The Sarantine Mosaic (26 page)

Very far to the west in that moment the autumn sun had long since risen above the woods near Varena. The sky was blue and the sunlight caught the red of the oak leaves and of the last apples on the trees in an orchard beside a road that joined the great highway to Rhodias a little farther south.

In the courtyard of the farmhouse adjoining that orchard an old man sat on a stone bench by his door, wrapped in a woollen cloak against the crispness of the breeze, enjoying the morning light and the colours. He held an earthenware bowl of herbal tea in both hands, warming them. A servant, grumbling out of ancient habit, fed the chickens. Two dogs slept by the open gate in the sunlight. In a distant field sheep could be seen but no shepherd. It was clear enough to make out the towers of Varena to the north and west. A bird trilled from the rooftop of the farmhouse.

Zoticus stood up, very abruptly. He set down his tea on the bench, spilling some of it. A watcher might have seen his hands tremble. The servant was not watching. The alchemist took a step or two towards his front gate and then turned to face the east, a grave, intent expression on his weathered face.

‘What is it? Linon!' he said sharply and aloud. ‘What is this?'

He was, of necessity, unaware that he was echoing another man's question. He received no reply, either. Of course. One of the dogs stood up, though, head tilted a little to one side, questioningly.

Zoticus remained that way for a long time, motionless, as if listening for something. He had closed his eyes. The servant ignored him, used to this. The chickens were fed, and then the goat, and he milked the one cow. The eggs were collected. Six of them this morning. The servant carried them inside. All this time the alchemist did not move. The dog hesitated, and then padded over to lie down beside him. The other dog remained by the gate, in the light.

Zoticus waited. But the world, or the half-world, gave nothing more back to him. Not after that one sharp vibration in the soul, in the blood, a gift—or a punishment—offered someone who had walked and watched in shadows most men never knew.

‘Linon,' he said again, at length, but softly this time, a breath. He opened his eyes, looking out at the distant trees of the forest through the gate before his home. Both dogs sat up this time, watching him. He reached down without looking and patted the one at his knee. After a while he went back into the house, leaving his forgotten tea to grow cold on the stone bench outside. The sun rose higher through the morning, in the clear and cloudless blue of the autumn sky.

Twice in his life Vargos thought (he was never entirely certain) he had seen one of the
zubir.
A glimpse in half-light, no more than that, of the Sauradian bison, lord of the Aldwood and all the great forests, emblem of a god.

Once, at summer sunset, working alone in his father's field, he had looked up squinting to see a bulky, shaggy shape at the edge of the wood. The light had been fading, the distance great, but something too large had moved against the dark curtain of the trees and
then disappeared. It might have been a stag but it had been enormous, and he hadn't seen the high, branched horns.

His father had beaten him with an axe handle for suggesting that evening that he might actually have seen one of the sacred beasts of the wood. To see a
zubir
was an awesome thing, reserved for priests and sacred warriors consecrated to Ludan. Fourteen-year-old boys with a disrespectful turn of mind were not granted such felicities in the scheme of the world as the Inicii—and Vargos's father—saw it.

The second time had been eight years ago on his solitary springtime journey south with a branded cheek and a hard, sustaining anger. He had fallen asleep to the howling of wolves and awakened in moonlight to the sound of something roaring in the woods. He had heard an answering roar from nearer yet. Peering into a night made strange by the noises and the blue moon, Vargos had again seen something massive move at the forest's edge and withdraw. He had lain awake, listening, but the roaring had not come again, and nothing else appeared at the limits of his sight as the blue moon swung west after the white one and then set, leaving a sky strewn with stars, and the distant wolves, and the murmuring of a dark stream beside him.

Twice, then, and uncertainty both times.

This time there was no doubt. The fear that went into Vargos lodged like a knife between two ribs. In fog and a damp cold on the Day of the Dead he stood in a stubbled field between the ancient Rhodian high road to Trakesia and the southernmost edgings of the infinitely more ancient forest and fell to his knees at what he saw on the road when the mist parted.

There was a dead man there. The others had already fled, and the dogs. Vargos saw that it was Pharus, the
stablemaster from Morax's. He lay flat on his back, limbs wide outflung like a child's discarded doll. It could be seen—even from there—that his entrails were spilling out. Blood was spreading all around him. His belly and chest had been ripped apart.

But that wasn't what drove Vargos to his knees as if felled by a blow. He had seen men die badly before. It was the other thing in the road. The creature that had done this to the man. The
zubir
that was—Vargos knew this in that moment as he knew his own name—more than only an emblem, after all, however awesome that might be in itself. His ideas of faith and power crumbled in that cold muddy field.

He had adopted the teachings of the sun god, had worshipped and invoked Jad and Heladikos his son almost from the time he had first come south, forsaking the gods of his tribe and the blood-soaked rituals as he had forsaken his home.

And here now was the presence of Ludan, the Ancient One, the oak god, before him in a swirling away of greyness on the Imperial high road, in one of his known guises.
Zubir
. The bison. Lord of the forest.

And this
was
a god who demanded blood. And this was the day of sacrifice. Vargos's heart was pounding. He saw that his hands were shaking and was not ashamed. Only afraid. A mortal man in a place where he should not have been.

The mist swirled again, fog wrapped the road like a cloak. The obliterating bulk of the bison was lost. And then it was not. It was, somehow, in the field right beside them, enormous and black, an overpowering presence, a rank smell of animal and blood, wet fur and rotting earth, leaving the dead man alone on the empty road, torn apart, his heart exposed to the day this was.

HER HAND ON THE
neck of the shuddering mule, Kasia saw the mist part, saw what had come to be in the road, and she went straight through her own fear and beyond in an instant.

In a kind of trance of unfeeling, she watched the fog descend again, and was utterly unsurprised when the
zubir
materialized in the field beside them. Vargos had fallen to his knees.

How, she thought, how should one be surprised at what a god could do? She realized suddenly that the donkey had stopped trembling and was standing very still, unnaturally so, given the smell and presence of the monstrous creature not ten paces away now. But what could be strange, what
could
be strange when one had strayed from a known road this far into the world of the powers? A bison stood before them, so big it would have blotted half the road from her sight if the road had not been lost. Three men could sit between the sharp, short curving of its horns. She saw blood on those horns, and streaky, viscous matter dripping slowly from them. She had seen the stablemaster in the road, ripped into meat.

She had thought this morning, foolishly, that she might escape.

She knew now—oh, she knew!—that Ludan was not to be escaped. Not like this. Not by some clever Rhodian with a scheme. Not by a girl named, however unfairly, however cruelly, to the god. Cruelty had no …
place
here in the field. It was a word that had no meaning, no
context
. The god was, and did what he did.

In this suspended state of calm, Kasia looked into the eyes of the
zubir
, eyes so deep a brown they were black, and she saw them clearly even in mist, and seeing, she surrendered her mortal will and the meaning of her soul to the ancient god of her people.
What man—what woman, even more than man—had ever been immune to destiny? Where could you run when your name was known to a god? The secret pagan priest here, the whispering villagers, Morax's gross, small-eyed wife … none of them mattered. Their own destinies awaited them, or had found them already. Ludan signified, and he was here.

Kasia was serene, unresisting, as one drugged with the juice of poppies, when the bison began moving towards the forest. It looked back at the three of them, slowly turning its massive shaggy head. Kasia thought she understood. She had been named. He knew her. There was no path in the world that would not lead her here. Her tread, barefoot in the mud and crushed grass, was steady as she began to follow. Fear was behind her, in another world. She wondered if she would have time to wish a prayer that mattered, for her mother and her sister far away, if such things were allowed, if they were still alive, if the sacrifice had any power in what she was. She knew without turning back that the two men were coming behind her. Choice was not granted here, to any of them.

They went into the Aldwood on the Day of the Dead following the
zubir
, and the black trees swallowed them even more completely than the fog had done before.

‘
THE NUMINOUS
,'
THE PHILOSOPHER
Archilochus of Arethae had written nine hundred years ago, ‘is not to be directly apprehended. Indeed, if the gods wish to destroy a man they need only show themselves to him.'

Crispin struggled to barricade his soul behind ancient learning, a desperately conjured image of a marble portico in sunlight, a white-clad, white-bearded teacher serenely illuminating the world for attentive disciples in the most celebrated of the city-states of Trakesia.

He failed. Terror consumed him, asserting mastery, dominance, as he followed the girl and the stupefying creature that was … more than he could grasp. A god? The showing forth of one? The numinous? Upwind of them now, it stank. Things crawled and oozed through the thick, matted fur that hung from its chin, neck, shoulders, even the knees and breast. The bison was enormous, impossibly so, taller than Crispin was, wide as a house, the great, horned head vast and appalling. And yet, as they entered the woods, the first black trees like sentinels, wet leaves falling about them and upon them, the creature moved lightly, gracefully, never turning after that first look back—certain they were following.

And they were. Had there been choice, any kind of volition here, Caius Crispus of Varena, son of Horius Crispus the mason, would have died in that wet cold field and joined his wife and daughters in the afterworld—whatever it turned out to be—rather than enter the Aldwood as a living man. The forest had frightened him even at a distance, in sunlight, seen from the safety of the road in Batiara. This morning, this otherworldly morning in Sauradia, there was no place on the god's earth he would not rather be than here in this dank, inhuman wilderness where even the
smells
could horrify.

The god's earth. What god? What power ruled in the world as he knew it? As he
had
known it: for this unnatural creature appearing in fog on the road had changed all that forever. Crispin spoke in his mind to the bird again, but Linon was silent as the dead, hanging about his throat as if she were, truly, no more than an amulet, a pedestrian little creation of leather and metal, worn for sentimental reasons.

He reached up with one hand on impulse and clasped the alchemist's creation. He flinched. The bird was burning hot to the touch. And this, as much as any other
thing—this change where no such change should have been possible—was what made Crispin finally accept that he had left the world he knew and was unlikely ever to walk back into it again. He had made a choice last night, had intervened. Linon had warned him. He regretted Vargos, suddenly: the man did not deserve a fate such as this, randomly hired at a border inn to attend an artisan walking the road to Trakesia.

No man deserved this fate, Crispin thought. His throat was dry; it was difficult to swallow. The fog drifted and swirled, trees disappeared then loomed around them, very close. Wet leaves and wet earth defined a hopelessly twisting path. The bison led them on; the forest swallowed them like the jaws of a living creature. Time blurred, much as the seen world had blurred; Crispin had no idea how far they had come. Unable not to, awed and afraid, he reached up and touched the bird again. He couldn't hold her. The heat had penetrated now through his cloak and tunic. He felt her on his chest like a coal from a fire.

‘Linon?'
he said again, and heard only the silence of his own mind.