Lord of Emperors

This was only as it should be. Pappio owed his appointment to his Green partisanship. His predecessor as head of the guild and Glassworks Director—an equally fervent Green—had selected him in large part for that reason. Pappio knew that when he chose to retire he was expected to pass on the position to another Green. It happened all the time, in every guild except the silk, which was a special case and closely scru tinized by the Imperial Precinct. One faction or the other controlled most of the guilds, and it was rare for that control to be wrested away. One had to be blatantly corrupt for the Emperor’s people to interfere.

Pappio had no intention of being blatant about anything, or even corrupt, if it came to that. He was a careful man.

And it was that instinctive caution, in part, that had made him a little uneasy about the surprising request he’d received, and the extremely substantial payment that had accompanied it—before he’d even done a preliminary sketch of the glass bowl requested!

He understood that it was his stature that was being bought. That the gift would acquire greatly enhanced value because it had been fashioned by the head of the guild himself, who never did such things any more. He also knew that the man buying this from him—as a wedding gift, he understood—could afford to do so. One didn’t need to make inquiries to know that the principal secretary to the Supreme Strategos, an historian who also happened to be chronicling the Emperor’s building projects, had sufficient resources to buy an elaborate bowl. This was a man who, more and more, seemed to require a certain deference. Pappio didn’t like the sallow, unsmiling, lean-faced secretary, but what did liking have to do with anything?

What was harder to sort out was why Pertennius of Eubulus was buying this gift. Some discreet questions had to be asked elsewhere before Pappio thought he had the answer. It turned out to be simple enough, in the end—one of the oldest stories of all—and it had nothing to do with the bride and groom.

It was someone else that Pertennius was trying to impress. And since that person happened to be dear to Pappio’s own heart, he had to overcome a certain indignation—visualizing a woman sleek and splendid as a falcon in the thin arms of the dour secretary—to concentrate on his unaccustomed craft again. He forced himself to do so, however, as best he could.

After all, he wouldn’t want the Principal Dancer for his beloved Greens to think him less than an exemplary artisan. Perhaps, he daydreamed, she might even ask for further work on her own behalf after seeing his bowl. Pappio imagined meetings, consultations, two heads bent close over a series of drawings, her notorious perfume— worn by only two women in all of Sarantium—enveloping him, a trusting hand laid on his arm . . .

Pappio was not a young man, was stout and bald and married with three grown children, but it was a truth of the world that certain women carried a magic about them, on the stage and off, and dreams followed where they went. You didn’t stop dreaming just because you weren’t young any more. If Pertennius could attempt to win admiration with a showy gift given to people he couldn’t possibly care about, might not Pappio try to let the exquisite Shirin see what the Director of the Imperial Glassworks could do when he put his hands and mind— and a part of his heart—to his earliest craft?

She would see the bowl when it was delivered to her house. It seemed the bride was living with her.

After some thought, and a morning’s sketching, Pappio decided to make the bowl green, with inset pieces of bright yellow glass like meadow flowers in the spring that was coming at last.

His heart quickened as he began to work, but it wasn’t the labour or the craft that was exciting him, or even the image of a woman now. It was something else entirely. If spring was nearly upon them, Pappio was thinking, humming a processional march to himself, then so were the chariots, so were the chariots, so were the chariots again.

Every morning, during the sunrise invocations in the elegant chapel she had elected to frequent, the young queen of the Antae went through an exercise of tabulating, as on a secretary’s slate in her mind, the things for which she ought to be grateful. Seen in a certain light, there were many of them.

She had escaped an attempt on her life, survived a late-season sailing to Sarantium, and then the first stages of settling in this city—a process more overwhelming than she wanted to admit. It had taken much from her to preserve an appropriately haughty manner when they had first come within sight of the harbour and walls. Even though she had known Sarantium could overawe, and had been preparing for it, Gisel learned, when the sun rose that morning behind the Imperial City, that sometimes there was no real way to prepare oneself.

She was grateful for her father’s training and the self-discipline her life had demanded: she didn’t think anyone had seen how daunted she was.

And there was more for which thanks ought to be given, to holy Jad or whatever pagan deities one chose to remember from the Antae forests. She had entirely respectable housing in a small palace near the triple walls, courtesy of the Emperor and Empress. She’d acted quickly enough on arrival to secure adequate funds of her own, by demanding loans to the crown from Batiaran merchants trading here in the east. Despite the irregularity of her sudden arrival, unannounced, on an Imperial ship, with only a small cadre of her guards and women, none of the Batiarans had dared gainsay their queen’s regal, matter-of-fact request. If she’d waited, Gisel knew, it might have been different. Once those back in Varena— those doubtless claiming or battling for her throne by now—learned where she was, they would send their own instructions east. Money might be harder to come by. More importantly, she expected they’d try to kill her then.

She was too experienced in these affairs—of royalty and survival—to have been foolish enough to wait. Once she’d acquired her funds, she’d hired a dozen Karchite mercenaries as personal guards and dressed them in crimson and white, the colours of her grandfather’s war banner.

Her father had always liked Karchites for guards. If you kept them sober when on duty and allowed them to disappear into cauponae when not, they tended to be fiercely loyal. She’d also accepted the Empress Alixana’s offer of three more ladies-in-waiting and a chef and steward from the Imperial Precinct. She was setting up a household; amenities and a reasonable staff were necessary. Gisel knew perfectly well that there would be spies among these, but that, too, was something with which she was familiar. There were ways of avoiding them, or misleading them.

She’d been received at court not long after arriving and welcomed with entirely proper courtesy and respect. She had seen and exchanged formal greetings with the grey-eyed, round-faced Emperor and the small, exquisite, childless dancer who had become his Empress. They had all been precisely and appropriately polite, though no private encounters or exchanges with either Valerius or Alixana had followed. She hadn’t been sure whether to expect these or not. It depended on the Emperor’s larger plans. Once, affairs had waited on her plans. Not any more.

She had received, in her own small city palace, a regular stream of dignitaries and courtiers from the Imperial Precinct in that first interval of time. Some came out of sheer curiosity, Gisel knew: she was a novelty, a diversion in winter. A barbarian queen in flight from her people. They might have been disappointed to be received with style and grace by a reserved, silk-clad young woman who showed no sign at all of using bear grease in her yellow hair.

A smaller number made the long trip through the crowded city for more thoughtful reasons, assessing her and what role she might play in the shifting alignments of a complex court. The aged, clear-eyed Chancellor Gesius had had himself carried through the streets to her bearing gifts in his litter: silk for a garment and an ivory comb. They spoke of her father, with whom Gesius had evidently corresponded for years, and then of theatre—he urged her to attend—and finally of the regrettable effect of the damp weather on his fingers and knee joints. Gisel almost allowed herself to like him, but was too experienced to permit herself such a response.

The Master of Offices, a younger, stiff-faced man named Faustinus, arrived the next morning, apparently in response to Gesius’s visit, as though the two men tracked each other’s doings. They probably did. The court of Valerius II would not be different in this regard from Gisel’s father’s or her own. Faustinus drank an herbal tea and asked a number of self-evidently harmless questions about how her court had been administered. He was a functionary, these things occupied his attention. He was also ambitious, she judged, but only in the way that officious men are who fear losing the patterns of their established lives. Nothing burned in him.

In the woman who came a few days after, there was something burning beneath a chilly, patrician manner, and Gisel felt both the heat and the cold. It was an unsettling encounter. She had heard of the Daleinoi, of course: wealthiest family in the Empire. With a father and brother dead, another brother said to be hideously maimed and hidden away somewhere, and a third keeping cautiously distant from the City, Styliane Daleina, wife now to the Supreme Strategos, was the visible presence of her aristocratic family in Sarantium, and there was nothing harmless about her, Gisel decided very early in their conversation.

They were almost of an age, she judged, and life had taken away both their childhoods very early. Styliane’s manner was unrevealing, her bearing and manner perfect, a veneer of exquisite politeness, betraying nothing of what might be her thoughts.

Until she chose to do so. Over dried figs and a small glass of warmed, sweetened wine, a desultory exchange about clothing styles in the west had turned into a sudden, very direct question about Gisel’s throne and her flight and what she hoped to achieve by accepting the Emperor’s invitation to come east.

‘I am alive,’ Gisel had said mildly, meeting the appraising blue gaze of the other woman. ‘You will have heard of what happened in the sanctuary on the day of its consecration.’

‘It was unpleasant, I understand,’ had said Styliane Daleina casually, speaking of murder and treason. She gestured dismissively. ‘Is this, then, pleasant? This pretty cage?’

‘My visitors are a source of very great consolation,’ Gisel had murmured, controlling anger ruthlessly. ‘Tell me, I have been urged to attend the theatre one night. Have you a suggestion?’ She smiled, bland and young, manifestly thoughtless. A barbarian princess, barely two generations removed from the forests where the women painted their naked breasts with dyes.

More than one person, Gisel had thought, leaning forward to carefully select a fig, could preserve her privacy behind empty talk.

Styliane Daleina left soon after, with an observation at the door that people at court seemed to think the principal dancer and actress for the Green faction was the preeminent performer of the day. Gisel had thanked her, and promised to repay her courtesy with a visit one day. She actually thought she might: there was a certain kind of bitter pleasure in this sort of sparring. She wondered if it were possible to find bear grease in Sarantium.

There were other visitors. The Eastern Patriarch sent his principal secretary, an officious, sour-smelling cleric who asked prepared questions about western faith and then lectured her on Heladikos until he realized she wasn’t listening. Some members of the small Batiaran community here—mostly merchants, mercenary soldiers, a few craftsmen—made a point of attending upon her until, at some point in the winter, they stopped coming, and Gisel concluded that Eudric or Kerdas, back home, had sent word, or even instructions. Agila was dead; they had learned that by now. He’d died in her father’s resting place the morning of the consecration. With Pharos and Anissa, the only two people left in the world who might have been said to love her. She’d heard the tidings, dry-eyed, and hired another half a dozen mercenaries.

The visitors from the court continued for a time. A few of the men gave indications of wishing to seduce her: a triumph for them, doubtless.

She remained a virgin, regretting it occasionally. Boredom was one of the central problems of this new life. It wasn’t even really a life. It was a waiting to see if life could continue, or begin again.

And this, unfortunately, was where the dutiful attempt to summon proper gratitude each morning in the chapel usually faltered as the invocations to holy Jad ended. She’d had an existence of real—if precarious—power back home. Reigning queen of a conquering people in the homeland of an empire. The High Patriarch in Rhodias deferred to her, as he had to her father. Here in Sarantium she was subjected to lectures from a lesser cleric. She was no more than a glittering object, a jewel of sorts for the Emperor and his court, without function or access to any role. She was, in the simplest reading of things, a possible excuse for an invasion of Batiara, and little more than that.

Those subtle people from the court who rode or were carried in curtained litters across the city to see her seemed to have gradually come to that same conclusion. It was a long way from the Imperial Precinct to her palace near the triple walls. Midway through the winter, the visits from the court had also begun to grow less frequent. It was not a surprise. At times it saddened her how little ever surprised her.

One of the would-be lovers—more determined than the others—continued to visit after the others had ceased to appear. Gisel allowed him, once, to kiss her palm, not her hand. The sensation had been mildly diverting, but after reflection she’d elected to be engaged the next time he came, and then the next. There hadn’t been a third visit.

She’d had little choice, really. Her youth, beauty, whatever desire men might have for her, these were among the few remaining tools she had, having left a throne behind.

She wondered when Eudric or Kerdas would attempt to have her murdered. If Valerius would really try to stop it. On balance, she thought, she was of more use to the Emperor alive, but there were arguments the other way, and there was the Empress to consider.

Every such calculation she had to make by herself. She’d no one she trusted to advise her here. Not that she’d really had that back home, either. At times she found herself feeling furious and bereft when she thought of the grey-haired alchemist who had helped her in this flight but had then abandoned her to pursue his own affairs, whatever they might have been. She had last seen him on the wharf in Megarium, standing in the rain as her ship sailed away.

Gisel, having returned from the chapel to her home, was sitting in the pretty solarium over the quiet street. She noted that the rising sun was now over the roofs across the way. She rang a small bell by her chair and one of the very well trained women the Empress had sent to her appeared in the doorway. It was time to begin preparing to go out. It was wrong, in truth, to say that nothing ever surprised her. There had been unexpected developments.

In the wake of one of them, involving a dancer who happened to be the daughter of that same grey-haired man who had left her in Megarium, she’d accepted an invitation for this afternoon.

And that reminded her of the other man she had enlisted to her service back home, the red-haired mosaicist. Caius Crispus would be present today as well.

She had ascertained that he was in Sarantium shortly after her own arrival. She’d needed to know; he raised considerations of his own. She had entrusted him with a dangerously private message, and had no idea if he’d delivered it, or even tried. She’d remembered him to be bitter, saturnine, unexpectedly clever. She’d needed to speak with him.

She hadn’t invited him to visit—as far as the world knew, he had never met her, after all. Six men had died to preserve that illusion. She’d gone, instead, to observe the progress being made on the Emperor’s new Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom. The Sanctuary wasn’t yet open to the general public, but a visit was an entirely appropriate—even a pious—outing for a visiting monarch. No one could have possibly queried it. Once she’d entered, she’d decided, entirely on impulse, on an unusual approach to this matter.

Thinking back to the events of that morning in early winter, as her women now began preparing her bath, Gisel found herself smiling privately. Jad knew, she wasn’t inclined to give way to impulse, and few enough things ever gave her occasion to be amused, but she hadn’t conducted herself in that stupefying place with what might be considered decorous piety, and she had to admit she’d enjoyed herself.

The tale had run around Sarantium by now. She’d intended it to.

A man on a scaffold under a dome with glass in his hands, trying to make a god. More than one, in truth, though that particular truth was not one he proposed to reveal. Crispin was, that day—early winter in Jad’s holy city of Sarantium—happy to be alive and not anxious to be burned for heresy. The irony was that he hadn’t yet realized or acknowledged his own happiness. It had been a long time since he’d known the feeling; he was a stranger now to such a mood, would have glowered in vexation and snapped off a brittle insult to someone who’d dared make the observation that he seemed content with his lot.

Brow unconsciously furrowed, mouth a line of concentration, he was attempting to finally confirm the colours of his own image of Jad above the emerging skyline of Sarantium on the dome. Other artisans were creating the City for him under his supervision; he himself was rendering the figures, and he was beginning with Jad, that an image of the god might look down upon all who entered here while the dome and semidomes and walls were being achieved. He wanted the god he made to echo, in a tacit homage, the one he’d seen in a small chapel in Sauradia, but not slavishly or too obviously. He was working on a different scale, his Jad a ruling element of a larger scene, not the entirety of the dome, and there were matters of balance and proportion to be worked through.

At the moment, he was thinking about eyes and the lines in the skin above and below them, remembering the wounded, haggard vision of Jad in that chapel he’d seen on the Day of the Dead. He’d fallen down. Had literally collapsed beneath that gaunt, overpowering figure.

His memory for colours was very good. It was flawless, in fact, and he knew this without false humility. He’d worked closely with the head of the Imperial Glassworks to find those hues that most precisely matched the ones he remembered from Sauradia. It helped that he was now in charge of the mosaic decoration for the most important, by far, of all Valerius II’s building projects. The previous mosaicist—one Siroes—had been dismissed in disgrace, and had somehow broken the fingers of both hands that same night in an unexplained accident. Crispin, as it happened, did know something about that. He wished he didn’t. He remembered a tall, fair-haired woman in his bedroom at dawn, murmuring, I can attest that Siroes was not in a position to hire assassins tonight. And she’d added, very calmly, Trust me in this.

He did. In that, if in nothing else. It was the Emperor, however, not the yellow-haired woman, who had shown Crispin this dome and offered it to him. What Crispin asked for now he tended to receive, at least insofar as tesserae were concerned.

In the other spheres of his life, down among the men and women of the City, he hadn’t yet decided what it was he even wanted. He only knew that he had a life below this scaffolding, as well, with friends, enemies—attempts on his life within days of his arrival—and complexities that could, if allowed, distract him dangerously from what he needed to do up here on this dome that an Emperor and an architect of genius had given to him.

He ran a hand through his thick red hair, rendering it even more haphazard than usual, and decided that the eyes of his god would be dark brown and obsidian like those of the figure in Sauradia, but that he would not evoke the pallor of the other Jad with grey hues in the skin of the face. He would pick up the two shades again when he did the long, thin hands, but would not make them ruined, as the other’s had been. An echoing of elements, not a copying. It was pretty much what he’d thought before coming back up here—first instincts tended to hold for him.

Having decided as much, Crispin took a deep breath and felt himself relax. He could begin tomorrow, then. With the thought he detected a slight stirring of the scaffold, a swaying movement, which meant someone was climbing.

This was forbidden. It was utterly and absolutely forbidden to the apprentices and artisans. To everyone, in fact, including Artibasos, who had built this Sanctuary. A rule: when Crispin was up here, no one climbed his scaffolding. He had threatened mutilation, dismemberment, death. Vargos, who was proving to be as competent an assistant here as on the road, had been scrupulous in preserving Crispin’s sanctity aloft.

Crispin looked down, more stunned by the breach than anything else, and saw that it was a woman—she had discarded a cloak for easier movement—who was ascending the scaffold rungs towards him. He saw Vargos among those far below on the marble tiles. His Inici friend spread his hands, helplessly. Crispin looked at the climber again. Then he blinked and caught his breath, gripping the low railing tightly with both hands.

Once before he had looked down from this great height, just after arriving, when he’d been using his fingers like a blind man to map this dome where he intended to make the world, and had seen a woman far below, feeling her very presence as an irresistible pull: the force and draw of the world where men and women went about their lives.

That time it had been an Empress.

He had gone down to her. Not a woman to be resisted, even if she simply stood below, waiting. Had gone down to speak of dolphins and of other things, to rejoin and be reclaimed by the living world from the place where love lost to death had taken him.

This time, staring in mute stupefaction at the climber’s steady, quite competent progress, Crispin tried to deal with who this was. Too astonished to call out or even know how to react, he simply waited, heart pounding, as his own queen came to him, high above the world, but in plain sight of all below.

She reached the last rung, then the scaffold itself and— ignoring his hastily extended hand—stepped onto it, a little flushed, breathless, but visibly pleased with herself, bright-eyed and unafraid, to stand in this place of absolutely private speech on a precarious platform just under Artibasos’s dome. However many listening ears there might be in dangerous Sarantium, there were none here.

Crispin knelt and lowered his head. He had last seen this young, beleaguered woman in her own palace, in his own city far to the west. Had kissed her foot in farewell and felt her hand brush his hair. Then he had left, having somehow promised to try to deliver a message to an Emperor. And he’d learned the morning after that she’d had six of her own guards killed—simply to preserve the secret of their encounter.

On the scaffolding below the dome, Gisel of the Antae brushed his hair again with a light, slow hand. Kneeling, he trembled.

‘No flour this time,’ his queen murmured. ‘An improvement, artisan. Bur I prefer the beard, I think. Has the east claimed you so soon? Are you lost to us? You may stand, Caius Crispus, and tell what you have to tell.’

‘Your Majesty,’ Crispin stammered, rising, feeling himself flushing, terribly unsettled. The world, coming up to him, even here. ‘This is . . . this is not a safe place for you, at all!’

Gisel smiled. ‘Are you so dangerous, artisan?’