The Sarantine Mosaic

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  He struggled to disentangle the elements of the work here, to gain some mastery over it and himself. Deep brown and obsidian in the eyes, to make them darker and stronger than the framing brown hair, shoulder length. The long face made longer by that straight hair and the beard; the arched, heavy eyebrows, deeply etched forehead, other lines scoring the cheeks—the skin so pale between beard and hair it showed as nearly grey. Then down to the rich, luxurious blue of the god’s robe beneath his cloak which was shot through, Crispin saw, with a dazzling myriad of contrasting colours for a woven texture and the hinted play and power of light in a god whose power was light.

  And then the hands. The hands were heartbreaking. Contorted, elongated fingers with the ascetic spiritualism suggested by that, but there was more: these were no cleric’s fingers, no hands of repose and clasped meditation, they were both scarred. One finger on the left hand had clearly been broken; it was crooked, the knuckle swollen: red and brown tesserae against white and grey. These hands had wielded weapons, had been cut, frozen, known savage war against ice and black emptiness in the endless defence of mortal children whose understanding was … that of children, no more.

  And the sorrow and judgement in the dark eyes was linked to what had happened to those hands. The colours, Crispin saw—the craftsman in him marvelling—brought hands and eyes inescapably together. The vivid, unnaturally raised veins on the wrists of both pale hands used the same brown and obsidian that were in the eyes. He knew, intuitively, that this precise pairing of tesserae would exist nowhere else on the dome. The eyes of sorrow and indictment, the hands of suffering and war. A god who stood between his unworthy children and the dark, offering sunlight each morning in their brief time of life, and then his own pure Light afterwards, for the worthy.

  Crispin thought of Ilandra, of his girls, of the plague ravaging like a rabid carnivore through all the world, and he lay on cold stone beneath this image of Jad and understood what it was saying to him, to all those here below: that the god’s victory was never assured, never to be taken for granted. It was this, he realized, that the unknown mosaicists of long ago were reporting on this dome to their brethren with this vast, weary god against the soft gold of his sun.

  ‘Are you all right? My lord! Are you all right?’

  He became aware that Vargos was addressing him with an urgency and concern that almost seemed amusing, after all they had survived today. It wasn’t especially uncomfortable on the stones, though cold. He moved a hand vaguely. It was still somewhat difficult to breathe, actually. It was better when he didn’t look up. Kasia, he saw as he turned his head, was standing a little apart, staring at the dome.

  Looking over at her, he grasped something else: Vargos knew this place. He’d been along this road, back and forth, for years. The girl would never have seen this incarnation of Jad either, had most likely never even heard of it. She’d only come from the north a year ago, forced into slavery and the faith of the sun god, had only known Jad as a young, fair-haired, blue-eyed god, a direct descendant—though this she wouldn’t know—of the solar deity in the pantheon of the Trakesians centuries ago.

  ‘What do you see?’ he said to her. His voice rasped in his throat. Vargos turned to follow his gaze to the girl. Kasia looked over at him anxiously, then away. She was very pale.

  ‘I … he …’ She hesitated. They heard footsteps. Crispin struggled to a sitting position and saw a cleric approaching in the white robes of the order of the Sleepless Ones. He understood now why it was so quiet here. These were the holy men who stayed awake all night praying while the god fought daemons beneath the world. Mankind has duties, the figure overhead was saying, this is an unending war. These men believed that and embodied it in their rituals. The image above and the order of clerics praying in the long nights fit together. The men who made the mosaic, so long ago, would have known that.

  ‘Tell us,’ he said quietly to Kasia as the white-clad figure, small, round-faced, full-bearded, came over to them.

  ‘He … doesn’t think he is winning,’ she said finally. ‘The battle.’

  The cleric stopped at that. He eyed the three of them gravely, apparently unsurprised to find a man sitting on the floor.

  ‘He isn’t certain he is,’ the cleric said to Kasia, speaking Sarantine, as she had. ‘There are enemies, and man does evil, abetting them. It is never sure, this battle. Which is why we must be a part of it.’

  ‘Do we know who achieved this?’ Crispin asked quietly.

  The cleric looked surprised. ‘Their names? The craftsmen?’ He shook his head. ‘No. There must have been many of them, I suppose. They were artisans … and a holy spirit possessed them for a time.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Crispin said, rising to his feet. He hesitated. ‘Today is the Day of the Dead here,’ he murmured, not sure why he was saying that. Vargos steadied him with a hand at his elbow and then stepped back.

  ‘I understand as much,’ the cleric said mildly. He had an unlined, gentle face. ‘We are surrounded by pagan heresies. They do evil to the god.’

  ‘Is that all they are to you?’ Crispin asked. In his mind was a voice—a young woman, a crafted bird, a soul: I am yours, lord, as I ever was from the time I was brought here.

  ‘What else should they be to me?’ the white-robed man said, raising his eyebrows.

  It was a fair question, Crispin supposed. He caught an anxious look from Vargos and let the matter rest. ‘I am sorry for … how you found me,’ he said. ‘I was affected by the image.’

  The cleric smiled. ‘You aren’t the first. Might I guess you are from the west … Batiara?’

  Crispin nodded. It wasn’t a difficult conjecture. His accent would have given that away.

  ‘Where the god is yellow-haired and comely, his eyes blue and untroubled as summer skies?’ The white-robed man was smiling complacently.

  ‘I am aware of how Jad is rendered in the west, yes.’ Cris-pin had never been much inclined to be lectured by anyone.

  ‘And as a last hazarded guess, may I assume you are an artisan of some sort?’

  Kasia looked astonished, Vargos wary. Crispin eyed the cleric coolly. ‘A clever surmise,’ he said. ‘How would you know this?’

  The man’s hands were clasped at his waist. ‘As I said, you aren’t the first westerner to react this way. And it is often those who make their own attempts at such things who … are most affected.’

  Crispin blinked. He might feel humbled by what was on the dome, but ‘attempts at such things’ was not acceptable.

  ‘I am impressed by your sagacity. It is indeed a fine piece of work. After I attend to certain requests from the Emperor in Sarantium, I might be willing to return and supervise the needed repairs to the erratic groundwork done on the dome.’

  The cleric’s turn to blink, pleasingly. ‘That work was done by holy men with a holy vision,’ he said indignantly.

  ‘I have no doubt of it. One shame is that we don’t know their names, to honour them, another is that they lacked technique equal to their vision. You do know that tiles have begun to dislodge towards the right side of the dome, as we face the altar. Parts of the god’s cloak and left forearm appear to have recklessly chosen to detach themselves from the rest of his august form.’

  The cleric looked up, almost reluctantly.

  ‘Of course you may have a parable or a liturgical explanation for this,’ Crispin added. In the oddest way, fencing with the man was restoring his equilibrium. Not necessarily a proper thing, he supposed, but he needed it just now.

  ‘You would propose changing the figure of the god?’ The man seemed genuinely aghast.

  Crispin sighed. ‘It has been changed, good cleric. When your extremely pious artisans did this work centuries ago, Jad had a robe and a left arm.’ He pointed. ‘Not the remains of dried-out groundwork.’

  The cleric shook his head. His features had reddened. ‘What manner of man looks up at glory and speaks of daring to set his own hands upon it?’

  Crispin
was quite calm now. ‘A descendant in the craft of those who did it in the first place. Lacking, perhaps, their piety, but with a better understanding of the technique of mosaic. I should add that the dome also appears near to losing some of its golden sun, to the left. I’d need to be up on a scaffold to be certain, but it seems some tesserae have dislodged there as well. If that goes, then the god’s hair will soon begin to fall out, I fear. Are you prepared to have Jad come down upon you, not in a thunderous descent but in a dribble of glass and stone?’

  ‘This is the most profane heresy!’ the cleric snapped, making the sign of the disk.

  Crispin sighed. ‘I am sorry you see it that way. I do not mean to provoke you. Or not only that. The setting bed on the dome was done in an old-fashioned way. One layer, and most likely with a mixture of materials we now understand to be less enduring than others. It is—as we all know—not holy Jad above us, but his rendering by mortal men. We worship the god, not the image, I understand.’ He paused. This was a matter of extreme contention in some quarters. The cleric opened his mouth as if to answer, but then closed it again.

  Crispin went on. ‘Mortals have their limitations, and this, too, we all know. Sometimes new things are discovered. It is no criticism of those who achieved this dome to note such a truth. Lesser men may preserve the work of greater. With competent assistants I could probably ensure the restored image above us would remain for several hundred years to come. It would take a season of work. Perhaps a little less or more. But I can tell you that without such intervention those eyes and hands and hair will begin to litter the stones around us soon. I would be sorry to see it. This is a singular work.’

  ‘It is unmatched in the world!’

  ‘I believe that.’

  The cleric hesitated. Kasia and Vargos, Crispin saw, were eyeing him with astonishment. It occurred to him— with a restorative amusement—that neither of them had had any reason to believe he was good for anything to this point. A worker in mosaic had little enough chance to show his gifts or skill walking the emptiness of Sauradia.

  In that moment, in an intervention Crispin could have called divine, a tinkling sound was heard across the floor. Crispin repressed a smile and walked over. He knelt, looking carefully, and found a brownish tessera without difficulty. He turned it over. The backing was dry, brittle. It crumbled to powder as he brushed it with a finger. He rose and walked back to the other three, handing the mosaic piece to the cleric.

  ‘A holy message?’ he said drily. ‘Or just a piece of dark stone from’—he looked up—‘most likely the robe again, on the right side?’

  The cleric opened his mouth and closed it, exactly as he had before. He was undoubtedly regretting, Crispin thought, that this had been his day to be awake in daylight and deal with visitors to the chapel. Crispin looked up again at the severe majesty overhead and regretted his bantering tone. Attempts at such things had rankled, but it hadn’t been personal, and he ought to have been above such pettiness. Especially today, and here.

  Men, he thought—perhaps especially this man, Caius Crispus of Varena —seemed to escape so rarely from the concerns and trivial umbrages that made up their daily lives. He ought to have been moved beyond them today, surely. Or perhaps—a sudden, quite different sort of thought—perhaps it was because he’d been taken so far beyond that he needed to find his way back in this manner?

  He looked at the cleric, and then up again at the god. The god’s image. It could be done, with skilful people. Probably close to half a year, however, realistically. He decided, abruptly, that they would stay the night here. He would speak to the leader of this holy order, make amends for irony and levity. If they could be made to understand what was happening on the dome, perhaps when Crispin reached the City bearing a letter from them, the Chancellor, or someone else—the Imperial Mosaicist?—might be enlisted in an attempt to preserve this splendour. He’d teased and been flippant, Crispin thought. Perhaps he’d make redress by an act of restoration, in memory of this day and perhaps of his own dead.

  In the unfolding of events, of a man’s life, so many things can intervene. Just as he was not to see his torch of Heladikos in the chapel outside Varena by glittering candlelight, so this, too, was a task Crispin was never to perform, though his intentions in that moment were deeply sincere and nearly pious. Nor did they, in fact, end up spending that night in the dormitory of the ancient sanctuary.

  The cleric slipped the brown tessera into his robe. But before anyone could speak again, they heard a distant and then a growing thunder of horses from the road.

  The cleric looked to the doors, startled. Crispin exchanged a sharp glance with Vargos. Then they heard, even through the doors and well back from the road, a loudly shouted command to halt. The hoofbeats stopped. There was a jingling, then boots on the path and the voices of men.

  The doors burst open admitting a spearshaft of daylight and half a dozen cavalry soldiers. They strode forward, heavy steps on stone. None of them looked up at the dome. Their leader, a burly, black-haired, very tall man, carrying his helmet under one arm, stopped before the four of them. He nodded to the cleric, stared at Crispin.

  ‘Carullus, tribune of the Fourth Sauradian. My respects. Saw the mule. We are looking for someone on this road. Would you be named Martinian of Varena, by any chance?’

  Crispin, unable to think of any adequate reason to do otherwise, nodded his head in agreement. He was, in fact, speechless.

  Carullus of the Fourth’s formal expression gave way on the instant to mingled disdain and triumph—a remarkable conjunction, in fact, a challenge ever to render in tesserae. He levelled a thick, indicting finger at Crispin. ‘Where the fuck have you been, you shit-smeared Rhodian slug? Sticking it into every poxed whore on the road? What are you doing on the road instead of at sea? You’ve been awaited in the fucking City for weeks now by his thrice-exalted Majesty, His Imperial Magnificence, the fucking Emperor Valerius II himself. You turd.’

  ‘You are a mentally defective idiot of a Rhodian, you know.’

  An entirely unexpected memory came to Crispin with the words, forming slowly, retrieved from some lost corner of childhood. It was amazing, really, what the mind could dredge forth. At the most absurd moments. He had been stunned unconscious when he was about nine years old, playing ‘Siege’ with friends around and on top of a woodshed. He’d failed to repel a ferocious Barbarian assault from two older boys and had pitched from the shed roof, landing on his head among logs.

  From that morning until the guardsmen of Queen Gisel had clapped a sack of flour over his head and clubbed him into submission the experience had not been repeated.

  It had now, Crispin grasped through the miasma of an excruciating headache, been duplicated twice in the same autumn season. His thoughts were extremely muddled. For a moment he’d attributed the obscene words he’d just heard to Linon. But Linon was sardonic not profane, she called him imbecile not idiot, spoke Rhodian not Sarantian, and she was gone.

  Recklessly, he opened his eyes. The world shifted and heaved, appallingly. He closed them again quickly, near to throwing up.

  ‘A genuine fool,’ the heavy voice went on implacably. ‘Ought never to be allowed out of doors. What in holy thunder do you expect to happen when a foreigner—a Rhodian at that!—calls a Sarantine cavalry tribune a fartfaced goat-fucker in the presence of his own men?’

  It wasn’t Linon. It was the soldier.

  Carullus. Of the Fourth Sauradian. That was the swine’s name.

  The swine went on, his tone a gross exaggeration of patience now. ‘Have you the least idea of the position you put me in? The Imperial army is entirely dependent on respect for authority … and regular payment, of course … and you left me next to no choice at all. I couldn’t draw a sword in a chapel. I couldn’t strike you with my fist … giving you far too much dignity. Flattening you with a helm was just about the only possible course. I didn’t even swing hard. Be grateful that I’m known for a kindly man, you snot-faced Rhodian prig,
and that you’ve a beard. The bruise won’t show as much before it heals. You’ll be as ugly as you’ve always been, not more than that.’

  Carullus of the Fourth chuckled. He actually chuckled. He’d been slugged with a helmet. It was coming back to him. On the cheekbone and jaw. Crispin had a memory of a swift, heavy arm coming across, then nothing more. He attempted to move his jaw up and down, and then from side to side. A searing pain made him gasp, but movement was possible, it seemed. He continued to try opening his eyes at intervals, but the world insisted upon moving about in a sick-making fashion whenever he did.

  ‘Nothing’s broken,’ Carullus said easily. ‘Told you, I’m a good-natured man. Bad for discipline, but there it is. There it is. The god made me what I am. You really must not think you can walk the roads of the Sarantine Empire making insults—however clever—to the face of military officers in the presence of their troops, my western friend. I have fellow tribunes and chiliarchs who would have dragged you straight outside and run you through in the graveyard to save lugging your corpse anywhere. I, on the other hand, do not entirely subscribe to the general loathing and contempt for the sanctimonious, cowardly, shit-smeared Rhodian catamites that most soldiers of the Empire profess. I actually find you people amusing at times and, as I said before, I’m a kindly man. Ask my troops.’

  Carullus, a tribune of the Sauradian Fourth, liked the cadences of his own voice, it appeared. Crispin wondered how and how soon he could kill this kindly man.

  ‘Where … am I?’ It hurt to talk.

  ‘In a litter. Travelling east.’

  This information brought no inconsiderable relief: it seemed the world was indeed moving, and the perception of a weaving landscape and an up-and-down-bobbing military conversationalist beside him was not merely a product of his braincase having being rearranged again.

  There was something urgent to be said. He struggled and then remembered what it was. Forced his eyes open again, finally grasping that Carullus was riding beside him, on a dark grey horse. ‘My man?’ Crispin asked, moving his jaw as little as possible. ‘Vargos.’