Sailing to Sarantium

In the good weather Pardos was outside at the oven making quicklime for the setting bed. The heat of the fire was pleasant when the wind picked up, and he liked being in the sanctuary yard. The presence of the dead under their headstones didn’t frighten him, or not in daylight at any rate. Jad had ordained that man would die. War and plague were part of the world the god had made. Pardos didn’t understand why, but he had no expectation of understanding. The clerics, even when they disagreed about doctrine or burned each other over Heladikos, all taught submission and faith, not a vainglorious attempt to comprehend. Pardos knew he wasn’t wise enough to be vain or to comprehend.

Beyond the graven, sculpted headstones of the named dead, a dark earth mound rose—no grass there yet—at the northern end of the yard. Beneath it lay bodies claimed by the plague. It had come two years ago and then again last summer, killing in numbers too great for anything but mass burial by slaves taken in war. There was lime ash in there, too, and some other elements mixed in. They were said to help contain the bitter spirits of the dead and what had killed them. It was certainly keeping the grass from coming back. The queen had ordered three court cheiromancers and an old alchemist who lived outside the walls to cast binding spells as well. One did all the things one could think to do in the aftermath of plague, whatever the clerics or the High Patriarch might say about pagan magics.

Pardos fumbled for his sun disk and gave thanks for being alive. He watched the black smoke of the lime kiln rise up towards the white, swift clouds, and noted the autumn reds and golds of the forest to the east. Birds were singing in the blue sky and the grass was green, though shading to brown near the sanctuary building itself where the afternoon light failed in the shadow of the new walls.

Colours, all around him in the world. Crispin had told him, over and over, to make himself see the colours. To think about them, how they played against each other and with each other; to consider what happened when a cloud crossed the sun—as now—and the grass darkened beneath him. What would he name that hue in his mind? How would he use it? In a marinescape? A hunting scene? A mosaic of Heladikos rising above an autumn forest towards the sun? Look at the grass—now!—before the light returned. Picture that colour in glass and stone tesserae. Embed it in memory, so you could embed it in lime and make a mosaic world on a wall or a dome.

Assuming, of course, there ever emerged a glassworks again in conquered Batiara where they made reds and blues and greens worthy of a name, instead of the muddied, bubbled, streaked excrescences they’d received in the morning shipment from Rhodias.

Martinian, a calm man and perhaps prepared for this, had only sighed when the urgently awaited sheets of new glass were unwrapped. Crispin had foamed into one of his notorious, blasphemous rages and smashed the topmost dirty brown sheet of what was supposed to be red, cutting one hand. ‘This is red! Not that dungheap colour!’ he had shouted, letting drops of his blood fall on the brownish sheet.

He could be entertaining in his fury, actually, unless you happened to be the one who had given him cause to lose his temper. When they had their beer and crusts of bread at lunch, or walking back towards Varena’s walls at sunset after work, the labourers and apprentices would trade stories of things Crispin had said and done when angry. Martinian had told the apprentices that Crispin was brilliant and a great man; Pardos wondered if a temper came with that.

He’d had some shockingly inventive ideas this morning for how to deal with the glassworks steward. Pardos himself would never have been able to even conceive of broken shards being inserted and applied in the ways Crispin had proposed, swearing violently even though they were on consecrated ground.

Martinian, ignoring his younger partner, had set about accepting and discarding sheets, eyeing them with care, sighing now and again. They simply couldn’t reject them all. For one thing, there was little chance of better quality in replacements. For another, they were working against time, with a formal re-burial and a ceremony for King Hildric planned by his daughter the queen for the first day after the Dykania Festival. It would take place here in the newly expanded sanctuary they were decorating now. It was already mid-autumn, the grapes harvested. The roads south were muddy after last week’s rains. The chances of getting new glass sent up from Rhodias in time were too slim even to be considered.

Martinian was, as usual, visibly resigned to the situation. They would have to make do. Pardos knew that Crispin was as aware of this as his partner. He just had his temper. And getting things right mattered to him. Perhaps too much so, in the imperfect world Jad had made as his mortal children’s dwelling place. Pardos the apprentice made a quick sign of the sun disk again and stoked the kiln, keeping it as hot as he could. He stirred the mixture inside with a long shovel. This would not be a good day to become distracted and let the setting lime emerge faulty.

Crispin had imaginative uses for broken glass on his mind.

So attentive was he to the lime mixture cooking in the oven that Pardos actually jumped when a voice— speaking awkwardly accented Rhodian—addressed him. He turned quickly, and saw a lean, red-faced man in the grey and white colours of the Imperial Post. The courier’s horse grazed behind him near the gate. Belatedly, Pardos became aware that the other apprentices and labourers working outside the sanctuary had stopped and were looking over this way. Imperial Couriers from Sarantium did not appear in their midst with any frequency at all.

‘Are you hard of hearing?’ the man said waspishly. He had a recent wound on his chin. The eastern accent was pronounced. ‘I said my name is Tilliticus. Sarantine Imperial Post. I’m looking for a man named Martinian. An artisan. They said he’d be here.’

Pardos, intimidated, could only gesture towards the sanctuary. Martinian, as it happened, was asleep on his stool in the doorway, his much-abused hat pulled over his eyes to block the afternoon sunlight.

‘Deaf and mute. I see,’ said the courier. He clumped off through the grass towards the building.

‘I’m not,’ said Pardos, but so softly he wasn’t heard. Behind the courier’s back, he flapped urgently at two of the other apprentices, trying to signal them to wake Martinian before this unpleasant man appeared in front of him.

HE HAD NOT BEEN ASLEEP. From his favourite position— on a pleasant day, at any rate—in the sanctuary entrance, Martinian of Varena had noticed the courier riding up from a distance. Grey and white showed clearly against green and blue in sunlight.

He and Crispin had used that concept, in fact, for a row of Blessed Victims on the long walls of a private chapel in Baiana years ago. It had been only a partial success—at night, by candlelight, the effect was not what Crispin had hoped it would be—but they’d learned a fair bit, and learning from errors was what mosaic work was about, as Martinian was fond of telling the apprentices. If the patrons had had enough money to light the chapel properly at night, it might have been different, but they’d known the resources when they made their design. It was their own fault. One always had to work within the constraints of time and money. That, too, was a lesson to be learned—and taught.

He watched the courier stop by Pardos at the lime kiln and he tipped his hat forward over his eyes, feigning sleep. He felt a peculiar apprehension. No idea why. And he was never able to give an adequate explanation afterwards, even to himself, as to why he did what he did next that autumn afternoon, altering so many lives forever. Sometimes the god entered a man, the clerics taught. And sometimes daemons or spirits did. There were powers in the half-world, beyond the grasp of mortal men.

He was to tell his learned friend Zoticus, over a mint infusion some days later, that it had had to do with feeling old that day. A week of steady rain had caused his finger joints to swell painfully. That wasn’t really it, however. He was hardly so weak as to let such a thing lead him into so much folly. But he truly didn’t know why he’d chosen— with no premeditation whatsoever—to deny being himself.

Did a man always understand his own actions? He would ask Zoticus that as they sat together in the alchemist’s farmhouse. His friend would give him a predictable reply and refill his cup with the infusion, mixed with something to ease the ache in his hands. The unpleasant courier would be long gone by then, to wherever his postings had taken him. And Crispin, too, would be gone.

Martinian of Varena feigned sleep as the easterner with the nose and cheekbones of a drinker approached him and rasped, ‘You! Wake! I’m looking for a man named Martinian. An Imperial Summons to Sarantium!’

He was loud, arrogant as all Sarantines seemed to be when they came to Batiara, his words thick with the accent. Everyone heard him. He meant for them to hear him. Work stopped inside the sanctuary being expanded to properly house the bones of King Hildric of the Antae, dead of the plague a little more than a year ago.

Martinian pretended to rouse himself from an afternoon doze in the autumn light. He blinked owlishly up at the Imperial Courier, and then pointed a stiff finger into the sanctuary—and up towards his longtime friend and colleague Caius Crispus. Crispin was just then attempting the task of making muddy brown tesserae appear like the brilliant glowing of Heladikos’s sacred fire, high up on a scaffold under the dome.

Even as he pointed, Martinian wondered at himself. A summons? To the City? And he was playing the games of a boy? No one here would give him away to an arrogant Sarantine, but even so . . .

In the stillness that ensued, a voice they all knew was suddenly heard overhead with unfortunate clarity. The resonance of sound happened to be very good in this sanctuary.

‘By Heladikos’s cock, I will carve slices from his rump with his useless glass and force feed him his own buttocks in segments, I swear by holy Jad!’

The courier looked affronted.

‘That’s Martinian,’ said Martinian helpfully. ‘Up there. He’s in a temper.’

IN FACT, HE REALLY wasn’t any more. The blasphemous vulgarity was almost reflexive. Sometimes he said things, and wasn’t even aware he was speaking aloud, when a technical challenge engaged him entirely. At the moment, he was obsessed, in spite of himself, with the problem of how to make the torch of Heladikos gleam red when he had nothing that was red with which to work. If he’d had some gold he could have sandwiched the glass against a gold backing and warmed the hue that way, but gold for mosaic was a fatuous dream here in Batiara after the wars and the plague.

He’d had an idea, however. Up on the high scaffold, Caius Crispus of Varena was setting reddish-veined marble from Pezzelana flat into the soft, sticky lime coat on the dome, interspersed with the best of the tesserae they’d managed to salvage from the miserable sheets of glass. The glass pieces he laid at angles in the setting bed, to catch and reflect the light.

If he was right, the effect would be a shimmer and dance along the tall shape of the flame, the flat stones mingled with the tilted, glinting tesserae. Seen from below, it ought to have that result in sunlight through the windows around the base of the dome, or by the light of the wall candles and the suspended iron lanterns running the length of the sanctuary. The young queen had assured Martinian that her bequest to the clerics here would ensure evening and winter lighting. Crispin had no reason to disbelieve her—it was her father’s tomb, and the Antae had had a cult of ancestor-worship, only thinly masked by their conversion to the Jaddite faith.

He had a cloth knotted around the cut in his left hand, and that made him awkward. He dropped a good stone, watched it fall a long way and swore again, reaching for another one. The setting bed was beginning to harden beneath the flame and torch he was filling in. He would have to work faster. The torch was silver. They were using whitish marble and some river-smooth stones for that—it ought to work. He’d heard that in the east they had a way of frosting glass to make an almost pure white tessera like snow, and that mother-of-pearl was available, for crowns and jewellery. He didn’t even like thinking about such things. It only frustrated him, here in the west amid ruins.

As it happened, these were his thoughts in the precise moment when the irritated, carrying eastern voice from below penetrated his concentration and his life. A coincidence, or the heard accents of Sarantium carrying his mind sailing that way towards the celebrated channel and the inner sea and the gold and silver and silk of the Emperor?

He looked down.

Someone, short as a snail from this height, was addressing him as Martinian. This would have been merely vexing had Martinian himself—by the doorway, as was usual at this hour—not also been gazing up at Crispin as the easterner barked the wrong name, disturbing all the work in the sanctuary.

Crispin bit back two obscene retorts and then a third response which was to direct the imbecile in the right direction. Something was afoot. It might only be a jibe directed at the courier—though that would be unlike his partner—or it might be something else.

He’d deal with it later.

‘I’ll be down when I’m done,’ he called, much more politely than the circumstances warranted. ‘Go pray for someone’s immortal soul in the meantime. Do it quietly.’

The red-faced man shouted, ‘Imperial Couriers are not kept waiting, you vulgar provincial! There is a letter for you!’

Interesting as this undoubtedly was, Crispin found it easy to ignore him. He wished he had some red vivid as the courier’s cheeks, mind you. Even from this height they showed crimson. It occurred to him that he’d never tried to achieve that effect on a face in mosaic. He slotted the idea among all the others and returned to creating the holy flame given as a gift to mankind, working with what he had.

HAD HIS INSTRUCTIONS NOT been unfortunately specific, Tilliticus would simply have dropped the packet on the dusty, debris-strewn floor of the shabby little sanctuary, reeking with the worst Heladikian heresy, and stormed out.

Men did not come—even here in Batiara—in their own slow time to receive an invitation from the Imperial Precinct in Sarantium. They raced over, ecstatic. They knelt. They embraced the knees of the courier. Once, someone had kissed his muddy, dung-smeared boots, weeping for joy.

And they most certainly offered the courier largess for being the bearer of such exalted, dazzling tidings.

Watching the ginger-haired man named Martinian finally descend from his scaffolding and walk deliberately across the floor towards him, Pronobius Tilliticus understood that his boots were not about to be kissed. Nor was any sum of money likely to be proffered him in gratitude.

It only confirmed his opinion of Batiara under the Antae. They might be Jad-worshippers, if barely, and they might be formal tributary allies of the Empire in a relationship brokered by the High Patriarch in Rhodias, and they might have conquered this peninsula a century ago and rebuilt some of the walls they had levelled then, but they were still barbarians.

And they had infected with their uncouth manners and heresies even those native-born descendants of the Rhodian Empire who had a claim to honour.

The man Martinian’s hair was actually an offensively bright red, Tilliticus saw. Only the dust and lime in it and in his untidy beard softened the hue. His eyes, unsoftened, were a hard, extremely unpleasant blue. He wore a nondescript, stained tunic over wrinkled brown leggings. He was a big man, and he carried himself in a coiled, angry way that was quite unappealing. His hands were large, and there was a bloodstained bandage wrapped around one of them.

He’s in a temper, the fool by the doorway had said. The fool was still on his stool, watching the two of them from beneath something misshapen that might once have been a hat. The deaf and mute apprentice had wandered in by now, along with all the others from outside. It ought to have been a splendid, resonant moment for Tilliticus to make his proclamation, to graciously accept the artisan’s stammering gratitude on behalf of the Chancellor and the Imperial Post, and then head for the best inn Varena could offer with some coins to spend on mulled wine and a woman.

‘And so? I’m here. What is it you want?’