The Sarantine Mosaic (112 page)

‘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 decided 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.'

The soldier showed no response to that. He said, ‘I do not understand what has happened here. But it is not safe for you, my lady.'

Alixana laughed. Crispin would remember that sound, too.

‘Oh, I know,' she said. ‘I know. It is not safe for me. But it is too late now.' She closed her eyes. Crispin saw that her hands were at her sides. His own were twisting and clenching, windows to the roiling he felt within. ‘It is so obvious now, much too late. Today will have been a day when they changed the Urban Prefect's guards here, I'll wager. I imagine they were already here, watching, when we sailed in at the end of the morning, waiting until we left this clearing.'

Crispin and the two soldiers looked at her.

‘Two dead here,' said Alixana. ‘So two of the Prefect's men were bought. And the four new ones arriving on their little boat will have been, of course, or there'd have been no point. And you think two of the Excubitors, too.' A spasm crossed her features, was gone. The mask
reasserted itself. ‘He will have left as soon as we went away. They'll have reached the City by now. Some time ago, I imagine.'

None of the three men with her said a word. Crispin's heart ached. These were
not
his people, Sarantium was not his place on Jad's earth, but he understood what she was saying. The world was changing. Might have already changed.

Alixana opened her eyes then. Looked straight at him. ‘He has something that allows him to … see things?' No reproach in her tone.
Nothing
in her tone. Had he told her right away …

He nodded. The two soldiers looked uncomprehending. They didn't matter. She did. She mattered very much, he realized, gazing at her. She turned past him, towards the two dead men near the prison house.

And then turned completely away, from the men standing with her, from the dead in the clearing. Faced north, her shoulders straight as always, head lifted a little, as if to see beyond the tall pines, beyond the strait with its dolphins and ships and white-capped waves, beyond harbour, city walls, bronze gates, the present and the past, the world and the half-world.

‘I believe,' said Alixana of Sarantium, ‘it may even be over by now.'

She turned back to look at them. Her eyes were dry.

‘I have placed you in mortal danger, Rhodian. I am sorry for it. You will have to go back on the Imperial ship alone. You may expect to be asked hard questions, perhaps as soon as you land. More likely later, tonight. It will be known you were with me today, before I disappeared.'

‘My lady?' he said. ‘You don't
know
what has happened.' He paused, swallowed hard. ‘He is cleverer than any man alive.' And then her last word penetrated, and he said, ‘Disappeared?'

She looked at him. ‘I do not know for certain, you are correct. But if things have fallen out in a certain way, the Empire as we have known it is ended and they will be coming for me. I would not care, but … ' She closed her eyes again. ‘But I do have … one or perhaps two things to do. I cannot let myself be found before that. Mariscus will take me back—there will be small craft on this island—and I will disappear.'