LITMIR.BIZ

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      The king shrugged. ‘A kindly husband will be found. Mazendar, see it is done.’

      Jarita. Whose name meant desert pool. Black eyes, black hair, light step en tering a room, leaving it, as if loath to trouble the air within. Lightest touch in the world. And Inissa, the baby they called Issa. Rustem closed his eyes.

      ‘Your other wife is of the warrior caste?’

      Rustem nodded. ‘Yes, my lord. And my son.’

      ‘They may be elevated with you in the ceremony. And come to Kabadh. If you desire a second wife there it shall be arranged.’

      Again Rustem closed his eyes.

      The world, hammering and hammering at his door, after all, entering like the wind.

      ‘This cannot take place until midsummer, of course. I wish to make use of you before that. You appear a competent man. There are never enough of them. You will treat me here, physician. Then you will undertake a winter journey for me. You are observant, it seems. Can serve your king even before you rise in caste. You will leave as soon as I am well enough to go back to Kabadh, in your own judgement.’

      Rustem opened his eyes then. Looked up slowly. ‘Where am I to go, great lord?’

      ‘Sarantium,’ said Shirvan of Bassania.

      He went home briefly when the King of Kings fell asleep, to change his bloodied clothes, replenish his herbs and medicines. It was cold in the windy darkness. The vizier gave him an escort of soldiers. It seemed he had become an important man. Not surprising, really, except that everything was surprising now.

      Both women were awake, though it was very late. They had oil lamps burning in the front room: a waste. He’d have chastised Katyun for it on a normal night. He walked in. They both rose quickly to see him. Jarita’s eyes filled with tears.

      ‘Perun be praised,’ said Katyun. Rustem looked from one to the other.

      ‘Papa,’ someone said sleepily.

      Rustem looked over and saw a little, rumpled figure stand up from the carpet before the fire. Shaski rubbed at his eyes. He’d been asleep but waiting here with his mothers.

      ‘Papa,’ he said again, hesitantly. Katyun moved over and laid a hand across his thin shoulders, as if afraid Rustem would reprimand the boy for being here and awake so late.

      Rustem felt an odd constriction in his throat. Not the kaaba. Something else. He said, carefully, ‘It is all right, Shaski. I am home now.’

      ‘The arrow?’ said his son. ‘The arrow they said?’

      It was curiously difficult to speak. Jarita was crying.

      ‘The arrow is safely removed. I used the Spoon of Enyati. The one you brought out for me. You did very well, Shaski.’

      The boy smiled then, shyly, sleepily, his head against his mother’s waist. Katyun’s hand brushed his hair, tender as moonlight. Her eyes sought Rustem’s, too many questions in them.

      The answers too large.

      ‘Go to sleep now, Shaski. I will speak with your mothers and then go back to my patient. I will see you tomorrow. Everything is well.’

      It was, and it wasn’t. Being elevated to the priestly caste was a stunning, miraculous thing. The castes of Bassania were immovable as mountains—except when the King of Kings wished them to move. A physician’s position at court meant wealth, security, access to libraries and scholars, no more anxieties about buying a larger house for a family or burning oil lamps at night. Shaski’s own future had suddenly expanded beyond all possible hope.

      But what could one say to a wife who was to be cast off by order of the King of Kings and given to another man? And the little one? Issa, asleep in her cradle now. The little one would be gone from him.

      ‘Everything is well,’ Rustem said again, trying to make himself believe it.

      The door had opened to reveal the world on his threshold. Good and evil walked hand in hand, not to be separated. Perun was opposed, always, by Azal. The two gods had entered into Time together; one could not exist without the other. So the priests taught before the Holy Flame in every temple in Bassania.

      The two women took the child to his room together. Shaski reached up and held each of their hands, walking through the door, claiming them both. They indulged him too much, Rustem thought. But this was not a night to dwell upon that.

      He stood alone in the front room of his own small house amid the burning of lamps and the firelight and he thought about fate and the chance moments that shaped a man’s life, and about Sarantium.

      Chapter II

      Pardos had never liked his hands. The fingers were too short, stubby, broad. They didn’t look like a mosaicist’s hands, though they showed the same network of cuts and scratches all the others’ did.

      He’d had a great deal of time to think about this and other things on the long road in wind and rain as autumn steadily turned to winter. Martinian’s fingers, or Crispin’s, or Pardos’s best friend Couvry’s—those were the right shape. They were large and long, appearing deft and capable. Pardos thought his own hands were like a farmhand’s, a labourer’s, someone in a trade where dexterity hardly mattered. It bothered him, sometimes.

      But he was a mosaicist, wasn’t he? Had finished his apprenticeship with two celebrated masters of the craft and had been formally admitted to the guild in Varena. He had his papers in his purse now, his name was entered on the rolls back home. So appearance wasn’t really important, after all. His short, thick fingers were nimble enough to do what needed to be done. The eye and the mind mattered, Crispin used to say before he went away; the hands could learn to do what they were told.

      It seemed to be true. They were doing what needed to be done here, though Pardos would never have dreamt that his first labours as a fully-fledged mosaicist would be expended in the remote, bitterly cold wilderness of Sauradia.

      He would never have even dreamt, in fact, of being this far away from home, and on his own. He had not been the sort of young man who imagined adventures in distant places. He was pious, careful, prone to worry, not at all impulsive.

      But he had left Varena—his home, all he knew of Jad’s created world—almost immediately after the murders in the sanctuary, and that was about as impulsive an action as could be imagined.

      It hadn’t felt as though he was being reckless, it seemed rather as if there was no real choice in the matter, and Pardos had wondered why the others couldn’t understand that. When pressed by his friends, and by Martinian and his concerned, kind-hearted wife, Pardos had only said, over and over, that he could not stay in a place where such things were done. When they told him, in tones of cynicism or sadness, that such things happened everywhere, Pardos replied—very simply—that he hadn’t seen them everywhere, only in the sanctuary expanded to house the bones of King Hildric outside Varena.

      The consecration of that sanctuary had been the most wonderful day of his life, at first. He and the other former apprentices, newly elevated to the guild, had been sitting with Martinian and his wife and with Crispin’s white-haired mother in places of honour for the ceremony. All the mighty of the Antae kingdom were there, and many of the most illustrious Rhodians, including representatives of the High Patriarch himself, had come to Varena along the muddy roads from Rhodias. Queen Gisel, veiled and clad in the pure white of mourning, had been sitting so near that Pardos could almost have spoken to her.

      Except that it hadn’t been the queen. It had been a woman pretending to be her, a lady-in-waiting. That woman had died in the sanctuary, and so had the queen’s giant, silent guard, chopped down by a sword that should never have been in a holy place. Then the swordsman— Agila, Master of Horse—had himself been slain where he stood by the altar, arrows whipping down from overhead. Other men had died the same way, while people screamed and trampled each other in a rush for the doors and blood spattered

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