Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

"No!" Crispin rasped, a little desperately. "What is this about'? Does it amuse you to play the wanton? Do you wander the streets soliciting lovers? There are other bedrooms in this inn."

Her expression was impossible to read. He hoped his tunic was concealing the evidence of his arousal. He dared not look down to check.

She said, "What is this about, he asks. I have assumed you to be intelligent, Rhodian. You gave some sign of it in the throne room. Are you stupid with exhaustion now? Can you not guess that there might be people in this city who think an invasion of Batiara a destructive folly? Who might assume that you-as a Rhodian-might share that belief and have some desire to save your family and your country the consequences of an invasion?"

The words were knives, sharp and precise, almost military in their directness. She added, in the same tone, "Before you became hopelessly enmeshed in the devices of the actress and her husband, it made some sense to assess you."

Crispin rubbed a hand across his eyes and forehead. She'd given him a partial explanation, after all. A renewal of anger chased fatigue. "You bed all those you recruit?" he said, staring coldly at her.

She shook her head. "You are not a courteous man, Rhodian. I bed where my pleasure leads me." Crispin was unmoved by the reproof. She spoke, he thought, with the untrammelled assurance of one never checked in her wishes. The actress and her husband.

"And plot to undermine your Emperor's designs?"

"He killed my father," said Styliane Daleina bluntly, sitting on his bed, pale hair framing the exquisite, patrician face. "Burned him alive with Sarantine Fire."

"An old rumour," Crispin said, but he was shaken, and trying to hide it. "Why are you telling me this?"

She smiled, quite unexpectedly. "To arouse you?"

And he had to laugh. Try as he might to hold back, the effortless shift of tone, the irony of it, was too witty. "Immolation is unexciting for me, I fear. Do I take it the Supreme Strategos shares the view that no war ought to be waged in Batiara? He has sent you here?"

She blinked. "Take no such thing. Leontes will do whatever Valerius tells him. He will invade you as he invaded the Majriti deserts or the northern steppes, or laid siege to Bassanid cities east."

"And all the while his new, beloved bride will be acting to subvert him?"

She hesitated for the first time. "His new prize is the phrase you want, Rhodian. Open your eyes and ears, there are things you ought to learn before Petrus the Trakesian and his little dancer co-opt you to their service."

Contempt lay undisguised in the aristocratic voice. She would have had no choice, Crispin imagined, in the matter of her wedding. The Strategos was young, though, triumphant, celebrated, an undeniably handsome man. Crispin looked at the woman in the room with him and had a sense of having entered black waters, with unimaginably complex currents trying to suck him down. He said, "I am only a mosaicist, my lady. I was brought here to assist with images on sanctuary walls and a dome."

"Tell me," said Styliane Daleina, as if he hadn't spoken, "about the queen of the Antae. Did she offer her body in exchange for your service too? Are you Jaded now because of that? Am I too late to be of any appeal? You reject me as lesser goods? Shall I weep?"

The dark waters swirled. This had to be a bluff, a guess. That late-night secret encounter could not be so widely known. A memory came to Crispin: another hand in his hair as he knelt to kiss an offered foot. A different woman, even younger than this one, as familiar with corridors of power and intrigue. Or perhaps. not so. West to the east. Could Varena ever be as subtle as Sarantium? Could any place on earth?

He shook his head. "I am not familiar with the thoughts or the. favours of the ruling ones of our world. This encounter is unique in my experience of life, my lady." It was a lie, and yet, as he looked at her through slatted interstices, the lines of shadow and light, it wasn't, at all.

The smile again, assured, unsettling. She seemed able to move, he thought, from the intrigues of empires to those of bedrooms without a pause. "How nice," she said. "I like being unique. You do know it shames a lady, however, to offer herself and be refused? I told you, I lie where pleasure leads me, not need. "She paused. "Or rather, where a different sort of need draws me."

Crispin swallowed. He didn't believe her, but her knee within the blue, simple robe lingered a hand's-breadth from his own. He clung desperately to his anger, a sense of being used. "It shames a man of pride to be seen as a piece in a game."

Her eyebrows arched swiftly and the tone changed-again. "But you are, you foolish man. Of course you are. Pride has nothing to do with it. Everyone at this court is proud, everyone is a piece in a game. In many games at once-some of murder and some of desire-though there is only one game that matters, in the end, and all the others are parts of it."

Which was an answer to his thought, he supposed. Her knee touched his. Deliberately. There were no accidental things with this woman, he was sure of it. Some of desire.

"Why should you imagine yourself to be different?" Styliane Daleina added, quietly.

"Because I will myself to be so," he said, surprising himself.

There was a silence. Then, "You grow interesting, Rhodian, I must concede, but this is almost certainly a self-deception. I suspect the actress has enchanted you already and you don't even know it. I shall weep, I suppose." Her expression had changed, but was nowhere near to tears. She stood abruptly, crossed in three strides to the door, turned there.

Crispin also rose. Now that she'd withdrawn he felt a chaos of emotions: apprehension, regret, curiosity, an unnerving measure of desire. He'd been a stranger to that last for so long. As he watched, she drew up her hood again, hiding the spilled gold of her hair.

"I also came to thank you for my gem, of course. It was… an interesting gesture. I am not difficult to find, artisan, should you have any thoughts about your home and the prospects of a war. It will become clear to you soon, I believe, that the man who brought you here to make holy images for him also intends to wreak violence upon Batiara for no reason but his own glory."

Crispin cleared his throat. "I am pleased to find my small gift deemed worthy of thanks." He paused. "I am an artisan only, my lady."

She shook her head, the expression cool again. "That is a coward in you, hiding from truths of the world, Rhodian. All men-and women- are more than one thing. Or have you willed yourself to be limited in this way? Will you live on a scaffold above all the dying?"

Her intelligence was appalling. Just as the Empress's had been. It crossed his mind that had he not met Alixana first he might indeed have had no defences against this woman. Styliane Daleina might not be wrong, after all. And then he wondered if the Empress had thought of that. If that was why he'd received so immediate a late-night invitation to the Traversite Palace. Could these women be that quick, that subtle? His head was aching.

"I have been here two days only, my lady, and have not slept tonight. You are speaking subversion against the Emperor who invited me to Sarantium, and even against your husband, if I understand you. Am I to be bought with a woman's hair on my pillow for a night, or a morning?" He hesitated. "Even yours?"

The smile returned at that, enigmatic and provoking. "It happens," she murmured. "It is sometimes longer than a night, or the night is… longer than an ordinary one. Time moves strangely in some circumstances. Have you never found that, Caius Crispus?"

He dared make no reply. She didn't seem to expect one. She said, "We may continue this another time." She paused. It seemed to him she was wrestling with something. Then she added, "About your images. The domes and walls? Do not grow… too attached to your work there, Rhodian. I say this with goodwill, and probably should not. It is weak of me."