The Sarantine Mosaic (29 page)

He had
known
this work was here, westernmost of all the renderings of the god done with the full dark eastern beard and those black, haunted eyes: Jad as judge, as worn, beleaguered warrior in deathly combat, not the shining, blue-eyed, golden sun-figure of Crispin's west. But knowing and
seeing
were so far from the same thing it was as if … as if one was the world and the other the half-world of hidden powers.

The old craftsmen. Their primitive fashion.

So he had thought, back home. Crispin felt an aching in his heart for the depths of his own folly, the revealed limitations of his understanding and skill. He felt naked before this, grasping that in its own way this work of mortal men in a domed chapel was as much a manifestation of the holy as the bison with its blood-smeared horns in the wood, and as appalling. The fierce, wild power of Ludan, accepting sacrifice in his grove, set against the immensity of craft and comprehension on this dome, rendering in glass and stone a deity as purely humbling. How did one move from one of these poles to the other? How did mankind
live
between such extremes?

For the deepest mystery, the pulsing heart of the enigma, was that as he lay on his back, paralysed by revelation, Crispin saw that the eyes were the same. The world's sorrow he'd seen in the
zubir
was here in the sun god above him, distilled by nameless artisans whose purity of vision and faith unmanned him. Crispin was actually unsure for a moment if he'd ever be able to get up, to reassert his self-control, his will.

He struggled to disentangle the elements of the work here, to gain some mastery over it and himself. Deep brown and obsidian in the eyes, to make them darker and stronger than the framing brown hair, shoulder length. The long face made longer by that straight hair and the beard; the arched, heavy eyebrows, deeply etched forehead, other lines scoring the cheeks—the skin so pale between beard and hair it showed as nearly grey. Then down to the rich, luxurious blue of the god's robe beneath his cloak which was shot through, Crispin saw, with a dazzling myriad of contrasting colours for a woven texture and the hinted play and power of light in a god whose power
was
light.

And then the hands. The hands were heartbreaking. Contorted, elongated fingers with the ascetic spiritualism suggested by that, but there was more: these were no cleric's fingers, no hands of repose and clasped meditation, they were both scarred. One finger on the left hand had clearly been broken; it was crooked, the knuckle swollen: red and brown tesserae against white and grey. These hands had wielded weapons, had been cut, frozen, known savage war against ice and black emptiness in the endless defence of mortal children whose understanding was … that of children, no more.

And the sorrow and judgement in the dark eyes was linked to what had happened to those hands. The colours, Crispin saw—the craftsman in him marvelling—brought hands and eyes inescapably together. The vivid, unnaturally raised veins on the wrists of both pale hands used the same brown and obsidian that were in the eyes. He knew, intuitively, that this precise pairing of tesserae would exist nowhere else on the dome. The eyes of sorrow and indictment, the hands of suffering and war. A god who stood between his unworthy children and the dark, offering sunlight each morning in their brief time of life, and then his own pure Light afterwards, for the worthy.

Crispin thought of Ilandra, of his girls, of the plague ravaging like a rabid carnivore through all the world, and he lay on cold stone beneath this image of Jad and understood what it was saying to him, to all those here below: that the god's victory was never assured, never to be taken for granted. It was
this
, he realized, that the unknown mosaicists of long ago were reporting on this dome to their brethren with this vast, weary god against the soft gold of his sun.

‘Are you all right?
My lord!
Are you all right?'

He became aware that Vargos was addressing him with an urgency and concern that almost seemed amusing,
after all they had survived today. It wasn't especially uncomfortable on the stones, though cold. He moved a hand vaguely. It was still somewhat difficult to breathe, actually. It was better when he didn't look up. Kasia, he saw as he turned his head, was standing a little apart, staring at the dome.

Looking over at her, he grasped something else: Vargos knew this place. He'd been along this road, back and forth, for years. The girl would never have seen this incarnation of Jad either, had most likely never even heard of it. She'd only come from the north a year ago, forced into slavery and the faith of the sun god, had only
known
Jad as a young, fair-haired, blue-eyed god, a direct descendant—though this she wouldn't know—of the solar deity in the pantheon of the Trakesians centuries ago.

‘What do you see?' he said to her. His voice rasped in his throat. Vargos turned to follow his gaze to the girl. Kasia looked over at him anxiously, then away. She was very pale.

‘I … he …' She hesitated. They heard footsteps. Crispin struggled to a sitting position and saw a cleric approaching in the white robes of the order of the Sleepless Ones. He understood now why it was so quiet here. These were the holy men who stayed awake all night praying while the god fought daemons beneath the world. Mankind has duties, the figure overhead was saying, this is an unending war. These men believed that and embodied it in their rituals. The image above and the order of clerics praying in the long nights fit together. The men who made the mosaic, so long ago, would have known that.

‘Tell us,' he said quietly to Kasia as the white-clad figure, small, round-faced, full-bearded, came over to them.

‘He … doesn't think he is winning,' she said finally. ‘The battle.'

The cleric stopped at that. He eyed the three of them gravely, apparently unsurprised to find a man sitting on the floor.

‘He isn't
certain
he is,' the cleric said to Kasia, speaking Sarantine, as she had. ‘There are enemies, and man does evil, abetting them. It is never sure, this battle. Which is why we must be a part of it.'

‘Do we know who achieved this?' Crispin asked quietly.

The cleric looked surprised. ‘Their names? The craftsmen?' He shook his head. ‘No. There must have been many of them, I suppose. They were artisans … and a holy spirit possessed them for a time.'

‘Yes, of course,' Crispin said, rising to his feet. He hesitated. ‘Today is the Day of the Dead here,' he murmured, not sure why he was saying that. Vargos steadied him with a hand at his elbow and then stepped back.

‘I understand as much,' the cleric said mildly. He had an unlined, gentle face. ‘We are surrounded by pagan heresies. They do evil to the god.'

‘Is that all they are to you?' Crispin asked. In his mind was a voice—a young woman, a crafted bird, a soul:
I am yours, lord, as I ever was from the time I was brought here.

‘What else should they be to me?' the white-robed man said, raising his eyebrows.

It was a fair question, Crispin supposed. He caught an anxious look from Vargos and let the matter rest. ‘I am sorry for … how you found me,' he said. ‘I was affected by the image.'

The cleric smiled. ‘You aren't the first. Might I guess you are from the west … Batiara?'

Crispin nodded. It wasn't a difficult conjecture. His accent would have given that away.

‘Where the god is yellow-haired and comely, his eyes blue and untroubled as summer skies?' The white-robed man was smiling complacently.

‘I am aware of how Jad is rendered in the west, yes.' Cris-pin had never been much inclined to be lectured by anyone.

‘And as a last hazarded guess, may I assume you are an artisan of some sort?'

Kasia looked astonished, Vargos wary. Crispin eyed the cleric coolly. ‘A clever surmise,' he said. ‘How would you know this?'

The man's hands were clasped at his waist. ‘As I said, you aren't the first westerner to react this way. And it is often those who make their own attempts at such things who … are most affected.'

Crispin blinked. He might feel humbled by what was on the dome, but ‘attempts at such things' was not acceptable.

‘I am impressed by your sagacity. It is indeed a fine piece of work. After I attend to certain requests from the Emperor in Sarantium, I might be willing to return and supervise the needed repairs to the erratic groundwork done on the dome.'

The cleric's turn to blink, pleasingly. ‘That work was done by holy men with a holy vision,' he said indignantly.

‘I have no doubt of it. One shame is that we don't know their names, to honour them, another is that they lacked technique equal to their vision. You do know that tiles have begun to dislodge towards the right side of the dome, as we face the altar. Parts of the god's cloak and left forearm appear to have recklessly chosen to detach themselves from the rest of his august form.'

The cleric looked up, almost reluctantly.

‘Of course you may have a parable or a liturgical explanation for this,' Crispin added. In the oddest way, fencing with the man was restoring his equilibrium. Not necessarily a
proper
thing, he supposed, but he needed it just now.

‘You would propose
changing
the figure of the god?' The man seemed genuinely aghast.

Crispin sighed. ‘It has
been
changed, good cleric. When your extremely pious artisans did this work centuries ago, Jad had a robe and a left arm.' He pointed. ‘Not the remains of dried-out groundwork.'

The cleric shook his head. His features had reddened. ‘What manner of man looks up at glory and speaks of daring to set his own hands upon it?'

Crispin was quite calm now. ‘A descendant in the craft of those who did it in the first place. Lacking, perhaps, their piety, but with a better understanding of the technique of mosaic. I should add that the dome also appears near to losing some of its golden sun, to the left. I'd need to be up on a scaffold to be certain, but it seems some tesserae have dislodged there as well. If that goes, then the god's hair will soon begin to fall out, I fear. Are you prepared to have Jad come down upon you, not in a thunderous descent but in a dribble of glass and stone?'

‘This is the most profane heresy!' the cleric snapped, making the sign of the disk.

Crispin sighed. ‘I am sorry you see it that way. I do not mean to provoke you. Or not only that. The setting bed on the dome was done in an old-fashioned way. One layer, and most likely with a mixture of materials we now understand to be less enduring than others. It is—as we all know—not holy Jad above us, but his rendering by mortal men. We worship the god, not the image, I understand.' He paused. This was a matter of extreme contention in some quarters. The cleric opened his mouth as if to answer, but then closed it again.

Crispin went on. ‘Mortals have their limitations, and this, too, we all know. Sometimes new things are discovered. It is no criticism of those who achieved this dome to note such a truth. Lesser men may preserve the work of greater. With competent assistants I could probably ensure the restored image above us would remain for several hundred years to come. It would take a season of work. Perhaps a little less or more. But I can tell you that without such intervention those eyes and hands and hair will begin to litter the stones around us soon. I would be sorry to see it. This is a singular work.'

‘It is unmatched in the world!'

‘I believe that.'

The cleric hesitated. Kasia and Vargos, Crispin saw, were eyeing him with astonishment. It occurred to him— with a restorative amusement—that neither of them had had any reason to believe he was
good
for anything to this point
.
A worker in mosaic had little enough chance to show his gifts or skill walking the emptiness of Sauradia.

In that moment, in an intervention Crispin could have called divine, a tinkling sound was heard across the floor. Crispin repressed a smile and walked over. He knelt, looking carefully, and found a brownish tessera without difficulty. He turned it over. The backing was dry, brittle. It crumbled to powder as he brushed it with a finger. He rose and walked back to the other three, handing the mosaic piece to the cleric.

‘A holy message?' he said drily. ‘Or just a piece of dark stone from'—he looked up—‘most likely the robe again, on the right side?'

The cleric opened his mouth and closed it, exactly as he had before. He was undoubtedly regretting, Crispin thought, that this had been his day to be awake in daylight and deal with visitors to the chapel. Crispin looked up again at the severe majesty overhead and regretted his
bantering tone.
Attempts at such things
had rankled, but it hadn't been personal, and he ought to have been above such pettiness. Especially today, and here.

Men, he thought—perhaps especially
this
man, Caius Crispus of Varena —seemed to escape so rarely from the concerns and trivial umbrages that made up their daily lives. He ought to have been moved beyond them today, surely. Or perhaps—a sudden, quite different sort of thought—perhaps it was because he'd been taken so far beyond that he needed to find his way back in this manner?

He looked at the cleric, and then up again at the god. The god's image. It
could
be done, with skilful people. Probably close to half a year, however, realistically. He decided, abruptly, that they would stay the night here. He would speak to the leader of this holy order, make amends for irony and levity. If they could be made to understand what was happening on the dome, perhaps when Crispin reached the City bearing a letter from them, the Chancellor, or someone else—the Imperial Mosaicist?—might be enlisted in an attempt to preserve this splendour. He'd teased and been flippant, Crispin thought. Perhaps he'd make redress by an act of restoration, in memory of this day and perhaps of his own dead.