Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

He went, in fact, as most of the god's world would come to know one day, south through Amoria into Soriyya. He quickly exhausted the meagre sum his father had been able to put together for him on short notice and was reduced to begging for scraps at chapel doors with the other maimed and mutilated, the orphans, and the women too old to sell their bodies for sustenance.

From these depths he was rescued the next autumn-as the story was to tell-by a virtuous cleric in a village near the desert wastes of Ammuz. Smitten with divine illumination, Pronobius Tilliticus went forth a distance alone into the desert the next spring carrying only a sun disk, and found a precipitate tooth of rock to climb. It was a difficult ascent, but he did it only once.

He lived there forty years in all, sustained at first by supplies sent out by the humble cleric who had brought him to Jad, and later by the pilgrims who began to seek out his needle-like crag in the sands, bearing baskets of food and wine which were hauled up on a rope-and-pulley arrangement and then lowered-empty-by the one-eyed hermit with his long, filthy beard and rotting clothes.

A number of people, carried out to the site in litters, unable to walk or gravely ill, and not a few women afflicted with barren wombs, were afterwards to claim in carefully witnessed testaments that their conditions had been cured when they ate of the half-masticated pieces of food the Jad-possessed anchorite was wont to hurl down from his precarious perch. Besought by the people below for prophecies and holy instruction, Pronobius Tilliticus would declaim terse parables and grim, strident warnings of dire futures.

He was, of course, correct in large measure, achieving his immortality by being the first holy man slain by the heathen fanatics of the sands when they swept out of the south into Soriyya following their own star-enraptured visionary and his ascetic new teachings.

When a vanguard of this desert army reached the stiletto of rock upon which the hermit-an old man by then, incoherent in his convictions and fierce rhetoric-still perched, seemingly impervious to the winds and the broiling sun, they listened to him fulminate for a time, amused. When he began coarsely spitting food down upon them, their amusement faded. Archers filled him with arrows like some grotesque, spiny animal. He fell from his perch, a long way. After routinely cutting off his genitalia they left him in the sand for the scavengers.

He would be formally declared holy and among the Blessed Victims gathered to Immortal Light, a performer of attested miracles and a sage, two generations later by the great Patriarch Eumedius.

In the official Life commissioned by the Patriarch it was chronicled how Tilliticus had spent hard and courageous years in the Imperial Post, loyally serving his Emperor, before hearing and heeding the summons of a far greater power. Movingly, the tale was told of how the holy man lost his eye to a wild lion of the desert while saving a lost child in peril.

"One sees Holy Jad within, not with the eyes of this world," he was reported to have said to the weeping child and her mother, whose own garment, stained by the blood that dripped from the sage's wounds, came to be included among the sacred treasures of the Great Sanctuary in Sarantium itself.

At the time the Life of the Blessed Tilliticus was written, it was either forgotten or deemed inconsequential by the recording clerics what role a minor Rhodian artisan might have played in the journey of the holy man to the god's eternal Light. Military slang also comes and goes, changes and evolves. No coarse, ribald associations at all would attach to the name of Jad's dearly beloved Pronobius by then.

On the same day that the mosaicist Cams Crispus of Varena survived two attempts on his life, first saw the domed Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom in Sarantium, and met the men and women who would shape and define his living days to come under the god's sun, far to the west a ceremony took place outside the walls of his home town in the much smaller sanctuary he had been commissioned with his partner and their craftsmen and apprentices to decorate.

Amid the forests of Sauradia the people of the Antae had-along with the Vrachae and Inicii and the other pagan tribes in that wild land- honoured their ancestors on the Day of the Dead with rites of blood. But after forcing their way west and south into Batiara as the Rhodian Empire crumbled inwards, they had adopted the faith of Jad and many of the customs and rituals of those they conquered. King Hildric, in particular, during a long and shrewd reign, had made considerable strides towards consolidating his people in the peninsula and achieving a measure of harmony with the subjugated but still haughty Rhodians.

It was considered unfortunate in the extreme that Hildric the Great had left no surviving heir save a daughter.

The Antae might worship Jad and gallant Heladikos now, might carry sun disks, build and restore chapels, attend at bathhouses and even theatres, treat with the mighty Sarantine Empire as a sovereign state and not a gathering of tribes… but they remained a people known for the precarious tenure of their leaders and utterly unaccustomed to a woman's rule. It was a matter of ongoing surprise in certain quarters that Queen Gisel hadn't been forced to marry or been murdered before now.

In the judgement of thoughtful observers, only the tenuous balance of power among rival factions had caused a clearly unacceptable condition to endure until the long-awaited consecration of Hildric's memorial outside the walls of Varena.

The ceremony took place late in the autumn, immediately after the three days of Dykania ended, when the Rhodians were accustomed to honour their own ancestors. Theirs was a civilized faith and society: candles were lit, prayers articulated, no blood was shed.

A significant number of those close-packed in the expanded and impressively decorated sanctuary did feel sufficiently unwell in the aftermath of Dykania's excesses to half wish that they themselves were dead, however. Among the many Rhodian festivals and holy days that dotted the round of the year, Dykania's inebriate debaucheries had been adopted by the Antae with an entirely predictable enthusiasm.

In the wan light of a sunless dawn, the fur-cloaked court of Varena and those of the Antae nobility who had travelled from afar now gathered, mingling with Rhodians of repute and a quantity of clerics, greater and lesser. There were a small number of places set aside for the ordinary folk of Varena and its countryside, and many of these had lined up since the night before to be present today. Most had been turned away, of course, but they lingered outside in the chill, talking, buying hot food and spiced wine and trinkets from quickly erected booths in the grassy spaces around the sanctuary.

The still-bare mound of earth that covered the dead of the last plague was an oppressive, inescapable presence in the north of the yard. A few men and women could be seen walking over there at intervals to stand silently in the hard wind.

There had been a persistent rumour that the High Patriarch himself might make the trip north from Rhodias to honour the memory of King

Hildric, but this had not come to pass. The talk, both within and without the sanctuary, was clear as to why.

The mosaicists-a celebrated pair, native to Varena-obedient to the will of the young queen, had put Heladikos on the dome.

Athan, the High Patriarch, who had signed-under duress from the east, it was generally believed-a Joint Pronouncement forbidding representations of Jad's mortal son, could hardly attend at a sanctuary that so boldly flouted his will. On the other hand, in the reality of the Batiaran peninsula as it was under the Antae, neither could he ignore a ceremony such as this. The Antae had come to the faith of Jad for the son as much as the father, and they were not about to leave Heladikos behind them, whatever the two Patriarchs might say. It was a… difficulty.