The Sarantine Mosaic (79 page)

‘I like it up here,' the queen said suddenly. She went to the low railing and looked down, seemingly unfazed by how high they were. Crispin had known people to faint or collapse, clutching at the planks of the scaffold up here.

There were other platforms, around the eastern perimeter of the dome, where men had begun setting tesserae on Crispin's sketched pattern, to make a cityscape and the deep blue and green of the sea, but no one else was aloft just now. Gisel of the Antae looked at her own hands on the rail, then turned and held them up to him. ‘Could I be
a mosaicist, do you think?' She laughed. He listened for desperation, fear, but heard only genuine amusement.

He said, ‘It is a craft only, unworthy of you, Majesty.'

She looked around for a time without answering him. ‘No. This isn't,' she said finally. She gestured at Artibasos's dome, at the beginnings of Crispin's own vast mosaic upon it. ‘This isn't unworthy of anyone. Are you pleased you came now, Caius Crispus? You didn't want to, I recall.'

And in response to the direct question, Crispin nodded his head, admitting it for the first time. ‘I didn't want to, but this dome is a life's gift for such as I.'

She nodded. Her mood had changed, swiftly. ‘Good. We also are pleased you are here. We have few we may trust in this city. Are you one such?'

She had been direct the first time, too. Crispin cleared his throat. She was so alone in Sarantium. The court would use her as a tool, and hard men back home would want her dead. He said, ‘In whatever ways I may help you, my lady, I shall.'

‘Good,' she repeated. He saw her colour had heightened. Her eyes were bright. ‘I wonder. How shall we do this? Shall I order you to come now and kiss me, so that those below can see?'

Crispin blinked, swallowed, ran a hand reflexively through his hair.

‘You do not improve your appearance when you do that, you know,' the queen said. ‘Think, artisan. There has to be a reason for my coming up here to you. Will it help you with the women of this city to be known as a queen's lover, or will it mark you as … untouchable?' And she smiled.

‘I … I don't have … My lady, I … '

‘You don't want to kiss me?' she asked. A mood so bright it was a danger in itself. She stood very still, waiting for him.

He was entirely unnerved. He took a deep breath, then a step forward.

And she laughed. ‘On further thought, it isn't necessary, is it? My hand will do, artisan. You may kiss my hand.'

She lifted it to him. He took it in his own and raised it to his lips, and just as he did so she turned her hand in his and it was her palm, soft and warm, that he kissed.

‘I wonder,' said the queen of the Antae, ‘if anyone could see me do that.' And she smiled again.

Crispin was breathing hard. He straightened. She remained very near and, bringing up both her hands, she smoothed his disordered hair.

‘We will leave you,' she said, astonishingly composed, the too-bright manner gone as swiftly as it had come, though her colour remained high. ‘You may call upon us now, of course. Everyone will assume they know why. As it happens, we wish to go to the theatre.'

‘Majesty,' Crispin said, struggling to regain a measure of calm. ‘You are the queen of the Antae, of Batiara, an honoured guest of the Emperor … an artisan cannot
possibly
escort you to the theatre. You will have to sit in the Imperial Box. Must be seen there. There are protocols …'

She frowned, as if struck only now by the thought. ‘Do you know, I believe you are correct. I shall have to send a note to the Chancellor then. But in that case, I may have come up here to no purpose, Caius Crispus.' She looked up at him. ‘You must take care to provide us with a reason.' And she turned away.

He was so deeply shaken that she was five rungs down the ladder before he even moved, offering her no assistance at all.

It didn't matter. She went down to the marble floor as easily as she'd come up. It occurred to him, watching her descend towards a score of unabashedly curious people staring up, that if he was marked now as her
lover, or even her confidant, then his mother and his friends might be endangered back home when word of this went west. Gisel had escaped a determined assassination attempt. There were men who wanted her throne, which meant ensuring she did not take it back. Those linked to her in any way would be suspect. Of what, it hardly mattered.

The Antae were not fastidious about such things.

And that truth, Crispin decided, staring down, applied as much to the woman nearing the ground now. She might be young, and terribly vulnerable here, but she'd survived a year on her throne among men who wished her dead or subjected to their will, and had managed to elude them when they did try to kill her. And she was her father's daughter. Gisel of the Antae would do whatever she had to do, he thought, to achieve her purposes, until and unless someone did end her life. Consequences for others wouldn't even cross her mind.

He thought of the Emperor Valerius, moving mortal lives this way and that like pieces on a gameboard. Did power shape this way of thinking, or was it only those who already thought this way who could achieve earthly power?

It came to Crispin, watching the queen reach the marble floor to accept bows and her cloak, that he'd been offered intimacy by three women in this city, and each occasion had been an act of contrivance and dissembling. Not one of them had touched him with any tenderness or care, or even a true desire.

Or, perhaps, that last wasn't entirely so. When he returned home later in the day to the house the Chancellor's people had by now arranged for him, Crispin found a note waiting. Tidings took little time to travel in this city—or certain kinds of tidings did. The note, when
unfolded, was not signed, and he'd never seen the round, smooth handwriting before, but the paper was astonishingly fine, luxurious. Reading the words, he realized no signature was needed, or possible.

You told me
,
Styliane Daleina had written,
that you were a stranger to the private rooms of royalty.

Nothing more. No added reproach, no direct suggestion that he'd deceived her, no irony or provocation. The stated fact. And the fact that she'd stated it.

Crispin, who'd intended to have a midday meal at home and then return to the Sanctuary, had taken himself off instead to his preferred tavern and then to the baths. In each of these places he'd had more wine than was really good for him.

His friend Carullus, tribune of the Fourth Sauradian, had found him later in the evening, back at The Spina. The burly soldier had seated himself opposite Crispin, signalled for a cup of wine for himself and grinned. Crispin had refused to smile back.

‘Two pieces of news, my inexplicably drunken friend,' Carullus had said breezily. He held up a finger. ‘One, I have met with the Supreme Strategos. I have met with him, and Leontes has promised half the arrears for the western army will be sent before midwinter and the rest by spring. A personal promise. Crispin, I've done it!'

Crispin looked at him, trying to share in his friend's delight and failing utterly. This
was
hugely important news, though—everyone knew about the army unrest and the arrears of pay. It was the reason Carullus had come to the City, if one excepted a desire to see chariots in the Hippodrome.

‘No, you haven't done it,' he said morosely. ‘It just means there's a war coming. Valerius is sending Leontes to Batiara, after all. You don't invade with unpaid troops.'

Carullus only smiled. ‘I know that, you sodden dolt. But who gets the
credit
,
man? Who writes his governor in the morning that he has succeeded in getting the payment released when everyone else has failed?'

Crispin nodded and reached for his wine again. ‘Pleased for you,' he said. ‘Truly. Forgive, if I'm not as pleased to hear that my friends and my mother are now to be invaded.'

Carullus shrugged. ‘Warn them. Tell them to leave Varena.'

‘Get fucked,' Crispin had said, uncharitably. Whatever was happening was
not
Carullus's fault, and his advice might be good—even more so in the light of what had happened that morning on the scaffolding.

‘That activity on your mind? I heard about your visitor this morning. Do you keep pillows up on that scaffold of yours? I'll let you sober up but I'll expect a
very
detailed explanation in the morning, my friend.' Carullus licked his lips.

Crispin swore again. ‘It was play-acting. Theatre. She wanted to talk to me and needed to give people something to think.'

‘I'm sure,' said Carullus, his eyebrows arched high.
‘Talk
to you? You rogue. They say she's magnificent, you know. Talk? Hah. Maybe you'll make me believe that in the morning. In, ah, the meantime,' he added after an unexpected pause, ‘that, er, reminds me of my second bit of news. I suppose I'm, ah, out of that sort of game now, myself. Actually.'

Crispin had looked muzzily up from his wine cup.

‘What?'

‘I'm, well, as it happens, I'm getting married,' Carullus of the Fourth said.

‘What?'
Crispin repeated, cogently.

‘I know, I know,' the tribune went on, ‘Unexpected, surprising, amusing, all that. A good laugh for all. Happens, though, doesn't it?' His colour heightened. ‘Ah, well, it
does
,
you know.'

Crispin nodded his head in bemusement, refraining only with some effort from saying, ‘What?' for a third time.

‘And, um, well, do you, er, mind if Kasia leaves your house now? It won't look right, of course, not after we have it proclaimed in chapel.'

‘What?' Crispin said, helplessly.

‘Wedding'll be in the spring,' Carullus went on, eyes bright. ‘I promised my mother back when I first left home that if I ever married I'd do it properly. There'll be a season's worth of proclaiming by the clerics, so someone can object if they want to, and then a real wedding celebration.'

‘Kasia?' Crispin said, finally getting a word in.
‘Kasia?'

And as his brain belatedly began to function, to put itself tentatively around this astonishing information, Crispin shook his head again, as if to clear it, and said, ‘Let me be certain I understand this, you bloated bag of wind. Kasia has agreed to marry you? I don't believe it! By Jad's bones and balls! You bastard! You didn't ask my permission and you don't fucking
deserve
her, you military lout.'

He was grinning widely by then, and he reached a hand across the table and gripped the other man's shoulder hard.

‘Of
course
I deserve her,' Carullus said. ‘I'm a man with a brilliant future.' But he, too, had been smiling, with unconcealed pleasure.

The woman in question was of the northern Inicii, sold by her mother into slavery a little more than a year before, rescued from that—and a pagan death—by Crispin on the road. She was too thin and too intelligent,
and too strong-willed, though uneasy in the City. On the occasion of their first encounter she had spat in the face of the soldier who was now grinning with delight as he announced that she'd agreed to marry him.

Both men, in fact, knew what she was worth.

And so, on a bright, windy day at the beginning of spring, a number of people were preparing themselves to proceed to the home of the principal female dancer of the Green faction where a wedding was to commence with the usual procession to the chosen chapel and then be celebrated with festivity afterwards.

Neither bride nor groom was in any way from a good family—though the soldier showed signs of possibly becoming an important person—but Shirin of the Greens had a glittering circle of acquaintances and admirers and had chosen to make this wedding the excuse for an elaborate affair. She'd had a very good winter season in the theatre.

In addition, the groom's close friend (and evidently the bride's, it was whispered by some, with a meaningful arch of eyebrows) was the new Imperial Mosaicist, the Rhodian who was executing the elaborate decorations in the Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom—a fellow perhaps worthy of cultivation. There were rumours that other significant personages might attend—if not the actual ceremony, then the celebration in Shirin's home afterwards.

It had also been widely reported that the food was being prepared in the dancer's kitchen by the Master Chef of the Blue faction. There were those in the City who would follow Strumosus into the desert if he took his pots and pans and sauces.

It was a curious, in many ways a unique event, this celebration orchestrated by Greens and Blues together. And all
for a middle-ranking soldier and a yellow-haired barbarian girl from Sauradia just arrived in the city with a completely unknown background. She was pretty enough, it was reported by those who'd seen her with Shirin, but not in the usual way of those girls who made a surprising marriage for themselves. On the other hand, it wasn't as if she was wedding a
really
significant fellow, was it?