Sometimes direct questions worked best. They could also unsettle a man. He watched this one. They were committed to nothing here; this needed to be assessed.
“Emperor Canassus in Rhodias, in the early days of their empire, has a comment on that in his Journals,” said Pero Villani to his duke, at night, in the chamber of the Council of Twelve.
The duke blinked. Then smiled again, more widely. “He does, indeed! ‘The son grows next to the father’s tree or seeks higher ground away from it.’”
He saw the artist was startled, in turn, that he knew the passage. Which was amusing. That his classical knowledge should surprise. He paused. This was enjoyable, but they did not have unlimited time.
He let his voice harden. “Which are you doing, Pero Villani? Staying close, or breaking away?”
—
PERO HAD THOUGHT to win a debating point with a quote. Which was about as foolish as possible, given where he was. Debating points?
The duke was fascinating and terrifying and old. There were so many stories. Some might be true. If all of them were, he was a monster. Actually, if all of them were true he had died long ago and the Council of Twelve was led by a demon from the half-world.
The flattery, patently insincere, had irritated him, however. It was true that two of his father’s works had been bought from creditors by the republic, but they would have been saving money on art, not making a statement about mastery.
But it had become more difficult to sustain anger. Proposal had been unexpected—and a relief. He was here to be offered or asked something? But what? And why at night? Why seized in the street?
He made himself speak calmly. “I honoured my father in life and I do so in death. I pray Jad grants him light. What is it you want of me?” And then, as he heard those words in his own ears, how brusque they sounded, he added, “How may I assist the council?”
The duke’s face was narrow, wrinkled, seamed. It was hard to discern its colour in the shadows there, but Pero imagined it pale like parchment. He saw the old man smile again. He wasn’t sure what was amusing. Perhaps his bravado?
“Would you be willing to paint my portrait?” Duke Ricci asked.
Pero fought to keep his mouth from dropping open. It took some effort. He said, “You seized me at night to ask that?”
“Of course not!” snapped another of the council, to Pero’s left.
The duke glanced coldly at the other man, then turned back to Pero. “The portrait of myself would be for this room, among the other ducal portraits. Done in due course, by way of a reward, with payment of eighty gold serales, if that is acceptable.”
Acceptable? It was what the very greatest artists were paid for a major work. It was ten times what he’d received from Citrani. And for this room, the council chamber? As the formal portrait of the duke to hang among the work of masters on these walls? Pero felt faint suddenly. He needed something to support himself, or a drink.
“How do you even know my work?” he managed.
“I don’t,” the duke said frankly. He shifted papers in front of him, adjusted the spectacles on his nose. “But we have reports from other artists, and from,” he glanced down, “a man named Sano, a bookseller, for whom it seems you work at times? He has paintings of yours?”
“Yes,” said Pero. He was fighting dizziness. His own work? In this room? “Why did you seek reports on me?”
“Because we need an artist with two qualities.”
Pero realized he was expected to ask, like words exchanged in an antiphonal litany.
He asked: “And these qualities are?”
“He must have talent and he must be young.”
“Talent. Yes, well . . . yes. Why young, my lord?”
His heart was beating fast.
“Because our painter must appear too youthful, too eager, too ambitious for his career to be a spy. Although he will be one, of course.”
Pero wondered if the others could hear his heart beating, if the room was loud with it. The duke, he noticed, seemed to be enjoying himself.
“A spy on what? Where?”
No smile this time from the tall old man at the head of the table. The council members were silent, watchful. The duke said, “We have been requested to send a skilled artist to someone. It is not without risk, but it is a rare opportunity for our republic. We need a man loyal, and with courage.”
“And who is it who wishes a painter?” Pero asked.
There was a shifting, a stir of anticipation around the table.
Duke Ricci said, his voice thin but extremely clear, “The Grand Khalif Gurçu in Asharias. He desires his portrait done by a western hand. We wish, in turn, to send someone to do that. Signore Villani, will you go to the Osmanli court, for Seressa?”
CHAPTER V
With any luck and the blessing of the god, Drago Ostaja thought, they might leave for home in the morning. He wanted that very much. It did depend, a lot, on Marin, however. Drago respected his ship’s owner, feared him a little, would deny that he loved him. He also knew he didn’t understand Marin Djivo—but anyone who said they did would be lying.
Drago was ready to sail. He had been from the moment they’d pulled into the Seressini lagoon and moored at the foreign merchants’ slip near the Arsenale, very early in the season, with wine, pepper, and grain to sell. First ship from the east at winter’s end.
He didn’t like Seressa. Never had, however many times he’d docked here with cargoes that brought Dubravae merchants like the Djivo family considerable wealth—and kept Drago employed as their captain.
There was no subtle reason for his unease. He didn’t like Seressinis. Few did, really. Seressa was in the business of making money, not friends—they said that themselves. The two city-states were not at war—Dubrava could never go to war with the stronger republic. Dubrava didn’t go to war with anyone: that was their way of life. War was ruinously expensive, and they weren’t powerful enough, in any case. They were merchants and diplomats, watchers not warriors. Treaties, negotiation, conciliation, bribes where needed, information shared in many directions (another kind of bribe). An almost infinite shrewdness and caution (someone had called it a woman’s attentiveness) guided policies in the Rector’s Palace. Dubrava’s walls had never been breached by catapults or cannon, their ships in the splendid harbour never fired or sunk.
It was cleverness more than anything, Drago knew. And if a ship’s captain born to a violence-prone people inland in wild Sauradia might dream of swinging a sword at a Seressini scion sniffing behind his handkerchief as he inspected goods, well, your dreams were your own, weren’t they?
In truth, they were treated with arrogance here (everyone was), but fairly. The Seressinis worshipped money. If you brought them things they could buy, then sell for more than they’d paid, you’d be welcome in this lagoon. They would bid fiercely against each other for your cargoes, especially if you were early—and Drago Ostaja took pride in being an early ship. The Djivo family paid him well for it.
Beyond commerce, the two republics either side of the Seressini Sea shared the faith of Jad—the western liturgy and images, with its bright-haired, shining god-figure and High Patriarch in Rhodias.
Drago had grown up differently: his childhood village sanctuary in Sauradia bore images of Jad as dark, bearded, gaunt, suffering. There had also been the heresy of the god’s beloved son.
He didn’t talk about Heladikos, not since arriving in Dubrava as a boy with his parents, fleeing Osmanli advances. He had seen the sea for the first time and felt—so decisively—that he’d found his true home, out there among the bright ships riding the green-and-white waves of the harbour. Sometimes you just knew.
And your beliefs were your own as much as your dreams. Or they were if you kept your mouth shut and were seen chanting the western liturgy in the seamen’s sanctuary or in Jaddite trading colonies among the
Asharites in long winter months in the east, waiting for spring and a fair wind.
How you prayed in your head, what you whispered to yourself at night, especially before sailing, wasn’t for anyone else. And sailors did often keep a place in their thoughts for Heladikos, who had fallen into the sea when he died, after driving his father’s chariot too close to the sun.
The son’s death was quietly seen by many mariners as a sacrifice, to protect those who sailed the wide, wild, deadly seas. It was a ship, sailors weeping for a young man’s ruined beauty, that had collected his body from the waves, wasn’t it? In the story.
And if you were among those who lived at sea, sometimes out of sight of any shore, well, you prayed to everything and everyone you could, didn’t you? The sea might be where Drago Ostaja felt he belonged, but it was never less than deadly.
It had once been preached by eastern clerics that the god’s gallant son had died bringing fire to mankind. Drago’s mother had told him that tale. It wasn’t a teaching any longer, not for hundreds of years. Heladikos bringing fire was heresy now, even in the east. They burned those who taught some old truths. Drago had never understood that. You didn’t have to kill people because what clerics thought had changed.
But the newer teaching was better, to his mind, it made more sense: mankind couldn’t have been fashioning metal weapons, cooking food, building ships, sailing, navigating, even collecting that half-mortal body from the sea, if they hadn’t already learned how to use fire before Heladikos fell from heaven.
No, today’s prayers in the east (not here, never here) were wiser: the god’s son had died in that chariot trying to approach his father to petition mercy for Jad’s suffering children below, living in pain and sorrow, dying too harshly of warfare and disease, childbirth and famine. Of so many terrible things. Storms at sea.
That was still how many people prayed in eastern Sauradia where Drago had grown up, and in Trakesia to the south, and in Moskav. Maybe Karch. Possibly other places he didn’t know. It was a liturgy with a patriarch based in Sarantium until not long ago.
Sarantium was gone. The city was Asharias now, taken by a conquering khalif. The world was a different place.
Drago tried not to think about that too often: about the City of Cities on the day the walls were breached and Asharites poured through like lava from a volcano, bringing fire. There was always suffering in the world. There was little you could do about it.
There had been mighty forests in Sauradia once, much reduced now by the need for timber. Powers were said to have dwelled—or to still dwell—in those woods.
What you worshipped, Drago Ostaja believed, had to be determined by where you grew up. How else could anyone be an Asharite, or one of those strange Kindath praying to the moons? You worshipped Jad if you were raised where Jad was worshipped.
That wasn’t a thought that needed sharing either.
At the moment his concern was filling and balancing the Blessed Ingacia with the cargo they were taking on. It was mostly northern woollens and cloth Marin had purchased, dyed over the winter in Seressa, to be sold east. A bulky cargo needed careful stowing, though they had been doing this for years and there was no mystery to it, just routine and prudence.
The mystery was Marin, more often. Second son of the family. The smart one, everyone knew, though not the more predictable, as everyone also knew. Not many shipowners took their reluctant captain with them, for example, to the most expensive brothel in Seressa and bought him the most expensive woman in the house for a night.
Marin had done it, Drago knew, to celebrate and reward his flying voyage from Khatib in the east to Dubrava, where they’d collected their owner (Marin) and raced on to Seressa. It had been a “pushing the season” trip, too early in spring for safety, but Drago had had a good feeling about the easterly that had sprung up, and had noticed that the fruit trees had already ripened. And, to be more certain, he’d consulted a Kindath sky-reader in a house on a lane he had come to know . . .
He’d heard what he’d needed to hear. The Blessed Ingacia had left the harbour of Khatib two days later, passing the ancient beacon light as the sun rose on their right (each man praying in his own way).
The clerics of Jad condemned sky-reading as heresy, magic. On the other hand, it was known that Emperor Rodolfo had such men at his court in Obravic, honoured for their learning. And Rodolfo was the Holy Jaddite Emperor, wasn’t he?
A mariner heading to sea sought wisdom where he could, and the moons and stars were above the world every night, telling their tales to those who could hear.
They’d docked in Candaria to take on wine from their warehouse on the island and were swiftly back to sea, hurrying home on what turned out to be a glorious wind. They were the first ship from the east into the harbour at Dubrava. The cannon saluted them.
That, Marin had declared, after he’d come on board and they’d crossed the narrow sea to Seressa (no Senjani raiders, thanks be to Jad), was worth an extra captain’s share and a silken woman at a place he knew. He’d offered two of the women, actually. Drago had quickly declined. One Seressini courtesan, at this level of sophistication, was daunting enough. He’d expected her to be disdainful, vexed at being assigned to the lowly captain and not the elegant shipowner.
If she was, Drago never saw it. He didn’t want to know what that night had cost Marin, but he knew he’d remember it a long time. In a way, a woman like that could destroy you for others.
“I will have this pleasure again, signore?” she’d even asked, stretching on the bed like a cat when morning came.
Drago had grunted, pulling on his boots. He’d wanted to be back at his ship. There were goods to be stowed. “Maybe. If I set a record again crossing from Khatib,” he replied.
“Khatib?” she said lazily. She had red hair. Her body was available to his glance even now, smooth, richly curved. “Tell me, handsome captain, what are they trading there this spring?”
Even the whores, he remembered thinking as he left the room. Everyone in Seressa was looking for information!
Which, he later thought, towards sundown the next day at sea, hugging the coastline past Mylasia, to the point where they’d angle across for Dubrava, ought to have made what Marin had said and done in the harbour less surprising.
Perhaps. Marin was Marin, though. He was going to surprise you.
—
IT WAS A VERY BRIGHT MORNING, which was unfortunate from Pero Villani’s current perspective. He’d had a late night, as friends celebrated his sudden good fortune—and toasted his departure, extensively.
Once he’d agreed, three nights earlier in the council chamber, the secrecy about the portrait commissioned in Asharias had been immediately lifted. The painting needed to be announced. The duke (whom he was going to also paint when he returned!) had wanted discretion for that first conversation only. If Pero had declined, it would have been said that the invitation had never been made. If he’d spoken of it after saying no, they would have denied it, and he’d possibly have been killed for the indiscretion. No one had said anything like that, they were far too well-mannered, but Pero knew his republic.
But saying yes, as it turned out, meant going to the Osmanli court to do more than render an image of the grand khalif. Painting a subject in the western manner required sessions of sketching, perhaps even doing the painting from life (if Gurçu the Destroyer could be induced to allow it). Pero Villani would have occasion to closely observe and perhaps even converse with the man who had taken Sarantium.
He was expected to remember these encounters and report them in detail when he returned. No one spoke the alternative phrasing aloud: if he returned.
It was suggested he take no notes, not even in code. A code would be seen as suspicious from a simple artist. The duke’s privy clerk—more respectful the second time they met—advised him as to this. Signore Villani could confidently expect the Osmanlis to
be listening to all his conversations. They would know his intimate preferences in bed after his first evening with one of the women they’d send to him.
“They will send me women?”
“Almost certainly,” the man replied, amused. “But only incidentally for your pleasure. Much more for their information.”
Pero remembered smiling. “How very like us,” he’d said.
There were other matters on which he was prepared by the privy clerk. These were, it was made clear, only possibilities, he was not to dwell overmuch upon them. But if opportunity presented itself . . .
Pero made a decision to push these matters aside from the start. Opportunity, he decided, was unlikely to arise, and he didn’t want it to.
It hadn’t been difficult to make the decision to go. What did he have to stay here for? The only things ahead of him in Seressa were like the barrel he’d moved into the roadway to trip a man he’d almost killed. Obstacles.
That moment still bothered him this morning, even through a headache. He wasn’t a violent man—or hadn’t thought he was. But in his anger he’d come close to killing someone in the dark. If it hadn’t been a guardsman wearing armour . . .
Sailing to Sarantium was the ancient phrase. One of his friends had quoted it last night, raising a cup. There was a new sorrow that came with the words, since there was no Sarantium any more. It used to mean that someone was changing his life, embarking on something new, transforming like a figure in a classical painting or mosaic, becoming something else.
He wondered if sailing to Asharias could achieve the same thing. Not just as a saying, but in reality, in the life that he, Pero, son of Viero Villani, was living. It could, he thought. It could change everything. He needed to paint well, earn respect from the khalif and his court, remember all he saw and heard, come home remembering. Unless the most secret, least likely part of his mission somehow happened. He had already decided he wasn’t going to think about that.
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