"Impossible. You must be wrong. That-"
Martinian stopped.
Crispin said, "I wish I was. Our work will be coming down here, too, I suspect. We'll be subject to Sarantine edicts, if all goes as the Empress intends."
The Empress. They knew about this. A miracle of the god, some had already named it. Martinian thought there might be more earthly explanations. "Gisel?"
"Gisel. You heard?"
"Word came from other couriers on the same ship." Martinian sat down himself now, on the facing rock. So many times, they'd sat here together, or on the tree stumps beyond the gate.
Crispin looked over his shoulder at the sanctuary. "We're going to lose this. What we did here."
Martinian cleared his throat. Something needed to be said. "Some of it has been lost, already."
"So soon? I didn't think…"
"Not for that reason. They… scraped down Heladikos in the spring."
Crispin said nothing. Martinian remembered this expression, too, however.
"Eudric was trying to earn support from the Patriarch in Rhodias, with the invasion looming. Backing away from the heresy of the Antae."
Heladikos and his torch had been the very last thing Crispin had done before he'd gone away. The younger man sat very still. Martinian was trying to read him, see what had changed, what had not. It felt odd not to understand Crispin intuitively, after so many years. People went away and they changed; hard on those who remained behind.
More sorrow and more life, Martinian thought. Both things. The documents from the courier were still clutched between the other man's large hands.
Crispin said, "Did it work? The… backing away?"
Martinian shook his head. "No. They had shed blood in a chapel, with Patriarchal envoys present and at risk. Eudric has a long way to go to win any kindness there. And he earned a good deal of outrage in Varena when our tesserae came down. The Antae saw it as disrespectful to Hildric. Sacking his chapel, in a way."
Crispin laughed softly. Martinian tried to remember the last time he'd heard his friend laugh in the year before he'd gone away. "Poor Eudric. Full circle, that. The Antae protesting destruction in a holy place in Batiara."
Martinian smiled a little. "I said that too." His turn to hesitate. He had expected an angrier reaction. He changed the ground a little. "It does look as if there will be no attack now. Is that so?"
Crispin nodded. "Not this year, at least. The army is north and east, against Bassania. We'll become a province of Sarantium, if negotiations hold."
Martinian shook his head slowly. He took off his hat, looked at it, put it back on his balding head. No attack.
Every man who could walk had been engaged in reinforcing the walls of Varena all winter. They'd been making weapons, drilling with them, storing food and water. There hadn't been much food to store, after a poor harvest.
He was afraid he might cry. "I didn't think to live so long."
The other man looked at him. "How are you?"
An attempt at a shrug. "Well enough. My hands. My hip, sometimes. Mostly water in my wine, now."
Crispin made a face. "Me too. Carissa?"
"Is very well. Anxious to see you. Is probably with your mother now."
"We should go, then. I was only stopping to see… the finished work here. There's little point now."
"No," said Martinian. He looked at the papers. "What… what did they bring you?"
Crispin hesitated again. He seemed to measure his words and thoughts more, Martinian thought. Did they teach that in the east?
Without speaking, the other man simply handed over the thick sheaf of documents. Martinian took them and read. He wouldn't have denied a consuming curiosity: some men had waited here a long time to deliver whatever these were.
He saw what these were. Colour left his face as he turned each signed and sealed deed and document of title. He went back and counted. Five of them, six, seven. Then the enumeration of other items and a listing of where they could be found and claimed. He found it difficult to breathe.
"We seem to be wealthy," Crispin said mildly.
Martinian looked up at him. Crispin was gazing off towards the forest, east. What he'd said was an understatement, prodigiously so. And the «we» was a great courtesy.
The papers delivered by the Imperial Courier attested, one by one by one, to lands all over Batiara, and moneys and moveable goods, now owned by or belonging to one Caius Crispus, artisan, of Varena.
The last page was a personal note. Martinian glanced up for permission. Crispin, looking back at him now, nodded. It was brief. Written in Sarantine. It read:
We did promise certain things if your journey bore fruit for us. Our beloved father taught us to keep royal promises and the god enjoins us to do so. Changes along the way do not change the truth of things. These are not gifts, but earned. There is another item, one we discussed in Varena as you will recall. It is not included among these, remaining yours to consider and choose for yourself-or not. The other conveyance sent herewith is, we trust, further evidence of our appreciation.
It was signed, "Gisel, Empress of Sarantium."
"Jad's blood and eyes and bones, what did you do there, Crispin?"
"She thinks I made her Empress," the other man said.
Martinian could only stare.
Crispin's tone was odd, eerily detached.
Martinian realized, suddenly, that it was going to take a great deal of time to understand what had happened to his friend in the east. There really were changes here. One didn't sail to Sarantium without that happening, he thought. He felt a chill.
"What is the… unincluded item she mentions?"
"A wife." Crispin's voice was flat. A chill, bleak tone, remembered from the year before.
Martinian cleared his throat. "I see. And the 'other conveyance'?"
Crispin looked up. Seemed to make an effort to bestir himself.'I don't know. There are a lot of keys in here." He held up a heavy leather purse. "The soldier said they'd orders to be on guard until I came, then it was my own look-out."
"Oh. The trunks in the old chapel, then. There are at least twenty of them."
They went to see.
Treasure, Martinian wondered? Gold coins and precious gems?
It wasn't that. As Crispin turned numbered keys in numbered locks, one after another, and opened trunk lids in the gentle light of the old, little-used chapel adjacent to the expanded sanctuary, Martinian of Varena, who had never travelled to Sarantium or even out of his own beloved peninsula, found himself beginning to weep, ashamed of the weakness of an old man.
But these were tesserae such as he had never seen or ever thought to see in all his days. A lifetime of working with muddied or streaked imitations of the brilliant colours of the mind's imagining had slowly conditioned him to accept the limitations of the possible here in broken Batiara. The deficiencies of the mortal world, the constraints placed upon achievement.
Now, long past a time when he might have fiercely set forth upon some project of a grandeur equal to these dazzling, flawless pieces of glass, they had come.
It was late. It was very, very late.
There was another note, in the first trunk. Crispin looked at it and then gave it to him. Martinian wiped his eyes and read. Same hand, the language changed now, Rhodian, the style personal, not royal.
I have an undertaking from the Emperor. A promise made to me. You will not do the god, nor Heladikos. Anything else you see fit to render in the sanctuary complex housing my father shall be preserved from edict and pronouncement and any decreed harm, so far as I may be able to make it so. This, as small compensation for a mosaic in Sarantium, done with adequate materials, and taken away.
The signature was also different: nothing but her name this time. Martinian laid down the note. Put his hand, slowly, into that first heavy trunk, into the tesserae-pale gold in this one, the colour warm and even as honey.