He was watching through a window. His spire of rock was like a keep – he assumed the wind-cut spire had occurred naturally, but the inside was as hollow as a log full of termites and just as packed – simply with irks. The tunnels ran in every direction, up and down and at odd angles, and the warren challenged his sense of direction just to find the jakes, which, thankfully, the Wild creatures seemed to need just as much as he did.
But he knew his way to the Great Hall, and it was there that his sense of time was most ruthlessly challenged, because there was always a feast laid – irks came and went, ate, played their faery harps with a magnificent ferocity that was utterly at variance to what he’d imagined irk music would be, and walked away. They came and went very quickly, and they spoke quickly, and his host sat in a chair of what appeared to be solid gold and laughed, applauded, spoke to this one and that one and never seemed to tire. Or leave his hall.
Nor did his consort, a female irk with a face shaped like a heraldic heart, eyes as big and bright as silver crowns and hair so red that Redmede thought it must have been dyed. She wore a green kirtle with hanging sleeves dagged like oak leaves, and she had by turns the air of a child and of an abbess.
It was his third visit to the hall – he couldn’t stop himself, and returned continually – when she turned and saw him, and her eyes widened, if that was possible. She sang an impossibly pure note, a high ‘c’, and her consort turned to her.
They sang together like a troubadour and his joglar for as long as it might take a man to say a pater noster, if he had been so inclined, and she smiled at Redmede, showing a mouth full of tiny, pointed teeth.
‘Welcome, beautiful stranger,’ she sang.
Liviapolis – Morgan Mortirmir
After the sabbath, Mortirmir returned to his classes at the Academy in a city that was rapidly returning to normal – so rapidly that the siege, the battle and the capture of the Emperor all began to seem like a dream.
Some things were not a dream.
One of the four religious sisters in his medical class on Monday curtsied, and let just a corner of her veil fall away. ‘My cousin tells me you helped save the princess,’ she breathed. ‘I had no idea – you are so young.’
He could only see her mouth, which was a fine, perfectly normal mouth. He instantly mocked himself for imagining that the four nuns were great beauties who had to hide their faces away.
‘Are you a Comnena?’ he asked.
She tittered. ‘Yes,’ she said.
It was hardly the stuff of romance, but she didn’t call him ‘the Plague’ even once during a half-day dissection of a pauper’s arm.
In the evening, he went back to his rooms over his inn. He had twice the space that Derkensun had, and a fine hearth with its own external chimney – which was the Morean fashion. He read Galeanius for an hour and found he’d learned very little. He decided to write a poem about the Comnena girl, and found that he had nothing to say. So, instead, he read a little poetry in Gallish – all the best courtly poetry was Gallish – and found that his mind was wandering.
Summer was far advanced, but hardly over. The light was still lingering, there was no need to light his fire, and he was bored and lonely and the last three days had opened a remarkable vista of new life.
He buckled on his sword and walked out into the evening. He saw the farm carts rolling in for the Tuesday market, and he waited while a herd of sheep was driven into the butcher’s market, and he sat at the edge of the Great Square near the palace and played chess with a stranger – a Moor from Ifriqu’ya who beat him after a long game. They shared a cup of tea in companionable silence and the Moor went off to his bed and Mortirmir went back to his. Nothing exciting had happened. He fell asleep wondering if the peak of his existence had been reached at age fifteen and a half.
The next morning he arose feeling adventurous, and he walked to the palace – where he had the password – and attended matins in the first light with the soldiers in the Outer Court. Giorgos Comnenos grinned at him and slapped his back. ‘Good of you to join us, barbarian, but if you hang around here, I’ll put you in uniform.’
Mortirmir smiled and spread his hands. ‘But that would be wonderful,’ he admitted.
‘Aren’t you a student at the University?’ Comnenos asked.
‘Yes,’ Mortirmir said.
‘You’re exempt from military duty then,’ Comnenos said. ‘Far too important. Aren’t you supposed to be in class?’
‘Not for an hour,’ Mortirmir admitted. ‘I was bored.’
Comnenos nodded. Mortirmir had seldom had a friend so worldly and handsome – and older – and the other man’s willingness to listen to him was like a tonic. ‘Well, take a note to my fiancée for me, then,’ he said, and beckoned to his servant for papyrus.
‘Suddenly I’m an officer,’ he said. ‘Here, take this for her. No poaching, barbarian.’
He found Anna by the gate.
‘I heard you were here,’ she said. ‘The palace looks enormous, but really it’s just a little town full of gossip. Will you bring my clothes and things from Harald’s? He will be in barracks for weeks to come.’ She smiled up at him. ‘I’m sure he wants to thank you for fetching the doctor.’
In two days replete with adventures, finding a Yahudat scholar at midnight had hardly made his list of events. The man was so famous in the Yahudat quarter that the guards had fetched him before the bells had rung a single change.
‘And you will stay here?’ Mortirmir asked.
She smiled. ‘Nordikans are very direct.’ She laughed. ‘But I’m coming to like them. And I’m welcome here.’
He agreed to bring her things and trotted to his history lecture. He was late, but much happier. Only to find that the class devolved into a tour of the Academy Library, a collection of four thousand scrolls and books dating from the foundation of the Empire in distant Ruma. He was good at research so he scarcely attended to the lesson until they were deep in the archives below the old rostra where the Senate still met on occasion.
But the librarian had elected to take them to the map room, and when he produced a chart of the ground near Chaluns in Arles, Mortirmir snapped to attention.
‘Saint Aetius himself handled this map!’ said the librarian reverently. He placed a glowing globe of blue-white light over the middle of the map. When the nuns leaned in to look more closely, he courteously moved the light source to them, leaving Mortirmir to stare at it in shadowy frustration.
So he provided his own light. There was an illumination of an irk in beautiful, naturalistic strokes in his corner. He smiled at it, committing the picture to memory, and some time passed before he noticed the silence.
All of his classmates were looking at him. And the librarian pursed his lips and vouchsafed him a small nod and the barest hair’s breadth of a smile.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. I – umm . . . Yes.’ He grinned in sudden triumph. He hadn’t even thought about making the light. He hadn’t even entered his memory palace to do it.
Antonio Baldesce, the Venike boy in his class, invited him to share a cup of wine. It wasn’t epochal, and he knew he was too young to be good company, but Baldesce was friendly instead of condescending.
‘You know Abraham Ben Rabbi?’ Baldesce asked.
Morgan shrugged. ‘I met him through a friend.’
‘And you met the new mercenary?’ Baldesce continued.
‘Not so much met,’ Morgan said. ‘He was not awake when I was there. I wasn’t introduced. Not to anyone.’ He remembered the older woman who burned like a torch with raw potentia. That sight he would take to his grave.
‘Don’t trust the old man, that’s all I’m saying. The Yahudat are venal beyond belief. Most of them serve the Wild in secret.’ Baldesce nodded. ‘If you go to the palace again, will you tell me? I might want to send a message to a friend.’