The Sarantine Mosaic

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  He entirely forgot there was blood on his dagger, neglected to clean it all that day, but no one paid any attention to him so it didn’t matter.

  He was so seldom noticed; an historian, a recorder of events, hovering and grey, present everywhere, but not ever someone who ever played any kind of role in events.

  Going up the stairs swiftly, then hurrying through the palace towards an upper staircase and the enclosed walkway that led to the rear of the kathisma, he was already casting his mind after phrasings, a way to begin. The proper tone of detachment and reflection at the outset of a chronicle was so important. Even the most perfunctory study of past events teaches that Jad’s just retribution for the godless and evil may be long in coming but …

  He stopped abruptly, forcing one of the eunuchs in a corridor to sidestep him quickly. He was wondering where the whore was. She was unlikely—surely—to be in the kathisma, though that would have been something to observe. Was she still in her bath in the other palace, naked and slippery with a soldier? He smoothed his tunic. Styliane would deal with her, he thought.

  We must have order in the City tonight, she had said.

  He knew what she meant. How could he not? The last death of an Emperor without a named heir had been Apius’s, and in the violence that followed that—in the Hippodrome and the streets and even the Imperial Senate chamber—an ignorant Trakesian peasant had been lifted on a shield, acclaimed by the rabble, robed in porphyry. Order was hugely important now, and calm among the eighty thousand in the Hippodrome.

  It crossed his mind that if all went as it should, by the end of this day his own status might rise a great deal. He thought of another woman, then, and smoothed his tunic again.

  He was very happy, a rare, almost an unprecedented state for him, as he carried enormous, world-shaking tidings to the kathisma, with blood on the blade in his belt.

  The sun was high above the City, past its peak, going down, but that day—and night—had a long way yet to go in Sarantium.

  In the tunnel, among the dead, two golden figures stood looking at each other in silence, and then walked slowly out and up the wide stairs, not touching, but side by side.

  On the stones behind them, on the mosaic stones under a blue cloak, lay Valerius of Sarantium, the second of that name. His body. What was left of it. His soul was gone, to dolphins, to the god, to wherever souls go.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE WORLD, just then, a longed-for child was born and somewhere a labourer died, leaving a farm grievously undermanned with the spring fields still to be ploughed and the crops all to be planted. A calamity beyond words.

  CHAPTER XII

  The Imperial boat tacked across the straits—no dolphins to be seen this time—and was docked with flawless expertise by a worried crew. Crispin was not the only one watching the port anxiously during their approach.

  Men had been killed on the isle. At least two of the Excubitors’ own number were traitors. Daleinus had escaped. The Empress had left them to row back with one man only. Danger was in the brightness of the air.

  No one new was waiting for them, however. No enemies, no friends, no one at all. They came into the slip and the dock crew moored them with the ropes and then stood by, waiting for the Empress to descend.

  Whatever the shape of the plot unfolding today, Crispin thought, on the isle, in the Imperial Precinct, it had not been so precisely devised as to include the possibility that the Empress might be taking a pleasure cruise with a visiting artisan, to look at dolphins—and visit a prisoner on an island.

  Alixana, he thought, could have stayed with them after all to sail home. But then what? Have herself carried in the litter back to the Attenine Palace or the Traversite to inquire if her husband had been attacked or killed yet by Lecanus Daleinus and the suborned Excubitors, and did they have any immediate plans for her?

  It was the Excubitors in the plot, he realized, that had made her certain there was a large scheme unfolding here. If the Imperial Guard were being turned, any of them, something deadly and immediate was at work. This was not simply an escape by a prisoner, a flight to freedom.

  No, he knew why she’d left her robe on the strand to make her way back in secrecy. He wondered if he’d ever see her again. Or the Emperor. And then he wondered— for he had to—what would happen to him when it was learned, as it surely would be, that he’d made this morning’s journey with the Empress across the water. They would ask him what he knew. He didn’t know what he would say. He didn’t know, yet, who would be asking.

  He thought about Styliane then. Remembering what she’d said to him before he’d left her in the night, through a window into the courtyard. Some events must happen now. I will not say I am sorry. Remember this room, though, Rhodian. Whatever else I do.

  He was not so innocent as to believe that the ruined brother on the isle, even with his bird-soul, had shaped his escape alone. Crispin wondered where his anger was: it had defined him for two years. Anger, he thought, was a luxury of sorts. It offered simplicity. There was nothing simple here. A thing was done once, she had said, and all else follows upon it.

  All else. An empire, a world, all who lived within that world. The shape of the past defining the shape of the present. I will not say I am sorry.

  He remembered going up the dark stairs, desire running in him like a river. The bitter complexity of her. Remembered it as he would always now remember Alixana, too. Images begetting images. The Empress on the stony beach. The whore, Pertennius had called her in his secret papers. Vile things, such hatred. Anger was easier, Crispin thought.

  He looked down. The crew on the dock were standing in order, still expecting the Empress to descend. The Excubitors and sailors aboard looked uncertainly at each other and then—it might have been amusing had there been any space for laughter in the world—at Crispin, for guidance. Their leader had gone with the Empress.

  Crispin shook his head. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘Go to your posts. Report, I suppose. Whatever you do when … this sort of thing happens.’ This sort of thing. He felt like an idiot. Linon would have told him as much.

  Carullus would have known what to say to them. But Crispin was not a soldier. Nor had his father been. Though that hadn’t stopped Horius Crispus from dying in battle, had it? Styliane’s father had burned. That abomination on the isle had been handsome once, and proud. Crispin thought of the god’s image on the dome in Sauradia, his face grey, his fingers broken in the struggle against evil.

  And he was falling, piece by piece.

  They lowered the wide plank to the dock. They didn’t unroll the carpet. The Empress was not here. Crispin went down and away from all of them amid the bustle of a harbour preparing for war, and no one stopped him, no one even noted his passing.

  In the distance as he walked from the sea he could hear a roaring sound. The Hippodrome. Men and women watching horses run for their delight. There was a sickness within him, a black foreboding in the day. Some events must happen now.

  He had no idea where to go, what to do. The taverns would be quiet, with so many at the Hippodrome, but he didn’t want to sit somewhere and get drunk. Yet. With the chariots running, Carullus wouldn’t be at home, he thought, nor would Shirin. Artibasos would be in the Sanctuary, and so would Pardos and Vargos, almost certainly. He could go to work. He could always do that. He had been working this morning when she’d come for him. He’d been trying to summon the distance and the clarity to render his daughters on the dome, that they might be there for as near to forever as an artisan could dream of achieving.

  He didn’t have any of it now. Not the girls, or distance or clarity. Not even the simplicity of anger any more. For the first time Crispin could remember, the thought of going up and absorbing himself in craft repelled him. He had seen men die this morning, had struck a blow himself. Going up the ladder now would be … a coward’s retreat. And he would badly mar whatever work he tried to do today.

  Another huge roar from the Hippodrome. He was walking that way. Enter
ed into the Hippodrome Forum, saw the vast bulk of the building, the Sanctuary across the way, the statue of the first Valerius and the Bronze Gates beyond it, leading into the Imperial Precinct.

  Events were happening there now, or had already happened. He looked at those gates, standing very still in a huge space. Imagined walking up and seeking admittance. An urgent need to speak to the Emperor. About some aspect of his dome, colour choices, the angle of tesserae. Could he be announced and presented?

  Crispin became aware that his mouth was very dry and his heart was hammering painfully. He was a Rhodian, from a fallen, conquered land, one that Valerius was proposing to visit again with devastating war. He’d sent messages home, to his mother, his friends, knowing they would mean nothing, could achieve nothing.

  He ought to hate the man who was readying this fleet, these soldiers. Instead, he was remembering Valerius one night in the Sanctuary, running his hand through the hair of a rumpled architect, like a mother, telling him—ordering him—to go home and sleep.

  Were the Antae better than what Sarantium might bring to the peninsula? Especially the Antae as they would be now, civil war savagely portended. There were more deaths coming, whether Valerius’s army sailed or not.

  And assassination attempts were not confined to barbarians like the Antae, Crispin thought, looking at the proud glory of those bronze gates. He wondered if Valerius was dead; thought again of Alixana. On the beach just now, the surf-washed stones: When your wife died … how did you go on living?

  How had she known to ask that?

  He ought not to care so much. He ought to still be a stranger here, detached from these glittering, deadly figures and whatever was happening today. These people—women and men—were so far beyond him they moved through an entirely different space in Jad’s creation. He was an artisan. A layer of glass and stone. Whoever ruled, he had told Martinian once, in his anger, there would be work for mosaicists, why should they be concerned with what intrigues happened in palaces?

  He was marginal, incidental … and burdened with images. He looked at the Bronze Gates, still hesitating, still imagining an approach, but then he turned away.

  He went to a chapel. Randomly chosen, the first one he came to along a lane running down and east. Not a street he knew. The chapel was small, quiet, nearly empty, a handful of women, mostly older, shapes in shadow, murmuring, no cleric at this hour. The chariots taking the people away. An old, old battle. Here the sunlight almost disappeared into a pallid half-light filtering through too-small windows ringing a low dome. No decorations. Mosaics were expensive, so were frescoes. It was obvious no wealthy people attended here, salving their souls with gifts to the clerics. There were lamps suspended from overhead in a single line from altar to doors, a handful of others at the side altars, but only a few of them were lit: they would be frugal with oil, at winter’s end.

  Crispin stood for a time facing the altar and the disk, and then he knelt—no cushions here—on the hard floor and closed his eyes. Among women at prayer he thought of his mother: small and brave and exquisite, scent of lavender always about her, alone for so long, since his father died. He felt very far away.

  Someone rose, signed the disk, and walked out. An old woman, bent with her years. Crispin heard the door open and swing shut behind him. It was very quiet. And then, in that stillness, he heard someone begin to sing.

  He looked up. No one else seemed to stir. The voice, delicate and plaintive, was off to his left. He seemed to see a shadowy figure there, at one of the side altars where the lamp was not burning. There were a handful of candles lit by the altar but he couldn’t even tell if the singer was a girl or an older woman, the light was so subdued.

  He did realize, after a moment, collecting his meandering thoughts, that the voice was singing in Trakesian, which was entirely strange. The liturgy here was always chanted in Sarantine.

  His command of Trakesian—the old tongue of those who had ruled much of the world before Rhodias—was precarious, but as he listened it came to Crispin that what he was hearing was a lament.

  No one else moved. No one entered. He knelt among praying women in a dim, holy place and listened to a voice sing of sorrow in an ancient tongue, and it occurred to him that music was one of the things that had not been in his life since Ilandra died. Her night songs for the girls had been for him, as well, listening in the house.

  Who knows love?

  Who says he knows love?

  This singer, a shape and barely that, a voice without a body, was not singing a Kindath lullaby. She was offering— Crispin finally understood—an entirely pagan sorrow: the corn maiden and the antlered god, the Sacrifice and the Hunted One. In a chapel of Jad. Images that had already been ancient when Trakesia was great.

  Crispin shivered, kneeling on stone. Looked again to his left, eyes straining to pierce the gloom. Only a shadow. Candles. Only a voice. No one moved.

  And it came to him then, feeling unseen spirits hovering in the dimness, that Valerius the Emperor had been Petrus of Trakesia before he came south to his uncle from the northern fields, and that he would have known this song.

  And with that, there came another thought and Crispin closed his eyes again and named himself a fool. For if this were true—and of course it was—then Valerius would also have known exactly what the bison in Crispin’s sketches for the Sanctuary was. He was from northern Trakesia, the forests and grainlands, places where pagan roots had been in the soil for centuries.

  Valerius would have recognized the zubir as soon as he’d seen it in the drawings.

  And he had said nothing. Had given the sketches to the Eastern Patriarch, had approved them for the dome of his own legacy, his Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom. Awareness entered Crispin like a wind. Overwhelmed, he pushed his hands through his hair.

  What man dared try to reconcile so many things in the span of a single life, he thought. East and west brought together again, north coming down to south, a faction dancer becoming an Empress. The daughter of one’s enemy and … victim, married to one’s own friend and Strategos. The zubir of the Aldwood, huge and wild—the essence of the wild—on a dome consecrated to Jad in the heart of the triple-walled City.

  Valerius. Valerius had tried. There was … a pattern here. Crispin felt he could nearly see it, almost understand. He was a maker of patterns himself, working in tesserae and light. The Emperor had worked with human souls and the world.

  There was a voice here, mourning.

  Shall the maiden never walk the bright fields again,

  Her hair as yellow as the grain?

  The horns of the god can hold the blue moon.

  When the Huntress shoots him he dies.

  How can we, the children of time, ever live

  If these two must die?

  How can we, the children of loss, ever learn

  What we may leave behind?

  When the sound of roaring is heard in the wood

  The children of earth will cry.

  When the beast that was roaring comes into the fields

  The children of blood must die.

  He struggled to understand the Trakesian words, and yet he understood so much, bypassing thought: the way he’d looked up in that chapel in Sauradia on the Day of the Dead and grasped a truth about Jad and the world on the dome. His heart was full, aching. Mysteries swept through him. He felt small, mortal, and alone, pierced by a song as by a sword.

  After a time he became aware that the solitary voice had ended. He looked over again. No sign of the singer. No one there. At all. He turned quickly to the doors. No one was walking out. No movement anywhere in the chapel, no footsteps. None of the others in the dim, filtered light had even stirred, during the song or now. As if they hadn’t even heard it.

  Crispin shivered again, uncontrollably, a feeling of something unseen brushing against him, against his life. His hands were shaking. He stared at them as if they belonged to someone else. Who was it who had sung that lament? What was being mour
ned with pagan words in a chapel of Jad? He thought of Linon, in grey mist on the cold grass. Remember me. Did the half-world linger forever, once you entered it? He didn’t know. He didn’t know.

  He clasped his hands together, staring at them— scratches, cuts, old scars—until they grew steady again. He spoke the Invocation to Jad into shadow and silence and he made the sign of the sun disk and then he asked the god for mercy and for light, for the dead and the living he knew, here and far away. And then he rose and went back out into the day, walking home along streets and lanes, through squares, under covered colonnades, hearing the noise from the Hippodrome behind him as he went—very loud now, something happening. He saw men running, appearing from all directions, carrying sticks and knives. He saw a sword. His heart was still hammering like a drum, painful in his breast.

  It was beginning. Or, seen another way, it was ending. He ought not to care so much. He did, though, more than words could tell. It was a truth, not to be denied. But there was no role left for him to play.

  He was wrong, in the event.

  Shirin was waiting when he arrived at his home. She had Danis about her neck.

  The riot boiled up with unbelievable speed. One moment the Blues were running their Victory Lap, the next, the screaming had changed, turned ugly, and there was savage violence in the Hippodrome.

  Cleander, in the tunnel where Scortius lay, looked back out through the Processional Gates and saw men battling with fists and then knives as the factions fought through the neutral stands to get at each other. People were being trampled in their efforts to get out of the way. He saw someone lifted bodily and thrown through the air, landing on heads several rows below. As he watched, a woman, twisting to get out of the way of a cluster of antagonists, fell to her knees and Cleander imagined—even at this distance and with the uproar all around—that he could hear her screams as they trampled her. People were milling desperately towards the exits in a brutal crush of bodies.

  He looked at his stepmother, then at the kathisma at the far end of the long straight. His father was up there, too far away to be of any help to them at all. He didn’t even know they’d come today. Cleander drew a deep breath. He took a last quick look at the doctors labouring over the prone body of Scortius and then he left. He took his stepmother gently by the elbow and led her further into the tunnel. She came obediently, saying nothing at all. He knew this place extremely well. They came at length to a small, locked door. Cleander picked the lock (it wasn’t difficult, and he’d done it before) and then unhooked the latch and they emerged at the very eastern end of the Hippodrome.