The Sarantine Mosaic (81 page)

The man she desired—and loved, though something in her fought the word—was the one who would stand with them today in the chapel holding a symbolic crown over his friend's head. It wasn't a truth she liked, but it didn't seem to be something she could
do
anything about.

Shirin would stand behind Kasia with another crown, and an elegant gathering of white-clad people from theatre and court and a number of rather more bluff military men would smile and murmur in approval and then they would all come back here to eat and drink: fish and oysters and winter game and wine from Candaria and Megarium.

What woman, really, married purely by choice? What sort of world would it be if that could happen? Not even aristocrats or royalty had such a luxury, so how could it descend to a barbarian girl who had been a slave in Sauradia for a bitter year that would linger in the soul for who knew how long?

She was marrying because a decent man wanted her and had asked. Because he offered the promise of shelter and support and some real kindness was in his nature, and because, failing this union, what life was there for her? Dependent on others all her days? Servant to a dancer until the dancer made her own prudent choice of husband? Joining one of the sects—the Daughters of Jad—who took eternal vows to a god in which Kasia didn't really believe?

How could she believe, having been offered as a sacrifice to Ludan, having seen a
zubir
, creature of her tribe's long faith, in the depths of the Aldwood?

‘You look beautiful,' Shirin said, turning from a conversation with the chef to look at Kasia in the doorway.

Kasia smiled warily. She didn't really believe it, but it might even be true. Shirin's house was efficiently run by her servants; Kasia had been living with her through the
winter more as a guest and friend than anything else and she'd eaten better food and slept in a softer bed than ever in her life. Shirin was quick, amusing, observant, always planning something, very much aware of her position in Sarantium: both the implications of renown and the transitory nature of it.

She was also more than any of these things, because none of them spoke to what she was on the stage.

Kasia had seen her dance. After that first visit to the theatre, early in the winter season, she had understood the other woman's fame. Seeing the masses of flowers thrown down onto the stage after a dance, hearing the wild, shouted acclamations—both the ritual ones of Shirin's Green faction and the spontaneous cries of those who were simply enraptured with what they'd seen—she had felt awed by Shirin, a little frightened by the change that took place when the dancer entered this world, and even more by what happened when she stepped between the torches and the music began for her.

She could never have exposed herself willingly the way Shirin did each time she performed, clad in streaming silks that hid next to nothing of her lithe form, doing comical, almost obscene things for the raucous delight of those in the less expensive, distant seats. But nor could she ever in her life have moved the way the Greens' dancer did, as Shirin leaped and spun, or paused with arms extended like a sea-bird, and then gravely stepped forward, bare feet arched like a hunter's bow, in the older, more formal dances that made men weep. Those same silks could lift like wings behind her or be gathered into a shawl when she knelt to mourn a loss, or into a shroud when she died and the theatre grew silent as a graveyard in a winter dark.

Shirin changed when she danced, and changed those who saw her.

Then she changed back, at home. There she liked to talk about Crispin. She had accepted Kasia as a houseguest as a favour to the Rhodian. He knew her father, she'd told Kasia. But there was more to it than that. It was obvious that he was often on the dancer's mind, even with all the men—young and less young, many of them married, from court and aristocratic houses and military officers' quarters—who regularly attended upon her. After those visits Shirin would talk to Kasia, revealing detailed knowledge of their positions and ranks and prospects: her finely nuanced social favours were part of the delicate dance she had to perform in this life of a dancer in Sarantium. Kasia had the sense that however their relationship had begun, Shirin was genuinely pleased to have her in the house, that friendship and trust had not before been elements in the dancer's life. Not that they ever had been in her own, if it came to that.

During the winter Carullus had come by almost every day when he was in the City. He'd been absent a month amid the rains, leaving to escort—triumphantly—the first shipment of the western army's arrears to his camp in Sauradia. He was thoughtful when he came back, told Kasia there seemed to be very strong indicators that a war was coming in the west. It was not precisely surprising, but there was a difference between rumours and onrushing reality. It had occurred to her, listening, that if he were to go there with Leontes he could die. She'd taken his hand as he talked. He liked it when she held his hand.

They'd seen little enough of Crispin during the winter. He had apparently chosen his team of mosaicists as quickly as possible and was up on his scaffolding all the time, working as soon as the morning prayers were done and into the night, by torchlight aloft. He slept on a cot in the Sanctuary some nights, Vargos reported, not even
returning to the home the Chancellor's eunuchs had found and furnished for him.

Vargos was working in the Sanctuary as well, and was their source for the best stories, including the one about an apprentice chased by Crispin—the Rhodian roaring imprecations and waving a knife—all around the Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom, for having let something called the quicklime be spoiled one morning. Vargos had started to explain about the quicklime, but Shirin had pretended to scream with boredom and had thrown olives at him until he'd stopped.

Vargos came by regularly to take Kasia to chapel in the morning if she'd go with him. Often she did. She was working to accustom herself to the noise and crowds, and these morning walks with Vargos were a part of that. He was another kind man, Vargos. She'd met three of them in Sauradia, it seemed, and one of them had offered marriage to her. She didn't deserve such fortune.

Sometimes Shirin came with them. It was useful to make an appearance, she explained to Kasia. The clerics of Jad disapproved of the theatre even more than they disliked the chariots and the violent passions and pagan magic they inspired. It was prudent for Shirin to be seen kneeling in sober garb, without evident adornment, her hair pinned back and covered, as she chanted the morning responses before the sun disk and the altar.

Sometimes Shirin would take them to a rather more elegant chapel than Vargos's, nearer to the house. After services there one morning, she had submissively accepted the blessing of the cleric and introduced Kasia to two of the other people attending—who happened to be the Master of the Senate and his much younger wife. The Senator, Plautus Bonosus by name, was a wry-looking, slightly dissipated man; the wife seemed reserved and
watchful. Shirin had invited them to the wedding ceremony and the celebration after. She'd mentioned some of the other guests attending and then added, casually, that Strumosus of Amoria was preparing the feast.

The Master of the Senate had blinked at this, and then quickly accepted the invitation. He looked like a man who enjoyed his luxuries. Later that morning, over spiced wine at home, Shirin had told Kasia some of the scandals associated with Bonosus. They did offer some explanation, Kasia had thought, for the young, second wife's very cool, self-contained manner. She had realized that it was something of a coup for Shirin to have so many distinguished people coming to a dancer's home, a defining and asserting of her preeminence. It was good for Carullus too, of course—and so for Kasia. She'd understood all of this. There had still been an aura of unreality to what was happening.

She had just been saluted by the Master of the Sarantine Senate in a chapel filled with aristocrats. He was coming to her wedding ceremony. She had been a slave when autumn began, thrown down on a mattress by farmers and soldiers and couriers with a few coins to spend.

THE WEDDING MORNING
was well advanced. They would be going to the chapel soon. The musicians would be their signal, Carullus arriving with them to escort his bride. Kasia, standing for inspection before a dancer and a chef on her marriage day, wore white—as all the wedding party and guests would—but with a bride's red silk about her waist. Shirin had given that to her last night, showed her how to knot it. Had made a sly joke, doing so. There would be more jests and bawdy songs later, Kasia knew. That much was exactly the same here in the City of Cities as it was at home in her village. Some
things didn't change no matter where you went in the world, it seemed. The red was for her maidenhead, to be lost tonight.

It had been lost, in fact, to a Karchite slaver in a northern field some time ago. Nor was the man she was to wed today a stranger to her body, though that had happened only once, the morning after Carullus had almost died defending Crispin and Scortius the charioteer from assassins in the dark.

Life did strange things to you, didn't it?

She had been going to Crispin's room that morning, unsure of what she wanted to say—or do—but had heard a woman's voice within, and paused and turned away without knocking. And had learned on the stairway from two of the soldiers about the attack in the night just ended, their comrades dead, Carullus wounded. Impulse, concern, extreme confusion, destiny—her mother would have said the last, and shaped a warding sign—had made Kasia turn after the soldiers had gone and walk back down the long upstairs hallway to knock on the tribune's door.

Carullus had opened, visibly weary, half-undressed already. She had seen the bloodstained bandage wrapped around one shoulder and across his chest, and then she'd seen and suddenly understood—she
was
the clever one, wasn't she?—the look in his eyes as he saw that it was she.

He wasn't the man who had saved her from Morax's inn and then from death in the forest, who had offered her a glimpse one dark night of what men might be like when they hadn't bought you, but he could be—she had thought, lying beside Carullus, after, in his bed— the one who saved her from the life that
followed
being saved. The old stories never talked about that part, did they?

She'd thought, as she watched the sun rise higher that morning, and heard his breathing settle as he fell into
needed sleep beside her like a child, that she might become his mistress. There were worse things in the world.

But only a little while after, even before winter began, with the midnight Ceremony of Unconquered Jad, he'd asked her to marry him.

When she'd accepted, smiling through tears he could not have properly understood, Carullus had vowed with an uplifted hand, swearing by the sexual organs of the god, that he wouldn't touch her again until their wedding night.

A promise he'd made long ago, he explained. He'd told her (more than once) about his mother and father, his childhood in Trakesia in a place not so different from her own village; he'd told of Karchite raids, his older brother's death, his own journey south to join the army of the Emperor. He talked, Carullus, quite a lot, but amusingly, and she knew now that the unexpected kindness she'd sensed in this burly, profane soldier was real. Kasia thought of her own mother, how she'd have wept to learn that her child was alive and entering into a protected life so unimaginably far away, in every respect, from their village and farm.

There was no way to send a message. The Imperial Post of Valerius II did not include farms near Karch on its customary routes. For all her mother knew, Kasia was dead by now.

For all Kasia knew, her mother and sister were.

Her new life was here, or wherever Carullus, as a tribune of the Fourth Sauradian, was posted, and Kasia— in white, with a bride's crimson girdling her waist on her wedding day—knew that she owed lifelong thanks to all the gods she could ever name for this.

‘Thank you,' she said to Shirin, who had just told her she looked beautiful, and was still gazing at her and smiling. The chef, an intense little man, seemed to be trying
not
to smile. His mouth kept twitching upwards. He had sauce on
his forehead. On impulse, Kasia used her fingers to wipe it away. He did smile then and extended his apron. She dried her fingers on it. She wondered if Crispin would be with Carullus when her husband-to-be came to bring her to the chapel, and what he might say, and what she would say, and how strange people were, that even the fairest day should not be without its sorrow.

Rustem hadn't been paying attention to where they were going, or who was around them, and he would blame himself for that later, even though it hadn't been his responsibility to look to their safety. That was why Nishik, querulous and dour, had been assigned to a travelling physician, after all.