Sailing to Sarantium (The Sarantine Mosaic, #1)

by Guy Gavriel Kay

He was late. It was late. It was very late.

Kyros’s favorite tasks: accompanying the cook to market just after the invocation in chapel, watching him appraise vegetables and fish and fruit, squeezing and smelling, sometimes even listening to food, devising the day’s meals on the spot in the light of what he found.

ignoring the imprecations of the clergy as they invoked death or dismemberment for the charioteers and their horses, fierce passion from a longed-for woman, sickness to a hated neighbor’s child or mule, storm winds for an enemy’s merchant vessel.

the simultaneous perception that this artifice, this art, was as precarious as . . . as any joy in mortal life. As a rose, perhaps, that died in a wind or at summer’s end.

A work of great beauty and sadness.” “Sadness?” She turned her head, looked at him. He hesitated. “Roses die. An artifice so delicate reminds us of the . . . impermanence of all things. All beautiful things.”

Every living moment that followed that time in the mist was a gift. He found he could master fear, remembering that.

“They are glass and stone, not mortal souls, my lord.”

There was grandeur here beyond description, an airiness, a defining of space that guided the massive pillars and the colossal arch supports into proportion and harmony.

there were recesses and niches and shadowed chapels for privacy and mystery and faith and calm.

Crysomallo opens the door, admitting him to the innermost of the Empress’s rooms. There are four doors here. The architects have made of this wing a maze of women’s chambers. He himself doesn’t even know where all the corridors lead and branch.

Can you not guess that there might be people in this city who think an invasion of Batiara a destructive folly? Who might assume that you—as a Rhodian—might share that belief and have some desire to save your family and your country the consequences of an invasion?”

Everyone at this court is proud, everyone is a piece in a game. In many games at once—some of murder and some of desire—though there is only one game that matters, in the end, and all the others are parts of it.”

Tesserae and their designs? How much do you know or care to know about tinting glass? Or cutting it? What have you decided about the merits and methods of angling tesserae in the setting bed? Or the composition and layers of the setting bed itself? Have you any firm views on the use of smooth stones for the flesh of human figures?”

lie where pleasure leads me, not need.

“He may not be so harmless. Tale-tellers aren’t, you know, especially if they are bitter.”

“You must be a terribly dangerous mosaicist?” Shirin’s dark eyes flashed. There was a teasing irony in the tone.

THE URBAN PREFECTURE IN the reign of the Emperor Valerius II fell under the auspices of Faustinus the Master of Offices, as did all of the civil service and, accordingly, it was run with his well-known efficiency and attention to detail.

Tilliticus went forth a distance alone into the desert the next spring carrying only a sun disk, and found a precipitate tooth of rock to climb. It was a difficult ascent, but he did it only once.

At the time the Life of the Blessed Tilliticus was written, it was either forgotten or deemed inconsequential by the recording clerics what role a minor Rhodian artisan might have played in the journey of the holy man to the god’s eternal Light. Military slang also comes and goes, changes and evolves.

care not to look up at the dome, where an image of golden Jad and an equally vivid, forbidden rendering of his son carrying a torch of fire in his falling chariot could be seen.

The mosaics had already been judged very fine by those who understood such things, though some had disparaged the quality of the glass pieces used.

PARDOS HAD ALREADY DECIDED that this was the most important day of his life. He had even half decided, frightening himself a little with the immensity of the thought,

that it might always be the most important day of his life. That nothing would or could ever match this morning.

What followed was not holy.

The movement of retreating bodies made the candles flicker. The mosaics overhead seemed to shift and alter in the eddies of light.

Almost everyone else on board had been present as a screen, a mask, to deceive the Antae port officials in Mylasia.

world was all around him even in autumn rain: seamen, seabirds, food vendors, uniformed customs officers, beggars, morning whores sheltering on the porticos, men dropping lines by the jetty for octopus, wharf children tying ship ropes for a tossed coin.

remained there through the days of walking that followed, in rain, in pale, brief sunlight, the leaves wet and heavy, almost all fallen, many-colored, smoke rising from charcoal pits, a distant sound of axes, a stream heard but not seen, sheep and goats to the south, a solitary shepherd. A wild boar ran from the woods once, and then—astonished in the sudden light as a cloud unsheathed the sun—darted back into dark and disappeared.

“There is always that,” said Valerius. “Much that men strive to achieve fails in the doing. Will you take more wine?” It was

had journeyed here to do this. Had done his sailing and was still sailing, perhaps, and would put into the mosaics of this Sanctuary as much of the living journey and what lay within it and behind it as his craft and desire could encompass.