The Sarantine Mosaic

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  The fellow was a stuffy prig, greying before his time, Vinaszh thought, but he had courage. He saw Prince Murash look up, black eyes blazing. Before the prince could speak, however, a faint, cold voice from the bed murmured, ‘You heard the physician. He is brought here for his skills. Why is there wrangling in my presence? Get out. All of you.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Of course, my gracious lord,’ said Mazendar the vizier, as the prince, mouth opening and closing, stood up uncertainly. The king had still not taken his eyes from the flames. His voice sounded to Vinaszh as if it already came from somewhere beyond the realms of living men. He would die, the doctor would die, Vinaszh, very probably, would die. He was a fool and a fool, near the end of his days.

  Men began moving nervously out into the corridor, where torches had now been lit in the wall brackets. The wind whistled, an otherworldly, lonely sound. Vinaszh saw his captain of the guard set down the doctor’s things before quickly walking out. The young prince stopped directly in front of the slim physician, who stood very still, waiting for them to leave. Murash lifted his hands and murmured, fierce and low, ‘Save him, or these fingers end your life. I swear it by Perun’s thunder.’

  The physician said nothing, merely nodded, calmly eyeing the hands of the overwrought prince as they opened and closed and then twisted before his face in a sudden gesture of strangulation. Murash hesitated another moment, then looked back at his father—it might be for the last time, Vinaszh thought, and had a swift, sharp memory of his own father’s deathbed in the south. Then the prince strode from the room as others made way for him. They heard his voice rising in prayer again, from the hallway.

  Mazendar was last to leave. He paused near the bed, glanced at Vinaszh and the physician, looking uncertain for the first time, and then murmured, ‘Have you instructions for me, dear my lord?’

  ‘I gave them,’ said the man on the bed quietly. ‘You saw who was here. Serve him loyally if he allows. He might not. The Lord of Thunder and the Lady guard your soul if that is so.’

  The vizier swallowed. ‘And yours, my great lord, if we meet not again.’

  The king made no reply. Mazendar went out. Someone closed the door from out in the corridor.

  Immediately, moving briskly, the physician opened his linen bag and extracted a small sachet. He strode to the fire and tossed the contents onto it.

  The flames turned blue, and a scent of wildflowers suddenly filled the room like an eastern springtime. Vinaszh blinked. The figure on the bed stirred.

  ‘Ispahani?’ said the King of Kings.

  The physician looked surprised. ‘Yes, my gracious lord. I would not have imagined you—’

  ‘I had a physician from the Ajbar Islands once. He was very skilled. Unfortunately he courted a woman he would have done better not to have touched. He used this scent, I recall.’

  Rustem crossed to the bedside. ‘It is taught that the nature of the treatment room can affect the nature of the treatment. We are influenced by such things, my lord.’

  ‘Arrows are not,’ said the king. But he had shifted a little to look at the physician, Vinaszh saw.

  ‘Perhaps that is so,’ said the doctor, noncommittally. He came to the bedside and, for the first time, bent to examine the shaft and the wound. Vinaszh saw him suddenly check his motion. A strange expression crossed the bearded features. He lowered his hands.

  Then he looked over at Vinaszh. ‘Commander, it is necessary for you to find gloves for me. The best leather ones in the fortress, as quickly as possible.’

  Vinaszh asked no questions. He was likely to die if the king died. He went, closing the door behind him, and hurried along the corridor, past those waiting there, and down the stairwell to find his own riding gloves.

  RUSTEM HAD BEEN TERRIFIED when he entered, overwhelmed, summoning all his reserves of composure so as not to show it. He’d almost dropped his implements, feared someone would see his trembling hands, but the captain of the guard had moved quickly to take them. He’d used the formal movements of genuflection to speak a calming invocation in his mind.

  After rising, he’d been more blunt than he ought to have been, asking the courtiers—and the vizier and a prince!—to leave the room. But he always used a manner of crisp efficiency to suggest authority beyond his years, and this was no time or place to deviate from his customary methods. If he was to die, it hardly mattered what they thought of him, did it? He asked the commander to stay. A soldier would be unfazed by bloodshed and screaming, and someone might have to hold the afflicted person down.

  The afflicted person. The King of Kings. Sword of Perun. Brother to the Sun and Moons.

  Rustem forced himself to stop thinking in that way. This was a patient. An injured man. That was what mattered. The courtiers left. The prince—Rustem didn’t know which of the king’s sons this was—paused in front of him and made vivid with twisting hands the threat of death that had been with Rustem from the moment he’d left his garden.

  It could not be allowed to matter. All would be as had been written.

  He’d cast the Ajbar powder into the fire to bring the room in tune with more harmonious presences and spirits, then crossed to the bed to examine the arrow and the wound.

  And he had smelled kaaba there.

  His mind reeling with shock, he’d realized that the smell had jogged a hovering awareness, and then a second one had emerged and left him very much afraid. He’d sent the commander hurrying for gloves. He needed them.

  If he touched that arrow shaft he would die.

  Alone in the room with the King of Kings, Rustem discovered that his fears were those of a physician and not a lowly subject now. He wondered how to say what was in his mind.

  The king’s eyes were on his face now, dark and cold. Rustem saw rage in them. ‘There is a poison on the shaft,’ Shirvan said.

  Rustem bowed his head. ‘Yes, my lord. Kaaba. From the fijana plant.’ He took a breath and asked, ‘Did your own physicians touch the arrow?’

  The king nodded his head very slightly. No hint of anger diminishing. He would be in very great pain but wasn’t showing it. ‘All three of them. Amusing. I ordered them to be executed for their incompetence, but they would each have died soon, wouldn’t they? None of them noted the poison.’

  ‘It is rare here,’ said Rustem, struggling to order his thoughts.

  ‘Not so rare. I have been taking small amounts for twenty-five years,’ said the king. ‘Kaaba, other evil substances. Anahita will summon us to herself when she wills, but men may still be prudent in their lives, and kings must be.’

  Rustem swallowed. He now had the explanation for his patient’s survival to this point. Twenty-five years? An image came into his mind: a young king touching— fearfully, surely—a trace amount of the deadly powder: the sickness that would have ensued … doing the same thing again later, and then again, and then beginning to taste it, in larger and larger amounts. He shook his head.

  ‘The king has endured much for his people,’ he said. He was thinking of the court physicians. Kaaba closed the throat before it reached the heart. One died in agony, of self-strangulation. He had seen it in the east. A method of formal execution. Amusing, the king had said.

  He was thinking of something else now, as well. He pushed that away for the moment, as best he could.

  ‘It makes no difference,’ said the king. His voice was much as Rustem had imagined it might be: cold, uninflected, grave. ‘This is a lion arrow. Protection from poison doesn’t help if the arrow cannot come out.’

  There was a tapping at the door. It opened and Vinaszh the garrison commander returned, breathing as if he’d been running, carrying dark brown leather riding gloves. They were too thick for easy use, Rustem saw, but he had no choice. He put them on. Unlaced the thong of the case that held a long thin metal implement. The one his son had brought out to the garden for him. He said an arrow, Papa.

  ‘There are sometimes ways of removing even these,’ Rustem said, trying
not to think about Shaski. He turned to the west, closed his eyes and began to pray, mentally tabulating the afternoon’s omens, good and bad, as he did so, and counting the days since the last lunar eclipse. When he had done the calculations he set out the indicated talismans and wardings. He proposed a sense-dulling herb for the pain of what was to come. The king refused it. Rustem called the garrison commander to the bedside and told him what he had to do to keep the patient steady. He didn’t say ‘the king’ now. This was an afflicted man. Rustem was a doctor with an assistant and an arrow to remove, if he could. He was at war now, with Azal the Enemy, who could blot out the moons and sun and end a life.

  In the event, the commander was not needed, nor was the herb. Rustem first broke off the blackened shaft as close to the entry wound as he could, then used a sequence of probes and a knife to widen the wound itself, a procedure he knew to be excruciatingly painful. Some men could not endure it, even dulled by medication. They would thrash and scream, or lose consciousness. Shirvan of Bassania never closed his eyes and never moved, though his breathing became shallow and rapid. There were beads of sweat on his brow and the muscles of his jaw were clenched beneath the plaited beard. When he judged the opening wide enough, Rustem oiled the long, slender, metal Spoon of Enyati and slid it in towards the embedded arrowhead.

  It was difficult to be precise with the thick gloves, already blood-soaked, but he had a view of the alignment of the flange now and knew which way to angle the cupping part of Enyati’s device. The shallow cup slid up to the flange through the flesh of the king—who had caught his breath now, but moved not at all where he lay. Rustem twisted a little and felt the spoon slip around the widest part of the head, pressing against it. He pushed a little further, not breathing himself in this most delicate moment of all, invoking the Lady in her guise as Healer, and then he twisted it again and pulled gently back a very little.

  The king gasped then and half lifted one arm as if in protest, but Rustem felt the catch as the arrowhead was gathered and shielded in the cup. He had done it in one pass. He knew a man, a teacher in the far east, who would have been gravely, judiciously pleased. Now only the smooth, oiled sides of the spoon itself would be exposed to the wounded flesh, the barbed flange safely nestled within.

  Rustem blinked. He went to brush the sweat from his forehead with the back of one bloody glove and remembered—barely in time—that he would die if he did so. His heart thudded.

  ‘We are almost home, almost done,’ he murmured. ‘Are you ready, dear my lord?’ The vizier had used that phrase. In this moment, watching the man on the bed deal silently with appalling pain, Rustem meant it too. Vinaszh, the commander, surprised him by coming forward a little at the head of the bed and leaning sideways to place his hand on the king’s forehead above the wound and the blood: more a caress than a restraining hold.

  ‘Who is ever ready for this?’ grunted Shirvan the Great, and in the words Rustem caught—astonishingly— the ghost of a sardonic amusement. Hearing it, he set his feet to the west, spoke the Ispahani word engraved on the implement and, gripping with both gloved hands, pulled it straight back out from the mortal flesh of the King of Kings.

  ‘I AM TO LIVE, I take it?’

  They were alone in the room. Time had run; it was full dark now outside. The wind was still blowing. On the king’s instructions, Vinaszh had stepped out to report only that treatment was continuing and Shirvan yet lived. No more than that. The soldier had asked no questions, neither had Rustem.

  The first danger was always excessive bleeding. He had packed the expanded wound opening with lint and a clean sponge. He left the wound unclosed. Closing wounds too soon was the most common error doctors made, and patients died of it. Later, if all went well, he would draw the wound together with his smallest skewers as sutures, taking care to leave space for drainage. But not yet. For now he bandaged the packed wound with clean linen going under the armpit and across the chest, then up and around both sides of the neck in the triangle pattern prescribed. He finished the bandage at the top and arranged the knot to point downwards, as was proper, towards the heart. He wanted fresh bedding and linen now, clean gloves for himself, hot water. He threw the commander’s bloodied gloves on the fire. They could not be touched.

  The king’s voice, asking the question, was faint but clear. A good sign. He’d accepted a sedating herb this time from Rustem’s bag. The dark eyes were calm and focused, not unduly dilated. Rustem was guardedly pleased. The second danger now, as always, was the green pus, though arrow wounds tended to heal better than those made by a sword. He would change the packing later, wash the wound, and change the salve and dressing before the end of the night: a variant of his own devising. Most physicians left the first bandage for two or three days.

  ‘My king, I believe you are. The arrow is gone, and the wound will heal if Perun wills and I am careful with it to avoid the noxious exudations.’ He hesitated. ‘And you have your own … protection against the poison that was in it.’

  ‘I wish to speak with you about that.’

  Rustem swallowed hard. ‘My lord?’

  ‘You detected the fijana’s poison by the smell of it? Even with your own scented herbs on the fire?’

  Rustem had feared this question. He was a good dissembler—most physicians were—but this was his king, mortal kin to the sun and moons.

  ‘I have encountered it before,’ he said. ‘I was trained in Ispahani, my lord, where the plant grows.’

  ‘I know where it grows,’ said the King of Kings. ‘What else do you have to tell me, physician?’

  Nowhere to hide, it seemed. Rustem took a deep breath.

  ‘I also smelled it elsewhere in this room, great lord. Before I put the herbal scent to the fire.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘I thought that might be so.’ Shirvan the Great looked coldly up at him. ‘Where?’ One word only, hard as a smith’s hammer.

  Rustem swallowed again. Tasted something bitter: the awareness of his own mortality. But what choice did he now have? He said, ‘On the hands of the prince, great king. When he bade me save your life, at risk of my own.’

  Shirvan of Bassania closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, Rustem saw a black rage in their depths again, despite the drug he had been given. ‘This … distresses me,’ said the King of Kings very softly. What Rustem heard was not distress, however. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder if the king had also detected kaaba on the arrowhead and shaft. He had been ingesting it for twenty-five years. If he had known the poison, he had allowed three physicians to handle it today without warning them, and had been about to let Rustem do the same. A test of competence? When he was on the brink of dying? What sort of man … ? Rustem shivered, could not help himself.

  ‘It seems,’ said Great Shirvan, ‘that someone besides myself has been protecting himself against poisons by building up a resistance. Clever. I have to say it was clever.’ He was silent a long time, then: ‘Murash. He would have made a good king, in fact.’

  He turned away and looked out the window; there was nothing to see in the darkness. They could hear the sound of the wind, blowing from the desert. ‘I appear,’ the king said, ‘to have ordered the death of the wrong son and his mother.’ There was another, briefer silence. ‘This distresses me,’ he said for a second time.

  ‘May these orders not be rescinded, great lord?’ Rustem asked hesitantly.

  ‘Of course not,’ said the King of Kings.

  The finality in the quiet voice was, Rustem would later decide, as frightening as anything else that day.

  ‘Summon the vizier,’ said Shirvan of Bassania, looking out upon night. ‘And my son.’

  Rustem the physician, son of Zorah, wished ardently in that moment to be home in his small house, shuttered against the wind and dark, with Katyun and Jarita, two small children peacefully asleep, a late cup of herbed wine at his elbow and a fire on the hearth, with the knocking of the world at his door something that had never taken place.


  Instead, he bowed to the man lying on the bed and walked to the doorway of the room.

  ‘Physician,’ said the King of Kings.

  Rustem turned back. He felt afraid, terribly out of his depth.

  ‘I am still your patient. You continue to be accountable for my well-being. Act accordingly.’ The tone was flat, the cold rage still there.

  It did not take immense subtlety to understand what this might mean.

  Only this afternoon, in the hour when a wind had arisen in the desert, he had been in his own modest treatment room, preparing to instruct four pupils on couching simple cataracts according to the learned devisings of Merovius of Trakesia.

  He opened the door. In the torchlight of the corridor he saw a dozen tired-looking courtiers. Servants or soldiers had brought benches; some of the waiting men were sitting, slumped against the stone walls. Some were asleep. Others saw him and stood up. Rustem nodded at Mazendar, the vizier, and then at the young prince, standing a little apart from the others, his face to a dark, narrow window-slit, praying.

  Vinaszh the garrison commander—the only man there that Rustem knew—raised his eyebrows in silent inquiry and took a step forward. Rustem shook his head and then changed his mind. You continue to be accountable, the King of Kings had said. Act accordingly.

  Rustem stepped aside to allow the vizier and the prince to walk into the room. Then he motioned for the commander to enter as well. He said nothing at all, but locked eyes with Vinaszh for a moment as the other man went in. Rustem followed and closed the door.

  ‘Father!’ cried the prince.

  ‘What is to be has long ago been written,’ murmured Shirvan of Bassania calmly. He was propped up on pillows, his bare chest wrapped in the linen bandages. ‘By the grace of Perun and the Lady, the designs of Black Azal have been blighted for a time. The physician has removed the arrow.’