Sailing to Sarantium

‘His eternal Light upon you.’ And for the first time ever, Valerius the Trakesian made the Imperial sign of blessing over another man.

His nephew knelt, touched forehead to floor three times, palms flat beside his head, then rose and walked out, calm as ever, unchanged though all had changed.

Valerius, Emperor of Sarantium, successor to Saranios the Great who had built the City, and to a line of Emperors after him, and before him in Rhodias, stretching back almost six hundred years, stood alone in an elegant chamber where oil lanterns hung from the ceiling and were set in brackets on the walls and where half a hundred candles burned extravagantly. His bedroom for tonight was somewhere nearby. He wasn’t sure where. He wasn’t familiar with this palace. The Count of the Excubitors had never had reason to enter here. He looked around the room. There was a tree near the courtyard window, made of beaten gold, with mechanical birds in the branches. They glittered in the flickering light with jewels and semi-precious stones. He supposed they sang, if one knew the trick. The tree was gold. It was entirely of gold. He drew a breath.

He went to the sideboard and poured himself a flask of ale. He sipped, then smiled. Honest Trakesian brew. Trust Petrus. It occurred to him that he should have clapped hands for a slave or Imperial officer, but such things slowed matters down and he had a thirst. He’d a right to one. It had been a day of days, as the soldiers said. Petrus had spoken true—he was entitled to an evening without further planning or tasks. Jad knew, there would be enough to deal with in the days to come. For one thing, certain people would have to be killed—if they weren’t dead already. He didn’t know the names of the men who’d wielded that liquid fire in the City—he didn’t want to know—but they couldn’t live.

He walked from the sideboard and sank down into a deep-cushioned, high-backed chair. The fabric was silk. He’d had little experience of silk in his life. He traced the material with a calloused finger. It was soft, smooth. It was . . . silken. Valerius grinned to himself. He liked it. So many years a soldier, nights on stony ground, in bitter winter or the southern desert storms. He stretched out his booted feet, drank deeply again, wiped his lip with the back of a scarred, heavy hand. He closed his eyes, drank again. He decided he wanted his boots removed. Carefully, he placed the ale flask on an absurdly delicate three-legged ivory table. He sat up very straight, took a deep breath and then clapped his hands three times, the way Apius—Jad guard his soul!—used to do.

Three doors burst open on the instant.

A score of people sprang into the room and flung themselves prostrate on the floor in obeisance. He saw Gesius and Adrastus, then the Quaestor of the Sacred Palace, the Urban Prefect, the Count of the Imperial Bedchamber—Hilarinus, whom he didn’t trust—the Quaestor of Imperial Revenue. All the highest officers of the Empire. Flattened before him on a green and blue mosaic floor of sea creatures and sea flowers.

In the ensuing stillness, one of the mechanical birds began to sing. Valerius the Emperor laughed aloud.

Very late that same night, the sea wind having long since died to a breath, most of the City asleep, but some not so. Among these, the Holy Order of the Sleepless Ones in their austere chapels, who believed—with fierce and final devotion—that all but a handful of them had to be constantly awake and at prayer through the whole of the night while Jad in his solar chariot negotiated his perilous journey through blackness and bitter ice beneath the world.

The bakers, too, were awake and at work, preparing the bread that was the gift of the Empire to all who dwelt in glorious Sarantium. In winter the glowing ovens would draw people from the darkness seeking warmth— beggars, cripples, streetwalkers, those evicted from their homes and those too new to the Holy City to have found shelter yet. They would move on to the glassmakers and the metalsmiths when the grey, cold day came.

In broiling summer now, the nearly naked bakers worked and swore at their ovens, slick with sweat, quaffing watery beer all night, no attendants at their doors save the rats, scurrying from cast light into shadow.

Torches burning on the better streets proclaimed the houses of the wealthy, and the tread and cry of the Urban Prefect’s men warned the illicit to take a certain care elsewhere in the night city. The roaming bands of wilder partisans—Green and Blue each had their violent cadres—tended to ignore the patrols, or, more properly, a lone patrol was inclined to be prudently discreet when the flamboyantly garbed and barbered partisans careened into sight from one tavern or another.

Women, save for the ones who sold themselves or patricians in litters with armed escorts, were not abroad after dark.

This night, however, all the taverns—even the filthiest cauponae where sailors and slaves drank—were closed in response to an Imperial death and an Emperor acclaimed. The shocking events of the day seemed to have subdued even the partisans. No shouting, drunken youths in the loose, eastern clothing of Bassania and the hair-styling of western barbarians could be seen—or heard—slewing through empty streets.

A horse neighed in one of the faction stables by the Hippodrome, and a woman’s voice could be heard through an open window over a colonnade nearby, singing the refrain of a song that was not at all devout. A man laughed, and then the woman did, and then there was silence there, too. The high screech of a cat in a laneway. A child cried. Children always cried in the darkness, somewhere. The world was what it was.

The god’s sun passed in its chariot through ice and past howling daemons under the world. The two moons worshipped—perversely—as goddesses by the Kindath had both set, over west into the wide sea. Only the stars, which no one claimed as holy, shone like strewn diamonds over the city Saranios had founded to be the New Rhodias, and to be more than Rhodias had ever been.

‘Oh City, City, ornament of the earth, eye of the world, glory of Jad’s creation, will I die before I see you again?’

So, Lysurgos Matanias, posted as ambassador to the Bassanid court two hundred years past, longing in his heart for Sarantium even amid the luxurious eastern splendours of Kabadh. Oh City, City.

In all the lands ruled by that City, with its domes and its bronze and golden doors, its palaces and gardens and statues, forums and theatres and colonnades, bathhouses and shops and guildhalls, taverns and whorehouses and sanctuaries and the great Hippodrome, its triple landward walls that had never yet been breached, and its deep, sheltered harbour and the guarded and guarding seas, there was a timeworn phrase that had the same meaning in every tongue and every dialect.

To say of a man that he was sailing to Sarantium was to say that his life was on the cusp of change: poised for emergent greatness, brilliance, fortune—or else at the very precipice of a final and absolute fall as he met something too vast for his capacity.

Valerius the Trakesian had become an Emperor.

Heladikos, whom some worshipped as the son of Jad and placed in mosaic upon holy domes, had died in his chariot bringing fire back from the sun.

PART ONE

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork . . .

Chapter I

The Imperial Post, along with most of the civil positions in the Sarantine Empire after Valerius I died and his nephew, having renamed himself appropriately, took the Golden Throne, was under the hegemony of the Master of Offices.

The immensely complex running of the mails—from the recently conquered Majriti deserts and Esperana in the far west to the long, always-shifting Bassanid border in the east, and from the northern wildernesses of Karch and Moskav to the deserts of Soriyya and beyond—required a substantial investment of manpower and resources, and no little requisitioning of labour and horses from those rural communities dubiously honoured by having an Imperial Posting Inn located in or near them.

The position of Imperial Courier, charged with the actual carrying of the public mails and court documents, paid only modestly well and involved an almost endless regimen of hard travelling, sometimes through uncertain territory, depending on barbarian or Bassanid activity in a given season. The fact that such positions were avidly solicited, with all the associated bribes, was a reflection of where the position might lead after a few years more than anything else.

The couriers of the Imperial Post were expected to be part-time spies for the Quaestor of Imperial Intelligence, and diligent labour in this unspoken part of the job— coupled with rather more of the associated bribes—might see a man appointed to the intelligence service directly, with more risks, less far-ranging travel, and significantly higher recompense. Along with a chance to be on the receiving end, at last, of some of the bribes changing hands.

As one’s declining years approached, an appointment from Intelligence back to, say, running a substantial Posting Inn could actually lead to a respectable retirement—especially if one was clever, and the Inn far enough from the City to permit rather more watering of wine and an enhancing of revenues by accepting travellers without the required Permits.

The position of courier was, in short, a legitimate career path for a man with sufficient means to make a start but not enough to be launched by his family in anything more promising.

This, as it happened, was a fair description of the competence and background of Pronobius Tilliticus. Born with an unfortunately amusing name (a frequently cursed legacy of his mother’s grandfather and his mother’s unfamiliarity with current army vernacular), with limited skill at law or numbers, and only a modest paternal niche in Sarantine hierarchies, Tilliticus had been told over and again how fortunate he was to have had his mother’s cousin’s aid in securing a courier’s position. His obese cousin, soft rump securely spread on a bench among the clerks in the Imperial Revenue office, had been foremost of those to make this observation at family gatherings.

Tilliticus had been obliged to smile and agree. Many times. He had a gathering-prone family.

In such an oppressive context—his mother was now constantly demanding he choose a useful wife—it was sometimes a relief to leave Sarantium. And now he was on the roads again with a packet of letters, bound for the barbarian Antae’s capital city of Varena in Batiara and points en route. He also carried one particular Imperial Packet that came—unusually—directly from the Chancellor himself, with the elaborate Seal of that office, and instructions from the eunuchs to make this delivery with some ceremony.

An important artisan of some kind, he was given to understand. The Emperor was rebuilding the Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom. Artisans were being summoned to the City from all over the Empire and beyond. It irked Tilliticus: barbarians and rustic provincials were receiving formal invitations and remuneration on a level three or four times his own to participate in this latest Imperial folly.

In early autumn on the good roads north and then west through Trakesia it was hard to preserve an angry mien, however. Even Tilliticus found the weather lifting his spirits. The sun shone mildly overhead. The northern grain had been harvested, and on the slopes as he turned west the vineyards were purple with ripening grapes. Just looking at them gave him a thirst. The Posting Inns on this road were well known to him and they seldom cheated couriers. He lingered a few days at one of them (Let the damned paint-dauber wait for his summons a little!) and feasted on spit-roasted fox, stuffed fat with grapes. A girl he remembered seemed also to enthusiastically remember him. The innkeeper did charge double the price for her exclusive services, but Tilliticus knew he was doing it and saw that as one of the perquisites of a position he dreamed of for himself.

On the last night, however, the girl asked him to take her away, which was simply ridiculous.

Tilliticus refused indignantly and—abetted by a quantity of scarcely watered wine—offered her a lecture about his mother’s family’s lineage. He exaggerated only slightly; with a country prostitute it was hardly required. She didn’t seem to take the chiding with particular good grace and in the morning, riding away, Tilliticus considered whether his affections had been misplaced.

A few days later he was certain they had been. Urgent medical circumstances dictated a short detour north and a further delay of several days at a well-known Hospice of Galinus, where he was treated for the genital infection she had given him.

They bled him, purged him with something that emptied his bowels and stomach violently, made him ingest various unpleasant liquids, shaved his groin, and daubed on a burning, foul-smelling black ointment twice a day. He was instructed to eat only bland foods and to refrain from sexual congress and wine for an unnatural length of time.

Hospices were expensive, and this one, being celebrated, was particularly so. Tilliticus was forced to bribe the chief administrator to record his stay as being for injuries incurred in the course of duties—or else he’d have had to pay for the visit out of his own pocket.

Well, a crab-infested chit in a Posting Inn was an injury incurred in the Emperor’s service, wasn’t it? This way, the administrator could bill the Imperial Post directly—and he would no doubt add to the tally half a dozen treatments Tilliticus hadn’t received and designate those sums for his own purse.

Tilliticus left a stiff letter addressed to the innkeeper four days’ ride back, to be delivered by the next eastbound courier. Let the bitch hump for slaves and farmhands in an alley back of a caupona if she wasn’t going to keep herself clean. The Posting Inns on the roads of the Empire were the finest in the world, and Pronobius Tilliticus regarded it as a positive duty to make sure she was gone when next he rode through.

He was in the service of the Sarantine Emperor. These things re flected directly upon the majesty and prestige of Valerius II and his glorious Empress Alixana. The fact that the Empress had been bought and used in her youth in exactly the same way as the chit in the inn was not a matter for open discussion at this stage in the world’s progression. A man was allowed his thoughts, however. They couldn’t kill you for thinking things.

He lasted a part of the prescribed period of abstinence, but a tavern he knew too well in Megarium, the port city and administrative centre of western Sauradia, proved predictably tempting. He didn’t remember any of the girls this time round but they were all lively enough, and the wine was good. Megarium had a reputation for decent wine, however barbaric the rest of Sauradia might be.

An unfortunate incident involving jests about his name—made one night by a loutish apprentice and a trader in Heladikian icons—left him with a gashed chin and a twisted shoulder that called for further medical treatment and a longer stay than anticipated in the tavern. The stay became less than pleasant after the first few days because it appeared that two of the once-willing girls had contracted an affliction unfortunately similar to the one he was to have been cured of by now, and they made no secret about blaming Tilliticus.

They didn’t throw him out, of course—he was an Imperial Courier, and the girls were bodies-for-sale, one of them a slave—but his food tended to arrive cold or overcooked after that, and no one rushed to help a man with an awkward shoulder manage his plates and flasks. Tilliticus was feeling seriously hard done by when he finally decided he was well enough to resume his journey. The tavern-keeper, a Rhodian by birth, gave him mail for relatives in Varena. Tilliticus tossed it in a midden-heap by the harbour.

It was much later in the autumn than it should have been by then and the rains had come. He caught one of the last of the small ships tacking west across the bay to the Batiaran port of Mylasia and docked in a cold, driving rain, having emptied his guts over the ship’s railing several times. Tilliticus had little love for the sea.

The city of Varena—where the barbaric, still half-pagan Antae who had sacked Rhodias a hundred years ago and conquered all Batiara held their wretched little court— was three days’ ride farther west, two if he hurried. He had not the least interest in hurrying. Tilliticus waited out the rain, drinking morosely by the harbour. His injuries allowed him to do that, he decided. This had been a very difficult run. His shoulder still hurt.

And he had liked that girl in Trakesia.