Lord of Emperors

He wasn’t. She was. He wanted to say that. Her hair was golden, her gaze a deep, remembered blue—she had the same colouring, in fact, as another of the very dangerous women he knew here. But where Styliane Daleina was ice with an edge of malice, Gisel, the daughter of Hildric the Great, showed something wilder and sadder, both.

He’d known she was here, of course. Everyone had heard of the arrival of the Antae queen. He’d wondered if she’d send for him. She hadn’t. She’d climbed up to find him, instead, graceful and assured as an experienced mosaicist. This was Hildric’s daughter. An Antae. Could hunt, shoot, ride, probably kill with a dagger secreted somewhere on her person. No delicate, sheltered court lady, this.

She said, ‘We are waiting, artisan. We have come a long way to see you, after all.’

He bowed his head. And told her, unvarnished and with nothing that mattered held back, of his conversation with Valerius and Alixana, when the small, brilliant figure that was the Empress of Sarantium had turned in a doorway to her inner chamber and asked—with seeming casualness—about the marriage proposal he undoubtedly carried from Varena.

Gisel was disturbed, he realized. Was trying to hide that and might have done so from a less observant man. When he finished, she was silent awhile.

‘Did she sort it through or did he?’ she asked.

Crispin thought about it. ‘Both of them, I believe. Together, or each on their own.’ He hesitated. ‘She is . . . an exceptional woman, Majesty.’

Gisel’s blue gaze met his briefly, then flicked away. She was so young, he thought.

‘I wonder what would have happened,’ she murmured, ‘had I not had the guardsmen killed.’

They’d be alive, Crispin wanted to say, but did not. He might have, a season ago, but was not quite the same angry, bitter man he’d been at the beginning of autumn. He’d had a journey, since.

Another silence. She said, ‘You know why I am here? In Sarantium?’

He nodded. It was all over the city. ‘You avoided an attempt on your life. In the sanctuary. I am horrified, Majesty.’

‘Of course you are,’ said his queen, and smiled, almost absently. For all the terrible nuances of what they were discussing and what had happened to her, an odd mood seemed to be playing about her, in the dance and drift of sunlight through the high windows all around the dome. He tried to fathom how she must feel, having fled from her throne and people, living here on sufferance, devoid of her own power. He couldn’t even imagine it.

‘I like it up here,’ the queen said suddenly. She went to the low railing and looked down, seemingly unfazed by how high they were. Crispin had known people to faint or collapse, clutching at the planks of the scaffold up here.

There were other platforms, around the eastern perimeter of the dome, where men had begun setting tesserae on Crispin’s sketched pattern, to make a cityscape and the deep blue and green of the sea, but no one else was aloft just now. Gisel of the Antae looked at her own hands on the rail, then turned and held them up to him. ‘Could I be a mosaicist, do you think?’ She laughed. He listened for desperation, fear, but heard only genuine amusement.

He said, ‘It is a craft only, unworthy of you, Majesty.’

She looked around for a time without answering him. ‘No. This isn’t,’ she said finally. She gestured at Artibasos’s dome, at the beginnings of Crispin’s own vast mosaic upon it. ‘This isn’t unworthy of anyone. Are you pleased you came now, Caius Crispus? You didn’t want to, I recall.’

And in response to the direct question, Crispin nodded his head, admitting it for the first time. ‘I didn’t want to, but this dome is a life’s gift for such as I.’

She nodded. Her mood had changed, swiftly. ‘Good. We also are pleased you are here. We have few we may trust in this city. Are you one such?’

She had been direct the first time, too. Crispin cleared his throat. She was so alone in Sarantium. The court would use her as a tool, and hard men back home would want her dead. He said, ‘In whatever ways I may help you, my lady, I shall.’

‘Good,’ she repeated. He saw her colour had heightened. Her eyes were bright. ‘I wonder. How shall we do this? Shall I order you to come now and kiss me, so that those below can see?’

Crispin blinked, swallowed, ran a hand reflexively through his hair.

‘You do not improve your appearance when you do that, you know,’ the queen said. ‘Think, artisan. There has to be a reason for my coming up here to you. Will it help you with the women of this city to be known as a queen’s lover, or will it mark you as . . . untouchable?’ And she smiled.

‘I . . . I don’t have . . . My lady, I . . . ’

‘You don’t want to kiss me?’ she asked. A mood so bright it was a danger in itself. She stood very still, waiting for him.

He was entirely unnerved. He took a deep breath, then a step forward.

And she laughed. ‘On further thought, it isn’t necessary, is it? My hand will do, artisan. You may kiss my hand.’

She lifted it to him. He took it in his own and raised it to his lips, and just as he did so she turned her hand in his and it was her palm, soft and warm, that he kissed.

‘I wonder,’ said the queen of the Antae, ‘if anyone could see me do that.’ And she smiled again.

Crispin was breathing hard. He straightened. She remained very near and, bringing up both her hands, she smoothed his disordered hair.

‘We will leave you,’ she said, astonishingly composed, the too-bright manner gone as swiftly as it had come, though her colour remained high. ‘You may call upon us now, of course. Everyone will assume they know why. As it happens, we wish to go to the theatre.’

‘Majesty,’ Crispin said, struggling to regain a measure of calm. ‘You are the queen of the Antae, of Batiara, an honoured guest of the Emperor . . . an artisan cannot possibly escort you to the theatre. You will have to sit in the Imperial Box. Must be seen there. There are protocols . . .’

She frowned, as if struck only now by the thought. ‘Do you know, I believe you are correct. I shall have to send a note to the Chancellor then. But in that case, I may have come up here to no purpose, Caius Crispus.’ She looked up at him. ‘You must take care to provide us with a reason.’ And she turned away.

He was so deeply shaken that she was five rungs down the ladder before he even moved, offering her no assistance at all.

It didn’t matter. She went down to the marble floor as easily as she’d come up. It occurred to him, watching her descend towards a score of unabashedly curious people staring up, that if he was marked now as her lover, or even her confidant, then his mother and his friends might be endangered back home when word of this went west. Gisel had escaped a determined assassination attempt. There were men who wanted her throne, which meant ensuring she did not take it back. Those linked to her in any way would be suspect. Of what, it hardly mattered.

The Antae were not fastidious about such things.

And that truth, Crispin decided, staring down, applied as much to the woman nearing the ground now. She might be young, and terribly vulnerable here, but she’d survived a year on her throne among men who wished her dead or subjected to their will, and had managed to elude them when they did try to kill her. And she was her father’s daughter. Gisel of the Antae would do whatever she had to do, he thought, to achieve her purposes, until and unless someone did end her life. Consequences for others wouldn’t even cross her mind.

He thought of the Emperor Valerius, moving mortal lives this way and that like pieces on a gameboard. Did power shape this way of thinking, or was it only those who already thought this way who could achieve earthly power?

It came to Crispin, watching the queen reach the marble floor to accept bows and her cloak, that he’d been offered intimacy by three women in this city, and each occasion had been an act of contrivance and dissembling. Not one of them had touched him with any tenderness or care, or even a true desire.

Or, perhaps, that last wasn’t entirely so. When he returned home later in the day to the house the Chancellor’s people had by now arranged for him, Crispin found a note waiting. Tidings took little time to travel in this city—or certain kinds of tidings did. The note, when unfolded, was not signed, and he’d never seen the round, smooth handwriting before, but the paper was astonishingly fine, luxurious. Reading the words, he realized no signature was needed, or possible.

You told me, Styliane Daleina had written, that you were a stranger to the private rooms of royalty.

Nothing more. No added reproach, no direct suggestion that he’d deceived her, no irony or provocation. The stated fact. And the fact that she’d stated it.

Crispin, who’d intended to have a midday meal at home and then return to the Sanctuary, had taken himself off instead to his preferred tavern and then to the baths. In each of these places he’d had more wine than was really good for him.

His friend Carullus, tribune of the Fourth Sauradian, had found him later in the evening, back at The Spina. The burly soldier had seated himself opposite Crispin, signalled for a cup of wine for himself and grinned. Crispin had refused to smile back.

‘Two pieces of news, my inexplicably drunken friend,’ Carullus had said breezily. He held up a finger. ‘One, I have met with the Supreme Strategos. I have met with him, and Leontes has promised half the arrears for the western army will be sent before midwinter and the rest by spring. A personal promise. Crispin, I’ve done it!’

Crispin looked at him, trying to share in his friend’s delight and failing utterly. This was hugely important news, though—everyone knew about the army unrest and the arrears of pay. It was the reason Carullus had come to the City, if one excepted a desire to see chariots in the Hippodrome.

‘No, you haven’t done it,’ he said morosely. ‘It just means there’s a war coming. Valerius is sending Leontes to Batiara, after all. You don’t invade with unpaid troops.’

Carullus only smiled. ‘I know that, you sodden dolt. But who gets the credit, man? Who writes his governor in the morning that he has succeeded in getting the payment released when everyone else has failed?’

Crispin nodded and reached for his wine again. ‘Pleased for you,’ he said. ‘Truly. Forgive, if I’m not as pleased to hear that my friends and my mother are now to be invaded.’

Carullus shrugged. ‘Warn them. Tell them to leave Varena.’

‘Get fucked,’ Crispin had said, uncharitably. Whatever was happening was not Carullus’s fault, and his advice might be good—even more so in the light of what had happened that morning on the scaffolding.

‘That activity on your mind? I heard about your visitor this morning. Do you keep pillows up on that scaffold of yours? I’ll let you sober up but I’ll expect a very detailed explanation in the morning, my friend.’ Carullus licked his lips.

Crispin swore again. ‘It was play-acting. Theatre. She wanted to talk to me and needed to give people something to think.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Carullus, his eyebrows arched high. ‘Talk to you? You rogue. They say she’s magnificent, you know. Talk? Hah. Maybe you’ll make me believe that in the morning. In, ah, the meantime,’ he added after an unexpected pause, ‘that, er, reminds me of my second bit of news. I suppose I’m, ah, out of that sort of game now, myself. Actually.’

Crispin had looked muzzily up from his wine cup.

‘What?’

‘I’m, well, as it happens, I’m getting married,’ Carullus of the Fourth said.

‘What?’ Crispin repeated, cogently.

‘I know, I know,’ the tribune went on, ‘Unexpected, surprising, amusing, all that. A good laugh for all. Happens, though, doesn’t it?’ His colour heightened. ‘Ah, well, it does, you know.’

Crispin nodded his head in bemusement, refraining only with some effort from saying, ‘What?’ for a third time.

‘And, um, well, do you, er, mind if Kasia leaves your house now? It won’t look right, of course, not after we have it proclaimed in chapel.’

‘What?’ Crispin said, helplessly.

‘Wedding’ll be in the spring,’ Carullus went on, eyes bright. ‘I promised my mother back when I first left home that if I ever married I’d do it properly. There’ll be a season’s worth of proclaiming by the clerics, so someone can object if they want to, and then a real wedding celebration.’

‘Kasia?’ Crispin said, finally getting a word in. ‘Kasia?’

And as his brain belatedly began to function, to put itself tentatively around this astonishing information, Crispin shook his head again, as if to clear it, and said, ‘Let me be certain I understand this, you bloated bag of wind. Kasia has agreed to marry you? I don’t believe it! By Jad’s bones and balls! You bastard! You didn’t ask my permission and you don’t fucking deserve her, you military lout.’

He was grinning widely by then, and he reached a hand across the table and gripped the other man’s shoulder hard.

‘Of course I deserve her,’ Carullus said. ‘I’m a man with a brilliant future.’ But he, too, had been smiling, with unconcealed pleasure.

The woman in question was of the northern Inicii, sold by her mother into slavery a little more than a year before, rescued from that—and a pagan death—by Crispin on the road. She was too thin and too intelligent, and too strong-willed, though uneasy in the City. On the occasion of their first encounter she had spat in the face of the soldier who was now grinning with delight as he announced that she’d agreed to marry him.

Both men, in fact, knew what she was worth.

And so, on a bright, windy day at the beginning of spring, a number of people were preparing themselves to proceed to the home of the principal female dancer of the Green faction where a wedding was to commence with the usual procession to the chosen chapel and then be celebrated with festivity afterwards.

Neither bride nor groom was in any way from a good family—though the soldier showed signs of possibly becoming an important person—but Shirin of the Greens had a glittering circle of acquaintances and admirers and had chosen to make this wedding the excuse for an elaborate affair. She’d had a very good winter season in the theatre.

In addition, the groom’s close friend (and evidently the bride’s, it was whispered by some, with a meaningful arch of eyebrows) was the new Imperial Mosaicist, the Rhodian who was executing the elaborate decorations in the Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom—a fellow perhaps worthy of cultivation. There were rumours that other significant personages might attend—if not the actual ceremony, then the celebration in Shirin’s home afterwards.

It had also been widely reported that the food was being prepared in the dancer’s kitchen by the Master Chef of the Blue faction. There were those in the City who would follow Strumosus into the desert if he took his pots and pans and sauces.

It was a curious, in many ways a unique event, this celebration orchestrated by Greens and Blues together. And all for a middle-ranking soldier and a yellow-haired barbarian girl from Sauradia just arrived in the city with a completely unknown background. She was pretty enough, it was reported by those who’d seen her with Shirin, but not in the usual way of those girls who made a surprising marriage for themselves. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she was wedding a really significant fellow, was it?

Then another rumour started that Pappio, the increasingly well-known Director of the Imperial Glassworks, had personally made a bowl commissioned as a gift for the happy couple. It seemed he hadn’t done any actual crafts-manship himself for years and years. No one could understand that, either. Sarantium was talking. With the chariot races not beginning again for some few days, the event was well timed: the City liked having things to talk about.

‘I’M NOT HAPPY,’ said a small, nondescript artificial bird in an inward, patrician voice heard only by the hostess of the day’s affair. The woman was staring critically at her own image in a round, silver-edged mirror held up by a servant.

‘Oh, Danis, neither am I!’ Shirin murmured in silent reply. ‘Every woman from the Precinct and the theatre will be dressed and adorned to dazzle and I look like I haven’t slept in days.’

‘That isn’t what I meant.’

‘Of course it isn’t. You never think of the important things. Tell me, do you think he’ll notice me?’

The bird’s tone became waspish. ‘Which one? The chariot-racer or the mosaicist?’

Shirin laughed aloud, startling her attendant. ‘Either of them,’ she said inwardly. Then her smile became wicked. ‘Or perhaps both, tonight? Wouldn’t that be something to remember?’

‘Shirin!’ The bird sounded genuinely shocked.

‘I’m teasing, silly. You know me better than that. Now tell me, why aren’t you happy? This is a wedding day, and it’s a love match. No one made this union, they chose each other.’ Her tone was surprisingly kind now, tolerant.

‘I just think something’s going to happen.’

The dark-haired woman in front of the small mirror, who did not, in fact, look at all as if she needed sleep or anything else beyond extremes of admiration, nodded her head, and the servant, smiling, set down the mirror and reached for a bottle that contained a perfume of very particular distinctiveness. The bird lay on the tabletop nearby.

‘Danis, really, what sort of party would this be if something didn’t happen?’

The bird said nothing.

There was a sound at the doorway. Shirin turned to look over her shoulder.

A small, rotund, fierce-looking man stood there, clad in a blue tunic and a very large bib-like covering tied at his neck and around his considerable girth. There were a variety of foodstains on the bib and a streak of what was probably saffron on his forehead. He possessed a wooden spoon, a heavy knife stuck into the tied belt of the bib, and an aggrieved expression.

‘Strumosus!’ said the dancer happily.

‘There is no sea salt,’ said the chef in a voice that suggested the absence amounted to a heresy equivalent to banned Heladikian beliefs or arrant paganism.

‘No salt? Really?’ said the dancer, rising gracefully from her seat.

‘No sea salt!’ the chef repeated. ‘How can a civilized household lack sea salt?’

‘A dreadful omission,’ Shirin agreed with a placating gesture. ‘I feel simply terrible.’

‘I request permission to make use of your servants and send one back to the Blues compound immediately. I need my undercooks to remain here. Are you aware of how little time we have?’

‘You may use my servants in any way you see fit today,’ Shirin said, ‘short of broiling them.’

The chef’s expression conveyed the suggestion that matters might come to that pass.

‘This is a completely odious man,’ the bird said silently. ‘At least I might assume you don’t desire this one.’

Shirin gave a silent laugh. ‘He is a genius, Danis. Everyone says so. Genius needs to be indulged. Now, be happy and tell me I look beautiful.’

There was another sound in the hallway beyond Strumosus. The chef turned, and then lowered his wooden spoon. His expression changed, grew very nearly benign. One might even have exaggerated slightly and said that he smiled. He stepped farther into the room and out of the way as a pale, fair-haired woman appeared hesitantly in the doorway.

Shirin did smile, and laid a hand to her cheek. ‘Oh, Kasia,’ she said. ‘You look beautiful.’

Chapter III

Earlier that same morning, very early in fact, the Emperor Valerius II of Sarantium, nephew to an Emperor, son of a grain farmer from Trakesia, could have been seen intoning the last of the antiphonal responses to the sunrise invocation in the Imperial Chapel of the Traversite Palace where he and the Empress had their private rooms.

The Emperor’s service is one of the first in the City, beginning in darkness, ending with the rising of the reborn sun at dawn when the chapel and sanctuary bells elsewhere in Sarantium are just beginning to toll. The Empress is not with him at this hour. The Empress is asleep. The Empress has her own cleric attached to her own suite of rooms, a man known for a relaxed attitude to the hour of morning prayer and equally lenient, if less well-publicized, views regarding the heresies of Heladikos, the mortal (or half-mortal, or divine) son of Jad. These things are not spoken of in the Imperial Precinct, of course. Or, they are not spoken of freely.

The Emperor is, as it happens, meticulous in his observations of the rituals of faith. His long engagement with both the High and the Eastern Patriarchs in an attempt to resolve the myriad sources of schism in the doctrines of the sun god is as much begotten by piety as it is by intellectual engagement. Valerius is a man of contradictions and enigmas, and he does little to resolve or clarify any of these for his court or his people, finding mystery an asset.

It amuses him that he is called by some the Night’s Emperor and said to hold converse with forbidden spirits of the half-world in the lamplit chambers and moonlit corridors of the palaces. It amuses him because this is entirely untrue and because he is here—as at every dawn—awake before most of his people, performing the rituals of sanctioned faith. He is, in truth, the Morning’s Emperor as much as he is anything else.

Sleep bores him, frightens him a little of late, fills him with a sense—in dream or near to dream—of a headlong rushing of time. He is not an old man by any means, but he is sufficiently advanced in years to hear horses and chariots in the night: the distant harbingers of an end to mortal tenure. There is much he wishes to do before he hears—as all true and holy Emperors are said to hear—the voice of the god, or the god’s emissary, saying, Uncrown, the Lord of Emperors awaits you now.

His Empress, he knows, would speak of dolphins tearing the sea’s surface, not onrushing horses in the dark, but only to him, since dolphins—the ancient bearers of souls—are a banned Heladikian symbol.

His Empress is asleep. Will rise some time after the sun, take a first meal abed, receive her holy adviser and then her bath attendants and her secretary, prepare herself at leisure for the day. She was an actress in her youth, a dancer named Aliana, tuned to the rhythms of late nights and late risings.

He shares the late nights with her, but knows better, after their years together, than to intrude upon her at this hour. He has much to do, in any case.

The service ends. He speaks the last of the responses. Some light is leaking through the high windows. A chilly morning outside, at this grey hour. He dislikes the cold, of late. Valerius leaves the chapel, bowing to the disk and altar, lifting a brief hand to his cleric. In the hallway he takes a stairway down, walking quickly, as he tends to. His secretaries hurry another way, going outdoors, taking the paths across the gardens—cold and damp, he knows—to the Attenine Palace, where the day’s business will begin. Only the Emperor and his appointed guards among the Excubitors are allowed to use the tunnel constructed between the two palaces, a security measure introduced a long time ago.

There are torches at intervals in the tunnel, lit and supervised by the guards. It is well ventilated, comfortably warm even in winter or, as now, on the cusp of spring. Quickening season, season of war. Valerius nods to the two guards and passes through the doorway alone. He enjoys this short walk, in fact. He is a man in a life that allows of no privacy at all. Even in his sleeping chamber there is always a secretary on a cot and a drowsy messenger by the door, waiting for the possibility of dictation or a summons or instructions to be run through the mysteries and spirits of a dark city.