Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

Dolphins, she wanted. He drew a breath, remembering the sallow secretary delivering a necklace, the man's face as he looked from Crispin- alone with the Empress, it would have seemed to him-to the woman herself, with her long dark hair unbound in her intimate rooms. There had been layers to that swiftly veiled expression, Crispin thought. These, too, were beyond him just now.

He thought of the Sanctuary again, and of the man who had taken him there along a low stone tunnel and through a door into glory. In the eye of his mind he still saw that dome and the semi-domes around it and the arches supporting them, marble set upon marble, and he saw his own work there, one day to come. The Sanctuary behind them was Artibasos's legacy, he thought, and it might end up being what the Emperor Valerius II was remembered for, and it could be-it could be-why the world might one day come to know that the Rhodian mosaicist Caius Crispus, only son of Horius Crispus of Varena and his wife Avita, had lived once, and done honourable work under Jad's sun and the two moons.

He was thinking that when they were attacked.

He had wondered, moments before, if he might be permitted to withdraw to his tesserae: glass and marble, gold and mother-of-pearl, stone and semi-precious stone, the shaping of a vision on scaffolding in the air, high above the intrigues and wars and desires of men and women.

It didn't appear that would be so, as the night became iron and blood.

Strumosus had told him once-or, in truth, had told a fishmonger in the market with Kyros standing by-that you could tell much about a man by watching when he first tasted extremely good or very bad food. Kyros had taken to observing Strumosus's occasional guests in the kitchen when he had the chance.

He did tonight. It was so very late and the earlier events had been so extraordinary that an unexpectedly intimate sense of aftermath-of events shared and survived-prevailed in the kitchen.

Outside, the bodies of the attackers had been tossed beyond the gates and the two soldiers of the Fourth Sauradian cavalry who had died defending Scortius and the mosaicist in the first street assault had been brought in with the dead gatekeeper to await proper burial. Nine bodies in all, violently dead. The cheiromancers of the City would be furiously busy today and tomorrow, shaping commissioned curse-tablets to be deposited at the graves. The newly dead had the power of emissaries to the half-world. Astorgus kept two cheiromancers on staff, salaried, preparing counterspells against those who wished the Blues" charioteers maimed or dead, or besought the same fate for the horses from malign spirits of darkness.

Kyros felt badly about the gatekeeper.

Niester had been playing games of Horse and Fox on one of the boards in the common room after the racing this afternoon. He was a body under a cloth now in the cold of the yard. He had two small children. Astorgus had detailed someone to go to his wife, but had told him to wait until after the dawn prayers. Let the woman sleep through the night. Time enough for grief to come knocking with a black fist.

Astorgus himself, in a grim, choleric mood, had gone off to meet with the Urban Prefect's officers. Kyros would not have wanted to be the man charged with dealing with the Blues" factionarius just now.

The faction's principal surgeon-a brisk, bearded Kindath-had been roused to tend the wounded soldier, whose name was Carullus of the Fourth Sauradian. His wounds turned out to be showy but not dangerous. The man had endured their cleansing and bandaging without expression, drinking wine with his free hand as the surgeon treated his shoulder. He had fought a running battle alone against six men along the dark laneway, allowing Scortius and the Rhodian to reach the faction gates. Carullus was still angry that the attackers had all been slain, Kyros gathered. No easy way to find out who'd hired them now.

Released by the doctor to the dinner table, the tribune of the Fourth Sauradian showed little sign of diminished appetite. Neither wounds nor anger diverted his attention from the bowls and plates in front of him. He had lost two of his soldiers tonight, had killed two men himself, but Kyros guessed that a military man would have to get used to that, and carry on, or he'd go mad. It was those at home who sometimes went mad, as Kyros's mother's sister had three years ago, when her son was killed in the Bassanid siege of Asen, near Eubulus. Kyros's mother remained certain it was grief that had rendered her vulnerable to the plague when it came the next year. His aunt had been one of the first to die. Asen had been returned by the Bassanids the following spring in the treaty that bought peace on the eastern borders, making the siege and the deaths even more pointless. Cities were always being taken and ceded back on both sides of the shifting border.

People didn't come back to life, though, even if a city was returned. You carried on, as this officer was, hungrily sponging up fish soup with a thick crust of bread. What else could one do? Curse the god, tear one's garments, retreat like a Holy Fool to some chapel or a rock in the desert or mountains? That last was possible, Kyros supposed, but he had discovered, since coming to this kitchen, that he had a hunger-a taste, you might say-for the gifts and dangers of the world. He might never be a charioteer, an animal trainer, a soldier-he would drag a bad foot with him through all his days-but there was a life to be lived, nonetheless. A life in the world.

And just now Scortius, First of the Blues, to whose glory a silver statue had been promised tonight for the Hippodrome spina, was glancing up, soup spoon in hand, and murmuring to Strumosus, "What can I say, my friend? The soup is worthy of the banquet hall of the god."

"It is," echoed the red-haired Rhodian beside him. "It is wonderful." His expression was rapt, as revealing as Strumosus had said faces could be at such times.

Strumosus, entirely relaxed now, sitting at the head of the table pouring wine for his three guests, had benignly tilted his head sideways. He said: "Young Kyros over there attended to it. He has the makings of a cook."

Two sentences. Simple words. Kyros feared he might weep for joy and pride. He did not, of course. He wasn't a child, after all. He did blush, unfortunately, and lower his head before all the approving smiles. And then he began waiting ardently for the moment, released to the privacy of his cot in the apprentices" room, when he could reclaim-over and again-that miraculous sequence of words and the expressions that had followed. Scortius had said. Then the Rhodian had added. Then Strumosus had said…

Kyros and Rasic were given the next day to themselves: an unexpected holiday, a reward for working all night. Rasic went whistling off to the harbour to buy a woman in a caupona. Kyros used the free time to go to his parents" apartment down in the overcrowded, pungent warrens of the Hippodrome where he'd grown up. He told them, shyly, about what had been said the night before. His father, a man of few words, had touched his son's shoulder with a scarred, bitten hand before going off to feed his beasts. His mother, rather less reserved, had screamed.

Then she had bustled out of their tiny apartment to tell all her friends, before buying and lighting an entire row of thanksgiving candles in the Hippodrome's own chapel. For once, Kyros didn't think she was being excessive.

The makings of a cook.

Strumosus had said that!

They didn't end up going to bed that night. There was food fit for the god's palaces behind the sun and wine to equal it in the blessedly warm, firelit kitchen. They finished with an herbal tea, just before sunrise, that reminded Crispin of the one Zoticus had served him before his journey had begun-which reminded him of Linon, and then home, which made him think, again, of how far away he was. Among strangers, but less so after tonight, it felt. He sipped the hot tea and allowed the faint dizziness of extreme fatigue to wash over him, a sense of distance, of words and movements drifting towards his awareness from far away.