he'd done the first of his two panels.

Not Jad. Not Heladikos. Nothing aspiring to holiness or faith. But there, in great and glittering splendour on the wall, in the carefully judged fall of light through the seasons and days (and there were brackets he'd hung himself, for lanterns in the night), were the Emperor of Sarantium, Valerius III, who had been Leontes the Golden, and his Empress, Gisel, who had sent the materials (tesserae like gems) and the promise that had set him free.

They were flanked by their court, but the work was done in such a way that only the two central figures were individually rendered, brought to vivid, golden life (and both of them were golden, their hair, their adornments, the gold in their robes). The courtiers, men and women,
were
hieratic, uniform, done after the old style, individual traits receding, only subtle differences of footwear and garb, stance and hair colour to offer a sense of movement
for the eye, which was brought back, always, to the two figures at the centre. Leontes and Gisel, tall and young and magnificent, in the glory of their coronation day (which he had not seen, but that didn't matter, it didn't matter at all), preserved here (given
life
here) until the stones and glass fell or the building burned or the world ended. The lord of Emperors could come,
would
come, and age them, take them both away, but this could still be here.

That panel was done. He had made it first. It was … as he had wanted it to be.

He stepped down then, walked across the centre of the small chapel, where the god's altar had stood long ago, to the other side and stepped up on the ladder there, a few steps off the ground, and swung himself around and looked back at the northern wall from exactly the same perspective.

Another Emperor, another Empress, their court. Same colours, almost exactly. And an utterly different work, asserting something (for those who could look, and see) worlds apart, with love.

Valerius II, who had been Petrus of Trakesia in his youth, stood centred here, as Leontes was on the opposite wall, not tall, not golden at all, not young. Round-faced (as he had been), receding hair (as it had been), the wise, amused grey eyes gazing out upon Batiara, where the Empire had begun, the Empire he'd dreamed of reclaiming.