Sailing to Sarantium (29 page)

'It is done,' Carullus said, turning back to Crispin. 'They say he's
had nothing broken. Won't walk or piss easy for a while, but nothing
that won't pass. Are we friends?'

'Fuck yourself with your sword. How far to your camp?'

Tomorrow night. He's all right, I'm telling you. I don't lie.'

'No, you just shit all over your uniform when you realize you've made
the mistake of your life.'

'Jad's blood! You swear more than I do! Martinian, there is fault
here both ways. I am being reasonable.'

'Only because a holy man saw what happened, you bloated fart, you
pantomime buffoon.'

Carullus laughed suddenly. 'True enough. Number it among the great
blessings of your life. Give money to the Sleepless Ones until the
day you die. Bloated fart is also good, by the way. I like it. I'll
use it. Do you want a drink?'

The situation was outrageous, and he was only moderately reassured
about Vargos's condition, but it did begin to appear that Carullus of
the Fourth Sauradian was not entirely a lout, and he did want a
drink.

Crispin nodded his head, carefully.

They brought him a flask, and later an aide to the tribune cleaned
Crispin's bloodied cheek and jaw line with decent care when they
halted for a brief rest. He saw Vargos then. They had indeed worked
him over, and more than a little, but had evidently chosen to reserve
more substantial chastisement until such time as everyone at their
camp could watch the fun. Vargos was awake by then. His face was
puffy from the blows and there was an ugly gash on his forehead, but
he was in a litter now. Kasia was led up, apparently untouched,
though with that furtive, doe-like look in her eyes again, as if
caught in torchlight by night hunters and frozen in place with
apprehension. He remembered his first sight of her. Yesterday at
about this time in the front room of Morax's inn. Yesterday? That was
astonishing. It would give him another headache if he dwelled on it.
He was an idiot. An imbecile.

Linon was gone, to her god, into silence in the Aldwood.

'We have an escort to the military camp,' Crispin said to both of
them, still moving his jaw as little as possible. 'I have achieved an
understanding with the tribune. We will not be harmed further. In
return I will allow him to continue functioning as a man and a
soldier. I am sorry if you were hurt, or frightened. It seems I am
now to be accompanied to Sarantium the rest of the way. There was
more urgency to my summons than was evident in the documents
themselves or their delivery. Vargos, they have promised a physician
at their camp tomorrow night to tend to you, and I will release you
from my service then. The tribune swears you will come to no harm and
I believe he is honest. A gross pig, but honest.'

Vargos shook his head. He mumbled something Crispin couldn't make
out. His lips were badly swollen, the words garbled.

'He wants to come with you,' Kasia said softly. The sun was low, now,
behind her, almost straight along the road. It was growing colder,
twilight coming. 'He says he cannot serve on this road any more,
after this morning. They will kill him.'

Crispin, after a moment's thought, realized that had to be true. He
remembered a blow struck by Vargos in the dark of the innyard before
dawn this morning. Vargos, too, had intervened in this sacrifice. His
own was not the only life in the midst of change, it seemed. In the
last bronze glow of the sun under-lighting clouds he looked closely
at the man in the other litter. 'This is correct? You wish me to
retain your services all the way to the City?'

Vargos nodded his head.

Crispin said, 'Sarantium is a different world, you know that.'

'Know that,' Vargos said, and this time he heard it clearly. 'Your
man.'

He felt something unexpected then, like a shaft of light through
everything else that day. It took him a moment to recognize it as
happiness. Crispin stretched out a hand from his litter and the other
man reached across the space between to touch it with his own.

'Rest now,' said Crispin, struggling to keep his own eyes open. His
head was hurting a great deal. 'It will be all right.' He wasn't sure
he believed that, but after a moment he saw that Vargos had indeed
closed his eyes and was asleep. Crispin touched his bruised chin
again and struggled not to yawn: it hurt when he opened his mouth so
much. He looked at the girl. 'We'll talk tonight,' he mumbled. 'Need
to sort out your life, too.'

He saw that quick, flaring apprehension in her again. Not a surprise,
really. Her life, what had happened to her this year, and this
morning. He saw Carullus coming over: long strides, his shadow behind
him on the road. Not a bad man, really. An easy laugh, sense of
humour. Crispin had provoked him. In front of his soldiers. It was
true. Not the wisest thing. Might admit that later. Might not. Might
be better not.

He was asleep before the tribune reached his litter.

'Don't hurt him!' Kasia said to the officer as he came up, though
Crispin never heard it. She stepped quickly between the litter and
the soldier.

'I can't hurt him, girl,' said the tribune of the Fourth Sauradian,
shaking his head bemusedly, looking at her. 'He has both my balls on
a smith's anvil and the hammer in his hand.'

'Good!' she said. 'Keep remembering that.' Her expression was fierce,
northern, not at all doe-like just then.

The soldier laughed aloud. 'Jad rot the moment I saw the three of you
in that chapel,' he said. 'Now Inicii slave girls tell me what to do?
What were you even doing abroad on the fucking Day of the Dead,
anyhow? Don't you know it is dangerous today in Sauradia?'

She went pale, he saw, but made no reply. There was a tale here, his
instincts told him. They also told him he wasn't likely to hear it.
He could have her beaten for disrespect, but knew he wouldn't. He
really was a kind-hearted man, Carullus told himself. The Rhodian
didn't know how lucky he was.

Carullus also had a sense-a mild one, to be sure-that his own future
might possibly be at risk as a result of this encounter at the
sanctuary. He'd seen, a little too late, the Rhodian's Permit, and
who had signed it, and had read the specific terms of the Emperor's
request for the presence of a certain Martinian of Varena.

An artisan. Only an artisan, but personally invited to the City to
lend his great expertise and knowledge to the Emperor's new Sanctuary
of Jad's Holy Wisdom. Another building. Another fucking building.

Wisdom, holy or wholly practical, suggested to Carullus that he
exercise a measure of caution here. The man talked a very confident
game, and he had papers to back him up. He did own the girl, too;
those documents had been in the satchel as well. Only since last
night, mind you. Part of that story he wasn't going to learn,
Carullus guessed. The girl was still glaring at him with those blue
northern eyes. She had a strong, clever face. Yellow hair.

If the cleric hadn't been watching what had happened, Carullus could
have had the three of them killed and dropped in a ditch. He probably
wouldn't have. He was far too soft, he told himself. Hadn't even
broken the Rhodian's jaw with his helmet. Shameful, really. Respect
for the army had disappeared in this generation. The Emperor's fault?
Possibly, though you could be drummed out of the ranks with a slit
nose for saying as much. Money went to monuments these days, to
Rhodian artisans, to shameful payments to the butt-fucked Bassanids
in the east, instead of to honest soldiers who kept the City and the
Empire safe. Word was that even Leontes, the army's beloved, the
golden-haired Supreme Strategos, spent all his time now in the City,
in the Imperial Precinct, dancing courtly attendance on the Emperor
and Empress, playing games of a morning with balls and mallets on
horseback, instead of smashing Bassanid or northern enemies into the
puling rabble they were. He had a rich wife now. Another reward.
Wives could be a world of trouble to a soldier, Carullus thought, had
always thought. Whores, if they were clean, were much less bother.

They had halted long enough. He gestured to his second in command.
Darkness was coming and the next inn was a ways yet. They could only
move as fast as the carried men. The litters were hoisted, the
litter-bearers' horses collected and led along. The girl gave him a
last fierce glare, then began walking between the two sleeping men,
barefoot, looking small and fragile in a brown, too-large cloak in
the last of the light. She was pretty enough. Thin for his taste, but
spirited, and one couldn't have everything. The artisan would be
useless to her tonight. One had to exercise a bit of discretion with
the personal slaves of other men, but Carullus wondered absently what
his best smile might achieve here. He tried to catch her eye, but
failed.

He was in some real pain but his father and brothers had given him
worse beatings in his day and Vargos was not by nature inclined to
feel sorry for himself or surrender to discomfort. He had struck an
army tribune in the chest today, nearly felled him; by rights they
could kill him for that. They had intended to, he knew, when they
reached the camp. Then Martinian had intervened, somehow. Martinian
did ... unexpected things. In the darkness of the inn's crowded
main-floor sleeping room, Vargos shook his head. So much had happened
since last night at Morax's.

He thought he had seen the old god this morning.

Ludan, in his guise of the zubir, in the Aldwood. In a sacred grove
of the Aldwood. He had stood there, knelt in that grove ... and had
walked alive from there out into the misty field again because
Martinian of Varena had carried some kind of magicked bird about his
neck.

The zubir. Against the memory of that, what were bruises or a swollen
mouth or a stream of red when he pissed tonight? He had seen what he
had seen, and lived. Was he blessed? Could such a man as he be
blessed?

Or was he being warned-a sudden thought-to forsake the other god, the
one behind the sun, Jad and his chariot-driving son?

Or was Martinian right about this, too: that the one power need not
mean a denial of the other? No cleric Vargos knew would accept that,
but Vargos had already decided that the Rhodian was worth listening
to.

And staying with.

All the way to Sarantium, it seemed. There was apprehension in that
thought. Megarium, on the coast in the west of Sauradia, was the
largest city Vargos had ever seen, and he hadn't liked it. The
confining walls, the crowded, filthy, noisy streets. Carts rumbling
by all night long, brawling voices when the taverns spilled their
denizens, no calm or quietude even in the dark when the moons rode.
And Vargos knew by tale what Sarantium was: as much beyond provincial
Megarium as golden-haired Leontes, Strategos of the Empire, was
beyond Vargos of the Inicii.

He couldn't stay here, though. It was the simplest of truths. He'd
made a decision in the dark of a hallway in Morax's late last night
and had sealed it with a blow of his staff in the pre-dawn courtyard
amid smoky torches and fog. When you can't go back and you can't stay
still, you move forward, nothing to think about, get on with it. The
sort of thing his father would have said, draining another flask of
home-brewed ale, wiping his moustache with his wet sleeve, gesturing
with a thick arm for one of the women to bring more beer. It wasn't a
complex decision, seen a certain way, and the grace here was that
there was a man worth following and a place to go.

Vargos lay on a perfectly decent cot in the next inn east from
Morax's and listened to snoring soldiers and laughter from the common
room. They were still drinking there, Martinian and the tribune.

He lay quietly, unable to sleep, and thought of the Aldwood again. Of
the zubir in the middle of the Imperial road in a swirling away of
fog, then appearing-somehow-right beside them in the misty field an
instant after. He would think of these things all his days, Vargos
knew. And remember how Pharus had looked in the road when they came
back out.

The stablemaster had been dead before they went into the wood, but
when they stood above his body, after, they saw what else had been
done to him. Vargos would swear by his mother's life and his own soul
that no man had walked up to where the dead man lay. Whatever had
claimed the man's heart had not been mortal.

He'd heard a lifeless bird speak aloud with a woman's voice to the
zubir. He'd led a man and a woman through the Aldwood and out. He'd
even-and here, for the first time, Vargos smiled a little in the
close darkness-struck a Sarantine officer, a tribune, and they'd only
roughed him up a little, and then they had put him in a litter-a
litter!-and carried him to this inn, because Martinian had made them.
That memory, too, would stay with him. He would have enjoyed having
his Jad-cursed father watch cavalrymen dismount to carry him along
the Imperial road like some senator or merchant prince.

Vargos closed his eyes. An unworthy, vain thought, today of all days.
Pride had no place in the soul tonight. He struggled to shape a
proper prayer to Jad and to his son, the fire-bearer, asking guidance
and forgiveness. In his mind's eye, though, he kept seeing again and
again that ripped-open chest of a dead man he'd known and the black
zubir with blood on the short, curved horns. To whom did one pray?

He was going to the City. Sarantium. Where the Imperial Palace was
and the Emperor, the Triple Walls and the Hippodrome. A hundred holy
sanctuaries, he'd heard, and half a million people. He didn't really
believe that last. He wasn't a northern lout any more, to be gulled
with gross, exaggerated tales. Men told lies in their pride.

Growing up, he had never imagined himself living anywhere but in
their village. Then, after that changed one mild, bloody spring
night, he'd expected to spend his days going back and forth along the
Imperial road in Sauradia until he grew too old for that and took a
position at the stable or the forge in one of the inns.