Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay Page A

that line of thought.
    ‘I don’t do any such thing. I refuse to be so obvious. I may—sometimes—be a little imprudent when provoked. The courier today was a complete and utter fool.’
    ‘And you told him so, of course.’
    Against his will, Crispin smiled. ‘He told me
I
was, actually.’
    ‘That means he isn’t, to be so perceptive.’
    ‘You mean it isn’t obvious?’
    Her turn to smile. ‘My mistake.’
    He poured himself another cup of the pale wine and mixed it half-and-half with water. In his mother’s house he always did.
    ‘I’m not going,’ he said. ‘Why would I want to go so far, with winter coming?’
    ‘Because,’ said Avita Crispina, ‘you aren’t entirely a fool, my child. We’re talking about
Sarantium,
Caius, dear.’
    ‘I know what we are talking about. You sound like Martinian.’
    ‘He sounds like me.’ An old jest. Crispin didn’t smile this time. He ate some more of the fish soup, which was very good.
    ‘I’m not going,’ he repeated later, at the doorway, bending to salute her on the cheek. ‘Your cook is too skilful for me to bear the thought of leaving.’ She smelled, as always, of lavender. His first memory was of that scent. It ought to have been a colour, he thought. Scents, tastes, sounds often attained hues in his mind, but this one didn’t. The flower might be violet, almost porphyry, in fact—the royal colour—but the
scent
wasn’t. It was his mother’s scent, simply that.
    Two servants, holding cudgels, were waiting to walk him home in the dark.
    ‘There are better cooks than mine in the east. I shall miss you, child,’ she replied calmly. ‘I expect regular letters.’
    Crispin was used to this. It still made him snort with exasperation as he walked away. He glanced back once and saw her in the spill of light, clad in a dark green robe. She lifted a hand to him and went within. He turned the corner, one of her men on either side of him, and walked the short distance to his home. He dismissed his mother’s servants and stood a moment outside, cloaked against the chill, looking up.
    Blue moon westering now in the autumn sky. Full as his heart once had been. The white moon, rising from the eastern end of his street, framed on both sides and below by the last houses and the city walls, was a pale, waning crescent. The cheiromancers attached meaning to such things. They attached meaning to everything overhead.
    Crispin wondered if he could find a meaning to attach to himself. To whatever he seemed to have become in theyear since a second plague summer had left him alive to bury a wife and two daughters himself. In the family plot, beside his father and grandfather. Not in a lime-strewn mound. Some things were not to be endured.
    He thought about the torch of Heladikos he had contrived today on the small dome. There still remained, like a muted shadow of colour, this pride in his craft, this love for it. Love. Was that still the word?
    He did want to see this latest artifice by candlelight: an extravagant blazing of candles and oil lanterns all through the sanctuary, lifting fire to light the fire he’d shaped in stone and glass. He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted.
    That, Martinian had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect.
    He
would
see it, Crispin knew, at the dedication of the sanctuary at autumn’s end, when the young queen and her clerics and pompous emissaries from the High Patriarch in Rhodias—if not the Patriarch himself—laid King Hildric’s bones formally to rest. They would not stint on candles or oil then. He’d be able to judge his work that day, harshly or otherwise.
    He never did, as events unfolded. He never did see his mosaic torch on that sanctuary dome outside the walls of Varena.
    As he turned to enter his own house, key to hand—the servants having been told, as usual, not to wait up—a rustling gave him warning, but