Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

Wisdom, holy or wholly practical, suggested to Carullus that he exercise a measure of caution here. The man talked a very confident game, and he had papers to back him up. He did own the girl, too; those documents had been in the satchel as well. Only since last night, mind you. Part of that story he wasn't going to learn, Carullus guessed. The girl was still glaring at him with those blue northern eyes. She had a strong, clever face. Yellow hair.

If the cleric hadn't been watching what had happened, Carullus could have had the three of them killed and dropped in a ditch. He probably wouldn't have. He was far too soft, he told himself. Hadn't even broken the Rhodian's jaw with his helmet. Shameful, really. Respect for the army had disappeared in this generation. The Emperor's fault? Possibly, though you could be drummed out of the ranks with a slit nose for saying as much. Money went to monuments these days, to Rhodian artisans, to shameful payments to the butt-fucked Bassanids in the east, instead of to honest soldiers who kept the City and the Empire safe. Word was that even Leontes, the army's beloved, the golden-haired Supreme Strategos, spent all his time now in the City, in the Imperial Precinct, dancing courtly attendance on the Emperor and Empress, playing games of a morning with balls and mallets on horseback, instead of smashing Bassanid or northern enemies into the puling rabble they were. He had a rich wife now. Another reward Wives could be a world of trouble to a soldier, Carullus thought, had always thought. Whores, if they were clean, were much less bother.

They had halted long enough. He gestured to his second in command. Darkness was coming and the next inn was a ways yet. They could only move as fast as the carried men. The litters were hoisted, the litter-bearers" horses collected and led along. The girl gave him a last fierce glare, then began walking between the two sleeping men, barefoot, looking small and fragile in a brown, too-large cloak in the last of the light. She was pretty enough. Thin for his taste, but spirited, and one couldn't have everything. The artisan would be useless to her tonight. One had to exercise a bit of discretion with the personal slaves of other men, but Carullus wondered absently what his best smile might achieve here. He tried to catch her eye, but failed.

He was in some real pain but his father and brothers had given him worse beatings in his day and Vargos was not by nature inclined to feel sorry for himself or surrender to discomfort. He had struck an army tribune in the chest today, nearly felled him; by rights they could kill him for that. They had intended to, he knew, when they reached the camp. Then Martinian had intervened, somehow. Martinian did… unexpected things. In the darkness of the inn's crowded main-floor sleeping room, Vargos shook his head. So much had happened since last night at Morax's.

He thought he had seen the old god this morning.

Ludan, in his guise of the zubir, in the Aldwood. In a sacred grove of the Aldwood. He had stood there, knelt in that grove… and had walked alive from there out into the misty field again because Martinian of Varena had carried some kind of magicked bird about his neck.

The zubir. Against the memory of that, what were bruises or a swollen mouth or a stream of red when he pissed tonight? He had seen what he had seen, and lived. Was he blessed? Could such a man as he be blessed?

Or was he being warned-a sudden thought-to forsake the other god, the one behind the sun, Jad and his chariot-driving son?

Or was Martinian right about this, too: that the one power need not mean a denial of the other? No cleric Vargos knew would accept that, but Vargos had already decided that the Rhodian was worth listening to.

And staying with.

All the way to Sarantium, it seemed. There was apprehension in that thought. Megarium, on the coast in the west of Sauradia, was the largest city Vargos had ever seen, and he hadn't liked it. The confining walls, the crowded, filthy, noisy streets. Carts rumbling by all night long, brawling voices when the taverns spilled their denizens, no calm or quietude even in the dark when the moons rode. And Vargos knew by tale what Sarantium was: as much beyond provincial Megarium as golden-haired Leontes, Strategos of the Empire, was beyond Vargos of the Inicii.

He couldn't stay here, though. It was the simplest of truths. He'd made a decision in the dark of a hallway in Morax's late last night and had sealed it with a blow of his staff in the pre-dawn courtyard amid smoky torches and fog. When you can't go back and you can't stay still, you move forward, nothing to think about, get on with it. The sort of thing his father would have said, draining another flask of home-brewed ale, wiping his moustache with his wet sleeve, gesturing with a thick arm for one of the women to bring more beer. It wasn't a complex decision, seen a certain way, and the grace here was that there was a man worth following and a place to go.

Vargos lay on a perfectly decent cot in the next inn east from Morax's and listened to snoring soldiers and laughter from the common room. They were still drinking there, Martinian and the tribune.

He lay quietly, unable to sleep, and thought of the Aldwood again. Of the zubir in the middle of the Imperial road in a swirling away of fog, then appearing-somehow-right beside them in the misty field an instant after. He would think of these things all his days, Vargos knew. And remember how Pharus had looked in the road when they came back out.

The stablemaster had been dead before they went into the wood, but when they stood above his body, after, they saw what else had been done to him. Vargos would swear by his mother's life and his own soul that no man had walked up to where the dead man lay. Whatever had claimed the man's heart had not been mortal.

He'd heard a lifeless bird speak aloud with a woman's voice to the zubir. He'd led a man and a woman through the Aldwood and out. He'd even-and here, for the first time, Vargos smiled a little in the close darkness-struck a Sarantine officer, a tribune, and they'd only roughed him up a little, and then they had put him in a litter-a litter! — and carried him to this inn, because Martinian had made them. That memory, too, would stay with him. He would have enjoyed having his Jad-cursed father watch cavalrymen dismount to carry him along the Imperial road like some senator or merchant prince.

Vargos closed his eyes. An unworthy, vain thought, today of all days. Pride had no place in the soul tonight. He struggled to shape a proper prayer to Jad and to his son, the fire-bearer, asking guidance and forgiveness. In his mind's eye, though, he kept seeing again and again that ripped-open chest of a dead man he'd known and the black zubir with blood on the short, curved horns. To whom did one pray?

He was going to the City. Sarantium. Where the Imperial Palace was and the Emperor, the Triple Walls and the Hippodrome. A hundred holy sanctuaries, he'd heard, and half a million people. He didn't really believe that last. He wasn't a northern lout any more, to be gulled with gross, exaggerated tales. Men told lies in their pride.

Growing up, he had never imagined himself living anywhere but in their village. Then, after that changed one mild, bloody spring night, he'd expected to spend his days going back and forth along the Imperial road in Sauradia until he grew too old for that and took a position at the stable or the forge in one of the inns.

Life did unexpected things to you, Vargos of the Inicii thought in the darkness. You made a decision, or someone else made one, and there you were. There you were. He heard a familiar rustling sound, then a grunt and a sigh; someone had a woman with him on the far side of the room-He turned over on his side, carefully. He'd been kicked in the lower back. That was why his piss was red, why it hurt to turn.