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Which meant—he realized much later, thinking about it, reliving this dialogue again and again on the long road east—that the moment she told him he had no real choice, unless he did decide to die and seek Ilandra and the girls with Jad behind the sun.
The young queen of the Antae and of Batiara, surrounded by mortal danger and fighting it with whatever tools came to hand, however unexpectedly, said softly, ‘You will tell the Emperor Valerius II and no one else that should he wish to regain this country and Rhodias within it, and not merely have a meaningless claim to them, there is an unmarried queen here who has heard of his prowess and his glory and honours them.’
Crispin’s jaw dropped. The queen did not flush, nor did her gaze flicker at all. His reaction was being closely watched, he realized. He said, stammering, ‘The Emperor is married. Has been for years. He changed the laws to wed the Empress Alixana.’
Calm and very still on her ivory seat, she said, ‘Alas, husbands or wives may be put aside. Or die, Caius Crispus.’
He knew this.
‘Empires,’ she murmured, ‘live after us. So does a name. For good or ill. Valerius II, who was once Petrus of Trakesia, has wanted to regain Rhodias and this peninsula since he brought his uncle to the Golden Throne twelve summers ago. He purchased his truce with the King of Kings in Bassania for that reason alone. King Shirvan is bribed so Valerius may assemble an army for the west when the time ripens. There are no mysteries here. But if he tries to take this land in war, he will not hold it. This peninsula is too far away from him, and we Antae know how to make war. And his enemies east and north—the Bassanids and the northern barbarians—will never sit quiet and watch, no matter how much he pays them. There will be men around Valerius who know this, and they may even tell him as much. There is another way to achieve his . . . desire. I am offering it to him.’ She paused. ‘You may tell him, too, that you have seen the queen of Batiara very near, in blue and gold and porphyry, and may . . . give him an honest description, should he ask for one.’
This time, though she continued to hold his gaze and even lifted her chin a little, she did flush. Crispin became aware that his hands were perspiring at his sides. He pressed them against his tunic. He felt the stirrings, astonishingly, of a long-dormant desire. A kind of madness, that, though desire often was. The queen of Batiara was not, in any possible sense, someone who could be thought of in this way. She was offering her face and exquisitely garbed body to his recording gaze, only that he might tell an Emperor about her, halfway around the world. He had never dreamed of moving—never wanted to move—in this world of royal shadows and intrigue, but his puzzle-solving mind was racing now, with his pulse, and he could begin to see the pieces of this picture.
No man—or woman—may know.
No woman. Clear as it could be. He was being asked to carry an overture of marriage to the Emperor, who was very much married, and to the most powerful and dangerous woman in the known world.
‘The Emperor and his low-born actress-wife have no children, alas,’ said Gisel softly. Crispin realized his thoughts must have been in his face. He was not good at this. ‘A sad legacy, one might imagine, of her . . . profession. And she is no longer young.’
I am, was the message beneath the message he was to bring. Save my life, my throne, and I offer you the homeland of the Rhodian Empire that you yearn for. I give you back the west to your east, and the sons to your need. I am fair, and young . . . ask the man who carries my words to you. He will say as much. Only ask.
‘You believe . . .’ he began. Stopped. Composed himself with an effort. ‘You believe this can be kept secret? Majesty, if I am even known to have been brought to you . . .’
‘Trust me in this. You can do me no service if you are killed on the way or when you arrive.’
‘You reassure me greatly,’ he murmured.
Surprisingly, she laughed again. He wondered what those on the other side of the doors would think, hearing that. He wondered what else they might have heard.
‘You could send no formal envoy with this?’
He knew the answer before she gave it. ‘No such messenger from me would have a chance to bespeak the Emperor in . . . privacy.’
‘And I will?’
‘You might. You have pure Rhodian blood on both sides. They acknowledge that, still, in Sarantium, though they complain about you. Valerius is said to be interested in ivory, frescoes . . . such things as you do with stones and glass. He is known to hold conversation with his artisans.’
‘How commendable of him. And when he finds that I am not Martinian of Varena? What sort of conversation will then ensue?’
The queen smiled. ‘That will depend on your wits, will it not?’
Crispin drew another breath. Before he could speak, she added, ‘You have not asked what return a grateful, newly-crowned Empress might make to the man who conveyed this message for her and had success follow upon it. You can read?’ He nodded. She reached into a sleeve of her robe and withdrew a parchment scroll. She extended it a little towards him. He walked nearer, inhaled her scent, saw that her eyelashes were accented and extended subtly. He took the parchment from her hand.
She nodded permission. He broke the seal. Uncurled the scroll. Read.
He felt the colour leave his face as he did so. And hard upon astonishment came bitterness, the core of pain that walked with him in the world.
He said, ‘It is wasted on me, Majesty. I have no children to inherit any of this.’
‘You are a young man,’ the queen said mildly.
Anger flared. ‘Indeed? So why no offer here of a comely Antae woman of your court, or an aristocrat of Rhodian blood for my prize? The brood mare to fill these promised houses and spend this wealth?’
She had been a princess and was a queen and had spent her life in palaces where judging people was a tool of survival. She said, ‘I would not insult you with such a proposal. I am told yours was a love-match. A rare thing. I count you lucky in it, though the allotted time was brief. You are a well-formed man, and would have resources to commend you, as the parchment shows. I imagine you could buy your own brood mare of high lineage, if other methods of choosing a second wife did not present themselves.’
MUCH LATER, IN HIS own bed, awake, with the moons long set and the dawn not far off, Crispin was to conclude that it was this answer, the gravity of it with the bite of irony at the end, that had decided him. Had she offered him a mate on paper or in word, he told himself, he would have refused outright and let her kill him if she wanted.
She would have, he was almost certain of it.
And that thought had come in the last of the darkness, even before he learned from the apprentices as they met at the sanctuary for the sunrise prayers that six of the Palace Guard in Varena had been found dead in the night, their throats slit.
Crispin would walk away from the babble of noise and speculation to stand in the sanctuary alone under his charioteer and torch on the dome. The light was just entering through the dome’s ring of windows, striking the angled glass. The mosaic torch seemed to flicker as he watched, a soft but unmistakable rippling, as of a muted flame. In his mind’s eye he could see it above burning lanterns and candles . . . given enough of them it would work.
He understood something. The queen of the Antae, battling for her life, had made something else as clear as it could be: she would not let the secrecy of his message be endangered in any way, even by her own most trusted guards. Six men dead. Nothing muted there at all.
He didn’t know how he felt. Or no, he realized that he did know: he felt like a too-small ship setting out from harbour far too late in the year, undermanned, with winter winds swirling all around it.
But he was going to Sarantium. After all.
EARLIER, IN THE DEPTHS of the night, in that room in the palace, feeling a stillness descend upon him, Crispin had said to the woman in the carved ivory seat, ‘I am honoured by your trust, Majesty. I would not want another war here, either among the Antae or a Sarantine invasion. We have endured our share of dying. I will carry your message and try to give it to the Emperor, if I survive my own deception. It is folly, what I am about to do, but everything we do is folly, is it not?’
‘No,’ she said, unexpectedly. ‘But I do not expect to be the one who persuades you of that.’ She gestured to one of the doors. ‘There is a man on the other side who will escort you home. You will not see me again, for reasons you understand. You may kiss my foot, if you feel sufficiently well.’
He knelt before her. Touched the slender foot in its golden sandal. Kissed the top of it. As he did, he felt long fingers brush through his hair to the place on his skull where the blow had fallen. He shivered. ‘You have my gratitude,’ he heard. ‘Whatever befalls.’
The hand was withdrawn. He stood, bowed again, went out through the indicated portal, and was escorted home by a tongueless, smooth-shaven giant of a man through the windy night streets of his city. He was aware of desire lingering as he walked in blackness away from the palace, from the chamber. He was astonished by it.
In that exquisite, small receiving room, a young woman sat alone for a time after he left. It was rare for her to be entirely solitary, and the sensation was not disagreeable. Events had moved swiftly since one of her sources of privy knowledge had mentioned the spoken-aloud details of a summons conveyed by the Imperial Post to an artisan working at her father’s resting place. She’d had little time to ponder nuances, only to realize that this was an unexpected, slender chance—and seize it.
Now there were deaths to attend to, regrettably. This game was lost before it began if it were known to Agila or Eudric or any of the others hovering around her throne that the artisan had had private converse with her in the night before journeying east. The man escorting the mosaic worker now was the only one she fully trusted. For one thing, he could not speak. For another, he had been hers since she was five years old. She would give him further orders for tonight when he returned. It would not be the first time he had killed for her.
The queen of the Antae offered, at length, a small, quiet prayer, asking forgiveness, among other things. She prayed to holy Jad, to his son the Charioteer who had died bringing fire to mortal men, and then—to be as sure as one could ever be sure—to the gods and goddesses her people had worshipped when they were a wild cluster of tribes in the hard lands north and east, first in the mountains, and then by the oak forests of Sauradia, before coming down into fertile Batiara and accepting Jad of the Sun, conquering heirs to an Empire’s homeland.
She nursed few illusions. The man, Caius Crispus, had surprised her a little, but he was an artisan only, and of an angry, despairing humour. Arrogant, as the Rhodians still were so much of the time. Not a truly reliable vessel for so desperate an enterprise. This was almost certainly doomed to failure, but there was little she could do but try. She had let him come near to her, kiss her foot. Had brushed his flour-smeared red hair with fingers deliberately slow . . . perhaps longing was the gateway to this man’s loyalty? She didn’t think so, but she didn’t know, and she could only use what few tools, or weapons, she had or was given.
Gisel of the Antae did not expect to see the wildflowers return in spring, or watch the midsummer bonfires burn upon the hills. She was nineteen years old, but queens were not, in truth, allowed to be so young.
Chapter II
When Crispin was a boy and free for a day in the way that only boys in summer can be free he had walked outside the city walls one morning and, after throwing stones in a stream for a time, had passed by a walled orchard universally reported among the young Varenans to belong to a spirit-haunted country house where unholy things happened after dark.
The sun was shining. In an effusion of youthful bravado, Crispin had climbed the rough stone wall, leaped across into a tree, sat down on a stout branch among the leaves and begun eating apples. He was heart-poundingly proud of himself and wondering how he’d prove he’d done this to his sure-to-be-sceptical friends. He decided to carve his initials—a newly learned skill—on the tree trunk, and dare the others to come see them.
He received, a moment later, the deepest fright of his young life.
It used to wake him at night sometimes, the memory having turned into a dream he’d have even as an adult, a husband, a father. In fact, he had managed to persuade himself that it mostly had been a dream, spun out of overly vivid childhood anxieties, the blazing midday heat, almost-ripe apples eaten too quickly. It had to have been a child’s fantasy, breeding ground of nightmare.
Birds did not talk.
More particularly, they did not discuss with each other from tree to tree, in the identically bored tones and timbre of an overbred Rhodian aristocrat, which eye of a trespassing boy should be pecked out and consumed first, or how the emptied eye sockets might then offer easy access to slithery morsels of brain matter within.
Caius Crispus, eight years old and blessed or cursed with an intensely visual imagination, had not lingered to further investigate this remarkable phenomenon of nature. There seemed to be several birds in animated colloquy about him, half hidden in the leaves and branches. He dropped three apples, spat out the half-chewed pulp of another, and leaped wildly back to the wall, scraping an elbow raw, bruising a shin, and then doing himself further damage when he landed badly on the baked summer grass by the path.
As he sprinted back, not quite screaming, towards Varena, he heard sardonic crowing laughter behind him.
Or he did in his dreams, after, at any rate.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, walking the same road south of the city, Crispin was thinking about the power of memories, the way they had of coming back so fiercely and unexpectedly. A scent could do it, the sound of rushing water, the sight of a stone wall beside a path.
He was remembering that day in the tree, and the recollection of terror took him a little further back, to the image of his mother’s face when the reserves of the urban militia returned from that same year’s spring campaign against the Inicii and his father was not with them.
Horius Crispus the mason had been a vivid, well-liked man, respected and successful in his craft and business. His only surviving son struggled, however, to shape a clear mental picture, after all these years, of the man who had gone marching north to the border and beyond into Ferrieres, red-bearded, smiling, easy-striding. He’d been too young when the militia’s deputy commander had come to their door with his father’s nondescript shield and sword.
He could remember a beard that scratched when he kissed his father’s cheek, blue eyes—his own eyes, people said—and the big, capable hands, scarred and always scratched. A big voice, too, that went soft within the house, near Crispin or his small, scented mother. He had these . . . fragments, these elements, but when he tried to pull them together in his mind to create a whole it somehow slipped away, the way the man had slipped away too soon.
He had stories to go by: from his mother, her brothers, sometimes his own patrons, many of whom remembered Horius Crispus well. And he could study his father’s steady, incisive work in houses and chapels, graveyards and public buildings all over Varena. But he couldn’t cling to any memory of a face that did not blur into an absence. For a man who lived for image and colour—who flourished in the realm of sight—this was hard.
Or it had been hard. Time passing did complex things, to deepen a wound or to heal it. Even, sometimes, to overlay it with another that had felt as if it would kill.
It was a beautiful morning. The wind was behind him, the coming winter in it, but crisp rather than cold while the sun shone, sweeping the mist from the eastern forests and hills to west and farther south. He was alone on the road. Not always a safe thing, but he felt no danger now, and he could see a long way in the open country south of the city—almost to the rim of the world, it seemed.
Behind him, when he glanced back, Varena gleamed, bronze domes, red roof-tiles, the city walls nearly white in the morning light. A hawk circled above its own warning shadow on the stubble of the fields east of the road. The harvested vines on the slopes ahead looked derelict and bare, but the grapes were inside the city, being made into wine even now. Queen Gisel, efficient in this as in many things, had ordered that city labourers and slaves join in the grain and grape harvests, to cover—as much as possible—the loss of so many people to the plague. The first festivals would be beginning soon, in Varena and in smaller villages everywhere, leading up to the wildness of Dykania’s three nights. It would be difficult, though, to shape a truly festive mood this autumn, Crispin thought. Or perhaps he was wrong about that. Perhaps festivals were more important after what had happened. Perhaps they were more uninhibited in the presence of death.
As he walked, he could see abandoned farmhouses and outbuildings on both sides of the country path. The rich farmland and vineyards around Varena were all very well, but they needed men to sow and reap and tend, and too many labourers were buried in the mass graves. The coming winter would be hard.
Even with these thoughts, it was difficult to remain grim this morning. Light nurtured him, as did clean, sharp colours, and the day was offering both. He wondered if he’d ever be able to create a forest with the browns and reds and golds and the late, deep green of the one he could see now beyond the bare fields. With tesserae worthy of the name, and perhaps a sanctuary dome designed with windows enough and—by the god’s grace—good, clear glass for those windows, he might. He might.
In Sarantium these things were to be found, men said. In Sarantium, everything on earth was to be found, from death to heart’s desire, men said.
He was going, it seemed. Sailing to Sarantium. Walking, actually, for it was too late in the year for a ship, but the old saying spoke of change, not a means of travel. His life was branching, taking him towards whatever might come on the road or at journey’s end.
His life. He had a life. The hardest thing was to accept that, it sometimes seemed. To move out from the rooms where a woman and two children had died in ugly pain, stripped of all inherent dignity or grace; to allow brightness to touch him again, like this gift of the morning sun.
In that moment, he felt like a child again himself, seeing a remembered stone wall come into view as the path curved and approached it. Half amused, half genuinely unsettled, Crispin added a few more inward curses to his emergent litany against Martinian, who had insisted that he make this visit.
It seemed that Zoticus, the alchemist, much consulted by farmers, the childless and the lovelorn, and even royalty on occasion, dwelled in the selfsame substantial farmhouse with an attached apple orchard where an eight-year-old boy had heard birds discussing with well-bred anticipation the consumption of his eyeballs and brain matter.
‘I will send to tell him to expect you,’ Martinian had said with firmness. ‘He knows more useful things than any man I know, and you are a fool if you undertake a journey like this without first speaking with Zoticus. Besides, he makes wonderful herbal infusions.’
‘I don’t like herbal infusions.’
‘Crispin,’ Martinian had said warningly. And had given directions.
And so here he was, cloaked against the wind, pacing alongside the rough stones of the wall, booted feet tracing the vanished, long-ago bare footsteps of a child who had gone out from the city alone one summer’s day to escape the sorrow in his house.
He was alone now, too. Birds flitted from branch to bough on both sides of the road. He watched them. The hawk was gone. A brown hare, too exposed, made swift, deliberately jerky progress across the field on his left. A cloud swept across the sun and its elongated shadow raced over the same field. The hare froze when the shadow reached it and then hurtled erratically forward again as light returned.
On the other side of the road the wall marched beside him, well built, well maintained, of heavy grey stones. Ahead, he could see the gateway to the farmyard, a marker stone opposite it. Unused though it now was, this had been a road laid down in the great days of the Rhodian Empire. In no great distance—a morning’s steady walking—it met the high road that ran all the way to Rhodias itself and beyond, to the southern sea at the end of the peninsula. As a child, Crispin used to enjoy the sensation of being on the same road as someone gazing into those distant ocean waters.
He stopped for a moment, looking at the wall. He had climbed it easily that morning long ago. There were still apples in the trees beyond. Crispin pursed his lips, weighing a thought. This was not a time to be duelling with childhood memories, he told himself sternly, repressively. He was a grown man, a respected, well-known artisan, a widower. Sailing to Sarantium.
With a small, resolute shrug of his shoulders, Crispin dropped the package he was carrying—a gift from Martinian’s wife for the alchemist—onto the brown grass beside the path. Then he stepped across the small ditch, pushed a hand through his hair, and proceeded to climb the wall again.
Not all skills were lost to the years, and it seemed he wasn’t so old after all. Pleased with his own agility, he swung one knee up, then the other, stood on the wide, uneven top of the wall, balanced, and then stepped—only boys leaped—across to a good branch. He found a comfortable spot, sat down and, pausing to be judicious, reached up and picked an apple.
He was surprised to find his heart was racing.
He knew that if they saw this, his mother and Martinian and half a dozen others would be performing a collective rueful headshake like the Chorus in one of those seldom-performed tragedies of the ancient Trakesian poets. Everyone said Crispin did things merely because he knew that he shouldn’t do them. A perversity of behaviour, his mother called it.
Perhaps. He didn’t think so, himself. The apple was ripe. Tasty, he decided.
He dropped it onto the grass among fallen ones for the small animals and stood up to cross back to the wall. No need to be greedy or childish. He’d proven his point, felt curiously pleased with himself. Settled a score with his youth, in a way.
‘Some people never learn, do they?’
One foot on a branch, one on top of the wall, Crispin looked down very quickly. Not a bird, not an animal, not a spirit of the half-world of air and shadow. A man with a full beard and unfashionably long grey hair stood in the orchard below, gazing up at him, leaning on a staff, foreshortened by the angle.
Flushing, acutely embarrassed, Crispin mumbled, ‘They used to say this orchard was haunted. I . . . wanted to test myself.’
‘And did you pass your test?’ the old man—Zoticus, beyond doubt—queried gently.
‘I suppose.’ Crispin stepped across to the wall. ‘The apple was good.’
‘As good as they were all those years ago?’
‘Hard to remember. I really don’t—’
Crispin stopped. A prickling of fear.
‘How do . . . how did you know I was here? Back then?’ ‘You are Caius Crispus, I presume? Martinian’s friend.’
Crispin decided to sit down on the wall. His legs felt oddly weak. ‘I am. I have a gift for you. From his wife.’
‘Carissa. Splendid woman! A neckwarmer, I do hope. I find I need them now, as winter comes. Old age. A terrible thing, let me tell you. How did I know you were here before? Silly question. Come down. Do you like mint leaves in an infusion?’