Sailing to Sarantium (The Sarantine Mosaic, #1)

by Guy Gavriel Kay

The clerics of the sun god have always feared any other avenues to power or understanding in the world. It became evident that arriving in the City with birds that had souls and spoke their own minds was a swift path to blinding if not death.” The tone was wry.

did learn on those journeys how to do what I wanted. As you can see. I never did get to Sarantium. A mild regret. I’m too old now.”

“I honor the old gods, yes. And their philosophers. And believe with them that it is a mistake to attempt to circumscribe the infinite range of divinity into one—or even two or three—images,

And he had made these birds. These crafted things that could see and hear.

what I believe to be the only access to a certain kind of power. Found in my travels, in a . . . profoundly guarded place and at some

“Is it difficult?” “What? Creating the birds? Yes, it was.” “I’m certain of that. No, I meant being aware that the world cannot know what you have done.”

“But alchemy always was a secret art, I knew that when I began to study it. I am . . . reconciled to this. I shall exult in my own soul, secretly.”

He had never really stopped to consider his attitude to what men called the half-world: that space where cheiromancers and alchemists and wise-women and astrologers claimed to be able to walk.

No mosaics here. Mosaic was expensive, a luxury. He made the sign of the sun disk before the peeling, nondescript fresco of fair-haired, smooth-cheeked Jad on the wall behind the altar stone, and knelt behind the cleric on the stone floor, joining the others in the sunrise rites.

multihued images of Sarantium—the fabled glories of the Imperial City,

“I’m sailing to Sarantium. Of course I am,” Crispin replied wryly, in silence. Linon gave an inward snort and was still.

Back in the days when he still enjoyed things, Crispin had always had a puzzle-solving mind. In work, in play. Designing a wall mosaic, gambling at his bathhouse.

Now, as he dressed quickly in the twilight chill, he found himself engaged in slotting pieces of information like tesserae within his mind to make a picture. He turned it, tilted it like glass to catch angles of light.

Crispin began worrying the puzzle again with a part of his mind, struggling for calm. Turning pieces of glass to find the light. Even a dim, precarious light, like candles in a breeze or a slant of winter sun through an arrow slit.

“I can’t let them do this to her,”

Crispin gave her a brief, very direct look, then tilted sideways, spilling some more of his wine, as he pulled the room key from his belt.

over. It was the one who’d raised his beer mug to him, earlier. He had a bright, inebriated glint in his eye. The prospect of violence, to cheer a dull night.

lord, you want . . . that girl, of all of them?” “I can hardly use all of them, keeper. That is the one who saved my purse.” He let himself smile again. “She’s a favorite of yours?”

After a time, Erytus of Megarium reappeared, having concluded an encounter with Morax. He presented Crispin with certain papers that indicated that the Inici slave girl Kasia was now the legal property of the artisan Martinian of Varena.

The young man was a rogue, but he’d been seduced into this crime, had his skull dented for it, and would doubtless suffer extremely at his family’s hands. Crispin did not particularly want to be the agency of his being hanged from a pagan oak in Sauradia.

She had lit no candles, had closed the shutters again and latched them. He could hear the rain outside.

Vargos, for all his violent, injurious struggling at the time, had had to concede to himself afterward that the scarring had probably been deserved.

Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived.

The world was a place of grief,

Man was born to sorrow, and women knew more of it.

Let there be Light for our lives, lord, and Light eternal when we come to you.

Kasia’s hearing was extremely good. She heard the voices before either of the men did.

went a short way through the muddy stubble in the dense, impenetrable grayness, and stopped. Listening. Kasia’s heart was racing now.

the mist parted again ahead of them, more than a swirling this time, a withdrawal, revealing the road across the narrow ditch for the first time that morning, and Crispin saw clearly what had, indeed, come on this day.

He had lain awake, listening, but the roaring had not come again, and nothing else appeared at the limits of his sight as the blue moon swung west after the white one and then set, leaving a sky strewn with stars, and the distant wolves, and the murmuring of a dark stream beside him.

And here now was the presence of Ludan, the Ancient One, the oak god, before him in a swirling away of grayness on the Imperial high road, in one of his known guises. Zubir. The bison. Lord of the forest.

And this was a god who demanded blood. And this was the day of sacrifice. Vargos’s heart was pounding. He saw that his hands were shaking and was not ashamed. Only afraid. A mortal man in a place where he should not have been.

she surrendered her mortal will and the meaning of her soul to the ancient god of her people. What man—what woman, even more than man—had ever been immune to destiny? Where could you run when your name was known to a god?

forest swallowed them like the jaws of a living creature. Time blurred, much as the seen world had blurred; Crispin had no idea how far they had come.

Only the awesome thing that led them, delicate for all its bulk, through the tall, silent trees for a measureless time until they came to a clearing and into it, one by one, and without a word spoken or a sound, Crispin knew that this was the place of sacrifice.

“I am sorry,” he said, words in the wood. It seemed important to say this. Something—an acknowledgment—from the world beyond this glade, these encircling trees where the wet leaves fell silently on the wet, cold grass. Vargos nodded.

A sacrifice. There was a pain in him; he had thought he was past such grief, after Ilandra, after the girls.

A stillness, rigid as suspended time.

Philosophy could be a consolation, an attempt to explain and understand the place of man in the gods’ creation. It couldn’t always succeed, though.

The mountains were visible again, rifts in the clouds above them showed blue and there was snow on the peaks. Light, shafts of color, coming back into the world.

Apprehension in her face, though there had not been in the forest, in the gray mist of the field.

“The bird was a talisman given me by a man said to be an alchemist.

“We worship them as the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do.” He surprised himself. “We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can’t even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another?” It

Crispin had not in all his life seen anything made that touched the strength of this.

The fierce, wild power of Ludan, accepting sacrifice in his grove, set against the immensity of craft and comprehension on this dome, rendering in glass and stone a deity as purely humbling. How did one move from one of these poles to the other? How did mankind live between such extremes?

For the deepest mystery, the pulsing heart of the enigma, was that as he lay on his back, paralyzed by revelation, Crispin saw that the eyes were the same. The world’s sorrow he’d seen in the zubir was here in the sun god above him, distilled by nameless artisans whose purity of vision and faith unmanned him.

to make them darker and stronger than the framing brown hair, shoulder length. The long face made longer by that straight hair and the beard; the arched, heavy eyebrows, deeply etched forehead, other lines scoring the cheeks—the skin so pale between beard and hair it showed as nearly gray.

Crispin saw, with a dazzling myriad of contrasting colors for a woven texture and the hinted play and power of light in a god whose power was light.

The colors, Crispin saw—the craftsman in him marveling—brought hands and eyes inescapably together. The vivid, unnaturally raised veins on the wrists of both pale hands used the same brown and obsidian that were in the eyes. He knew, intuitively, that this precise pairing of tesserae would exist nowhere else on the dome. The eyes of sorrow and indictment, the hands of suffering and war. A god who stood between his unworthy children and the dark, offering sunlight each morning in their brief time of life, and then his own pure Light afterward, for the worthy.

It was this, he realized, that the unknown mosaicists of long ago were reporting on this dome to their brethren with this vast, weary god against the soft gold of his sun.