Sailing to Sarantium

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  They began walking, alone on the road, in the grey world.

  The fog began to lift some time afterwards. Then a pale, weak, wintry sun appeared through a thinning of the clouds for the first time that day. They stopped without a word spoken, looking up at it. And from the forest north of them in that moment there came a sound, high, clear, wordless, one sung note of music. A woman’s voice.

  ‘Linon?’ Crispin cried urgently, in his mind, unable not to. ‘Linon?’

  There was no reply. The inner silence was absolute. That long, unearthly note seemed to hang in the air between forest and field, earth and sky, and then it faded away like the mist.

  Later that day, towards twilight far to the west, a grey-haired, grey-bearded man rode a jostling farmer’s cart towards the city walls of Varena.

  The farmer, having had more than one animal cured of an ailment by his passenger, was happy to oblige with irregular rides into the city. The passenger, at the moment, could not have been said to appear happy, or pleased, or anything but preoccupied. As they approached the walls and merged with the streaming traffic heading into and out of Varena before sunset closed the gates, the solitary passenger was recognized by a number of people. Some greeted him with deference and awe, others moved quickly to the far side of the road or fell back making a sign of the sun disk as the farmer’s cart passed carrying an alchemist. Zoticus was, in fact, long accustomed to both responses and knew how to deal with each. Today he scarcely noticed them.

  He’d had a shock this morning that had greatly undermined the wry detachment with which he preferred to view the world and what transpired within it. He was still dealing—not entirely successfully—with that.

  ‘I think you should go into the city,’ had said the falcon earlier that day. He’d named her Tiresa when he’d claimed her soul. ‘I think it would be good for you tonight.’

  ‘Go to Martinian and Carissa,’ little Mirelle had added, softly. ‘You can talk with them.’ There’d been a murmur of agreement from the others, a rustling of leaves in his mind.

  ‘I can talk with all of you,’ he’d said aloud, irritated. It offended him when the birds became solicitous and protective, as if he were growing fragile with age, needed guarding. Soon they’d be reminding him to wear his boots.

  ‘Not the same,’ Tiresa had said briskly. ‘You know it isn’t.’

  Which was true, but he still didn’t like it.

  He’d tried to read—Archilochus, as it happened—but his concentration was precarious and he gave it up, venturing out for a walk in the orchard instead. He felt extremely strange, a kind of hollowness. Linon was gone. Somehow. She’d been gone, of course, since he’d given her away, but this was . . . different. He’d never quite stopped regretting the impulse that had led him to offer a bird to the mosaicist travelling east. Or not just east: to Sarantium. City he’d never seen, never would see now. He’d found a power in his life, claimed a gift, his birds. There were other things he would not be allowed, it seemed.

  And the birds weren’t really his, were they? But if they weren’t, then what could they be said to be? And where was Linon, and how had he heard her voice this morning from so far?

  And what was he doing shivering in his orchard without a cloak or his stick on a windy, cold autumn day? At least he had his boots on.

  He’d gone back inside, sent Clovis off, complaining, with a request to Silavin the farmer down the road, and had taken the birds’ collective counsel after all.

  He couldn’t talk to his friends about what was troubling him, but sometimes talking about other things, any other things, the very timbre of human voices, Carissa’s smile, Martinian’s gentle wit, the shared warmth of a fire, the bed they’d offer him for the night, a morning visit to the bustle of the market . . .

  Philosophy could be a consolation, an attempt to explain and understand the place of man in the gods’ creation. It couldn’t always succeed, though. There were times when comfort could only be found in a woman’s laughter, a friend’s known face and voice, shared rumours about the Antae court, even something so simple as a steaming bowl of pea soup at a table with others.

  Sometimes, when the shadows of the half-world pressed too near, one needed the world.

  He left Silavin at the city gates, with thanks, and made his way to Martinian’s home late in the day. He was welcomed there, as he’d known he would be. His visits were rare; he lived a life outside the walls. He was invited to spend a night, and his friends made it seem as if he was doing them a great honour by accepting. They could see he was disturbed by something but—being friends—they never pressed him to speak, only offered what they could, which was a good deal just then.

  In the night he woke in a strange bed, in darkness, and went to the window. There were lights burning in the palace, on the upper floors where the beleaguered young queen would be. Someone else awake, it seemed. Not his grief. His gaze went beyond, to the east. There were stars above Varena in the clear night. They blurred in his sight as he stood there, holding memory to himself like a child.

  CHAPTER V

  They walked for a long time, moving through a world becoming gradually more familiar as the mist continued to lift. And yet, for all the re-emergence of the ordinary, Crispin thought, it had also become a landscape changed beyond his capacity of description. Where the bird had been about his neck there was an absence that felt oddly like a weight. There were crows in the Weld again, towards the woods, and they heard a songbird in a thicket south of the road. A flash of russet was a fox, though they never saw the hare it pursued.

  At what must have been mid-afternoon they stopped. Vargos unwrapped the food again. Bread, cheese, ale for each of them. Crispin drank deeply. He looked away to the south. The mountains were visible again, rifts in the clouds above them showed blue and there was snow on the peaks. Light, shafts of colour, coming back into the world.

  He became aware that Kasia was looking at him.

  ‘She . . . the bird spoke,’ she said. Apprehension in her face, though there had not been in the forest, in the grey mist of the field.

  He nodded. He had made himself ready for this during the silent walking. He had guessed it would come, that it had to come.

  ‘I heard,’ he said. ‘She did.’

  ‘How? My lord?’

  Vargos watched them, holding his flask.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he lied. ‘The bird was a talisman given me by a man said to be an alchemist. My friends wanted me to have such a thing for protection. They believe in forces I do not. Did not. I . . . understand next to nothing of what happened today.’

  And that was not a lie. Already the morning felt to be a recollection of being wrapped in mist, with a creature in the Aldwood larger than the world, than his comprehension of the world. Thinking back, the only vivid colour he could remember was the red blood on the bison’s horns.

  ‘He took her, instead of . . . me.’

  ‘He took Pharus, as well,’ said Vargos quietly, pushing the stopper back into his flask. ‘We saw Ludan, or his shadow today.’ There was something near to anger in the scarred face. ‘How do we worship Jad and his son after this?’

  Real anguish here, Crispin thought, and was moved. They had lived through something together this morning. Wildly different paths to that glade seemed to matter less than one might have expected.

  He drew a breath. ‘We worship them as the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do.’ He surprised himself. ‘We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can’t even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another?’ It was posed as a rhetorical question, a flourish, but the words hung in the brightening air. A blackbird lifted from the stubble of the field and flew away west in a low, sweeping arc, wings beating.

  ‘I do not know,’ said Vargos, finally. ‘I have no learning. Twice, when I
was younger, I thought I saw the zubir, the bison. I was never sure. Was I being marked? For today, in some way?’

  ‘I am not the man to answer that,’ said Crispin.

  ‘Are we . . . safe now?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Until the next thing comes,’ Crispin said, and then, more kindly, ‘Safe from those who followed, yes, I believe so. From whatever was in the wood? I . . . also believe so.’ He doesn’t want the girl. He came for me.

  It took a certain act of will, but he kept his mind from calling out again to the silence. Linon had been with him for so little time—abrasive, unyielding—but no one else, not even Ilandra, had ever been within him in that way. My dear, she had said, at the end. Remember me.

  If he understood any of this rightly, Linon had been a woman, named as Kasia had been named to the forest god, but she had died in that grove a long time ago. Heart cut out, body hanging from a sacred tree. And soul . . . ? Soul claimed by a mortal man who had been watching, insanely daring, and drawing upon some arcane power Crispin’s mind could not compass.

  He remembered, unexpectedly, the look on Zoticus’s face when it had emerged that of all his birds it was Linon whose inward voice Crispin had heard. She was his first, Crispin thought, and knew it was true.

  Tell him goodbye, the bird had said silently at the end, in what would once have been her own voice. Crispin shook his head. He had thought once, in his arrogance, that he knew something of the world of men and women.

  ‘There is a chapel we will come to soon,’ Vargos said. Crispin pulled his thoughts back, and realized they had both been watching him. ‘Before sunset. A real one, not just a roadside shrine.’

  ‘Then we will enter it and pray,’ said Crispin.

  There would be comfort in the well-worn rituals, he realized. A returning to the customary, where people lived out their lives. Where they had to live their lives. The day, he thought, had done all it could do, the world had revealed all it would just now. They would calm themselves, he would order his thoughts, begin adjusting to the absence about his throat and in his mind, begin thinking of what to say in a difficult letter to Zoticus, perhaps even begin looking forward to wine and a meal at tonight’s inn. A returning to the customary, indeed, as if coming home from a very long journey.

  Men, when they think in this way—that the crisis, the moment of revealed power, has passed—are as vulnerable as they will ever be. Good leaders of armies at war know this. Any skilled actor or writer for the stage knows it. So do clerics, priests, perhaps cheiromancers. When people have been very deeply shaken in certain ways they are, in fact, wide open to the next bright falling from the air. It is not the moment of birth—the bursting through a shell into the world—that imprints the newborn gosling, but the next thing, the sighting that comes after and marks the soul.

  They went on, two men and a woman, through an opening world. No one else was on the road. It was the Day of the Dead. The autumn light became mild as the sun swung west, palely veiled. A cool breeze moved the clouds. More rifts of blue could be seen overhead. Crows in the fields, jays, and another small bird Crispin didn’t know, swift-flying on their right, with a bright tail red as blood. Snow far off, on the distant mountain peaks emerging one by one. The sea beyond. He could have sailed, if the courier . . .

  They came to the place of which Vargos had spoken. It was set behind iron gates, some distance back from the road on the south side. It faced the forest. The chapel was much larger than the usual roadside places of prayer. A real one, as Vargos had put it: a grey stone octagon with a dome above, neatly cropped grass around it, a dormitory beside, outbuildings behind, a graveyard. It was very peaceful here. Crispin saw cows and a goat in the meadow beyond the graves.

  Had he been more aware of time and place, had his mind not been wrestling with unseen things, he might have realized where they were and been prepared. He did not, and he was not.

  They tied the mule by the low wall, went through the unlocked iron gate and up the stone path. There were late-season flowers growing beside it, lovingly tended. Crispin saw an herb garden to the left, back towards the meadow. They opened the heavy wooden door of the chapel and the three of them went in and Crispin looked at the walls, as his eyes slowly adjusted to the muted light, and then, stepping forward, he looked up at the dome.

  DIVISIONS OF FAITH in the worship of Jad had led to burnings and torture and war almost from the beginning. The doctrine and liturgy of the sun god, emerging from the promiscuous gods and goddesses of Trakesia during the early years of the Empire of Rhodias, had not evolved without their share of schisms and heresies and the frequently savage responses to these. The god was in the sun, or he was behind the sun. The world had been born in light, or it had been released from ice and darkness by holy light. At one time the god was thought to die in winter and be reborn in the spring, but the gentle cleric who had expounded this had been ordered torn apart between cavalry horses by a High Patriarch in Rhodias. For a brief time, elsewhere, it had been taught that the two moons were Jad’s offspring—a belief more than halfway to the doctrines of the Kindath, who named them sisters of the god and equal to him in disturbing ways. This unfortunate fallacy, too, had required a number of deaths to extirpate.

  The varying forms of belief in Heladikos—as mortal son, as half-mortal child, as god—were only the most obdurate and enduring of these conflicts waged in the holy name of Jad. Emperors and Patriarchs, first in Rhodias and then Sarantium, wavered and grew firm and then reversed their positions and tolerance, and Heladikos the Charioteer moved in and out of acceptance and fashion, much as the sun moved in and out of cloud on a windy day.

  In the same way, amongst all these bitter wars, fought with words and iron and flame, the rendered image of Jad himself had become a line of demarcation over the years, a battlefield of art and belief, of ways of imagining the god who sent life-bringing light and battled darkness every night beneath his world while men slept their precarious sleep.

  And this modest, beautifully made old chapel in a quiet, isolated place on the ancient Imperial road in Sauradia was that dividing line.

  HE’D HAD NO WARNING at all. Crispin took some steps forward in the subdued, delicate light of the chapel, noting, absently, the old-fashioned mosaics of intertwined flowers on the walls, and then looked up.

  A moment later, he found himself lying on the cold stones of the floor, struggling to breathe, gazing up at his god.

  He ought to have known what was waiting for him in this place. Even setting out from Varena it had crossed his mind that the road through Sauradia would take him past this chapel at some point—he wasn’t certain exactly where, but he knew it was on the Imperial road—and he’d even been looking forward to seeing what the old craftsmen had done in their primitive fashion, rendering Jad in the eastern way.

  But the intensity and the terror of what had happened this morning in the fog and the wood had driven that thought so far from him that he was wide open, defenceless, utterly exposed to the force of what had been done by mortal men on this dome. After the Aldwood and the bison and Linon, Crispin had no barriers within himself, no refuge, and the power of the image above hammered into him, driving all strength from his body so that he fell down like a pantomime grotesque or a helpless drunk in an alley behind a caupona.

  He lay flat on his back staring up at the figure of the god: the bearded face and upper torso of Jad massively rendered across virtually the entirety of the dome. A gaunt image, battle-weary and grim, weighted down—he registered the heavy cloak, the bowed shoulders—by his burdens and the stern evils of his children. A figure as absolute and terrifying as the bison had been: another dark, massive head, against the pale, golden tesserae of the sun behind him. A figure seeming as if it would descend in overwhelming judgement from above. The image encompassed the head and shoulders, both lifted hands. No more, no room on the dome for more. Spreading across the softly illuminated space, gazing down with eyes large as some figures Crispin had made in his day, it was
so out of scale it should never have worked, and yet Crispin had not in all his life seen anything made that touched the strength of this.

  He had known this work was here, westernmost of all the renderings of the god done with the full dark eastern beard and those black, haunted eyes: Jad as judge, as worn, beleaguered warrior in deathly combat, not the shining, blue-eyed, golden sun-figure of Crispin’s west. But knowing and seeing were so far from the same thing it was as if . . . as if one was the world and the other the half-world of hidden powers.

  The old craftsmen. Their primitive fashion.

  So he had thought, back home. Crispin felt an aching in his heart for the depths of his own folly, the revealed limitations of his understanding and skill. He felt naked before this, grasping that in its own way this work of mortal men in a domed chapel was as much a manifestation of the holy as the bison with its blood-smeared horns in the wood, and as appalling. The fierce, wild power of Ludan, accepting sacrifice in his grove, set against the immensity of craft and comprehension on this dome, rendering in glass and stone a deity as purely humbling. How did one move from one of these poles to the other? How did mankind live between such extremes?

  For the deepest mystery, the pulsing heart of the enigma, was that as he lay on his back, paralysed by revelation, Crispin saw that the eyes were the same. The world’s sorrow he’d seen in the zubir was here in the sun god above him, distilled by nameless artisans whose purity of vision and faith unmanned him. Crispin was actually unsure for a moment if he’d ever be able to get up, to reassert his self-control, his will.