Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

He looked around. The revived Karchites and several of the other guests-including a cheerful, grey-clad courier-were quaffing Candarian red wine unwatered, downing it like beer. He managed not to wince at the sight, raising his own glass in a genial salute. He felt very far from his own world. Ordinary circumstances had been left a long way or, at home, behind city walls. Where he ought to have stayed, shaping images of beauty with such materials as came to hand. There was no beauty here.

It occurred to him that he ought not to leave his new slave alone for too long, even with a lock on the door. There wasn't much he could do if she went missing now and never turned up. He went upstairs.

"Are you going to stick it in her?" Linon cackled suddenly. The crude-ness and the patrician voice and Crispin's mood were all janglingly at odds with each other. He made no reply.

The girl had the key. He knocked softly and called to her. She unbolted to his voice and opened the door. He stepped inside and closed and bolted it again. It was very dark in the room. She had lit no candles, had closed the shutters again and latched them. He could hear the rain outside. She stood very near to him, not speaking. He was embarrassed, surprisingly aware of her, still wondering why he had done what he had done tonight. She knelt with a rustle, a blurred female shape, and then bent her head to kiss his foot before he could withdraw. He stepped quickly back, clearing his throat, uncertain what to say.

He gave her the topmost blanket from the bed and bade her sleep on the servants pallet by the far wall. She never spoke. Aside from that instruction, neither did he. He lay in the bed listening to the rain for a long time. He thought of the queen of the Antae, whose foot he himself had kissed, before this journey had begun. He remembered a Senator's wife, tapping at his door. Another inn. Another country. He finally fell asleep. He dreamt of Sarantium, of making a mosaic there, with brilliant tesserae and all the shining jewels he needed: images on a towering dome of an oak tree in a grove, lightning bolts in a livid sky.

They would burn him in the City for such an impiety, but this was only a dream. No one died for his dreams.

He woke in the darkness before dawn. After a moment of disorientation, he swung out of bed and crossed the cold floor to the window. He opened the shutters. The rain had stopped again, though water was still dripping off the roof. A heavy fog had drifted in; he could scarcely see the courtyard below. There were men stirring down there-Vargos would be among them, readying the mule-but sounds were muted and distant. The girl was awake, standing beside her pallet, a pale, thin figure, ghostlike, silently watching him.

"Let's go," he said, after a moment.

Not long afterwards they were on the road, three of them walking east a mist-shrouded half-world as dawn came without a sunrise on the pay of the Dead.

Vargos of the Ihicii was not a slave.

Many of the Posting Inns" servants-for-hire along the main Imperial roads were, of course, but Vargos had chosen this job of his own will, as he was quick to point out to those who erred in addressing him. He'd signed his second five-year indenture with the Imperial Post three years ago, carried his copy of the paper on his person, though he couldn't read it, and collected a payment twice a year, in addition to his guaranteed room and board. It wasn't much, but over the years he'd bought new boots twice, a woollen cloak, several tunics, an Esperanan knife, and he could offer a copper follis or two to a whore. The Imperial Post preferred slaves, naturally, but there weren't enough of them, since the Emperor Apius had elected to pacify the northern barbarians rather than subdue them, and stout men were badly needed for parties on the roads. Some of those stout men, including Vargos, were northern barbarians.

At home, Vargos's father had often expressed-generally with spilled ale and a table-thumping fist-his views on working or soldiering for Sarantium's fat-rumped catamites, but Vargos had been of the habit of disagreeing with his parent on occasion. Indeed, it had been after the last such discussion that he had left their village one night and begun his journey south.

He couldn't remember the details of the argument any more-something to do with a superstition about ploughing beneath a blue full moon-but it had ended with the old man, blood dripping from his scalp, deliberately branding his youngest son on the cheek with a hunting knife while Vargos's brothers and uncles enthusiastically held him down. Vargos, for all his violent, injurious struggling at the time, had had to concede to himself afterwards that the scarring had probably been deserved. It was not really acceptable among the Inicii for a son to hammer his father half to death with a stick of firewood in the course of an agrarian dispute.

He'd chosen not to linger for further debate or familial chastisement, however. There was a world beyond their village, and precious little within it for a youngest son. He had walked out of the house that same spring night, the two nearly full moons high above the newly planted fields and the dense, well-known forests, and had set his marred face to the far south, never looking back.

He'd expected, of course, to join the Imperial army, but someone in a roadside caupona had mentioned positions on offer at the Posting Inns, and Vargos had thought he might try that for a season or two.

That had been eight summers ago. Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived. He'd his share of newer scars since then, for the roads were dangerous and hungry men turned outlaw easily enough in Sauradia, but the work suited Vargos. He liked open spaces, had no single master to knuckle his forehead to, and didn't share his father's bone-deep hatred of the Empires-either Sarantine or the old one in Batiara.

Even though he was known as a keep-to-himself man, he had acquaintances at every Posting Inn and roadside tavern from the Batiaran border to Trakesia by now. That meant decently clean sleeping straw or pallets, a fireside sometimes in winter, food and beer, and some of the girls could be soft enough on the occasions when they weren't commanded elsewhere. It helped that he was one of the freemen, and had a coin or two to spend. He had never been out of Sauradia. Most of the Imperial Post servants stayed in their province, and Vargos had never had the least desire to wander farther than he already had eight years ago, cheek dripping blood, from the north.

Until this morning, on the Day of the Dead, when the red-haired pvhodian who'd hired him at Lauzen's inn by the border set out in fog from Morax's with a slave girl marked for the oak god.

Vargos had converted to the Jaddite faith years ago, but that didn't mean a man from the northern reaches of the Aldwood couldn't recognize one who'd been named to the tree. She was of the Inicii herself, sold off to a slave trader, perhaps even from a village or farm near his own. In her eyes, and in the looks given her by some of the men and women at Morax's, Vargos had read the signs the night before. No one had said a word, but no one had to. He knew what day was coming.

Vargos's conversion to the sun god's faith-along with a contentious belief in the holiness of Heladikos, the god's mortal son-had been a real one, as it happened. He prayed each dawn and at sunset, lit candles at chapels for the Blessed Victims, fasted on the days that called for fasts. And he disapproved now, deeply, of the old ways he'd left behind: the oak god, the corn maiden, the seemingly endless thirst for blood and human hearts eaten raw. But he'd never have dreamt of interfering, and certainly hadn't done so, the two other times he'd been here at Morax's, close to the southern godtree on this day.