Sailing to Sarantium (The Sarantine Mosaic, #1)

by Guy Gavriel Kay

But Linon was sardonic not profane, she called him imbecile not idiot,

He felt something unexpected then, like a shaft of light through everything else that day. It took him a moment to recognize it as happiness.

the other man reached across the space between to touch it with his own.

Wisdom, holy or wholly practical, suggested to Carullus that he exercise a measure of caution here. The man talked a very confident game, and he had papers to back him up.

When you can’t go back and you can’t stay still, you move forward, nothing to think about, get on with it.

He was going to the City. Sarantium. Where the Imperial Palace was and the Emperor, the Triple Walls and the Hippodrome. A hundred holy sanctuaries, he’d heard, and half a million people.

They had a phrase along the Imperial road. He’s sailing to Sarantium, they said when some man threw himself at an obvious and extreme hazard, risking all, changing everything one way or another, like a desperate gambler at dice putting his whole stake on the table.

Then west again for a time across the grass-covered ridges of soft hills and over the wide, slow river meandering south with the road beside it. Another forest on the other side of the gleaming water, as black, as vast, as Vargos flew over it, north and north in the clear, cold night. He saw where the oaks ended and the pines began, and then at last he saw by the moons a range of mountains he had always known, and he was flying lower over fields he had tilled himself in childhood, seeing a stream he had swum in during summers gone, and the first tiny outlying houses of the village,

“Oh, I know,” he said softly. Then, after another silence, “Why you? Not your sister?” She hadn’t expected that, either. No one had asked these things. “My mother thought she was . . . more likely to marry. With nothing to offer but herself.” “And you thought?”

Oh City, City, my eyes are never dry when I remember you. My heart is a bird, winging home.

sail up the curve of the Serpent’s Tooth—the great chains drawn back in this time of peace—passing between the narrow cliffs, looking up at walls and guards on each side, thinking of Sarantine Fire unleashed on hapless foes who thought to take Jad’s holy and defended City. Awe would give way to—or be joined by—a proper measure of fear. Sarantium was no harbor or haven for the weak.

On the threshold. Whatever was to begin could now begin.

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains, All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins.

Plautus Bonosus, Master of the Senate, walked with his wife and unmarried daughters toward the small, elite Sanctuary of the Blessed Victims near their home to offer the dawn invocation on the second anniversary of the Victory Riot in Sarantium.

They wanted the head of Lysippus the Calysian, the Empire’s chief taxation officer, and they were making certain Jad’s anointed Emperor knew it.

Valerius II had shown no signs of such an intent. His loyalty to the fat, gross man who had so efficiently and incorruptibly funded his building schemes and the expensive co-opting of various barbarian tribes had always been firm. It was said that Lysippus had been a part of the machinations that brought the first Valerius to the throne.

“All Jad’s children are born to die. The vestments of Empire are seemly for a shroud, my lord. Are they not?”

the only reason the guard didn’t look properly at your papers and detain you when the names didn’t match was because you were with me.” “I know,” Crispin said, grinning suddenly. “I relied on that.”

“Are you actually planning to give your own name at the Bronze Gates? In the Attenine Palace?

they crossed the Hippodrome Forum now, the Sanctuary behind them, the Imperial Precinct to their right, a squat, balding man behind a folding, hastily assembled

The young man’s name, he learned, was Witticus, a Karchite. He made a mental note of it, leaning forward to applaud politely with the others in the kathisma.

Bonosus knew that the Emperor was of a different mind.

That, Bonosus thought wryly, had been an issue—one way or another—for much longer than a few hundred years, even before the faith of Jad had emerged in Rhodias.

He was young. It was an opportunity. Sailing to Sarantium, men called it, when someone took a chance like this.

sandwiched between the two finest drivers of the day, with one of them making it clear that if he didn’t cut off the other, his brief tenure in the City might be over.

And now the Emperor was here: a new element to the festival excitement of the Hippodrome. That distant purple-robed figure at the western end of the stands—just

That makes two Emperors in this room. In this city. Two . . . living Emperors.”

Could one forget how to be free?

Martinian of Varena is at the Hippodrome with the tribune of the Fourth Sauradian.”

It could, in fact, have changed his life and a number of other lives, and—arguably—the course of events in the Empire. This happens, more often than is sometimes suspected. Lovers first meet at a dinner one almost failed to attend.

My name is Caius Crispus, son of Horius Crispus. I am a mosaicist, and have been all my grown life. Martinian of Varena is my colleague and partner and has been so for twelve years.”

“A mosaicist spends much of his life going up and down on a variety of platforms and hoists. I can suggest some contrivances the Imperial engineers might employ to silence the mechanism, for example.”

The murmuring also stopped. There was a silence that partook of a great many things then in the candlelit throne room of the Attenine Palace, among the jeweled birds, the golden and silver trees, the censers of frankincense, the exquisite works of ivory and silk and sandalwood and semiprecious stone. It was broken, at length, by laughter.

Valerius II was soft-featured, quite unprepossessing, with alert gray eyes and the smooth-shaven cheeks that had led to the attack on Crispin’s own beard. His hairline was receding though the hair remained a sandy brown laced with gray.

Alixana—who had been merely Aliana of the Blues once, an actress and dancer—was dressed in a dazzle of crimson and gold silk, the porphyry in the robe over her tunic used as an accent, but present, unavoidably present, defining her status.

head held high despite the weight of ornament she carried, the Empress of Sarantium glittered in his sight, and the clever, observant amusement in her dark eyes reminded him that there was no one on earth more dangerous than this woman seated beside the Emperor.

An idea came to him in that moment, anger-driven. Inwardly he winced at his own subversive thought, and he kept silent. There were limits to recklessness.

“if he has the skills to assist with the Sanctuary mosaics.”

only a fool would even suggest using that method on a dome! No mosaicist worth the name would consider it.”

You adjust it in relation to the piece beside it, and the one beside that and beyond it, toward or away from the light entering through windows or rising from below. You can build up the setting bed into a relief, or recede it for effect. You can—if

you are a mosaicist, and not merely someone sticking glass in a pasty surface—allow

you allow light to be your tool, your servant, your . . . gift in rendering what is holy.”

You forgo the play of light that is at the heart

lofty ambition to now lay on the shoulders of an untried, ill-mannered westerner,” said Styliane Daleina, tartness in her voice.

The Emperor glanced over at her, his expression blank. She had courage, Crispin had to concede, to be challenging him in this mood.

and the weight of his heroic dome, like some demigod of the Trakesian pantheon. The Rhodian, should he be capable, will attempt to decorate the Sanctuary for us, in a manner pleasing to Jad and ourselves.”

mosaicist, as I told you, my lord, sees the changing colors and light of Jad’s world with some . . . precision.

There is never time to see actual faces in a race, only an impression—as the Rhodian said—of light or dark. The stands before the turn were dark. Which meant the watchers were turned away from us. Why would they turn away from

For the Hippodrome to be turned away from the two of us, something violent had to have happened since that first collision. And if a third—or a fourth—chariot had smashed into the first pair, then the Hippodrome crews were not going to be able to clear the track.”

Tonight, in fact. Strumosus, in a fever of brilliance, controlled chaos, and skin-blistering invective, had coordinated the preparation of eight elaborate courses of culinary celebration, climaxing in a parade of fifty boys—they’d recruited and cleaned up the stablehands—carrying enormous silver platters of shrimp-stuffed whitefish in his celebrated sauce around the wildly cheering banquet room while trumpets sounded and blue banners were madly waved.