Sailing to Sarantium

To clarify.’ ‘To clarify. Yes. Please,’ Crispin said.

‘My heart,’ Linon repeated, in his mind this time, ‘is broken.’

‘You shut up,’ Crispin replied swiftly, with undeniable satisfaction.

Linon did not address him again. Crispin was aware of the bird, though, could almost feel an affronted presence at the edge of his thoughts like a night animal beyond a spill of torchlight. He waited while Zoticus poured himself a fresh cup. Then he listened to the alchemist in careful silence while the sun reached its zenith on an autumn day in Batiara and began its descent towards the cold dark. Metals to gold, the dead to life . . .

The old pagan who could breathe into crafted birds patrician voice, sight without eyes, hearing without ears, and the presence of a soul, told him a number of things deemed needful, in the wake of the gift he’d given.

Certain other understandings Crispin obtained only afterwards.

‘She wants you, the shameless whore! Are you going to? Are you?’

Keeping his expression bland, Crispin walked beside the carried litter of the Lady Massina Baladia of Rhodias, sleekly well-bred wife of a Senator, and decided it had been a mistake to wear Linon on a thong around his neck like an ornament. The bird was going into one of his travelling bags tomorrow, on the back of the mule plodding along behind them.

‘You must be so fatigued,’ the Senator’s wife was saying, her voice honeyed with commiseration. Crispin had explained that he enjoyed walking in the open country and didn’t like horses. The first was entirely untrue, the second was not. ‘If only I had thought to bring a litter large enough to carry both of us. And one of my girls, of course . . . we couldn’t possibly ride just alone!’ The Senator’s wife tittered. Amazingly.

Her white linen chiton, wildly inappropriate for travelling, had—quite unnoticed by the lady, of course— slipped upward sufficiently to reveal a well-turned ankle. She wore a gold anklet, Crispin saw. Her feet, resting on lambswool throws within the litter, were bare this mild afternoon. The toenails were painted a deep red, almost purple. They hadn’t been yesterday, in their sandals. She’d been busy last night at the inn, or her servant had been.

‘Mice and blood, I’ll wager she reeks of scent! Does she? Crispin, does she?’

Linon had no sense of smell. Crispin elected not to reply. The lady did, as it happened, have a heady aroma of spice about her today. Her litter was sumptuous, and even the slaves carrying it and accompanying her were appreciably better garbed—in pale blue tunics and dark blue dyed sandals—than was Crispin. The rest of their party—Massina’s young female attendants, three wine merchants and their servants journeying the short distance to Mylasia and then down the coast road, a cleric continuing towards Sauradia, and two other travellers heading for the same healing medicinal waters as the lady—walked or rode mules a little ahead or behind them on the wide, well-paved road. Massina Baladia’s armed and mounted escort, also clad in that delicately pale blue—which looked significantly less appropriate on them—rode at the front and back of the column.

None of the party was from Varena itself. None had any reason to know who Crispin was. They were three days out from Varena’s walls, still in Batiara and on a busy stretch of road. They had already been forced to step onto the gravel side-path several times as companies of archers and infantry passed them on manoeuvres. There was some need for caution on this road, but not the most extreme sort. The leader of the lady’s escort gave every indication of regarding a red-bearded mosaicist as the most dangerous figure in the vicinity.

Crispin and the lady had dined together the night before, in the Imperial Posting Inn.

As a part of their careful dance with the Empire, the Antae had permitted the placement of three such inns along their own road from Sauradia’s border to the capital city of Varena, and there were others running down the coast and on the main road to Rhodias. In return, the Empire paid a certain sum of money into the Antae coffers and undertook the smooth carriage of the mails all the way to the Bassanid border in the east. The inns represented a small, subtle presence of Sarantium in the peninsula. Commerce necessitated accommodations, always.

The others in their company, lacking the necessary Imperial Permits, had made do with a rancid hostel a short distance farther back. The Lady Massina’s distant attitude to the artisan who had been trudging along in their party, lacking even a mount, had undergone a wondrous change when the Senator’s wife understood that Martinian of Varena was en titled to use the Imperial Inns, and by virtue of a Permit signed by Chancellor Gesius in Sarantium itself—where, it seemed, he was presently journeying in response to an Imperial request.

He had been invited to dine with her.

When it had also become clear to the lady, over spit-roasted capons and an acceptable local wine, that this artisan was not unfamiliar with a number of the better people in Rhodias and in the elegant coastal resort of Baiana, having done some pretty work for them, she grew positively warm in manner, going so far as to confide that her journey to the medical sanctuary was for childbearing reasons.

It was quite common, of course, she had added with a toss of her head. Indeed, some silly young things regarded it as fashionable to attend at warm springs or hospices if they were wed a season and not yet expecting. Did Martinian know that the Empress Alixana herself had made several journeys to healing shrines near Sarantium? It was hardly a secret. It had started the fashion. Of course, given the Empress’s earlier life— did he know she had changed her name, among . . . other things?—it was easy enough to speculate what bloody doings in some alley long ago had led her to be unable to give the Emperor an heir. Was it true that she dyed her hair now? Did Martinian actually know the luminaries in the Imperial Precinct? How exciting that must be.

He did not. Her disappointment was palpable, but short-lived. She seemed to have some degree of difficulty finding a place for her sandalled foot that did not encounter his ankle under the table. The capons were followed by an overly sauced fish plate with olives and a pale wine. Over the sweet cheese, figs and grapes, the lady, grown even further confiding, informed her dinner companion that it was her privy belief that the unexpected difficulties she and her august spouse were experiencing had little to do with her.

It was, she added, eyeing him in the firelight of the common room, difficult to test this, of course. She had been willing, however, to make the trip north out of too-boring Rhodias amid the colours of autumn to the well-known hospice and healing waters near Mylasia. One sometimes met—only sometimes, of course—the most interesting people when one travelled.

Did not Martinian find this to be so?

‘CHECK FOR BEDBUGS.’

‘I know that, you officious lump of metal.’ He had dined a second time tonight with the lady; they had had a third flask of wine this time. Crispin was aware of the effect of it on himself.

‘And talk to me in your head, unless you want people to assume you are mad.’

Crispin had been having difficulty with this. It was good advice. So, as it happened, was the first suggestion. Crispin held a candle over the sheets, with the blanket pulled back and managed to squash a dozen of the evil little creatures with his other hand.

‘And they call this an Imperial Posting Inn. Hah!’

Linon, Crispin had learned quite early in their journeying together, was not short of opinions or shy with regard to their expression. He could still bring himself up short in a quiet moment with the realization that he was holding extended conversations in his mind with a temperamental sparrow-like bird made of faded brown leather and tin, with eyes fashioned from blue glass, and an incongruously patrician Rhodian voice both in his head and when speaking aloud.

He had entered a different world.

He had never really stopped to consider his attitude to what men called the half-world: that space where cheiromancers and alchemists and wisewomen and astrologers claimed to be able to walk. He knew— everyone knew—that Jad’s mortal children lived in a world that they shared, dangerously, with spirits and daemons that might be indifferent to them, or malevolent, or sometimes even benign, but he had never been one of those who let his every waking moment be suffused with that awareness. He spoke his prayers at dawn, and at sunset when he remembered, though he seldom bothered to attend at a sanctuary. He lit candles on the holy days when he was near a chapel. He paid all due respect to clerics—when the respect was deserved. He believed, some of the time, that when he died his soul would be judged by Jad of the Sun and his fate in the afterlife would be determined by that judgement.

The rest of the time, of late, very privately, he remembered the unholy ugliness of the two plague summers and was deeply, even angrily unsure of such spiritual things. He would have said, if asked a few days ago, that all alchemists were frauds and that a bird such as Linon was a deception to gull rustic fools.

That, in turn, meant denying his own memories of the apple orchard, but it had been easy enough to explain away childhood terrors as trickery, an actor’s voice projection. Hadn’t they all spoken with the same voice?

They had, but it wasn’t a deception after all.

He had Zoticus’s crafted bird with him as a companion and—in principle, at least—a guardian for his journey. It sometimes seemed to him that this irascible, ludicrously touchy creature—or creation—had been with him forever.

‘I certainly didn’t end up with a mild spirit, did I?’ he remembered saying to Zoticus as he took his leave from the farmhouse that day.

‘None of them are,’ the alchemist had murmured, a little ruefully. ‘A constant regret, I assure you. Just remember the command for silence and use it when you must.’ He’d paused, then added wryly, ‘You aren’t particularly mild yourself. It may be a match.’

Crispin had said nothing to that.

He had already used the command several times. In a way it was hardly worth it . . . Linon was almost intolerably waspish after being released from darkness and silence.

‘Another wager,’ the bird said now, inwardly, ‘leave the door unlocked and you won’t sleep alone tonight.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Crispin snapped aloud. Then, recollecting himself, added silently, ‘This is a crowded Imperial Inn, she’s a Rhodian aristocrat. And,’ he added peevishly, ‘you have nothing to wager in any case, you lump of stuff.’

‘A figure of speech, imbecile. Just leave the door unbolted. You’ll see. I’ll watch for thieves.’

This, of course, was one of the benefits of having the bird, Crispin had already learned. Sleep was meaningless to Zoticus’s creation, and as long as he hadn’t silenced Linon he could be alerted to anything untoward approaching while he slept. He was irked, though, and the more so because a fabricated bird had roused his temper.

‘Why would you possibly assume you have the least understanding of a woman like that? Listen to me: she plays little games during the day or over dinner out of sheer boredom. Only a fool would regard them as more.’ He wasn’t sure why he was so irritated about this, but he was.

‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’ Linon replied. Crispin couldn’t sort out the tone this time. ‘You think boredom stops with the meal? A stable boy understands women better than you. Just keep playing with your little glass chips, imbecile, and leave these judgements to me!’

Crispin spoke the silencing command with some satisfaction, blew out his candle and went to bed, resigned to being night food for the predatory insects he’d missed. It would be much worse, he knew, at the common hostel the others in the party had been forced to continue on towards for the night. An extremely small consolation. He didn’t like travelling.

He tossed, turned, scratched where he imagined things biting him, then felt something doing so and swore. After a few moments, surprised at his own irresolution, he got up again, walked quickly across the cold floor, and slid home the bolt on the door. Then he crawled back into the bed.

He had not made love to a woman since Ilandra died.

He was still awake some time later, watching the shape of the waning blue moon slide across the window, when he heard the handle tried, then a very soft tapping at the door.

He didn’t move, or speak. The tapping came again, twice more—light, teasing. Then it stopped, and there was silence again in the autumn night. Remembering many things, Crispin watched the moon leave the window, trailing stars, and finally fell asleep.

HE WOKE TO MORNING noises in the yard below. In the moment he opened his eyes, surfacing from some lost dream, he had a swift, sure realization about Zoticus’s bird, and some wonder that it had taken him so long.