The Sarantine Mosaic

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  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.

  They might be followed. They might die here on the road. This was a day of sacrifice and the risen dead. There might be daemons abroad, in search of mortal souls. Her mother had believed that. But Kasia had claimed her knife in the mist before dawn, darting through fog to the smithy and taking it from its hiding place. She could kill someone, or herself, before they took her for Ludan.

  She had seen the shape of Pharus the stablemaster in the courtyard as they walked past. He had been leaning forward intently, still watching her as he had for the past two days. And though his eyes had been almost hidden in the enveloping greyness she could feel the fury in him. She had wondered suddenly if he was the oak priest here, the one who offered the heart of the sacrifice.

  Then Vargos—who had simply been one of many servants on the road, a man who’d slept here so many nights without exchanging a single word with her—had stopped in front of Pharus and clubbed him upwards between the legs with his staff.

  It was when Pharus collapsed with an appalling inhalation of breath that Kasia had begun struggling not to show the fierceness of her joy. With every step they took down the road after that blow—wrapped in fog as in a blanket, a womb, unable to see ten paces ahead or behind—she felt herself being reborn, remade.

  It was wrong, she knew it was. There was death out here today, and no sane person ought to be abroad. But death had been summoned and waiting for her at the inn already, a certainty, and it might or might not find her out in the mist. Any way you looked at it, a chance was better than none at all. And she had her little knife.

  Vargos was leading them, the Rhodian behind. They walked in silence, save for the muffled snorting of the mule and the creaking of the weight on its back. They listened. Ahead and behind. The world had shrunk nearly to nothingness. They moved, unseeing, in an endless grey on a straight road the Rhodians had built five hundred years ago in their Empire’s bright glory.

  Kasia thought about the artisan behind her. She should be ready to die for him, given what he’d done. She might be, in fact. But she was the erimitsu, and thought too much for her own good. So her mother used to say, and her father, brother, aunts—just about everyone.

  She wasn’t sure why he hadn’t touched her last night. He might prefer boys, or find her thin, or simply have been tired. Or he might have been being kind. Kindness was not a thing she knew much about.

  He had cried a name in the middle of the night. She’d been dozing herself, on the pallet, fully clothed, and had startled awake to the sound of his voice. She couldn’t remember the name and he’d never quite awakened, though she’d waited, listening.

  The other thing she didn’t understand was how he’d known to run to the courtyard instead of up the stairs with everyone else when she screamed. The thief might have escaped, otherwise. It had been black in the room; she couldn’t have identified anyone. Pacing along by the mule, Kasia worried that puzzle like a dog with a scrap of meat on a bone and eventually gave it up. She wrapped herself more tightly in Martinian’s cloak. The cold was damp, penetrating. She had no shoes, but she was used to that. She looked over to left and right, couldn’t see a thing beyond the road, could barely see the road itself beneath her feet. It would be easy enough, actually, to fall into the ditches. She knew where the forest was, to their left, knew it would draw nearer as they continued east.

  Around mid-morning—at a guess—they came to one of the small roadside chapels. Kasia hadn’t even seen it until Vargos spoke softly and they stopped. She peered through the greyness and made out the dark outline of the tiny chapel. They’d have gone right past had Vargos not been looking for it. Martinian called a halt. Standing where they were, listening all the time for sounds in all directions, they quickly ate chunks of dark bread with some beer, and shared out a wheel of cheese Vargos had taken from the servants’ table. When they finished, Vargos looked an inquiry at Martinian. The red-bearded man hesitated, then Kasia saw him nod. He led them into the empty chapel for the invocation to Jad. Somewhere the sun had risen by now, was shining. Kasia listened to the two men hurry through the litany, and joined them for the responses she had been taught: Let there be Light for our lives, lord, and Light eternal when we come to you.

  They went back out into the fog, untied the mule, began walking again. There was nothing to be seen at all. In front of her the world ended beyond Vargos. It was like walking in a dream, no passage of time, no sense of movement, the slabs of the road cold underfoot, walking away and away.

  Kasia’s hearing was extremely good. She heard the voices before either of the men did.

  She reached back, touched Martinian on the arm, pointed back down the road. In the same moment Vargos said, very softly, ‘They are coming. Left, just up here. Cross over.’

  There was a short, flat cart bridge spanning the ditch, leading into the fields. She wouldn’t have seen that, either. They took the mule across, went a short way through the muddy stubble in the dense, impenetrable greyness, and stopped. Listening. Kasia’s heart was racing now. They had come for her, after all. It was not over. They ought not to have stopped to pray, she thought.

  Let there be Light. There was no light. At all.

  Martinian stood on the other side of the mule, his red beard and hair dulled by the greyness. Kasia saw him hesitate, then slip an old, heavy sword silently free of the ropes that strapped it to the mule’s side. Vargos watched him. They heard the noises clearly now, voices approaching from the west, men talking too loudly, to encourage themselves. Footsteps now on the road—eight men? ten?—muffled but very near, just across the ditch. Kasia strained to see, prayed she would not be able to. If the fog lifted for even a moment now they were lost.

  Then she heard growling, and a sharp, urgent bark. They had brought the dogs. Of course. And they all knew her scent. They were lost.

  Kasia laid one hand across the mule’s shoulders, felt its nervousness, willed it to silence. She fumbled for her knife. She had the power to die before they took her, if no other power at all. Her brief, mad joy had gone, was lost, swift as a bird into greyness all around.

  She thought of her mother a year ago, alone on a leafstrewn path with a small bag of coins in her hands, watching the slave train take her daughter away. It had been a brilliantly clear day, snow gleaming on the mountain peaks, birdsong, the leaves red and gold, and falling.

  CRISPIN CONSIDERED HIMSELF an articulate man and knew he was a reasonably educated one. He’d had a tutor for many years after his father died, at his mother’s insistence and his uncle’s. Had struggled through the classical authors on rhetoric and ethics, and the tragic dramas of Arethae, greatest of the city-states in Trakesia: those thousand-year-old confrontations between men and gods written in an almost-lost form of the language men now called Sarantine. Writings from a different world, before stern Rhodias had shaped its empire and Trakesia’s cities had dwindled into islets of pagan philosophy and then, latterly, not even tha
t, as the Schools were closed. It was merely another province of Sarantium now, barbarians in the north of it and beyond its northern borders, and Arethae was a village huddled under the grandeur of its ruins.

  Even more than his education, Crispin thought, fifteen years of working for and then alongside Martinian of Varena would have honed the thinking of any man. Gentle as his older partner might be in manner, Martinian was unrelenting and even joyful in chasing a dialectic down to its conclusions. Crispin had learned, of necessity, to give as good as he got and to derive a certain pleasure in marshalling words to guide premises to resolutions. Colour and light and form had always been his chief delight in the world, the realm of his own gift, but he took no little pride in being able to order and formulate his thoughts.

  It was therefore with real distress that he had come to understand earlier this morning that he wasn’t even close to having words to express how uncomfortable he was out here in the fog. He couldn’t begin to say how passionately he wanted to be anywhere else but here in Sauradia on an almost-invisible road. It went beyond fear and awareness of danger: his was the distress of a soul that felt itself to be in entirely the wrong sort of world.

  And that was before they’d heard the men and dogs.

  They stood now in the wet earth of a bare field, in silence. He was aware of the girl beside him, her steadying hand on the mule, keeping it quiet. Vargos was a shrouded shape a little ahead of them, with his staff. Crispin, on a thought, turned and carefully worked his sword free of the ropes on the mule’s back. He felt awkward holding it, a fool, and at the same time genuinely afraid. If anything at all turned on the swordplay of Caius Crispus of Varena … He expected Linon, on her thong about his neck, to say something caustic, but the bird had been silent from the moment they awoke this morning.

  He had brought the sword at the last moment, an impulse, an afterthought, and only because it had been his father’s and he was leaving home and going far away. His mother had said nothing, but her arched eyebrows had been—as ever—infinitely expressive. She’d sent a servant for the heavy footsoldier’s blade Horius had carried when summoned to militia duty.

  In the house where he’d grown up, Crispin had drawn it from its scabbard and noted with surprise that blade and sheath were oiled and cared for, even after a quarter of a century. He’d made no comment on that, merely raised his own eyebrows and then offered a few dramatic, self-mocking passes with the sword in his mother’s receiving room. He’d struck a martial pose, weapon levelled at a bowl of apples on the table.

  Avita Crispina had winced to see it. She’d murmured drily, ‘Try not to hurt yourself, dear.’ Crispin had laughed, and sheathed the blade, claiming his wine with relief.

  ‘You are supposed to tell me to come home with it or upon it,’ he’d murmured indignantly.

  ‘That’s a shield, dear,’ his mother had said gently.

  He had no shield, no real idea how to use the sword, and there were dogs here with the hunters. Would the fog impede them, or the water in the ditch by the road? Or would the hunting hounds simply follow the girl’s known scent right across the small bridge and lead the men right to them? The barking grew strident in that moment. Someone shouted, almost directly in front of them:

  ‘They’ve crossed to the field! Come on!’

  One question answered, at any rate. Crispin took a breath and lifted his father’s blade. He did not pray. He thought of Ilandra, as he always did, but he did not pray. Vargos spread his feet wide and held his staff before him in both hands.

  ‘He’s here!’ said Linon suddenly, in a tone Crispin had never heard from the bird. ‘Oh, lord of worlds, I knew it! Crispin, do not move! Don’t let the others move.’

  ‘Hold still!’ Crispin said sharply, instinctively, to Vargos and the girl.

  In that moment several things seemed to happen at once. The accursed mule brayed stridently, legs gone rigid as tree trunks. The dogs’ triumphant barking went suddenly high with shrill, yelping panic. And the shouting man screamed in terror, the sound ripping through the fog.

  The mist swirled about the road, parted for a moment.

  And in that instant Crispin saw something impossible. A shape from tormented dream, from nightmare. His mind slammed down, desperately denying what his eyes had just told him. He heard Vargos croak something that must have been a prayer. Then the fog closed in again like a curtain. Sight was gone. There was still screaming, high-pitched, appalling, from the vanished road. The mule trembled in every stiffened limb. He heard the streaming sound of it urinating beside him. The dogs were whining like whipped puppies. They heard them fleeing, back to the west.

  There came a rumbling sound, as of the earth itself, shaking beneath them. Crispin stopped breathing. Ahead of them, among the hunters, the first man’s scream went sharply, wildly higher, and then was cut off. The rumbling stopped. Crispin heard running footsteps, men screaming and the dogs’ yelping sounds receding swiftly back the way they had come. Vargos had now dropped to his knees in the cold, sodden field, the staff fallen from his fingers. The girl was clutching at the trembling mule, struggling to steady it. Crispin saw that his hand holding the sword was shaking helplessly.

  ‘What is it? Linon! What is this?’

  But before the bird on his neck could make any reply, the mist parted again ahead of them, more than a swirling this time, a withdrawal, revealing the road across the narrow ditch for the first time that morning, and Crispin saw clearly what had, indeed, come on this day. His understanding of the world and the half-world changed forever in that moment as he, too, sank to his knees in the mud, his father’s sword dropping from his fingers. The girl remained standing by the mule, transfixed. He would remember that.

  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.