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I'd like to leave behind Rhodias reclaimed, the new Sanctuary and its dome,
and ... and perhaps some memory of what we were, you and I.'
'Three things,' she says, not able to think, just then, of anything more
clever. It occurs to her that she will weep if she does not take care. An
Empress ought not to weep.
'Three things,' he echoes. 'Before it ends, as it always ends.'
Uncrown, a voice was said to say when it ended for one of Jad's holy, anointed
ones. The Lord of Emperors awaits you now.
No one could say if it was true, if those words were truly spoken and heard.
The god's world was made in such a way that men and women lived in mist and
fog, in a wavering light, never knowing with certainty what would come.
'More wine?' she says.
He looks at her, nods his head, lets go of her hand. She takes his cup, fills
it, brings it back. It is silver, worked in gold, rubies set around it.
'I am sorry,' he says. 'I'm sorry, love.'
He isn't even certain why he says this, but a feeling is with him now,
something in her face, something hovering in the air of this exquisite room
like a bird: not singing, enchanted into invisibility, but present nonetheless
in the world.
Not far away from that palace room where no bird is singing, a man is as high
in the air as birds might fly, working from a scaffold under a dome. The
exterior of the dome is copper, gleaming under moon and stars. The interior is
his.
There is light here in the Sanctuary; there always is, by order of the
Emperor. The mosaicist has served tonight as his own apprentice, mixing lime
for the setting bed, carrying it up the ladder himself.
Not a great amount, he isn't covering a wide area tonight. He isn't doing very
much at all. Only the face of his wife, dead now two years, very nearly.
There is no one watching him. There are guards at the entrance, as always,
even in the cold, and a small, rumpled architect is asleep somewhere in this
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vastness of lamplight and shadow, but Crispin works in silence, as alone as a
man can be in Sarantium.
If anyone were watching him, and knew what it was he was doing, they would
need a true understanding of his craft (of all such crafts, really) not to
conclude that this was a hard, cold man, indifferent in life to the woman he
is so serenely rendering. His eyes are clear, his hands steady, meticulously
choosing tesserae from the trays beside him. His expression is detached,
austere: addressing technical dilemmas of glass and stone, no more.
No more? The heart cannot say, sometimes, but the hand and eye- if steady
enough and clear enough-may shape a window for those who come after. Someone
might look up one day, when all those awake or asleep in Sarantium tonight are
long dead, and know that this woman was fair, and very greatly loved by the
unknown man who placed her overhead, the way the ancient Trakesian gods were
said to have set their mortal loves in the sky, as stars.
Eventually, morning came. Morning always comes. There are always losses in the
night, a price paid for light.
PART II
THE NINTH DRIVER
CHAPTER VII
Men and women were always dreaming in the dark. Most of the night's images
fell away with sunrise, or before if they harried the sleeper awake. Dreams
were longings, or warnings, or prophecies. They were gifts or curses, from
powers benevolent or malign, for all knew-
whatever the faith into which they had been born-that mortal men and women
shared the world with forces they didn t understand.
There were many who plied a trade in city or countryside telling those
troubled by visions what they might signify. A small number saw certain kinds
of dream as actual memories of a world other than the one into which the
dreamer and the listener had been born to live and die, but this was treated
in most faiths as a black heresy.
As winter turned towards spring that year, a great many people had dreams they
were to remember.
A moonless night, late in winter. At a watering place in the far south, where
camel routes met in Ammuz, near to where men had decreed a border with
Soriyya-as if the shifting, blowing sands knew of such things-a man, a leader
of his tribe, a merchant, awoke in his tent and dressed himself and went out
into the dark.
He walked past tents where his wives and children and his brothers and their [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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