The Sarantine Mosaic (24 page)

He couldn't remember the details of the argument any more—something to do with a superstition about
ploughing beneath a blue full moon—but it had ended with the old man, blood dripping from his scalp, deliberately branding his youngest son on the cheek with a hunting knife while Vargos's brothers and uncles enthusiastically held him down. Vargos, for all his violent, injurious struggling at the time, had had to concede to himself afterwards that the scarring had probably been deserved. It was not really acceptable among the Inicii for a son to hammer his father half to death with a stick of firewood in the course of an agrarian dispute.

He'd chosen not to linger for further debate or familial chastisement, however. There was a world beyond their village, and precious little within it for a youngest son. He had walked out of the house that same spring night, the two nearly full moons high above the newly planted fields and the dense, well-known forests, and had set his marred face to the far south, never looking back.

He'd expected, of course, to join the Imperial army, but someone in a roadside caupona had mentioned positions on offer at the Posting Inns, and Vargos had thought he might try that for a season or two.

That had been eight summers ago. Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived. He'd his share of newer scars since then, for the roads
were
dangerous and hungry men turned outlaw easily enough in Sauradia, but the work suited Vargos. He liked open spaces, had no single master to knuckle his forehead to, and didn't share his father's bone-deep hatred of the Empires—either Sarantine or the old one in Batiara.

Even though he was known as a keep-to-himself man, he had acquaintances at every Posting Inn and roadside tavern from the Batiaran border to Trakesia by now. That meant decently clean sleeping straw or pallets, a fireside sometimes in winter, food and beer, and some of the girls
could be soft enough on the occasions when they weren't commanded elsewhere. It helped that he was one of the freemen, and had a coin or two to spend. He had never been out of Sauradia. Most of the Imperial Post servants stayed in their province, and Vargos had never had the least desire to wander farther than he already had eight years ago, cheek dripping blood, from the north.

Until this morning, on the Day of the Dead, when the red-haired Rhodian who'd hired him at Lauzen's inn by the border set out in fog from Morax's with a slave girl marked for the oak god.

Vargos had converted to the Jaddite faith years ago, but that didn't mean a man from the northern reaches of the Aldwood couldn't recognize one who'd been named to the tree. She was of the Inicii herself, sold off to a slave trader, perhaps even from a village or farm near his own. In her eyes, and in the looks given her by some of the men and women at Morax's, Vargos had read the signs the night before. No one had said a word, but no one had to. He knew what day was coming.

Vargos's conversion to the sun god's faith—along with a contentious belief in the holiness of Heladikos, the god's mortal son—had been a real one, as it happened. He prayed each dawn and at sunset, lit candles at chapels for the Blessed Victims, fasted on the days that called for fasts. And he disapproved now, deeply, of the old ways he'd left behind: the oak god, the corn maiden, the seemingly endless thirst for blood and human hearts eaten raw. But he'd never have dreamt of interfering, and certainly hadn't done so, the two other times he'd been here at Morax's, close to the southern godtree on this day.

None of his business, he'd have said, if the thought had even occurred to him or been raised by anyone else. A servant didn't summon the Imperial army or clergy to halt a pagan sacrifice. Not if he wanted to go on living and
working on this road. And what was one girl a year, among all of them? There had been plagues two summers in a row. Death was everywhere in the midst of them.

The red-headed Batiaran hadn't raised anything at all with Vargos. He'd simply bought the girl—or had her bought for him—and was taking her away to save her life. His choice of her could have been an accident, chance, but it wasn't, and Vargos knew it.

They'd been planning to stay here two nights, in order not to be travelling on this day.

That intention had been in line with what every halfway prudent man on the roads of Sauradia was doing on the Day of the Dead. But late last night, before going up the stairs to his room after the extremely strange capture of the thief, Martinian of Varena had summoned Vargos out to the hallway from his pallet in the servants' room and told him they'd be leaving tomorrow after all, before sunrise, with the girl.

Vargos, taciturn as he was, had been unable not to repeat, ‘Tomorrow?'

The Rhodian, unexpectedly sober despite all the wine they'd been noisily drinking in the other room, had looked at Vargos for a long moment in the dimly lit corridor. It was difficult to make out his expression behind the full beard, in the shadows. ‘I don't think it is safe to stay here,' was all he'd said, speaking Rhodian. ‘After what has happened.'

It wasn't in the
least
safe outside, Vargos thought but did not say. He'd considered that the other man might be testing him, or trying to say something without putting it into words. But he hadn't been prepared for what came next.

‘It is the Day of the Dead tomorrow,' said Martinian, speaking carefully. ‘I will not make you go with us. You do not owe me that. If you prefer to stay, I will release you freely and hire another man when I can.'

That wouldn't be tomorrow, Vargos knew. There would be expressions of regret but no one would be free to travel with the artisan tomorrow. Not for a fistful of silver solidi.

No one would have to.

Vargos had made a swift decision or two in his day. He shook his head. ‘You asked for a man to come to the Trakesian border, I recollect. I'll be ready with the mule before the sun-up prayers. Jad's light will see us through the day.'

The Batiaran was not a fellow with an easy smile, but he'd smiled briefly then and placed a hand on Vargos's shoulder before heading up the stairs. He said, ‘Thank you, friend,' before he went.

In eight years, no one had ever offered to release him from duty in that way before, or offered a thank-you to a short-term hired servant for simply performing—or continuing—his contracted service.

This meant two things, Vargos had finally decided, back on his narrow pallet, elbowing away a too-close, snoring Trakesian. One was that Martinian had known exactly what he was doing—somehow—when he'd had the merchant buy him that girl. And the other was that Vargos was his man now.

Courage spoke to him. The courage of Jad in his chariot battling cold and darkness each long night under the world, of Heladikos driving his horses far too high to bring back fire from his father, and of a single traveller risking his own death for a girl who had been named to a savage ending on the morrow.

Vargos had seen some celebrated men in his time on this road. Merchant princes, aristocrats from the far-off City itself, clad in gold and white, soldiers in bronze armour and regimental colours, austere, immensely powerful figures in the clergy of the god. Some years ago,
memorably, Leontes himself, Supreme Strategos of all the Empire's armies, had passed with a company of his own picked guard on their way back east from Megarium. They'd been riding to the military camp near Trakesia, then heading north and east against the restive Moskav tribes. Vargos, in a dense press of men and women, had caught only a flashing glimpse of golden hair, helmetless, as people screamed in ecstasy beside the road. That had been in the year after the great victory against the Bassanids beyond Eubulus, and after the Triumph the Emperor had granted Leontes in the Hippodrome. Even in Sauradia they had heard about that. Not since Rhodias had an Emperor granted a strategos such a processional.

It was this artisan from Varena, though, a descendant of the legions, the Rhodians, the blood Vargos had been raised to hate, who had done the bravest thing he knew, last night and now. And Vargos was going to follow him.

They were unlikely to get far, he thought grimly.
Jad's light will see us through
, he'd said in the hallway the night before. There was no light to speak of as they led the mule out of the courtyard in a black, blanketing thickness of pre-dawn fog. The pale autumn sun would be rising ahead of them soon—and they would have no way of even knowing.

The three of them walked from the yard in an unnatural, muffled stillness. Men—or the blurred outlines of men—stood and watched them pass. No one offered to help, though Vargos knew every man there. They had tasted no food or drink, on Martinian's instructions. Vargos knew why. He still wasn't sure how Martinian knew.

The girl was barefoot, wrapped in the artisan's second cloak, the hood hiding her face. No other travellers were moving, though the Megarian merchants had left earlier, in full darkness, carrying the wounded man in a litter. Vargos, awake and loading the mule by torchlight, had
seen them go. They wouldn't travel far today, but they had little choice but to move on. Where Vargos came from, the apprehended thief would have been an obvious candidate to be hanged from Ludan's Tree.

Here, he wasn't sure. The girl had been named. They might choose another, or they might not relinquish her, fearing a year's bad luck if they did. Things were different in the south. Different tribes had settled here, different histories had set their stamp. Would they kill him and the Batiaran to take her back? Almost certainly, if they wanted her and the two men resisted. This sacrifice was the holiest rite of the year in the old religion; men interfered at absolute peril of their lives.

Vargos was quite certain Martinian would resist.

He was somewhat surprised to feel an equal certainty in himself, a cold anger overriding fear. As they passed out from the courtyard he walked past the stablemaster, Pharus, a burly figure in the mist. Pharus was staring at them in a certain way, no proper respect in his bearing at all, and though Vargos had known him for years he did not hesitate. He stopped in front of the man just long enough to swing the bottom of his staff upwards, hard, hammering Pharus right between the legs without a word spoken. The stablemaster let out a high-pitched screech and crumpled in the mud, hands clutching for his groin as he thrashed on the cold, wet ground.

Vargos bent low in the fog and spoke softly in the ear of the gasping, writhing man. ‘A warning. Leave her be. Find another, Pharus.'

He straightened, carried on, not looking back. He never looked back. Not since he'd left home. He saw Martinian and the girl gazing at him, cloaked shadows on the almost invisible surface of the road. He shrugged, and spat. ‘Private quarrel,' he said. He knew they would know it was a lie, but some things were best not spoken
aloud, Vargos had always felt. He did not, for example, tell them he expected to die before midday.

HER MOTHER USED TO
call her
erimitsu
,
‘clever one' in their own dialect. Her sister was
calamitsu
,
which was ‘beautiful one,' and her brother was, of course,
sangari
,
which was ‘beloved.' Her brother and father had died last summer, black sores bursting all over their bodies, blood running from their mouths when they tried to scream at the end. They buried them in the pit with all the others. In the autumn, faced with winter coming, imminent starvation, and two daughters, her mother had sold one to the slavers: the one who had the intelligence to perhaps survive in the harsh world far away.

Kasia had had a reputation already that made her almost unmarriageable at home. Too clever by half, and too thin by more than that in a tribe where women were valued for full hips and soft figures—promise of comfort in the long cold and children easily birthed. Her mother had made a bitter, brutal choice but not a unique one that year as the first snows fell on the mountains above them. The Karchite slave traders knew what they were doing that season, travelling the northern villages of Trakesia and then Sauradia in a slow circuit of acquisition.

The world was a place of grief, Kasia had understood, beyond tears, after the first two nights journeying south with shackles on her wrists. Man was born to sorrow, and women knew more of it. She'd lain on the cold ground, head averted, watching the last sparks of the dying fire as she lost her maidenhead to two of the slavers in the dark.

A year in Morax's inn had done nothing to change her thinking, though she had not starved and had learned what to do to avoid being beaten too often. She was alive. Her mother and sister might be dead by now. She
didn't know. Had no way of knowing. The men hurt her sometimes, upstairs, but not always and not most of them. You learned, if you were clever, to shield that cleverness and gather a blank, stolid endurance about you like a cloak. And you passed days and nights and days and nights that way. The first winter in this alien south, spring, summer, then the coming of autumn again with turning leaves and memories you wanted to avoid.

You tried never to think of home. Of being free to walk out of doors when work was done, following the stream uphill to places where you could sit entirely alone beneath circling hawks and among the small quick woodland creatures they hunted, listening to the heartbeat of the world, dreaming in daylight with open eyes. You didn't dream, here. You endured, behind the cloak. Who had ever said existence offered more?

Until the day you understood they were going to kill you, and you realized—with genuine astonishment—that you wanted to survive. That somehow life still burned inside like the obdurate embers of a fire more fierce than desire or grief.

On the almost-invisible road, walking east with two men in grey, sound-swallowing fog on the Day of the Dead, Kasia watched them dealing with fear and the rawness of their danger and was unable to deny her joy. She struggled to hide it, as she had hidden every emotion for a year. She was afraid if she smiled they would think her simple, or mad, so she kept close to the mule, a hand on its rope, and tried not to meet the eyes of either man when the mist swirled and showed their faces.