Rustem refrained from comment on either of these solutions and, after examining the man’s tongue and taking his pulse, advised the governor to make a meal of the well-cooked liver of a sheep or cow on those evenings when he wished to have relations with either of his women. Noting the governor’s extremely florid complexion, he also suggested refraining from the consumption of wine with that important meal. He expressed great confidence that this would prove helpful. Confidence, of course, was half the treatment. The governor was profuse in his thanks and gave instructions that Rustem was to be assisted in all his affairs while in Sarnica. Two days later he sent a silk robe and an elaborate Jaddite sun disk to Rustem’s inn as gifts. The disk, though beautiful, was hardly an appropriate offering to a Bassanid, but Rustem concluded that his suggestions had met with some nocturnal success.
While in Sarnica, Rustem visited with one of his former pupils and met two doctors with whom he’d exchanged correspondence. He purchased a text of Cadestes on skin ulcers and paid to have another manuscript copied and sent to him in Kabadh. He told those physicians he met exactly what had happened in Kerakek, and how, as a consequence of saving the king’s life, he was soon to become a royal physician. In the interval, he explained, he had requested and received permission to conduct a journey of acquisition, obtaining further knowledge for himself and written sources from the west.
He gave a morning lecture, pleasingly well attended, on the Ispahani treatment of difficult childbirths, and another on the amputation of limbs when inflammation and noxious exudations followed upon a wound. He left after a stay of almost a month and a gracious farewell dinner hosted by the physicians’ guild. He was given the names of several doctors in the Imperial City upon whom he was urged to call, and the address of a respectable inn where members of the healing profession were inclined to stay when in Sarantium.
The food on the road north was wretched and the accommodations worse, but—given that it was the end of winter, not yet spring, when any remotely intelligent people avoided travel entirely—the trip proved largely uneventful. Their arrival in Sarantium was rather less so. Rustem had not expected to encounter both death and a wedding on his first day.
It had been years since Pappio, Director of the Imperial Glassworks, had actually done any actual glassblowing or design work himself. His duties now were administrative and diplomatic, involving the coordination of supplies and production and the distribution of tesserae and flat sheets of glass to craftsmen requesting them, in the City and beyond. Determining priorities and placating outraged artisans comprised the most delicate part of his office. Artisans, in Pappio’s experience, tended to incline towards outrage.
He had his system worked out. Imperial projects came first, and amongst those Pappio made assessments of how important a given mosaic might be in the scheme of things. This required delicate inquiries in the Imperial Precinct at times, but he did have a staff for that, and he had acquired a sufficient polish to his own manners to make it feasible for him to attend upon some of the higher civil service functionaries when necessary. His wasn’t the most important of the guilds—the silk guild had that distinction, of course—but it wasn’t anywhere near the least significant, either, and under this particular Emperor, with his elaborate building projects, it could be said that Pappio was an important man. He was treated respectfully, in any case.
Private commissions came behind the Imperial ones, but there was a complication: the artisans engaged on projects for the Emperor received their supplies free of charge, while those doing mosaic or other glass work for citizens had to buy their tesserae or sheets of glass. The Imperial Glassworks was expected to pay for itself now, in the modern scheme of things devised by thrice-exalted Valerius II and his advisers. Pappio was not, therefore, at liberty to entirely ignore the entreaties of those mosaicists clamouring for tesserae for private ceilings, walls, or floors. Nor, frankly, would it make sense for him to refuse all the quiet offers of sums for his own purse. A man had a duty to his family, didn’t he?
Over and above these nuanced issues, Pappio had a powerful inclination to favour those craftsmen—or patrons—who had a demonstrated affinity for the Greens.
The Splendid Greens of Great and Glorious Achievement were his own beloved faction, and one of the extreme pleasures attendant upon his rise to this lofty status in his guild was that he was now in a position to subsidize the faction somewhat, and be honoured and recognized accordingly in their banquet hall and at the Hippodrome. He was no longer just another humble supporter. He was a dignitary, present at the feasts, prominently seated at the theatre, among those in the preferred places for the chariot races themselves. Long past were the days when he’d line up before dawn outside the Hippodrome gates to get a standing place to watch the horses run.
He couldn’t be too obvious in his favouritism—the Emperor’s people were present and observing, every-where—but Pappio did make sure that, all other things being remotely balanced, a Green mosaicist did not go away empty-handed if competing for hard-to-find colours or semi-precious stones with a known follower of the accursed Blues or even someone without declared allegiance.
This was only as it should be. Pappio owed his appointment to his Green partisanship. His predecessor as head of the guild and Glassworks Director—an equally fervent Green—had selected him in large part for that reason. Pappio knew that when he chose to retire he was expected to pass on the position to another Green. It happened all the time, in every guild except the silk, which was a special case and closely scru tinized by the Imperial Precinct. One faction or the other controlled most of the guilds, and it was rare for that control to be wrested away. One had to be blatantly corrupt for the Emperor’s people to interfere.
Pappio had no intention of being blatant about anything, or even corrupt, if it came to that. He was a careful man.
And it was that instinctive caution, in part, that had made him a little uneasy about the surprising request he’d received, and the extremely substantial payment that had accompanied it—before he’d even done a preliminary sketch of the glass bowl requested!
He understood that it was his stature that was being bought. That the gift would acquire greatly enhanced value because it had been fashioned by the head of the guild himself, who never did such things any more. He also knew that the man buying this from him—as a wedding gift, he understood—could afford to do so. One didn’t need to make inquiries to know that the principal secretary to the Supreme Strategos, an historian who also happened to be chronicling the Emperor’s building projects, had sufficient resources to buy an elaborate bowl. This was a man who, more and more, seemed to require a certain deference. Pappio didn’t like the sallow, unsmiling, lean-faced secretary, but what did liking have to do with anything?
What was harder to sort out was why Pertennius of Eubulus was buying this gift. Some discreet questions had to be asked elsewhere before Pappio thought he had the answer. It turned out to be simple enough, in the end—one of the oldest stories of all—and it had nothing to do with the bride and groom.
It was someone else that Pertennius was trying to impress. And since that person happened to be dear to Pappio’s own heart, he had to overcome a certain indignation—visualizing a woman sleek and splendid as a falcon in the thin arms of the dour secretary—to concentrate on his unaccustomed craft again. He forced himself to do so, however, as best he could.
After all, he wouldn’t want the Principal Dancer for his beloved Greens to think him less than an exemplary artisan. Perhaps, he daydreamed, she might even ask for further work on her own behalf after seeing his bowl. Pappio imagined meetings, consultations, two heads bent close over a series of drawings, her notorious perfume— worn by only two women in all of Sarantium—enveloping him, a trusting hand laid on his arm . . .
Pappio was not a young man, was stout and bald and married with three grown children, but it was a truth of the world that certain women carried a magic about them, on the stage and off, and dreams followed where they went. You didn’t stop dreaming just because you weren’t young any more. If Pertennius could attempt to win admiration with a showy gift given to people he couldn’t possibly care about, might not Pappio try to let the exquisite