She has a habit of lowering her voice for emphasis, not raising it: training on the stage. It is very effective. Many things about her are. He looks out again, and down, through the screening curtain at the cluster of men before the one doorway that matters.
‘White,’ he says, and pauses before adding softly, no more than a breath of his own,’bordered, shoulder to knee, with purple.’
‘Ah,’ she says. And rises then, bringing the bedsheet to cover herself as she walks towards him, trailing it behind her. She is not tall but moves as if she were. ‘He wears porphyry. This morning. And so?’
‘And so,’ he echoes. But not as a question.
Reaching through the beads of the curtain with one hand, he makes a brief, utterly unexceptionable sign of the sun disk for the benefit of the men who have been waiting in the street-level apartment across the way for a long time now. He waits only to see the sign returned from a small, iron-barred guard’s portal and then he rises to cross towards the small, quite magnificent woman in the space between room and solarium.
‘What happens, Petrus?’ she asks. ‘What happens now?’
He is not a physically impressive man, which makes the sense of composed mastery he can display all the more impressive—and unsettling— at times.
‘Idle torment was offered,’ he murmurs. ‘Was it not? We have some little leisure now.’
She hesitates, then smiles, and the bedsheet, briefly a garment, slips to the floor.
There is a very great tumult in the street below not long after. Screaming, desperately wild shouts, running footsteps. They do not leave the bed this time. At one point, in the midst of lovemaking, he reminds her, a whisper at one ear, of a promise made a little more than a year ago. She has remembered it, of course, but has never quite let herself believe it. Today—this morning—taking his lips with her own, his body within hers again, thinking of an Imperial death in the night just past, and another death now, and the uttermost unlikeliness of love, she does. She actually does believe him now.
Nothing has ever frightened her more, and this is a woman who has already lived a life, young as she is, where great fear has been known and appropriate. But what she says to him, a little later, when space to speak returns to them, as movement and the conjoined spasms pass, is: ‘Remember, Petrus. A private bath, cold and hot water, with steam, or I find myself a spice merchant who knows how to treat a high-born lady.’
All he’d ever wanted to do was race horses.
From first awareness of being in the world, it seemed to him, his desire had been to move among horses, watch them canter, walk, run; talk to them, talk about them, and about chariots and drivers all the god’s day and into starlight. He wanted to tend them, feed them, help them into life, train them to harness, reins, whip, chariot, noise of crowd. And then—by Jad’s grace, and in honour of Heladikos, the god’s gallant son who died in his chariot bringing fire to men—stand in his own quadriga behind four of them, leaning far forward over their tails, reins wrapped about his body lest they slip through sweaty fingers, knife in belt for a desperate cutting free if he fell, and urge them on to speeds and a taut grace in the turnings that no other man could even imagine.
But hippodromes and chariots were in the wider world and of the world, and nothing in the Sarantine Empire—not even worship of the god—was clean and uncomplicated. It had even become dangerous here in the City to speak too easily of Heladikos. Some years ago the High Patriarch in what remained of ruined Rhodias and the Eastern Patriarch here in Sarantium had issued a rare joint Pronouncement that Holyjad, the god in the Sun and behind the Sun, had no born children, mortal or otherwise—that all men were, in spirit, the sons of the god. That Jad’s essence was above and beyond propagation. That to worship, or even honour the idea of a begotten son was paganism, assailing the pure divinity of the god.