The visitors from the court continued for a time. A few of the men gave indications of wishing to seduce her: a triumph for them, doubtless.
She remained a virgin, regretting it occasionally. Boredom was one of the central problems of this new life. It wasn’t even really a life. It was a waiting to see if life could continue, or begin again.
And this, unfortunately, was where the dutiful attempt to summon proper gratitude each morning in the chapel usually faltered as the invocations to holy Jad ended. She’d had an existence of real—if precarious—power back home. Reigning queen of a conquering people in the homeland of an empire. The High Patriarch in Rhodias deferred to her, as he had to her father. Here in Sarantium she was subjected to lectures from a lesser cleric. She was no more than a glittering object, a jewel of sorts for the Emperor and his court, without function or access to any role. She was, in the simplest reading of things, a possible excuse for an invasion of Batiara, and little more than that.
Those subtle people from the court who rode or were carried in curtained litters across the city to see her seemed to have gradually come to that same conclusion. It was a long way from the Imperial Precinct to her palace near the triple walls. Midway through the winter, the visits from the court had also begun to grow less frequent. It was not a surprise. At times it saddened her how little ever surprised her.
One of the would-be lovers—more determined than the others—continued to visit after the others had ceased to appear. Gisel allowed him, once, to kiss her palm, not her hand. The sensation had been mildly diverting, but after reflection she’d elected to be engaged the next time he came, and then the next. There hadn’t been a third visit.
She’d had little choice, really. Her youth, beauty, whatever desire men might have for her, these were among the few remaining tools she had, having left a throne behind.
She wondered when Eudric or Kerdas would attempt to have her murdered. If Valerius would really try to stop it. On balance, she thought, she was of more use to the Emperor alive, but there were arguments the other way, and there was the Empress to consider.
Every such calculation she had to make by herself. She’d no one she trusted to advise her here. Not that she’d really had that back home, either. At times she found herself feeling furious and bereft when she thought of the grey-haired alchemist who had helped her in this flight but had then abandoned her to pursue his own affairs, whatever they might have been. She had last seen him on the wharf in Megarium, standing in the rain as her ship sailed away.
Gisel, having returned from the chapel to her home, was sitting in the pretty solarium over the quiet street. She noted that the rising sun was now over the roofs across the way. She rang a small bell by her chair and one of the very well trained women the Empress had sent to her appeared in the doorway. It was time to begin preparing to go out. It was wrong, in truth, to say that nothing ever surprised her. There had been unexpected developments.
In the wake of one of them, involving a dancer who happened to be the daughter of that same grey-haired man who had left her in Megarium, she’d accepted an invitation for this afternoon.
And that reminded her of the other man she had enlisted to her service back home, the red-haired mosaicist. Caius Crispus would be present today as well.
She had ascertained that he was in Sarantium shortly after her own arrival. She’d needed to know; he raised considerations of his own. She had entrusted him with a dangerously private message, and had no idea if he’d delivered it, or even tried. She’d remembered him to be bitter, saturnine, unexpectedly clever. She’d needed to speak with him.
She hadn’t invited him to visit—as far as the world knew, he had never met her, after all. Six men had died to preserve that illusion. She’d gone, instead, to observe the progress being made on the Emperor’s new Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom. The Sanctuary wasn’t yet open to the general public, but a visit was an entirely appropriate—even a pious—outing for a visiting monarch. No one could have possibly queried it. Once she’d entered, she’d decided, entirely on impulse, on an unusual approach to this matter.
Thinking back to the events of that morning in early winter, as her women now began preparing her bath, Gisel found herself smiling privately. Jad knew, she wasn’t inclined to give way to impulse, and few enough things ever gave her occasion to be amused, but she hadn’t conducted herself in that stupefying place with what might be considered decorous piety, and she had to admit she’d enjoyed herself.
The tale had run around Sarantium by now. She’d intended it to.
A man on a scaffold under a dome with glass in his hands, trying to make a god. More than one, in truth, though that particular truth was not one he proposed to reveal. Crispin was, that day—early winter in Jad’s holy city of Sarantium—happy to be alive and not anxious to be burned for heresy. The irony was that he hadn’t yet realized or acknowledged his own happiness. It had been a long time since he’d known the feeling; he was a stranger now to such a mood, would have glowered in vexation and snapped off a brittle insult to someone who’d dared make the observation that he seemed content with his lot.
Brow unconsciously furrowed, mouth a line of concentration, he was attempting to finally confirm the colours of his own image of Jad above the emerging skyline of Sarantium on the dome. Other artisans were creating the City for him under his supervision; he himself was rendering the figures, and he was beginning with Jad, that an image of the god might look down upon all who entered here while the dome and semidomes and walls were being achieved. He wanted the god he made to echo, in a tacit homage, the one he’d seen in a small chapel in Sauradia, but not slavishly or too obviously. He was working on a different scale, his Jad a ruling element of a larger scene, not the entirety of the dome, and there were matters of balance and proportion to be worked through.
At the moment, he was thinking about eyes and the lines in the skin above and below them, remembering the wounded, haggard vision of Jad in that chapel he’d seen on the Day of the Dead. He’d fallen down. Had literally collapsed beneath that gaunt, overpowering figure.
His memory for colours was very good. It was flawless, in fact, and he knew this without false humility. He’d worked closely with the head of the Imperial Glassworks to find those hues that most precisely matched the ones he remembered from Sauradia. It helped that he was now in charge of the mosaic decoration for the most important, by far, of all Valerius II’s building projects. The previous mosaicist—one Siroes—had been dismissed in disgrace, and had somehow broken the fingers of both hands that same night in an unexplained accident. Crispin, as it happened, did know something about that. He wished he didn’t. He remembered a tall, fair-haired woman in his bedroom at dawn, murmuring, I can attest that Siroes was not in a position to hire assassins tonight. And she’d added, very calmly, Trust me in this.
He did. In that, if in nothing else. It was the Emperor, however, not the yellow-haired woman, who had shown Crispin this dome and offered it to him. What Crispin asked for now he tended to receive, at least insofar as tesserae were concerned.
In the other spheres of his life, down among the men and women of the City, he hadn’t yet decided what it was he even wanted. He only knew that he had a life below this scaffolding, as well, with friends, enemies—attempts on his life within days of his arrival—and complexities that could, if allowed, distract him dangerously from what he needed to do up here on this dome that an Emperor and an architect of genius had given to him.
He ran a hand through his thick red hair, rendering it even more haphazard than usual, and decided that the eyes of his god would be dark brown and obsidian like those of the figure in Sauradia, but that he would not evoke the pallor of the other Jad with grey hues in the skin of the face. He would pick up the two shades again when he did the long, thin hands, but would not make them ruined, as the other’s had been. An echoing of elements, not a copying. It was pretty much what he’d thought before coming back up here—first instincts tended to hold for him.
Having