The Sarantine Mosaic (4 page)

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 façades 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, honeycoloured 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 nowintent 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 manoeuvrings 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.

But here in Sarantium issues of faith were endlessly debated everywhere, in dockfront cauponae, whorehouses, cookshops, the Hippodrome, the theatres. You couldn't buy a brooch to pin your cloak without hearing the vendor's views on Heladikos or the proper liturgy for the sunrise invocations.