The Sarantine Mosaic (80 page)

Then another rumour started that Pappio, the increasingly well-known Director of the Imperial Glassworks, had personally made a bowl commissioned as a gift for the happy couple. It seemed he hadn't done any actual craftsmanship himself for years and years. No one could understand that, either. Sarantium was talking. With the chariot races not beginning again for some few days, the event was well timed: the City liked having things to talk about.

‘
I
'
M NOT HAPPY
,'
said a small, nondescript artificial bird in an inward, patrician voice heard only by the hostess of the day's affair. The woman was staring critically at her own image in a round, silver-edged mirror held up by a servant.

‘Oh, Danis, neither am I!'
Shirin murmured in silent reply.
‘Every woman from the Precinct and the theatre will be dressed and adorned to dazzle and I look like I haven't slept in days.'

‘That isn't what I meant.'

‘Of course it isn't. You never think of the important things. Tell me, do you think he'll notice me?
'

The bird's tone became waspish.
‘Which one? The chariot-racer or the mosaicist?'

Shirin laughed aloud, startling her attendant.
‘Either of them,'
she said inwardly. Then her smile became wicked.
‘Or perhaps both, tonight? Wouldn't that be something to remember?'

‘Shirin!'
The bird sounded genuinely shocked.

‘I'm teasing, silly. You know me better than that. Now tell me, why aren't you happy? This is a wedding day, and it's a love match. No one made this union, they chose each other.'
Her tone was surprisingly kind now, tolerant.

‘I just think something's going to happen.'

The dark-haired woman in front of the small mirror, who did not, in fact, look at all as if she needed sleep or anything else beyond extremes of admiration, nodded her head, and the servant, smiling, set down the mirror and reached for a bottle that contained a perfume of very particular distinctiveness. The bird lay on the tabletop nearby.

‘Danis, really, what sort of party would this be if something didn't happen?'

The bird said nothing.

There was a sound at the doorway. Shirin turned to look over her shoulder.

A small, rotund, fierce-looking man stood there, clad in a blue tunic and a very large bib-like covering tied at his neck and around his considerable girth. There were a variety of foodstains on the bib and a streak of what was probably saffron on his forehead. He possessed a wooden spoon, a heavy knife stuck into the tied belt of the bib, and an aggrieved expression.

‘Strumosus!' said the dancer happily.

‘There is no sea salt,' said the chef in a voice that suggested the absence amounted to a heresy equivalent to banned Heladikian beliefs or arrant paganism.

‘No salt? Really?' said the dancer, rising gracefully from her seat.

‘No
sea
salt!' the chef repeated. ‘How can a civilized household lack sea salt?'

‘A
dreadful
omission,' Shirin agreed with a placating gesture. ‘I feel simply terrible.'

‘I request permission to make use of your servants and send one back to the Blues compound immediately.
I need my undercooks to remain here. Are you aware of how little time we have?'

‘You may use my servants in any way you see fit today,' Shirin said, ‘short of broiling them.'

The chef's expression conveyed the suggestion that matters might come to that pass.

‘This is a completely odious man,'
the bird said silently.
‘At least I might assume you don't desire this one.'

Shirin gave a silent laugh.
‘He is a genius, Danis. Everyone says so. Genius needs to be indulged. Now, be happy and tell me I look beautiful.'

There was another sound in the hallway beyond Strumosus. The chef turned, and then lowered his wooden spoon. His expression changed, grew very nearly benign. One might even have exaggerated slightly and said that he smiled. He stepped farther into the room and out of the way as a pale, fair-haired woman appeared hesitantly in the doorway.

Shirin did smile, and laid a hand to her cheek. ‘Oh, Kasia,' she said. ‘You look beautiful.'

CHAPTER III

E
arlier that same morning, very early in fact, the Emperor Valerius II of Sarantium, nephew to an Emperor, son of a grain farmer from Trakesia, could have been seen intoning the last of the antiphonal responses to the sunrise invocation in the Imperial Chapel of the Traversite Palace where he and the Empress had their private rooms.

The Emperor's service is one of the first in the City, beginning in darkness, ending with the rising of the reborn sun at dawn when the chapel and sanctuary bells elsewhere in Sarantium are just beginning to toll. The Empress is not with him at this hour. The Empress is asleep. The Empress has her own cleric attached to her own suite of rooms, a man known for a relaxed attitude to the hour of morning prayer and equally lenient, if less well-publicized, views regarding the heresies of Heladikos, the mortal (or half-mortal, or divine) son of Jad. These things are not spoken of in the Imperial Precinct, of course. Or, they are not spoken of freely.

The Emperor is, as it happens, meticulous in his observations of the rituals of faith. His long engagement with both the High and the Eastern Patriarchs in an attempt to resolve the myriad sources of schism in the doctrines of the sun god is as much begotten by piety as it is by intellectual engagement. Valerius is a man of contradictions and enigmas, and he does little to resolve or clarify any of these for his court or his people, finding mystery an asset.

It amuses him that he is called by some the Night's Emperor and said to hold converse with forbidden spirits of the half-world in the lamplit chambers and moonlit corridors of the palaces. It amuses him because this is entirely untrue and because he is here—as at every dawn—awake before most of his people, performing the rituals of sanctioned faith. He is, in truth, the Morning's Emperor as much as he is anything else.

Sleep bores him, frightens him a little of late, fills him with a sense—in dream or near to dream—of a headlong rushing of time. He is not an old man by any means, but he is sufficiently advanced in years to hear horses and chariots in the night: the distant harbingers of an end to mortal tenure. There is much he wishes to do before he hears—as all true and holy Emperors are said to hear—the voice of the god, or the god's emissary, saying,
Uncrown, the Lord of Emperors awaits you now.

His Empress, he knows, would speak of dolphins tearing the sea's surface, not onrushing horses in the dark, but only to him, since dolphins—the ancient bearers of souls—are a banned Heladikian symbol.

His Empress is asleep. Will rise some time after the sun, take a first meal abed, receive her holy adviser and then her bath attendants and her secretary, prepare herself at leisure for the day. She was an actress in her youth, a dancer named Aliana, tuned to the rhythms of late nights and late risings.

He shares the late nights with her, but knows better, after their years together, than to intrude upon her at this hour. He has much to do, in any case.

The service ends. He speaks the last of the responses. Some light is leaking through the high windows. A chilly morning outside, at this grey hour. He dislikes the cold, of late. Valerius leaves the chapel, bowing to the disk and altar, lifting a brief hand to his cleric. In the hallway he
takes a stairway down, walking quickly, as he tends to. His secretaries hurry another way, going outdoors, taking the paths across the gardens—cold and damp, he knows—to the Attenine Palace, where the day's business will begin. Only the Emperor and his appointed guards among the Excubitors are allowed to use the tunnel constructed between the two palaces, a security measure introduced a long time ago.

There are torches at intervals in the tunnel, lit and supervised by the guards. It is well ventilated, comfortably warm even in winter or, as now, on the cusp of spring. Quickening season, season of war. Valerius nods to the two guards and passes through the doorway alone. He enjoys this short walk, in fact. He is a man in a life that allows of no privacy at all. Even in his sleeping chamber there is always a secretary on a cot and a drowsy messenger by the door, waiting for the possibility of dictation or a summons or instructions to be run through the mysteries and spirits of a dark city.

And many nights, still, he spends with Alixana in her own intricate tangle of chambers. Comfort and intimacy there, and something else deeper and rarer than either—but he is not alone. He is never alone. Privacy, silence, solitude are limited to this tunnel walk underground, ushered into the corridor by one set of guards, received at the other end by another pair of the Excubitors.

When he raps and the doorway is opened at the Attenine Palace end, a number of men are waiting, as they always are. They include the aged Chancellor Gesius; Leontes, the golden Strategos; Faustinus, Master of Offices; and the Quaestor of Imperial Revenue, a man named Vertigus, with whom the Emperor cannot say he is well pleased. Valerius nods to them all and ascends the stairs quickly as they rise from obeisance and fall into place behind him.
Gesius needs assistance now, at times, especially when the weather is damp, but there has been no sign of any similar impairment of the Chancellor's thinking, and Valerius will trust no one in his retinue half so much.

It is Vertigus he briskly quizzes and unsettles this morning when they come to the Audience Chamber. The man is hardly a fool—he'd have been dismissed long ago if he were—but he cannot be called ingenious, and almost everything the Emperor wishes to achieve, in the City, the Empire, and beyond, turns upon finances. Competence is not, unfortunately, sufficient these days. Valerius is paying a great deal for buildings, a very great deal to the Bassanids, and he has just yielded (as planned) to entreaties from several sources and released the final arrears of last year's payment for the western army.

There is never enough money, and the last time measures were enacted to try to generate a sufficiency Sarantium burned in a riot that almost cost him his throne and his life and every plan he'd ever shaped. It had required some thirty thousand deaths to avoid those consequences. Valerius is of the hope that his unprecedented, almostcompleted Great Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom will serve as his expiation before the god for those deaths—and certain other things—when the day for such a reckoning comes, as it always does. Given this, the Sanctuary serves more than one purpose in his designs.

Most things do.

It was difficult. She was aware that Carullus loved her and that an astonishing number of people were treating their wedding as an occasion for celebration, as if the marriage of an Inici girl and a Trakesian soldier were an event of significance. She was being wed at an exquisite, patrician chapel near Shirin's house—the Master
of the Senate and his family were among the regular attendees there. The banquet would take place back here in the home of the Greens' Principal Dancer. And the round, fierce man acclaimed by everyone as the finest chef in all the Empire was preparing Kasia's wedding feast.

It was hard to believe. Mostly, she
didn't
believe it, moving through events as in a dream, as though expecting to wake up in Morax's inn in a chill fog with the Day of the Dead still to come.

Kasia, who had been seen as the clever one by her mother, and unmarriageable, the daughter sold to the slavers, was aware that all of this extravagance had to do with the people they knew: Crispin and his friends Scortius the chariot-racer and Shirin, into whose house Kasia had moved when the betrothal was announced early in the winter. Carullus had actually met—twice now—with the Supreme Strategos himself and had achieved a success regarding the arrears of soldiers' pay. There was a rumour that Leontes might even make an appearance at the tribune's wedding party. At
her
wedding party.

The other part of this exaggerated attention had to do, she'd come to understand, with the fact that for all their vaunted cynicism (or perhaps because of it) the Sarantines were almost unfailingly intense and emotional by nature, as if living here at the centre of the world heightened and added significance to every event. The notion that she and Carullus were marrying for love, having chosen each other freely, held extravagant appeal for those surrounding them. Shirin, witty and ironic as she was, could go misty-eyed at the very thought.

Such marriages tended not to happen.

And it wasn't happening here, whatever people were thinking, though Kasia was the only one who knew that. She hoped.