The Sarantine Mosaic

by Guy Gavriel Kay

The woman sat on a backless, cushioned seat, the man on the floor by her feet, his head resting against her thigh. They watched the flames in a silence characteristic of her but unusual for him. It had been a very long day. One of her hands rested lightly on his shoulder. Both of them were remembering other flames, other rooms; a slight awkwardness inhabited the place, an awareness of the other chamber—and the bed—just beyond the beaded arch of a door.

  He said, at length, ‘You haven’t worn that scent before, have you? You don’t wear any perfume usually. Do you?’

  She shook her head, then realizing he couldn’t see her, murmured, ‘No.’ And, after a hesitation, ‘It’s Shirin’s. She insisted I wear it tonight.’

  He turned his head then and looked up at her, his eyes wide. ‘Hers? Then … it’s the Empress’s perfume?’

  Kasia nodded. ‘Shirin said I should feel like royalty tonight.’ She managed a smile. ‘I think it is safe. Unless you’ve invited guests.’

  Their guests had left them some time ago at the front door, departing with bawdy jests and a ragged soldiers’ chorus of one particularly obscene song.

  Carullus, newly appointed chiliarch of the Second Calysian Cavalry, chuckled briefly, then fell silent.

  ‘I can’t imagine wanting anyone else to be with me,’ he said quietly. And then, ‘And you don’t need Alixana’s scent to be royal here.’

  Kasia made a wry face, an expression from her past, at home. She seemed to be recovering those aspects of herself, slowly. ‘You are a flatterer, soldier. Did that work on the girls in taverns?’

  She had been a girl in a tavern.

  He shook his head, still serious, intent. ‘Never said it. Never had a wife.’

  Her expression changed, but he was looking into the fire again and couldn’t see it. She looked down at him. At this soldier, this husband. A big man, black hair, broad shoulders, thick hands, a burly chest. And she abruptly realized, wondering at it, that he was afraid of her, of hurting or distressing her.

  Something twisted, oddly, within Kasia then as the firelight danced. There had been a pool of water once, far in the north. She would go there to be alone. Erimitsu: the clever one. Too sharp, disdainful. Before the plague and then an autumn road with her mother standing among falling leaves watching them lead her away, roped to the other girls.

  The gods of the north, those windswept open spaces, or Jad, or the zubir of the southern Aldwood—someone or something had led her to this room. There seemed to be shelter here. A fire, walls. A man sitting quietly on the floor at her feet. A place out of the wind, for once.

  It was a gift, it was a gift. The twist in her heart tightened as she looked down. A gift. Her hand, in turn, tightened on his shoulder, moved to brush his hair.

  ‘You do now,’ she said. ‘You have a wife now. Will you not take her to bed?’

  ‘Oh, Jad!’ he said, releasing his breath in a rush, as if he’d been holding it for a long time.

  She actually laughed. Another gift.

  Mardoch of the First Amorian Infantry, summoned north from the borderlands to Deapolis with his company—none of the officers would say for certain why, though everyone had guesses—was half convinced he’d been poisoned by something he’d eaten in one of the cauponae they’d sampled tonight. Wretched luck. His very first leave in the City, after six months in the Emperor’s army, and he was sick as a Bassanid dog, with the older men laughing at him.

  A few of the others had waited the first two times he’d been forced to stop and heave his guts in a shop doorway, but when his belly churned again and he slowly recovered to stand precariously upright, wiping his wet chin, shivering against a wall in the butt-freezing wind, he discovered that the bastards had gone on without him this time. He listened, heard singing voices somewhere ahead, and pushed off from the wall to follow.

  He was far from sober, in addition to the extreme disarray of his internal organs. He soon lost track of the singing and he had no real idea where he was. He decided he’d head back towards the water—they’d been going that way in any case—and find either another caupona or their inn or a girl. The white moon had to be east, which gave him a direction. He didn’t feel as sick any more, either, which was a blessing of bright Heladikos, ever the soldier’s friend.

  It was cold, though, and the downward-sloping way seemed longer and the lanes more twisty than earlier in the evening. It was strangely difficult to keep going in the proper direction. He kept seeing those eerie flames as he went, appearing, disappearing. You weren’t supposed to talk about them, but they were unsettling, in the extreme. Made him jump, they did. Mardoch kept walking, cursing under his breath.

  When a litter he hadn’t seen or heard pulled up beside him and a clipped, aristocratic voice from inside asked if a citizen could assist a brave soldier of the Empire, he was entirely happy to accede.

  He achieved a salute, then climbed inside as one of the big bearers pulled the curtain back for him. Mardoch settled himself on plump cushions, aware of his own unsavoury smell, suddenly. The man inside was even bigger than the litter-bearer—stupefyingly so, in fact. He was huge. It was very dark when the curtain fell back, and there was a sweetish scent, some perfume that threatened to churn Mardoch’s stomach again.

  ‘You are heading for the waterfront, I assume?’ the patrician asked.

  ‘’Course I am,’ Mardoch snorted. ‘Where else’ll a soldier find a whore he can afford? Begging your lordship’s pardon.’

  ‘Best to be careful of the women there,’ the man said. His voice was distinctive, curiously high-pitched, very precise.

  ‘Everyone says that.’ Mardoch shrugged. It was warm here, the pillows were astonishingly soft. He could almost sleep. In the dark it was hard to make out the details of the man’s face. The bulk of him was what registered.

  ‘Everyone is wise. Will you take wine?’

  TWO DAYS LATER, when muster was taken in Deapolis among the First Amorians, Mardoch of Sarnica would be among three men reported missing and routinely declared a deserter. It did happen when the young country soldiers went into the City and were exposed to what it offered in the way of temptation. They were all warned, of course, before being allowed to go on leave. Recaptured men could be blinded or maimed for desertion, depending on their officers. For a first offence and a voluntary return, you would probably just be whipped. But with rumours of war growing and the frenzy of building in the shipyards in Deapolis and on the other side of the strait, past the small forested islands, the soldiers knew that those who didn’t return on their own might expect much worse when they were tracked down. Men were killed for deserting in wartime.

  Within another day or two some of the rumours would become more specific. The eastern army was losing half its pay, it was said. Then someone heard they’d lose all of it. Some business about farmland granted to compensate. Farmland at the edge of the desert? No one found it amusing. Those plans were said to be for those who stayed behind in the east. The rest of them were going to war—in those boats being slapped together much too quickly for an infantryman’s comfort. That was why they’d been ordered to Deapolis. To sail that long way west, far from home, to Batiara, to fight the Antae or the Inicii—those savage, godless tribes that ate their enemies’ cooked flesh and drank their hot blood, or gouged knife slits in bellies and raped soldiers in there before gelding and skinning them and hanging them from oak trees by their hair.

  Two of the three missing soldiers would come back to the company on that second day, white-faced and apprehensive, badly the worse for drinking binges. They would take their lashes, be routinely salved by the company physician with wine in the wounds and down their throats. Mardoch of Sarnica didn’t return, was never found, in fact. A lucky bastard, some of his companions would decide, looking anxiously at the boats being built.

  ‘WILL YOU TAKE WINE?’ Mardoch heard the light, clipped voice ask him in the shadowed warmth of the enclosed litter. The movement of the bearers was steady, soothing.

  Silly que
stion to ask a soldier. Of course he’d take wine. The cup was heavy, had jewels set into it. The wine was dark and good. The other man watched him as Mardoch drained the cup.

  When he held it out for more, the enormous patrician shook his head slowly in the close, scented darkness. ‘That will be sufficient, I think,’ the man said. Mardoch blinked. He had a blurred, confused sense that a hand was lying on his thigh, and it wasn’t his own.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he thought he said.

  Rustem was a physician, and had spent too much time in Ispahani to be shocked or startled by iron rings set into bedposts or the other, more delicate devices he found in the room they showed him to in the Senator’s small, elegant guest-house near the triple walls.

  This was, he concluded, a bedroom wherein Plautus Bonosus was evidently inclined to amuse himself away from the comfort—and the constraints—of his family.

  It was hardly unusual: aristocrats all over the world did variants of the same thing if they lived in circumstances that allowed for some privacy. Kerakek had no such houses, of course. Everyone in a village knew what everyone else was doing, from the fortress on down.

  Rustem placed the series of thin golden rings— designed, he had belatedly realized, to fit over the shafts of variously sized male sexual organs—back into their leather bag. He pulled the drawstrings closed and replaced the bag beside the silken scarves and lengths of thin cord and a number of more obscure objects in the brass-lined trunk from which he’d taken it. The trunk hadn’t been locked, and the room was now his own, as a guest of the Senator. He’d felt no guilt about looking around while arranging his own belongings. He was a spy for the King of Kings. He needed to become skilful at this. Scruples would have to be expunged. Would Great Shirvan and his advisers be interested to learn of the night-time inclinations of the Master of the Sarantine Senate?

  Rustem closed the trunk and glanced over at the subsiding fire. He could stoke it himself, of course, but he made a different decision. The objects he had just observed and held had induced unusual feelings, and an awareness of just how far away he was from his own wives. Despite the fatigue attendant upon a long and turbulent day—with a death at the outset—Rustem noted, with professional expertise, the signs of arousal within himself.

  He went to the door, opened it, and called down for someone to build up the fire. It was a small house. He heard an immediate reply from below stairs. With some satisfaction he saw the young serving girl—Elita, she’d named herself earlier—enter the room, eyes deferentially lowered, a few moments afterwards. He’d thought it might be the rather officious steward, but that fellow was clearly above such duties and probably asleep already. The hour was late.

  Rustem sat in the window seat and watched the woman attend to the flames and sweep the ashes. When she’d done and had risen to her feet, he said mildly, ‘I tend to be cold at night, girl. I should prefer you to stay.’

  She flushed, but made no demur. He’d known she wouldn’t, not in a house of this sort. And he was an honoured guest.

  She proved to be soft, agreeably warm, compliant if not truly adept. He preferred that, in a way. If he’d wanted extreme carnal experience he’d have inquired after an expensive prostitute. This was Sarantium. One could get anything here, word was. Anything in the world. He treated the girl kindly, letting her stay in the bed with him after. Her own was certainly going to be no more than a pallet in a cold room below, and they could hear the wind outside.

  It did occur to him, as he felt his mind beginning to drift, that the servants might have been instructed to keep a watchful eye on this visiting Bassanid—which would explain the girl’s acquiescence as easily as anything else. There was something amusing in that, and something disturbing, too. He was too tired to sort it through. He fell asleep. He dreamed of his daughter, the one he was losing as the King of Kings raised him to glory and the priestly caste.

  The girl, Elita, was still with him some time later when the entire house was roused by an urgent pounding and a shouting at the door in the depths of the night.

  Moving in a litter through darkness from the Imperial Precinct to her own city home, an unexpected escort riding beside her, Gisel decided, long before they arrived, what she intended to do.

  She thought that she might in time be able to reclaim some pride in that fact: it would be her choice, her decision made. That didn’t mean that anything she did would necessarily succeed. With so many other plans and schemes now in place—here and back home—the odds were overwhelmingly against her. They always had been, from the time her father died and the Antae had reluctantly crowned his only living child. But at least she could think, act, not bob like a small boat on the great wave of events.

  She had known, for example, exactly what she was doing when she sent an angry, bitter artisan halfway across the world with a proposal of marriage to the Emperor of Sarantium. She remembered standing before that man, Caius Crispus, alone at night in her palace, letting him look—demanding that he gaze his fill of her.

  You may tell the Emperor you have seen the queen of the Antae very near …

  She flushed, remembering that. After what she’d encountered in the palace tonight, the measure of her innocence was clear. It was past time to lose some of that innocence. But she couldn’t even really say what plan tonight’s decision—with the unworthy thread of fear still in it—might further. She only knew she was going to do it.

  She lifted the curtain a little, could see the horse still keeping pace beside her litter. She recognized a chapel door. They were nearing her house. Gisel took a deep breath, tried to be amused at her fear, this primitive anxiety.

  It was simply a question, she told herself, of putting something new into play, something that came from her, to see what ripples it might create. In this tumble and rush of huge events, one used whatever came to hand or mind—as always—and she had decided to treat her own body as a piece in the game. In play.

  Queens lacked, really, the luxury to think of themselves otherwise. In an elegant room in a palace tonight, the Emperor of Sarantium had taken away from her any lingering illusions about consultation, negotiation, diplomacy, anything that might forestall for Batiara the iron-edged truth of war.

  Seeing him in that exquisite small chamber with his Empress, seeing her, had also removed certain other illusions. In that astonishing room, with its fabrics and wall hangings and silver candlesticks, amid mahogany and sandalwood, and leather from Soriyya, and incense, with a golden sun disk on the wall above each door and a golden tree wherein sat a score of jewelled birds, Gisel had felt as if the souls in the room were at the very centre of the spinning world. Here was the heart of things. Sudden, violent images of the future had seemed to dance and whirl in the firelit air, hurtling past at a dizzying speed along the walls while the room itself remained, somehow, motionless as those birds on the golden branches of the Emperor’s tree.

  Valerius was going to war in Batiara.

  It had been resolved in his mind long ago, Gisel finally understood. He was a man who made his own decisions, and his gaze was on generations yet to be born as much as on those he ruled today. She had met him now, she could see it.

  She herself, her presence here, might be of assistance or might not. A tactical tool. It didn’t matter, not in the larger scheme. Neither did anyone else’s views. Not the Strategos’s, the Chancellor’s, not even Alixana’s.

  The Emperor of Sarantium, contemplative and courteous and very sure of himself, had a vision: of Rhodias reclaimed, the sundered Empire remade. Visions on this scale could be dangerous; such ambition carried all before it sometimes. He wants to leave a name, Gisel had thought, kneeling before him to hide her face, and then rising again, her composure intact. He wants to be remembered for this.

  Men were like that. Even the wise ones. Her father no exception. A dread of dying and being forgotten. Lost to the memory of the world as it went mercilessly on without them. Gisel searched within herself and found no such burning need. She didn’t w
ant to be hated or scorned when Jad called her to him behind the sun, but she felt no fierce passion to have her name sung down the echoing years or have her face and form preserved in mosaic or marble forever—or for however long stone and glass could endure.

  What she liked, she realized wistfully, was the idea of rest at the end, when it came. Her body beside her father’s in that modest sanctuary outside Varena’s walls, her soul in grace with the god the Antae had adopted. Was such grace allowed? The possibility of it?

  Earlier, in the palace, meeting the watchful eyes of the eunuch Chancellor Gesius for a moment, Gisel had thought she’d seen pity and understanding, both. A man who’d survived to serve three Emperors in his day would have some knowledge of the turnings of the world.

  But Gisel was still inside these turnings, still young and alive, far from detached serenity or grace. Anger caught in her throat. She hated the very idea that someone might pity her. An Antae, a queen of the Antae? Hildric’s daughter? Pity? It was enough to make one kill.

  Killing was not, in the circumstances, a possibility tonight. Other things were, including the spill of her own blood. An irony? Of course it was.

  The world was full of those.

  The litter stopped. She lifted the curtain again, saw the door of her own home, night torches burning in their brackets on the wall to either side. She heard her escort swing down from his horse, saw his face appear beside her. His breath made a puff of smoke in the very cold night air.

  ‘We have arrived, gracious lady. I am sorry for the chill. May I help you alight?’

  She smiled at him. Found that she could smile quite easily. ‘Come in to warm yourself. I’ll have a mulled wine made before you ride back through the cold.’ She looked straight into his eyes.

  The pause was brief. ‘I am greatly honoured,’ said golden Leontes, Supreme Strategos of the Sarantine armies. A tone that made one believe him. And why not believe him? She was a queen.