Crispin led the queen out of the chapel and back into the night, and he didn’t ask her to draw up her hood again. They made no attempt to hide at all. They walked along tended paths, gravel crunching underfoot, past sculptures of Emperors and soldiers (suitably rendered) in the starlit, moonlit gardens, and they saw no one and were disturbed by no one as they went.
Such dangers as might be feared tonight by those who lived here were thought to be outside the Bronze Gates, in the labyrinths of the City.
They went past a fountain, not flowing yet so early in the spring, and then the long portico of the silk guild, and then, with the sound of the sea in his ears, Crispin led his queen up to the entrance of the Attenine Palace, which was alight with lamps tonight. There were guards here, but the double doors stood wide open. He walked straight up the steps to them, and there he saw a man standing just inside, beyond the guards, in the green and brown colours of the Chancellor’s eunuchs.
He stopped in front of the guards, the queen beside him. They eyed him warily. He ignored them, pointed at the eunuch. ‘You!’ he snapped. ‘We need an escort for the queen of the Antae.’
The eunuch turned, his training immaculate, betraying no surprise at all, and he stepped out onto the portico. The guards looked from Crispin to the queen. The Chancellor’s man bowed to Gisel, and then, a moment later, so did they. Crispin drew a breath.
‘Rhodian!’ said the eunuch as he straightened. He was smiling. ‘You need another shave.’ And it was with a sense of being blessed, guarded, granted aid, that Crispin recognized the man who had barbered his beard the first time he’d come to this palace.
‘Probably,’ Crispin admitted. ‘But at the moment the queen wishes to see the Chancellor and to pay her last respects to Valerius.’
‘She can do both at once, then. I am at your service, Majesty. The Chancellor is in the Porphyry Room with the body. Come. I will take you there.’ The guards didn’t even move as they went through, so regal was Gisel, so obviously confident the man escorting her.
It was not a long way, as it turned out. The Porphyry Room, where Empresses of Sarantium gave birth, where Emperors lay in state when they were summoned to the god, was on this level, halfway down a single straight corridor. There were lamps at intervals, shadows between them, no one at all seemed to be about. It was as if the Imperial Precinct, the palace, the hallway lay under some sort of alchemist’s spell, so calm and still was it. Their footsteps echoed as they went. They were alone with their escort, walking to visit the dead.
The man who led them stopped outside a pair of doors. They were silver, bearing a pattern of crowns and swords in gold. Two guards here, as well. They seemed to know Gesius’s man. Nodded. The eunuch knocked once, softly, and opened the door himself. He gestured for them to go inside.
Gisel went first again. Crispin paused in the doorway, uncertain now. The room was smaller than he’d expected. There were purple hangings on all the walls, an artificial tree of beaten gold, a canopied bed against the far wall, and a bier in the centre now, with a shrouded body upon it. There were candles burning all around, and one man knelt—on a cushion, Crispin saw—while two clerics softly chanted the Mourning Rites.
The kneeling man looked up. It was Gesius, parchment pale, thin as a scribe’s pen, looking very old. Crispin saw him recognize the queen.
‘I am very pleased to find you, my lord,’ Gisel said. ‘I wish to pray for the soul of Valerius who has left us, and to speak with you. Privately.’ She crossed to a ewer on a stand, poured water on her hands in the ritual of ablution, dried them on a cloth.
Crispin saw something flicker in the old man’s face as he looked at her.
‘Of course, Majesty. I am at your service in all things.’
Gisel looked briefly at the clerics. Gesius gestured. They broke off their chanting and went out through a single door on the far side of the room, beside the bed. The door closed, candles flickered with the movement.
‘You may go, Caius Crispus.’ The queen didn’t even turn around. Crispin looked at the eunuch who had escorted them. The man turned, expressionless, and went through the door. Crispin was about to follow, but then he hesitated and turned back.
He went forward, past Gisel, and he poured water for himself, in turn, murmuring the words spoken in the presence of the dead, and he dried his hands. Then he knelt at the side of the bier, beside the body of the dead Emperor. He smelled—over the scent of incense in the room—something charred and burnt, and he closed his eyes.
There were words of prayer suited for this moment. He didn’t speak them. His thoughts were empty at first, then he shaped an image in his mind of Valerius. A man of ambition, in more ways than Crispin suspected he would ever grasp. Round-faced, soft-featured, mild of voice and bearing.
Crispin knew—still—that he ought to have hated and feared this man. But if there was a truth to be understood down here among the living at the bottom of the scaffold it was that hatred, fear, love, all of them, were never as simple as one might wish them to be. Without praying in any formal way, he bade farewell in silence to the image shaped in his mind, which was all he felt entitled to do.
He rose and went to the door. As he went out he heard Gisel say softly to the Chancellor—and was ever after to wonder if she spoke when she did to allow him to overhear, as a gift of sorts—‘The dead are gone from us. We can only speak of what will happen now. I have a thing to say.’
The doors swung shut. Standing in the corridor, Crispin felt suddenly weary beyond words. He closed his eyes. Swayed on his feet. The eunuch was at his side. He said, a voice gentle as rain, ‘Come, Rhodian. A bath, a shave, wine.’
Crispin opened his eyes. Shook his head. But heard himself saying, even as he did so, ‘All right.’ He was spent. He knew it.
They went back down the corridor, turned, turned again. He had no idea where they were. They came to a flight of stairs.
‘Rhodian!’
Crispin looked up. A man, lean and grey, striding with brisk, angular efficiency, came up to them. There was no one else in the hallway, or on the stairs above them.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Pertennius of Eubulus.
He was really very tired. ‘Always turning up, aren’t I?’
‘Very much so.’
‘Paying my respects to the dead,’ he said.
Pertennius sniffed, audibly. ‘Wiser to pay them to the living,’ he said. And smiled then, with his wide, thin mouth. Crispin tried and failed to recall the man ever smiling like that before. ‘Any tidings from outside?’ Pertennius asked. ‘Have they cornered her yet? She can’t run for long, of course.’
It was unwise. In the extreme. Crispin knew it, even as he moved. It was, in truth, sheerest, self-destructive folly. But it seemed, in that moment, that he had found his anger after all, and in the finding—in the moment of locating it again—Crispin drew back his fist and sent it forward with all the force he had, smashing the secretary of the newly anointed Emperor full in the face, sending him flying backwards to sprawl on the marble floor, motionless.
There was a rigid, an almost intolerable silence.
‘Your poor, poor hand,’ said the eunuch mildly. ‘Come, come let us tend to it.’ And he led the way up the stairs without a backwards glance at the unconscious man. Crispin went where he was taken.
They treated him kindly in the upper-level chambers where the Chancellor and his retinue resided. Many of them remembered with amusement his first evening here, half a year ago. He was bathed, as promised, given wine, was even shaved, though there was no jesting tonight. Someone played a stringed instrument. He realized that these men—all Gesius’s—were facing very great changes themselves. If the Chancellor fell, which was almost a certainty, their own future became precarious. He said nothing. What could he say?
Eventually he slept, in a good bed and a quiet room they provided for him. And so spent one night of his life sleeping in the Attenine Palace of Sarantium not far from a living Emperor and a dea
d one. He dreamt of his wife, who was dead too, but also of another woman running and running, fleeing pursuit down an endless, exposed beach of smooth hard stones in too-bright moonlight with dolphins leaping offshore in a black, shining sea.
Behind Crispin and the eunuch, as the doors closed in the room with the draped walls and the golden tree and a blackened body in a shroud, an elderly man who had been expecting to meet his own death tonight, and had determined to greet it with dignity in this same room where he had prayed for three dead Emperors, was listening to a young woman speak—a woman he had forgotten tonight, as had they all. With every word spoken he seemed to feel his will reviving, his mind chasing and shaping contingencies.
By the time she stopped, vivid and fierce, looking at him closely, Gesius was entertaining the possibility of life beyond the sunrise after all.
For himself, if not for others.
And in that precise moment, before he could speak his reply, the small inner door to the Porphyry Room was opened without a knock and—as if drawn hither by something supernatural, preordained, in a night fraught with power and mystery—a tall man, broad-shouldered, golden-haired, came in alone.
Thrice-exalted Leontes, regent upon earth now under Jad of the Sun, newly proclaimed, pious as a cleric, come to pray by candlelight with a sun disk in his hands for his predecessor’s soul as it journeyed. He stopped on the threshold and glanced briefly at the eunuch, whose presence was expected, and then more carefully at the woman standing by the bier, who was not expected at all.
Gesius prostrated himself on the floor.
Gisel of the Antae did not, or not immediately.
First, she smiled. And then she said (still standing, her father’s daughter, courageous and direct as a blade), ‘Great lord, thanks be to Jad you have come. The god is merciful beyond our deserving. I am here to tell you that the west is yours now, lord, and lifelong freedom from the stain of this night’s black and godless evil. If you but choose.’
And Leontes, who had not been prepared for anything like this at all, said, after a long moment, ‘Explain yourself, my lady.’
She looked back at him, unmoving, tall and fair, brilliant as a diamond. An explanation in herself, really, the Chancellor thought, keeping utterly silent, hardly breathing.
Only then did she kneel, gracefully, and lower her forehead to touch the marble floor in obeisance. And then, straightening, but still kneeling before the Emperor with jewels in her hair and all about her, she did explain.
When she was done, Leontes was silent for a long time.
At length, his magnificent features grave, he looked over at the Chancellor and asked one question: ‘You agree? Lecanus Daleinus could not have planned this himself from the isle?’
And Gesius, inwardly declaring to the god that he was unworthy of so much largess, said only, seeming calm and unruffled as dark water on a windless morning, ‘No, my great lord. Most surely he could not.’
‘And we know that Tertius is a coward and a fool.’
It was not a question, this time. Neither the Chancellor nor the woman said a word. Gesius was finding it difficult to breathe, tried to hide the fact. He had a sense that there were scales hovering in the air of the room, above the burning candles.
Leontes turned to the body under silk on the bier. ‘They burned him. Sarantine Fire. We all know what that means.’
They had known. The question had been whether Leontes would ever acknowledge it to himself. The answer, in Gesius’s mind, had been negative, until the woman—this other tall, fair-haired woman with blue eyes—had come and altered everything. She had invited the Chancellor to speak to the new Emperor, had told him what should be said. He had been about to do so, having nothing to lose at all—and then the new Emperor had arrived, himself. The god was mysterious, unknowable, overwhelming. How could men not be humble?
Leontes, muscles rippling under his tunic and robe, crossed to the platform where Valerius II lay covered, toe to head, in purple silk. There was a sun disk under the cloth, held in his crossed hands, the Chancellor knew: he had placed it there, along with the coins on Valerius’s eyes.
Leontes stood a moment between the tall candles, looking down, and then, with a swift, violent movement, pulled back the cloth from the dead man’s body.
The woman looked quickly away from the horror revealed. So did the Chancellor, though he had seen it already tonight. Only the newly anointed Emperor of Sarantium, soldier of half a hundred battlefields, who had seen death in so many shapes and guises, endured looking down at this. It was as though, Gesius thought, staring grimly at the marble floor, he needed to.
At length, they heard Leontes draw the shroud back up, covering the dead again, in decency.
He stepped back. Drew a breath. A last weight settled, with finality, on the scales in the air.
Leontes said, in a voice that did not admit of the possibility of doubt in the world, of error, ‘It is a foul and black abomination in the eyes of Jad. He was the god’s anointed, holy and great. Chancellor, you will have men find Tertius Daleinus, wherever he may be, and bind him in chains to be executed. And you will bring here to me now in this chamber the woman who was my wife, that she may look a last time upon this, her work tonight.’
Who was my wife.
Gesius stood up, so quickly he became dizzy for a moment. He hurried out, through the same inner door by which the Emperor had entered. The world had changed, and was changing again. No man, however wise, could ever dare say he knew what the future held.
He closed the door behind himself.
Two people were left alone then, with the dead man and the candles and the golden tree in a room devised for the births and deaths of Emperors.
Gisel, still kneeling, looked up at the man before her. Neither of them spoke. There was something within her so overflowing, so intense, it was extremely near to pain.
He moved first, coming towards her. She rose only when he extended a hand to aid her and she closed her eyes when he kissed her palm.
‘I will not kill her,’ he murmured.
‘Of course not,’ she said.
And kept her eyes tightly, tightly closed, that what blazed in them in that moment might not be seen.
THERE WERE INTRICATE matters of marriage and Imperial succession and a myriad of other details of law and faith that needed attending to. There were deaths to be achieved, with formal propriety. Steps taken (or not taken) at the outset of a reign could define it for a long time.
The august Chancellor Gesius, affirmed in his position that same night, dealt with all of these things, including the deaths.
It did take some little time to observe the necessary protocols. There was, therefore, no Imperial coronation in the Hippodrome until three days after. On that morning, bright and auspicious, in the kathisma, before the assembled, wildly cheering citizens of Sarantium—eighty thousand of them and more shouting at the top of their lungs—Leontes the Golden took the name Valerius III, in humble, respectful homage, and he crowned his golden Empress, Gisel, who did not change the name her own great father had given her when she was born in Varena, and so was recorded in history that way when the deeds of their reign together came to be chronicled.
IN THE PORPHYRY ROOM on the night this was set in motion, a door was opened and a man and woman kneeling in prayer before a covered body turned to see a second woman enter.
She stopped on the threshold and looked at them. Leontes stood up. Gisel did not, clasping her sun disk, her head cast down in what might have been thought to be humility.
‘You asked for me? What is it?’ said Styliane Daleina briskly to the man she had today brought to the Golden Throne. ‘I have much to do tonight.’
‘No, you don’t,’ said Leontes, blunt and final as a judge. And was watching her as she registered—quickly, always quickly—the import of his tone.
If he had hoped (or feared) to see terror or fury in her eyes then he was disappointed (or relieved). He did see something flicker there. A
different man might have known it for irony, a vast, black amusement, but the man who could have read her that way lay dead on the bier.
Gisel stood up. And of the three of them living, she was the one wearing the colours of royalty in this room. Styliane looked at her for a moment, and what might perhaps have been unexpected was the measure of her calm, approaching indifference.
She looked away from the other woman, as if dismissing her. She said to her husband, ‘You have discerned a way to claim Batiara. How clever of you. Did you do it all by yourself?’ She glanced at Gisel, and the queen of the Antae lowered her eyes to the marble floor again, not in apprehension or intimidation, but so that exultation might be secret a little longer.
Leontes said, ‘I have discerned murder and impiety and will not live with them under Jad.’
Styliane laughed.
Even here, even now, she could laugh. He looked at her. How could a soldier, who judged so much of the world in terms of courage, not admire this, whatever else he felt?
She said, ‘Ah. You will not live with them? You renounce the throne? The court? Will join an order of clerics? Perch on a rock in the mountains with your beard to your knees? I would never have imagined it! Jad’s ways are mighty.’
‘They are,’ said Gisel, speaking for the first time, and the mood was changed, effortlessly. ‘They are, indeed.’
Styliane looked at her again, and this time Gisel lifted her eyes and met that gaze. It was simply too difficult, after all, to be secret. She had sailed here utterly alone, fleeing death, without allies of any kind, those who loved her dying in her stead. And now …
The man did not speak. He was staring at the aristocratic wife Valerius had given him in great honour, for shining conquests in the field. He had summoned her here intending to pull back the cloth again from the dead man and force her to look upon the hideous ruin of him, but in that moment he understood that such gestures held no meaning, or not any meaning one might expect.
He had never really understood her in any case, the daughter of Flavius Daleinus.
The Sarantine Mosaic Page 94
