Sailing to Sarantium

It didn’t seem in the least silly to Crispin. For the moment he deferred a reply. ‘I’ll get the gift,’ he said, and climbed down—jumping would lack all dignity—on the outside of the wall. He reclaimed the parcel from the grass, brushed some ants from it, and walked up the road towards the farmyard gate, breathing deeply to calm himself.

Zoticus was waiting, leaning on his staff, two large dogs beside him. He opened the gate and Crispin walked in. The dogs sniffed at him but heeled to a command. Zoticus led the way towards the house through a neat, small yard. The door was open, Crispin saw.

‘Why don’t we just eat him now?’

Crispin stopped. Childhood terror. The very worst kind, that made nightmares for life. He looked up. The voice was lazy, aristocratic, remembered. It belonged to a bird perched on the branch of an ash tree, not far from the doorway.

‘Manners, manners, Linon. This is a guest.’ Zoticus’s tone was reproving.

‘A guest? Climbing the wall? Stealing apples?’

‘Well, eating him would hardly be a proportionate response, and the philosophers teach that proportion is the essence of the virtuous life, do they not?’

Crispin, stupefied, fighting fear, heard the bird give an elaborate sniff of disapproval. Looking more closely, he abruptly realized, with a further shock, that it was not a real bird. It was an artifice. Crafted.

And it was talking. Or else . . .

‘You are speaking for it!’ he said quickly. ‘Casting your voice? The way the actors do, on stage sometimes?’

‘Mice and blood! Now he insults us!’

‘He is bringing a neckwarmer from Carissa. Behave, Linon.’

‘Take the neck thing, then let us eat him.’

Crispin, his own choler rising suddenly, said bluntly, ‘You are a construct of leather and metal. You can’t eat anything. Don’t bluster.’

Zoticus glanced quickly over at him, surprised, and then laughed aloud, the sound unexpectedly robust, filling the space before his doorway.

‘And that,’ he said, ‘will teach you, Linon! If anything can.’

‘It will teach me that we have an ill-bred guest this morning.’

‘You did propose eating him. Remember?’

‘I am only a bird. Remember? Indeed, I am less than that, it seems. I am a construct of leather and metal.’

Crispin had the distinct sense that if the small grey and brown thing with the glass eyes could have moved it would have turned its back on him, or flown away in disgust and wounded pride.

Zoticus walked over to the tree, turned a screw on each of the tiny legs of the bird, loosening their grip on the branch, and picked it up. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘The water is boiled and the mint was picked this morning.’

The mechanical bird said nothing, nestled in his free hand. It looked like a child’s toy. Crispin followed into the house. The dogs lay down in the yard.

THE INFUSION WAS GOOD, actually. Crispin, more calm than he’d expected to be, wondered if the old alchemist might have added something besides mint to it, but he didn’t ask. Zoticus was standing at a table examining the courier’s map Crispin had produced from the inner pocket of his cloak.

Crispin looked around. The front room was comfortably furnished, much as any prosperous farmhouse might be. No dissected bats or pots with green or black liquids boiling in them, no pentagrams chalked on the wooden floor. There were books and scrolls, to mark a learned and an unexpectedly well-off man, but little else to suggest magics or cheiromancy. Still, he saw half a dozen of the crafted birds, made of various materials, perched on shelves or the backs of chairs, and they gave him pause. None of these had spoken yet, and the small one called Linon lay silently on its side on a table by the fire. Crispin had little doubt, however, that any and all of them could address him if they chose.

It amazed him how calmly he accepted this. On the other hand, he’d had twenty-five years to live with the knowledge.

‘The Imperial Posting Inns, whenever you can,’ Zoticus was murmuring, head lowered still to the map, a curved, polished glass in one hand to magnify it. ‘Comforts and food are unreliable elsewhere.’

Crispin nodded, still distracted. ‘Dog meat instead of horse or swine, I know.’

Zoticus glanced up, his expression wry. ‘Dog is good,’ he said. ‘The risk is getting human flesh in a sausage.’

Crispin kept a composed face with some effort. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well spiced, I’m sure.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Zoticus, turning back to the map. ‘Be especially careful through Sauradia, which can be unstable in autumn.’

Crispin watched him. Zoticus had taken a quill now and was making notations on the map. ‘Tribal rites?’

The alchemist glanced up briefly, eyebrows arched. His features were strong, the blue eyes deep-set, and he wasn’t as old as the grey hair and the staff might have suggested. ‘Yes, that. And knowing they will be mostly on their own again until spring, even with the big army camp near Trakesia and soldiers at Megarium. Notorious winter brigands, the Sauradi tribes. Lively women, as I recall, mind you.’ He smiled a little, to himself, and returned to his annotations.

Crispin shrugged. Sipped his tea. Resolutely tried to put his mind away from sausages.

Some might have seen this long autumn journey as an adventure in itself. Caius Crispus did not. He liked his own city walls, and good roofs against rain, and cooks he knew, and his bathhouse. For him, broaching a new cask of wine from Megarium or the vineyards south of Rhodias had always been a preferred form of excitement. Designing and executing a mosaic was an adventure . . . or had been once. Walking the wet, windswept roads of Sauradia or Trakesia with an eye out for predators—human or otherwise—in a struggle to avoid becoming someone else’s sausage was not an adventure, and a greybeard’s cackling about lively women did not make it one.

He said, ‘I’d still like an answer, by the way, silly question or not. How did you know I was here all those years ago?’

Zoticus put down the quill and sat in a heavy chair. One of the mechanical birds—a falcon with a silver and bronze body and yellow jewelled eyes, quite unlike the drab, sparrow-like Linon—was fixed to the high back of the chair, screws adjusted so its claws held fast. It gazed inimically at Crispin with a pale glitter.

‘You do know I am an alchemist.’

‘Martinian said as much. I also know that most who use that name are frauds, hooking coins and goods from innocents.’

Crispin heard a sound from the direction of the fire. It might have been a log shifting, or not.

‘Entirely true,’ said Zoticus, unperturbed. ‘Most are. Some are not. I am one of those who are not.’

‘Ah. Meaning you know the future, can induce passionate love, cure the plague, and find water?’ He sounded truculent, Crispin knew. He couldn’t help it.

Zoticus gazed at him levelly. ‘Only the last, actually, and not invariably. No. Meaning I can sometimes see and do things most men cannot, with frustratingly erratic success. And meaning I can see things in men and women that others cannot. You asked how I knew you? Men have an aura, a presence to them. It changes little, from childhood to death. Very few people dare my orchard, which is useful—as you might guess—for a man living alone in the countryside. You were there once. I knew your presence again this morning. The anger in you was not present in the child, though there was a loss then, too. The rest is little enough altered. It is not,’ he said kindly, ‘so complicated an explanation, is it?’

Crispin looked at him, cupping his drink in both hands. His glance shifted to the jewelled falcon gripping the back of the alchemist’s heavy chair. ‘And these?’ he asked, ignoring the observations about himself.

‘Oh. Well. That’s the whole point of alchemy, isn’t it? To transmute one substance into another, proving certain things about the nature of the world. Metals to gold. The dead to life. I have learned to make inanimate substance think and speak, and retain a soul.’ He said it much as he might have described learning how to make the mint tea they were drinking.

Crispin looked around the room at the birds. ‘Why . . . birds?’ he asked, the first of fully a dozen questions that occurred. The dead to life.

Zoticus looked down, that private smile on his face again. After a moment, he said, ‘I wanted to go to Sarantium myself once. I had ambitions in the world, and wished to see the Emperor and be honoured by him with wealth and women and world’s glory. Apius, some time after he took the Golden Throne, initiated a fashion for mechanical animals. Roaring lions in the throne room. Bears that rose on their hind legs. And birds. He wanted birds everywhere. Singing birds in all his palaces. The mechanical artisans of the world were sending him their best contrivances: wind them up and they warbled an offkey paean to Jad or a rustic folk ditty, over and over again until you were minded to throw them against a wall and watch the little wheels spill out. You’ve heard them? Beautiful to look at, sometimes. And the sound can be appealing—at first.’

Crispin nodded. He and Martinian had done a Senator’s house in Rhodias.

‘I decided,’ said Zoticus, ‘I might do better. Far better. Create birds that had their own power of speech. And thought. And that these, the fruits of long study and labour and . . . some danger, would be my conduits to fame in the world.’

‘What happened?’

‘You don’t remember? No, you wouldn’t. Apius, under the influence of his Eastern Patriarch, began blinding alchemists and cheiromancers, even simple astrologers for a while. The clerics of the sun god have always feared any other avenues to power or understanding in the world. It became evident that arriving in the City with birds that had souls and spoke their own minds was a swift path to blinding if not death.’ The tone was wry.

‘So you stayed here?’

‘I stayed. After . . . some extended travels. Mostly in autumn, as it happened. This season makes me restless even now. I did learn on those journeys how to do what I wanted. As you can see. I never did get to Sarantium. A mild regret. I’m too old now.’

Crispin, hearing the alchemist’s words in his mind again, realized something. The clerics of the sun god. ‘You aren’t a Jaddite, are you?’

Zoticus smiled, and shook his head.

‘Odd,’ said Crispin dryly, ‘you don’t look Kindath.’

Zoticus laughed. There came that sound again, from towards the fire. A log, almost certainly. ‘I have been told I do,’ he said. ‘But no, why would I exchange one fallacy for another?’

Crispin nodded. This was not a surprise, all things considered. ‘Pagan?’

‘I honour the old gods, yes. And their philosophers. And believe with them that it is a mistake to attempt to circumscribe the infinite range of divinity into one—or even two or three—images, however potent they might be on a dome or a disk.’

Crispin sat down on the stool opposite the other man. He sipped from his cup again. Pagans were not all that rare in Batiara among the Antae—which might well explain why Zoticus had lingered safely in this countryside—but this was still an extraordinarily frank conversation to be having. ‘I’d imagine,’ he said, ‘that the Jaddite teachers—or the Kindath, from what little I know—would simply say that all modes of divinity may be encompassed in one if the one is powerful enough.’

‘They would,’ Zoticus agreed equably. ‘Or two for the pure Heladikians, three with the Kindath moons and sun. They would all be wrong, to my mind, but that is what they’d say. Are we about to debate the nature of the divine, Caius Crispus? We’ll need more than a mint infusion in that case.’

Crispin almost laughed. ‘And more time. I leave in two days and have a great deal to attend to.’

‘Of course you do. And an old man’s philosophizing can hardly appeal just now, if ever. I have marked your map with the hostelries I understand to be acceptable, and those to be particularly avoided. My last travels were twenty years and more ago, but I do have my sources. Let me also give you two names in the City. Both may be trusted, I suspect, though not with everything you know or do.’

His expression was direct. Crispin thought of a young queen in a candlelit room, and wondered. He said nothing. Zoticus crossed to the table, took a sheet of parchment and wrote upon it. He folded the parchment twice and handed it to Crispin.

‘Be careful around the last of this month and the first day of the next. It would be wise not to travel those days, if you can arrange to be staying at an Imperial Inn. Sauradia will be a . . . changed place.’

Crispin looked his inquiry.

‘The Day of the Dead. Not a prudent time for strangers to be abroad in that province. Once you are in Trakesia you’ll be safer. Until you get to the City itself and have to explain why you aren’t Martinian. That ought to be amusing.’

‘Oh, very,’ said Crispin. He had been avoiding thinking about that. Time enough. It was a long journey by land. He unfolded the paper, read the names.

‘The first is a doctor,’ said Zoticus. ‘Always useful. The second is my daughter.’

‘Your what?’ Crispin blinked.

‘Daughter. Seed of my loins. Girl child.’ Zoticus laughed. ‘One of them. I told you: I did travel a fair bit in my youth.’

They heard a barking from the yard. From farther within the house a long-faced, slope-shouldered servant appeared and made his unhurried way to the door and out. He silenced the dogs. They heard voices outside. A moment later he reappeared, carrying two jars.

‘Silavin came, master. He says his swine is recovered. He brought honey. Promises a ham.’

‘Splendid!’ said Zoticus. ‘Store the honey in the cellar.’

‘We have thirty jars there, master,’ said the servant lugubriously.

‘Thirty? So many? Oh dear. Well . . . our friend here will take two back for Carissa and Martinian.’

‘That still leaves twenty-six,’ said the glum-faced servant.

‘At least,’ agreed Zoticus. ‘We shall have a sweet winter. The fire is all right, Clovis, you may go.’

Clovis withdrew through the inner doorway—Crispin caught a glimpse of a hallway and a kitchen at the end before the door closed again.

‘Your daughter lives in Sarantium?’ he asked.

‘One of them. Yes. She’s a prostitute.’

Crispin blinked again.

Zoticus looked wry. ‘Well. Not quite. A dancer. Much the same, if I understand the theatre there. I don’t really know. I’ve never seen her. She writes me, at times. Knows her letters.’

Crispin looked at the name on the paper again. Shirin. There was a street name, as well. He glanced up. ‘Trakesian?’

‘Her mother was. I was travelling, as I say. Some of my children write to me.’

‘Some?’

‘Many are indifferent to their poor father, struggling in his aged loneliness among the barbarians.’

The eyes were amused, the tone a long way from what the words implied. Crispin, out of habit, resisted an impulse to laugh, then stopped fighting it.

‘You had an adventurous past.’

‘Middling so. In truth, I find more excitement now in my studies. Women were a great distraction. I am mostly freed of that now, thank the high gods. I actually believe I have a proper understanding of some of the philosophers now, and that is an adventure of the spirit. You will take one of the birds? As my gift to you?’

Crispin put his drink down abruptly, spilling some on the table. He snatched at the map to keep it dry. ‘What? Why would you—?’

‘Martinian is a dear friend. You are his colleague, his almost-son. You are going a long way to a dangerous place. If you are careful to keep it private, one of the birds will be of assistance. They can see, and hear. And offer companionship, if nothing else.’ The alchemist hesitated. ‘It . . . pleases me to think one of my creations will go with you to Sarantium, after all.’

‘Oh, splendid. I am to walk the arcades of the City conversing with a companionable jewelled falcon? You want me blinded in your stead?’

Zoticus smiled faintly. ‘Not a choice gift, were that so. No. Discretion will be called for, but there are other ways of speaking with them. With whichever of them you can hear inwardly. You have no training. It is not certain, Caius Crispus. Nothing is in my art, I fear. But if you can hear one of the birds, it may become yours. In the act of hearing, a transference can be achieved. We will know soon enough.’ His voice changed. ‘All of you, shape a thought for our guest.’

‘Don’t be absurd!’ snapped an owl screwed onto a perch by the front door.

‘A fatuous notion!’ said the yellow-eyed falcon on the high back of Zoticus’s chair. Crispin could imagine it glaring at him.

‘Quite so,’ said a hawk Crispin hadn’t noticed, from the far side of the room. ‘The very idea is indecent.’ He remembered this jaded voice. From twenty-five years ago. They sounded utterly identical, all of them. He shivered, unable to help himself. The hawk added, ‘This is a petty thief. Unworthy of being addressed. I refuse to dignify him so.’

‘That is enough! It is commanded,’ said Zoticus. His voice remained soft but there was iron in it. ‘Speak to him, within. Do it now.’

For the first time Crispin had a sense that this was a man to be feared. There was a change in the alchemist’s hard-worn, craggy features when he spoke this way, a look, a manner that suggested— inescapably—that he had seen and done dark things in his day. And he had made these birds. These crafted things that could see and hear. And speak to him. It came to Crispin, in a rush, exactly what was being proposed. He discovered that his hands were clenched together.

It was silent in the room. Unsure of what to do, Crispin eyed the alchemist and waited.

He heard something. Or thought he did.

Zoticus calmly sipped his drink. ‘And so? Anything?’ His voice was mild again.

There had been no actual sound.

Crispin said, wonderingly, fighting a chill fear, ‘I thought . . . well, I believe I did hear . . . something.’

‘Which was?’

‘I think . . . it sounded as if someone said, Mice and blood.’

There came a shriek of purest outrage from the table by the fire.

‘No! No, no, no! By the chewed bones of a water rat, I am not going with him! Throw me in the fire! I’d rather die!’

Linon, of course. The small brown and dark grey sparrow, not the hawk or owl or the imperious yellow-eyed falcon, or even one of the oracular-looking ravens on the untidy bookshelf.

‘You aren’t even properly alive, Linon, don’t be dramatic. A little travel again will be good for you. Teach you manners, perhaps.’

‘Manners? He sloughs me off to a stranger after all these years and speaks of manners?’

Crispin swallowed and, genuinely afraid of what underlay this exercise, he sent a thought, without speaking: ‘I did not ask for this. Shall I refuse the gift?’

‘Pah! Imbecile.’

Which did, at least, confirm something.

He looked at the alchemist. ‘Do you . . . did you hear what it said to me?’

Zoticus shook his head. His expression was odd. ‘It feels strangely, I confess. I’ve only done this once before and it was different then.’

‘I’m . . . honoured, I think. I mean, of course I am. But I’m still confused. This was not asked for.’

‘Go ahead. Humiliate me!’

‘I daresay,’ said Zoticus. He didn’t smile now. Nor did he seem to have heard the bird. He toyed with his earthenware cup. From the chairback, the falcon’s harsh eyes seemed fixed on Crispin, malevolent and glittering. ‘You could hardly ask for what you do not comprehend. Nor steal it, like another apple.’

‘Unkind,’ Crispin said, controlling his own quick anger.

Zoticus drew a breath. ‘It was. Forgive me.’

‘We can undo this, can we not? I have no desire to become enmeshed in the half-world. Do the cheiromancers of Sarantium all have creatures like this? I am a mosaicist. That is all I want to be. It is all I want to do, when I get there. If they let me live.’

It was almost all. He had a message to convey if he could. He had undertaken as much.

‘I know this. Forgive me. And no, the charlatans at the Imperial Court, or those casting maledictions on chariot racers for the Hippodrome mob cannot do this. I am more or less certain of it.’

‘None of them? Not a single one? You, alone, of Jad’s mortal children on earth can . . . make creatures such as these birds? If you can do it—’

‘—why can no one else? Of course. The obvious question.’

‘And the obvious answer is?’ Sarcasm, an old friend, never far away of late.

‘That it is possible someone has learned this, but unlikely, and I do not believe it has happened this way. I have discovered . . . what I believe to be the only access to a certain kind of power. Found in my travels, in a . . . profoundly guarded place and at some risk.’

Crispin crossed his arms. ‘I see. A scroll of chants and pentagrams? Boiled blood of a hanged thief and running around a tree seven times by double moonlight? And if you do the least thing wrong you turn into a frog?’

Zoticus ignored this. He simply looked at Crispin from beneath thick, level brows, saying nothing. After a moment, Crispin began to feel ashamed. He might be unsettled here, this staggering imposition of magic might be unlooked-for and frightening, but it was an offered gift, generous beyond words, and the implications of what the alchemist had actually achieved here . . .

‘If you can do this . . . if these birds are thinking and speaking with their own . . . will . . . you ought to be the most celebrated man of our age!’

‘Fame? A lasting name to echo gloriously down the ages? That would be pleasant, I suppose, a comfort in old age, but no, it couldn’t happen . . . think about it.’

‘I am. Why not?’

‘Power tends to be co-opted by greater power. This magic isn’t particularly . . . intimidating. No half-worlds-pawned fireballs or death spells. No walking through walls or flying over them, invisible. Merely fabricated birds with . . . souls and voices. A small thing, but how could I defend myself, or them, if it was known they were here?’

‘But why should —?’

‘How would the Patriarch in Rhodias, or even the clerics in the sanctuary you are rebuilding outside Varena, take to the idea of pagan magic vesting a soul in crafted birds? Would they burn me or stone me, do you think? A difficult doctrinal decision, that. Or the queen? Would Gisel, rising above piety, not see merit in the idea of hidden birds listening to her enemies? Or the Emperor in Sarantium: Valerius II has the most sophisticated network of spies in the history of the Empire, east or west, they say. What would be my chances of dwelling here in peace, or even surviving, if word of these birds went out?’ Zoticus shook his head. ‘No, I have had years to ponder this. Some kinds of achievement or knowledge seem destined to emerge and then disappear, unknown.’

Thoughtful now, Crispin looked at the other man. ‘Is it difficult?’

‘What? Creating the birds? Yes, it was.’

‘I’m certain of that. No, I meant being aware that the world cannot know what you have done.’

Zoticus sipped his tea. ‘Of course it is difficult,’ he said at length. Then he shrugged, his expression ironic. ‘But alchemy always was a secret art, I knew that when I began to study it. I am . . . reconciled to this. I shall exult in my own soul, secretly.’

Crispin could think of nothing to say. Men were born and died, wanted something, somehow, to live after them—beyond the mass burial mound or even the chiselled, too-soon-fading inscription on the headstone of a grave. An honourable name, candles lit in memory, children to light those candles. The mighty pursued fame. An artisan could dream of achieving a work that would endure, and be known to have been one’s own. Of what did an alchemist dream?