The Sarantine Mosaic (141 page)

He wasn't enamoured of the image of himself as someone who drank to blur pain, but he didn't seem able to do much about it, either.

One of the hardest things was the outrage of other people. It enveloped him. For a private man that was difficult. Well-meaning, wildly passionate friends (he had more than he'd realized here, one never really stopped to count), cursing the new Emperor, offering wine in their homes or taverns. Or late at night in the kitchen of the Blues' compound, where Strumosus of Amoria held forth with articulate savagery on barbarism and the presence of it in a civilized place.

Crispin had gone there to see Scortius, but the charioteer had been asleep, medicated, and he had ended up in the kitchen taking a meal long after dark. He didn't get back to the compound again until just before departing. Scortius was sleeping that time, too. He chatted briefly with the Bassanid physician, the one whose name and address Zoticus had given him before
the man was even in Sarantium. He was past the point of trying to sort that through, as well: there were simply things in the world he would never understand, and they didn't all have to do with the doctrines of holy faith.

He finally caught up with Scortius to say goodbye later that same evening. There was a crowd in the man's chambers—a routine circumstance, it appeared. It made that parting casual, which was easier.

He found that too much of the passion of others expended in sympathy for him was both wearying and humiliating. People had
died
here. People were dying all the time. Crispin had had a commission withdrawn, his work found unsatisfactory. It happened.

He tried to make himself see it this way, at any rate, to advise others to perceive it as such. He didn't succeed.

Shirin, when he called on her and said these things, declared him soulless (he made no witty comment about her choice of words, it wasn't the time for that) and an outright liar, and then she stormed out of her own sitting room, tears on her cheeks. Danis, the bird, from around her throat in the hallway as they left, declared silently that he was a fool, unworthy of his own gifts. Of
any
gifts.

Whatever that meant.

She didn't even come back to see him out. One of the household women walked him to the door and closed it behind him.

Artibasos, the next afternoon, serving a good Candarian, well watered, with olives and fresh bread and olive oil, reacted differently.

‘Stop!' he cried, as Crispin tried the same explanation about commissions being ended or withdrawn. ‘You shame me!'

Crispin fell obediently silent, looking down at the dark wine in his cup.

‘You don't believe any of what you say. You are only saying it to make
me
feel better.' The little architect's hair was standing straight up, giving him the unsettling look of a man who'd just been terrified by a daemon.

‘Not entirely,' Crispin said. He remembered Valerius smoothing down that hair, the night he'd taken Crispin to see the dome that was his gift.

Unworthy of any gifts.

He took a breath. ‘Not just for you. I'm trying to make myself … to find a way to …'

It wasn't any good. How did you say this aloud, and keep your pride?

For they were profoundly right, all of them. He
was
lying, or trying to. Sometimes you needed a certain kind of dishonesty, even with yourself, to … carry on. Of course artisans lost commissions. All the time. Patrons didn't pay to keep a project going, remarried and changed their minds, went abroad. Or even died, and their sons or widows had a different idea of what should be done to the ceiling of the family dining room or the bedroom walls of the country estate.

It was true, everything he'd said about that was true, and it was still a lie, in the heart.

His drinking, starting in the morning, every morning, was its own proof of that, if you thought about it. He didn't
want
to think about it. He looked at the cup Artibasos had poured for him and drained it, held it out for more.

It was a death, what had happened. The heart would cry.

‘You will never go back in there, will you?' the little architect had said to him.

Crispin shook his head.

‘It is in your mind, isn't it? All of it?'

Crispin had nodded.

‘Mine, too,' Artibasos had said.

THE EMPEROR
went north to Eubulus with his army, but the fleet, under the Strategos of the Navy, did sail, after all. Leontes, now Valerius III, was hardly a man to let such an assembly go to waste. No good general was. The ships, laden with provisions and siege engines and weapons meant for a war in the west, were sent east instead through the Calchas Sea and then north. All the way through the far straits, to anchor near Mihrbor, firmly in Bassanid territory. Enough soldiers went on board to achieve a landing and defend it.

The army going overland, the troops that had been about to sail for Batiara, would be far larger than any force Shirvan had sent to harry the north. It was an army of invasion, this one, long-planned, and the new Emperor intended to use it that way—but in a different direction.

The Bassanids had breached the peace. A mistake, born of a desire to hamper a western invasion and an understanding—accurate enough—of the desires and designs of Valerius II.

Valerius II was dead.

The consequences of the miscalculation were on the Bassanids' own heads.

The soldier Carullus, once of the Fourth Trakesian, then very briefly of the Second Calysian, more recently a member of the Supreme Strategos's own guard, was not in either force, not those who rode and marched or those who sailed.

He was unhappy about this. In the extreme.

The new Emperor continued to have strong views, amounting almost to an element of his well-known piety, about taking newly married men to a theatre of war if
there were options and alternatives. With an army of this size, there were.

Further, there had been dramatic and lethal purges in the ranks of the Excubitors after the role some of them had played in the assassination. Some innocent, highly capable men had undoubtedly been among those executed, but that was a risk to be assumed by those belonging to a small, elite company when absolute truth was hard to come by. At the very least it could be said that they'd failed to detect treachery among their fellows and paid a price for that.

This treachery, of course, had placed the new Emperor on his throne but that—one need hardly say—was not a relevant point.

Carullus, complaining volubly, had had to content himself with yet another shift and promotion—when he was appointed one of the three ranking officers just below the new Count of the Excubitors. It was a very substantial rise this time, a court office, not just a military one.

‘You have
any
idea,' he fumed one night, having spent a day in the Imperial Precinct absorbing information, ‘how many changes of clothing a man needs in this position? How
often
you change each day? How many ceremonies I'm expected to learn? Want to know what you wear for escorting fucking envoys from the fucking Karchites? I can tell you!'

He did, in detail. It seemed to help him to talk, and it was good, Crispin found, to have someone else's troubles (such as they were) to consider.

They ended up in The Spina every night, Pardos and Vargos accompanying them, various others coming and going at their booth. It was regarded as their booth by then. Carullus was a well-known, well-liked man, and Crispin had achieved, it appeared, a certain notoriety.
It had also become known that he was leaving. People kept stopping by.

Pardos had surprised Crispin. He had decided to stay in Sarantium, continue to work at his craft here, despite the changes in matters of faith. With time to reflect, later, Crispin was to understand how he'd misjudged his former apprentice. It appeared that Pardos, now a fully fledged member of the guilds of course, had his own discomfort about working with certain images.

It had begun to change for him, Pardos said, while he was labouring to preserve that vision of Jad in Sauradia. A conflict of piety and craft, he'd said, stumbling, an awareness of his own unworthiness.

‘We're
all
unworthy,' Crispin had protested, fist on the table. ‘That's part of the
point
of it!'

But he'd let it slide, seeing Pardos's evident distress. What was the profit in making the other man unhappy? When did you ever change someone's views on faith, even a friend's?

Distraught as he obviously was about what was to happen to the work on the dome (spear-butts and hammers pounding, tesserae shattered and falling), Pardos was content to work on a secular scale, to make a life here, doing scenes for the state in administrative buildings, or private commissions for the courtiers and merchants and guilds who could afford mosaics. He could even work for the factions, he said: Hippodrome images for the walls and ceilings within the compounds. The new doctrines prescribed against rendering people only in a holy place. And for the wealthy, a mosaicist could still offer marinescapes, hunting scenes, interwoven patterns for flooring or walls.

‘Naked women and their toys for whorehouses?' Carullus had asked, cackling, making the younger man
blush and Vargos frown. But the soldier had only been trying to change the mood.

Vargos, for his part, had made an immediate offer to sail west with Crispin. A difficulty, that, one that needed to be addressed.

The next evening, mostly sober, Crispin had gone walking with him through the City. They'd found an inn near the walls, far from anyone they were likely to know, and the two of them talked alone for a time.

In the end, Crispin had dissauded him, not without effort and not without regret. Vargos was well on the way to making himself a life here. He could be more than a simple labourer—could apprentice himself to Pardos, who would be thrilled to have him. Vargos
liked
the City, far more than he'd expected to, and Crispin made him acknowledge that. He wouldn't be the first of the Inicii to force the Imperial City to give him a welcome and a decent life.

Crispin also admitted that he had no idea what he was going to do when he got home. It was hard to see himself doing fish and seaweed and sunken ships on a summerhouse wall in Baiana or Mylasia now. He didn't even know if he would
stay
at home. He couldn't accept the burden of Vargos's life, of having the other man follow wherever his uncertain path carried him. That wasn't friendship, really. It was something else, and Vargos was a free man here. Had
always
been his own, free man.

Vargos didn't say a great deal, wasn't someone who argued, was certainly not the sort to inflict himself anywhere or on anyone. His expression revealed little as Crispin spoke, but that night was difficult for both of them. Something had happened on the road, and it had made a bond. Bonds could be broken, but there was a price.

It was deeply tempting to invite Vargos to come west. Crispin's uncertainty about his future would be balanced
by having this man with him. The big, scarred servant he had hired at the western border of Sauradia to take him along the Imperial Road had become someone whose presence brought a measure of stability to the world.

That could happen, when you went into the Aldwood with someone, and came out. They didn't speak of that day at all, but it underlay everything that
was
said, and the sadness of parting.

Only at the end did Vargos say something that brought it briefly to the surface. ‘You're sailing?' he had asked, as they were settling their account in the tavern. ‘Not back along the road?'

‘I'd be afraid to,' Crispin had said.

‘Carullus would give you a guard.'

‘Not against what frightens me.'

And Vargos had nodded his head.

‘We were …
allowed
to leave,' Crispin had murmured, remembering fog on the Day of the Dead, Linon on the dark, wet grass. ‘You don't test that by going back.'

And Vargos had nodded again and they had gone back out into the streets.

A FEW DAYS LATER
they had to pretty much carry Carullus from The Spina. The soldier was caught in such a whirlwind of emotion it was almost comical: his marriage, his meteoric rise, which meant at the same time missing a glorious war, his delight in what had happened to his beloved Leontes set against what that meant to his dear friend, and an awareness, day by passing day, of Crispin's onrushing departure date.

That particular night as they drank he talked even more than usual. The others were almost in awe of his volubility: stories, jests, observations in an endless stream, battlefield experiences, lap-by-lap recollections of races seen years ago. He wept at the end of the night,
hugging Crispin hard, kissing both his cheeks. The three others took him home through the streets. Approaching his own door Carullus was singing a victory song of the Greens.