‘It is no grace,’ he said. And immediately regretted the sour, self- pitying tone in the words. Lifted a quick hand to forestall a rebuke. ‘What must I do to make everyone happy, Martinian? Sell the house for a pittance to one of the land speculators? Move in with you? And with my mother? Marry a fifteen-year-old ready to whelp children? Or a widow with land and sons already? Both? Take Jad’s vows and join the clerics? Turn pagan? Become a Holy Fool?’
‘Go to Sarantium,’ said his friend.
‘No.’
They looked at each other. Crispin realized that he was breathing hard. The older man said, his voice soft now in the lengthening shadows, ‘That is too final for something so large. Say it again in the morning and I’ll never speak of this again. On my oath.’
Crispin, after a silence, only nodded. He needed a drink, he realized. An unseen bird called, clear and far from towards the woods. Martinian rose, clapped his hat on his head against the sundown wind. They walked together back into Varena before the night curfew sounded and the gates were locked against whatever lay outside in the wild forests, the night fields and lawless roads, in the moonlit, starlit air where daemons and spirits assuredly were.
Men lived behind walls, when they could.
IN THE LAST OF the light, Crispin went to his favourite baths, nearly deserted at this hour. Most men visited the baths in the afternoon, but mosaicists needed light for their work and Crispin preferred the quiet at the end of day now. A few men were taking exercise with the heavy ball, ponderously lobbing it back and forth, naked and sweating with exertion. He nodded to them in passing, without stopping. He took some steam first, and then the hot and cold waters, and had himself oiled and rubbed down—his autumn regimen, against the chill. He spoke to no one beyond civil greetings in the public rooms at the end, where he had a beaker of wine brought to him at his usual couch. After, he reclaimed the Imperial Packet from the attendant with whom he had checked it and, declining an escort, walked home to drop the packet and change for dinner. He intended not to discuss the matter tonight, at all.
‘YOU ARE GOING TO GO, then. To Sarantium?’
Certain intentions, in the presence of his mother, remained largely meaningless. That much was unchanged. Avita Crispina signalled, and the servant ladled out more of the fish soup for her son. In the light of the candles, he watched the girl withdraw gracefully to the kitchen. She had the classic Karchite colouring. Their women were prized as house slaves by both the Antae and the native Rhodians.
‘Who told you?’ They were alone at dinner, reclining on facing couches. His mother had always preferred the formal old fashions.
‘Does it matter?’
Crispin shrugged. ‘I suppose not.’ A sanctuary full of men had heard that courier. ‘Why am I going to go, Mother, do tell me?’
‘Because you don’t want to. You do the opposite of what you think you should. A perversity of behaviour. I have no idea where you derived it.’
She had the audacity to smile, saying that. Her colour was good tonight, or else the candles were being kind. He had no tesserae so white as her hair, none even close. In Sarantium the Imperial Glassworks had, rumour told, a method of making . . .
He halted that line of thought.
‘I don’t do any such thing. I refuse to be so obvious. I may— sometimes—be a little imprudent when provoked. The courier today was a complete and utter fool.’
‘And you told him so, of course.’
Against his will, Crispin smiled. ‘He told me I was, actually.’
‘That means he isn’t, to be so perceptive.’
‘You mean it isn’t obvious?’
Her turn to smile. ‘My mistake.’
He poured himself another cup of the pale wine and mixed it half-and-half with water. In his mother’s house he always did.
‘I’m not going,’ he said. ‘Why would I want to go so far, with winter coming?’
‘Because,’ said Avita Crispina, ‘you aren’t entirely a fool, my child. We’re talking about Sarantium, Caius, dear.’
‘I know what we are talking about. You sound like Martinian.’
‘He sounds like me.’ An old jest. Crispin didn’t smile this time. He ate some more of the fish soup, which was very good.
‘I’m not going,’ he repeated later, at the doorway, bending to salute her on the cheek. ‘Your cook is too skilful for me to bear the thought of leaving.’ She smelled, as always, of lavender. His first memory was of that scent. It ought to have been a colour, he thought. Scents, tastes, sounds often attained hues in his mind, but this one didn’t. The flower might be violet, almost porphyry, in fact—the royal colour—but the scent wasn’t. It was his mother’s scent, simply that.
Two servants, holding cudgels, were waiting to walk him home in the dark.
‘There are better cooks than mine in the east. I shall miss you, child,’ she replied calmly. ‘I expect regular letters.’
Crispin was used to this. It still made him snort with exasperation as he walked away. He glanced back once and saw her in the spill of light, clad in a dark green robe. She lifted a hand to him and went within. He turned the corner, one of her men on either side of him, and walked the short distance to his home. He dismissed his mother’s servants and stood a moment outside, cloaked against the chill, looking up.
Blue moon westering now in the autumn sky. Full as his heart once had been. The white moon, rising from the eastern end of his street, framed on both sides and below by the last houses and the city walls, was a pale, waning crescent. The cheiromancers attached meaning to such things. They attached meaning to everything overhead.
Crispin wondered if he could find a meaning to attach to himself. To whatever he seemed to have become in the year since a second plague summer had left him alive to bury a wife and two daughters himself. In the family plot, beside his father and grandfather. Not in a lime-strewn mound. Some things were not to be endured.
He thought about the torch of Heladikos he had contrived today on the small dome. There still remained, like a muted shadow of colour, this pride in his craft, this love for it. Love. Was that still the word?
He did want to see this latest artifice by candlelight: an extravagant blazing of candles and oil lanterns all through the sanctuary, lifting fire to light the fire he’d shaped in stone and glass. He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted.
That, Martinian had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect.
He would see it, Crispin knew, at the dedication of the sanctuary at autumn’s end, when the young queen and her clerics and pompous emissaries from the High Patriarch in Rhodias—if not the Patriarch himself—laid King Hildric’s bones formally to rest. They would not stint on candles or oil then. He’d be able to judge his work that day, harshly or otherwise.
He never did, as events unfolded. He never did see his mosaic torch on that sanctuary dome outside the walls of Varena.
As he turned to enter his own house, key to hand—the servants having been told, as usual, not to wait up—a rustling gave him warning, but not enough.
Crispin managed to lash out with a fist and catch a man in the chest, hard. He heard a thick grunt, drew breath to cry out, then felt a sack dropped over his head and tightened expertly at his throat, blinding and choking him at once. He coughed, smelled flour, tasted it. He kicked out violently, felt his foot meet a knee or shin and heard another muffled cry of pain. Lashing and