The Sarantine Mosaic

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  Saw the bird, almost immediately, on the window ledge.

  ‘I don’t know why she’s here today! How can I answer that? Keep calm. She may only be anxious. She may—’

  Alixana laughed aloud. Again the illusion was frightening. It was another woman’s laughter, not her own. Crispin remembered Styliane in her own bedchamber, the low, sardonic sound of her amusement, identical to this. ‘You are disgusting, by choice,’ the Empress said. ‘A comic version of yourself, like some cheap pantomime figure. Have you nothing better to offer or ask than a grope in your darkness?’

  ‘What else could I … possibly … offer you, dear sister? Wife of the Supreme Strategos. Did he please … you last night? In your dark? Did someone else? Oh, tell me! Tell!’ The voice, through the whistling sound, was laboured, broken, as if the sounds were crawling up from some labyrinthine half-blocked tunnel leading down to things below the earth.

  ‘Good!’ Crispin heard again, in the silence of the half-world. ‘I think I’m right. She’s just checking on you. The war coming. This is an accident. She’s only worried. You’d be pleased—she looks wretched, used by slaves. Old!’

  Fighting nausea, Crispin stayed where he was, his breathing carefully shallow, though there was no actual secret to his presence now. His mind was in a desperate whirl. Out of the chaos, a question spun free and he reached for it: how did this man and his creature know, here, about the war?

  There was something ugly at work here. This bird was like none he had yet known or heard. The inner voice wasn’t that of Zoticus’s creations. This birdsoul spoke in a woman’s voice, bitter and hard, from beyond Bassania: Ispahani or Ajbar or lands whose names he did not know. It was dark in hue, small as Linon, but not like Linon at all.

  He remembered that the Daleinoi had made their fortune with a monopoly on the spice trade to the east. He looked at the man on the couch, burned so terribly, turned into this horror, and again the thought came to him: how is he alive?

  And again the same answer came and he was afraid.

  ‘I know,’ said the bird abruptly, replying to something. ‘I know! I know! I know!’ And what Crispin heard now in the low, harsh voice was exultation, fierce as a blaze.

  ‘I take no delight,’ the Empress said, all ice and edge like Styliane, ‘in any of this, and see no reason to attend to your pleasures. I prefer my own, brother. I’m here to ask if there’s anything you need … immediately.’ She left an emphasis on the last word. ‘You might recall, dear brother, that they leave us alone for only a little while.’

  ‘Of course I … recall. That is why you are cruel … to be dressed … still. Little sister, come closer … and tell me. Tell me … how did he … take you, last night?’

  Stomach churning, Crispin saw the ruined man’s hand, gnarled like a claw, reach under his own tunic to his groin. And he heard the inward laughter of the eastern bird.

  ‘Think of your father,’ said Alixana. ‘And of your ancestors. If this is all you are now, brother, I shall not return. Consider it, Lecanus. I warned you last time. I’m going to take a walk now and a meal in sunlight on the island. I will come back before I sail. When I do, if this is what you are, still, I will have no more time for this journey and will not return.’

  ‘Oh! Oh!’ wheezed the man on the couch. ‘I am desolate! I have … shamed my dear sister. Our innocent … fair child.’

  Crispin saw Alixana bite her lip, staring at the figure before her as if her gaze could probe his depths. She couldn’t know, Crispin thought. She couldn’t know why her immaculate, brilliant deception was being so effortlessly defeated. But she sensed it was being foiled, somehow, that Lecanus was playing with her, and perhaps that was why she feared this room so much. And why she still came.

  She said nothing more, walked from the room and the house, head high, shoulders straight, as before. An actress, an Empress, proud as some goddess of the ancient pantheon, betraying nothing, unless you looked very, very closely.

  Crispin followed, the laughter of the bird drilling in his head. Just as he came into the sunshine, closing his eyes, temporarily blind, he heard, ‘I want to be there! Lecanus, I want us to be there!’

  He didn’t hear the reply, of course.

  ‘Styliane never pleasured him, in the event you were wondering. She’s corrupt in her own ways, but she never did that.’

  Crispin was wondering how much was known about a certain recent night, and then decided not to think about it. They were on the southern side of the island, facing Deapolis across the water. Her Excubitors had accompanied them through the trees, past a second clearing with another set of huts and houses. These were empty. There had been other prisoners here once, evidently. Not now. Lecanus Daleinus had the isle to himself, with his handful of guards.

  It was past midday now, by the sun. They would be racing again in the Hippodrome soon, if they hadn’t started already, the day turning steadily towards an announcement of war. Crispin understood that the Empress was simply allowing an interval to pass before she went back to that house in the clearing to see if anything had changed.

  It wouldn’t have, he knew. What he didn’t know was whether to say anything about it. There were so many betrayals embedded here: of Zoticus, of Shirin and her bird, and of his own privacy, his gift, his secret. Linon. At the same time, those last silent words of the eastern creature were still with him, with the undeniable signal of danger in them.

  He had little appetite when they sat down to their meal, picked in a desultory fashion at the fish-cakes and the olives. Drank his wine. Had asked for it to be well watered. The Empress was largely silent, had been from the time they’d left the clearing. She had walked off by herself, in fact, when they’d first reached this strand, becoming a small, purple-cloaked dot in the distance along the stony beachfront here, two of her soldiers following at a distance. Crispin had sat down on a grassy place between trees and stones, watching the changing light on the sea. Green, blue, blue-green, grey.

  Eventually she had come back, gestured for him not to rise, and had taken her place, gracefully, on a square of silk unfolded for her. The food had been spread on another cloth in this quiet place that ought to have been soothing in its beauty, a benign embodiment of the quickening spring.

  Crispin said, after a time, ‘You watched them together, I gather. Styliane and … her brother.’

  The Empress wasn’t eating either. She nodded. ‘Of course. I had to. How else would I have learned how and what to say, playing her?’ She looked at him.

  So obvious, seen in that way. An actress, learning her part. Crispin looked back out to sea. Deapolis showed clearly across the water. He could see more ships in the harbour there. A fleet for an army, sailing west, to his home. He had warned his mother, and Martinian and Carissa. It meant nothing. What could they do? There was a dull fear within him; the memory of the bird in that dark cabin a part of that now.

  He said, ‘And you do this … you come here, because … ’

  ‘Because Valerius won’t let him be killed. I thought of doing it, despite that. Killing him. But it matters a great deal to the Emperor. The visible hand of mercy, since the family … suffered so much when those … unknown people burned Flavius. So I come here, and do this … performance, and learn nothing. If I am to believe him, Lecanus is broken and vile and purposeless.’ She paused. ‘I can’t stop coming.’

  ‘Why won’t he kill him? There has to be so much hatred. I know they think the Emperor … ordered it. The burning.’ Not a question he’d ever imagined himself asking anyone, let alone the Empress of Sarantium. And not with this terrible inward sense that perhaps the killing of this man ought to have been done by now. Perhaps even in mercy. He thought, wistfully, of a scaffold in the air, shining pieces of glass and stone, memory, his girls.

  Sorrow was easier than this. The thought came to him suddenly. A hard truth.

  Alixana was silent for a long time. He waited. Caught the drift of her scent. That gave him pause for a moment, then he decide
d that Lecanus couldn’t have known about the personal nature of that perfume. He’d been here too long. And then he realized that that wasn’t it either: the man’s nose was gone. The Empress would have realized that. Crispin shuddered. She saw it. Looked away.

  She said, ‘You can have no idea what it was like here in the time when Apius was dying.’

  ‘I’m certain of that,’ Crispin said.

  ‘He had his own nephews blinded and imprisoned here.’ Her voice was flat, lifeless. He had never heard her like this. ‘There was no heir. Flavius Daleinus was behaving, for months before Apius died, as an Emperorin-waiting. Receiving courtiers at his estate and even his city home, on a chair in a receiving room on a crimson carpet. Some of them knelt before him.’

  Crispin said nothing.

  ‘Petrus … believed Daleinus would be entirely, dangerously wrong as Emperor. For many reasons.’ She looked at him, the dark eyes searching his. And he understood what was unsettling him so: he had no idea how to react when she spoke, or looked, as a woman, a person, and not as an Imperial power beyond comprehension.

  He said, ‘So he helped put his uncle on the throne instead. I know this. Everyone does.’

  She refused to look away. ‘Everyone does. And Flavius Daleinus died in Sarantine Fire on the street outside his house. He was … wearing porphyry. He was on his way to the Senate, Crispin.’

  The clothing had all burned away, Carullus had told him, but there had been rumours of the purple trim. Crispin, sitting on an island strand these long years after, had no doubt of the truth of what the Empress was saying.

  He took a breath and said, ‘I am lost here, my lady. I don’t understand what I am doing here, why I am hearing this. I am supposed to call you thrice-exalted, kneel in obeisance.’

  She smiled a little then, for the first time. ‘Indeed, artisan. I had almost forgotten. You haven’t done either in a while, have you?’

  ‘I have no idea how to … act here.’

  She shrugged, her expression still amused, something else in her voice, however. ‘Why should you know? I am being capricious and unfair, telling hidden things, enforcing the illusion of intimacy. But I can have you killed and buried here if I say but a word to the soldiers. Why should you assume you might know how to conduct yourself?’

  She reached over and chose a pitted olive. ‘You can’t know this, either, of course, but that ruined figure we just saw was the best of them all. Clever and brave, a splendid, handsome man. He went east himself, many times, with the spice caravans, past Bassania, to learn whatever he could. I regret what the fire did to him more than what happened to his father. He should have died, not lived to become—this thing.’

  Crispin swallowed again. ‘Why the fire? Why that way?’

  Alixana’s gaze was steady. His awareness was of her courage … and simultaneously of the fact that she might be showing him courage, leading him to see it in her, for her own purposes. He was adrift and afraid, continuously aware of how many layers and contours of meaning there were with this woman. He shivered. Even before she answered, he was sorry he’d asked.

  She said, ‘Empires need symbols. New Emperors need powerful ones. A moment when all changes, when the god speaks with a clear voice. On the day Valerius I was acclaimed in the Hippodrome, Flavius Daleinus wore purple in the street, walked out to claim the Golden Throne as if by right. He died appallingly, as if by a bolt from Jad, a striking down from above for such presumption, never to be forgotten.’ Her eyes never left his own. ‘It would not have been the same had he been stabbed by some soldier in an alleyway.’

  Crispin found that he could not look away from her. The exact, worldly intelligence within her beauty. He opened his mouth, found he could not speak. And seeing that, she smiled. ‘You are about to say again,’ said the Empress Alixana, ‘that you are only an artisan, that you want nothing to do with any of this. Am I right, Caius Crispus?’

  He closed his mouth. Took a deep, unsteady breath. She could be wrong, and she was, this time. His heart pounding, an odd, roaring sound in his ears, Crispin heard himself say, ‘You cannot deceive the man in that house, my lady, even though he is blind. He has an unnatural creature with him that can see, and speaks to him silently. Something from the half-world. He knows it is you and not his sister, Empress.’

  She went white. He would always remember it. White as a shroud. As the winding sheet in which the dead were wrapped for burial. She stood up, too quickly, almost fell, the only graceless movement he had ever seen her make.

  He scrambled to his feet as well, the roaring in his head like a surf or a storm. He said, ‘He was asking the bird—it is a bird—why you were here, today … of all days. They decided it was accident. That you were only worried. Then the bird said that … that it wanted to be present when … something happened.’

  ‘Oh, dearest Jad,’ said the Empress of Sarantium, and her flawless voice cracked like a plate on stone. And then, ‘Oh, my love.’

  She turned and began to move, almost running, back through the trees on the path. Crispin followed. The Excubitors, alert and attentive as soon as she had stood up, followed them both. One of them sprinted ahead, to guard the path.

  No one spoke. They came back to the clearing. It was silent, as before. The smoke was still rising, as before. No movement could be seen.

  But the door to the prison house of Lecanus Daleinus was unbarred and open and there were two dead guards lying on the ground.

  Alixana stood frozen, rooted to the spot, like one of the pines in the windless air. Her face was riven with anguish, like a tree by a lightning bolt. There were legends, from long ago, of women, wood spirits, changed into trees. Crispin thought of them, seeing her now. There was an appalling, choking sensation in his own chest and the roaring sound had not stopped.

  One of the Excubitors swore furiously, shattering the stillness. All four of them dashed across the open space, drawing their blades, to kneel in pairs by the two slain men. It was Crispin who walked over—he saw that each man had been cut down by a sword, from behind—and re-entered the silent, open house.

  The lamps were gone. The front room was empty. He strode quickly to the back and to the kitchen room at the side. No one there. He came back to the main room, looked at the ledge of the window by the door. The bird, too, was gone.

  Crispin walked out again, into the gentle, deceiving sunshine. The Empress stood, alone, still rooted to the earth, near the encircling trees. Dangerous, he had time to think, before one of the two Excubitors beside the nearest of the dead men stood up and moved behind his fellow soldier. His sword was still drawn. The other man was kneeling, examining the body of the guard. The drawn sword went up, a glinting of metal in the light.

  ‘No!’ Crispin screamed.

  They were the Excubitors, the Imperial Guards, best soldiers in the Empire. The kneeling soldier didn’t look up or back. He’d have died, had he done so. Instead, he hurtled straight to one side from his kneeling position, rolling hard as he did, over the flat of his own sword. The blade that had been sweeping down to take him from behind bit, instead, into the body of the already-slain guard. The attacker swore savagely, ripped his blade free, turned to face the other soldier—the leader of this quartet—who was up now, his own sword levelled.

  There was still no one near the Empress, Crispin saw.

  The two Excubitors faced each other in the sunlight, feet wide for balance, circling slowly. The other two soldiers were on their feet now, halfway across the clearing, but frozen as if in shock.

  There was death here now. There was more than that.

  Caius Crispus of Varena, in the world, of the world, said a quick silent prayer to the god of his fathers and took three hard running steps, hammering his shoulder with all the force he could command into the small of the back of the traitorous soldier in front of him. Crispin wasn’t a fighter, but he was a big man. The man’s breath was expelled with a rush, his head snapped back, his arms splayed helplessly out and wide with the impact,
the sword spinning from nerveless fingers.

  Crispin fell to the ground with him, on top of him, rolled quickly away. He pushed himself up. In time to see the man whose life he’d saved plunge his blade, without ceremony, straight into the back of the other soldier where he lay on the ground, killing him.

  The Excubitor threw Crispin one swift, searching look, then wheeled and sprinted towards the Empress, bloodied sword in hand. Struggling up from his knees, heart in his throat, Crispin watched him go. Alixana stood motionless, a sacrifice in a glade, accepting her fate.

  The soldier stopped in front of her and spun around to defend his Empress.

  Crispin heard a strange sound in his own throat. There were two dead men next to him in this clearing. He ran, stumbling, over to Alixana himself. Her face, he saw, was still chalk white.

  The other two Excubitors came quickly over now, their own blades out, horror written in both faces. The leader, standing in front the Empress, waited for them, his head and eyes darting about, scanning the clearing and the shadows of the pines.

  ‘Sheathe!’ he snapped. ‘Formation. Now.’

  They did, drew themselves up side by side. He stood before them, his gaze ferocious. Looked at one, and then the other.

  Then he plunged his bloodied sword into the belly of the second man.

  Crispin gasped, his fists clenched at his side.

  The leader of the Excubitors watched his victim fall, then he turned again and looked at the Empress.

  Alixana had not moved. She said, her voice entirely without inflection, almost inhuman, ‘He was bought as well, Mariscus?’

  The man said, ‘My lady, I could not be sure. Of Nerius I am sure.’ He gestured with his head at the remaining soldier. He looked at Crispin searchingly. ‘You trust the Rhodian?’ he asked.

  ‘I trust the Rhodian,’ said Alixana of Sarantium. There was no life in her tone, in her face. ‘I believe he saved you.’