Sailing to Sarantium

Gisel of the Antae did not expect to see the wildflowers return in spring, or watch the midsummer bonfires burn upon the hills. She was nineteen years old, but queens were not, in truth, allowed to be so young.

Chapter II

When Crispin was a boy and free for a day in the way that only boys in summer can be free he had walked outside the city walls one morning and, after throwing stones in a stream for a time, had passed by a walled orchard universally reported among the young Varenans to belong to a spirit-haunted country house where unholy things happened after dark.

The sun was shining. In an effusion of youthful bravado, Crispin had climbed the rough stone wall, leaped across into a tree, sat down on a stout branch among the leaves and begun eating apples. He was heart-poundingly proud of himself and wondering how he’d prove he’d done this to his sure-to-be-sceptical friends. He decided to carve his initials—a newly learned skill—on the tree trunk, and dare the others to come see them.

He received, a moment later, the deepest fright of his young life.

It used to wake him at night sometimes, the memory having turned into a dream he’d have even as an adult, a husband, a father. In fact, he had managed to persuade himself that it mostly had been a dream, spun out of overly vivid childhood anxieties, the blazing midday heat, almost-ripe apples eaten too quickly. It had to have been a child’s fantasy, breeding ground of nightmare.

Birds did not talk.

More particularly, they did not discuss with each other from tree to tree, in the identically bored tones and timbre of an overbred Rhodian aristocrat, which eye of a trespassing boy should be pecked out and consumed first, or how the emptied eye sockets might then offer easy access to slithery morsels of brain matter within.

Caius Crispus, eight years old and blessed or cursed with an intensely visual imagination, had not lingered to further investigate this remarkable phenomenon of nature. There seemed to be several birds in animated colloquy about him, half hidden in the leaves and branches. He dropped three apples, spat out the half-chewed pulp of another, and leaped wildly back to the wall, scraping an elbow raw, bruising a shin, and then doing himself further damage when he landed badly on the baked summer grass by the path.

As he sprinted back, not quite screaming, towards Varena, he heard sardonic crowing laughter behind him.

Or he did in his dreams, after, at any rate.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, walking the same road south of the city, Crispin was thinking about the power of memories, the way they had of coming back so fiercely and unexpectedly. A scent could do it, the sound of rushing water, the sight of a stone wall beside a path.

He was remembering that day in the tree, and the recollection of terror took him a little further back, to the image of his mother’s face when the reserves of the urban militia returned from that same year’s spring campaign against the Inicii and his father was not with them.

Horius Crispus the mason had been a vivid, well-liked man, respected and successful in his craft and business. His only surviving son struggled, however, to shape a clear mental picture, after all these years, of the man who had gone marching north to the border and beyond into Ferrieres, red-bearded, smiling, easy-striding. He’d been too young when the militia’s deputy commander had come to their door with his father’s nondescript shield and sword.

He could remember a beard that scratched when he kissed his father’s cheek, blue eyes—his own eyes, people said—and the big, capable hands, scarred and always scratched. A big voice, too, that went soft within the house, near Crispin or his small, scented mother. He had these . . . fragments, these elements, but when he tried to pull them together in his mind to create a whole it somehow slipped away, the way the man had slipped away too soon.

He had stories to go by: from his mother, her brothers, sometimes his own patrons, many of whom remembered Horius Crispus well. And he could study his father’s steady, incisive work in houses and chapels, graveyards and public buildings all over Varena. But he couldn’t cling to any memory of a face that did not blur into an absence. For a man who lived for image and colour—who flourished in the realm of sight—this was hard.

Or it had been hard. Time passing did complex things, to deepen a wound or to heal it. Even, sometimes, to overlay it with another that had felt as if it would kill.

It was a beautiful morning. The wind was behind him, the coming winter in it, but crisp rather than cold while the sun shone, sweeping the mist from the eastern forests and hills to west and farther south. He was alone on the road. Not always a safe thing, but he felt no danger now, and he could see a long way in the open country south of the city—almost to the rim of the world, it seemed.

Behind him, when he glanced back, Varena gleamed, bronze domes, red roof-tiles, the city walls nearly white in the morning light. A hawk circled above its own warning shadow on the stubble of the fields east of the road. The harvested vines on the slopes ahead looked derelict and bare, but the grapes were inside the city, being made into wine even now. Queen Gisel, efficient in this as in many things, had ordered that city labourers and slaves join in the grain and grape harvests, to cover—as much as possible—the loss of so many people to the plague. The first festivals would be beginning soon, in Varena and in smaller villages everywhere, leading up to the wildness of Dykania’s three nights. It would be difficult, though, to shape a truly festive mood this autumn, Crispin thought. Or perhaps he was wrong about that. Perhaps festivals were more important after what had happened. Perhaps they were more uninhibited in the presence of death.

As he walked, he could see abandoned farmhouses and outbuildings on both sides of the country path. The rich farmland and vineyards around Varena were all very well, but they needed men to sow and reap and tend, and too many labourers were buried in the mass graves. The coming winter would be hard.

Even with these thoughts, it was difficult to remain grim this morning. Light nurtured him, as did clean, sharp colours, and the day was offering both. He wondered if he’d ever be able to create a forest with the browns and reds and golds and the late, deep green of the one he could see now beyond the bare fields. With tesserae worthy of the name, and perhaps a sanctuary dome designed with windows enough and—by the god’s grace—good, clear glass for those windows, he might. He might.

In Sarantium these things were to be found, men said. In Sarantium, everything on earth was to be found, from death to heart’s desire, men said.

He was going, it seemed. Sailing to Sarantium. Walking, actually, for it was too late in the year for a ship, but the old saying spoke of change, not a means of travel. His life was branching, taking him towards whatever might come on the road or at journey’s end.

His life. He had a life. The hardest thing was to accept that, it sometimes seemed. To move out from the rooms where a woman and two children had died in ugly pain, stripped of all inherent dignity or grace; to allow brightness to touch him again, like this gift of the morning sun.

In that moment, he felt like a child again himself, seeing a remembered stone wall come into view as the path curved and approached it. Half amused, half genuinely unsettled, Crispin added a few more inward curses to his emergent litany against Martinian, who had insisted that he make this visit.

It seemed that Zoticus, the alchemist, much consulted by farmers, the childless and the lovelorn, and even royalty on occasion, dwelled in the selfsame substantial farmhouse with an attached apple orchard where an eight-year-old boy had heard birds discussing with well-bred anticipation the consumption of his eyeballs and brain matter.

‘I will send to tell him to expect you,’ Martinian had said with firmness. ‘He knows more useful things than any man I know, and you are a fool if you undertake a journey like this without first speaking with Zoticus. Besides, he makes wonderful herbal infusions.’

‘I don’t like herbal infusions.’

‘Crispin,’ Martinian had said warningly. And had given directions.

And so here he was, cloaked against the wind, pacing alongside the rough stones of the wall, booted feet tracing the vanished, long-ago bare footsteps of a child who had gone out from the city alone one summer’s day to escape the sorrow in his house.

He was alone now, too. Birds flitted from branch to bough on both sides of the road. He watched them. The hawk was gone. A brown hare, too exposed, made swift, deliberately jerky progress across the field on his left. A cloud swept across the sun and its elongated shadow raced over the same field. The hare froze when the shadow reached it and then hurtled erratically forward again as light returned.

On the other side of the road the wall marched beside him, well built, well maintained, of heavy grey stones. Ahead, he could see the gateway to the farmyard, a marker stone opposite it. Unused though it now was, this had been a road laid down in the great days of the Rhodian Empire. In no great distance—a morning’s steady walking—it met the high road that ran all the way to Rhodias itself and beyond, to the southern sea at the end of the peninsula. As a child, Crispin used to enjoy the sensation of being on the same road as someone gazing into those distant ocean waters.

He stopped for a moment, looking at the wall. He had climbed it easily that morning long ago. There were still apples in the trees beyond. Crispin pursed his lips, weighing a thought. This was not a time to be duelling with childhood memories, he told himself sternly, repressively. He was a grown man, a respected, well-known artisan, a widower. Sailing to Sarantium.

With a small, resolute shrug of his shoulders, Crispin dropped the package he was carrying—a gift from Martinian’s wife for the alchemist—onto the brown grass beside the path. Then he stepped across the small ditch, pushed a hand through his hair, and proceeded to climb the wall again.

Not all skills were lost to the years, and it seemed he wasn’t so old after all. Pleased with his own agility, he swung one knee up, then the other, stood on the wide, uneven top of the wall, balanced, and then stepped—only boys leaped—across to a good branch. He found a comfortable spot, sat down and, pausing to be judicious, reached up and picked an apple.

He was surprised to find his heart was racing.

He knew that if they saw this, his mother and Martinian and half a dozen others would be performing a collective rueful headshake like the Chorus in one of those seldom-performed tragedies of the ancient Trakesian poets. Everyone said Crispin did things merely because he knew that he shouldn’t do them. A perversity of behaviour, his mother called it.

Perhaps. He didn’t think so, himself. The apple was ripe. Tasty, he decided.

He dropped it onto the grass among fallen ones for the small animals and stood up to cross back to the wall. No need to be greedy or childish. He’d proven his point, felt curiously pleased with himself. Settled a score with his youth, in a way.

‘Some people never learn, do they?’

One foot on a branch, one on top of the wall, Crispin looked down very quickly. Not a bird, not an animal, not a spirit of the half-world of air and shadow. A man with a full beard and unfashionably long grey hair stood in the orchard below, gazing up at him, leaning on a staff, foreshortened by the angle.

Flushing, acutely embarrassed, Crispin mumbled, ‘They used to say this orchard was haunted. I . . . wanted to test myself.’

‘And did you pass your test?’ the old man—Zoticus, beyond doubt—queried gently.

‘I suppose.’ Crispin stepped across to the wall. ‘The apple was good.’

‘As good as they were all those years ago?’

‘Hard to remember. I really don’t—’

Crispin stopped. A prickling of fear.

‘How do . . . how did you know I was here? Back then?’ ‘You are Caius Crispus, I presume? Martinian’s friend.’

Crispin decided to sit down on the wall. His legs felt oddly weak. ‘I am. I have a gift for you. From his wife.’

‘Carissa. Splendid woman! A neckwarmer, I do hope. I find I need them now, as winter comes. Old age. A terrible thing, let me tell you. How did I know you were here before? Silly question. Come down. Do you like mint leaves in an infusion?’