She shakes her head again. "How could I be?" she asks, meaning what she says. "You have always wanted this, I have always said I did not think it could be done. You see it differently, and are wiser than any of us."
He looks up, the grey eyes mild. "I make mistakes, love. This might be one. But I need to try, and this is the time to do it, with Bassania bribed to be quiet, and chaos in the west, and the young queen here with us. It makes too much… sense."
His mind works that way. In part.
In part. She draws a breath, and murmurs, "Would you still need to do this if we had a son?"
Her heart is pounding. That almost never happens any more. She watches him. Sees the startled reaction, then what replaces it: his mind engaging, addressing, not flinching away.
After a long time, he says, "That is an unexpected question."
"I know," she says. "It came to me while I was waiting here for you." Not entirely true. It came to her first a long time ago.
He says, "You think, if we did, that because of the risk…?"
She nods. "If you had an heir. Someone you were leaving this to." She does not gesture. There is more than any gesture could compass. This. An empire. A legacy of centuries.
He sighs. Has still not released her hand. Says, softly, looking into the fire now, "Maybe so, love. I don't know."
An admission. For him to say that much. No sons, no one to come after, to take the throne, light the candles on the anniversary of their deaths. There is an old pain in her.
He says, still quietly, "There are some things I have always wanted. I'd like to leave behind Rhodias reclaimed, the new Sanctuary and its dome, and… and perhaps some memory of what we were, you and I."
"Three things," she says, not able to think, just then, of anything more clever. It occurs to her that she will weep if she does not take care. An Empress ought not to weep.
"Three things," he echoes. "Before it ends, as it always ends."
Uncrown, a voice was said to say when it ended for one of Jad's holy, anointed ones. The Lord of Emperors awaits you now.
No one could say if it was true, if those words were truly spoken and heard. The god's world was made in such a way that men and women lived in mist and fog, in a wavering light, never knowing with certainty what would come.
"More wine?" she says.
He looks at her, nods his head, lets go of her hand. She takes his cup, fills it, brings it back. It is silver, worked in gold, rubies set around it.
"I am sorry," he says. "I'm sorry, love."
He isn't even certain why he says this, but a feeling is with him now, something in her face, something hovering in the air of this exquisite room like a bird: not singing, enchanted into invisibility, but present nonetheless in the world.
Not far away from that palace room where no bird is singing, a man is as high in the air as birds might fly, working from a scaffold under a dome. The exterior of the dome is copper, gleaming under moon and stars. The interior is his.
There is light here in the Sanctuary; there always is, by order of the Emperor. The mosaicist has served tonight as his own apprentice, mixing lime for the setting bed, carrying it up the ladder himself. Not a great amount, he isn't covering a wide area tonight. He isn't doing very much at all. Only the face of his wife, dead now two years, very nearly.
There is no one watching him. There are guards at the entrance, as always, even in the cold, and a small, rumpled architect is asleep somewhere in this vastness of lamplight and shadow, but Crispin works in silence, as alone as a man can be in Sarantium.
If anyone were watching him, and knew what it was he was doing, they would need a true understanding of his craft (of all such crafts, really) not to conclude that this was a hard, cold man, indifferent in life to the woman he is so serenely rendering. His eyes are clear, his hands steady, meticulously choosing tesserae from the trays beside him. His expression is detached, austere: addressing technical dilemmas of glass and stone, no more.
No more? The heart cannot say, sometimes, but the hand and eye- if steady enough and clear enough-may shape a window for those who come after. Someone might look up one day, when all those awake or asleep in Sarantium tonight are long dead, and know that this woman was fair, and very greatly loved by the unknown man who placed her overhead, the way the ancient Trakesian gods were said to have set their mortal loves in the sky, as stars.
Eventually, morning came. Morning always comes. There are always losses in the night, a price paid for light.
PART II
THE NINTH DRIVER
CHAPTER VII
Men and women were always dreaming in the dark. Most of the night's images fell away with sunrise, or before if they harried the sleeper awake. Dreams were longings, or warnings, or prophecies. They were gifts or curses, from powers benevolent or malign, for all knew-whatever the faith into which they had been born-that mortal men and women shared the world with forces they didn’t understand.
There were many who plied a trade in city or countryside telling those troubled by visions what they might signify. A small number saw certain kinds of dream as actual memories of a world other than the one into which the dreamer and the listener had been born to live and die, but this was treated in most faiths as a black heresy.
As winter turned towards spring that year, a great many people had dreams they were to remember.
A moonless night, late in winter. At a watering place in the far south, where camel routes met in Ammuz, near to where men had decreed a border with Soriyya-as if the shifting, blowing sands knew of such things-a man, a leader of his tribe, a merchant, awoke in his tent and dressed himself and went out into the dark.
He walked past tents where his wives and children and his brothers and their wives and children slept, and he came, still half asleep but strangely disturbed, to the edge of the oasis, a place where the last of the green gave way to the endless sands.
He stood there under the arc of the heavens. Under so many stars it seemed impossible to him, suddenly, to comprehend their number in the sky above men and the world. His heart, for no reason he could understand, was beating rapidly. He had been in a deep sleep moments ago. Was still uncertain how and why he had come to be out here now. A dream. He had had a dream.
He looked up again. It was a mild night, generous, spring coming. Summer to follow: the burning, killing sun, water a longing and a prayer. A trace of a breeze flicked and eddied in the soft darkness, cool and reviving on his face. He heard the camels and the goats behind him, and the horses. His herds were large; he was a fortune-favoured man.
He turned and saw a young boy, one of the camel herders, standing not far away: on watch, for the moonless nights were dangerous. The boy's name was Tarif. It was a name that would be remembered, become known to chroniclers of generations yet unborn because of the exchange of words that followed.
The merchant drew a breath, adjusting the drape of his white robes. Then he gestured for the boy to approach and he instructed him, speaking carefully, to find the merchant's full-brother Musafa in his tent. To wake him, with apologies, and advise him that as of the sun's rising Musafa was to take command of and responsibility for their people. That he was particularly charged, in the name and memory of their father, to be mindful of the well-being of his absent brother's wives and children.
"Where are you going, lord?" Tarif asked, becoming immortal with a handful of words. A hundred thousand children would bear his name in years to come.
"Into the sands, "said the man, whose name was Ashar ibn Ashar. "I may be some time."