The old pagan who could breathe into crafted birds patrician voice, sight without eyes, hearing without ears, and the presence of a soul, told him a number of things deemed needful, in the wake of the gift he’d given.
Certain other understandings Crispin obtained only afterwards.
‘She wants you, the shameless whore! Are you going to? Are you?’
Keeping his expression bland, Crispin walked beside the carried litter of the Lady Massina Baladia of Rhodias, sleekly well-bred wife of a Senator, and decided it had been a mistake to wear Linon on a thong around his neck like an ornament. The bird was going into one of his travelling bags tomorrow, on the back of the mule plodding along behind them.
‘You must be so fatigued,’ the Senator’s wife was saying, her voice honeyed with commiseration. Crispin had explained that he enjoyed walking in the open country and didn’t like horses. The first was entirely untrue, the second was not. ‘If only I had thought to bring a litter large enough to carry both of us. And one of my girls, of course . . . we couldn’t possibly ride just alone!’ The Senator’s wife tittered. Amazingly.
Her white linen chiton, wildly inappropriate for travelling, had—quite unnoticed by the lady, of course—slipped upward sufficiently to reveal a well-turned ankle. She wore a gold anklet, Crispin saw. Her feet, resting on lambswool throws within the litter, were bare this mild afternoon. The toenails were painted a deep red, almost purple. They hadn’t been yesterday, in their sandals. She’d been busy last night at the inn, or her servant had been.
‘Mice and blood, I’ll wager she reeks of scent! Does she? Crispin, does she?’
Linon had no sense of smell. Crispin elected not to reply. The lady did, as it happened, have a heady aroma of spice about her today. Her litter was sumptuous, and even the slaves carrying it and accompanying her were appreciably better garbed—in pale blue tunics and dark blue dyed sandals—than was Crispin. The rest of their party—Massina’s young female attendants, three wine merchants and their servants journeying the short distance to Mylasia and then down the coast road, a cleric continuing towards Sauradia, and two other travellers heading for the same healing medicinal waters as the lady—walked or rode mules a little ahead or behind them on the wide, well-paved road. Massina Baladia’s armed and mounted escort, also clad in that delicately pale blue—which looked significantly less appropriate on them—rode at the front and back of the column.
None of the party was from Varena itself. None had any reason to know who Crispin was. They were three days out from Varena’s walls, still in Batiara and on a busy stretch of road. They had already been forced to step onto the gravel side-path several times as companies of archers and infantry passed them on manoeuvres. There was some need for caution on this road, but not the most extreme sort. The leader of the lady’s escort gave every indication of regarding a red-bearded mosaicist as the most dangerous figure in the vicinity.
Crispin and the lady had dined together the night before, in the Imperial Posting Inn.
As a part of their careful dance with the Empire, the Antae had permitted the placement of three such inns along their own road from Sauradia’s border to the capital city of Varena, and there were others running down the coast and on the main road to Rhodias. In return, the Empire paid a certain sum of money into the Antae coffers and undertook the smooth carriage of the mails all the way to the Bassanid border in the east. The inns represented a small, subtle presence of Sarantium in the peninsula. Commerce necessitated accommodations, always.
The others in their company, lacking the necessary Imperial Permits, had made do with a rancid hostel a short distance farther back. The Lady Massina’s distant attitude to the artisan who had been trudging along in their party, lacking even a mount, had undergone a wondrous change when the Senator’s wife understood that Martinian of Varena was entitled to use the Imperial Inns, and by virtue of a Permit signed by Chancellor Gesius in Sarantium itself—where, it seemed, he was presently journeying in response to an Imperial request.
He had been invited to dine with her.
When it had also become clear to the lady, over spitroasted capons and an acceptable local wine, that this artisan was not unfamiliar with a number of the better people in Rhodias and in the elegant coastal resort of Baiana, having done some pretty work for them, she grew positively warm in manner, going so far as to confide that her journey to the medical sanctuary was for childbearing reasons.
It was quite common, of course, she had added with a toss of her head. Indeed, some silly young things regarded it as fashionable to attend at warm springs or hospices if they were wed a season and not yet expecting. Did Martinian know that the Empress Alixana herself had made several journeys to healing shrines near Sarantium? It was hardly a secret. It had started the fashion. Of course, given the Empress’s earlier life—did he know she had changed her name, among . . . other things?—it was easy enough to speculate what bloody doings in some alley long ago had led her to be unable to give the Emperor an heir. Was it true that she dyed her hair now? Did Martinian actually know the luminaries in the Imperial Precinct? How exciting that must be.
He did not. Her disappointment was palpable, but short-lived. She seemed to have some degree of difficulty finding a place for her sandalled foot that did not encounter his ankle under the table. The capons were followed by an overly sauced fish plate with olives and a pale wine. Over the sweet cheese, figs and grapes, the lady, grown even further confiding, informed her dinner companion that it was her privy belief that the unexpected difficulties she and her august spouse were experiencing had little to do with her.
It was, she added, eyeing him in the firelight of the common room, difficult to test this, of course. She had been willing, however, to make the trip north out of too-boring Rhodias amid the colours of autumn to the well-known hospice and healing waters near Mylasia. One sometimes met—only sometimes, of course—the most interesting people when one travelled.
Did not Martinian find this to be so?
‘CHECK FOR BEDBUGS.’
‘I know that, you officious lump of metal.’ He had dined a second time tonight with the lady; they had had a third flask of wine this time. Crispin was aware of the effect of it on himself.
‘And talk to me in your head, unless you want people to assume you are mad.’
Crispin had been having difficulty with this. It was good advice. So, as it happened, was the first suggestion. Crispin held a candle over the sheets, with the blanket pulled back and managed to squash a dozen of the evil little creatures with his other hand.
‘And they call this an Imperial Posting Inn. Hah!’
Linon, Crispin had learned quite early in their journeying together, was not short of opinions or shy with regard to their expression. He could still bring himself up short in a quiet moment with the realization that he was holding extended conversations in his mind with a temperamental sparrow-like bird made of faded brown leather and tin, with eyes fashioned from blue glass, and an incongruously patrician Rhodian voice both in his head and when speaking aloud.
He had entered a different world.
He had never really stopped to consider his attitude to what men called the half-world: that space where cheiromancers and alchemists and wisewomen and astrologers claimed to be able to walk. He knew—everyone knew—that Jad’s mortal children lived in a world that they shared, dangerously, with spirits and daemons that might be indifferent to them, or malevolent, or sometimes even benign, but he had never been one of those who let his every waking moment be suffused with that awareness. He spoke his prayers at dawn, and at sunset when he remembered, though he seldom bothered to attend at a sanctuary. He lit candles on the holy days when he was near a chapel. He paid all due respect to clerics—when the respect was deserved. He believed, some of the time, that when he died his soul would be judged by Jad of the Sun and his fate in the afterlife would be determined by that judgement.
The rest of the time, of late, very privately, he remembe
red the unholy ugliness of the two plague summers and was deeply, even angrily unsure of such spiritual things. He would have said, if asked a few days ago, that all alchemists were frauds and that a bird such as Linon was a deception to gull rustic fools.
That, in turn, meant denying his own memories of the apple orchard, but it had been easy enough to explain away childhood terrors as trickery, an actor’s voice projection. Hadn’t they all spoken with the same voice?
They had, but it wasn’t a deception after all.
He had Zoticus’s crafted bird with him as a companion and—in principle, at least—a guardian for his journey. It sometimes seemed to him that this irascible, ludicrously touchy creature—or creation—had been with him forever.
‘I certainly didn’t end up with a mild spirit, did I?’ he remembered saying to Zoticus as he took his leave from the farmhouse that day.
‘None of them are,’ the alchemist had murmured, a little ruefully. ‘A constant regret, I assure you. Just remember the command for silence and use it when you must.’ He’d paused, then added wryly, ‘You aren’t particularly mild yourself. It may be a match.’
Crispin had said nothing to that.
He had already used the command several times. In a way it was hardly worth it . . . Linon was almost intolerably waspish after being released from darkness and silence.
‘Another wager,’ the bird said now, inwardly, ‘leave the door unlocked and you won’t sleep alone tonight.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Crispin snapped aloud. Then, recollecting himself, added silently, ‘This is a crowded Imperial Inn, she’s a Rhodian aristocrat. And,’ he added peevishly, ‘you have nothing to wager in any case, you lump of stuff.’
‘A figure of speech, imbecile. Just leave the door unbolted. You’ll see. I’ll watch for thieves.’
This, of course, was one of the benefits of having the bird, Crispin had already learned. Sleep was meaningless to Zoticus’s creation, and as long as he hadn’t silenced Linon he could be alerted to anything untoward approaching while he slept. He was irked, though, and the more so because a fabricated bird had roused his temper.
‘Why would you possibly assume you have the least understanding of a woman like that? Listen to me: she plays little games during the day or over dinner out of sheer boredom. Only a fool would regard them as more.’ He wasn’t sure why he was so irritated about this, but he was.
‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’ Linon replied. Crispin couldn’t sort out the tone this time. ‘You think boredom stops with the meal? A stable boy understands women better than you. Just keep playing with your little glass chips, imbecile, and leave these judgements to me!’
Crispin spoke the silencing command with some satisfaction, blew out his candle and went to bed, resigned to being night food for the predatory insects he’d missed. It would be much worse, he knew, at the common hostel the others in the party had been forced to continue on towards for the night. An extremely small consolation. He didn’t like travelling.
He tossed, turned, scratched where he imagined things biting him, then felt something doing so and swore. After a few moments, surprised at his own irresolution, he got up again, walked quickly across the cold floor, and slid home the bolt on the door. Then he crawled back into the bed.
He had not made love to a woman since Ilandra died.
He was still awake some time later, watching the shape of the waning blue moon slide across the window, when he heard the handle tried, then a very soft tapping at the door.
He didn’t move, or speak. The tapping came again, twice more—light, teasing. Then it stopped, and there was silence again in the autumn night. Remembering many things, Crispin watched the moon leave the window, trailing stars, and finally fell asleep.
HE WOKE TO MORNING noises in the yard below. In the moment he opened his eyes, surfacing from some lost dream, he had a swift, sure realization about Zoticus’s bird, and some wonder that it had taken him so long.
He was not greatly surprised to discover, when he went downstairs for watered ale and a morning meal, that the Lady Massina Baladia of Rhodias, the Senator’s wife, and her mounted escorts and her servants had already left, at first daybreak.
There was a mild, unexpected regret here, but it had been almost intolerable to envisage his re-entry into this sphere of mortal life as a coupling with a jaded Rhodian aristocrat playing bed games on a country night—not even knowing his true name. In another way, it might have been easier that way, but he wasn’t . . . detached enough for that.
On the road again in the chill early-morning breeze, he soon caught up with the merchants and the cleric who had waited for him at the inn up the road. Settling into the long day’s striding, he remembered his realization upon first awakening. He drew a breath, released Linon from silence in the bag on the mule’s back, and asked a question.
‘How dazzlingly brilliant of you,’ the bird snapped icily. ‘She did come last night, didn’t she? I was right, wasn’t I?’
White clouds were overhead, swift before the north wind. The sky was a light, far blue. The sun, safe returned from its dark journey under the icy cold rim of the world, was rising directly in front of them, bright as a promise. Black crows dotted the stubble of the fields. A pale frost glinted on the brown grass beside the road. Crispin looked at it all in the early light, wondering how he’d achieve that rainbow brilliance of colour and gleaming with glass and stone. Had anyone ever done frost-tipped autumn grass on a dome?
He sighed, hesitated, then replied honestly, ‘She did. You were right. I locked the door.’
‘Pah! Imbecile. Zoticus would have kept her busy all night long and sent her back to her own room exhausted.’
‘I’m not Zoticus.’
A feeble answer and he knew it. The bird only laughed sardonically. But he wasn’t really up to sparring this morning. Memories were too much with him.
It was colder today, especially when the clouds passed in front of the rising sun. His feet were cold in their sandals; boots tomorrow, he thought. The fields and the vineyards on the north side of the road were bare now, of course, and did nothing to stay the wind. He could see the first dark smudge of forests in the far distance now, north-east: the wild, legendary woods that led to the border and then Sauradia. The road would fork today, south towards Mylasia, where he could have caught a ship earlier in the year for a swift sailing to Sarantium. His slow course overland would angle north, towards that untamed forest, and then east again, the long Imperial road marching along its southernmost edgings.
He slowed a little, opened one of his bags as the mule paced stolidly along over the flawlessly fitted stone slabs of the road, and took out his brown woollen cloak. After a moment, he reached into the bag again and withdrew the bird on its leather thong, dropping it around his neck again. An apology, of sorts.
He’d expected Linon’s brittle, waspish tone after the inflicted silence and blindness. He was already growing used to that. What he needed to do now, Crispin thought, closing and retying the bag and then wrapping himself in the cloak, was come to terms with a few other aspects of this journey east under an assumed name, bearing a message from the queen of the Antae for the Emperor in his head, and a creature of the half-world around his neck. And among the things now to be dealt with was the newly apprehended fact that the crafted bird he was carrying with him was undeniably and emphatically female.
TOWARDS MIDDAY, they came to a tiny roadside chapel. In Memory of Clodius Paresis, an inscription over the arched doorway said. With Jad now, in Light.
The merchants and the cleric wanted to pray. Crispin, surprising himself, went in with them while the servants watched the mules and goods outside. No mosaics here. Mosaic was expensive, a luxury. He made the sign of the sun disk before the peeling, nondescript fresco of fair-haired, smooth-cheeked Jad on the wall behind the altar stone, and knelt behind the cleric on the stone floor, joining the others in the sunrise rites.
It was rather late in the
day, perhaps, but there were those who believed the god was tolerant.
CHAPTER III
Kasia took the pitcher of beer, only slightly watered because the four merchants at the large table were regular patrons, and headed back from the kitchen towards the common room.
‘Kitten, when you’ve done with that, you can attend to our old friend in the room above. Deana will finish your tables tonight.’ Morax gestured straight overhead, smiling meaningfully. She hated when he smiled, when he was so obviously being pleasant. It usually meant trouble.
This time it almost certainly meant something worse.
The room overhead, directly above the warmth of the kitchen, was reserved for the most reliable—or generous—patrons of the inn. Tonight it held an Imperial Courier from Sarnica named Zagnes, many years on the road, decent in his manner and known to be easy on the girls, sometimes just wanting a warm body in his bed of an autumn or winter night.
Kasia, newest and youngest of the serving girls at the inn, endlessly slated for the abusive patrons, had never been sent to him before. Deana, Syrene, Khafa—they all took turns when he was staying here, even fought for the chance of a calm night with Zagnes of Sarnica.
Kasia got the rough ones. Fair skinned, as were most of the Inicii, she bruised easily, and Morax was routinely able to extract additional payment from her men for damage done to her. This was an Imperial Posting Inn; their travellers had money, or positions to protect. No one really worried about injuries to a bought serving girl, but most patrons—other than the genuine aristocrats, who didn’t care in the least—were unwilling to appear crude or untutored in the eyes of their fellows. Morax was skilled at threatening outraged indignation on behalf of the entire Imperial Posting Service.
If she was being allowed a night with Zagnes in the best room it was because Morax was feeling a disquiet about something concerning her. Or—a new thought—because they didn’t want her bruised just now.
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