In that moment, in an intervention Crispin could have called divine a tinkling sound was heard across the floor. Crispin repressed a smile and walked over. He knelt, looking carefully, and found a brownish tessera without difficulty. He turned it over. The backing was dry, brittle. It crumbled to powder as he brushed it with a finger. He rose and walked back to the other three, handing the mosaic piece to the cleric.
‘A holy message?’ he said dryly. ‘Or just a piece of dark stone from’- he looked up-‘most likely the robe again, on the right side?’
The cleric opened his mouth and closed it, exactly as he had before. He was undoubtedly regretting, Crispin thought, that this had been his day to be awake in daylight and deal with visitors to the chapel. Crispin looked up again at the severe majesty overhead and regretted his bantering tone. Attempts at such things had rankled, but it hadn’t been personal, and he ought to have been above such pettiness. Especially today, and here.
Men, he thought-perhaps especially this man, Caius Crispus of Varena -seemed to escape so rarely from the concerns and trivial umbrages that made up their daily lives. He ought to have been moved beyond them today, surely. Or perhaps-a sudden, quite different sort of thought-perhaps it was because he’d been taken so far beyond that he needed to find his way back in this manner?
He looked at the cleric, and then up again at the god. The god’s image. It could be done, with skilful people. Probably close to half a year, however, realistically. He decided, abruptly, that they would stay the night here. He would speak to the leader of this holy order, make amends for irony and levity. If they could be made to understand what was happening on the dome, perhaps when Crispin reached the City bearing a letter from them, the Chancellor, or someone else-the Imperial Mosaicist?-might be enlisted in an attempt to preserve this splendour. He’d teased and been flippant, Crispin thought. Perhaps he’d make redress by an act of restoration, in memory of this day and perhaps of his own dead.
In the unfolding of events, of a man’s life, so many things can intervene. Just as he was not to see his torch of Heladikos in the chapel outside Varena by glittering candlelight, so this, too, was a task Crispin was never to perform, though his intentions in that moment were deeply sincere and nearly pious. Nor did they, in fact, end up spending that night in the dormitory of the ancient sanctuary.
The cleric slipped the brown tessera into his robe. But before anyone could speak again, they heard a distant and then a growing thunder of horses from the road.
The cleric looked to the doors, startled. Crispin exchanged a sharp glance with Vargos. Then they heard, even through the doors and well back from the road, a loudly shouted command to halt. The hoofbeats stopped. There was a jingling, then boots on the path and the voices of men.
The doors burst open admitting a spearshaft of daylight and half a dozen cavalry soldiers. They strode forward, heavy steps on stone. None of them looked up at the dome. Their leader, a burly, black-haired, very tall man, carrying his helmet under one arm, stopped before the four of them. He nodded to the cleric, stared at Crispin.
‘Carullus, tribune of the Fourth Sauradian. My respects. Saw the mule. We are looking for someone on this road. Would you be named Martinian of Varena, by any chance?’
Crispin, unable to think of any adequate reason to do otherwise, nodded his head in agreement. He was, in fact, speechless.
Carullus of the Fourth’s formal expression gave way on the instant to mingled disdain and triumph-a remarkable conjunction, in fact, a challenge ever to render in tesserae. He levelled a thick, indicting finger at Crispin. ‘Where the fuck have you been, you shit-smeared Rhodian slug? Sticking it into every poxed whore on the road? What are you doing on the road instead of at sea? You’ve been awaited in the fucking City for weeks now by his thrice-exalted Majesty, His Imperial Magnificence, the fucking Emperor Valerius II himself. You turd.’