The Sarantine Mosaic (88 page)

The dancer's servants and the ones she'd hired for the day and the boys they'd brought with them from the compound seemed to have finished clearing the tables. Strumosus eyed them carefully as they assembled now, straightening tunics, wiping at spots on cheek or clothing.

One tall, very dark-eyed, well-made fellow—no one Kyros knew—met the chef's glance as Strumosus paused in front of him and murmured, with an odd half-smile, ‘Did you know that Lysippus is back?'

It was said softly, but Kyros was standing beside the cook, and though he turned quickly and busied himself with dessert trays he had good ears.

He heard Strumosus, after a pause, say only, ‘I won't ask how you came by that knowledge. There's sauce on your forehead. Wipe it off before you go back out.'

Strumosus moved on down the line. Kyros found himself breathing with difficulty. Lysippus the Calysian, Valerius's grossly fat taxation master, had been exiled after the Victory Riot. The Calysian's personal habits had been a cause of fear and revulsion among the lower classes of the City; his had been a name used to threaten wayward children.

He had also been Strumosus's employer before he was exiled.

Kyros glanced furtively over at the chef, who was sorting out the last of the serving boys now. This was just
a rumour, Kyros reminded himself, and the tidings might be new to him but not necessarily to Strumosus. In any case, he had no way to sort out what it might mean, and it was none of his affair in any possible way. He was unsettled, though.

Strumosus finished arranging the boys to his satisfaction and sent them parading back out to the diners with ewers of sweetened wine and the great procession of desserts: sesame cakes, candied fruit, rice pudding in honey, musk melon, pears in water, dates and raisins, almonds and chestnuts, grapes in wine, huge platters of cheeses—mountain and lowland, white and golden, soft and hard—with more honey for dipping, and his own nut bread. A specially baked round loaf was carried up to the bride and groom with two silver rings inside that were the chef's gift to them.

When the last platter and tray and flask and beaker and serving dish had gone out and no sounds of catastrophe emerged from the dining hall, Strumosus finally allowed himself to sit on a stool, a cup of wine at his elbow. He didn't smile, but he did set down his wooden spoon. Watching from the corner of his eye, Kyros sighed. They all knew what the lowered spoon meant. He allowed himself to relax.

‘I imagine,' said the chef to the room at large, ‘that we have done enough to let the last of the wedding day be mild and merry and the night be what it will.' He was quoting some poet or other. He often did. Meeting Kyros's glance, Strumosus added, softly, ‘Rumours of Lysippus bubble up like boiled milk every so often. Until the Emperor revokes his exile, he isn't here.'

Which meant he knew Kyros had overheard. He didn't miss much, Strumosus. The chef looked away and around the crowded kitchen. He lifted his voice, ‘A serviceable
afternoon's work, all of you. The dancer should be happy out there.'

She says to tell you that if you do not come rescue her immediately she will scream at her own banquet and blame you. You understand,'
added the bird, silently,
‘that I don't like being made to talk to you this way. It feels unnatural.'

As if there was anything remotely natural about any of these exchanges, Crispin thought, trying to pay attention to the conversation around him.

He could hear Shirin's bird as clearly as he'd heard Linon—provided he and the dancer were sufficiently close to each other. At a distance, Danis's inward voice faded and then disappeared. No thoughts he sent could be heard by the bird—or by Shirin. In fact, Danis was right. It
was
unnatural.

Most of the guests were back in Shirin's reception room. The Rhodian tradition of lingering at table—or couch in the old-style banquets—was not followed in the east. When the meal was done and people were drinking their last cups of mixed or honey-sweetened wine, Sarantines tended to be on their feet again, sometimes unsteadily.

Crispin glanced across the room and was unable to suppress a grin. He brought a hand up to cover his mouth. Shirin, wearing the bird about her neck, had been cornered against the wall—between a handsome wood-and-bronze trunk and a large decorative urn—by the Principal Secretary of the Supreme Strategos. Pertennius, gesturing in full conversational flight, showed little inclination to register her attempts at shifting to rejoin her guests.

This was an accomplished, sophisticated woman, Crispin decided cheerfully. She could deal with her own suitors, welcome or unwelcome. He turned back to the
conversation he'd been following. Scortius and the muscular Green charioteer, Crescens, were discussing alternative dispositions of the horses in a quadriga. Carullus had left his new bride and was hanging on their every syllable. So were a number of others. The racing season was about to start; this exchange was visibly whetting appetites. Holy men and charioteers were the figures most revered by Sarantines. Crispin remembered hearing that even before he'd begun his journey. It was true, he had come to realize—at least as far as the charioteers went.

Kasia, not far away, was in the company of two or three of the younger Green dancers, with Vargos hovering protectively nearby. The dancers were likely to be tormenting her about the night to come; it was part of the wedding tradition. It was also a teasing that would be appallingly inappropriate for this particular bride. It occurred to Crispin that he ought to go over and salute her properly himself.

‘She now says to say she will offer you pleasures you have only imagined if you'll only come over here,'
said the dancer's bird abruptly in his head. Then added,
‘I hate when she does this.'

Crispin laughed aloud, occasioning curious glances from those following the debate beside him. Turning the sound into a cough, he looked across the room again. Shirin's mouth was fixed in a rigid smile. Her eyes met his over the shoulder of the lean, sallow secretary and there was black murder in them: nothing that promised delight at all, of the flesh or the spirit. Crispin realized, belatedly, that Pertennius must be very drunk. That, too, diverted him. Leontes's secretary was normally the most controlled of men.

Even so, Shirin could cope, he decided. This was all very amusing, in fact. He lifted a hand in a wave and smiled affably at the dancer before turning back again to the chariot-racers' conversation.

He and Zoticus's daughter had achieved an understanding, built around his ability to hear the bird and the story he'd told her about Linon. She had asked him, that chilly afternoon in autumn—it seemed a long time ago—if what he'd done with his bird meant that she should release Danis in the same way. He had been unable to answer that. There had ensued a silence, one that Crispin understood, then he had heard the bird murmur, inwardly,
‘If I weary of this I will tell you. It is a promise. If that happens, take me back.
'

Crispin had shivered, thinking of the glade where Linon's surrendered soul had saved their lives in the mist of the half-world. Taking one of the alchemist's birds back to the Aldwood was not a simple matter, but he hadn't spoken of that then, or since.

Not even when a letter came from Martinian to Shirin and she sent word to Crispin in the Sanctuary and he came and read it. It seemed that Zoticus had left instructions with his old friend: if he were not home from an unexpected autumn journey by midwinter, or had not sent tidings, Martinian was to act as if he were dead and divide the alchemist's estate according to directions given. The servants were attended to; there were various personal bequests; some named objects and documents were burned.

The house near Varena and all that lay within it undestroyed were left to his daughter Shirin, to use or deal with as she saw best.

‘Why did he
do
that? What in Jad's impossible name,' the girl had exclaimed to Crispin in her own sitting room, the bird lying on the chest by the fire, ‘am I to do with a house in Batiara?'

She'd been bewildered and upset. She had never met her father in her life, Crispin knew. Nor was she his only child.

‘Sell it,' he'd said. ‘Martinian will do it for you. He's the most honest man in the world.'

‘Why did he leave it to
me?'
she'd asked.

Crispin had shrugged. ‘I didn't know him at all, girl.'

‘Why do they think he's dead? Where did he go?'

And that answer he thought he did have. It wasn't a difficult puzzle, which didn't make the solution easier to live with. Martinian had written that Zoticus had taken a very sudden, late-season trip to Sauradia. Crispin had earlier written to the alchemist about Linon, a cryptic retelling of what had happened in the glade.

Zoticus would have understood the implications: far more of them than Crispin had. He was quite certain, in fact, where Shirin's father had gone.

And reasonably sure what would have happened when he got there.

He hadn't told this to the girl. Instead, he'd carried some difficult thoughts out into the wintry cold and a slanting rain, and had had a great deal to drink later that night in The Spina and then a quieter tavern, his assigned guards following him about, protecting the Emperor's so-valued mosaic artisan from all possible harm. Worldly harm. There were other kinds. The wine didn't do what he needed it to do. The memory of the
zubir
,
the dark, huge presence of it in his life, seemed destined not to leave him.

Shirin herself was a balancing spirit. He'd come to think of her that way as the winter deepened. An image of laughter, movements quick as hummingbirds, with a cleverness equally quick and a generosity one might not have expected in a woman so celebrated. She couldn't even walk out-of-doors in the City without hired guards of her own to fend off admirers.

It appeared—and he hadn't known
this
until today— that the dancer had formed a relationship of sorts with Gisel, the young Antae queen. He had no idea when that had begun. They certainly hadn't told him. The women he knew here were … complicated.

There had been a moment earlier this afternoon when Crispin had been excruciatingly aware that there were four women in the room who had entangled him in intimacies recently: a queen, a dancer, a married aristocrat … and the one he'd saved from slavery, who was a bride today.

Only Kasia had touched him, he had thought, with what he knew to be tenderness, on a windy, black, dream-haunted night in Sauradia. The memory made him uncomfortable. He could still hear the shutter banging in the wind outside, still see Ilandra in his dream, the
zubir
between them, and then gone. He had been awake and crying out and Kasia had been beside his bed in the cold room, speaking to him.

He looked over at her, newly married to his closest friend here, and then glanced quickly away when he saw that her eyes had been resting on him.

And that, too, was an echo of a different exchange of glances earlier this afternoon, with someone else.

In the moment when Leontes the Golden had been speaking to Carullus, and an assembly of wedding guests had hung upon his words as upon holy text, Crispin had been unable not to look at another recent bride.

His reward
,
Styliane had called herself last autumn, in the half-light of Crispin's room at an inn. Crispin, listening to Leontes now, had understood something, remembering the Strategos's direct words and manner in the Attenine Palace the night of his own first appearance there. Leontes spoke to the court like a blunt soldier, and to soldiers and citizens with the grace of a courtier, and it worked, it worked very well.

As the unflawed mingling of charm and pious honesty captured and held this mixed gathering like some fortress under siege, Crispin had found Styliane Daleina staring back at him, as if she'd been waiting to gather in his gaze.

She had lifted her shoulders a little, gracefully, as if to say without the need for words,
Do you see now? I live
with this perfection, as an ornament
. And Crispin had been able to hold those blue eyes for only a moment and had then turned away.

Gisel, his queen, had not lingered long enough to even notice his presence here, let alone resume the charade of intimacy between them. He had visited her twice during the winter—as bidden—at the small palace they'd given her near the walls, and each time the queen's manner had been regally detached, matter-of-fact. No thoughts or surmises about their country and invasion had been exchanged. She had not yet seen the Emperor in private. Or the Empress. It chafed her, he could see, living here with few tidings from home and no way of doing or achieving anything.

Crispin had tried, and failed, to imagine the shape and tenor of an encounter between the Empress Alixana and the young queen who had sent him here with a secret message in autumn half a year ago.