Sailing to Sarantium (3 page)

Oradius, evident danger past, roused himself to a fulsome speech of
gratitude in his rich, round tones. It seemed to go over well enough,
though Bonosus rather doubted the rabble in the chamber understood
half of what was being said to them in the archaic rhetoric. Oradius
asked the guards to assist the Empire's loyal citizenry from the
chamber. They went-Blues, Greens, shopkeepers, apprentices,
guildsmen, beggars, the many-raced sortings of a very large city.

Sarantines weren't especially rebellious, Bonosus thought wryly, so
long as you gave them their free bread each day, let them argue about
religion, and provided their beloved dancers and actors and
charioteers.

Charioteers, indeed. Jad's Most Holy Emperor Astorgus the Charioteer.
A wonderful image! He might whip the people into line, Bonosus
thought, briefly amusing himself again.

His flicker of initiative spent, Plautus Bonosus leaned sideways on
his bench, propped on one hand, and waited for the emissaries from
the Imperial Precinct to come and tell the Senators what they were
about to think.

 

It turned out to be a little more complex than that, however. Murder,
even in Sarantium, could sometimes be a surprise.

In the better neighbourhoods of the City it had become fashionable in
the previous generation to add enclosed balconies to the second and
third storeys of houses or apartments. Reaching out over the narrow
streets, these sun rooms now had the ironic, if predictable, effect
of almost completely blocking the sunlight, all in the name of status
and in order to afford the womenfolk of the better families a chance
to view the street life through beaded curtains or sometimes
extravagant window openings, without themselves suffering the
indignity of being observed.

Under the Emperor Apius, the Urban Prefect had passed an ordinance
forbidding such structures to project more than a certain distance
from the building walls, and had followed this up by tearing down a
number of solaria that violated the new law. Needless to say, this
did not happen on the streets where the genuinely wealthy and
influential kept their city homes. The power of one patrician to
complain tended to be offset by the ability of another to bribe or
intimidate. Private measures, of course, could not be entirely
forestalled, and some regrettable incidents had unfortunately taken
place over the years, even in the best neighbourhoods.

In one such street, lined with uniformly handsome brick facades and
with no shortage of lanterns set in the exterior walls to offer
expensive lighting at night, a man now sits in a flagrantly oversized
solarium, alternately watching the street below and the exquisitely
slow, graceful movements of a woman as she plaits and coils her hair
in the bedroom behind him.

Her lack of self-consciousness, he thinks, is an honour of sorts
extended to him. Sitting unclothed on the edge of the bed, she
displays her body in a sequence of curves and recesses: uplifted arm,
smooth hollow of arm, honey-coloured amplitude of breast and hip, and
the lightly downed place between her thighs where he has been
welcomed in the night just past.

The night a messenger came to report an Emperor dead.

As it happens, he is wrong about one thing: her absorbed,
unembarrassed nakedness has more to do with self-directed ease than
any particular emotion or feeling associated with him at this moment.
She is not, after all, unused to having her body seen by men. He
knows this, but prefers, at times, to forget it.

He watches her, smiling slightly. He has a smooth-shaven, round face
with a soft chin and grey, observant eyes. Not a handsome or an
arresting man, he projects a genial, uncontentious, open manner. This
is, of course, useful.

Her dark brown hair, he notes, has become tinged with red through the
course of the summer. He wonders when she's had occasion to be
outside enough for that to happen, then realizes the colour might be
artificial. He doesn't ask. He is not inclined to probe the details
of what she does when they are not together in this apartment he has
bought for her on a carefully chosen street.

That reminds him of why he is here just now. He looks away from the
woman on the bed-her name is Aliana-and back out through the beaded
curtains over the street. Some movement, for the morning is advanced
and the news will have run through Sarantium by now.

The doorway he is watching remains closed. There are two guards
outside it, but there always are. He knows the names of these two,
and the others, and their backgrounds. Details of this sort can
sometimes matter. Indeed, they tend to matter. He is careful in such
things, and less genial than might appear to the unsubtle.

A man had entered through that doorway, his bearing urgent with
tidings, just before sunrise. He had watched this by the light of the
exterior torches, and had noted the livery. He had smiled then.
Gesius the Chancellor had chosen to make his move. The game was
begun, indeed. The man in the solarium expects to win it but is
experienced enough in the ways of power in the world, already, to
know that he might not. His name is Petrus.

'You are tired of me,' the woman says, ending a silence. Her voice is
low, amused. The careful movements of her arms, attending to her
hair, do not cease. 'Alas, the day has come.'

'That day will never come,' the man says calmly, also amused. This is
a game they play, from within the entirely improbable certainty of
their relationship. He does not turn from watching the doorway now,
however.

'I will be on the street again, at the mercy of the factions. A toy
for the wildest partisans with their barbarian ways. A cast-aside
actress, disgraced and abandoned, past my best years.'

She was twenty in the year when the Emperor Apius died. The man has
seen thirty-one summers; not young, but it was said of him-before and
after that year-that he was one of those who had never been young.

'I'd give it two days,' he murmurs, 'before some infatuated scion of
the Names, or a rising merchant in silk or Ispahani spice won your
fickle heart with jewellery and a private bathhouse.'

'A private bathhouse,' she agrees, 'would be a considerable lure.'

He glances over, smiling. She'd known he would, and has managed, not
at all by chance, to be posed in profile, both arms uplifted in her
hair, her head turned towards him, dark eyes wide. She has been on
the stage since she was seven years old. She holds the pose a moment,
then laughs.

The soft-featured man, clad only in a dove-grey tunic with no
undergarments in the aftermath of lovemaking, shakes his head. His
own sand-coloured hair is thinning a little but not yet grey. 'Our
beloved Emperor is dead, no heir in sight, Sarantium in mortal peril,
and you idly torment a grieving and troubled man.'

'May I come and do it some more?' she asks.

She sees him actually hesitate. That surprises and even excites her,
in truth: a measure of his need of her, that even on this morning.

But in that instant there comes a sequence of sounds from the street
below. A lock turning, a heavy door opening and closing, hurried
voices, too loud, and then another, flat with command. The man by the
beaded curtain turns quickly and looks out again.

The woman pauses then, weighing many things at this moment in her
life. But the real decision, in truth, has been made some time ago.
She trusts him, and herself, amazingly. She drapes her body-a kind of
defending in the bed linen before saying to his now-intent profile,
from which the customary genial expression has entirely gone, What is
he wearing?'

He ought not to have been, the man will decide much later, nearly so
surprised by the question and what she-very deliberately-revealed
with it. Her attraction for him, from the beginning, has resided at
least as much in wit and perception as in her beauty and the gifts
that drew Sarantines to the theatre every night she performed,
alternately aroused and then driven to shouts of laughter and
applause.

He is astonished, though, and surprise is rare for him. He is not a
man accustomed to allowing things to disconcert him. This happens to
be one matter he has not confided in her, however. And, as it turns
out, what the silver-haired man in the still-shaded street has
elected to wear as he steps from his home into the view of the world,
on a morning fraught with magnitude, matters very much.

Petrus looks back at the woman. Even now he turns away from the
street to her, and both of them will remember that, after. He sees
that she's covered herself, that she is a little bit afraid, though
would surely deny it. Very little escapes him. He is moved, both by
the implications of her voicing the question and by the presence of
her fear.

'You knew?' he asks quietly.

'You were extremely specific about this apartment,' she murmurs, 'the
requirement of a solarium over this particular street. It was not
hard to note which doorways could be watched from here. And the
theatre or the Blues' banqueting hall are sources of information on
Imperial maneuverings as much as the palaces or the barracks are.
What is he wearing, Petrus?'

She has a habit of lowering her voice for emphasis, not raising it:
training on the stage. It is very effective. Many things about her
are. He looks out again, and down, through the screening curtain at
the cluster of men before the one doorway that matters.

'White,' he says, and pauses before adding softly, no more than a
breath of his own,'bordered, shoulder to knee, with purple.'

'Ah,' she says. And rises then, bringing the bedsheet to cover
herself as she walks towards him, trailing it behind her. She is not
tall but moves as if she were. 'He wears porphyry. This morning. And
so?'

'And so,' he echoes. But not as a question.

Reaching through the beads of the curtain with one hand, he makes a
brief, utterly unexceptionable sign of the sun disk for the benefit
of the men who have been waiting in the street-level apartment across
the way for a long time now. He waits only to see the sign returned
from a small, iron-barred guard's portal and then he rises to cross
towards the small, quite magnificent woman in the space between room
and solarium.

'What happens, Petrus?' she asks. 'What happens now?'

He is not a physically impressive man, which makes the sense of
composed mastery he can display all the more impressive—and
unsettling— at times.

'Idle torment was offered,' he murmurs. 'Was it not? We have some
little leisure now.'

She hesitates, then smiles, and the bedsheet, briefly a garment,
slips to the floor.

There is a very great tumult in the street below not long after.
Screaming, desperately wild shouts, running footsteps. They do not
leave the bed this time. At one point, in the midst of lovemaking, he
reminds her, a whisper at one ear, of a promise made a little more
than a year ago. She has remembered it, of course, but has never
quite let herself believe it. Today—this morning—taking
his lips with her own, his body within hers again, thinking of an
Imperial death in the night just past, and another death now, and the
uttermost unlikeliness of love, she does. She actually does believe
him now.

Nothing has ever frightened her more, and this is a woman who has
already lived a life, young as she is, where great fear has been
known and appropriate. But what she says to him, a little later, when
space to speak returns to them, as movement and the conjoined spasms
pass, is: 'Remember, Petrus. A private bath, cold and hot water, with
steam, or I find myself a spice merchant who knows how to treat a
high-born lady.'

 

All he'd ever wanted to do was race horses.

From first awareness of being in the world, it seemed to him, his
desire had been to move among horses, watch them canter, walk, run;
talk to them, talk about them, and about chariots and drivers all the
god's day and into starlight. He wanted to tend them, feed them, help
them into life, train them to harness, reins, whip, chariot, noise of
crowd. And then—by Jad's grace, and in honour of Heladikos, the
god's gallant son who died in his chariot bringing fire to men—stand
in his own quadriga behind four of them, leaning far forward over
their tails, reins wrapped about his body lest they slip through
sweaty fingers, knife in belt for a desperate cutting free if he
fell, and urge them on to speeds and a taut grace in the turnings
that no other man could even imagine.

But hippodromes and chariots were in the wider world and of the
world, and nothing in the Sarantine Empire—not even worship of
the god—was clean and uncomplicated. It had even become
dangerous here in the City to speak too easily of Heladikos. Some
years ago the High Patriarch in what remained of ruined Rhodias and
the Eastern Patriarch here in Sarantium had issued a rare joint
Pronouncement that Holy Jad, the god in the Sun and behind the Sun,
had no born children, mortal or otherwise—that all men were, in
spirit, the sons of the god. That Jad's essence was above and beyond
propagation. That to worship, or even honour the idea of a begotten
son was paganism, assailing the pure divinity of the god.

But how else, clerics back in Soriyya and elsewhere had preached in
opposition, had the ineffable, blindingly bright Golden Lord of
Worlds made himself accessible to lowly mankind? If Jad loved his
mortal creation, the sons of his spirit, did it not hold that he
would embody a part of himself in mortal guise, to seal the covenant
of that love? And that seal was Heladikos, the Charioteer, his child.

Then there were the Antae, who had conquered in Batiara and accepted
the worship of Jad-embracing Heladikos with him, but as a demi-god
himself, not merely a mortal child. Barbaric paganism, the orthodox
clerics now thundered-except those who lived in Batiara under the
Antae. And since the High Patriarch himself lived there at their
sufferance in Rhodias, the fulminations against Heladikian heresies
were muted in the west.