The Sarantine Mosaic (50 page)

He imagined her observing his conduct just now. He winced at the thought of her arched eyebrows, the
quirked, amused mouth, and then—failing to see any obvious alternatives—he began to laugh.

Earlier that same night, walking with an escort from the Attenine towards the Traversite Palace, where the Empress of Sarantium had her favoured autumn and winter quarters, Crispin had found himself thinking of his wife.

This happened all the time, but the difference—and he was aware of it—was that in his mind the image of Ilandra appeared now as a shield, a defence, though he remained unsure what it was he feared. It was windy and cold crossing the gardens; he wrapped himself in the cloak they'd given him.

Guarded by the dead, hiding behind the memory of love, he was conducted to the smaller of the two main palaces under swiftly moving clouds and the westered, sunken moons and entered, and walked marble corridors with lanterns burning on the walls and paused before soldiers at the doorway of an Empress who had summoned him, so late at night, to her private quarters.

He was expected. The nearest soldier nodded, expressionless, and opened the door. Crispin passed into a space of firelight, candlelight, and gold. The eunuchs and soldiers remained outside. The door was closed behind him. Ilandra's image slowly faded as a lady-in-waiting approached, silk-clad, light on slippered feet, and offered him a silver cup of wine.

He accepted, with real gratitude. She took his cloak and laid it on a bench against the wall by the fire. Then she smiled at him sidelong and withdrew through an inner door. Crispin stood alone and looked around in the light of myriad candles. A room in sumptuous good taste; a little ornate to a western eye, but the Sarantines tended to be. Then he caught his breath.

There was a golden rose on a long table by the wall to his left. Slender as a living flower, seemingly as pliant, four buds on the long stem, thorns among the small, perfect leaves, all of gold, all four buds rendered in stages of unfolding, and a fifth, at the crown, fully opened, achieved, each thin, exquisite petal a marvel of the goldsmith's craft, with a ruby at the centre of it, red as a fire in the candlelight.

The beauty caught at his heart, and the terrible fragility. If one were merely to take that long stem between two fingers and twist it would bend, distort, fall awry. The flower seemed almost to sway in a breeze that wasn't there. So much perfection and so transient, so vulnerable. Crispin ached for the mastery of it—the time and care and craft brought to this accomplishment—and for the simultaneous perception that this artifice, this art, was as precarious as … as any joy in mortal life.

As a rose, perhaps, that died in a wind or at summer's end.

He thought suddenly of the young queen of the Antae then, and of the message he carried, and he was aware of pity and fear within himself, a very long way from home.

A silver branching of candles wavered on the table by the rose. There was no sound, but the flicker of movement made him turn.

She had been on the stage in her youth, knew very well—even now—how to move with silence and a dancer's grace. She was small, slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed, exquisite as the rose. She brought thorns to mind, the drawing of blood, the danger at the heart of beauty.

She had changed to a night robe of deep red, had had her women remove the spectacular headdress and the jewels at wrist and throat. Her hair was down now for the
night, thick and long and dark, unsettling. There were diamonds still hanging at her ears, her only ornament, catching the light. Her scent was about her, drifting towards him through a space she defined, and surrounding her, also, was an aura: of power, and of amused intelligence, and of something else he could not name but knew he feared and was right to fear.

‘How deeply acquainted might you be, Rhodian, with the private chambers of royalty?' Her voice was low, wry, shockingly intimate.

Careful, oh careful
, he told himself, setting down his wine cup and bowing low, hiding a surging anxiety with the slowness of the movements. He straightened. Cleared his throat. ‘Not at all, my lady. I am honoured and out of my element.'

‘A Batiaran far from his peninsula? A fish netted from water? How would you taste, Caius Crispus of Varena?' She did not move. The firelight was caught in her dark eyes and in the diamonds beside them. It flashed from the diamonds, was drowned in her eyes. She smiled.

She was toying with him. He knew this, but his throat was still dry. He coughed again, and said, ‘I have no idea. I am at your service in all things, thrice-exalted.'

‘You did say that. They shaved your beard, I understand. Poor man.' She laughed, came forward then, straight towards him and then past, as he caught his breath. She stood by the long table, looking at the rose. ‘You were admiring my flower?' Her voice was honey, or silk.

‘Very much, my lady. A work of great beauty and sadness.'

‘Sadness?' She turned her head, looked at him.

He hesitated. ‘Roses die. An artifice so delicate reminds us of the … impermanence of all things. All beautiful things.'

Alixana said nothing for a time. Not a young woman any more. Her dark, accentuated eyes held his until he looked away and down. Her scent, this near, was intoxicating, eastern, it made him think of colours, many things did: this was near to the red of her robe, but deeper, darker, porphyry, in fact. The purple of royalty. He looked down and wondered: could that be intentional, or was it only him—turning scent, sound, taste into colour? There were hidden arts here in Sarantium of which he would know nothing. He was in the City of Cities, ornament of the world, eye of the universe. There were mysteries.

‘The impermanence of the beautiful. Well said. That,' the Empress murmured, looking at the rose, ‘is why it is here, of course. Clever man. Could you, Rhodian, make me something in mosaic that suggests the opposite: a hint of what endures beyond the transitory?'

She had asked him here for a reason, after all. He looked up. ‘What would suggest that for you, Empress?'

‘Dolphins,' she said, without any warning at all.

He felt himself go white.

She turned fully around and watched him, leaning against the ivory of the table, hands braced on either side of her, fingers spread. Her expression was thoughtful, evaluating; that disconcerted him more than irony would have done.

‘Drink your wine,' the Empress said. ‘It is very good.' He did. It was.

It didn't help him. Not with this.

Dolphins were deadly at this point in the story of the world. Much more than simply marine creatures, leaping between water and air, graceful and decorative—the sort any woman might enjoy seeing on the walls of her rooms. Dolphins were entangled in paganism, or trammelled in the nets of Heladikian heresies, or both.

They carried souls from the mortal realm of the living through the echoing chambers of the sea to the realms of the Dead, and judgement. So the Ancients had believed in Trakesia long ago—and in Rhodias before Jad's teachings came. Dolphins had served the many-named god of the Afterworld, conduits of the spirits of the dead, traversing the blurred space between life and what came after.

And some of that old, enduring paganism had crossed— through a different sort of blurred space—into the faith of Jad, and his son Heladikos, who died in his chariot bringing fire to men. When Heladikos's chariot plunged, burning like a torch, into the sea—so the dark tale ran—it was the dolphins who came and bore his ruined beauty upon their backs. Making of themselves a living bier, they carried it to the ends of the uttermost sea of the world to meet his father, sinking low at dusk. And Jad had claimed the body of his child and taken it into his own chariot, and carried it down—as every night—into the dark. A deeper, colder dark that night, for Heladikos had died.

And so the dolphins were said to be the last creatures of the living world to see and touch beloved Heladikos, and for their service to him they were holy in the teachings of those who believed in Jad's mortal son.

One might choose one's deadly sacrilege. The dolphins carried souls to the dark god of Death in the pagans' ancient pantheon, or they bore the body of the one god's only son in a now-forbidden heresy.

Either way, either meaning, an artisan who placed dolphins on a ceiling or wall was inviting mortal consequences from an increasingly vigilant clergy. There had been dolphins once in the Hippodrome, diving to number the laps run. They were gone, melted down. Sea-horses counted the running now.

It was this Emperor, Valerius II, who had urged the joint Pronouncement of Athan, the High Patriarch in Rhodias,
and Zakarios, the Eastern one here in the City. Valerius had worked very hard to achieve that rare agreement. Two hundred years of bitter, deadly dispute in the schismatic faith of Jad had been papered over with that document, but the price for whatever gains an ambitious Emperor and superficially united clergy might enjoy had been the casting of all Heladikians into heresy: at risk of denunciation, ritual cursing in chapels and sanctuaries, fire. It was rare to be executed in Valerius's Empire for breaking the laws of man, but men were burned for heresy.

And it was Valerius's Empress who was asking him now, scented and gleaming in red and threaded gold by late-night candlelight, for dolphins in her rooms.

He felt much too drained by all that had happened tonight to properly sort through this. He temporized, carefully. ‘They are handsome creatures, indeed, especially when they leap from the waves.'

Alixana smiled at him. ‘Of course they are.' Her smile deepened. ‘They are also the bearers of Heladikos to the place where sea meets sky at twilight.'

So much for temporizing. At least he knew which sin he might be burned for committing.

She was making it easier for him, however. He met her eyes, which had not left his face. ‘Both Patriarchs have banned such teachings, Empress. The Emperor swore an oath in the old Sanctuary of Jad's Wisdom to uphold their will in this.'

‘You heard of that? Even in Batiara? Under the Antae?' ‘Of course we did. The High Patriarch is in Rhodias, my lady.'

‘And did the king of the Antae … or his daughter after … swear a similar oath to uphold?'

A stunningly dangerous woman. ‘You know they did not, my lady. The Antae came to Jad by way of the Heladikian teachings.'

‘And have not changed their doctrines, alas.'

Crispin spun around.

The Empress merely turned her head and smiled at the man who had entered—as silently as she had—and had just spoken from the farthest door of the room.

For the second time, his heart racing, Crispin set down his wine and bowed to conceal a mounting unease. Valerius had changed neither his clothing nor his manner. He crossed to the wall himself and poured his own cup of wine. The three of them were alone, no servants in the room.

The Emperor sipped from his cup and looked at Crispin, waiting. An answer seemed to be expected.

It was very late; an utterly unanticipated mood seized Crispin, though it was one his mother and friends would all have claimed they knew. He murmured, ‘One of the Antae's most venerated clerics has written that heresies are not like clothing styles or beards, my lord, to go in and out of fashion by the season or the year.'

Alixana laughed aloud. Valerius smiled a little, though the grey eyes remained attentive in the round, soft face. ‘I read that,' he said. ‘Sybard of Varena.
A Reply to a Pronouncement.
An intelligent man. I wrote to him, saying as much, invited him here.'

Crispin hadn't known that. Of course he hadn't known that.

What he did know—what
everyone
seemed to know— was that Valerius's manifest ambitions in the Batiaran peninsula derived much of their credibility from the religious schisms and the declared need to rescue the peninsula from ‘error.' It was odd, and at the same time of a piece with what he was already learning about the man, that the Emperor might anchor a possible reconquest of Rhodias and the west in religion, and at the same time praise the Antae cleric whose work challenged, point by point, the document that gave him that anchor.

‘He declined the invitation,' said Alixana softly, ‘with some unkind words. Your partner Martinian also declined our invitation. Why, Rhodian, do none of you want to come to us?'

‘Unfair, my heart. Caius Crispus has come, on cold autumn roads, braving a barber's razor and our court … only to find himself beset by a mischievous Empress with an impious request.'

‘Better my mischief than Styliane's malice,' said Alixana crisply, still leaning back against the table. Her tone changed, slyly. It was interesting: Crispin knew the shadings of this voice, already. He felt as if he always had. ‘If heresies change by the season,' she murmured, ‘may not the decorations of my walls, my lord Emperor? You have already conquered
here
, in any case.'