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

The detailed revelations made it unnecessary to interrogate formally the soldier from Amoria who had been interrupted and personally halted by the Supreme Strategos while apparently attempting a further assault on the Rhodian artisan in a public bathhouse.

In accordance with the new protocols, a member of the judiciary was requested to attend immediately at the Urban Prefecture. Upon arrival, the judge was presented with the one-time courier’s confession and such further details as had been assembled regarding the events of the night before and that afternoon.

The judge had some latitude under Marcellinus’s new Code of Laws. The death penalty had been largely eliminated as contrary to the spirit of Jad’s creation and as a benign Imperial gesture in the aftermath of the Victory Riots, but the possible fines, dismemberments, mutilations, and terms of exile or incarceration were wide-ranging.

The judge on duty that evening happened to be a Green supporter. The deaths of two common soldiers and a Blue partisan was a grave mat­ter, to be sure, but the Rhodian involved-the only important figure in the story, it seemed-had been unharmed, and the courier had confessed his crimes freely. Six perpetrators had been killed. The judge had barely divested himself of his heavy cloak and sipped once or twice from the wine cup they brought him before ruling that the gouging of one eye and a slit nose, to label Tilliticus as a punished criminal, would be a proper and sufficient judicial response. Along with a lifetime’s exile, of course. Such a figure could not possibly be allowed to remain in the City. He might corrupt the pious inhabitants.

The Amorianite soldier was routinely branded on the forehead with a hot iron as a would-be assassin and-of course-thereby forfeited his place in the army and his pension. He too was exiled.

It all unfolded with satisfying efficiency, and the judge even had time to finish his wine and exchange some salacious gossip with the notary about a young pantomime actor and a very prominent Senator. He was home in time for his evening meal.

That same evening, a surgeon on contract to the Urban Prefecture was called in and Pronobius Tilliticus lost his left eye and had his nose carved open with a heated blade. He would lie in the Prefecture’s infirmary for that night and the next and then be taken in chains across the harbour to Deapolis port and released there, to make his one-eyed, marked way in exile through the god’s world and the Empire-or wherever he chose to go beyond it.

He went, in fact, as most of the god’s world would come to know one day, south through Amoria into Soriyya. He quickly exhausted the mea­gre sum his father had been able to put together for him on short notice and was reduced to begging for scraps at chapel doors with the other maimed and mutilated, the orphans, and the women too old to sell their bodies for sustenance.

From these depths he was rescued the next autumn-as the story was to tell-by a virtuous cleric in a village near the desert wastes of Ammuz. Smitten with divine illumination, Pronobius Tilliticus went forth a dis­tance alone into the desert the next spring carrying only a sun disk, and found a precipitate tooth of rock to climb. It was a difficult ascent, but he did it only once.

He lived there forty years in all, sustained at first by supplies sent out by the humble cleric who had brought him to Jad, and later by the pil­grims who began to seek out his needle-like crag in the sands, bearing baskets of food and wine which were hauled up on a rope-and-pulley arrangement and then lowered-empty-by the one-eyed hermit with his long, filthy beard and rotting clothes.

A number of people, carried out to the site in litters, unable to walk or gravely ill, and not a few women afflicted with barren wombs, were afterwards to claim in carefully witnessed testaments that their conditions had been cured when they ate of the half-masticated pieces of food the Jad-possessed anchorite was wont to hurl down from his precarious perch. Besought by the people below for prophecies and holy instruc­tion, Pronobius Tilliticus would declaim terse parables and grim, strident warnings of dire futures.

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