Crispin found that he was having trouble breathing. Very carefully, with another glance at the couch, he shifted the paper a little and read on, in disbelief.
She will have congress with these men, insatiably, sometimes two of them at one time using her like a whore in her own bath while the other women fondle themselves and each other and offer lewd, lascivious encouragement. A virtuous girl from Eubulus, the official told me in great secrecy, was poisoned by the Empress for daring to say that this conduct was impious. Her body has never been found. The unspeakable whore who is now our Empress always has her holy men detained outside the baths in the morning until after the soldiers have been dismissed through a hidden inner door. She then greets the clerics, half-naked, the reek of carnality about her, making a mockery of the morning prayers to holy Jad.
Crispin swallowed hard. He felt a pulse throbbing in his temple. He looked over at the sleeping man. Pertennius was snoring now. He looked ill and grey and helpless. Crispin became aware that his hands were shaking. He released the sheet of paper when it began to rattle in his grasp. He felt rage and fear and—beneath them both like a sounding drum—a growing horror. He thought he might be sick.
He ought to go, he knew. He needed to go from here. But there was a power to this exquisitely phrased vituperation, this venom, that caused him—almost without volition, as if he’d been rendered subject to a dark spell—to leaf to another page.
When the Trakesian farmer who foully murdered to claim the throne for his illiterate relative was finally seated there in his own right, though not his own peasant name (for he abandoned that as a vain effort to abandon the dung smell of the fields), he began to more openly practise his nighttime rites of daemons and black spirits. Ignoring the desperate words of his holy clerics, and ruthlessly destroying those who would not be silent, Petrus of Trakesia, the Night’s Emperor, turned the seven palaces of the Imperial Precinct into unholy places, full of savage rituals and blood at darkfall. Then, in a vicious mockery of piety, he declared an intention to build a vast new Sanctuary to the god. He commissioned evil, godless men—foreigners, many of them—to design and decorate it, knowing they would never gainsay his own black purposes. It was truly believed by many in the City in this time that the Trakesian himself conducted rituals of human sacrifice in the unfinished Sanctuary by night when none were allowed but his own licensed confederates. The Empress, besmeared with the blood of innocent victims, would dance for him, it was said, between candles lit in mockery of the holiness of Jad. Then, naked, with the Emperor and others watching, the whore would take an unlit candle from the altar, as she had done in her youth on the stage, and she would lie down in sight of all and …
Crispin crammed the papers back together. It was enough. It was more than enough. He did feel ill now. This unctuous, watchful, so-discreet secretary of the Strategos, this official chronicler of the wars of Valerius’s reign and his building projects, with his honoured place in the Imperial Precinct, had been spewing forth in this room the accumulated filth and bile of hatred.
Crispin wondered if these words were ever meant to be read. And when? Would people believe them? Could they shape, in years to come, an impression of truth for those who had never actually known the people of whom these ugly words were written? Was it possible?
It occurred to him that if he but walked from here with a randomly chosen sheaf of these papers in his hand Pertennius of Eubulus would be disgraced, exiled.
Or, very possibly, executed. A death to Crispin’s name. Even so, it stayed in his mind to do it, standing there over the cluttered table, breathing hard, imagining these pages as crimson-hued with their hatred, listening to the sleeping man’s snores and the snap of the fire and the faint, distant sounds of the night city.
He remembered Valerius, that first night, standing under the stupendous dome Artibasos had achieved. The intelligence and the courtesy of the Emperor as he patiently watched Crispin come to terms with the surface he was being given for his own craft.
He remembered Alixana in her rooms. A rose in gold on a table. The terrible impermanence of beauty. Everything transitory. Make me something that will last, she had said.
Mosaic: a striving after the eternal. He’d realized that she understood that. And had understood even then, that first night, that this woman would be with him always, in some way. That had been before the man now sleeping gape-mouthed on his couch had knocked and entered, bearing a gift from Styliane Daleina.
Crispin remembered—and now understood in a very different way—the devouring glance Pertennius had cast about Alixana’s small, rich, firelit chamber, and the expression in his eyes when he’d seen the Empress with her hair unbound and seemingly alone with Crispin late at night. The unspeakable whore who is now our Empress.
Abruptly, Crispin left the room.
He went quickly down the stairs. The servant was dozing on a stool in the hallway under an iron wall sconce. He snapped suddenly awake at the sound of footsteps. Sprang up.
‘Your master is asleep in his clothing,’ Crispin said brusquely. ‘See to him.’
He unlocked the front door and went out to where there was cold air and a darkness that appalled him so much less than what he had just read by firelight. He stopped in the middle of the street, looked up, saw stars: so remote, so detached from mortal life, no one could invoke them. He welcomed the cold, rubbing hard at his face with both hands as if to cleanse it.
He suddenly wanted, very much, to be home. Not in the house he’d been given here, but half a world away. Truly home. Beyond Trakesia, Sauradia, the black forests and empty spaces, in Varena again. He wanted Martinian, his mother, other friends too much neglected these past two years, the comfort of the lifelong-known.
False shelter, that. He knew it, even as he shaped the thought. Varena was a cesspool now, as much or more than Sarantium was, a place of murder and civil violence and black suspicions in the palace: without even the possibility of redemption that lay overhead here on the Sanctuary dome.
There was, really, nowhere to hide from what the world seemed to be, unless one played Holy Fool and fled into a desert somewhere, or climbed a crag. And, really, in the great scale and scheme of things—he took another deep breath of the cold night air—how did a fearful, bitter scribe’s malevolence and lecherous dishonesty measure against … the death of children? It didn’t. It didn’t at all.
It occurred to him that sometimes you didn’t really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had. He wasn’t about to flee from all this, let his hair grow wild and his garments stink of unwashed sweat and excrement in the desert while his skin blistered and burned. One lived in the world. Sought what slender grace was to be found, however one defined such things, and accepted that Jad’s creation—or Ludan’s, the zubir’s, or that of any other worshipped power—was not a place where mortal men and women were meant to find tranquil ease. There might be other worlds—some taught as much—better than this, where such harmonies were possible, but he didn’t live in one and was not ever going to live in one.
And thinking so, Crispin turned and looked down the street a little way and he saw the torchlit wall of the enormous house adjacent to Pertennius’s and the gated courtyard into which an elegant litter had been carried a little time ago, and in the starlit dark he saw that the front door of that house now stood open to the night and a servant woman was there, robed against the chill, a candle in her hand, looking at him.
The woman saw that he had noticed her. Wordlessly, she lifted the candle and gestured with her other hand towards the open doorway.
Crispin had actually wheeled around to face the other way before he’d even realized he was doing so, the movement entirely involuntary. His back to the dark invitation of that light, he stood very still again in the street, but all was changed now, changed utterly, by that open door. To his left, above the handsome stone and brick façades of the houses here, the arc of the starlit dome rose, a serene curve above al
l these jagged, wounding mortal lines and edges, disdainful of them in its purity.
But made by a mortal man. A man named Artibasos, one of those who lived down here among all the cutting, human interactions of wife, children, friends, patrons, enemies, the angry, indifferent, bitter, blind, dying.
Crispin felt the wind rise, imagined the slim serving girl shielding her candle in the open doorway behind him. Visualized his own tread approaching her, passing through that door. Became aware that his heart was pounding. I am not ready for this, he thought, and knew that in one way it was simply untrue, and in another he would never be ready for what lay beyond that door, so the thought was meaningless. But he also understood, alone on a starlit night in Sarantium, that he needed to enter that house.
Need had many guises, and desire was one of them. The jagged edges of mortality. A door his life had brought him to, after all. He turned around.
The girl was still there, waiting. Her task was to wait. He went towards her. No supernatural fires flitted or sparked in the night street now. No human voices came to him, of watchman’s cry or night walker’s song or faction partisans careening from a distant tavern, heard over the rooftops. There were four torches spaced evenly in iron brackets along the beautifully fashioned stone wall of the great house. The stars were bright above him, the sea behind now, almost as far away. The woman in the doorway was very young, Crispin saw, no more than a girl, fear in her dark eyes as he came up to her.
She held out her candle to him and, without speaking, gestured again inside, towards the stairs which were unlit by any lamps at all. He took a breath, felt the hammering presence of something deep within himself and acknowledged a part, in the heavy current of the moment, of what the intensity of this stirring meant. The fury of mortality. Darkness, some light carried, but not very much.
He took the flame from the girl’s cold fingers and went up the winding stair.
There was no illumination but his own, throwing his moving shadow against the wall, until he reached the upper landing and turned and saw a glow—orange, crimson, yellow, rippled gold—through the partly opened door of a room along the corridor. Crispin remained still for a long moment, then he blew out his candle and set it down: a blue-veined marble-topped table, iron feet like lion’s paws. He went down the hallway, thinking of stars and the cold wind outside and his wife when she died and before, and then of the night last autumn here when a woman had been waiting for him in his room before dawn, a blade in her hand.
He came to her door now through this dark house, pushed it open, entered, saw lamps, the fire, low and red, a wide bed. He leaned back against the door, closing it with his body, his heart drumming in his chest, his mouth dry. She turned; had been standing by a window over an inner courtyard.
Her long pale golden hair was unpinned and down, all her jewellery removed. She wore a robe of whitest silk, a bride’s night raiment. In bitter irony, in need?
His vision actually blurred with apprehension and desire, seeing her, his breath coming ragged and quick. He feared this woman and almost hated her and he felt that he might die if he did not have her.
She met him in the middle of the room. He was unaware of having stepped forward, time moving in spasms, as in a fever dream. Neither of them spoke. He saw the fierce, hard blue of her eyes, but then she suddenly twisted and lowered her head, exposing her neck like a wolf or a dog in submission. And then before he could even react, respond, try to understand, she had lifted her head again, the eyes uncanny, and took his mouth with her own as she had done once, half a year ago.
She bit him this time, hard. Crispin swore, tasted his own blood. She laughed, made to draw back. He cursed again, aroused beyond words, intoxicated, and held her by the curtain of her hair, pulling her back to him. And this time as they kissed he saw her eyes fall shut, her lips part, a pulsing in her throat, and Styliane’s face in the flickering firelight of her room was white as her robe, as a flag of surrender.
There was none, however. No surrendering. He had never known lovemaking as a battle before, each kiss, touch, coming together, twisting apart for desperate breath an engagement of forces, the need for the other hopelessly entangled with anger and a fear of never coming back out, never controlling oneself again. She provoked him effortlessly, would approach, touch, withdraw, return, lowered her neck again once in that brief, submissive averting—her throat long and sleek, the skin smooth and scented and young in the night— and he felt a sudden, genuinely shocking tenderness entwine with anger and desire. But then she lifted her head again, the eyes brilliant, mouth wide, and her hands raked his back as they kissed. Then, very swiftly, she lifted his hand and, twisting away, bit him there.
He was a worker in mosaic, in glass and tile and light. His hands were his life. He snarled something incoherent, lifted her off the ground, carried her before him to the high, canopied bed. He stood a moment there, holding her in his arms, and then he laid her down. She looked up at him, light caught in her eyes, changing them. Her robe was torn at one shoulder. He had done that. He saw the shadowed curve of her breast with the firelight upon it.
She said: ‘Are you certain?’
He blinked. ‘What?’
He would remember her smile then, all that it meant and said about Styliane. She murmured, ironic, assured, but bitter as the ashes of a long-ago fire, ‘Certain it isn’t an empress or a queen you want, Rhodian?’
He was speechless a moment, looking down upon her, his breath caught as on a fishhook embedded in his chest. He became aware that his hands were shaking.
‘Very certain,’ he whispered hoarsely, and pulled his own white tunic over his head. She lay motionless a moment then lifted one hand and traced a long finger lightly, slowly down his body, a single straight movement, illusion of simplicity, of order in the world. He could see that she was struggling hard for her own control, though, and that added to his desire.
Very certain. It was entirely true, and yet hopelessly not so, for where could certainty lie in the world in which they lived? The clean, straight movement of her finger was not the movement of their lives. It didn’t matter, he told himself. Not tonight.
He let the questions and the losses slip from him. He lowered himself upon her and she guided him hard into her, and then those long slender arms and her long legs were wrapped around his body, hands gripping in his hair and then moving up and down his back, mouth at his ear whispering things, over and again, rapid and needful, until her own breathing grew more ragged and terribly urgent, exactly as his own. He knew he must be hurting her but heard her cry out harshly only as her body curved upwards in its own arc and lifted him with her for that moment, away from all the jagged edges and the broken lines.
He saw tears startle like diamonds on her cheekbones and he knew—knew—that even consumed like a burning taper by desire she was raging within against the revealed weakness of that, the dimensions of longing betrayed. She could kill him now, he thought, as easily as kiss him again. Not a haven, this woman, this room, not a shelter of any kind at all, but a destination he’d needed overwhelmingly to reach and could not, by any means, deny: these bitter, furious complexities of human need, down here beneath the perfect dome and the stars.
‘YOU HAVE NO DREAD of high places, I may assume?’
Lying beside each other. Some of her golden hair across his face, tickling a little. One of her hands on his thigh. Her face was averted, he could see only a profile as she stared at the ceiling. There was a mosaic there, he now saw, and abruptly remembered Siroes who had made it, whose hands had been broken by this woman for his failings.
‘A fear of heights? It would be an impediment in my work. Why?’
‘You’ll leave through the window. He may be home soon, with his own servants. Go down the wall and across the courtyard to the far end by the street. There is a tree to climb. It will take you to the top of the outer wall.’
‘Am I leaving now?’
She turned her head then. He saw her mouth quirk a litt
le. ‘I hope not,’ she murmured. ‘Though you may have to depart in haste if we delay too long.’
‘Would he … come in?’
She shook her head. ‘Unlikely.’
‘People die because of unlikely things.’
She laughed at that. ‘True enough. And he would feel compelled to kill you, I suppose.’
This surprised him a little. He’d somehow concluded that these two—the Strategos and his aristocratic prize— had their shared understandings in matters of fidelity. That servant with her candle, visible to the street in the open doorway …
He was silent.
‘Do I frighten you?’ She was looking at him now.
Crispin shifted to face her. There seemed no reason to dissemble. He nodded his head. ‘But in yourself, not because of your husband.’ She held his glance a moment and then, unexpectedly, looked away. He said, after a pause, ‘I wish I liked you more.’
‘Liking? A trivial feeling,’ she said, too quickly. ‘It has little to do with this.’
He shook his head. ‘Friendship begins with it, if desire doesn’t.’
Styliane turned back to him. ‘I have been a better friend than you know,’ she said. ‘From the outset. I did tell you not to become attached to any work on that dome.’
She had said that, without explaining it. He opened his mouth but she held up a finger and laid it against his lips. ‘No questions. But remember.’
‘An impossibility,’ he said. ‘Not to be attached.’
She shrugged. ‘Ah. Well. I am helpless against impossibilities, of course.’
She shivered suddenly, exposed to the cold air, her skin still damp from lovemaking. He glanced across the room. Rose from the bed and tended to the guttering fire, adding logs, shifting them. It took him a few moments, building it up again. When he stood, naked and warmed, he saw that she was propped on one elbow, watching him with a frank, appraising gaze. He felt abruptly self-conscious, saw her smile, seeing that.
The Sarantine Mosaic Page 67
