The Sarantine Mosaic (76 page)

It seemed that his second, delicate wife, had a greater dislike for desert sand and heat than she had ever revealed, and an equally strong interest in seeing and dwelling within the bustle and excitement of the royal city. Rustem, nonplussed, had indicated that it was likely she could be accommodated in this wish. Jarita had kissed him happily, even passionately, and gone off to see her baby in the nursery.

Katyun, his first wife—calm, composed Katyun, who was being honoured, as was her son, by elevation to the highest of the three castes, with the prospect of unimagined wealth and opportunity—had erupted in a storm of grief upon hearing these same tidings. She had refused to be consoled, wailing and distraught.

Katyun did
not
have any liking for the great cities of the world, never having seen—or having felt any desire to see—any of them. Sand in clothing or hair was a trivial affliction; the heat of the desert sun could be dealt with if one knew the proper ways to live; small, remote Kerakek was an entirely pleasant place in which to dwell if one were the wife of a respected physician and had the status that came therewith.

Kabadh, the court, the famous water gardens, the
churka
grounds, the flower-laden, crimson-pillared hall of dance … these were places where women would be painted and perfumed and garbed in exquisite silks and in the manners and malice of long practice and familiarity. A woman from the desert provinces among such … ?

Katyun had wept in her bed, squeezing her eyes tightly shut, refusing even to look at him, as Rustem strove to comfort her with talk of what opportunities this royal munificence offered for Shaski—and any other children they might now have.

That last had been an impulsive, unplanned comment, but it did produce an ebbing of tears. Katyun wanted another baby and Rustem knew it. With a move to Kabadh, in the lofty role of royal physician, there would be no further arguments about living space or resources that could be applied against the idea of another child.

Inwardly, he had still been wounded, however. Jarita had been
much
too matter-of-fact about being set aside with her daughter; Katyun gave
no
evidence of realizing how astonishing this change in their fortunes was, no sign of pride in him, of excitement in their shared new fate.

The suggestion about a second child did calm her. She dried her eyes, sat up in the bed, looked at him thoughtfully and then managed a brief smile. Rustem spent what was left of the night with her. Katyun, less delicately pretty than Jarita, was also less shy than his second wife and rather more skilled in arousing him by diverse means. Before dawn he had been induced, still half-asleep, to make a first assay at engendering the promised offspring. Katyun's touch and her whispering voice at his ear were balm to his pride.

At sunrise he'd returned to the fortress to determine the status of his royal patient. All was well. Shirvan healed swiftly, signs of an iron constitution and the benign alignment of auspices. Rustem took no credit for the former, was at pains to monitor and adjust for the latter.

In between visits with the king, he found himself closeted with the vizier, Mazendar, others joining them at intervals. Rustem received an education, at speed, in certain aspects of the world as they knew it that winter, with particular emphasis on the nature and the possible intentions of Valerius II of Sarantium, whom some named the Night's Emperor.

If he was going there, and was to do so to some purpose, there were things he needed to know.

When he finally did depart—having made hasty arrangements for his students to continue with a physician he knew in Qandir, even farther to the south—the winter was well advanced.

The most difficult parting—and this was entirely unexpected—was with Shaski. The women were reconciled to what was happening, could understand it; the baby was too young to know. His son, too soft by far, Rustem thought, was visibly struggling not to cry as Rustem finished tightening the drawstrings on his pack one morning and turned to bid a last farewell to all of them.

Shaski had come forward a few steps down the walk. He rubbed at his eyes with bunched fists. He was
trying
,
Rustem had to acknowledge. He was attempting not to cry. But what little boy grew so absurdly attached to his father? It was a weakness. Shaski was still of an age when the world he ought to know and need was that of the women. A father was to provide food and shelter and moral guidance and ensure discipline in the home. Perhaps Rustem had made a mistake, after all, in allowing the child to listen to his lessons from the hallway. Shaski had no business reacting this way. There were even soldiers watching; an escort from the fortress would go with him the first part of the way, as a sign of favour.

Rustem opened his mouth to admonish the boy and discovered that—shamefully—he had an awkward lump in his own throat and a constriction of feeling in his chest that made it difficult to speak. He coughed.

‘Listen to your mothers,' he said, more huskily than he'd expected.

Shaski nodded his head. ‘I will,' he whispered. He still wasn't crying, Rustem saw. His small fists were clenched at his sides. ‘When will you come home, Papa?'

‘When I have done what I have to do.'

Shaski took another two steps towards the gate where Rustem stood. They were alone, halfway between the women by the door and the military escort a little down the road. He could have touched the boy if he'd reached out. One bird was singing in the bright, crisp winter morning.

His son took a deep breath, visibly summoning courage. ‘I don't want you to go, you know,' said Shaski.

Rustem strove for outrage. Children were
not
to speak this way. Not to their fathers. Then he saw that the boy knew this, and had lowered his eyes and hunched his shoulders, as if awaiting a reprimand.

Rustem looked at him and swallowed, then turned away, saying nothing after all. He carried the pack a few steps until one of the soliders jumped down from his mount and took it from him, fastening it efficiently to the back of a mule. Rustem watched him. The leader of the soldiers looked at him and raised an eyebrow in inquiry, gesturing at the horse they'd given him.

Rustem nodded, inexplicably irritated. He took a step towards the horse, then suddenly turned around, to look back at the gate. Shaski was still there. He lifted his hand to wave to the boy, and smiled a little, awkwardly, that the child might know his father wasn't angry about what he'd said, even though he should have been. Shaski's eyes were on Rustem's face. He still wasn't crying. He still looked as though he might. Rustem looked at him another moment, drinking in the sight of that small form, then he nodded his head, turned briskly and accepted a hand up onto his horse and they rode off. The uncomfortable feeling in his chest lingered for a time and then it went away.

THE ESCORT RODE
with him to the border but Rustem continued west into Sarantine lands—for the first time
in his life—alone save for a dark-eyed, bearded manservant named Nishik. He left the horse with the soldiers and continued on a mule, now; it was more suited to his role.

The manservant was another deception. Just as Rustem was not, for the moment, simply a teaching physician in search of manuscripts and learned discussions with western colleagues, so was his servant not really a servant. Nishik was a veteran soldier, experienced in combat and survival. In the fortress it had been impressed upon Rustem that such skills might be important on his journey, and perhaps even more so when he reached his destination. He was, after all, a spy.

They stopped in Sarnica, making no secret of their arrival or Rustem's role in saving the life of the King of Kings and his forthcoming status. It had been too dramatic an event: the tidings of the assassination attempt had already run before them across the border, even in winter.

The governor of Amoria requested that Rustem attend upon him and seemed appropriately horrified to learn further details of deadly perfidy within the royal family of Bassania. After the formal audience, the governor dismissed his attendants and confided privately to Rustem that he had been encountering some difficulties in fulfilling his obligations to both his wife and his favourite mistress. He admitted, somewhat shamefacedly, that he'd gone so far as to consult a cheiromancer, without success. Prayer had also failed to be of use.

Rustem refrained from comment on either of these solutions and, after examining the man's tongue and taking his pulse, advised the governor to make a meal of the well-cooked liver of a sheep or cow on those evenings when he wished to have relations with either of his women. Noting the governor's extremely florid complexion, he
also suggested refraining from the consumption of wine with that important meal. He expressed great confidence that this would prove helpful. Confidence, of course, was half the treatment. The governor was profuse in his thanks and gave instructions that Rustem was to be assisted in all his affairs while in Sarnica. Two days later he sent a silk robe and an elaborate Jaddite sun disk to Rustem's inn as gifts. The disk, though beautiful, was hardly an appropriate offering to a Bassanid, but Rustem concluded that his suggestions had met with some nocturnal success.

While in Sarnica, Rustem visited with one of his former pupils and met two doctors with whom he'd exchanged correspondence. He purchased a text of Cadestes on skin ulcers and paid to have another manuscript copied and sent to him in Kabadh. He told those physicians he met exactly what had happened in Kerakek, and how, as a consequence of saving the king's life, he was soon to become a royal physician. In the interval, he explained, he had requested and received permission to conduct a journey of acquisition, obtaining further knowledge for himself and written sources from the west.

He gave a morning lecture, pleasingly well attended, on the Ispahani treatment of difficult childbirths, and another on the amputation of limbs when inflammation and noxious exudations followed upon a wound. He left after a stay of almost a month and a gracious farewell dinner hosted by the physicians' guild. He was given the names of several doctors in the Imperial City upon whom he was urged to call, and the address of a respectable inn where members of the healing profession were inclined to stay when in Sarantium.

The food on the road north was wretched and the accommodations worse, but—given that it was the end of
winter, not yet spring, when any remotely intelligent people avoided travel entirely—the trip proved largely uneventful. Their arrival in Sarantium was rather less so. Rustem had
not
expected to encounter both death and a wedding on his first day.

It had been years since Pappio, Director of the Imperial Glassworks, had actually done any actual glassblowing or design work himself. His duties now were administrative and diplomatic, involving the coordination of supplies and production and the distribution of tesserae and flat sheets of glass to craftsmen requesting them, in the City and beyond. Determining priorities and placating outraged artisans comprised the most delicate part of his office. Artisans, in Pappio's experience, tended to incline towards outrage.

He had his system worked out. Imperial projects came first, and amongst those Pappio made assessments of how important a given mosaic might be in the scheme of things. This required delicate inquiries in the Imperial Precinct at times, but he
did
have a staff for that, and he had acquired a sufficient polish to his own manners to make it feasible for him to attend upon some of the higher civil service functionaries when necessary. His wasn't the most important of the guilds—the silk guild had that distinction, of course—but it wasn't anywhere near the least significant, either, and under this particular Emperor, with his elaborate building projects, it could be said that Pappio was an important man. He was treated respectfully, in any case.

Private commissions came behind the Imperial ones, but there
was
a complication: the artisans engaged on projects for the Emperor received their supplies free of charge, while those doing mosaic or other glass work for citizens had to buy their tesserae or sheets of glass. The Imperial
Glassworks was expected to pay for itself now, in the modern scheme of things devised by thrice-exalted Valerius II and his advisers. Pappio was not, therefore, at liberty to entirely ignore the entreaties of those mosaicists clamouring for tesserae for private ceilings, walls, or floors. Nor, frankly, would it make sense for him to refuse
all
the quiet offers of sums for his own purse. A man had a duty to his family, didn't he?

Over and above these nuanced issues, Pappio had a powerful inclination to favour those craftsmen—or patrons—who had a demonstrated affinity for the Greens.

The Splendid Greens of Great and Glorious Achievement were his own beloved faction, and one of the extreme pleasures attendant upon his rise to this lofty status in his guild was that he was now in a position to subsidize the faction somewhat, and be honoured and recognized accordingly in their banquet hall and at the Hippodrome. He was no longer just another humble supporter. He was a dignitary, present at the feasts, prominently seated at the theatre, among those in the preferred places for the chariot races themselves. Long past were the days when he'd line up before dawn outside the Hippodrome gates to get a standing place to watch the horses run.