Sailing to Sarantium

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Crispin closed his eyes for a moment in the brilliance of the day, and just then—without any warning at all, like a flung spear or a sudden shaft of light—an image came to him. Whole and vast and unforgettable, completely unexpected, a gift. And also a burden, as such images had always been for him: the terrible distance between the art conceived in the eye of the mind and what one could actually execute in a fallible world with fallible tools and one’s own crushing limitations. But sitting there on the marble benches of the Sarantine Hippodrome, assailed by the tumult and the screaming of the crowd, Caius Crispus of Varena knew with appalling certainty what he would like to do on a sanctuary dome here, given the chance. He might be. They’d asked for a mosaicist. He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. His fingers were tingling. He opened his eyes and looked down at his scarred, scratched hands.