Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

"Ah! Let sound the soldiers" drums! Cams Crispus of Varena, bold hero of a later age! You can't? I don't see why not. They will only find someone else. And kill you for trying to interfere. Who are you, artisan, to step between a god and his sacrifice?"

Crispin had finished dressing. He sat down on the bed again. It creaked.

‘I don't know how to answer that."

"Of course you don't," said Linon.

The girl whispered, "My lord. I will do anything you like, always."

"What else does a slave do?" he snapped, distracted. She flinched, as if struck. He drew a breath.

‘I need your help," he said again to the bird. The puzzle had taken a shape, poor though it might be. He rocked back and forth a little, creaking the bed. "Here's what I want to happen.»

A few moments later he explained to the girl what steps she, in her turn, had to take if she wanted to live through the day to come. He made it sound as if he knew what he was doing. What became almost intolerable was the look that entered her eyes as he spoke and she understood that he was going to try to save her. She wanted to survive, so much. It burned in her, this desire to live.

He had told Martinian, back home, that he felt no real desire for anything, not even life. Perhaps, Crispin thought, that made him the perfect man for the folly of this.

He sent the girl downstairs. She knelt in front of him first, looked as if she wanted to say something, but he quelled that with a glance and gestured to the door. After she left he sat for another moment, then stood up and began attending to what needed to be prepared in the room.

"Are you angry?" he asked Linon suddenly, surprising himself.

"Yes," said the bird, after a moment.

Will you’d tell me why?"

"No."

Will you help me?"

‘I am a lump of leather and metal, as someone once said. You can render me blind, deaf, and silent with a thought. What else can I do?"

Going down the stairs towards the noise and warmth of the common room, Crispin glanced outside. It was full dark outside, the forest lost to sight in the black. Clouds again, no moons or stars to be seen. He ought to have been going down with no more on his mind than the anticipation of a good red wine from Candaria and some modest hopes for the stew. Instead, every shadow, every movement in the shadows beyond the streaked windows, carried an aura of dread. It is considered a good omen if she lives until the heart is removed.

He was committed, just about. He carried the copper key at his belt, but he had left the door to his room ajar, like an ineffectual Rhodian fool unused to the harsh realities of travel, the real dangers of the road.

It had become clear that the red-bearded Rhodian drinking and even sharing a steadily replenished quantity of expensive wine was travelling all the way to Sarantium with a Permit signed by the Imperial Chancellor himself. The entire common room knew it by now. The man kept dropping the name of Gesius into every third sentence. It would have been irritating, had he not been so genial. and generous. It appeared he was an artisan of some sort, a soft, city fellow summoned to help with one of the Emperor's projects.

Thelon of Megarium considered himself adept at sizing up such men, I and the opportunity they represented.

For one thing, the artisan-Martinian, he'd named himself-was quite evidently not carrying his purse. Which meant that the Permit, and whatever moneys he had been advanced or had carried with him from Batiara-obviously a sufficient sum to allow the real indulgence of Candarian wine-were not on his person, unless he'd stuffed them in his underclothes. Thelon grinned behind his hands at the thought of a crumpled, shit-smeared paper being presented at the next Posting Inn. No, the Imperial Permit was not in Martinian's clothing, he'd wager a good deal.

Or if he'd had a good deal to wager, he would have. Thelon was without resources and attached to his uncle's mercantile party only out of the goodness of his uncle's heart-as his uncle was prone to remind him. They were on their way home to Megarium, having made some useful transactions at the military camp towards Trakesia where the Fourth and the First Sauradian legions were based. Useful for Uncle Erytus, that is. Thelon had no direct interest in any profits. He wasn't even being paid. He was here merely to learn the route, his uncle had said, and the people to be dealt with, and to show he could conduct himself properly among a class of folk better than waterfront rabble.

If he proved a decently quick study, Uncle Erytus had allowed, he might be permitted to come into the business at a fair salary and lead some minor trading expeditions himself. Eventually, perhaps, after time had run and maturity had demonstrated itself, he might become a partner with his uncle and cousins.

Thelon's mother and father had showered Uncle Erytus with abject, embarrassing gratitude. Thelon's creditors, including several shit-faced dice players in a certain caupona by the harbour, had declined to express similar enthusiasm.

All things considered, Thelon had to admit that this had been a usefully timed journey away from home, though the weather was ghastly and his pious uncle and bloodless cousins took the sunrise invocations too seriously by more than half and frowned at the very mention of whores. Thelon had been actively pondering how to arrange a quick tension-relieving encounter with their pretty blond serving girl tonight, when the artisan's voluble indiscretions at the next table had steered his thoughts in another direction entirely.

Certain hard facts were unfortunately inescapable. He was going to be home in a few too-short days. There had been an intimation from some parties that if he wished to continue enjoying the use and comfort of his lees he had best be prepared to make a significant payment towards eliminating his dicing debt. Thelon's uncle, as mulishly stupid about a little gambling as he was about girls, was not about to advance him any sums. That much had become obvious, despite Uncle Erytus's almost reluctant good humour after his successful transactions in boots and cloaks and whatever for the soldiers, and the purchase of crudely carved religious artifacts in a town east of the army camp. Trakesian wooden sun disks, he'd informed Thelon, were much in demand in Megarium, and even more so across the bay in Batiara. There was a good profit to be made, as much as fifteen per cent, after all expenses. Thelon had heroically refrained from yawning.

He had also decided, long before this, not to point out that his uncle's piety and scruples appeared not to make him averse to bribing innkeepers-all of whom appeared to know Erytus well-to allow them to stay illicitly at a sequence of Imperial Inns along the road. Not that he was complaining, mind you, but there was a principle here, somewhere.

"Would it be a very great presumption," Uncle Erytus was now saying, leaning towards the red-bearded man, "to ask to be honoured with a glimpse of the illustrious Permit you are honoured with?" Thelon cringed at the fawning, unctuous language. His uncle, licking someone's boots, was an ugly sight.

The artisan's face darkened. "You don't think I have it?" he growled, affronted.

Thelon lifted a hand quickly, to hide another smirk. His uncle, drinking a polite cup of the other man's Candarian, flushed red as the wine. "No, not at all! I am sure you… of course you… it is just that I've never actually seen the Seal or the signature of the august Chancellor Gesius. So celebrated a man. Three Emperors served! You would be honouring me, good sir! A glimpse… the handwriting of so glorious a figure… an example for my sons."

His uncle, Thelon reflected sourly, had all the social-climbing traits one might expect in a modestly successful provincial merchant. He would endlessly regale his family with the unspeakably trivial story of this Permit if he saw it, and would probably find a religious moral to impose upon them, too. Virtue, the rewards thereof. Thelon diverted himself by imagining just what sort of example a eunuch was for his cousins.