Events were happening there now, or had already happened. He looked at those gates, standing very still in a huge space. Imagined walking up and seeking admittance. An urgent need to speak to the Emperor. About some aspect of his dome, colour choices, the angle of tesserae. Could he be announced and presented?
Crispin became aware that his mouth was very dry and his heart was hammering painfully. He was a Rhodian, from a fallen, conquered land, one that Valerius was proposing to visit again with devastating war. He'd sent messages home, to his mother, his friends, knowing they would mean nothing, could achieve nothing.
He ought to hate the man who was readying this fleet, these soldiers. Instead, he was remembering Valerius one night in the Sanctuary, running his hand through the hair of a rumpled architect, like a mother, telling him-ordering him-to go home and sleep.
Were the Antae better than what Sarantium might bring to the peninsula? Especially the Antae as they would be now, civil war savagely portended. There were more deaths coming, whether Valerius's army sailed or not.
And assassination attempts were not confined to barbarians like the Antae, Crispin thought, looking at the proud glory of those bronze gates. He wondered if Valerius was dead; thought again of Alixana. On the beach just now, the surf-washed stones: When your wife died… how did you go on living?
How had she known to ask that?
He ought not to care so much. He ought to still be a stranger here, detached from these glittering, deadly figures and whatever was happening today. These people-women and men-were so far beyond him they moved through an entirely different space in Jad's creation. He was an artisan. A layer of glass and stone. Whoever ruled, he had told Martiman once, in his anger, there would be work for mosaicists, why should they be concerned with what intrigues happened in palaces?
He was marginal, incidental… and burdened with images. He looked at the Bronze Gates, still hesitating, still imagining an approach, but then he turned away.
He went to a chapel. Randomly chosen, the first one he came to along a lane running down and east. Not a street he knew. The chapel was small, quiet, nearly empty, a handful of women, mostly older, shapes in shadow, murmuring, no cleric at this hour. The chariots taking the people away. An old, old battle. Here the sunlight almost disappeared into a pallid half-light filtering through too-small windows ringing a low dome. No decorations. Mosaics were expensive, so were frescoes. It was obvious no wealthy people attended here, salving their souls with gifts to the clerics. There were lamps suspended from overhead in a single line from altar to doors, a handful of others at the side altars, but only a few of them were lit: they would be frugal with oil, at winter's end.
Crispin stood for a time facing the altar and the disk, and then he knelt-no cushions here-on the hard floor and closed his eyes. Among women at prayer he thought of his mother: small and brave and exquisite, scent of lavender always about her, alone for so long, since his father died. He felt very far away.
Someone rose, signed the disk, arid walked out. An old woman, bent with her years. Crispin heard the door open and swing shut behind him. It was very quiet. And then, in that stillness, he heard someone begin to sing.
He looked up. No one else seemed to stir. The voice, delicate and plaintive, was off to his left. He seemed to see a shadowy figure there, at one of the side altars where the lamp was not burning. There were a handful of candles lit by the altar but he couldn't even tell if the singer was a girl or an older woman, the light was so subdued.
He did realize, after a moment, collecting his meandering thoughts, that the voice was singing in Trakesian, which was entirely strange. The liturgy here was always chanted in Sarantine.
His command of Trakesian-the old tongue of those who had ruled much of the world before Rhodias-was precarious, but as he listened it came to Crispin that what he was hearing was a lament.
No one else moved. No one entered. He knelt among praying women in a dim, holy place and listened to a voice sing of sorrow in a ancient tongue, and it occurred to him that music was one of the things that had not been in his life since Ilandra died. Her night songs for the girls had been for him, as well, listening in the house.
Who knows love?
Who says he knows love?
This singer, a shape and barely that, a voice without a body, was not singing a Kindath lullaby. She was offering-Crispin finally understood- an entirely pagan sorrow: the corn maiden and the antlered god, the Sacrifice and the Hunted One. In a chapel of Jad. Images that had already been ancient when Trakesia was great.
Crispin shivered, kneeling on stone. Looked again to his left, eyes straining to pierce the gloom. Only a shadow. Candles. Only a voice. No one moved.
And it came to him then, feeling unseen spirits hovering in the dimness, that Valerius the Emperor had been Petrus of Trakesia before he came south to his uncle from the northern fields, and that he would have known this song.
And with that, there came another thought and Crispin closed his eyes again and named himself a fool. For if this were true-and of course it was-then Valerius would also have known exactly what the bison in Crispin's sketches for the Sanctuary was. He was from northern Trakesia, the forests and grainlands, places where pagan roots had been in the soil for centuries.
Valerius would have recognized the zubir as soon as he'd seen it in the drawings.
And he had said nothing. Had given the sketches to the Eastern Patriarch, had approved them for the dome of his own legacy, his Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom. Awareness entered Crispin like a wind. Overwhelmed, he pushed his hands through his hair.
What man dared try to reconcile so many things in the span of a single life, he thought. East and west brought together again, north coming down to south, a faction dancer becoming an Empress. The daughter of one's enemy and… victim, married to one's own friend and Strategos. The zubir of the Aldwood, huge and wild-the essence of the wild-on a dome consecrated to Jad in the heart of the triple-walled City.
Valerius. Valerius had tried. There was… a pattern here. Crispin felt he could nearly see it, almost understand. He was a maker of patterns himself, working in tesserae and light. The Emperor had worked with human souls and the world.
There was a voice here, mourning.
Shall the maiden never walk the bright fields again, Her hair as yellow as the grain? The horns of the god can hold the blue moon. When the Huntress shoots him he dies.
How can we, the children of time, ever live If these two must die? How can we, the children of loss, ever learn what we may leave behind?
When the sound of roaring is heard in the wood The children of earth will cry.
When the beast that was roaring comes into the fields The children of blood must die.
He struggled to understand the Trakesian words, and yet he understood so much, bypassing thought: the way he'd looked up in that chapel in Sauradia on the Day of the Dead and grasped a truth about Jad and the world on the dome. His heart was full, aching. Mysteries swept through him. He felt small, mortal, and alone, pierced by a song as by a sword.
After a time he became aware that the solitary voice had ended. He looked over again. No sign of the singer. No one there. At all. He turned quickly to the doors. No one was walking out. No movement anywhere in the chapel, no footsteps. None of the others in the dim, filtered light had even stirred, during the song or now. As if they hadn't even heard it.