He and Crispin had used that concept, in fact, for a row of Blessed Victims on the long walls of a private chapel in Baiana years ago. It had been only a partial success—at night, by candlelight, the effect was not what Crispin had hoped it would be—but they’d learned a fair bit, and learning from errors was what mosaic work was about, as Martinian was fond of telling the apprentices. If the patrons had had enough money to light the chapel properly at night, it might have been different, but they’d known the resources when they made their design. It was their own fault. One always had to work within the constraints of time and money. That, too, was a lesson to be learned—and taught.
He watched the courier stop by Pardos at the lime kiln and he tipped his hat forward over his eyes, feigning sleep. He felt a peculiar apprehension. No idea why. And he was never able to give an adequate explanation afterwards, even to himself, as to why he did what he did next that autumn afternoon, altering so many lives forever. Sometimes the god entered a man, the clerics taught. And sometimes daemons or spirits did. There were powers in the half-world, beyond the grasp of mortal men.
He was to tell his learned friend Zoticus, over a mint infusion some days later, that it had had to do with feeling old that day. A week of steady rain had caused his finger joints to swell painfully. That wasn’t really it, however. He was hardly so weak as to let such a thing lead him into so much folly. But he truly didn’t know why he’d chosen— with no premeditation whatsoever—to deny being himself.
Did a man always understand his own actions? He would ask Zoticus that as they sat together in the alchemist’s farmhouse. His friend would give him a predictable reply and refill his cup with the infusion, mixed with something to ease the ache in his hands. The unpleasant courier would be long gone by then, to wherever his postings had taken him. And Crispin, too, would be gone.
Martinian of Varena feigned sleep as the easterner with the nose and cheekbones of a drinker approached him and rasped, ‘You! Wake! I’m looking for a man named Martinian. An Imperial Summons to Sarantium!’
He was loud, arrogant as all Sarantines seemed to be when they came to Batiara, his words thick with the accent. Everyone heard him. He meant for them to hear him. Work stopped inside the sanctuary being expanded to properly house the bones of King Hildric of the Antae, dead of the plague a little more than a year ago.
Martinian pretended to rouse himself from an afternoon doze in the autumn light. He blinked owlishly up at the Imperial Courier, and then pointed a stiff finger into the sanctuary—and up towards his longtime friend and colleague Caius Crispus. Crispin was just then attempting the task of making muddy brown tesserae appear like the brilliant glowing of Heladikos’s sacred fire, high up on a scaffold under the dome.
Even as he pointed, Martinian wondered at himself. A summons? To the City? And he was playing the games of a boy? No one here would give him away to an arrogant Sarantine, but even so . . .
In the stillness that ensued, a voice they all knew was suddenly heard overhead with unfortunate clarity. The resonance of sound happened to be very good in this sanctuary.
‘By Heladikos’s cock, I will carve slices from his rump with his useless glass and force feed him his own buttocks in segments, I swear by holy Jad!’
The courier looked affronted.
‘That’s Martinian,’ said Martinian helpfully. ‘Up there. He’s in a temper.’
IN FACT, HE REALLY wasn’t any more. The blasphemous vulgarity was almost reflexive. Sometimes he said things, and wasn’t even aware he was speaking aloud, when a technical challenge engaged him entirely. At the moment, he was obsessed, in spite of himself, with the problem of how to make the torch of Heladikos gleam red when he had nothing that was red with which to work. If he’d had some gold he could have sandwiched the glass against a gold backing and warmed the hue that way, but gold for mosaic was a fatuous dream here in Batiara after the wars and the plague.
He’d had an idea, however. Up on the high scaffold, Caius Crispus of Varena was setting reddish-veined marble from Pezzelana flat into the soft, sticky lime coat on the dome, interspersed with the best of the tesserae they’d managed to salvage from the miserable sheets of glass. The glass pieces he laid at angles in the setting bed, to catch and reflect the light.
If he was right, the effect would be a shimmer and dance along the tall shape of the flame, the flat stones mingled with the tilted, glinting tesserae. Seen from below, it ought to have that result in sunlight through the windows around the base of the dome, or by the light of the wall candles and the suspended iron lanterns running the length of the sanctuary. The young queen had assured Martinian that her bequest to the clerics here would ensure evening and winter lighting. Crispin had no reason to disbelieve her—it was her father’s tomb, and the Antae had had a cult of ancestor-worship, only thinly masked by their conversion to the Jaddite faith.
He had a cloth knotted around the cut in his left hand, and that made him awkward. He dropped a good stone, watched it fall a long way and swore again, reaching for another one. The setting bed was beginning to harden beneath the flame and torch he was filling in. He would have to work faster. The torch was silver. They were using whitish marble and some river-smooth stones for that—it ought to work. He’d heard that in the east they had a way of frosting glass to make an almost pure white tessera like snow, and that mother-of-pearl was available, for crowns and jewellery. He didn’t even like thinking about such things. It only frustrated him, here in the west amid ruins.
As it happened, these were his thoughts in the precise moment when the irritated, carrying eastern voice from below penetrated his concentration and his life. A coincidence, or the heard accents of Sarantium carrying his mind sailing that way towards the celebrated channel and the inner sea and the gold and silver and silk of the Emperor?
He looked down.
Someone, short as a snail from this height, was addressing him as Martinian. This would have been merely vexing had Martinian himself—by the doorway, as was usual at this hour—not also been gazing up at Crispin as the easterner barked the wrong name, disturbing all the work in the sanctuary.
Crispin bit back two obscene retorts and then a third response which was to direct the imbecile in the right direction. Something was afoot. It might only be a jibe directed at the courier—though that would be unlike his partner—or it might be something else.
He’d deal with it later.
‘I’ll be down when I’m done,’ he called, much more politely than the circumstances warranted. ‘Go pray for someone’s immortal soul in the meantime. Do it quietly.’
The red-faced man shouted, ‘Imperial Couriers are not kept waiting, you vulgar provincial! There is a letter for you!’
Interesting as this undoubtedly was, Crispin found it easy to ignore him. He wished he had some red vivid as the courier’s cheeks, mind you. Even from this height they showed crimson. It occurred to him that he’d never tried to achieve that effect on a face in mosaic. He slotted the idea among all the others and returned to creating the holy flame given as a gift to mankind, working with what he had.
HAD HIS INSTRUCTIONS NOT been unfortunately specific, Tilliticus would simply have dropped the packet on the dusty, debris-strewn floor of the shabby little sanctuary, reeking with the worst Heladikian heresy, and stormed out.
Men did not come—even here in Batiara—in their own slow time to receive an invitation from the Imperial Precinct in Sarantium. They raced over, ecstatic. They knelt. They embraced the knees of the courier. Once, someone had kissed his muddy, dung-smeared boots, weeping for joy.
And they most certainly offered the courier largess for being the bearer of such exalted, dazzling tidings.
Watching the ginger-haired man named Martinian finally descend from his scaffolding and walk deliberately across the floor towards him, Pronobius Tilliticus understood that his boots were not about to be kissed. Nor was any sum of money likely to be proffered him in gratitude.
It only confirmed his opinion of Batiara under the Antae.