He said, "You'd do well to get some sleep. We can talk another-"
"Do you know that they worship bison in Sauradia?" said Pertennius abruptly. "It is in Metractes's History of the Rhodian Wars.
Again, Crispin felt a flicker of alarm. His regret at being here grew more intense. "I remember Metractes," he said casually. "I was made to memorize him as a child. Dismally dull."
Pertennius looked offended. "Hardly so, Rhodian! A fine historian. A model for my own histories."
"I beg your pardon," Crispin said quickly. "He is, ah, voluminous, certainly."
"Comprehensive," said Pertennius. He closed his eyes again. The hand came back up to rest over them. "Will this feeling pass?" he asked plaintively.
"In the morning," Crispin said. "With sleep. There is little else to be done for it."
"Am I going to be sick?"
"It is certainly possible," Crispin said. "Do you want to stand by the window?"
"Too far. Tell me about the bison."
Crispin drew a breath. Pertennius's eyes had opened again, were on him. "There is nothing to tell. And everything. How does one explain these things? If words would do, I wouldn't be a mosaicist. It is as the roebuck and the rabbits and the birds and the fish and the foxes and the grain in the fields. I wanted them all on my dome. You have the sketches here, secretary, you can see the design. Jad created the world of animals as well as mortal man. That world lies between walls and walls, west and east, under the hand and eye of the god."
All true, not the truth.
Pertennius made a vague sign of the sun disk. He was visibly struggling to stay awake. "You made it very big."
"They are big," Crispin said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.
"Ah? You've seen one? And Rhodias is up there too? My dome, you said. Is that pious? Is it… proper in a sanctuary?"
Crispin had his back to the window now, leaning against the ledge. He was about to answer, or try, when he realized there was no need any more. The secretary was asleep on the green couch, still in his sandals and the white garb of a wedding guest.
He took a deep breath, felt an undeniable sense of relief, escape. It was time to go, escort or not, before the other man awoke and asked further questions of this disconcertingly sharp nature. He's harmless, Shirin had said to Crispin on that first day they met. Crispin had disagreed. He still did. He crossed from the window, making for the door. He would send the servant up, to attend to his master.
If he hadn't seen scribbled handwriting across his own sketch on the table, he would have walked out. The temptation was irresistible, however. He paused, glanced quickly again at the sleeping man. Pertennius's mouth had fallen open. Crispin bent over the sketches.
Pertennius-it had to be him-had written a series of cryptic notes all over Crispin's drawings of the dome and wall decorations. The writing was crabbed, almost illegible. These were his notes for himself-not worth bothering with. There was nothing privileged about sketched proposals.
Crispin straightened to go. And as he did his eye fell across another page half-hidden under one of the sketches, written in the same hand, but more carefully, even elegantly, and this time he could read the words.
It was revealed to me by one of the officials of the Master of Offices (a man who cannot here be named for reasons of his life and security) that the Empress, remaining as corrupt as she was in her youth, is known to have certain of the younger Excubitors brought to her in her baths of a morning by her ladies who are, of course, chosen for their own depraved morals. She greets these men wantonly, naked and shameless as when she coupled with animals on the stage, and has the soldiers" clothing stripped from them.
Crispin found that he was having trouble breathing. Very carefully, with another glance at the couch, he shifted the paper a little and read on, in disbelief.
She will have congress with these men, insatiably, sometimes two of them at one time using her like a whore in her own bath while the other women fondle themselves and each other and offer lewd, lascivious encouragement. A virtuous girl from Eubulus, the official told me in great secrecy, was poisoned by the Empress for daring to say that this conduct was impious. Her body has never been found. The unspeakable whore who is now our Empress always has her holy men detained outside the baths in the morning until after the soldiers have been dismissed through a hidden inner door. She then greets the clerics, half-naked, the reek of carnality about her, making a mockery of the morning prayers to holy Jad.
Crispin swallowed hard. He felt a pulse throbbing in his temple. He looked over at the sleeping man. Pertennius was snoring now. He looked ill and grey and helpless. Crispin became aware that his hands were shaking. He released the sheet of paper when it began to rattle in his grasp. He felt rage and fear and-beneath them both like a sounding drum- a growing horror. He thought he might be sick.
He ought to go, he knew. He needed to go from here. But there was a power to this exquisitely phrased vituperation, this venom, that caused him-almost without volition, as if he'd been rendered subject to a dark spell-to leaf to another page.
When the Trakesian farmer who foully murdered to claim the throne for his illiterate relative was finally seated there in his own right, though not his own peasant name (for he abandoned that as a vain effort to abandon the dung smell of the fields), he began to more openly practise his nighttime rites of daemons and black spirits. Ignoring the desperate words of his holy clerics, and ruthlessly destroying those who would not be silent, Petrus of Trakesia, the Night's Emperor, turned the seven palaces of the Imperial Precinct into unholy places, full of savage rituals and blood at darkfall. Then, in a vicious mockery of piety, he declared an intention to build a vast new Sanctuary to the god. He commissioned evil, godless men-foreigners, many of them-to design and decorate it, knowing they would never gainsay his own black purposes. It was truly believed by many in the City in this time that the Trakesian himself conducted rituals of human sacrifice in the unfinished Sanctuary by night when none were allowed but his own licensed confederates. The Empress, besmeared with the blood of innocent victims, would dance for him, it was said, between candles lit in mockery of the holiness of Jad. Then, naked, with the Emperor and others watching, the whore would take an unlit candle from the altar, as she had done in her youth on the stage, and she would lie down in sight of all and…
Crispin crammed the papers back together. It was enough. It was more than enough. He did feel ill now. This unctuous, watchful, so-discreet secretary of the Strategos, this official chronicler of the wars of Valerius's reign and his building projects, with his honoured place in the Imperial Precinct, had been spewing forth in this room the accumulated filth and bile of hatred.
Crispin wondered if these words were ever meant to be read. And when? Would people believe them? Could they shape, in years to come, an impression of truth for those who had never actually known the people of whom these ugly words were written? Was it possible?
It occurred to him that if he but walked from here with a randomly chosen sheaf of these papers in his hand Pertennius of Eubulus would be disgraced, exiled.
Or, very possibly, executed. A death to Crispin's name. Even so, it stayed in his mind to do it, standing there over the cluttered table, breathing hard, imagining these pages as crimson-hued with their hatred, listening to the sleeping man's snores and the snap of the fire and the faint, distant sounds of the night city.
He remembered Valerius, that first night, standing under the stupendous dome Artibasos had achieved. The intelligence and the courtesy of the Emperor as he patiently watched Crispin come to terms with the surface he was being given for his own craft.