The Sarantine Mosaic

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  He looked at his patient and, wordlessly, poured two full measures of his preferred sedative.

  Scortius stared up at him from his pillow. His eyes were dark, his face quite white now. He accepted the mixture, both doses, without protest.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, after a moment. Rustem nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, surprising himself.

  Scortius turned his face to the wall.

  Rustem reclaimed his walking stick and went out, closing the door behind him, to leave the man his privacy.

  He had his speculations but he quelled them. Whatever the man in the bed had said before about his doctor knowing all, it wasn’t the truth, ought not to be the truth.

  It occurred to him, going down the corridor, that they really needed to assert more control over Shaski’s movements here. It was not at all proper for a child, the doctor’s son, to be part of the disruption in patients’ rooms.

  He would have to speak with Katyun about it, among other things. It was time for a midday meal, but he paused to look for Shaski in his put-together treatment rooms in the next building. The boy was more often there than anywhere else.

  He wasn’t now. Someone else was. Rustem recognized the Rhodian artisan—not the young one who’d saved his life in the streets, but the other, more senior fellow who had dressed them in white and taken them all to a wedding feast.

  The man—Crispinus was his name, something like that—looked unwell, but not in a fashion likely to elicit Rustem’s sympathy. Men who drank themselves into illness, especially this early in the day, had only themselves to blame for the consequences.

  ‘Good day, doctor,’ the artisan said, clearly enough. He stood up from the table he’d been sitting upon. No visible unsteadiness. ‘Am I intruding?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Rustem said. ‘How may I … ?’

  ‘I came to visit Scortius, thought I’d confirm with his doctor that it was all right.’

  Well, wine-smitten or not, at least this man knew the protocol in matters of this sort. Rustem nodded briskly. ‘I wish there were more like you. There was just a party with dancers in his room, and wine.’

  The Rhodian—Crispin was the name, actually— smiled faintly. There was a line of strain above his eyes and a degree of unhealthy pallor that suggested that he’d been drinking for longer than this morning. It didn’t square with what Rustem remembered of the decisive man he’d encountered that first day here, but this wasn’t his patient and he made no comment.

  ‘Who would drink wine this early in the day?’ the Rhodian said wryly. He rubbed his forehead. ‘Dancers entertaining him? That sounds like Scortius. You threw them out?’

  Rustem had to smile. ‘Does that sound like me?’

  ‘From what I’ve heard, yes.’ The Rhodian was another clever man, Rustem decided. He kept a hand on the table, supporting himself.

  ‘I gave him a soporific just now, he’ll sleep awhile. You’d do better to come back later in the afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll do that, then.’ The man pushed himself away from the table and swayed. His expression was rueful. ‘Sorry. I’ve been indulging … a sorrow.’

  ‘May I help?’ Rustem said politely.

  ‘I wish, doctor. No. Actually … I’m leaving. Day after next. Sailing west.’

  ‘Oh. Going home? No further employment here for you?’

  ‘You might say that,’ the artisan said after a moment.

  ‘Well … a safe journey to you.’ He really didn’t know the man. The Rhodian nodded his head and walked steadily past Rustem and out the door. Rustem turned to follow him. The man stopped in the hallway.

  ‘I was given your name, you know. Before I left home. I’m … sorry we never had a chance to meet.’

  ‘Given my name?’ Rustem echoed, bemused. ‘How?’

  ‘A … friend. Too complicated to explain. Oh … there’s something in there for you, by the way. One of the messenger boys brought it while I was waiting. Apparently left at the gate.’ He gestured towards the innermost of the two rooms. An object wrapped in cloth stood on the examining table there.

  ‘Thank you,’ Rustem said.

  The Rhodian went down the short corridor and out. The sunlight, Rustem thought, was probably an affliction for him just now. Indulging a sorrow. Not his patient. They couldn’t all be his concern.

  He was interesting, though. Another stranger, observing the Sarantines. A man he might have liked to know better, actually. Leaving now. It wouldn’t happen. Odd, about being given Rustem’s name. Rustem walked into his inner room. On the table beside the parcel he saw a note, his name on it.

  First, he unwrapped the cloth from the object on the table. And then, entirely overcome, he sat down on a stool and stood staring at it.

  There was no one about. He was entirely alone, looking.

  Eventually he stood up and took the note. It had a seal, which he broke. He unfolded and read, and then he sat down again.

  With gratitude, the brief inscription read, this exemplar of all things that must bend or they break.

  He sat there for a very long time, becoming aware of how rare it was for him to be alone now, how seldom he had this silence or calm. He stared at the golden rose on the table, long and slim as the living flower might have been, golden petals unfurling, the very last one, at the top, fully opened, rubies in all of them.

  He knew then, with that frightening, otherworldly certainty that Shaski seemed to have, that he would never see her again.

  HE TOOK THE ROSE with him (wrapped and concealed) when he and his family eventually sailed, a very long way west to a land where such objects of uttermost craft and art were, as yet, unknown.

  It was a place where competent physicians were urgently needed, and could rise swiftly in a society that was in the process of defining itself. His unusual domestic arrangements were tolerated on that far frontier, but he was advised, early, to change his faith. He did so, adopting the god of the sun in the manner that Jad was worshipped in Esperana. He had responsibilities, after all: two wives, two children (then a third and then a fourth, both boys, not long after they settled), and four former soldiers from the east who had changed their lives to come with them. Two of their new household women from Sarantium had, unexpectedly, also taken ship with his family. And he had an eldest child, a son, who was best made to appear—they all understood this—to fit in, as much as could be, lest he be singled out and danger come to him thereby.

  One bent sometimes, thought Rustem, so as not to be broken by the winds of the world, whether of desert or sea or these wide, rolling grasslands in the farthest west.

  All of his children and one of his wives turned out to like horses, very much. His longtime soldier friend Vinaszh—who married and had a family of his own but continued to entwine his destiny with theirs—turned out to have an eye for choosing and breeding them. He was a good businessman. So was Rustem, to his own surprise. He ended his days in comfort, a rancher as much as a doctor.

  He gave the rose to his daughter when she married.

  He kept the note, though, all his life.

  CHAPTER XVI

  He had known the last days here would be difficult, he hadn’t fully grasped just how much so. For one thing, from the time he came down from the dome the second time, late at night, after returning from the Imperial wedding in the palace and working by lantern-light to finish an image of his daughters that would be torn down almost as soon as it had set, Crispin had spent very little time entirely sober.

  He wasn’t enamoured of the image of himself as someone who drank to blur pain, but he didn’t seem able to do much about it, either.

  One of the hardest things was the outrage of other people. It enveloped him. For a private man that was difficult. Well-meaning, wildly passionate friends (he had more than he’d realized here, one never really stopped to count), cursing the new Emperor, offering wine in their homes or taverns. Or late at night in the kitchen of the Blues’ compound, where Strumosus of Amoria held forth
with articulate savagery on barbarism and the presence of it in a civilized place.

  Crispin had gone there to see Scortius, but the charioteer had been asleep, medicated, and he had ended up in the kitchen taking a meal long after dark. He didn’t get back to the compound again until just before departing. Scortius was sleeping that time, too. He chatted briefly with the Bassanid physician, the one whose name and address Zoticus had given him before the man was even in Sarantium. He was past the point of trying to sort that through, as well: there were simply things in the world he would never understand, and they didn’t all have to do with the doctrines of holy faith.

  He finally caught up with Scortius to say goodbye later that same evening. There was a crowd in the man’s chambers—a routine circumstance, it appeared. It made that parting casual, which was easier.

  He found that too much of the passion of others expended in sympathy for him was both wearying and humiliating. People had died here. People were dying all the time. Crispin had had a commission withdrawn, his work found unsatisfactory. It happened.

  He tried to make himself see it this way, at any rate, to advise others to perceive it as such. He didn’t succeed.

  Shirin, when he called on her and said these things, declared him soulless (he made no witty comment about her choice of words, it wasn’t the time for that) and an outright liar, and then she stormed out of her own sitting room, tears on her cheeks. Danis, the bird, from around her throat in the hallway as they left, declared silently that he was a fool, unworthy of his own gifts. Of any gifts.

  Whatever that meant.

  She didn’t even come back to see him out. One of the household women walked him to the door and closed it behind him.

  Artibasos, the next afternoon, serving a good Candarian, well watered, with olives and fresh bread and olive oil, reacted differently.

  ‘Stop!’ he cried, as Crispin tried the same explanation about commissions being ended or withdrawn. ‘You shame me!’

  Crispin fell obediently silent, looking down at the dark wine in his cup.

  ‘You don’t believe any of what you say. You are only saying it to make me feel better.’ The little architect’s hair was standing straight up, giving him the unsettling look of a man who’d just been terrified by a daemon.

  ‘Not entirely,’ Crispin said. He remembered Valerius smoothing down that hair, the night he’d taken Crispin to see the dome that was his gift.

  Unworthy of any gifts.

  He took a breath. ‘Not just for you. I’m trying to make myself … to find a way to …’

  It wasn’t any good. How did you say this aloud, and keep your pride?

  For they were profoundly right, all of them. He was lying, or trying to. Sometimes you needed a certain kind of dishonesty, even with yourself, to … carry on. Of course artisans lost commissions. All the time. Patrons didn’t pay to keep a project going, remarried and changed their minds, went abroad. Or even died, and their sons or widows had a different idea of what should be done to the ceiling of the family dining room or the bedroom walls of the country estate.

  It was true, everything he’d said about that was true, and it was still a lie, in the heart.

  His drinking, starting in the morning, every morning, was its own proof of that, if you thought about it. He didn’t want to think about it. He looked at the cup Artibasos had poured for him and drained it, held it out for more.

  It was a death, what had happened. The heart would cry.

  ‘You will never go back in there, will you?’ the little architect had said to him.

  Crispin shook his head.

  ‘It is in your mind, isn’t it? All of it?’

  Crispin had nodded.

  ‘Mine, too,’ Artibasos had said.

  THE EMPEROR went north to Eubulus with his army, but the fleet, under the Strategos of the Navy, did sail, after all. Leontes, now Valerius III, was hardly a man to let such an assembly go to waste. No good general was. The ships, laden with provisions and siege engines and weapons meant for a war in the west, were sent east instead through the Calchas Sea and then north. All the way through the far straits, to anchor near Mihrbor, firmly in Bassanid territory. Enough soldiers went on board to achieve a landing and defend it.

  The army going overland, the troops that had been about to sail for Batiara, would be far larger than any force Shirvan had sent to harry the north. It was an army of invasion, this one, long-planned, and the new Emperor intended to use it that way—but in a different direction.

  The Bassanids had breached the peace. A mistake, born of a desire to hamper a western invasion and an understanding—accurate enough—of the desires and designs of Valerius II.

  Valerius II was dead.

  The consequences of the miscalculation were on the Bassanids’ own heads.

  The soldier Carullus, once of the Fourth Trakesian, then very briefly of the Second Calysian, more recently a member of the Supreme Strategos’s own guard, was not in either force, not those who rode and marched or those who sailed.

  He was unhappy about this. In the extreme.

  The new Emperor continued to have strong views, amounting almost to an element of his well-known piety, about taking newly married men to a theatre of war if there were options and alternatives. With an army of this size, there were.

  Further, there had been dramatic and lethal purges in the ranks of the Excubitors after the role some of them had played in the assassination. Some innocent, highly capable men had undoubtedly been among those executed, but that was a risk to be assumed by those belonging to a small, elite company when absolute truth was hard to come by. At the very least it could be said that they’d failed to detect treachery among their fellows and paid a price for that.

  This treachery, of course, had placed the new Emperor on his throne but that—one need hardly say—was not a relevant point.

  Carullus, complaining volubly, had had to content himself with yet another shift and promotion—when he was appointed one of the three ranking officers just below the new Count of the Excubitors. It was a very substantial rise this time, a court office, not just a military one.

  ‘You have any idea,’ he fumed one night, having spent a day in the Imperial Precinct absorbing information, ‘how many changes of clothing a man needs in this position? How often you change each day? How many ceremonies I’m expected to learn? Want to know what you wear for escorting fucking envoys from the fucking Karchites? I can tell you!’

  He did, in detail. It seemed to help him to talk, and it was good, Crispin found, to have someone else’s troubles (such as they were) to consider.

  They ended up in The Spina every night, Pardos and Vargos accompanying them, various others coming and going at their booth. It was regarded as their booth by then. Carullus was a well-known, well-liked man, and Crispin had achieved, it appeared, a certain notoriety. It had also become known that he was leaving. People kept stopping by.

  Pardos had surprised Crispin. He had decided to stay in Sarantium, continue to work at his craft here, despite the changes in matters of faith. With time to reflect, later, Crispin was to understand how he’d misjudged his former apprentice. It appeared that Pardos, now a fully fledged member of the guilds of course, had his own discomfort about working with certain images.

  It had begun to change for him, Pardos said, while he was labouring to preserve that vision of Jad in Sauradia. A conflict of piety and craft, he’d said, stumbling, an awareness of his own unworthiness.

  ‘We’re all unworthy,’ Crispin had protested, fist on the table. ‘That’s part of the point of it!’

  But he’d let it slide, seeing Pardos’s evident distress. What was the profit in making the other man unhappy? When did you ever change someone’s views on faith, even a friend’s?

  Distraught as he obviously was about what was to happen to the work on the dome (spear-butts and hammers pounding, tesserae shattered and falling), Pardos was content to work on a secular scale, to make a life here, doing scene
s for the state in administrative buildings, or private commissions for the courtiers and merchants and guilds who could afford mosaics. He could even work for the factions, he said: Hippodrome images for the walls and ceilings within the compounds. The new doctrines prescribed against rendering people only in a holy place. And for the wealthy, a mosaicist could still offer marinescapes, hunting scenes, interwoven patterns for flooring or walls.

  ‘Naked women and their toys for whorehouses?’ Carullus had asked, cackling, making the younger man blush and Vargos frown. But the soldier had only been trying to change the mood.

  Vargos, for his part, had made an immediate offer to sail west with Crispin. A difficulty, that, one that needed to be addressed.

  The next evening, mostly sober, Crispin had gone walking with him through the City. They’d found an inn near the walls, far from anyone they were likely to know, and the two of them talked alone for a time.

  In the end, Crispin had dissauded him, not without effort and not without regret. Vargos was well on the way to making himself a life here. He could be more than a simple labourer—could apprentice himself to Pardos, who would be thrilled to have him. Vargos liked the City, far more than he’d expected to, and Crispin made him acknowledge that. He wouldn’t be the first of the Inicii to force the Imperial City to give him a welcome and a decent life.

  Crispin also admitted that he had no idea what he was going to do when he got home. It was hard to see himself doing fish and seaweed and sunken ships on a summerhouse wall in Baiana or Mylasia now. He didn’t even know if he would stay at home. He couldn’t accept the burden of Vargos’s life, of having the other man follow wherever his uncertain path carried him. That wasn’t friendship, really. It was something else, and Vargos was a free man here. Had always been his own, free man.

  Vargos didn’t say a great deal, wasn’t someone who argued, was certainly not the sort to inflict himself anywhere or on anyone. His expression revealed little as Crispin spoke, but that night was difficult for both of them. Something had happened on the road, and it had made a bond. Bonds could be broken, but there was a price.