They felt very bad. It was, putting it mildly, not easy to breathe. He clutched his side and felt blood pouring from the wound through his fingers. The boy with the knife had jerked it upwards after stabbing him.
But they left. Thanks be to Jad, they left. Leaving only one behind. Someone at a window was calling for the watch.
‘Holy Jad,’ whispered Bonosus’s son. ‘Scortius. I swear … we had no idea … ’
‘Know you didn’t. Thought … were killing just anyone.’ It was irresponsible to be feeling such hilarity, but the absurdity of this was so extreme. To die, like this?
‘No. We didn’t! I mean … ’
Not really the time to be ironic, actually.
‘Get me upright, before someone comes.’
‘Can you … can you walk?’
‘Of course I can walk.’ Probably a lie.
‘I’ll take you to my father’s house,’ the boy said. Bravely enough. The charioteer could guess what consequences would await Cleander after he appeared at the door with a wounded man.
Closeted with his wife and son.
Something became clear, suddenly. That was why they’d been together tonight. And then something else did, driving amusement entirely away.
‘Not your house. Holy Jad, no!’
He was not going to appear at Thenaïs’s door at this hour of night, having been wounded by partisans after descending from the bedchamber of Shirin of the Greens. He winced at the image of her face, hearing this. Not at the outraged expression that would ensue: the lack of one. The detached, ironic coldness coming back.
‘But you need a physician. There’s blood. And my father can keep this—’
‘Not your house.’
‘Then where? Oh! The Blues’ compound! We can—’
A good thought, but …
‘Won’t help. Our doctor was at the wedding today and will be drunk and unconscious. Too many people, too. We must keep this quiet. For … for the lady. Now be silent and let me—’
‘Wait! I know. The Bassanid!’ exclaimed Cleander.
It was, in fact, a good thought.
And resulted in the two of them arriving, after a genuinely harrowing progress through the city, at the small house Bonosus kept for his own use near the triple walls. On the way they passed the enormous dark litter again. Scortius saw it stop, was aware of someone watching them from within, making no movement at all to help. Something made him shiver; he couldn’t have said what.
He had lost a fair bit of blood by the time they reached their destination. Every step with his left foot seemed to drive the kicked ribs inward, shockingly. He’d refused to allow the boy to get help at any tavern. No one was to know of this. Cleander almost carried him the last part of the way. The lad was terrified, exhausted, but he got them there.
‘Thank you, boy,’ he managed to say, as the house’s steward, in a nightshirt, grey hair disconcertingly upright in the glow of the candle he held, opened the door to their pounding. ‘You did well. Tell your father. No one else!’
He hoped that was clear enough. Saw the Bassanid coming to stand behind the steward, lifted one hand briefly in apologetic greeting. It occurred to him that if Plautus Bonosus had been in this house tonight instead of the eastern doctor, none of this would have happened. Then he did, in fact, lose consciousness.
She is awake, in her room with the golden rose that was made for her long ago. Knows he will come to her tonight. Is looking at the rose, in fact, and thinking about frailty when she hears the door open, the familiar tread, the voice that is always with her.
‘You are angry with me, I know.’
She shakes her head. ‘Afraid of what will come, a little. Not angry, my lord.’
She pours his wine, waters it. Crosses to the seat he has taken by the fire. He takes the wine, and her hand, kisses the palm. His manner is quiet, easy, but she knows him better than she knows anyone alive and can read the signs of his excitement.
‘It was finally useful,’ she says, ‘to have the queen watched all this time.’
He nods. ‘She’s clever, isn’t she? Knew we weren’t surprised.’
‘I saw that. Will she be difficult, do you think?’
He looks up, smiles. ‘Probably.’
The implication being, of course, that it doesn’t really matter. He knows what he wants to do, and to have others do. None of them will learn all the details, not even his Empress. Certainly not Leontes, who will lead the army of conquest. She wonders, suddenly, how many men her husband will send, and a thought crosses her mind. She dismisses it, then it slips back in: Valerius is, in fact, more than subtle enough to be careful, even with his trusted friends.
She does not tell him that she, too, had a warning that the Strategos was bringing Gisel to the palace today. Alixana believes, privately, that her husband does know she’s watching Leontes and his wife and has done so for some time, but it is one of the things they do not discuss. One of the ways in which theirs is a partnership.
Most of the time.
The signs have long been present—no one will be able to claim to have been taken entirely by surprise—but without warning or consultation, the Emperor has just declared an intention to go to war this spring. They have been at war for much of his reign, to the east, north, south-east, far off in the Majriti deserts. This is different. This is Batiara. Rhodias. Heartland of the Empire. Sundered, then lost beyond a wide sea.
‘You are sure of this?’ she asks him.
He shakes his head. ‘Sure of the consequences? Of course not. No mortal can claim to know the unknown that might come,’ her husband says softly, still holding her hand. ‘We live with that uncertainty.’ He looks at her. ‘You are angry with me. For not telling you.’
She shakes her head again. ‘How could I be?’ she asks, meaning what she says. ‘You have always wanted this, I have always said I did not think it could be done. You see it differently, and are wiser than any of us.’
He looks up, the grey eyes mild. ‘I make mistakes, love. This might be one. But I need to try, and this is the time to do it, with Bassania bribed to be quiet, and chaos in the west, and the young queen here with us. It makes too much … sense.’
His mind works that way. In part.
In part. She draws a breath, and murmurs, ‘Would you still need to do this if we had a son?’
Her heart is pounding. That almost never happens any more. She watches him. Sees the startled reaction, then what replaces it: his mind engaging, addressing, not flinching away.
After a long time, he says, ‘That is an unexpected question.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘It came to me while I was waiting here for you.’ Not entirely true. It came to her first a long time ago.
He says, ‘You think, if we did, that because of the risk … ?’
She nods. ‘If you had an heir. Someone you were leaving this to.’ She does not gesture. There is more than any gesture could compass. This. An empire. A legacy of centuries.
He sighs. Has still not released her hand. Says, softly, looking into the fire now, ‘Maybe so, love. I don’t know.’
An admission. For him to say that much. No sons, no one to come after, to take the throne, light the candles on the anniversary of their deaths. There is an old pain in her.
He says, still quietly, ‘There are some things I have always wanted. I’d like to leave behind Rhodias reclaimed, the new Sanctuary and its dome, and … and perhaps some memory of what we were, you and I.’
‘Three things,’ she says, not able to think, just then, of anything more clever. It occurs to her that she will weep if she does not take care. An Empress ought not to weep.
‘Three things,’ he echoes. ‘Before it ends, as it always ends.’
Uncrown, a voice was said to say when it ended for one of Jad’s holy, anointed ones. The Lord of Emperors awaits you now.
No one could say if it was true, if those words were truly spoken and heard. The god’s world was made in such a way that men
and women lived in mist and fog, in a wavering light, never knowing with certainty what would come.
‘More wine?’ she says.
He looks at her, nods his head, lets go of her hand. She takes his cup, fills it, brings it back. It is silver, worked in gold, rubies set around it.
‘I am sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry, love.’
He isn’t even certain why he says this, but a feeling is with him now, something in her face, something hovering in the air of this exquisite room like a bird: not singing, enchanted into invisibility, but present nonetheless in the world.
Not far away from that palace room where no bird is singing, a man is as high in the air as birds might fly, working from a scaffold under a dome. The exterior of the dome is copper, gleaming under moon and stars. The interior is his.
There is light here in the Sanctuary; there always is, by order of the Emperor. The mosaicist has served tonight as his own apprentice, mixing lime for the setting bed, carrying it up the ladder himself. Not a great amount, he isn’t covering a wide area tonight. He isn’t doing very much at all. Only the face of his wife, dead now two years, very nearly.
There is no one watching him. There are guards at the entrance, as always, even in the cold, and a small, rumpled architect is asleep somewhere in this vastness of lamplight and shadow, but Crispin works in silence, as alone as a man can be in Sarantium.
If anyone were watching him, and knew what it was he was doing, they would need a true understanding of his craft (of all such crafts, really) not to conclude that this was a hard, cold man, indifferent in life to the woman he is so serenely rendering. His eyes are clear, his hands steady, meticulously choosing tesserae from the trays beside him. His expression is detached, austere: addressing technical dilemmas of glass and stone, no more.
No more? The heart cannot say, sometimes, but the hand and eye—if steady enough and clear enough—may shape a window for those who come after. Someone might look up one day, when all those awake or asleep in Sarantium tonight are long dead, and know that this woman was fair, and very greatly loved by the unknown man who placed her overhead, the way the ancient Trakesian gods were said to have set their mortal loves in the sky, as stars.
EVENTUALLY, MORNING CAME. Morning always comes. There are always losses in the night, a price paid for light.
PART TWO
THE NINTH DRIVER
CHAPTER VII
Men and women were always dreaming in the dark. Most of the night’s images fell away with sunrise, or before if they harried the sleeper awake. Dreams were longings, or warnings, or prophecies. They were gifts or curses, from powers benevolent or malign, for all knew— whatever the faith into which they had been born—that mortal men and women shared the world with forces they didn’t understand.
There were many who plied a trade in city or countryside telling those troubled by visions what they might signify. A small number saw certain kinds of dream as actual memories of a world other than the one into which the dreamer and the listener had been born to live and die, but this was treated in most faiths as a black heresy.
As winter turned towards spring that year, a great many people had dreams they were to remember.
A moonless night, late in winter. At a watering place in the far south, where camel routes met in Ammuz, near to where men had decreed a border with Soriyya—as if the shifting, blowing sands knew of such things—a man, a leader of his tribe, a merchant, awoke in his tent and dressed himself and went out into the dark.
He walked past tents where his wives and children and his brothers and their wives and children slept, and he came, still half asleep but strangely disturbed, to the edge of the oasis, a place where the last of the green gave way to the endless sands.
He stood there under the arc of the heavens. Under so many stars it seemed impossible to him, suddenly, to comprehend their number in the sky above men and the world. His heart, for no reason he could understand, was beating rapidly. He had been in a deep sleep moments ago. Was still uncertain how and why he had come to be out here now. A dream. He had had a dream.
He looked up again. It was a mild night, generous, spring coming. Summer to follow: the burning, killing sun, water a longing and a prayer. A trace of a breeze flicked and eddied in the soft darkness, cool and reviving on his face. He heard the camels and the goats behind him, and the horses. His herds were large; he was a fortune-favoured man.
He turned and saw a young boy, one of the camel herders, standing not far away: on watch, for the moonless nights were dangerous. The boy’s name was Tarif. It was a name that would be remembered, become known to chroniclers of generations yet unborn because of the exchange of words that followed.
The merchant drew a breath, adjusting the drape of his white robes. Then he gestured for the boy to approach and he instructed him, speaking carefully, to find the merchant’s full-brother Musafa in his tent. To wake him, with apologies, and advise him that as of the sun’s rising Musafa was to take command of and responsibility for their people. That he was particularly charged, in the name and memory of their father, to be mindful of the well-being of his absent brother’s wives and children.
‘Where are you going, lord?’ Tarif asked, becoming immortal with a handful of words. A hundred thousand children would bear his name in years to come.
‘Into the sands,’ said the man, whose name was Ashar ibn Ashar. ‘I may be some time.’
He touched the boy on the forehead, and then turned his back on him, on the palm trees and night flowers and water, the tents and animals and movable goods of his people, and he walked out alone under the stars.
So many of them, he thought again. How could there be so many? What could it mean that there were so many stars? His heart was full as a water gourd with their presence overhead. He felt, in fact, like speaking a prayer, but something stopped him. He made a decision that he would be silent, instead: open to what lay all about him and above, not imposing himself upon it. He took a fold of the garment he wore and drew it deliberately across his mouth as he went.
He was gone a very long time, had been given up for dead by the time he returned to his people. He was greatly changed by then.
So, too, not long after, was the world.
The third time Shaski ran away from home that winter he was found on the road west out of Kerakek, moving slowly but with resolution, carrying a pack much too large for him.
The patrolling soldier from the fortress who brought him back volunteered, amused, to beat the child properly for his mothers, in the obvious absence of a paternal hand.
The two women, anxious and flustered, hastily declined, but did agree that some measure of real chastisement was required. Doing this once was a boy’s adventure, three times was something else. They’d attend to it themselves, they promised the soldier, and apologized again for the trouble he’d been caused.
No trouble, the man said, and meant it. It was winter, a bought peace silencing the long border all the way from Ammuz and Soriyya to Moskav in the freezing north. The garrison in Kerakek was bored. Drinking and gambling could only amuse one so much in a place as hopelessly remote as this was. You weren’t even allowed to ride out and chase nomads or find a woman or two in one of their camps. The desert people were important to Bassania, it had been made explicitly, endlessly clear. More important, it seemed, than the soldiers themselves. Pay was late, again.
The younger of the two women was dark-eyed, quite pretty, if distraught at the moment. The husband, as noted, was away. It seemed reasonable to contemplate a return visit, just to make sure everything was all right. He could bring a toy for the lad. One learned these tricks with the young mothers.
Shaski, standing between his two mothers just inside the fence around their small front yard, looked up stonily at the man on the horse. Earlier that morning, laughing, the soldier had held him by his ankles upside-down in the road until—blood rushing dizzily to his head—Shaski had named the house where he lived. Told to say thank you now, he
did so, his voice flat. The soldier left, though not before smiling at his mother Jarita in a way Shaski didn’t like.
When questioned by his mothers in the house after— a catechism that included a vigorous shaking and many tears (from them, not him)—he simply repeated what he’d said the other times: he wanted his father. He was having dreams. His father needed them. They needed to go to where his father was.
‘Do you know how far that is?’ his mother Katyun shrieked, rounding upon him. This was the worst part, actually: she was normally so calm. He didn’t like it at all when she was upset. It was also a difficult question. He didn’t really know how far away his father was.
‘I took clothes,’ he said, pointing at his pack on the floor. ‘And my second warm vest you made me. And some apples. And my knife in case I met someone bad.’
‘Perun defend us!’ his mother Jarita exclaimed. She was dabbing at her eyes. ‘What are we to do? The boy isn’t eight years old!’
Shaski wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything.
His mother Katyun knelt down on the carpet before him. She took his hands between her own. ‘Shaski, my love, little love, listen to me. It is too far away. We do not have flying creatures to carry us, we have no spells or magic or anything to take us there.’
‘We can walk.’
‘We can’t, Shaski, not in this world.’ She was still holding his hands. ‘He doesn’t need us now. He is helping the Kings of Kings in a place in the west. He will meet us in Kabadh in the summer. You will see him then.’
They still didn’t understand. It was strange how grown people could fail to understand things, even though adults were supposed to know more than children and kept telling you that.
He said, ‘Summer is too long from now, and we mustn’t go to Kabadh. That is the thing we have to tell father. And if he is too far to walk, let’s get horses. Or mules. My father got a mule. I can ride one. We all can. You can take turns holding the baby when we ride.’
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