Guy Gavriel Kay – Sailing to Sarantium (страница 16)
The Antae had worn bear grease in their hair when they’d first come to settle in the peninsula. This woman was not, manifestly, an exponent of such traditions. He imagined those rubies—he couldn’t help himself—set in his mosaic torch on the sanctuary dome. He imagined them gleaming by candlelight there.
The queen wore a golden sun disk about her throat, an image of Heladikos upon it. Her robe was blue silk, threaded with fine gold wire, and there was a purple band running down the left side, from high collar to ankle. Only royalty wore purple, in keeping with a tradition going back to the Rhodian Empire at its own beginnings six hundred years ago.
He was alone in a palace room at night with the headache of his life and a queen—his queen—regarding him with a mild, steady appraisal.
It was common opinion, all through the Batiaran peninsula, that the queen was unlikely to live through the winter. Crispin had heard wagers offered and taken, at odds.
The Antae might have moved beyond bear grease and pagan rituals in a hundred years but they were most emphatically not accustomed to being ruled by a woman, and any choice of a mate—and king—for Gisel was fraught with an almost inconceivable complexity of tribal hierarchies and feuds. In a way, it was only due to these that she was still alive and reigning a year and more after her father’s death and the savage, inconclusive civil war that had followed. Martinian had put it that way one night over dinner. The factions of the Antae were locked in balance around her; if she died, that balance spiralled away and war came. Again.
Crispin had shrugged. Whoever reigned would commission sanctuaries to their own glory in the god’s name. Mosaicists would work. He and Martinian were extremely well known, with a reputation among the upper classes and reliable employees and apprentices. Did it matter so much, he’d asked the older man, what happened in the palace in Varena? Did any such things signify greatly after the plague?
The queen was still gazing at him beneath level brows, waiting. Crispin, belatedly realizing what was expected, saluted her with his cup and drank. It was magnificent wine. The very best Sarnican. He’d never tasted anything so complex. Under any normal circumstances, he would . . .
He put it down, quickly. After the blow to his head, this drink could undo him completely.
‘A careful man, I see,’ she murmured.
Crispin shook his head. ‘Not really, Majesty.’ He had no idea what was expected of him here, or what to expect. It occurred to him that he ought to feel outraged . . . he’d been assaulted and abducted outside his own home. Instead, he felt curious, intrigued, and he was sufficiently self-aware to recognize that these feelings had been absent from his life for some time.
‘May I assume,’ he said, ‘that the footpads who clapped a flour sack on my head and dented my braincase were from the palace? Or did your loyal guards rescue me from common thieves?’
She smiled at that. She couldn’t be older than her early twenties, Crispin thought, remembering a royal betrothal and a husband-to-be dying of some mischance a few years ago.
‘They were my guards. I told you, their orders were to be courteous, while ensuring you came with them. Apparently you did some injuries to them.’
‘I am delighted to hear it. They did some to me.’
‘In loyalty to their queen and in her cause. Do you have the same loyalties?’
Direct, very direct.
Crispin watched as she moved to an ivory and rose-wood bench and sat down, her back very straight. He saw that there were three doors to the room and imagined guards poised on the other side of each of them. He pushed his hands through his hair—a characteristic motion, leaving it randomly scattered—and said quietly, ‘I am engaged, to the best of my skill, and using deficient materials, in decorating a sanctuary to honour your father. Is that answer enough, Majesty?’
‘Not at all, Rhodian. That is self-interest. You are extremely well paid, and the materials are the best we can offer right now. We’ve had a plague and a war, Caius Crispus.’
‘Oh, really,’ he said. Couldn’t help himself.
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Insolence?’
Her voice and expression made him abruptly aware that whatever the proper court manners might be, he was not displaying them, and the Antae had never been known for patience.
He shook his head. ‘I lived through both,’ he murmured. ‘I need no reminders.’
She regarded him in silence another long moment. Crispin felt an unexplained prickling along his back up to the hairs of his neck. The silence stretched. Then the queen drew a breath and said without preamble: ‘I need an extremely private message carried to the Emperor in Sarantium. No man—or woman—may know the contents of this, or that it is even being carried. That is why you are here alone, and were brought by night.’
Crispin’s mouth went dry. He felt his heart begin to hammer again. ‘I am an artisan, Majesty. No more than that. I have no place in the intrigues of courts.’ He wished he hadn’t put down the wine glass. ‘And,’ he added, too tardily, ‘I am not going to Sarantium.’
‘Of course you are,’ she said dismissively. ‘What man would not accept that invitation.’ She knew about it. Of course she did. His
‘It is not my invitation,’ he said pointedly. ‘And Martinian, my partner, has indicated he will not go.’
‘He is an old man. You aren’t. And you have nothing to keep you in Varena at all.’
He had nothing to keep him. At all.
‘He isn’t old,’ he said.
She ignored that. ‘I have made inquiries into your family, your circumstances, your disposition. I am told you are choleric and of dark humour, and not inclined to be properly respectful. Also that you are skilled at your craft and have attained a measure of renown and some wealth thereby. None of this concerns me. But no one has reported you to be cowardly or without ambition. Of course you will go to Sarantium. Will you carry my message for me?’
Crispin said, before he had really thought about the implications at all, ‘What message?’
Which meant—he realized much later, thinking about it, reliving this dialogue again and again on the long road east—that the moment she told him he had no real choice, unless he
The young queen of the Antae and of Batiara, surrounded by mortal danger and fighting it with whatever tools came to hand, however unexpectedly, said softly, ‘You will tell the Emperor Valerius II and no one else that should he wish to regain this country and Rhodias within it, and not merely have a meaningless claim to them, there is an unmarried queen here who has heard of his prowess and his glory and honours them.’
Crispin’s jaw dropped. The queen did not flush, nor did her gaze flicker at all. His reaction was being closely watched, he realized. He said, stammering, ‘The Emperor is married. Has been for years. He changed the
Calm and very still on her ivory seat, she said, ‘Alas, husbands or wives may be put aside. Or die, Caius Crispus.’
He knew this.
‘Empires,’ she murmured, ‘live after us. So does a name. For good or ill. Valerius II, who was once Petrus of Trakesia, has wanted to regain Rhodias and this peninsula since he brought his uncle to the Golden Throne twelve summers ago. He purchased his truce with the King of Kings in Bassania for that reason alone. King Shirvan is bribed so Valerius may assemble an army for the west when the time ripens. There are no mysteries here. But if he tries to take this land in war, he will not hold it. This peninsula is too far away from him, and we Antae know how to make war. And his enemies east and north—the Bassanids and the northern barbarians—will never sit quiet and watch, no matter how much he pays them. There will be men around Valerius who know this, and they may even tell him as much. There is another way to achieve his . . . desire. I am offering it to him.’ She paused. ‘You may tell him, too, that you have seen the queen of Batiara very near, in blue and gold and porphyry, and may . . . give him an honest description, should he ask for one.’
This time, though she continued to hold his gaze and even lifted her chin a little, she did flush. Crispin became aware that his hands were perspiring at his sides. He pressed them against his tunic. He felt the stirrings, astonishingly, of a long-dormant desire. A kind of madness, that, though desire often was. The queen of Batiara was not, in any possible sense, someone who could be thought of in this way. She was offering her face and exquisitely garbed body to his recording gaze, only that he might tell an Emperor about her, halfway around the world. He had never dreamed of moving—never wanted to move—in this world of royal shadows and intrigue, but his puzzle-solving mind was racing now, with his pulse, and he could begin to see the pieces of this picture.
No woman. Clear as it could be. He was being asked to carry an overture of marriage to the Emperor, who was very much married, and to the most powerful and dangerous woman in the known world.