Alixana had wanted dolphins here. Had taken him to see them in the straits.
Gesius the Chancellor, smiling and benign, had been waiting to escort him to Gisel himself when Crispin presented himself at the Bronze Gates. Had done so, and withdrawn. There was no hidden meaning to this after-dark invitation, Crispin realized: they worked late in the Imperial Precinct, especially in wartime and with a diplomatic campaign already unfolding for Batiara. He’d been invited to see the Empress when she had a moment to grant him in a crowded day. A countryman sailing home, bidding farewell. There was no secrecy now, no abduction in the dark, no private message that could kill him if revealed.
That was past. He had journeyed here, she had journeyed even farther. He was going back. He wondered what he’d find in Varena, in the place where wagers on her life had been drunkenly made in taverns for a year.
Men had won those wagers, lost them. And those of the Antae lords who had sought to murder her and rule in her stead … what would become of them now?
‘If you’d been a little quicker in your planning,’ Gisel said, ‘you might have taken an Imperial ship. It left two days ago, with my messages for Eudric and Kerdas.’
He looked at her. Again the eerie sense that this woman could read his thoughts. He wondered if she was like that with everyone. Wondered how any man could have been foolish enough to wager against her. She had glanced away just now, was gesturing to her woman to bring him wine. It was carried across the room on a golden tray inlaid with precious stones around the rim. The riches of Sarantium, the unimaginable wealth here. He poured for himself, added water.
‘A careful man, I see,’ said the Empress Gisel. She smiled, deliberately.
He remembered these words as well. She’d said the same thing the first time, in Varena. There was such an odd sense to this night encounter. The distance travelled, in half a year.
He shook his head. ‘I feel I need my wits about me.’ ‘Don’t you, usually?’
He shrugged. ‘I was thinking about the usurpers myself. What is to happen? Or may one ask, Majesty?’
It mattered, of course. He was going back, his mother was there, his house, his friends.
‘It depends on them. On Eudric, mostly. I have formally invited him to become Governor of the new Sarantine province of Batiara, in the name of the Emperor Valerius III.’
Crispin stared, then collected himself and looked down. This was an Empress. One didn’t gape at her like a fish.
‘You would reward the man who …’
‘Tried to kill me?’
He nodded.
She smiled. ‘Which of the Antae nobility did not wish me dead last year, Caius Crispus? They all did. Even the Rhodians knew that. What man might I choose if I eliminated all of those? Best to empower the one who won, is it not? An indication of capability. And he will live … in some fear, I believe.’
He found himself staring again. Couldn’t help himself. She was twenty years old, he guessed, perhaps not even that. As calculating and precise as a … as a monarch. Hildric’s daughter. They lived, these people, in a different world. Valerius had been like this, he thought suddenly.
He was thinking very quickly, actually. ‘And the Patriarch in Rhodias?’
‘Good for you,’ said the Empress. ‘He has messages of his own, arriving on the same ship. The schisms of Jad are to be resolved if he agrees. The Eastern Patriarch will accept his preeminence again.’
‘In exchange for … ?’
‘Pronouncements supporting the reunion of the Empire, Sarantium as the Imperial Seat, and endorsement of a number of specific matters of doctrine, as proposed by the Emperor.’
It was all so neat, unfolding at such speed.
And his anger was hard to check. ‘Such matters to include the representation of Jad in chapels and sanctuaries, of course.’
‘Of course,’ she murmured, unruffled. ‘It matters a great deal to the Emperor, that one.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘I know that you know,’ she replied.
There was a silence.
‘I expect questions of government to be sorted through more easily than issues of faith. I have told Leontes as much.’
Crispin said nothing.
After a moment she added, ‘I was in the Great Sanctuary again this morning. I took that passageway you showed me. I wanted to see the work on the dome again.’
‘Before they start scraping it off, you mean?’
‘Yes,’ she said, undisturbed. ‘Before that. I told you when we passed through at night—I have a clearer understanding, now, of matters we discussed at our first meeting.’
He waited.
‘You lamented your tools. Remember? I told you they were the best we had. That there had been a plague and a war.’
‘I remember.’
Gisel smiled a little. ‘What I told you was the truth. What you told me was more true: I have seen what can be done by a master with proper equipment to deploy. Working on my father’s chapel, I had you hampered like a strategos on a battlefield with only farmers and labourers to command.’
His father had been like that. Had died like that.
‘With deference, my lady, I am uneasy with the comparison.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Think about it later, however. I was pleased with it myself, when it came to me this morning.’
She was being entirely gracious, complimenting him, granting a private audience merely to bid him farewell. He had no cause at all to be surly here. Gisel’s rise to this throne might save his homeland and hers from destruction.
He nodded. Rubbed at his smooth chin. ‘I shall have leisure to do so, I imagine, on board ship, Majesty.’
‘Tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘The next day after.’
He was to realize later (leisure on board ship) that she had known this, had been guiding a conversation.
‘Ah. So you are still resolving business affairs.’
‘Yes, Majesty. Though I believe I am done.’
‘You have been paid all outstanding sums? We would want that properly dealt with.’
‘I have, my lady. The Chancellor was good enough to attend to that himself.’
She looked at him. ‘He owes you his life. We are … also aware of our debt to you, of course.’
He shook his head. ‘You were my queen. Are my queen. I did nothing that—’
‘You did what was needful for us, at personal risk, twice.’ She hesitated. ‘I shall not dwell over-long on the other matter—’ He was aware she had switched to the personal voice. ‘But I am still of the west, and take pride in what we can show them here. It is a regret for me that … circumstances have required the undoing of your work here.’
He lowered his eyes. What was there to say? It was a death.
‘It has also occurred to me, with what else I have learned these past days, that there is one more person you might desire to see before you sail.’
Crispin looked up.
Gisel of the Antae, Gisel of Sarantium, gazed back at him with those blue eyes.
‘She can’t see you, however,’ she said.
THERE WERE DOLPHINS again. He’d wondered if he would see them, and was aware that there was something mortally foolish and vain in that doubting: as if the creatures of the sea would appear or not appear in consequence of whatever men and women did in cities, on the land.
Looked at another way (though it was a heresy), there were a great many souls to be carried these days, in and about Sarantium.
He was on a small, sleek Imperial craft, passage gained merely by showing Gisel’s slim dagger with the image of her father in ivory for a handle. A gift, she’d declared it, handing it to him, a way to remember her. Though she’d also said she expected to be in Varena before too many years had passed. If all fell out as it should, there would be ceremonies in Rhodias.
A note had gone before him, alerting the crew that the one bearing the image of the Empress’s father could sail to a place ot
herwise forbidden.
He had been there before.
Styliane was not in the prison cells under the palaces. Someone with a keener sense of irony and punishment— Gesius, most likely, who had lived through so much violence in his days, and survived all of it—had chosen a different place for her to live out the life the new Emperor had granted her, as a mercy to one he had wed and a sign to the people of his benevolence.
And one really didn’t have to look further than Leontes on the Golden Throne and Styliane on the isle, Crispin thought, watching the dolphins beside the ship again, to find a sufficiency of ironies.
They docked, were tied, a plank was run out and down for him. The only visitor, only person disembarking here.
Memories and images. He looked, almost against his will, and saw where Alixana had dropped her cloak on the stones and walked away. He’d been dreaming of that place, moonlit.
Two Excubitors met the ship. One of those on board came down the plank and spoke quietly to them. They led him, wordlessly, along the path through the trees. Birds were singing. The sun slanted through the leafy canopy.
They came to the clearing where men had died on the day Valerius was killed. No one spoke. Crispin became aware, try as he might to quell it, that his principal feeling was dread.
He wished he hadn’t come. Couldn’t have said with any certainty why he had. His escorts stopped, one of them gestured towards the largest of the houses here. He didn’t need the indication.
The same house in which her brother had been. Of course.
A difference, however. Windows open on all sides, barred, but unshuttered, to let in the morning light. He wondered. Went forward. There were guards here. Three of them. They looked past him at his escorts and evidently received some signal. Crispin didn’t look back to see. The door was unlocked by one of them.
No words, at all. He wondered if they’d been forbidden to talk, to avoid any chance of being seduced, corrupted. He walked in. The door closed behind him. He heard the key turn. They were taking no chances at all. They would know what this prisoner had done.
This prisoner sat quietly in a chair by the far wall, her profile to him, unmoving. No visible response to the arrival of someone. Crispin looked at her, and dread slipped away, to be replaced by a myriad of other things he couldn’t even begin to sort out.
She said, ‘I told you I am not eating.’
She hadn’t turned her head, hadn’t seen him.
Couldn’t see him. Even from where he stood, across the room, Crispin realized that her eyes were gone, gouged out. Black sockets where the brightness he remembered had been. He pictured, fighting it, an underground room, implements, a burning fire, torches, large men with fat, skilled thumbs approaching her.
One more person you might desire to see, Gisel had said.
‘I don’t blame you at all,’ he said. ‘I imagine the food is dreadful.’
She started. There was pity in that, that a woman so flawlessly composed, so impossible to disconcert, should be made to react like this, merely by an unexpected voice.
He tried to imagine being blind. Colour and light gone, shadings, hues, the wealth and play of them. Nothing worse in the world. Death better, he thought.
‘Rhodian,’ she said. ‘Come to see what it is like to bed a blind woman now? Jaded appetites?’
‘No,’ he said, keeping calm. ‘No appetite at all, like you, it seems. Come to say goodbye. I leave for home tomorrow.’
‘Finished so soon?’ Her tone changed.
She didn’t turn her head. They had shorn off almost all her golden hair. With another woman it might have marred her appearance. With Styliane it only revealed the perfection of cheek and bone below the still-bruised and hollowed eye socket. They hadn’t marked her, he thought. Only the blinding.
Only the blinding. And this prison on the isle where her brother had lived his days in darkness, burned and burning within, without any light allowed to enter.
And here was, as much as anything, a mark of the nature of the woman, Crispin thought, of her pride: light flooding the room, useless to her, offered only to whoever might enter. Only the silent guards would come, day by day—but there was no hiding for Styliane Daleina, no shielding herself in darkness. If you dealt with her, you had to accept what there was to see. It had always been so.
‘You have finished your work already?’ she repeated.
‘I haven’t,’ he said quietly. Not bitter now. Not here, seeing this. ‘You warned me, long ago.’
‘Ah. That. Already? I didn’t think it would be …’
‘So swift?’
‘So swift. He told you it was a heresy, your dome.’
‘Yes. Did it himself, I’ll grant.’
She turned to him.
And he saw that they had marked her, after all. The left side of her face was branded with the symbol of a murderer: a crude blade cut into a circle meant to stand for the god’s sun. The wound was crusted with blood, her face inflamed around it. She needed a physician, he thought, doubted they’d made arrangements for one. A cheek scarred into ugliness, with fire.
Again, someone with a dark awareness of irony. Or, perhaps, just a person in a locked and soundproof room under the earth, utterly impervious to such things, only following the duly prescribed protocols of justice in the Imperial Precinct of Sarantium.
He must have made a sound. She smiled, an expression he remembered, wry and knowing. It hurt to see it, here. ‘You are heart-struck by my enduring beauty?’
Crispin swallowed hard. Took a deep breath. ‘In truth,’ he said, ‘I am. I could wish it were not so.’
That silenced her a moment.
‘That is honest, at least,’ she said. ‘I recall that you liked him. Both of them.’
‘That would have been a presumption for an artisan. I admired him greatly.’ He paused. ‘Both of them.’
‘And Valerius was your patron, of course, surety of all your work. Which will now be lost. Poor Rhodian. Do you hate me?’
‘I could wish I did,’ he said finally. So much light in the room. The breeze cool, fragrant with wood-smells. Birdsong in the trees, all around the clearing. The greengold leaves. Born now, green in summer, dying in the fall. Do you hate me?
‘Is he marching north?’ she asked. ‘Against Bassania?’
A lifetime in the halls and rooms of power. A mind that could not stop working.
‘He is.’
‘And … Gisel is to negotiate with Varena?’
‘She is.’
Gisel, he thought, was exactly the same in this. They did live in a different world, these people. Same sun and moons and stars, but a different world.
Her mouth twisted wryly again. ‘I would have done the same, you realize? I told you the night we first spoke that there were those of us who thought the invasion misguided.’
‘Alixana was one of them,’ he said.
She ignored that, effortlessly.
‘He had to be killed before the fleet sailed. If you stop to think, you will see it. Leontes had to be in the City. He wouldn’t have turned back, once he’d sailed.’
‘How unfortunate. So Valerius had to die, that Leontes—and you—could rule?’
‘I … thought that was it, yes.’
He opened his mouth, closed it. ‘You thought?’
Her mouth twisted again. She winced this time, brought a hand up towards her wounded face, then put it down without touching. ‘After the tunnel, it didn’t seem important any more.’
‘I don’t …’
‘I could have killed him years ago. A foolish girl, I was. I thought the thing to do was take power, the way my father ought to have been given power. Leontes ruling, but only needing his soldiers’ love and his piety to be content, my brothers and I …’ She stopped.
I could have killed him years ago.
Crispin looked at her. ‘You think Valerius killed your father?’
‘Oh, Rhodian. I know he did. What I didn’t know was that nothing else
mattered. I … should have been wiser.’
‘And killed sooner?’
‘I was eight years old,’ she said. And stopped. The birds were loud outside. ‘I think my life ended then. In a way. The life I was … headed towards.’
The son of Horius Crispus the mason looked at her. ‘You think this was love, then? What you did?’
‘No, I think it was vengeance,’ she said. And then added, with no warning at all, ‘Will you kill me, please?’
No warning, except that he could see what they had done and were doing to her, in the guise of mercy. Knew how desperately she would want this to end. There weren’t even logs here for a fire. Fire could be used to kill oneself. They would probably force food into her, he thought, if she refused to eat. There were ways of doing that. Leontes intended to demonstrate his generous nature by keeping a murderous woman alive for a time, because she had been his wife in the eyes of Jad.
A pious man, everyone knew it. They might even bring her out at times, on display.
Crispin looked at her. Could not speak.
She said, softly, that the guards would not hear, ‘You have known me a little, Rhodian. We have … shared some things, however briefly. Will you leave this room and leave me … in this life?’
‘I am—’
‘Just an artisan, I know. But—’
‘No!’ He almost shouted. Then he lowered his own voice. ‘That isn’t it. I am … not a man … who kills.’
His father’s head, flying from his shoulders, blood spurting from the toppling body. Men telling the tale in a tavern in Varena. A boy overhearing them.
‘Make an exception,’ she murmured lightly, but he could hear desperation beneath the cool tone.
He closed his eyes. ‘Styliane … ’
She said, ‘Or see it another way. I died years ago. I told you. You are just … signing a deed already executed.’
He looked at her again. She was facing him directly now, eyeless, marred, exquisitely beautiful. ‘Or punish me for your lost work. Or for Valerius. Or for any reason. But please.’ She was whispering. ‘No one else will do it, Crispin.’
He looked around. Nothing remotely resembling a weapon in here, guards at all the iron-barred windows and beyond the locked door.
The Sarantine Mosaic Page 103
