The Sarantine Mosaic (77 page)

He couldn't be
too
obvious in his favouritism—the Emperor's people were present and observing, everywhere—but Pappio did make sure that, all other things being remotely balanced, a Green mosaicist did not go away empty-handed if competing for hard-to-find colours or semi-precious stones with a known follower of the accursed Blues or even someone without declared allegiance.

This was only as it should be. Pappio owed his appointment to his Green partisanship. His predecessor as head of the guild and Glassworks Director—an equally fervent
Green—had selected him in large part for that reason. Pappio knew that when he chose to retire he was expected to pass on the position to another Green. It happened all the time, in every guild except the silk, which was a special case and closely scrutinized by the Imperial Precinct. One faction or the other controlled most of the guilds, and it was rare for that control to be wrested away. One had to be blatantly corrupt for the Emperor's people to interfere.

Pappio had no intention of being blatant about anything, or even corrupt, if it came to that. He was a careful man.

And it was that instinctive caution, in part, that had made him a little uneasy about the surprising request he'd received, and the extremely substantial payment that had accompanied it—before he'd even done a preliminary sketch of the glass bowl requested!

He understood that it was his stature that was being bought. That the gift would acquire greatly enhanced value because it had been fashioned by the head of the guild himself, who never did such things any more. He also knew that the man buying this from him—as a wedding gift, he understood—could afford to do so. One didn't need to make inquiries to know that the principal secretary to the Supreme Strategos, an historian who also happened to be chronicling the Emperor's building projects, had sufficient resources to buy an elaborate bowl. This was a man who, more and more, seemed to require a certain deference. Pappio didn't like the sallow, unsmiling, lean-faced secretary, but what did liking have to do with anything?

What was harder to sort out was
why
Pertennius of Eubulus was buying this gift. Some discreet questions had to be asked elsewhere before Pappio thought he had the answer. It turned out to be simple enough, in the end—one of the oldest stories of all—and it had nothing to do with the bride and groom.

It was someone else that Pertennius was trying to impress. And since that person happened to be dear to Pappio's own heart, he had to overcome a certain indignation—visualizing a woman sleek and splendid as a falcon in the thin arms of the dour secretary—to concentrate on his unaccustomed craft again. He forced himself to do so, however, as best he could.

After all, he wouldn't want the Principal Dancer for his beloved Greens to think him less than an exemplary artisan. Perhaps, he daydreamed, she might even ask for further work on her own behalf after seeing his bowl. Pappio imagined meetings, consultations, two heads bent close over a series of drawings, her notorious perfume— worn by only two women in all of Sarantium—enveloping him, a trusting hand laid on his arm …

Pappio was not a young man, was stout and bald and married with three grown children, but it was a truth of the world that certain women carried a magic about them, on the stage and off, and dreams followed where they went. You didn't stop dreaming just because you weren't young any more. If Pertennius could attempt to win admiration with a showy gift given to people he couldn't possibly care about, might not Pappio try to let the exquisite Shirin see what the Director of the Imperial Glassworks could do when he put his hands and mind— and a part of his heart—to his earliest craft?

She would see the bowl when it was delivered to her house. It seemed the bride was living with her.

After some thought, and a morning's sketching, Pappio decided to make the bowl green, with inset pieces of bright yellow glass like meadow flowers in the spring that was coming at last.

His heart quickened as he began to work, but it wasn't the labour or the craft that was exciting him, or even the image of a woman now. It was something else entirely. If
spring was nearly upon them, Pappio was thinking, humming a processional march to himself, then so were the chariots, so were the chariots, so were the chariots again.

Every morning, during the sunrise invocations in the elegant chapel she had elected to frequent, the young queen of the Antae went through an exercise of tabulating, as on a secretary's slate in her mind, the things for which she ought to be grateful. Seen in a certain light, there were many of them.

She had escaped an attempt on her life, survived a late-season sailing to Sarantium, and then the first stages of settling in this city—a process more overwhelming than she wanted to admit. It had taken much from her to preserve an appropriately haughty manner when they had first come within sight of the harbour and walls. Even though she had known Sarantium could overawe, and had been preparing for it, Gisel learned, when the sun rose that morning behind the Imperial City, that sometimes there was no real way to prepare oneself.

She was grateful for her father's training and the selfdiscipline her life had demanded: she didn't think anyone had seen how daunted she was.

And there was more for which thanks ought to be given, to holy Jad or whatever pagan deities one chose to remember from the Antae forests. She had entirely respectable housing in a small palace near the triple walls, courtesy of the Emperor and Empress. She'd acted quickly enough on arrival to secure adequate funds of her own, by demanding loans to the crown from Batiaran merchants trading here in the east. Despite the irregularity of her sudden arrival, unannounced, on an Imperial ship, with only a small cadre of her guards and women, none of the Batiarans had dared gainsay their queen's
regal, matter-of-fact request. If she'd waited, Gisel knew, it might have been different. Once those back in Varena— those doubtless claiming or battling for her throne by now—learned where she was, they would send their own instructions east. Money might be harder to come by. More importantly, she expected they'd try to kill her then.

She was too experienced in these affairs—of royalty and survival—to have been foolish enough to wait. Once she'd acquired her funds, she'd hired a dozen Karchite mercenaries as personal guards and dressed them in crimson and white, the colours of her grandfather's war banner.

Her father had always liked Karchites for guards. If you kept them sober when on duty and allowed them to disappear into cauponae when not, they tended to be fiercely loyal. She'd also accepted the Empress Alixana's offer of three more ladies-in-waiting and a chef and steward from the Imperial Precinct. She was setting up a household; amenities and a reasonable staff were necessary. Gisel knew perfectly well that there would be spies among these, but that, too, was something with which she was familiar. There were ways of avoiding them, or misleading them.

She'd been received at court not long after arriving and welcomed with entirely proper courtesy and respect. She had seen and exchanged formal greetings with the grey-eyed, round-faced Emperor and the small, exquisite, childless dancer who had become his Empress. They had all been precisely and appropriately polite, though no private encounters or exchanges with either Valerius or Alixana had followed. She hadn't been sure whether to expect these or not. It depended on the Emperor's larger plans. Once, affairs had waited on
her
plans. Not any more.

She
had
received, in her own small city palace, a regular stream of dignitaries and courtiers from the Imperial Precinct in that first interval of time. Some came
out of sheer curiosity, Gisel knew: she was a novelty, a diversion in winter. A barbarian queen in flight from her people. They might have been disappointed to be received with style and grace by a reserved, silk-clad young woman who showed no sign at all of using bear grease in her yellow hair.

A smaller number made the long trip through the crowded city for more thoughtful reasons, assessing her and what role she might play in the shifting alignments of a complex court. The aged, clear-eyed Chancellor Gesius had had himself carried through the streets to her bearing gifts in his litter: silk for a garment and an ivory comb. They spoke of her father, with whom Gesius had evidently corresponded for years, and then of theatre—he urged her to attend—and finally of the regrettable effect of the damp weather on his fingers and knee joints. Gisel almost allowed herself to like him, but was too experienced to permit herself such a response.

The Master of Offices, a younger, stiff-faced man named Faustinus, arrived the next morning, apparently in response to Gesius's visit, as though the two men tracked each other's doings. They probably did. The court of Valerius II would not be different in this regard from Gisel's father's or her own. Faustinus drank an herbal tea and asked a number of self-evidently harmless questions about how her court had been administered. He was a functionary, these things occupied his attention. He was also ambitious, she judged, but only in the way that officious men are who fear losing the patterns of their established lives. Nothing burned in him.

In the woman who came a few days after, there
was
something burning beneath a chilly, patrician manner, and Gisel felt both the heat and the cold. It was an unsettling encounter. She had heard of the Daleinoi, of course: wealthiest family in the Empire. With a father and brother
dead, another brother said to be hideously maimed and hidden away somewhere, and a third keeping cautiously distant from the City, Styliane Daleina, wife now to the Supreme Strategos, was the visible presence of her aristocratic family in Sarantium, and there was nothing harmless about her, Gisel decided very early in their conversation.

They were almost of an age, she judged, and life had taken away both their childhoods very early. Styliane's manner was unrevealing, her bearing and manner perfect, a veneer of exquisite politeness, betraying nothing of what might be her thoughts.

Until she chose to do so. Over dried figs and a small glass of warmed, sweetened wine, a desultory exchange about clothing styles in the west had turned into a sudden, very direct question about Gisel's throne and her flight and what she hoped to achieve by accepting the Emperor's invitation to come east.

‘I am alive,' Gisel had said mildly, meeting the appraising blue gaze of the other woman. ‘You will have heard of what happened in the sanctuary on the day of its consecration.'

‘It was unpleasant, I understand,' had said Styliane Daleina casually, speaking of murder and treason. She gestured dismissively. ‘Is this, then, pleasant? This pretty cage?'

‘My visitors are a source of very great consolation,' Gisel had murmured, controlling anger ruthlessly. ‘Tell me, I have been urged to attend the theatre one night. Have you a suggestion?' She smiled, bland and young, manifestly thoughtless. A barbarian princess, barely two generations removed from the forests where the women painted their naked breasts with dyes.

More than one person, Gisel had thought, leaning forward to carefully select a fig, could preserve her privacy behind empty talk.

Styliane Daleina left soon after, with an observation at the door that people at court seemed to think the principal dancer and actress for the Green faction was the preeminent performer of the day. Gisel had thanked her, and promised to repay her courtesy with a visit one day. She actually thought she might: there was a certain kind of bitter pleasure in this sort of sparring. She wondered if it were possible to find bear grease in Sarantium.

There were other visitors. The Eastern Patriarch sent his principal secretary, an officious, sour-smelling cleric who asked prepared questions about western faith and then lectured her on Heladikos until he realized she wasn't listening. Some members of the small Batiaran community here—mostly merchants, mercenary soldiers, a few craftsmen—made a point of attending upon her until, at some point in the winter, they stopped coming, and Gisel concluded that Eudric or Kerdas, back home, had sent word, or even instructions. Agila was dead; they had learned that by now. He'd died in her father's resting place the morning of the consecration. With Pharos and Anissa, the only two people left in the world who might have been said to love her. She'd heard the tidings, dry-eyed, and hired another half a dozen mercenaries.

The visitors from the court continued for a time. A few of the men gave indications of wishing to seduce her: a triumph for them, doubtless.

She remained a virgin, regretting it occasionally. Boredom was one of the central problems of this new life. It wasn't even really a life. It was a waiting to see if life could continue, or begin again.

And this, unfortunately, was where the dutiful attempt to summon proper gratitude each morning in the chapel usually faltered as the invocations to holy Jad ended. She'd had an existence of real—if precarious—power back home. Reigning queen of a conquering people in the homeland
of an empire. The High Patriarch in Rhodias deferred to her, as he had to her father. Here in Sarantium she was subjected to lectures from a lesser cleric. She was no more than a glittering object, a jewel of sorts for the Emperor and his court, without function or access to any role. She was, in the simplest reading of things, a possible excuse for an invasion of Batiara, and little more than that.