The Sarantine Mosaic (75 page)

The cheiromancer gestured to a bench. Pardos sat down carefully; the bench was very old.

The man, who was rail-thin, dressed in black and missing the little finger of his left hand, took Pardos's short, broad hand and bent his head over it, studying the palm for a long time by the light of the candles and the smoky brazier. He coughed, at intervals. Pardos experienced an odd mixture of fear and anger and self-contempt as he endured the close scrutiny. Then the man—he still had not spoken—had Pardos toss some dried-out chicken bones from his fist down onto the greasy table. He examined
these for another long while and then declared in a high, wheezing voice that Pardos would not die on the journey east and that he was expected on the road.

That last made no sense at all and Pardos asked about it. The cheiromancer shook his head, coughing. He put a stained cloth to his mouth. He said, when the coughing subsided, that it was difficult to discern further details. He was asking for more money, Pardos knew, but he refused to offer more than he'd already paid and he walked out into the morning sunshine. He wondered if the man was as poor as he seemed to be, or if the shabbiness of his attire and chambers was a device to avoid drawing attention to himself. Certainly cheiromancers were not short of trade in Varena. The cough and rheumy voice had sounded real, but the wealthy could fall ill almost as easily as the poor.

Still embarrassed by what he'd done, and aware of how the cleric who presided over services in his chapel would feel about his visiting a seer, Pardos made a point of reporting the visit to Couvry. ‘If I do get killed,' he said, ‘go get those three folles back, all right?' Couvry had agreed, without any of his usual joking.

The night before Pardos left, Couvry and Radulph took him drinking at their favourite wine shop. Radulph was also going away soon, but only south to Baiana near Rhodias where his family lived, and where he expected to find steady work decorating homes and summer retreats by the sea. That hope might be affected if civil war broke out, or an invasion came from the east, but they decided not to talk about that on their last night together. During the course of a liquid farewell, Radulph and Couvry both expressed wistfully intense regret that they weren't coming with Pardos. Now that they were reconciled to his sudden departure, they had begun to see it as a grand adventure.

Pardos didn't view it that way at all, but he wasn't about to disappoint his friends by saying so. He was deeply touched when Couvry opened a parcel he'd brought and they presented Pardos with a new pair of boots for the road. They'd traced his sandals one night while he slept, Radulph explained, to get the size right.

The tavern closed early, by order of Eudric Goldenhair, once the chancellor, who had proclaimed himself regent in the absence of the queen. There had been some unrest in the wake of that proclamation. A number of people had died in street fighting the last few days. The drinking places were under a curfew. Tensions were high and would be rising.

Among other things, no one seemed to have any idea where the queen had gone, clearly a matter of some agitation among those now occupying the palace.

Pardos simply hoped she was all right, wherever she was, and that she would come back. The Antae didn't favour women rulers, but Pardos thought Hildric's daughter would be better, by far, than any of those likely to take her place.

He left home the next morning, immediately after the sunrise invocation, taking the road east towards Sauradia.

IN THE EVENT
, dogs were his biggest problem. They tended to avoid larger parties, but there were two or three dawns and twilights when Pardos was walking on his own, and on one particularly bad night he found himself caught between inns. On these occasions, wild dogs came after him. He laid about with his staff, surprising himself with the violence of his own blows and his profane language, but he took his share of bites. None of the animals appeared to be sick—which was a good thing or he'd have been dying or dead by now and Couvry would have had to go get the money back from the fortune-teller.

The inns tended to be filthy and cold, with food of indeterminate origin, but Pardos's room at home was no city palace and he was hardly a stranger to small biting things sharing his pallet. He observed his share of unsavoury figures drinking too much bad wine on damp nights, but it must have been obvious that the quiet young man had nothing in the way of wealth or goods to steal and they left him pretty much alone. He did take the precaution of smearing and staining his new boots, to make them look older.

He liked the boots. Didn't mind the cold or the walking at all. Found the great black forest to the north— the Aldwood—to be oddly exciting. He enjoyed trying to detect and define shadings of dark green and grey and muddy brown and black as the shifting light caused changes at the edge of the forest. It occurred to him that his grandfathers and their fathers might have lived in these woods; perhaps that was why he was drawn to them. The Antae long had made their home in Sauradia, among the Inicii and Vrachae and other warring tribes, before setting out on their great migration south and west into Batiara, where an empire had been crumbling and ready to fall. Perhaps the trees stretching alongside the Imperial road were speaking to something ancient in his blood. The cheiromancer had said he was expected on the road. He hadn't said
what
was expecting him.

He sought out others to travel with, as instructed by Martinian, but after the first few days he didn't greatly worry if he found no one. He was as faithful as he could be about the morning invocations and the sunset rites, trying to find roadside chapels for his prayers, so he often fell behind less pious companions even when he did link up with them.

One smooth-shaven wine merchant from Megarium had offered to pay Pardos to share his bed—at an Imperial
Inn, even—and had needed a rap with a staff on the back of his knees to dissaude him from a grab at Pardos's privates as a masking twilight overtook their party on the road. Pardos had worried that the man's friends might react to his cry of pain and make trouble, but in fact they seemed to be familiar with their colleague's nature and gave Pardos no difficulty. One of them had even apologized, which was unexpected. Their group had stopped at the Imperial Inn when it loomed out of darkness—large and torchlit and welcoming—and Pardos had kept going, alone. That was the night he ended up huddled on the southern side of a stone wall in the knifing cold, dealing with wild dogs in the white moonlight. The wall ought to have kept out the dogs, but it was broken down in too many places. Pardos knew what that meant. Plague had been here as well in the years just past. When men died in such numbers there were never enough hands for what needed to be done.

That one night was very hard and he did wonder, shivering and struggling to stay awake, if he would die here in Sauradia, having lived a brief, utterly inconsequential life. He thought about what he was doing so far away from everything he knew, without the means to make a fire, staring into the black for the lean, slavering apparitions that could kill him if he missed their approach. He heard other sounds, as well, from the forest on the far side of the wall and the road: deep, repeated grunting, and a howling, and once the tread of something very large. He didn't stand up to see what it might be, but after that time the dogs went away, thanks be to Jad. Pardos sat huddled in his cloak, leaning against his pack and the rough shelter of the wall, and looked up at the far stars and the one white moon and thought about where he was in Jad's creation. Where the small, breathing, unimportant thing that was Pardos of the Antae was passing this cold night in the world. The stars were hard and bright as diamonds in the dark.

Later, he was to decide that that long night had given him a new appreciation of the god, if that wasn't a thought too laden with presumption, for how
dare
a man such as he speak of appreciating the god? But the thought remained with him: didn't Jad do something infinitely more difficult each and every night, battling alone against enemies and evil in the bitter cold and dark? And—a further truth—didn't the god do it for the benefit of
others
,
for his mortal children, and not for himself at all? Pardos had simply been fighting for his own life, not for anything else that lived.

He'd thought, at one point in the darkness after the white moon set, of the Sleepless Ones, those holy clerics who kept a night-long vigil to mark their awareness of what the god did in the night. Then he'd fallen into a fitful, dreamless sleep.

And the very next day, chilled, painfully stiff and very tired, he came to a chapel of those same Sleepless Ones, set back a little from the road, and he entered, gratefully, wanting to pray and give thanks, perhaps find some warmth on a cold, windy morning, and then he saw what was overhead.

One of the clerics was awake and came forward to greet Pardos kindly, and they spoke the sunrise invocation together before the disk and beneath the awesome figure of the dark, bearded god on the dome above. Afterwards, Pardos hesitantly told the cleric that he was from Varena, and a mosaicist, and that the work on the dome was— truly—the most overwhelming he had ever seen.

The white-robed holy man hesitated, in turn, and asked Pardos if he was acquainted with another western mosaicist, a man named Martinian, who had passed this way earlier in the autumn. And Pardos remembered, just in time, that Crispin had travelled east using his partner's name, and he said yes, he did know Martinian, had done
his apprenticeship with him and was journeying east to join him now, in Sarantium.

At that, the thin-faced cleric hesitated a second time and then asked Pardos to wait for him a few moments. He went through a small door at one side of the chapel and returned with another man, older, grey-bearded, and this man explained, awkwardly, that the other artisan, Martinian, had suggested to them that the image of Jad overhead might need a certain measure of … attention, if it were to endure as it should.

And Pardos, looking up again, more carefully now, saw what Crispin had seen and nodded his head and said that this was, indeed, so. Then they asked him if he might be willing to assist them in this. Pardos blinked, overawed, and stammered something about the need for a great many tesserae to match those used above for this exacting, almost impossible task. He would require a mosaicist's equipment and tools, and scaffolding …

The two holy men had exchanged a glance and then led Pardos through the chapel to one of the outbuildings behind, and then down some creaking stairs to a cellar. And there, by torchlight, Pardos saw the disassembled parts of scaffolding and the tools of his own trade. There were a dozen chests along the stone walls and the clerics opened these, one by one, and Pardos saw tesserae of such brilliance and quality that he had to struggle not to weep, remembering the muddy, inadequate glass Crispin and Martinian had been forced to use all the time in Varena. These were the tesserae used to make that image of Jad overhead: the clerics had kept them down here, all these hundreds of years.

The two holy men had looked at him, waiting, saying nothing at all, until at length Pardos simply nodded his head. ‘Yes,' he'd said. ‘Yes.' And, ‘I will need some of you to help me.'

‘You must teach us what we need to do,' the older man had said, holding up a torch, looking down at the shining glass in the ancient chests as it reflected and caught the light.

Pardos ended up staying in that place, working among those holy men, living with them, through almost the whole of the winter. It seemed he had been, in the strangest way, expected there.

There came a time when he reached the limits of what he felt capable of doing without guidance or greater experience, putting his own hands to a work of such holy magnificence, and he told the clerics as much. They respected him by then, acknowledged his piety and care, and he even thought they liked him. No one demurred. Wearing a white robe they offered him, Pardos stayed awake with the Sleepless Ones on the last night and, shivering, heard his own name chanted by holy men in their rituals as someone virtuous and deserving, for whom the god's grace was besought. They gave him gifts—a new cloak, a sun disk—when he set out again with his staff and pack on a bright morning, with birdsong hinting at spring, continuing towards Sarantium.

In all honesty, Rustem had to admit that his vanity had been offended. With the passage of a little more time, he decided, this wounded, unsettled, choleric feeling would probably pass and he might begin to find his wives' reactions and his own response to be amusing and instructive, but an adequate interval had not yet gone by.

It seemed he had indulged himself in some domestic illusions. He wasn't the first man to do so. Slender, fragile Jarita, who was being discarded, cast off by the desire of the King of Kings to raise Rustem of Kerakek to the priestly caste, had appeared entirely content when informed of this development—as soon as she was told of the promise that
she was to be given an appropriate, kindly husband. Her only request was that this happen in Kabadh.