The Sarantine Mosaic

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  The detailed revelations made it unnecessary to interrogate formally the soldier from Amoria who had been interrupted and personally halted by the Supreme Strategos while apparently attempting a further assault on the Rhodian artisan in a public bathhouse.

  In accordance with the new protocols, a member of the judiciary was requested to attend immediately at the Urban Prefecture. Upon arrival, the judge was presented with the one-time courier’s confession and such further details as had been assembled regarding the events of the night before and that afternoon.

  The judge had some latitude under Marcellinus’s new Code of Laws. The death penalty had been largely eliminated as contrary to the spirit of Jad’s creation and as a benign Imperial gesture in the aftermath of the Victory Riots, but the possible fines, dismemberments, mutilations, and terms of exile or incarceration were wide-ranging.

  The judge on duty that evening happened to be a Green supporter. The deaths of two common soldiers and a Blue partisan was a grave matter, to be sure, but the Rhodian involved—the only important figure in the story, it seemed—had been unharmed, and the courier had confessed his crimes freely. Six perpetrators had been killed. The judge had barely divested himself of his heavy cloak and sipped once or twice from the wine cup they brought him before ruling that the gouging of one eye and a slit nose, to label Tilliticus as a punished criminal, would be a proper and sufficient judicial response. Along with a lifetime’s exile, of course. Such a figure could not possibly be allowed to remain in the City. He might corrupt the pious inhabitants.

  The Amorianite soldier was routinely branded on the forehead with a hot iron as a would-be assassin and—of course—thereby forfeited his place in the army and his pension. He too was exiled.

  It all unfolded with satisfying efficiency, and the judge even had time to finish his wine and exchange some salacious gossip with the notary about a young pantomime actor and a very prominent Senator. He was home in time for his evening meal.

  That same evening, a surgeon on contract to the Urban Prefecture was called in and Pronobius Tilliticus lost his left eye and had his nose carved open with a heated blade. He would lie in the Prefecture’s infirmary for that night and the next and then be taken in chains across the harbour to Deapolis port and released there, to make his one-eyed, marked way in exile through the god’s world and the Empire—or wherever he chose to go beyond it.

  He went, in fact, as most of the god’s world would come to know one day, south through Amoria into Soriyya. He quickly exhausted the meagre sum his father had been able to put together for him on short notice and was reduced to begging for scraps at chapel doors with the other maimed and mutilated, the orphans, and the women too old to sell their bodies for sustenance.

  From these depths he was rescued the next autumn—as the story was to tell—by a virtuous cleric in a village near the desert wastes of Ammuz. Smitten with divine illumination, Pronobius Tilliticus went forth a distance alone into the desert the next spring carrying only a sun disk, and found a precipitate tooth of rock to climb. It was a difficult ascent, but he did it only once.

  He lived there forty years in all, sustained at first by supplies sent out by the humble cleric who had brought him to Jad, and later by the pilgrims who began to seek out his needle-like crag in the sands, bearing baskets of food and wine which were hauled up on a rope-and-pulley arrangement and then lowered—empty—by the one-eyed hermit with his long, filthy beard and rotting clothes.

  A number of people, carried out to the site in litters, unable to walk or gravely ill, and not a few women afflicted with barren wombs, were afterwards to claim in carefully witnessed testaments that their conditions had been cured when they ate of the half-masticated pieces of food the Jad-possessed anchorite was wont to hurl down from his precarious perch. Besought by the people below for prophecies and holy instruction, Pronobius Tilliticus would declaim terse parables and grim, strident warnings of dire futures.

  He was, of course, correct in large measure, achieving his immortality by being the first holy man slain by the heathen fanatics of the sands when they swept out of the south into Soriyya following their own star-enraptured visionary and his ascetic new teachings.

  When a vanguard of this desert army reached the stiletto of rock upon which the hermit—an old man by then, incoherent in his convictions and fierce rhetoric— still perched, seemingly impervious to the winds and the broiling sun, they listened to him fulminate for a time, amused. When he began coarsely spitting food down upon them, their amusement faded. Archers filled him with arrows like some grotesque, spiny animal. He fell from his perch, a long way. After routinely cutting off his genitalia they left him in the sand for the scavengers.

  He would be formally declared holy and among the Blessed Victims gathered to Immortal Light, a performer of attested miracles and a sage, two generations later by the great Patriarch Eumedius.

  In the official Life commissioned by the Patriarch it was chronicled how Tilliticus had spent hard and courageous years in the Imperial Post, loyally serving his Emperor, before hearing and heeding the summons of a far greater power. Movingly, the tale was told of how the holy man lost his eye to a wild lion of the desert while saving a lost child in peril.

  ‘One sees Holy Jad within, not with the eyes of this world,’ he was reported to have said to the weeping child and her mother, whose own garment, stained by the blood that dripped from the sage’s wounds, came to be included among the sacred treasures of the Great Sanctuary in Sarantium itself.

  At the time the Life of the Blessed Tilliticus was written, it was either forgotten or deemed inconsequential by the recording clerics what role a minor Rhodian artisan might have played in the journey of the holy man to the god’s eternal Light. Military slang also comes and goes, changes and evolves. No coarse, ribald associations at all would attach to the name of Jad’s dearly beloved Pronobius by then.

  CHAPTER X

  On the same day that the mosaicist Caius Crispus of Varena survived two attempts on his life, first saw the domed Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom in Sarantium, and met the men and women who would shape and define his living days to come under the god’s sun, far to the west a ceremony took place outside the walls of his home town in the much smaller sanctuary he had been commissioned with his partner and their craftsmen and apprentices to decorate.

  Amid the forests of Sauradia the people of the Antae had—along with the Vrachae and Inicii and the other pagan tribes in that wild land—honoured their ancestors on the Day of the Dead with rites of blood. But after forcing their way west and south into Batiara as the Rhodian Empire crumbled inwards, they had adopted the faith of Jad and many of the customs and rituals of those they conquered. King Hildric, in particular, during a long and shrewd reign, had made considerable strides towards consolidating his people in the peninsula and achieving a measure of harmony with the subjugated but still haughty Rhodians.

  It was considered unfortunate in the extreme that Hildric the Great had left no surviving heir save a daughter.

  The Antae might worship Jad and gallant Heladikos now, might carry sun disks, build and restore chapels, attend at bathhouses and even theatres, treat with the mighty Sarantine Empire as a sovereign state and not a gathering of tribes … but they remained a people known for the precarious tenure of their leaders and utterly unaccustomed to a woman’s rule. It was a matter of ongoing surprise in certain quarters that Queen Gisel hadn’t been forced to marry or been murdered before now.

  In the judgement of thoughtful observers, only the tenuous balance of power among rival factions had caused a clearly unacceptable condition to endure until the long-awaited consecration of Hildric’s memorial outside the walls of Varena.

  The ceremony took place late in the autumn, immediately after the three days of Dykania ended, when the Rhodians were accustomed to honour their own ancestors. Theirs was a civilized faith and society: candles were lit, prayers articulated, no blood was shed.

  A significant numbe
r of those close-packed in the expanded and impressively decorated sanctuary did feel sufficiently unwell in the aftermath of Dykania’s excesses to half wish that they themselves were dead, however. Among the many Rhodian festivals and holy days that dotted the round of the year, Dykania’s inebriate debaucheries had been adopted by the Antae with an entirely predictable enthusiasm.

  In the wan light of a sunless dawn, the fur-cloaked court of Varena and those of the Antae nobility who had travelled from afar now gathered, mingling with Rhodians of repute and a quantity of clerics, greater and lesser. There were a small number of places set aside for the ordinary folk of Varena and its countryside, and many of these had lined up since the night before to be present today. Most had been turned away, of course, but they lingered outside in the chill, talking, buying hot food and spiced wine and trinkets from quickly erected booths in the grassy spaces around the sanctuary.

  The still-bare mound of earth that covered the dead of the last plague was an oppressive, inescapable presence in the north of the yard. A few men and women could be seen walking over there at intervals to stand silently in the hard wind.

  There had been a persistent rumour that the High Patriarch himself might make the trip north from Rhodias to honour the memory of King Hildric, but this had not come to pass. The talk, both within and without the sanctuary, was clear as to why.

  The mosaicists—a celebrated pair, native to Varena—obedient to the will of the young queen, had put Heladikos on the dome.

  Athan, the High Patriarch, who had signed—under duress from the east, it was generally believed—a Joint Pronouncement forbidding representations of Jad’s mortal son, could hardly attend at a sanctuary that so boldly flouted his will. On the other hand, in the reality of the Batiaran peninsula as it was under the Antae, neither could he ignore a ceremony such as this. The Antae had come to the faith of Jad for the son as much as the father, and they were not about to leave Heladikos behind them, whatever the two Patriarchs might say. It was a … difficulty.

  In the expected, equivocal resolution, half a dozen senior clerics had made the muddy trip from Rhodias, arriving two days before, in the midst of Dykania.

  They sat now with grim, unhappy faces at the front of the sanctuary before the altar and the sun disk, taking care not to look up at the dome, where an image of golden Jad and an equally vivid, forbidden rendering of his son carrying a torch of fire in his falling chariot could be seen.

  The mosaics had already been judged very fine by those who understood such things, though some had disparaged the quality of the glass pieces used. Perhaps more importantly, the new images overhead had caused the pious folk of Varena, who had waited longest and been rewarded with places at the back, to murmur in genuine wonder and awe. Shimmering in the light of the candles the queen had ordered lit for her mighty father, the torch of Heladikos seemed to flicker and glow with a light of its own as the shining god and his doomed child looked down on those gathered below.

  Afterwards, rather too obvious analogies were made by a great many and complex, competing morals drawn from the ferocious events of a morning that began in cold, windy greyness, moved into a consecrated space of candlelight and prayers, and ended with blood on the altar and the sun disk beyond.

  PARDOS HAD ALREADY DECIDED that this was the most important day of his life. He had even half decided, frightening himself a little with the immensity of the thought, that it might always be the most important day of his life. That nothing would or could ever match this morning.

  With Radulph and Couvry and the others, he sat—they were sitting, not standing!—in the section allocated to the artisans: carpenters, masons, bricklayers, metal workers, fresco painters, glaziers, mosaicists, all the others.

  Labourers, on instructions from the court, had brought in and carefully placed wooden benches all through the sanctuary over the past few days. The sensation was odd, to be seated in a place of worship. Clad in the new brown tunics and belts Martinian had bought them for this morning, Pardos struggled furiously to both appear calm and mature and see every single thing that happened in each moment that passed.

  Pardos knew he had to try to seem poised: he wasn’t an apprentice any more. Martinian had signed the papers for him and Radulph and Couvry yesterday afternoon. They were formally attested craftsmen now, could serve any mosaicist who would hire them, or even—though that would be foolish—seek commissions on their own. Radulph was returning home to Baiana; he’d always said he would. There would be plenty of work to be found in that summer resort. He was Rhodian, his family knew people. Pardos was Antae and knew no one outside Varena. He and Couvry were staying on with Martinian—and with Crispin, if and when he ever returned from the glories and terrors of the east. Pardos hadn’t expected to miss so acutely a man who had routinely threatened him with maimings and dismemberments, but the fact was, he did.

  Martinian had taught them patience, discipline, order, the balance between the imagined and the possible. Crispin had been teaching Pardos to see.

  He was trying to apply those lessons now, observing the colours worn by the burly Antae leaders and those of the well-born Rhodians who were present here, men and women both. Martinian’s wife, beside him, had a shawl of a wonderfully deep red colour over her dark grey robe. It looked like summer wine. Crispin’s mother, on Martinian’s other side, wore a long blue cloak so dark it made her white hair seem to gleam in the candlelight. Avita Crispina was a small woman, composed and straight-backed, with a scent of lavender about her. She had greeted Pardos and Radulph and Couvry by name and offered them felicitations as they walked in together: they’d had no idea, any of them, that she’d even known they existed.

  To the left of the raised altar, close to where the clerics would chant the rites of the day and of Hildric’s memorial service, the most important members of the court were seated beside and behind the queen. The men were bearded, unsmiling, clad soberly in browns and russets and dark greens—hunting colours, Pardos thought. He recognized Eudric, yellow-haired and battle-scarred—handsome for all that—once commander of the northern cohorts that did battle with the Inicii, now Chancellor of the Antae realm. Most of the others he didn’t know. He thought some of the men looked distinctly uncomfortable without their swords. Weapons were forbidden in the chapel, of course, and Pardos saw hands straying restlessly to gold and silver belts and finding nothing there.

  The queen herself sat on an elevated seat set among the first row of the new wooden benches on that side. She was exquisite and a little frightening in the white robes of mourning with a white silk veil hiding her face. Only the almost-throne itself and a single band of dark purple in the soft hat that held the veil in place marked her as royalty today. Wives and mothers and daughters had always worn the veil, Martinian had told them, in the glory days of Rhodias when a man was buried or at his memorial. The queen, so garbed and hidden, raised above everyone else, seemed to Pardos to be a figure out of history or from the tales of other, fantastic worlds, told around night fires.

  Martinian, of course, was the only one of them who’d ever spoken to her in the palace, when he and Crispin were commissioned to the work, and afterwards as he requested funds and reported progress. Radulph had seen her once, up close, as she rode back through the city from a royal hunt beyond the walls. Pardos never had. She was beautiful, Radulph had said.

  In the strangest way, you could almost tell that now, even if you couldn’t see her face, Pardos thought. It occurred to him that dressing in white amid those clad in deeper autumn colours was an effective way to draw the eye. He considered that, how it might be used, and thought of Crispin as he did.

  There was a rustling sound and he turned quickly to the front. The three clerics who would conduct the rites—the celebrated Sybard of Varena from the court, and two from this sanctuary—stepped forward from behind the sun disk and paused, in yellow, in blue, in yellow, until the murmurous sounds grew slowly quieter and then stopped. In the flicker of candle and olive oil lam
p, under the god and his son on the small dome, they raised their hands, six palms held outwards in the blessing of Jad.

  What followed was not holy.

  Afterwards, Pardos understood that the clerics’

  gestures had been chosen as a pre-arranged signal. Some device for co-ordinating actions had been needed, and everyone knew how this ceremony would begin.

  The brown-bearded, big-shouldered man who stood up, just as the clerics were about to start the rites, was Agila, the Master of Horse, though Pardos knew that only later. The burly Antae took two heavy-booted strides towards the altar from beside the queen and threw back his fur-lined cloak in the full view of all those assembled.

  He was perspiring heavily, his colour was high, and he was wearing a sword.

  The clerics’ hands remained in the air like six forgotten appendages as they faltered into silence. Four other men, Pardos saw, his heart now beginning to pound, also stood up from the back of the royal section and moved into the aisles between the rows of benches. Their cloaks were also withdrawn; four swords were revealed, and then unsheathed. This was heresy, a violation. It was worse.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the court cleric cried sharply, his voice shrill with outrage. Gisel the queen did not move, Pardos saw. The big, bearded man stood almost directly in front of her, but facing the body of the sanctuary.

  He heard Martinian say softly under his breath, ‘Jad shelter us. Her guards are outside. Of course.’

  Of course. Pardos knew the rumours and the fears and the threats—everyone did. He knew the young queen never took food or drink that had not been prepared by her own people and tasted first by them, that she never ventured forth, even within the palace, without a cadre of armed guards. Except here. In the sanctuary: veiled in mourning on her father’s memorial day, in the sight of her people both high and low and of the holy clerics and the watching god, in a consecrated space where arms were forbidden, where she could assume she would be safe.