Sailing to Sarantium (The Sarantine Mosaic, #1)

by Guy Gavriel Kay

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

I am growing old, Plautus Bonosus thought. He rubbed his eyes. The past kept impinging upon the present: all he saw now appeared shot through with images of things seen before. Too many interwoven memories.

she was young enough—she was terribly young enough—to cling to life, and whatever hope it might offer in the face of the waiting dark, or the light of her god that might follow. His gods were different. He was so much older. The long darkness was not always to be feared, he thought. Living on was not an absolute good. There were balances, harmonies to be sought. Things had their season. The same journey in a different cloak, he thought.

All things in the shaped world—his rooms, his garden, the orchard beyond, the stone wall, the fields and forests across the ribbon of road, the two moons rising higher and then setting as he stood in his open doorway, the pale sunrise when it came at last—all things had seemed to him to be almost unbearably precious then, numinous and transcendent,