Lord of Emperors (72 page)

In the morning he left Sarantium, on the tide at dawn, when hues and shades of colour were just coming back into the world at the end of the god's long voyage through the dark.

The sun rose behind them, filtered by a line of low clouds. As he stood at the stern of the ship upon which Plautus Bonosus, in kindness amid his own sorrow, had offered him passage, Crispin, with the handful of other passengers, looked back upon the City. Eye of the world, they called it. Glory of Jad's creation.

He saw the bustle and brilliance of the deep, sheltered harbour, the iron pillars that held the chains that could be dropped across the entrance in time of war. He watched small boats cut across their wake, ferries to Deapolis, morning fishermen setting out, others coming back from a night's harvesting on the waves, sails of many colours.

He caught a glimpse, far off, of the triple walls themselves, where they curved down to the water. Saranios himself had drawn the line for these when first he came. He saw the glint of this muted early sunlight on rooftops everywhere, watching the City climb up from the sea, chapel and sanctuary domes, patrician homes, guild-house roofs bronzed in ostentatious display. He saw the vast bulk of the Hippodrome where men raced horses.

And then, as they swept from a south-west course more towards the west, clearing the harbour, reaching the swells of the open sea where their own white sails billowed, Crispin saw the Imperial Precinct gardens and playing fields and palaces, and they filled his sight, all of his gaze, as he was carried past them and away.

West they went, on a dawn wind and tide, the mariners calling to each other, orders shouted in the brightening, the zest of something beginning. A long journey. He looked back still, as did the other passengers, all of them caught, held at the stern rail as if in a spell. But at the end, as they drew farther and farther off, Crispin was looking at one thing only, and the very last thing he saw, far distant, almost on the horizon but gleaming above all else, was Artibasos's dome.

Then the rising sun finally burst above those low clouds east, appearing right behind the distant City, dazzlingly bright, and he had to shield his eyes, avert his gaze, and when he looked back again, blinking, Sarantium was gone, it had left him, and there was only the sea.

An old man in a chapel doorway, not far from the walls of Varena. Once he would have been engaged in considering the present colour of those walls, somewhere between honey and ochre, pondering ways of using glass and stone and light to accomplish that hue as it appeared in this particular late-spring sunshine. Not any more. Now, he is content to simply enjoy the day, the afternoon. He is aware, in the way that sometimes creeps up on the aged, that there are no assurances of another spring.

He is virtually alone here, only a few other men about, somewhere in the yard or in the unused old chapel adjacent to the expanded sanctuary. The sanctuary is not in use now, either, though a king is buried here. Since an assassination attempt in the autumn, the clerics have refused to conduct services, or even remain in their dormitory, despite substantial pressure from those currently governing in the palace. The man in the doorway has views on this, but for the moment he simply enjoys the quiet as he waits for someone to arrive. He has been coming here for some days now, feeling more impatient than an old man really should, he tells himself, if the lessons of a long life had been properly absorbed.

He tilts the stool on which he sits, leans back against the wood of the doorway (an old habit), and slides forward the remarkably shapeless hat he wears. He is irrationally fond of the hat, enduring all jests and gibes it provokes with perfect equanimity. For one thing, the headgear-absurd even when new-saved his life almost fifteen years ago when an apprentice, fearful in a darkened chapel at evening, thought he was a thief approaching without a light. The blow from a staff that the young fellow (broad-shouldered, even back then) had intended to bring crashing down on an intruder's head was averted at the last instant when the hat was seen and known.

Martinian of Varena, at his ease in the spring light, looks off down the readjust before allowing himself to fall asleep.

He saw that same apprentice coming. Or, more accurately, these long years later, he saw his one-time apprentice, now his colleague and partner and awaited friend, Caius Crispus, approaching along the path leading to the wide, low wooden gate that fenced in the sanctuary yard and its graves.

"Rot you, Crispin," he said mildly.
'Just
as I was about to nap." Then he considered the fact that he was quite alone, that no one was listening to him, and he allowed himself an honest response, quickly tilting the stool back forward, aware of the sudden hard beating of his heart.

He felt wonder, anticipation, very great happiness.

Watching, shadowed in the doorway, he saw Crispin-hair and beard shorter than when he'd left, but not otherwise discernibly altered- unhook the gate latch and enter the yard. Martinian lifted his voice and called to the other men waiting. They weren't apprentices or artisans: no work was being done here now. Two of those men came striding quickly around the corner of the building. Martinian pointed towards the gate.

"There he is. Finally. I couldn't tell you if he's in a temper, but it is generally safer to assume as much."

Both men swore, much as he had, though with more genuine feeling, and started forward. They had been in Varena nearly two weeks, waiting with increasing irritation. Martinian was the one who had suggested the odds were good that the traveller, when he did come, would stop at this chapel outside the walls. He is pleased to have been correct, though not happy about what the other man will find here.

In his doorway, he watched two strangers go forward, the first souls to greet a traveller on his return from far away. Both of them are easterners, ironically. One is an Imperial Courier, the other an officer in the army of Sarantium. The army that was supposed to have been invading this spring and wasn't, now.

That being the largest change of all.

Some time later, after the two Sarantines had formally conveyed whatever messages they had lingered to deliver and had gone away, along with the soldiers who had been here on guard with them, Martinian decided that Crispin had been sitting alone by the gate long enough, whatever the tidings had been. He rose slowly and walked forward, nursing the usual ache in his hip.

Crispin had his back to him, seemed immersed in the documents he'd been given. It was not good to surprise a man, Martinian had always felt, so he called the other's name while still a distance away.

"I saw your hat," Crispin said, not looking up. "I only came home to burn it, you understand."

Martinian walked up to him.

Crispin, sitting on the large moss-covered boulder he'd always liked, looked over at him. His eyes were bright, remembered. "Hello," he said. "I didn't think to find you here."

Martinian had also intended some kind of jest, but found himself incapable of one, just then. Instead, he bent forward, wordlessly, and kissed the younger man on the forehead, in benediction. Crispin stood up, and put his arms around him and they embraced.

"My mother?" the younger man asked, when they stepped back. His voice was gruff.

"Is well. Awaiting you."

"How did you all…? Oh. The courier. So you knew I was on the way?"

Martinian nodded. "They arrived some time ago."

"I had a slower boat. Walked from Mylasia."

"Still hate horses?"

Crispin hesitated. "Riding them." He looked at Martinian. His eyebrows met when he frowned; Martinian remembered that. The older man was trying to sort out what else he was seeing in the traveller's face. Differences, but hard to pin down.

Crispin said, "They brought the tidings from Sarantium? About the changes?"

Martinian nodded. "You'll tell me more?"

"What I know."

"You are… all right?" A ridiculous question, but in some ways the only one that mattered.

Crispin hesitated again. "Mostly. A great deal happened."

"Of course. Your work… it went well?"

Another pause. As if they were fumbling their way back towards easiness. "It went very well, but…" Crispin sat down on the rock again. "It is coming down. Along with others, everywhere."
'What?

"The new Emperor has… beliefs about renderings of Jad."

"Impossible. You must be wrong. That-"

Martinian stopped.

Crispin said, "I wish I was. Our work will be coming down here, too, I suspect. We'll be subject to Sarantine edicts, if all goes as the Empress intends."

The Empress. They knew about this. A miracle of the god, some had already named it. Martinian thought there might be more earthly explanations. "Gisel?"

"Gisel. You heard?"

"Word came from other couriers on the same ship." Martinian sat down himself now, on the facing rock. So many times, they'd sat here together, or on the tree stumps beyond the gate.

Crispin looked over his shoulder at the sanctuary. "We're going to lose this. What we did here."

Martinian cleared his throat. Something needed to be said. "Some of it has been lost, already."

"So soon? I didn't think…"

"Not for that reason. They… scraped down Heladikos in the spring."

Crispin said nothing. Martinian remembered this expression, too, however.

"Eudric was trying to earn support from the Patriarch in Rhodias, with the invasion looming. Backing away from the heresy of the Antae."

Heladikos and his torch had been the very last thing Crispin had done before he'd gone away. The younger man sat very still. Martinian was trying to read him, see what had changed, what had not. It felt odd not to understand Crispin intuitively, after so many years. People went away and they changed; hard on those who remained behind.

More sorrow
and
more life, Martinian thought. Both things. The documents from the courier were still clutched between the other man's large hands.

Crispin said, "Did it work? The… backing away?"

Martinian shook his head. "No. They had shed blood in a chapel, with Patriarchal envoys present and at risk. Eudric has a long way to go to win any kindness there. And he earned a good deal of outrage in Varena when our tesserae came down. The Antae saw it as disrespectful to Hildric. Sacking his chapel, in a way."

Crispin laughed softly. Martinian tried to remember the last time he'd heard his friend laugh in the year before he'd gone away. "Poor Eudric. Full circle, that. The Antae protesting destruction in a holy place in Batiara."

Martinian smiled a little. "I said that too." His turn to hesitate. He had expected an angrier reaction. He changed the ground a little. "It does look as if there will be no attack now. Is that so?"

Crispin nodded. "Not this year, at least. The army is north and east, against Bassania. We'll become a province of Sarantium, if negotiations hold."

Martinian shook his head slowly. He took off his hat, looked at it, put it back on his balding head. No attack.

Every man who could walk had been engaged in reinforcing the walls of Varena all winter. They'd been making weapons, drilling with them, storing food and water. There hadn't been much food to store, after a poor harvest.

He was afraid he might cry. "I didn't think to live so long."

The other man looked at him. "How are you?"

An attempt at a shrug. "Well enough. My hands. My hip, sometimes. Mostly water in my wine, now."

Crispin made a face. "Me too. Carissa?"

"Is very well. Anxious to see you. Is probably with your mother now."

"We should go, then. I was only stopping to see… the finished work here. There's little point now."

"No," said Martinian. He looked at the papers. "What… what did they bring you?"

Crispin hesitated again. He seemed to measure his words and thoughts more, Martinian thought. Did they teach that in the east?

Without speaking, the other man simply handed over the thick sheaf of documents. Martinian took them and read. He wouldn't have denied a consuming curiosity: some men had waited here a long time to deliver whatever these were.

He saw what these were. Colour left his face as he turned each signed and sealed deed and document of title. He went back and counted. Five of them, six, seven. Then the enumeration of other items and a listing of where they could be found and claimed. He found it difficult to breathe.

"We seem to be wealthy," Crispin said mildly.

Martinian looked up at him. Crispin was gazing off towards the forest, east. What he'd said was an understatement, prodigiously so. And the «we» was a great courtesy.

The papers delivered by the Imperial Courier attested, one by one by one, to lands all over Batiara, and moneys and moveable goods, now owned by or belonging to one Caius Crispus, artisan, of Varena.

The last page was a personal note. Martinian glanced up for permission. Crispin, looking back at him now, nodded. It was brief. Written in Sarantine. It read:

It was signed, "Gisel, Empress of Sarantium."

"Jad's blood and eyes and bones, what did you
do
there, Crispin?"

"She thinks I made her Empress," the other man said.

Martinian could only stare.

Crispin's tone was odd, eerily detached.