Bad analogy, he thought. He did need one, urgently.
The lady looked across the space of the room at him for a long moment, and then said, all icy, composed perfection, ‘You do me too much honour in your turn, and honour the memory of the Empire in Rhodias with such generosity. I thank you.’ She did not smile. She closed her long fingers, the ruby nestled in her palm.
Crispin bowed.
‘I must say, ‘interjected the Empress of Sarantium, plaintively, ‘that I am desolate now beyond all words. Did I, too, not urge you to speak, Rhodian? Did I not stop our beloved Scortius to give you an opportunity to show your cleverness? What gift will you make to me, dare I ask?’
‘Ah, you are cruel, my love,’ said the Emperor beside her. He looked amused again.
‘I am cruelly scorned and overlooked,’ said his wife.
Crispin swallowed hard. ‘I am at the service of the Empress in all things I may possibly do for her.’
‘Good!’ said Alixana of Sarantium, her voice crisp, changing on the instant, as if this was exactly what she’d wanted to hear. Very good. Gesius, have the Rhodian conducted to my rooms. I wish to discuss a mosaic there before I retire for the night.’
There was another rustle of sound and movement. Lanterns nickered. Crispin saw the sallow-faced man near the Strategos pinch his lips together suddenly. The Emperor, still amused, said only, ‘I have summoned him for the Sanctuary, beloved. All other diversions must follow our needs there.’
‘I am not,’ said the Empress of Sarantium, arching her magnificent eyebrows, ‘a diversion.’
She smiled, though, as she spoke, and laughter followed in the throne room like a hound to her lead.
Valerius stood. ‘Rhodian, be welcome to Sarantium. You have not entered among us quietly.’ He lifted a hand. Alixana laid hers upon it, shimmering with rings, and she rose. Together, they waited for their court to perform obeisance. Then they turned and went from the room through the single door Crispin had seen behind the thrones.
Straightening, and then standing up once more, he closed his eyes briefly, unnerved by the speed of events. He felt like a man in a racing chariot, not at all in control of it.
When he opened his eyes again, it was to see the real charioteer, Scortius, gazing at him. ‘Be very careful,’ the Soriyyan murmured softly. ‘With all of them.’
‘How?’ Crispin managed to say, just before the gaunt old Chancellor swooped down upon him as upon a prize. Gesius laid thin, proprietary fingers on Crispin’s shoulder and smoothly guided him from the room, across the tesserae of the Imperial hunt, past the silver trees and the jewelled birds in the branches and the avidly watchful, silken figures of the Sarantine court.
As he walked through the silver doors into the antechamber again someone behind him clapped their hands sharply three times and then amid a resumption of talk and languid, late-night laughter, Crispin heard the mechanical birds of the Emperor begin to sing.
CHAPTER VIII
‘Jad boil the bastard in his own fish sauce!’ Rasic snarled under his breath as he scrubbed at a stained pot. ‘We might as well have joined the Sleepless Ones and gotten some holy credit for being up all fucking night!’ Kyros, stirring his soup over the fire with a long wooden spoon, pretended not to be listening. You didn’t boil things in the fish sauce, anyhow. Strumosus was known to have exceptionally good hearing, and there was a rumour that once, years ago, the eccentric cook had tossed a dozing kitchen boy into a huge iron pot when the soup in that pot came to a boil unattended.
Kyros was pretty sure that wasn’t true, but he had seen the rotund master chef bring a chopping knife down a finger’s breadth away from the hand of an undercook who was cleaning leeks carelessly. The knife had stuck, quivering, in the table. The undercook had looked at it, at his own precariously adjacent fingers, and fainted. ‘Toss him in the horse trough,’ Strumosus had ordered. Kyros’s bad foot had excused him from that duty, but four others had done it, carrying the unconscious undercook out the door and down the portico steps. It had been winter then, a bitterly cold, grey afternoon. The surface of the water in the trough across the courtyard was frozen. The undercook revived, spectacularly, when they dropped him in.