Kay, Guy Gavriel – Sarantine Mosaic 01 – Sailing to Sarantium

When her tears had stopped, Kasia’s explanation tonight had been clear enough: there was no place for her at home any more. Once sold, once a slave, sent up or down a hall to any man’s room, she had no hope of a life among her own people. There was no going back, marrying, raising a fam­ily, sharing in the traditions of a tribe. Those traditions did not allow space for what she’d been forced to become, whatever she had been in the time before the plague when she had a father and brother for shelter.

A man captured and enslaved might escape and return to his village with honour and status-a living emblem of defiant courage. Not a girl sold to the traders for winter grain. The village of her childhood was barred to her now, on the far side of a doorway to the past and there was no key. One could feel some sorrow for other’s griefs, Crispin thought, awake and listening to the wind.

In the crowded, roiling streets of Sarantium, amid the arcades and workshops and sanctuaries and so many people from so many lands she could-perhaps-create a life for herself. Not an easy or a sure thing for a woman, but she was young, had intelligence and spirit. No one need learn she had been an inn girl in Sauradia, and if they did . . . well, the Empress Alixana herself had been little better in her day. More expen­sive, but not different in kind, if any of the rumours were true.

Crispin supposed they slit your nose, or worse, for saying that. It was blowing hard outside. He could hear that shutter banging and the high keening of the wind. The Day of the Dead. Was it the wind?

The fire had taken the edge off the chill in the room, and he was under two good blankets. He thought, unexpectedly, of the queen of the Antae, young and afraid, her fingers in his hair as he knelt before her. The last time his head had been cracked like this. He was tired and his jaw hurt. He really shouldn’t have been drinking with the soldiers tonight. Extremely stupid. Imbecilic, someone would have said. Decent man, though, Carullus of the Fourth. A surprise. Liked to hear himself talk. That image of the god, on the chapel dome. Mosaicists had made it, arti­sans, like himself. But not. Something else. He wished he knew their names, wished someone did. Would write to Martinian about that; try to order his thoughts. He could see the god’s eyes in his mind right now.

As vividly as he had ever seen anything. That fog this morning, nothing to see at all, all colours leached from the world. Voices pursuing, the dogs the dead man. The forest and what took them into it. He had feared those woods at first sight, all the way back at the border, and yet he had walked in the Aldwood, after all, black, dense trees, leaves falling, a sacrifice in the glade. No. Not quite. The completion of a sacrifice.

How did one deal with so much? By drinking wine with soldiers? Per­haps. Oldest refuge, one of the oldest. By pulling blankets up to one’s bruised face in bed, and falling asleep, sheltered from the knife of wind and the night? Though not the night that was always there now.

Caius Crispus, too, had a dream in that cold dark, though in his he did not fly. He saw himself walking the echoing corridors of an empty palace and he knew what it was, where he was. Had been there with Martinian years ago: the Patriarchal Palace in Rhodias, most glittering emblem of religious power-and wealth-in the Empire. Once, at any rate. In its day.

Crispin had seen it in dusty, emptied-out decay, long after the Antae sack and conquest: most of the rooms looted and empty, closed up. He and Martinian had been walking through it-a cadaverous, coughing cleric as their guide-to view a celebrated old wall mosaic a patron wanted copied for his summer house in Baiana by the sea. The two of them had been admitted, reluctantly, by virtue of a letter-and probably a sum of money-from their wealthy patron, to walk through echoing emptiness and dust.

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