The Sarantine Mosaic (62 page)

She reddened angrily. ‘Of course he has details. He
knows
I'm First of the Greens. I wrote him that when they named me. He never replied.' She tossed her head. ‘Of course he has so
many
children scattered all over. From his travels. I suppose we all write letters and he just answers the favoured ones.'

Crispin shook his head. ‘He did say his children didn't write to him. I couldn't tell if he was serious.'

‘He never replies,' Shirin snapped. ‘Two letters and one bird, that is all I have ever had from my father.' She picked up her own wine cup. ‘I suppose he sent birds to all of us.'

Crispin suddenly remembered something. ‘I don't … believe so.'

‘Oh? And how would you know?' Anger in her voice.

‘He told me he'd only ever given away one of his birds.'

She grew still. ‘He said that?'

Crispin nodded.

‘But why? I mean … ?'

He had a guess, actually. He said, ‘Are any of your … siblings here in the City?'

She shook her head. ‘Not any I know of.'

‘That might be why. He did say he'd always planned to journey to Sarantium and never had. That it was a disappointment. Perhaps your being here … ?'

Shirin looked over at her bird, then back to Crispin. Something seemed to occur to her. She said, with an indifferent shrug, ‘Well, why sending a mechanical toy would be so important to him, I have no idea.'

Crispin looked away. She was dissembling, but she had to do that. So was he, for that matter. He was going to need time, he thought, to sort this through as well. Every encounter he had in this city seemed to be raising challenges of one sort or another. He sternly reminded himself that he was here to work. On a dome. A transcendent dome high above all the world, a gift to him from the Emperor and the god. He was
not
going to let himself become trammelled in the intrigues of this city.

He rose on that thought, resolutely. He'd intended to go to the Sanctuary this afternoon. This visit was to have been a minor interlude, a dutiful call. ‘I ought not to outstay your welcome to an uninvited stranger.'

She stood up quickly, her first awkward motion. It made her seem younger.

He approached, became aware of her perfume again. And had to ask, against his own better judgement. ‘I … was given to understand earlier that only the Empress Alixana was allowed that particular … scent. Is it indiscreet to ask … ?'

Shirin smiled suddenly, visibly pleased. ‘You noticed? She saw me dance in the spring. Sent a private message with a note and a flask. It was made public that, in appreciation of my dancing, the Empress had permitted me to
use the scent that was otherwise hers alone. Even though she's known to favour the Blues.'

Crispin looked down at her. A small, quick, dark-eyed woman, quite young. ‘A great honour.' He hesitated. ‘It suits you as much as it does her.'

She looked ironic. She would be used to compliments, he realized. ‘The association with power
is
attractive, isn't it?' she murmured drily.

Crispin laughed aloud. ‘Jad's blood! If all the women in Sarantium are as clever as the ones I've already met …'

‘Yes?' she said, looking up at him slantwise. ‘What follows, Caius Crispus?' Her tone was deliberately arch, teasing again. It was effective, he had to concede.

He couldn't think of a reply. She laughed. ‘You'll have to tell me about the others, of course. One must know one's rivals in this city.'

Crispin looked at her. He could imagine what her bird would have said to that. He was grateful it was silent. Otherwise—

‘Oh, gods! You are a disgrace! You bring shame upon …everything!'

Crispin winced, covering it with a quick hand to his mouth. Not silenced, obviously. It was evident that Zoticus's daughter had her own methods of controlling her bird. She'd been toying with both of them, he thought. Shirin turned, smiling privately to herself, and led the way back down the corridor to the front door.

‘I'll call again,' Crispin murmured, turning there. ‘If I may?'

‘Of course. You must. I'll assemble a small dinner party for you. Where are you staying?'

He named the inn. ‘I'll be looking for a house, though. I believe the Chancellor's officials are to find me one.'

‘Gesius? Really? And Leontes met with you at the baths? You have powerful friends, Rhodian. My father
was wrong. You couldn't possibly need someone like me for … anything.' She smiled again, the clever expression belying the words. ‘Come and see me dance. The chariots are finished, it is theatre season now.'

He nodded. She opened the door and stood back to let him pass.

‘Thank you again for the greeting,' he said. He wasn't sure
why
he'd said that. Teasing. Mostly. She'd done enough of it, herself.

‘Oh, dear,' Shirin of the Greens murmured. ‘I'm not to be allowed to forget that, am I? My beloved father would be so ashamed. It isn't how he raised me, of course. Good day, Caius Crispus,' she added, keeping a small but discernible distance this time. After her own gibes at him, he was pleased to see that she had reacted a little, however.

‘Don't kiss him! Don't! Is the door open?'

A brief pause, then,
‘No I do not know that, Shirin!
With you I am never certain.'
Another silence, as Shirin said whatever she said, and then in a very different tone Crispin heard the bird say
, ‘Very well. Yes, dear. Yes, I know. I do know that.'

There was a tenderness there that took him straight back to the Aldwood. Linon.
Remember me.

Crispin bowed, feeling a sudden wave of grief pass over him. Zoticus's daughter smiled and the door closed. He stood on the portico thinking, though not very coherently. Carullus's soldiers waited, watching him, eyeing the street … which was empty now. A wind blew. It was cold, the late-afternoon sun hidden by the roofs of houses west.

Crispin took a deep breath then he knocked on the door again.

A moment later it swung open. Shirin's eyes were wide. She opened her mouth but, seeing his expression,
said nothing at all. Crispin stepped inside. He himself closed the door on the street.

She looked up at him.

‘Shirin, I'm sorry, but I can hear your bird,' he said. ‘We have a few things to talk about.'

The Urban Prefecture in the reign of the Emperor Valerius II fell under the auspices of Faustinus the Master of Offices, as did all of the civil service and, accordingly, it was run with his well-known efficiency and attention to detail.

These traits were much in evidence when the former courier and suspected assassin, Pronobius Tilliticus, was brought to questioning in the notorious, windowless building near the Mezaros Forum. The new legal protocols established by Valerius's Quaestor of the Judiciary, Marcellinus, were painstakingly followed: a scribe and a notary were both present as the Questioner set out his array of implements.

In the event, none of the hanging weights or metal probes or the more elaborate contrivances proved necessary. The man Tilliticus offered a complete and detailed confession as soon as the Questioner, gauging his subject with an experienced eye, elected to suddenly clutch and shear off a hank of the man's hair with a curved, serrated blade. As his locks fell to the stone floor, Tilliticus screamed as if he'd been pierced by the jagged blade. Then he began to babble forth far more than they needed to hear. The secretary recorded; the notary witnessed and affixed his seal when it was done. The Questioner, showing no signs of disappointment, withdrew. There were other subjects waiting in other chambers.

The detailed revelations made it unnecessary to interrogate formally the soldier from Amoria who had been interrupted and personally halted by the Supreme
Strategos while apparently attempting a further assault on the Rhodian artisan in a public bathhouse.

In accordance with the new protocols, a member of the judiciary was requested to attend immediately at the Urban Prefecture. Upon arrival, the judge was presented with the one-time courier's confession and such further details as had been assembled regarding the events of the night before and that afternoon.

The judge had some latitude under Marcellinus's new Code of Laws. The death penalty had been largely eliminated as contrary to the spirit of Jad's creation and as a benign Imperial gesture in the aftermath of the Victory Riots, but the possible fines, dismemberments, mutilations, and terms of exile or incarceration were wide-ranging.

The judge on duty that evening happened to be a Green supporter. The deaths of two common soldiers and a Blue partisan was a grave matter, to be sure, but the Rhodian involved—the only
important
figure in the story, it seemed—had been unharmed, and the courier had confessed his crimes freely. Six perpetrators had been killed. The judge had barely divested himself of his heavy cloak and sipped once or twice from the wine cup they brought him before ruling that the gouging of one eye and a slit nose, to label Tilliticus as a punished criminal, would be a proper and sufficient judicial response. Along with a lifetime's exile, of course. Such a figure could not possibly be allowed to remain in the City. He might corrupt the pious inhabitants.

The Amorianite soldier was routinely branded on the forehead with a hot iron as a would-be assassin and—of course—thereby forfeited his place in the army and his pension. He too was exiled.

It all unfolded with satisfying efficiency, and the judge even had time to finish his wine and exchange
some salacious gossip with the notary about a young pantomime actor and a very prominent Senator. He was home in time for his evening meal.

That same evening, a surgeon on contract to the Urban Prefecture was called in and Pronobius Tilliticus lost his left eye and had his nose carved open with a heated blade. He would lie in the Prefecture's infirmary for that night and the next and then be taken in chains across the harbour to Deapolis port and released there, to make his one-eyed, marked way in exile through the god's world and the Empire—or wherever he chose to go beyond it.

He went, in fact, as most of the god's world would come to know one day, south through Amoria into Soriyya. He quickly exhausted the meagre sum his father had been able to put together for him on short notice and was reduced to begging for scraps at chapel doors with the other maimed and mutilated, the orphans, and the women too old to sell their bodies for sustenance.

From these depths he was rescued the next autumn—as the story was to tell—by a virtuous cleric in a village near the desert wastes of Ammuz. Smitten with divine illumination, Pronobius Tilliticus went forth a distance alone into the desert the next spring carrying only a sun disk, and found a precipitate tooth of rock to climb. It was a difficult ascent, but he did it only once.

He lived there forty years in all, sustained at first by supplies sent out by the humble cleric who had brought him to Jad, and later by the pilgrims who began to seek out his needle-like crag in the sands, bearing baskets of food and wine which were hauled up on a rope-and-pulley arrangement and then lowered—empty—by the one-eyed hermit with his long, filthy beard and rotting clothes.

A number of people, carried out to the site in litters, unable to walk or gravely ill, and not a few women
afflicted with barren wombs, were afterwards to claim in carefully witnessed testaments that their conditions had been cured when they ate of the half-masticated pieces of food the Jad-possessed anchorite was wont to hurl down from his precarious perch. Besought by the people below for prophecies and holy instruction, Pronobius Tilliticus would declaim terse parables and grim, strident warnings of dire futures.

He was, of course, correct in large measure, achieving his immortality by being the first holy man slain by the heathen fanatics of the sands when they swept out of the south into Soriyya following their own star-enraptured visionary and his ascetic new teachings.

When a vanguard of this desert army reached the stiletto of rock upon which the hermit—an old man by then, incoherent in his convictions and fierce rhetoric— still perched, seemingly impervious to the winds and the broiling sun, they listened to him fulminate for a time, amused. When he began coarsely spitting food down upon them, their amusement faded. Archers filled him with arrows like some grotesque, spiny animal. He fell from his perch, a long way. After routinely cutting off his genitalia they left him in the sand for the scavengers.

He would be formally declared holy and among the Blessed Victims gathered to Immortal Light, a performer of attested miracles and a sage, two generations later by the great Patriarch Eumedius.

In the official
Life
commissioned by the Patriarch it was chronicled how Tilliticus had spent hard and courageous years in the Imperial Post, loyally serving his Emperor, before hearing and heeding the summons of a far greater power. Movingly, the tale was told of how the holy man lost his eye to a wild lion of the desert while saving a lost child in peril.