The Sarantine Mosaic (122 page)

He saw the Strategos stand. Saw Styliane facing him, her head high. Beside her, Lysippus the Calysian seemed to become aware that he was still holding the nozzle of the fire device. He let it fall. His face was strange now, too. There were three dead bodies beside him, all charred and black. The two guards. And Lecanus Daleinus, who had first burned all those years ago, with his father.

Leontes said nothing. Very slowly he moved forward. Stood before his wife and the Calysian.

‘What are you doing here?' he said. To Lysippus.

Styliane was as ice, as marble. Pertennius saw the Calysian looking at the Strategos as though unsure where he'd come from. ‘What does it look like?' he said. A memorable voice. ‘I'm admiring the floor mosaics.'

Leontes, commander of the armies of Sarantium, was a different sort of man than the dead Emperor behind him. He drew his sword. A gesture repeated more times than could ever be numbered. Without speaking again he drove the blade through flesh and into the heart of the man standing beside his wife.

Lysippus never even moved, had no chance to defend himself. Pertennius, coming forward a step, unable to hold back, saw the astonishment in the Calysian's eyes before the blade was pulled out, hard, and he fell, thunderously.

The echoes of that took time to die away. Amid a stench of meat and the bodies of five dead men now, a husband and a wife faced each other underground and Pertennius shivered, watching them.

‘Why did you do that?' said Styliane Daleina.

The slap took her across the face, a soldier's blow. Her head snapped to one side.

‘Be brief, and precise,' said her husband. ‘Who did this?'

Styliane didn't even bring a hand up to touch her cheek. She looked at her husband. She had been ready to be
burned alive, the secretary remembered, only moments ago. There was no fear in her, not the least hint of it.

‘My brother,' she said. ‘Lecanus. He has taken his revenge for our father. He sent word to me this morning that he was coming here. Had obviously bribed his guards on the island, and through them the Excubitors at the doors here.'

‘And you came?'

‘Of course I came. Too late to stop it. The Emperor was dead, and the two soldiers. And the Calysian had already killed Lecanus.'

The lies, so effortless, so necessary. The words that might make this work, for all of them.

She said, ‘My brother is dead.'

‘Rot his evil soul,' said her husband flatly. ‘What was the Calysian doing here?'

‘A good question to ask him,' Styliane said. The left side of her face was red where he'd hit her. ‘We might have an answer had someone not blundered in waving a sword.'

‘Careful, wife. I still have the sword. You are a Daleinus, and by your own statement your family has just murdered our holy Emperor.'

‘Yes, husband,' she said. ‘They have. Will you kill me now, my dear?'

Leontes was silent. Looked back, for the first time. Saw Pertennius watching. His expression did not change. He turned to his wife again. ‘We are on the very eve of war. Today. It was to be announced today. And now there are tidings that the Bassanids are across the border in the north, breaking the peace. And the Emperor is dead. We have no Emperor, Styliane.'

Styliane Daleina smiled then. Pertennius saw it. A woman so beautiful it could stop your breath. ‘We will,' she said. ‘We will very soon. My lord.'

And she knelt, exquisite and golden among the blackened bodies of the dead, before her husband.

Pertennius stepped away from the wall and went forward a few steps and did the same, falling to both knees, lowering his head to the floor. There was a long silence in the tunnel.

‘Pertennius,' said Leontes, at length, ‘there is much to be done. The Senate will have to be called into session. Go to the kathisma in the Hippodrome. Immediately. Tell Bonosus to come back here with you. Do
not
tell him why but make it clear he must come.'

‘Yes, my lord.'

Styliane looked at him. She was still on her knees. ‘Do you understand? Tell no one what has happened here, or about the Bassanid attack. We
must
have order in the City tonight, to control this.'

‘Yes, my lady.'

Leontes looked at her. ‘The army is here. It will not be the same as … the last time there was no heir.'

His wife looked back at him, and then at her brother, beside her on the ground.

‘No,' she said. ‘Not the same.' And then she said it again, ‘Not the same.'

Pertennius saw the Strategos reach out then and help her to rise. His hand went to her bruised cheek, gently this time. She did not move, but her eyes were on his. They were so golden, the two of them, Pertennius thought, so tall. His heart was swelling.

He stood and turned and went. He had orders to obey.

He entirely forgot there was blood on his dagger, neglected to clean it all that day, but no one paid any attention to him so it didn't matter.

He was so seldom noticed; an historian, a recorder of events, hovering and grey, present everywhere, but not ever someone who ever played any kind of
role
in events.

Going up the stairs swiftly, then hurrying through the palace towards an upper staircase and the enclosed walkway that led to the rear of the kathisma, he was already casting his mind after phrasings, a way to begin. The proper tone of detachment and reflection at the outset of a chronicle was so important.
Even the most perfunctory study of past events teaches that Jad's just retribution for the godless and evil may be long in coming but …

He stopped abruptly, forcing one of the eunuchs in a corridor to sidestep him quickly. He was wondering where the whore was. She was unlikely—surely—to be in the kathisma, though
that
would have been something to observe. Was she still in her bath in the other palace, naked and slippery with a soldier? He smoothed his tunic. Styliane would deal with her, he thought.

We must have order in the City tonight
, she had said.

He knew what she meant. How could he not? The last death of an Emperor without a named heir had been Apius's, and in the violence that followed that—in the Hippodrome and the streets and even the Imperial Senate chamber—an ignorant Trakesian peasant had been lifted on a shield, acclaimed by the rabble, robed in porphyry. Order was hugely important now, and calm among the eighty thousand in the Hippodrome.

It crossed his mind that if all went as it should, by the end of this day his own status might rise a great deal. He thought of another woman, then, and smoothed his tunic again.

He was very happy, a rare, almost an unprecedented state for him, as he carried enormous, world-shaking tidings to the kathisma, with blood on the blade in his belt.

The sun was high above the City, past its peak, going down, but that day—and night—had a long way yet to go in Sarantium.

In the tunnel, among the dead, two golden figures stood looking at each other in silence, and then walked slowly out and up the wide stairs, not touching, but side by side.

On the stones behind them, on the mosaic stones under a blue cloak, lay Valerius of Sarantium, the second of that name. His body. What was left of it. His soul was gone, to dolphins, to the god, to wherever souls go.

SOMEWHERE IN THE WORLD
, just then, a longed-for child was born and somewhere a labourer died, leaving a farm grievously undermanned with the spring fields still to be ploughed and the crops all to be planted. A calamity beyond words.

CHAPTER XII

T
he Imperial boat tacked across the straits—no dolphins to be seen this time—and was docked with flawless expertise by a worried crew. Crispin was not the only one watching the port anxiously during their approach.

Men had been killed on the isle. At least two of the Excubitors' own number were traitors. Daleinus had escaped. The Empress had left them to row back with one man only. Danger was in the brightness of the air.

No one new was waiting for them, however. No enemies, no friends, no one at all. They came into the slip and the dock crew moored them with the ropes and then stood by, waiting for the Empress to descend.

Whatever the shape of the plot unfolding today, Crispin thought, on the isle, in the Imperial Precinct, it had not been so precisely devised as to include the possibility that the Empress might be taking a pleasure cruise with a visiting artisan, to look at dolphins—and visit a prisoner on an island.

Alixana, he thought, could have stayed with them after all to sail home. But then what? Have herself carried in the litter back to the Attenine Palace or the Traversite to inquire if her husband had been attacked or killed yet by Lecanus Daleinus and the suborned Excubitors, and did they have any immediate plans for her?

It was the Excubitors in the plot, he realized, that had made her certain there was a large scheme unfolding here.
If the Imperial Guard were being turned, any of them, something deadly and immediate was at work. This was not simply an escape by a prisoner, a flight to freedom.

No, he knew why she'd left her robe on the strand to make her way back in secrecy. He wondered if he'd ever see her again. Or the Emperor. And then he wondered— for he had to—what would happen to him when it was learned, as it surely would be, that he'd made this morning's journey with the Empress across the water. They would ask him what he knew. He didn't know what he would say. He didn't know, yet, who would be asking.

He thought about Styliane then. Remembering what she'd said to him before he'd left her in the night, through a window into the courtyard.
Some events must happen now. I will not say I am sorry. Remember this room, though, Rhodian. Whatever else I do.

He was not so innocent as to believe that the ruined brother on the isle, even with his bird-soul, had shaped his escape alone. Crispin wondered where his anger was: it had defined him for two years. Anger, he thought, was a luxury of sorts. It offered simplicity. There was nothing simple here.
A thing was done once, she had said, and all else follows upon it.

All else. An empire, a world, all who lived within that world. The shape of the past defining the shape of the present.
I will not say I am sorry.

He remembered going up the dark stairs, desire running in him like a river. The bitter complexity of her. Remembered it as he would always now remember Alixana, too. Images begetting images. The Empress on the stony beach.
The whore
, Pertennius had called her in his secret papers. Vile things, such hatred. Anger was easier, Crispin thought.

He looked down. The crew on the dock were standing in order, still expecting the Empress to descend. The
Excubitors and sailors aboard looked uncertainly at each other and then—it might have been amusing had there been any space for laughter in the world—at Crispin, for guidance. Their leader had gone with the Empress.

Crispin shook his head. ‘I have no idea,' he said. ‘Go to your posts. Report, I suppose. Whatever you do when … this sort of thing happens.'
This sort of thing
. He felt like an idiot. Linon would have told him as much.

Carullus would have known what to say to them. But Crispin was not a soldier. Nor had his father been. Though that hadn't stopped Horius Crispus from dying in battle, had it? Styliane's father had burned. That abomination on the isle had been handsome once, and proud. Crispin thought of the god's image on the dome in Sauradia, his face grey, his fingers broken in the struggle against evil.

And he was falling, piece by piece.

They lowered the wide plank to the dock. They didn't unroll the carpet. The Empress was not here. Crispin went down and away from all of them amid the bustle of a harbour preparing for war, and no one stopped him, no one even noted his passing.

In the distance as he walked from the sea he could hear a roaring sound. The Hippodrome. Men and women watching horses run for their delight. There was a sickness within him, a black foreboding in the day.
Some events must happen now.

He had no idea where to go, what to do. The taverns would be quiet, with so many at the Hippodrome, but he didn't want to sit somewhere and get drunk. Yet. With the chariots running, Carullus wouldn't be at home, he thought, nor would Shirin. Artibasos would be in the Sanctuary, and so would Pardos and Vargos, almost certainly. He could go to work. He could always do that. He
had
been working this morning when she'd
come for him. He'd been trying to summon the distance and the clarity to render his daughters on the dome, that they might be there for as near to forever as an artisan could dream of achieving.

He didn't have any of it now. Not the girls, or distance or clarity. Not even the simplicity of anger any more. For the first time Crispin could remember, the thought of going up and absorbing himself in craft repelled him. He had seen men die this morning, had struck a blow himself. Going up the ladder now would be … a coward's retreat. And he would badly mar whatever work he tried to do today.

Another huge roar from the Hippodrome. He was walking that way. Entered into the Hippodrome Forum, saw the vast bulk of the building, the Sanctuary across the way, the statue of the first Valerius and the Bronze Gates beyond it, leading into the Imperial Precinct.

Events were happening there now, or had already happened. He looked at those gates, standing very still in a huge space. Imagined walking up and seeking admittance. An urgent need to speak to the Emperor. About some aspect of his dome, colour choices, the angle of tesserae. Could he be announced and presented?

Crispin became aware that his mouth was very dry and his heart was hammering painfully. He was a Rhodian, from a fallen, conquered land, one that Valerius was proposing to visit again with devastating war. He'd sent messages home, to his mother, his friends, knowing they would mean nothing, could achieve nothing.