"Sailing to Sarantium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

CHAPTER X

On the same day that the mosaicist Cams Crispus of Varena survived two attempts on his life, first saw the domed Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom in Sarantium, and met the men and women who would shape and define his living days to come under the god's sun, far to the west a ceremony took place outside the walls of his home town in the much smaller sanctuary he had been commissioned with his partner and their craftsmen and apprentices to decorate.

Amid the forests of Sauradia the people of the Antae had-along with the Vrachae and Inicii and the other pagan tribes in that wild land- honoured their ancestors on the Day of the Dead with rites of blood. But after forcing their way west and south into Batiara as the Rhodian Empire crumbled inwards, they had adopted the faith of Jad and many of the customs and rituals of those they conquered. King Hildric, in particular, during a long and shrewd reign, had made considerable strides towards consolidating his people in the peninsula and achieving a measure of harmony with the subjugated but still haughty Rhodians.

It was considered unfortunate in the extreme that Hildric the Great had left no surviving heir save a daughter.

The Antae might worship Jad and gallant Heladikos now, might carry sun disks, build and restore chapels, attend at bathhouses and even theatres, treat with the mighty Sarantine Empire as a sovereign state and not a gathering of tribes… but they remained a people known for the precarious tenure of their leaders and utterly unaccustomed to a woman's rule. It was a matter of ongoing surprise in certain quarters that Queen Gisel hadn't been forced to marry or been murdered before now.

In the judgement of thoughtful observers, only the tenuous balance of power among rival factions had caused a clearly unacceptable condition to endure until the long-awaited consecration of Hildric's memorial outside the walls of Varena.

The ceremony took place late in the autumn, immediately after the three days of Dykania ended, when the Rhodians were accustomed to honour their own ancestors. Theirs was a civilized faith and society: candles were lit, prayers articulated, no blood was shed.

A significant number of those close-packed in the expanded and impressively decorated sanctuary did feel sufficiently unwell in the aftermath of Dykania's excesses to half wish that they themselves were dead, however. Among the many Rhodian festivals and holy days that dotted the round of the year, Dykania's inebriate debaucheries had been adopted by the Antae with an entirely predictable enthusiasm.

In the wan light of a sunless dawn, the fur-cloaked court of Varena and those of the Antae nobility who had travelled from afar now gathered, mingling with Rhodians of repute and a quantity of clerics, greater and lesser. There were a small number of places set aside for the ordinary folk of Varena and its countryside, and many of these had lined up since the night before to be present today. Most had been turned away, of course, but they lingered outside in the chill, talking, buying hot food and spiced wine and trinkets from quickly erected booths in the grassy spaces around the sanctuary.

The still-bare mound of earth that covered the dead of the last plague was an oppressive, inescapable presence in the north of the yard. A few men and women could be seen walking over there at intervals to stand silently in the hard wind.

There had been a persistent rumour that the High Patriarch himself might make the trip north from Rhodias to honour the memory of King

Hildric, but this had not come to pass. The talk, both within and without the sanctuary, was clear as to why.

The mosaicists-a celebrated pair, native to Varena-obedient to the will of the young queen, had put Heladikos on the dome.

Athan, the High Patriarch, who had signed-under duress from the east, it was generally believed-a Joint Pronouncement forbidding representations of Jad's mortal son, could hardly attend at a sanctuary that so boldly flouted his will. On the other hand, in the reality of the Batiaran peninsula as it was under the Antae, neither could he ignore a ceremony such as this. The Antae had come to the faith of Jad for the son as much as the father, and they were not about to leave Heladikos behind them, whatever the two Patriarchs might say. It was a… difficulty.

In the expected, equivocal resolution, half a dozen senior clerics had made the muddy trip from Rhodias, arriving two days before, in the midst of Dykania.

They sat now with grim, unhappy faces at the front of the sanctuary before the altar and the sun disk, taking care not to look up at the dome, where an image of golden Jad and an equally vivid, forbidden rendering of his son carrying a torch of fire in his falling chariot could be seen.

The mosaics had already been judged very fine by those who understood such things, though some had disparaged the quality of the glass pieces used. Perhaps more importantly, the new images overhead had caused the pious folk of Varena, who had waited longest and been rewarded with places at the back, to murmur in genuine wonder and awe. Shimmering in the light of the candles the queen had ordered lit for her mighty father, the torch of Heladikos seemed to flicker and glow with a light of its own as the shining god and his doomed child looked down on those gathered below.

Afterwards, rather too obvious analogies were made by a great many and complex, competing morals drawn from the ferocious events of a morning that began in cold, windy greyness, moved into a consecrated space of candlelight and prayers, and ended with blood on the altar and the sun disk beyond.

Pardos had already decided that this was the most important day of his life. He had even half decided, frightening himself a little with the immensity of the thought, that it might always be the most important day of his life. That nothing would or could ever match this morning.

With Radulph and Couvry and the others, he sat-they were sitting, not standing! — in the section allocated to the artisans: carpenters, masons, bricklayers, metal workers, fresco painters, glaziers, mosaicists, all the others.

Labourers, on instructions from the court, had brought in and carefully placed wooden benches all through the sanctuary over the past few days. The sensation was odd, to be seated in a place of worship. Clad in the new brown tunics and belts Martinian had bought them for this morning, Pardos struggled furiously to both appear calm and mature and see every single thing that happened in each moment that passed.

Pardos knew he had to try to seem poised: he wasn't an apprentice any more. Martinian had signed the papers for him and Radulph and Couvry yesterday afternoon. They were formally attested craftsmen now, could serve any mosaicist who would hire them, or even-though that would be foolish-seek commissions on their own. Radulph was returning home to Baiana; he'd always said he would. There would be plenty of work to be found in that summer resort. He was Rhodian, his family knew people. Pardos was Antae and knew no one outside Varena. He and Couvry were staying on with Martinian-and with Crispin, if and when he ever returned from the glories and terrors of the east. Pardos hadn't expected to miss so acutely a man who had routinely threatened him with mannings and dismemberments, but the fact was, he did.

Martinian had taught them patience, discipline, order, the balance between the imagined and the possible. Crispin had been teaching Pardos to see.

He was trying to apply those lessons now, observing the colours worn by the burly Antae leaders and those of the well-born Rhodians who were present here, men and women both. Martinian's wife, beside him, had a shawl of a wonderfully deep red colour over her dark grey robe. It looked like summer wine. Crispin's mother, on Martinian's other side, wore a long blue cloak so dark it made her white hair seem to gleam in the candlelight. Avita Crispina was a small woman, composed and straight-backed, with a scent of lavender about her. She had greeted Pardos and Radulph and Couvry by name and offered them felicitations as they walked in together: they'd had no idea, any of them, that she'd even known they existed.

To the left of the raised altar, close to where the clerics would chant the rites of the day and of Hildric's memorial service, the most important members of the court were seated beside and behind the queen. The men were bearded, unsmiling, clad soberly in browns and russets and dark greens-hunting colours, Pardos thought. He recognized Eudric, yellow-haired and battle-scarred-handsome for all that-once commander of the northern cohorts that did battle with the Inicii, now Chancellor of the Antae realm. Most of the others he didn't know. He thought some of the men looked distinctly uncomfortable without their swords. Weapons were forbidden in the chapel, of course, and Pardos saw hands straying restlessly to gold and silver belts and finding nothing there.

The queen herself sat on an elevated seat set among the first row of the new wooden benches on that side. She was exquisite and a little frightening in the white robes of mourning with a white silk veil hiding her face. Only the almost-throne itself and a single band of dark purple in the soft hat that held the veil in place marked her as royalty today. Wives and mothers and daughters had always worn the veil, Martinian had told them, in the glory days of Rhodias when a man was buried or at his memorial. The queen, so garbed and hidden, raised above everyone else, seemed to Pardos to be a figure out of history or from the tales of other, fantastic worlds, told around night fires.

Martinian, of course, was the only one of them who'd ever spoken to her in the palace, when he and Crispin were commissioned to the work, and afterwards as he requested funds and reported progress. Radulph had seen her once, up close, as she rode back through the city from a royal hunt beyond the walls. Pardos never had. She was beautiful, Radulph had said.

In the strangest way, you could almost tell that now, even if you couldn't see her face, Pardos thought. It occurred to him that dressing in white amid those clad in deeper autumn colours was an effective way to draw the eye. He considered that, how it might be used, and thought of Crispin as he did.

There was a rustling sound and he turned quickly to the front. The three clerics who would conduct the rites-the celebrated Sybard of Varena from the court, and two from this sanctuary-stepped forward from behind the sun disk and paused, in yellow, in blue, in yellow, until the murmurous sounds grew slowly quieter and then stopped. In the flicker of candle and olive oil lamp, under the god and his son on the small dome, they raised their hands, six palms held outwards in the blessing of Jad.

What followed was not holy.

Afterwards, Pardos understood that the clerics" gestures had been chosen as a pre-arranged signal. Some device for co-ordinating actions had been needed, and everyone knew how this ceremony would begin.

The brown-bearded, big-shouldered man who stood up, just as the clerics were about to start the rites, was Agila, the Master of Horse, though Pardos knew that only later. The burly Antae took two heavy-booted strides towards the altar from beside the queen and threw back his fur-lined cloak in the full view of all those assembled.

He was perspiring heavily, his colour was high, and he was wearing a sword.

The clerics" hands remained in the air like six forgotten appendages as they faltered into silence. Four other men, Pardos saw, his heart now beginning to pound, also stood up from the back of the royal section and moved into the aisles between the rows of benches. Their cloaks were also withdrawn; four swords were revealed, and then unsheathed. This was heresy, a violation. It was worse.

"What are you doing? " the court cleric cried sharply, his voice shrill with outrage. Gisel the queen did not move, Pardos saw. The big, bearded man stood almost directly in front of her, but facing the body of the sanctuary.

He heard Martinian say softly under his breath, "Jad shelter us. Her guards are outside. Of course."

Of course. Pardos knew the rumours and the fears and the threats- everyone did. He knew the young queen never took food or drink that had not been prepared by her own people and tasted first by them, that she never ventured forth, even within the palace, without a cadre of armed guards. Except here. In the sanctuary: veiled in mourning on her father's memorial day, in the sight of her people both high and low and of the holy clerics and the watching god, in a consecrated space where arms were forbidden, where she could assume she would be safe.

Except she couldn't.

"What," rasped the muscular, sweating man in front of the queen, ignoring the cleric, "does Batiara say about treason? What do the Antae do to rulers who betray them?" The words rang harshly in the holy space, ascended to the dome.

"What are you saying? How dare you come armed into a sanctuary?" The same cleric as before. A brave man, Pardos thought. It was said Sybard had challenged the Emperor of Sarantium on a question of faith, in writing. He would not be afraid here, Pardos thought. His own hands were trembling.

The bearded Antae reached into his cloak and pulled out a bunched-together sheaf of parchments. "I have papers!" he cried. "Papers that prove this false queen, false daughter, false whore, has been preparing to surrender us all to the Inicii!"

"That," said Sybard the cleric with astonishing composure, as a shocked swell of sound ran through the sanctuary, "is undoubtedly a lie. And even if it were not so, this is not the place or time to deal with it."

"Be silent, you gelded lapdog of a whore! It is Antae warriors who decide when and where a lying bitch dog meets her fate!"

Pardos swallowed hard. He felt stunned. The words were savage, unthinkable. This was the queen he was describing in that way.

Two things happened very quickly then, almost in the same moment. The bearded man drew his sword, and an even bigger, shaven-headed man behind the queen stood up and moved forward, placing himself directly in front of her. His face was expressionless.

"Stand aside, mute, or you will be slain," said the man with the sword. Throughout the sanctuary people had risen and now began pushing towards the doors. There was a scraping of benches, a babble of sound.

The other man made no movement, shielding the queen with only his body. He was weaponless.

"Put down your sword!" cried the cleric again from the altar. "This is madness in a holy place!"

"Kill her, already!" Pardos heard then, a flat, low tone, but quite distinct, from among the Antae seats near Gisel.

Someone screamed then. The movement of retreating bodies made the candles flicker. The mosaics overhead seemed to shift and alter in the eddies of light.

The queen of the Antae stood up.

Her back straight as a spear shaft, she lifted her two hands and drew back her veil, and then removed the soft hat with the emblem of royalty around it and laid it gently down on the raised chair so that every man and woman there could see her face.

It was not the queen.

The queen was youthful, golden-haired. Everyone knew. This woman was no longer young, and her hair was a dark brown with grey in it. There was a cold, regal fury in her eyes, though, as she said to the man before her, beyond the intervening mute, "You are unmasked, Agila, in treachery. Submit yourself to judgement."

Pardos was watching the perspiring man named Agila as he lost what remained of his self-control. He could see it happen-the dropping jaw, the gaping, astonished eyes, then the foul, obscene cry of rage.

The unarmed mute was the first to die, being nearest. Agila's sword swept in a vicious backhand that took the man at an angle across the upper chest, biting deeply into his neck. Agila tore the blade back and free as the man fell, soundlessly, and Pardos saw blood fly through holy space to spatter the clerics, the altar, the holy disk. Agila stepped right over the toppled body and plunged his sword straight into the heart of the woman who had impersonated the queen, balking him.

She screamed as she died, taken by agony, twisting and falling backwards onto the bench beside her chair. One hand clutched at the blade in her breast as if pulling it to herself. Pardos saw Agila rip it back, savagely, slicing her palm open.

There was screaming everywhere by then. The movement to the doors became a frenzied press, near to madness. Pardos saw an apprentice he knew stumble and fall and disappear. He saw Martinian gripping his own wife and Crispin's mother tightly by the elbows as they entered the frantic press, steering towards the exits with everyone else. Couvry and Radulph were right behind them. Then Couvry moved up, even as Pardos watched, and took Avita Crispina's other arm, shielding her.

Pardos stayed where he was, on his feet but motionless.

He could never afterwards say exactly why, only that he was watching, that someone had to watch.

And observing in this way-quite close, in fact, a still point amid swirling chaos-Pardos saw the Chancellor, Eudric Goldenhair, step forward from his place near the fallen woman and say in a voice that resonated, "Put up your sword, Agila, or it will be taken from you. What you have done is unholy and it is treachery and you will not be allowed to flee, or to live."

His manner was amazingly calm, Pardos thought. He watched as Agila wheeled swiftly towards the other man. A space had cleared, people were fleeing the sanctuary.

"Fuck yourself with your dagger, Eudric! You horse-buggered offal! We did this together and you will not disclaim it now. Only a dice roll chose which of us would stand up here. Surrender my sword? Fool! Shall I call in my soldiers to deal with you now?"

"Call them, liar," said the other man. His tone was level, almost grave. The two of them stood less than five paces apart. "There will be no reply when you do. My own men have dealt with yours already-in the woods where you thought to post them secretly."

"What? You treacherous bastard!"

"What an amusing thing for you to say, in the circumstances," said Eudric. Then he took a quick step backwards and added: "Vincelas!" extremely urgently, as Agila, eyes maddened, clove through the space between them.

There was a walkway overhead, not especially high: a place for musicians to play unseen, or for clerics" meditation and quiet pacing on days when winter or autumn rains made the outdoors bitter. The arrow that killed Agila, Master of the Antae Horse, came from there. He toppled like a tree, sword clattering on the floor, at the feet of Eudric.

Pardos looked up. There were half a dozen archers on the walkway. As he watched, the four men with drawn swords-Agila's men-slowly lowered and then dropped their weapons.

They died that way, surrendering, as six more arrows sang.

Pardos realized he was standing quite alone now, in the section reserved for the artisans. He felt utterly exposed. He didn't leave, but he did sit down. His palms were wet, his legs felt weak.

"I do apologize," said Eudric smoothly, looking up from the dead men to the three clerics still standing before the altar. Their faces were the colour of buttermilk, Pardos thought. Eudric paused to adjust the collar of his tunic and then the heavy golden necklace he wore. "We should be able to restore order quickly enough now, calm the people, bring them back in. This is a political matter, a most unfortunate one. Not your concern at all. You will carry on with the ceremony, of course."

"What? We will not!" said the court cleric, Sybard, his jaw set. "The very suggestion is an impious disgrace. Where is the queen? What has been done to her?"

"I can assure you I am far more anxious to know the answer to that than you are," said Eudric Goldenhair. Pardos, watching intently, had Agila's words still ringing in his head: We did this together.

"One ventures to guess," added Eudric smoothly, to no one and to all of them left in the sanctuary, "that she must have had some word of Agila's vile plot and elected to save herself rather than be present at the holy rites for her father. Hard to blame a woman for that. It does raise some. questions, naturally." He smiled.

Pardos would remember that smile. Eudric went on, after a pause, "I propose to restore order here and then establish it in the palace-in the queen's name, of course-while we ascertain exactly where she is. Then," said the yellow-haired Chancellor, "we shall have to determine how next to proceed here in Varena, and indeed in all of Batiara. In the meantime," he said, in a voice suddenly cold that did not admit of contradiction, "you are under a misapprehension of your own, good cleric. Hear me: I did not ask you to do something, I told you to do it. The three of you will proceed with the ceremony of consecration and of mourning, or your own deaths will follow upon those you have seen. Believe it, Sybard. I have no quarrel with you, but you can die here, or live to achieve what goals you have set for yourself and our people. Holy places have been sanctified with blood before today."

Sybard of Varena, long-shanked and long-necked, looked at him a moment. "There are no goals I could properly pursue," he said, "were I to do as you say. I have offices to perform for those slain here and comfort to offer their families. Kill me if you will." And he walked from the raised place before the altar and out the side door. Eudric's eyes narrowed to slits, Pardos saw, but he said nothing. A smaller Antae nobleman, smooth-chinned but with a long brown moustache, stood beside him now, and Pardos saw this man lay a steadying hand on the Chancellor's arm as Sybard passed right by them.

Eudric stared straight ahead, breathing deeply. It was the smaller man who now gave crisp commands. Guards began mopping with their own cloaks at the blood where the woman and the mute had died. There was a great deal. They carried their bodies out through the side exit, and then those of Agila and his slain men.

Other soldiers went out into the yard, where frightened people could still be heard milling about. They were instructed to order the crowd back in. To report that the ceremony was to proceed.

It amazed Pardos, thinking of it after, but most of those who had rushed out, trampling each other in terror, did come back. He didn't know what that said about people, what it meant about the world in which they lived. Couvry came back, Radulph did. Martinian and the two women did not. Pardos realized that he was glad of that.

He stayed where he was. His gaze went back and forth from Eudric and the man beside him to the two remaining clerics before the altar. One of the clerics turned to look back at the sun disk, and then he walked over to it and, using the corner of his own robe, wiped at the blood there and then at the blood on the altar. When he turned around and came back, Pardos saw the smeared blood dark on his yellow robe and saw that the man was weeping.

Eudric and the one beside him took their seats, exactly as before. The two clerics glanced nervously over at them and then raised their hands once more, four palms outwards, and then they spoke, in perfect ritual unison.

"Holy Jad," they said, "let there be Light for all your children gathered here, now and in days to come." And the people in the sanctuary spoke the response, raggedly at first and then more clearly. Then the clerics spoke again, and the response came again.

Pardos rose quietly then as the rites began, and he moved past Couvry and Radulph and those sitting beyond them towards the eastern aisle and then he walked past all the people gathered there beneath the mosaic of Jad and Heladikos with his gift of fire, and he went out the doors into the cold of the yard and down the path and through the gate and away from there.

At the moment a man and a woman she had loved since childhood were dying in her father's sanctuary, the queen of the Antae was standing fur-cloaked and hooded at the stern railing of a ship sailing east from Mylasia through choppy seas. She was gazing back west and north to land, to where Varena would be, far beyond the intervening fields and forests. There were no tears in her eyes. There had been earlier, but she was not alone here and visible grief, for a queen, required privacy.

Overhead, on the mainmast of the sleek, burnished ship, whipped by the stiff breeze, flew a crimson lion and a sun disk on a blue field: the banner of the Sarantine Empire.

The handful of Imperial passengers-couriers, military officers, taxation officials, engineers-would disembark at Megarium, giving thanks for a safe journey through wind and white waves. It was late to be sailing, even for the short run across the bay.

Gisel would not be among those leaving the ship. She was going farther. She was sailing to Sarantium.

Almost everyone else on board had been present as a screen, a mask, to deceive the Antae port officials in Mylasia. If this ship had not been in the harbour, the other passengers would have ridden the Imperial road north and east to Sauradia and then back down south to Megarium. Or they might have taken another, less trim craft than this royal one, had the seas been judged safe for a fast trip across the bay.

This ship, expertly manned, had been riding at anchor in Mylasia waiting for one passenger only, should she decide to come.

Valerius II, Jad's Holy Emperor of Sarantium, had extended an extremely private invitation to the queen of the Antae in Batiara, suggesting she visit his great City, seat of Empire, glory of the world, to be feted and honoured there, and perhaps hold converse upon matters of moment for both Batiara and Sarantium in Jad's world as it was in that year. The queen had had conveyed to the ship's captain in Mylasia harbour-discreedy-her acceptance six days ago.

She had been about to be killed, otherwise.

She was likely to die in any case, Gisel thought, looking back over the white-capped sea at the receding coastline of her home, wiping at tears that were caused by the wind at the stern, but only by the wind. Her heart ached as with a wound, and a grim, hard-eyed image of her father was in her mind, for she knew what he would have thought and said of this flight. It was a grief. It was a grief, among all the others of her life.

Her hood blew back in a swirling of the salt wind, exposing her face to the elements and men's eyes, sending her hair streaming. It didn't matter. Those on board knew who she was. The need for uttermost care had ended when the ship slipped anchor on the dawn tide carrying her from her throne, her people, her life.

Was there a way to return? A course to sail between the rocks of violent rebellion at home and those of the east, where an army was almost certainly being readied to reclaim Rhodias? And if there was such a course, if it existed in the god's world, was she wise enough to find it? And would they let her live so long?

She heard a footfall on the deck behind her. Her women were below, both of them violently unwell at sea. She had six of her own guards here.

Only six to go so far, and not Pharos, the silent one she'd so dearly wanted by her side-but he was always by her side, and the deception would have failed had he not remained in the palace.

It wasn't one of the guards who approached now, nor the ship's captain, who was being courteous and deferential in exactly proper measure. It was the other man, the one she had summoned to the palace to help her achieve this flight, the one who had said why Pharos would have to remain in Varena. She remembered weeping then.

She turned her head and looked at him. Middling height, long grey-white hair and beard, the rugged features and deep-set blue eyes, the ash-wood staff he carried. He was a pagan. He would have to be, she thought, to be what else he was.

"The breeze is a good one, they tell me," said Zoticus the alchemist. He had a deep, slow voice. "It will carry us swiftly to Megarium, my lady."

"And you will leave me there?"

Blunt, but she had little choice. She had needs, desperate ones; could not make traveller's talk just now. Everything, everyone who might be a tool needed to be made a tool, if she could manage it.

The craggy-faced alchemist came to the rail, standing a diffident distance apart from her. He shivered and wrapped himself in his cloak before nodding his head. "I am sorry, my lady. As I said at the outset, I have matters that must be attended to in Sauradia. I am grateful for this passage. Unless the wind gets wilder, in which case my gratitude will be tempered by my stomach." He smiled at her.

She did not return it. She could have her soldiers bind him, deny him departure at Megarium; she doubted the Emperor's seamen would interfere. But what was the point of doing that? She could bind the man with ropes, but not his heart and mind to her, and that was what she needed from him. From someone.

"Not so grateful as to stay by your queen who needs you?" She did not veil her reproach. He had been a man inclined to women in his youth, she remembered learning once. She wondered if she might think of something yet, to keep him. Would her maidenhead be a lure? He might have bedded virgins but would never have slept with a queen before, she thought bitterly. There was a pain in her, watching the grey coastline recede and merge into the grey sea. They would be in the sanctuary by now, back home, beginning her father's rites under the candles and the lanterns.

The alchemist did not avert his eyes, though her own gaze was icy cold. Was this the first of the prices she was paying, and would continue to pay, Gisel thought… that a queen adrift on another ruler's boat, with only a handful of soldiers by her and her throne left behind for others to claim, could not compel proper homage or duty any more?

Or was it just the man? There was no disrespect in him, to be fair, only a frank directness. He said gravely,'I have served you, Majesty, in all ways I can here. I am an old man, Sarantium is very far. I have no powers that would aid you there."

"You have wisdom, secret arts, and loyalty… I still believe."

"And are right to believe that last. I have as little desire as you, my lady, to see Batiara plunged into war again."

She pushed at a whipping strand of hair. The wind was raw on her face. She ignored it. "You understand that is why I am here? Not my own escape? This is no… escape."

"I understand," said Zoticus.

"It isn't simply a question of who rules in Varena among us, it is Sarantium that matters. None of them in the palace has the least understanding of that."

"I know it," said Zoticus. "They will destroy each other and lie open to the east." He hesitated. "May I ask what you hope to achieve in Sarantium? You spoke of returning home.. how would you, without an army?"

A hard question. She didn't know the answer. She said, "There are armies and… armies. There are different levels of subjugation. You know what Rhodias is now. You know what. we did to it when we conquered. It is possible I can act so that Varena and the rest of the peninsula is not ruined the same way." She hesitated. "I might even stop them from coming. Somehow."

He did not smile, or dismiss that. He said only, "Somehow. But then you would not return either, would you?"

She had thought of that, too. "Perhaps. I would pay that price, I suppose. Alchemist, if I knew all paths to what will be, I'd not have asked for counsel. Stay by me. You know what I am trying to save."

He bowed then, but ignored the renewed request. "I do know, my lady. I was honoured, and remain so, that you summoned me."

Ten days ago, that had been. She'd had him brought to her on the easy pretext that he was once more to offer his spells of the half-world to help ease the souls of the dead in the plague mound-and her father's spirit, too, with the memorial day approaching. He had first come to the palace more than a year before, when the mound was raised.

She remembered him from that time: a man not young but measured and observant, a manner that reassured. No boasting, no promised miracles. His paganism meant little to her. The Antae had been pagans themselves, not so long ago, in the dark forests of Sauradia and the blood-sown fields beside.

It was said that Zoticus spoke with the spirits of the dead. That was why she had summoned him two summers ago. It had been a time of universal fear and pain: plague, a savage Inici incursion in the wake of it, a brief, bloody civil war when her father died. Healing had been desperately needed, and comfort wherever it could be found.

Gisel had invoked every form of aid she could those first days on the throne, to quiet the living and the dead. She had ordered this man to add his voice to those that were to calm the spirits in the burial mound behind the sanctuary. He had joined the cheiromancers, with their tall, inscribed hats and chicken entrails, in the yard one sundown after the clerics had spoken their prayers and had gone piously within. She didn't know what he had done or said there, but it had been reported that he was the last to leave the yard under the risen moons.

She had thought of him again ten days ago, after Pharos had brought her tidings that were terrifying but not, in truth, entirely unexpected. The alchemist came, was admitted, bowed formally, stood leaning on his staff. They had been alone, save for Pharos.

She had worn her crown, which she rarely did in private. It had seemed important somehow. She was the queen. She was still the queen. She could remember her own first words; imagined, on the deck of the ship, that he could as well.

"They are to kill me in the sanctuary," she had said, "on the day after Dykania, when we honour my father there. It is decided, by Eudric and Agila and Kerdas, the snake. All of them together, after all. I never thought they would join. They are to rule as a triumvirate, I am told, once I am gone. They will say I have been treating with the Inicii."

"A poor lie," Zoticus had said. He had been very calm, the blue eyes mild and alert above the grey beard. It could surprise no one in Varena, she knew, that there were threats on her life.

"It is meant to be weak. A pretext, no more. You understand what will follow?"

"You want me to hazard a guess? I'd say Eudric will have the others out of the way within a year."

She shrugged. "Possibly. Don't underestimate Kerdas, but it hardly matters."

"Ah," he had said then, softly. A shrewd man. "Valerius?"

"Of course, Valerius. Valerius and Sarantium. With our people divided and brutalizing each other in civil war, what will stop him, think you?"

"A few things might," he'd said gravely, "eventually But not at first, no. The Strategos, whatever his name is, would be here by summer."

"Leontes. Yes. By summer. I must live, must stop this. I do not want Batiara to fall, I do not want it drenched in blood again."

"No man or woman could want that last, Majesty."

Then you will help me," she'd said. She was being dangerously frank, had already decided she had next to no choice. "There is no one in this court I trust. I cannot arrest all three of them, they each walk with a small army wherever they go. If I name any one of them my betrothed, the others will be in open revolt the next day."

"And you would be negated, rendered nothing at all, the moment you declared it. They would kill each other in the streets of every city and in the fields outside all walls."

She had looked at him, heartsick and afraid, trying not to hope too much. "You understand this, then?"

"Of course I do," he had said, and smiled at her. "You should have been a man, my lady, the king we need.. though making us all the poorer in another way, of course."

It was flattery. A man with a woman. She had no time for it. "How do I get away?" she'd said bluntly. "I must get away and survive the leaving so I can return. Help me."

He had bowed, again. "I am honoured," he'd said, had to say. And then: "Where, my lady?"

"Sarantium," she had said baldly. "There is a ship."

And she'd seen that she'd surprised him after all. Had felt some small pleasure then, amid the bone-deep anxiety that walked with her and within her as a shadow or half-world spirit through all the nights and days.

She'd asked if he could kill people for her. Had asked it once before, when they had raised the plague mound. It had been a casual question then, for information. It wasn't this time, but his answer had been much the same.

"With a blade, of course, though I have little skill. With poisons, but no more readily than many people you might summon. Alchemy transmutes things, my lady, it does not pretend to the powers the charlatans and false cheiromancers claim."

"Death," she had said, "is a transmutation of life, is it not?"

She remembered his smile, the blue eyes resting on her face, unexpectedly tender. He would have been a handsome man once, she thought; indeed, he still was. It came to her that the alchemist was troubled in his own right, bearing some burden. She could see it but had no room to acknowledge the fact in any way. Who lived in Jad's world without griefs?

He'd said, "It may be seen that way, or otherwise, my lady. It may be seen as the same journey in a different cloak. You need," he had murmured, changing tone, "at least a day and a night away from these walls before they discover you are gone, if you are to reach Mylasia safely. My lady, that requires that someone you trust pretend to be the queen on the day of the ceremony."

He was clever. She needed him to be. He went on. She listened. She would be able to leave the city in a disguise on the second night of Dykania when the gates were open for the festival. The queen could wear the heavily veiled white of full Rhodian mourning in the sanctuary, which would allow someone to take her place. She could declare an intention to withdraw from public view into her private chambers the day before the consecration, to pray for her father's soul. Her guards- a select, small number of them-could wait outside the walls and meet her on the road. One or two of her women could wait with them, he said. Indeed, she would need ladies-in-waiting with her, would she not? Two other guards could, in festival guise themselves, pass out through the walls with her amid the night chaos of Dykania and join the others in the countryside. They could even meet, he said, at his own farmhouse, if that was acceptable to her. Then they would have to ride like fury for Mylasia. It could be done in a night and a day and an evening. Half a dozen guards would keep her safe on the road. Could she ride like that, he asked?

She could. She was Antae. Had been in the saddle since girlhood.

Not so long ago.

She made him repeat the plan, adding details, going step by step. She changed some things, interpolated others. Had to, he couldn't know the palace routines well enough. She added a female complaint as a further excuse for her withdrawal before the consecration. There were ancient fears about a woman's blood among the Antae. No one would intrude.

She had Pharos pour wine for the alchemist and let him sit while she considered, finally, who might pose as herself. A terrible question. Who could do it? Who would? Neither she nor the grey-bearded man sipping at his wine said so, but each of them knew it was almost certain that woman would die.

There was only one name, really, in the end. Gisel had thought she might weep, then, thinking of Anissa who had nursed her, but she did not. Then Zoticus, looking at Pharos, had murmured, "He, too, will have to stay behind, to guard the woman disguised as you. Even I know he never leaves you."

It was Pharos who had reported the triple-headed plot to her. He looked at the other man now from by the doorway, shook his head once, decisively, and moved to stand next to Gisel. The shelter at her side. Shield. All her life. She looked up at him, turned back to the alchemist, opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it, as around a pain, without speaking.

It was true, what the old man said. It was agonizingly true. Pharos never left her, or the doorway to her chambers if she was within. He had to be seen in the palace and then the sanctuary while she fled, in order that she could flee. She lifted one hand then and laid it upon the muscled forearm of the mute, shaven-haired giant who had killed for her and would die for her, would let his soul be lost for her, if need be. Tears did come then, but she turned her head aside, wiped them away. A luxury, not allowed.

She had not been, it seemed, born into the world for peace or joy or any sure power-or even to keep those very few who loved her by her side.

And so it was that the queen of the Antae was nearly alone when she walked forth in disguise on the second night of Dykania, out from the palace and through her city, past bonfires in the squares and moving torchlight and out the open gates amid a riotous, drunken crowd and then, two mornings later, under grey skies with a threat of rain, leaving behind the only land she had ever known for the seas of late autumn and the world, sailing east.

The alchemist who had come to her summons and had devised her escape had been waiting in Mylasia. Before leaving her chambers ten days ago he had requested passage to Sauradia on the Imperial ship. Transactions of his own, he had explained. Business left unfinished long ago.

He doubted she would ever know how deeply she had touched him.

Child-queen, alone and preternaturally serious, mistrustful of shadows, of words, of the very wind. And what man could blame her for it? Besieged and threatened on all sides, wagers taken openly in her city as to the season of her death. And yet wise enough-alone of all in that palace, it seemed-to understand how the Antae's tribal feuds had to be altered now in a greater world or they would revert to being only a tribe again, driven from the peninsula they'd claimed, hacking each other to pieces, scrabbling for forage space among the other barbarian federations. He stood now on a slip in the harbour of Megarium, cloaked against the slant, cold rain, and watched the Sarantine ship move back out through the water, bearing the queen of the Antae to a world that would-some truths were hard-almost certainly prove too dangerous and duplicitous even for her own fierce intelligence.

She would get there, he thought; he had taken the measure of that ship and its captain. He had travelled in his day, knew roads and the sea. A commercial ship, wide, clumsy, deep-bellied, would have been at gravest risk this late in the year. A commercial ship would not have sailed. But this was a craft sent especially for a queen.

She would reach Sarantium, he judged-see the City, as he himself never had-but he could see no joy in her doing so. There had been only death waiting at home, though, the certainty of it, and she was young enough-she was terribly young enough-to cling to life, and whatever hope it might offer in the face of the waiting dark, or the light of her god that might follow.

His gods were different. He was so much older. The long darkness was not always to be feared, he thought. Living on was not an absolute good. There were balances, harmonies to be sought. Things had their season. The same journey in a different cloak, he thought. It was autumn now, in more ways than the one.

There had been a moment on board, watching Batiara disappear in greyness off the stern, when he had seen her weighing whether or not to try seducing him. It had wrung his heart. For Gisel in that moment, for this young queen of a people not his own, he might even have surmounted all the inward matters of his own, truths apprehended in his soul, and sailed on to Sarantium.

But there were powers greater than royalty in the world, and he was travelling to meet one now in a place he knew. His affairs were in order. Martinian and a notary had the necessary papers. His heart had quailed at times once the decision had come to him-only a fool, vainglorious, would have denied that-but there was no least shadow of doubt in him as to what he had to do.

He had heard an inward cry earlier this autumn, a known voice from the distant east, unimaginably far. And then, some time after, a letter had arrived from Martmian's friend, the artisan to whom he had given a bird. Linon. And reading the careful words, discerning the meaning beneath their ambiguous, veiled phrasing, he had understood the cry. Linon. First one, little one. It had been a farewell, and more than that.

No sleep had come to him the night that letter came. He had moved from bed to high-backed chair to farmhouse doorway, where he stood wrapped in a blanket looking out upon the mingled autumn moonlight and the stars in a clear night. All things in the shaped world-his rooms, his garden, the orchard beyond, the stone wall, the fields and forests across the ribbon of road, the two moons rising higher and then setting as he stood in his open doorway, the pale sunrise when it came at last-all things had seemed to him to be almost unbearably precious then, numinous and transcendent, awash in the glory of the gods and goddesses that were, that still were.

By dawn he had made his decision, or, more properly, realized it had been made for him. He would have to go, would fill his old travelling pack again-the worn, stained canvas, Esperanan leather strap, bought thirty years since-with gear for the road and with the other things he would have to carry, and begin the long walk to Sauradia for the first time in almost twenty years.

But that very same morning-in the way the unseen powers of the half-world sometimes had of showing a man when he had arrived at the correct place, the proper understanding-a messenger had come from Varena, from the palace, from the young queen, and he had gone to her.

He had listened to what she told him, unsurprised, then briefly surprised. Had taken thought as carefully as he could for Gisel-younger than his never-seen daughters and sons, but also older than any of them might ever have to be, he mused-and pitying her, mastering his own grave meditations and fear, his growing awareness of what it was he had done long ago and was now to do, he gave her, as a kind of gift, the plan for her escape.

Then he asked if he might sail with her, as far as Megarium.

And here, now, he was, the watched ship heeling already away to the south across the line of the wind and the white waves, the driven rain cold in his face. He kept the pack between his feet on the stone jetty, wise to the ways of harbours. He wasn't a young man; waterfronts were hard places everywhere. He didn't feel afraid, though; not of the world.

The world was all around him even in autumn rain: seamen, seabirds, food vendors, uniformed customs officers, beggars, morning whores sheltering on the porticos, men dropping lines by the jetty for octopus, wharf children tying ship ropes for a tossed coin. In summer they would dive. It was too cold now. He had been here before, many times. Had been a different man then. Young, proud, chasing immortality in mysteries and secrets that might be opened like an oyster for its pearl.

It occurred to him that he almost certainly had children living here. It did not occur to him to look for them. No point, not now. That would be a failure of integrity, he thought. Rank sentimentality. Aged father on last long journey, come to embrace his dear children.

Not him. Never that sort of man. It was the half-world he had embraced, instead.

"Is it gone?" Tiresa said, from inside the pack. All seven of them were in there, unseeing but not silenced. He never silenced them.

"The ship? Yes, it is gone. Away south."

"And we?" Tiresa usually spoke for the others when they were being orderly: falcon's privilege.

"We are away as well, my dears. We are, even now."

"In the rain?"

"We have walked in rain before."

He bent and shouldered the pack, the smooth, supple leather strap sitting easily across his shoulder. It didn't feel heavy, even with his years. It shouldn't, he thought. He had one change of clothing in it, some food and drink, a knife, one book, and the birds. All the birds, all the claimed and crafted birdsouls of his life's bright courage and dark achievement.

There was a boy, perhaps eight years old, sitting on a post, watching him watch the ship. Zoticus smiled and, reaching into the purse at his belt, tossed him a silver piece. The boy caught it deftly, then noted the silver, eyes wide.

"Why?" he asked.

"For luck. Light a candle for me, child."

He strode off, swinging his staff as he walked through the rain, head high, back straight, north-east through the city to pick up the spur of the Imperial road at the landward gate as he had so many times long and long ago, but here now to do something very different: to end the thirty years" tale, a life's untellable story, to carry the birds home that their called and gathered souls might be released.

That cry in the distance had been a message sent. He had thought, when he was young, reading in the Ancients, shaping a prodigious, terrifying exercise of alchemy, that the sacrifice in the Sauradian wood was what mattered there, the act of homage to the power they worshipped in the forest. That the souls of those given to the wood god might be dross, unimportant, free to be claimed, if dark craft and art were equal to that.

Not so. It was otherwise. He had indeed discovered he possessed that knowledge, the appalling and then exhilarating capacity to achieve a transference of souls, but earlier this autumn, standing in his own farmyard of a morning, he had heard a voice in his mind cry out from the Aldwood. Linon, in her own woman's voice-that he had heard only once, from hiding, when they killed her in the wood-and he had understood, an old man now, wherein he had been wrong, long ago.

Whatever it was that was in the forest had laid claim to the souls, after all. They were not for the having.

A sleepless night had followed then, too, and a burgeoning awareness like a slow sunrise. He was no longer young. Who knew how many seasons or years the blessed gods would have him see? And with the letter, after, had come certainty. He knew what was asked of him, and he would not go down into whatever travelling followed the dropped cloak of mortal life with these wrongly taken souls charged against his name.

One was still gone from him; one-his first-had been given back. The others were in his pack now as he walked in rain, carrying them home.

What lay waiting for him among the trees he did not know, though he had taken something not meant for him, and balancings and redress were embedded at the core of his own art and the teachings he had studied. Only a fool denied his fear. What was, would be. Time was running, it was always running. The gift of foretelling was not a part of his craft. There were powers greater than royalty in the world.

He thought of the young queen, sailing. He thought of Linon: that very first time, bowel-gripping terror, and power and awe. So long ago. The cold rain on his face now was a leash that tethered him to the world. He passed through Megarium and reached the walls and saw the road ahead of him through the open gates, and had his first glimpse of the Aldwood in the grey distance beyond.

He paused then, just for a moment, looking, felt the hard, mortal banging of his heart. Someone bumped him from behind, swore in Sarantine, moved on.

"What is it? " Tiresa asked. Quick one. A falcon.

"Nothing, love. A memory."

"Why is a memory nothing?»

Why, indeed? He made no reply, went on, staff in hand, through the gates. He waited by the ditch for a company of horsed merchants to pass, and their laden mules, and then began walking again. So many autumn mornings here, remembered in a blur, striding alone in search of fame, of knowledge, the hidden secrets of the world. Of the half-world.

By midday he was on the main road, running due east, and the great wood marched with him, north and very near.

It remained there through the days of walking that followed, in rain, in pale, brief sunlight, the leaves wet and heavy, almost all fallen, many-coloured, smoke rising from charcoal pits, a distant sound of axes, a stream heard but not seen, sheep and goats to the south, a solitary shepherd. A wild boar ran from the woods once, and then-astonished in the sudden light as a cloud unsheathed the sun-darted back into dark and disappeared.

The forest remained there in the nights, too, beyond shuttered windows in inns where he was remembered by no one in the common rooms and recognized no one after so long, where he ate and drank alone and took no girls upstairs as once he had, and was walking again with the day's first eastward breaking.

And it was there, a boy's stone throw from the road, towards evening of a last day, when an afternoon drizzle had passed and the westering sun lay red and low behind him, throwing his own long shadow forward as he went through a hamlet he remembered-shuttered at day's end now in the cold, no one at all in the single street-and came, not far beyond, his shadow leading him, to the inn where he had always stayed before going out in the dark before sunrise to do what he did on the Day of the Dead.

He stopped on the road outside the inn, irresolute. He could hear sounds from the enclosed yard. Horses, the creak of a cart being shifted, a hammering in the smithy, stablehands. A dog barked. Someone laughed. The foothills of the mountains that barred access to the coast and the sea rose up behind the inn, goats dotting the twilit meadow. The wind had died. He looked back behind him at the red sun and the reddened clouds along the horizon. A better day tomorrow, they promised. There would be fires lit inside the inn, mulled wine for warmth.

"We are afraid," he heard.

Not Tiresa. Mirelle, who never spoke. He had made her a robin, copper-chested, small as Linon. The same voice all of them had, the wry, patrician tones of the jurist by whose new-laid grave he had done his dark, defining ceremony. An unexpected irony there. that nine souls of Sauradian girls sacrificed in an Aldwood grove should all sound, when claimed, like an arrogant judge from Rhodias, killed by too much drink. Same voice, but he knew the timbre of each spirit as he knew his own.

"Oh, my dears," he said gently, "do not be fearful."

"Not for us." Tiresa now. Hint of impatience. "We know where we are. We are afraid for you."

He hadn't expected that. Found he could think of nothing to say. He looked back along the road again, and then east, ahead. No one riding, no one walking. All sane mortals drawing themselves now within walls at day's end, barred windows, roofs, fires against the cold and nearly fallen dark. His shadow lay on the Imperial road, the shadow of his staff. A hare startled in the field and broke, zigzagging, caught by the long light, down into the wet ditch by the road. The sun and the western clouds above it red as fire, as the last of a fire.

There was no reason, really, to wait for morning, fair as it might prove to be.

He walked on, alone on the road, leaving the lights of the inn behind, and after no very great distance more came to a small, flat bridge across the northern roadside ditch and knew the place and crossed there as he had years ago and years ago, and went through the wet dark autumn grass of that field, and when he came to the black edgings of the wood he did not pause but entered into the weighted, waiting darkness of those ancient trees, with seven souls and his own.

Behind him, in the world, the sun went down.

Darkness lasted in the Aldwood, night a deepening of it not a bringing forth. Morning was a distant, intuited thing, not an altering of space or light. The moons were usually known by pull, not by shining, though sometimes they might be glimpsed, and sometimes a star would appear between black branches, moving leaves, above a lifting of mist.

In the glade where blood was shed each autumn by masked priests of a rite so old no one knew how it had begun, these truths were altered- a very little. The trees here gave way enough for light to fall when the tendrils of fog were not hovering. The noontide sun might make the leaves show green in spring or summer, red-gold as they were claimed by autumn frosts. The white moon could make a cold, spare beauty of the black branches in midwinter, the blue one draw them back into strangeness, the half-world. Things could be seen.

Such as the crushed grass and fallen leaves and the sod where a hoofed tread that ought to have been too massive for the earth had fallen, just now, and had gone back among the trees. Such as seven birds lying on the hard ground, Grafted birds, artifices. Such as the man near them. What was left, more truly, of what had been a man. His face was untouched. The expression, by the moonlight which was blue just then, serene, accepting, a quiet laid upon it.

He had returned of his own will: some weight had been given to that, allowance made, dispensation. The body below was ripped apart, bloodily, from groin to breastbone. Blood and matter lay exposed, trailed along the grass away, where the hoofprints went.

An old, worn traveller's pack lay on the ground a little distance away. It had a wide leather strap, Esperanan, worn soft.

It was silent in the glade. Time ran. The blue moon slipped through empty spaces overhead and passed away from what it saw below. No wind, no sound in the bare branches, no stirring of fallen leaves. No owl called in the Aldwood, or nightingale, no rumbling tread of beast, or god returning. Not now. That had been and had passed. Would be again, and again, but not tonight.

Then, into such stillness in the cold night, came speech. The birds on the grass, and yet not them. Voices of women were heard in the air, in the darkness, soft as leaves, women who had died here, long ago.

Do you hate him?

Now? Look what has been done to him.

Not only now. Ever. Before. I never did.

A quiet again, for a time. Time meant little here, was hard to compass, unless by the stars slipping from sight as they moved, when they could be seen.

Nor I.

Nor I. Should we have?

How so?

Truly. How so?

And only look, said Linon then, her first words, who had been first of them to be claimed and to return, look how he has paid.

He wasn't afraid, though, was he? Tiresa.

Yes, he was, said Linon. A breath in the stillness. He isn't, any more.

Where is he? Mirelle.

No one answered that.

Where are we to go? asked Mirelle.

Ah. That I do know. We are there already. We are gone. Only say goodbye and we are gone, said Linon.

Goodbye, then, said Tiresa. Falcon.

Goodbye, whispered Mirelle.

One by one they bade farewell to each other, rustling words in the dark air as the souls took leave. At the end, Linon was alone, who had been first of all, and in the quiet of the grove she said the last words to the man lying beside her in the grass, though he could not hear her now, and then she spoke something more in the dark, more tender than a farewell, and then at last her bound soul accepted its release, so long denied.

And so that hidden knowledge and those transmuted souls passed from the created world where men and women lived and died, and the birds of Zoticus the alchemist were not seen or known again under sun or moons. Except for one.

When autumn came round again, in a mortal world greatly changed by then, those coming at dawn on the Day of the Dead to perform the ancient, forbidden rites found no dead man, no crafted birds in the grass. There was a staff, and an empty pack with a leather strap, and they wondered at those. One man took the staff, another the pack, when they were done with what they had come there to do.

Those two, as it happened, were to know good fortune all their days, afterwards, and then their children did, who took the staff and the pack when they died, and then their children's children.

There were powers greater than royalty in the world.

"I should be exceedingly grateful," said the cleric Maximius, principal adviser to the Eastern Patriarch, "if someone would explain to us why a cow so absurdly large is to be placed on the dome of the Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom. What does this Rhodian think he is about?"

There was a brief silence, worthy of the arch, acidic tones in which the comment had been made.

"I believe," said the architect Artibasos gravely, after a glance at the Emperor, "that the animal might be a bull, in fact."

Maximius sniffed. "I am, of course, entirely happy to defer to your knowledge of the farmyard. The question remains, however."

The Patriarch, in a cushioned seat with a back, allowed himself a small smile behind his white beard. The Emperor remained expressionless.

"Deference becomes you," said Artibasos, mildly enough. "It might be worth cultivating. It is customary-except perhaps among clerics-to have opinions preceded by knowledge."

This time it was Valerius who smiled. It was late at night. Everyone knew the Emperor's hours, and Zakarios, the Eastern Patriarch, had long since made his adjustments to them. The two men had negotiated a relationship built around an unexpected personal affection and the real tension between their offices and roles. The latter tended to play itself out in the actions and statements of their associates. This, too, had evolved over the years. Both men were aware of it.

Excepting the servants and two yawning Imperial secretaries standing by in the shadows, there were five men in the room-a chamber in the smaller Traversite Palace-and they had each, at some point, spent a measure of time examining the drawings that had brought them here. The mosaicist was not here. It was not proper that he be present for this. The fifth man, Pertennius of Eubulus, secretary to the Supreme Strategos, had been making notes as he studied the sketches. Not a surprise: the historian's mandate here was to chronicle the Emperor's building projects, and the Great Sanctuary was the crown jewel among them.

Which made the preliminary drawings for the proposed dome mosaics of extreme significance, both aesthetic and theological.

Zakarios, behind his thick, short, steepled fingers, shook his head as a servant offered wine. "Bull or cow," he said, "it is unusual.. much of the design is unusual. You will agree, my lord?" He adjusted the ear flap of his cap. He was aware that the unusual headgear with its dangling chin strings did no favours to his appearance, but he was past the age when such things mattered and was rather more concerned with the fact that it was not yet winter and he was already cold all the time, even indoors.

"One could hardly fail to agree," Valerius murmured. He was clad in a dark blue wool tunic and the new style of trousers, belted, tucked into black boots. Working garb, no crown, no jewels. Of all those in the room, he was the only one who seemed oblivious to the hour. The blue moon was well over to the west, above the sea by now. "Would we have preferred a more «usual» design for this Sanctuary?"

"This dome serves a holy purpose," the Patriarch said firmly. "The images thereon-at the very summit of the Sanctuary-are to inspire the devout to pious thoughts. This is not a mortal palace, my lord, it is an evocation of the palace of Jad."

"And you feel," said Valerius, "that the proposal of the Rhodian is deficient in this regard? Really?" The question was pointed.

The Patriarch hesitated. The Emperor had an unsettling habit of posing such blunt queries, cutting past detail to the larger issue. The fact was, the charcoal sketches of the proposed mosaic were astonishing. There really was no other simple word for it, or none that came to the Patriarch's mind at this late hour.

Well, one other word: humbling.

That was good he thought. Wasn't it? The dome crowned a sanctuary- a house-meant to honour the god, as a palace housed and exalted a mortal ruler. The god's exaltation ought to be greater, for the Emperor was merely his Regent upon earth. Jad's messenger was the last voice they heard when they died: Uncrown, the lord of Emperors awaits you now.

For worshippers to feel awe, sweep, immense power above them..

"The design is remarkable," Zakarios said frankly-it was risky to be less than direct with Valerius. He settled his fingers in his lap. "It is also. disturbing. Do we want the faithful to be uneasy in the god's house?"

"I don't even know where I am when I look at this," Maximius said plaintively, striding over to the broad table surface where Pertennius of Eubulus was standing over the drawings.

"You are in the Traversite Palace," said the little architect, Artibasos, helpfully. Maximius flashed him a glance etched in rancour.

"What do you mean?" Zakarios asked. His principal adviser was an officious, bristling, literal-minded man, but good at what he did.

"Well, look," said Maximius. "We are to imagine ourselves standing beneath this dome, within the Sanctuary. But lying along the… I suppose the eastern rim, the Rhodian is showing what is obviously the City. and he is showing the Sanctuary itself, seen from a distance…"

"As if from the sea, yes," said Valerius quietly.

"… and so we will be inside the Sanctuary but must imagine ourselves to be looking at it from a distance. It… it gives me a headache," concluded Maximius firmly. He touched his brow, as if to emphasize the pain. Pertennius gave him a sidelong glance.

There was a little silence again. The Emperor looked at Artibasos. The architect said, with unexpected patience, "He is showing us the City within a larger meaning. Sarantium, Queen of Cities, glory of the world, and in such an image the Sanctuary is present, as it must be, along with the Hippodrome, the Precinct palaces, the landward walls, the harbour, the boats in the harbour…"

"But," said Maximius, a finger stabbing upwards, "with all respect to our glorious Emperor, Sarantium is the glory of this world, whereas the house of the god honours the worlds above the world… or should." He looked back at the Patriarch, as if for approval.

"What is above it?" the Emperor asked softly.

Maximius turned quickly. "My lord? I beg your. above?"

"Above the City, cleric. What is there?"

Maximius swallowed.

"Jad is, my lord Emperor," said Pertennius the historian, answering. The secretary's tone was detached, the Patriarch thought, as if he'd really rather not be forced to participate in any of this. Only to chronicle it. Nonetheless, what he had said was true.

Zakarios could see the drawings from where he sat. The god was indeed above Sarantium, magnificent and majestic in his solar chariot, riding up like sunrise, straight on, unimpeachably bearded in the eastern fashion. Zakarios had half expected to protest a prettily golden western image here, but the Rhodian had not done that. Jad on this dome was dark and stern, as the eastern worshippers knew him, filling one side of the dome, nearly to the crown of it. It would be a glory if it could be achieved.

"Jad is, indeed," said Valerius the Emperor. "The Rhodian shows our City in majesty-the New Rhodias, as Saranios named it in the beginning and intended it to be-and above it, where he must be and always is, the artisan gives us the god." He turned to Zakarios. "My lord Patriarch, what confusing message is there in this? What will a weaver or a shoemaker or a soldier beneath this image take to his heart, gazing up?"

"There is more, my lord," added Artibasos quietly. "Look to the western rim of the dome, where he shows us Rhodias in ruins-a reminder of how fragile the achievements of mortal men must be. And see how all along the northern curve we will have the world the god has made in all its splendour and variety: men and women, farms, roads, small children, animals of all kinds, birds, hills, forests. Imagine these sketched trees as an autumn forest, my lords, as the notes suggest. Imagine the leaves in colour overhead, lit by lanterns or the sun. That bull is a part of that, a part of what Jad has made, just as is the sea sweeping along the southern side of the dome towards the City. My lord Emperor, my lord Patriarch, the Rhodian is proposing to offer us, in mosaic, upon my dome, a rendering of so much of the world, the god's world, that I am… I find it overwhelming, I confess."

His voice trailed away. Pertennius, the historian, gave him a curious look. No one spoke immediately. Even Maximius was still. Zakarios drew a hand through his beard and looked across at the Emperor. They had known each other a long time.

"Overwhelming," the Patriarch echoed, claiming the word for himself. "Is it too ambitious?"

And saw he'd hit a sore point. Valerius looked directly at him a moment, then shrugged. "He has sketched it, undertakes to achieve it if we give him the men and material." He shrugged. "I can cut off his hands and blind him if he fails."

Pertennius glanced over at that, his thin features betraying no expression, then back to the sketches, which he'd been continuing to study.

"A question, if I may?" he murmured. "Is it… unbalanced, my lords? The god is always at the centre of a dome. But here Jad and the City are to the east, the god mounting up that side towards the apex… but there is nothing to match him to the west. It is almost as if the design… requires a figure on the other side."

"He will give us a sky," said Artibasos, walking over. "Earth, sea, and sky. The notes describe a sunset, west, over Rhodias. Imagine that, with colours."

"Even so, I see a difficulty," said Leontes's long-faced scribe. He laid a manicured finger on the charcoal sketch. "With respect, my lords, you might suggest he put something here. More, um, well… something. Balance. For as we all know, balance is everything to the virtuous man." He looked pious, briefly, pursing his thin lips together.

Some pagan philosopher or other had probably said that, Zakarios thought sourly. He didn't like the historian. The man seemed to be always present, watching, giving nothing away.

"That," said Maximius, a little too petulantly, "might be so, but it does nothing to ease my headache, I can tell you that."

"And we are all very grateful," said the Emperor softly, "to be told that, cleric."

Maximius flushed beneath his black beard and then, seeing Valerius's icy expression, which did not sort with his mild tone, went pale. It was too easy to forget, sometimes, with the easy manners and open nature the Emperor displayed, Zakarios thought, sympathizing with his aide, how Valerius had brought his uncle to the throne and how he had kept it, himself.

The Patriarch intervened. "I am prepared to say that I am content. We find no heresies here. The god is honoured and the City's earthly glory is properly shown to lie beneath Jad's protection. If the Emperor and his advisers are pleased we will approve this design on behalf of the god's clergy and bless the doing and the completing of it."

"Thank you," said Valerius. His nod was brief, formal. "We had relied upon you to say as much. This is a vision worthy of the Sanctuary, we judge."

"If it can be done," said Zakarios.

"There is always that," said Valerius. "Much that men strive to achieve fails in the doing. Will you take more wine?"

It was really very late. It was later still when the two clerics and the architect and historian took their leave, to be escorted from the Precinct by Excubitors. As they left the room, Zakarios saw Valerius signalling one of his secretaries. The man stumbled forward from the shadows along the wall. The Emperor had begun dictating to him, even before the door was closed. Zakarios was to remember that image, and also the sensation he had, in the depths of the same night, waking from a dream.

He seldom dreamed, but in this one he was standing under the dome the Rhodian had made. It was done, achieved, and looking up by the blazing of suspended chandeliers and oil lamps and the massed candles, Zakarios had understood it wholly, as one thing, and had grasped what was happening on the western side, where nothing but a sunset lay opposite the god. A sunset, while Jad was rising? Opposite the god? There was a heresy, he thought, sitting suddenly up in his bed, awake and disoriented. But he couldn't remember what sort it was, and he fell fitfully asleep again. By morning he had forgotten all but the moment, bolt upright in darkness, a dream of candlelit mosaics gone from him in the night like water in a rushing stream, like falling summer stars, like the touch of loved ones who have died and gone away.

It came down to seeing, Martinian had always said, and Crispin had taught the same thing to all their apprentices over the years, believing it with passion. You saw in the eye of your mind, you looked with fierce attention at the world and what it showed you, you chose carefully among the tesserae and the stones and-if they were on offer-the semi-precious gems you were given. You stood or sat in the palace chamber or chapel or the bedroom or dining hall you were to work within, and you watched what happened through a day as the light changed, and then again at night, lighting candles or lanterns, paying for them yourself if you had to. You went up close to the surface where you would work, touching it-as he was doing now, on a scaffold dizzyingly high above the polished marble floors of Artibasos's Sanctuary in Sarantium-and you ran your eyes and your fingers over and across the surface that had been given to you. No wall would ever be utterly smooth, no arc of a dome could attain perfection. Jad's children were not made for perfection. But you could use imperfections. You could compensate for them, and even turn them into strengths. if you knew them, and where they were.

Crispin intended to have the curve of this dome memorized, sight and touch, before he allowed even the bottom layer of rough plaster to be laid down. He'd won his first argument with Artibasos already, with unexpected support from the head of the bricklayers" guild. Moisture was the enemy of mosaic. They were to spread a shielding coat of resin over all the bricks, beginning it as soon as he was done with this traverse. Then the team of carpenters would hammer thousands of flat-headed nails through that coat and between the bricks, leaving the heads protruding slightly, to help the first coarse layer of plaster-rough-textured sand and pounded brick- adhere. It was almost always done in Batiara, virtually unknown here in the east, and Crispin had been vehement in his assurance that the nails would go a long way to helping the plaster bind firmly, especially on the curves of the dome. He was going to have them do it on the walls, too, though he hadn't told Artibasos or the carpenters yet. He had some further ideas for the walls as well. He hadn't talked about those yet, either.

There would be two more layers of plaster after the first, they had agreed, fine and then finer yet. And on the last of these he would do his work, with the craftsmen and apprentices he chose, following the design he had submitted and which had now been approved by court and clerics. And in the doing would seek to render here as much of the world as he knew and could compass in one work. No less than that.

For the truth was, he and Martinian had been wrong all these years, or not wholly right.

This was one of the hard things Crispin had learned on his journey, leaving home in bitterness and arriving in another state he could not yet define. Seeing was indeed at the heart of this craft of light and colour- it had to be-but it was not all. One had to look, but also to have a desire, a need, a vision at the base of that seeing. If he was ever to achieve anything even approaching the unforgettable image of Jad he'd seen in that small chapel on the road, he would have to find within himself a depth of feeling that came-somehow-near to what had been felt by the unknown, fervently pious men who had rendered the god there.

He would never have their pure, unwavering certainty, but it seemed to him that something that might be equal to it was within him now, miraculously. He had come out from behind city walls in the fading west, carrying three dead souls in his walled heart and a birdsoul about his neck, and had journeyed to greater walls here in the east. From a city to the City, passing through wilderness and mist and into a wood that terrified- that could not but terrify-and out alive. Granted life, or-more truly, perhaps-with his life and Vargos's and Kasia's bought by Linon's soul left there on the grass at her own command.

He had seen a creature in the Aldwood he would have in him all his days. Just as Ilandra would be with him, and the heartbreak of his girls. You moved through time and things were left behind and yet stayed with you. The nature of how men lived. He had thought to avoid that, to hide from it, after they'd died. It could not be done.

"You do not honour them by living as if you, too, have died," Martinian had said to him, eliciting an anger near to rage. Crispin felt a deep rush of affection for his distant friend. Just now, high above the chaos of Sarantium, it seemed as if there were so many things he wanted to honour or exalt-or take to task, if it came to that, for there was no need for, no justice in, children dying of plague, or young girls being cut into pieces in the forest, or sold in grief for winter grain.

If this was the world as the god-or gods-had made it, then mortal man, this mortal man, could acknowledge that and honour the power and infinite majesty that lay within it, but he would not say it was right, or bow down as if he were only dust or a brittle leaf blown from an autumn tree, helpless in the wind.

He might be, all men and women might be as helpless as that leaf, but he would not admit it, and he would do something here on the dome that said-or aspired to say-these things, and more.

He had journeyed here to do this. Had done his sailing and was still sailing, perhaps, and would put into the mosaics of this Sanctuary as much of the living journey and what lay within it and behind it as his craft and desire could encompass.

He would even have-though he knew they might maim or blind him for it-Heladikos here. Even if only veiled, hinted at, in a sunset shaft of light and an absence. Someone looking up, someone tuned to images in a certain way, could place Jad's son himself where the design demanded he be, falling into the fallen west, a torch in his hand. The torch would be there, a spear of light from the low sunset clouds shooting up into the sky, or from heaven descending to earth where mortals dwelled.

He would have Ilandra here, and the girls, his mother, faces of his life, for there was room to place such images and they belonged, they were part of the sailing, his own and all men's journey. The figures of men's lives were the essence of those lives. What you found, loved, left behind, had taken away from you.

His Jad would be the bearded eastern god of that chapel in Sauradia, but the pagan zubir would be here on the dome, an animal hidden among the other animals he would render. And yet not quite so: only this one would be done in black and white stone, after the old Rhodian fashion of the first mosaics. And Crispin knew-if those approving his charcoal drawing could not-how that image of a Sauradiari bison would show amid all the colours he was using here. And Linon, shining jewels for her eyes, would lie in the grass nearby-and let men wonder at it. Let them call the zubir a bull if they would, let them puzzle at a bird on the grass. Wonder and mystery were a part of faith, were they not? He would say that, if asked.

On the scaffold, he stood alone and apart, eyes to the brickwork, running his hands across and across like someone blind-and aware of that irony, as ever when he did this-gesturing below at intervals for the apprentices to wheel the scaffold for him. It swayed when it moved, he had to grip the railing, but he had spent much of his working life on platforms such as this and had no fear of the height. It was a refuge, in fact. High above the world, above the living and the dying, the intrigues of courts and men and women, of nations and tribes and factions and the human heart trapped in time and yearning for more than it was allowed, Crispin strove not to be drawn back down into the confusing fury of those things, desiring now to live-as Martinian had urged him-but away from the blurring strife, to achieve this vision of a world on a dome. All else was transitory, ephemeral. He was a mosaicist, as he had told people and told people, and this distanced elevation was his haven and his source and destination, all in one. And with fortune and the god's blessing he might do something here that could last, and leave a name.

So he thought, was thinking, in the moment he glanced down from so far above the world to check if the apprentices had locked the scaffold wheels again, and saw a woman come through the silver doors into the sanctuary.

She moved forward, walking over the gleaming marble stones, graceful, even as seen from so high, and she stopped under the dome and looked up.

She looked up for him and, without a word spoken or a gesture made, Crispin felt a tugging back of the world as something fierce and physical, imperative, commanding, making a mockery of illusions of remote asceticism. He was not made to live his life like a holy man in an untouchable place. Best he acknowledge it now. Perfection, he had just been thinking, was not attainable by men. Imperfections could be turned into strengths. Perhaps.

Standing on the scaffold, he laid both hands flat for a moment more against the cold bricks of the dome and closed his eyes. It was extremely quiet this high up, serene, solitary. A world to himself, a creation to enact. It ought to have been enough. Why was it not? He let his hands fall to his sides. Then he shrugged-a gesture his mother knew, and his friends, and his dead wife-and motioning for those below to hold the platform steady, he began the long climb down.

He was in the world, neither above it nor walled off from it any more. If he had sailed to anything, it was to that truth. He would do this work or would fail in it as a man living in his time, among friends, enemies, perhaps lovers, and perhaps with love, in Varena under the Antae or here in Sarantium, City of Cities, eye of the world, in the reign of the great and glorious, thrice-exalted Emperor Valerius II, Jad's Regent upon earth, and the Empress Alixana.

It was a long, slow descent, hand and foot, the familiar movements, over and again. Out of careful habit he emptied his mind as he came down: men died if they were careless here, and this dome was higher than any he had known. He felt the pull, though, even as he moved: the world drawing him back down to itself.

He reached the wooden base of the rolling platform, set on wheels upon the marble floor. He swung around and stood on the base a moment, that little distance yet above the ground. Then he nodded his head to the woman standing there, who had neither spoken nor gestured but who had come here and had claimed him for them all. He wondered if, somehow, she had known she was doing that. She might have. It would sort with what he knew about her, already.

He drew a breath and stepped down off the scaffolding. She smiled.