A Brightness Long Ago, page 39
He spoke, I listened, mostly. He already knew where I was going. It was why he’d given me two copies of his letter. I nodded when he was done talking. I was ready to leave. I had already decided to do so. That wind.
I begged two horses of him before he went back in. He called to someone I hadn’t seen in the darkness. Gian came forward and took instructions. I went with him to their camp and was given horses. Brunetto found me there; I’d known he would. He would have been watching for me. We left in the last of the dark, riding towards the sunrise.
Ginevra della Valle would be in Remigio—a city exposed to the world now. She had two small children, fatherless.
If he dies on this campaign I will have you killed, she had said.
I rode there.
* * *
“It has nothing to do with me!” the High Patriarch of Jad shouted from his throne in a crowded, anxious room of his most senior advisers. “I wasn’t even here for almost all of what happened in the east!”
Not entirely true. He had been Patriarch in Rhodias for more than two years now. But what could he have done?
They had received word of the fall of Sarantium.
Horror was starkly visible on faces in the extravagantly decorated room. It was not, for once, a display. The Patriarch saw men weeping. It made him even more anxious, and angry. Were they really going to blame him for this? Some would try; he knew it!
He abruptly announced that he was cutting the meeting short. They were going to pray again, he declared. It would be seen as a pious response—and would give him time to think!
Not that the added time, as he led them all through the routines of the rarely used afternoon invocation in the sanctuary of the palace, offered anything in the way of ideas.
He demanded solitude after. He did the evening rites with three clerics only, in his chamber before the small altar there. He ate by himself and went to bed early, without a companion. In the darkness, alone except for the guard and a servant, he was astonished to discover, at a certain point, that he too seemed to be weeping.
Becoming Patriarch had been a young man’s delicious pleasure amid trappings of luxury and useful power. There had been little he could desire or request that was not offered to him by someone keen to please.
In darkness, on the night of the day they learned of Sarantium’s fall, Scarsone Sardi realized (one could say belatedly) that power might have implications. Also, that some events could not be undone, and could change the world.
He gave up on sleep. He called for light and his favourite Candarian wine (some things were not going to be altered, there was no reason, surely?). He had his principal secretary summoned. Yes, it was the middle of the night. The City of Cities had been taken, amid death and fire. A secretary could be roused to his work!
The first letter was to his uncle in Firenta.
He ordered Piero Sardi (he had never given him an order before) to abandon the siege of Bischio. It was not to take place this year. The Jaddite world would be instructed to dress in mourning until autumn, and any military action, any conflicts pursued, would lead to a Patriarchal ban from all rites and services, including those for weddings, births, funerals, and the memorials for the souls of the dead.
Every leader in every city-state and every country that worshipped the god would receive the same notice, he had his secretary write his uncle. The west would mourn Sarantium—and atone for its collective failure.
Next year would be next year. But the world, Scarsone declared, could pause, even if it could not stop.
He liked that phrasing. He did not go back to sleep. He had servants summon the palace clerics for an extremely early start to the morning rites, startling them, and himself a little bit.
It had occurred to him that although his thought had been true—that he hadn’t been in Rhodias during all the years leading up to the Asharite conquest in the east—he would be remembered, perhaps forever, as the man who was High Patriarch when Sarantium fell, having received no support from the west despite its repeated pleas. He didn’t like that.
They observed the rites with particular intensity all week, even adding that midday service of the Ascendant Sun. Scarsone was busier than he’d ever been with correspondence. He intended to enforce that year-long truce in Batiara and beyond, and was telling everyone who mattered.
Then, a few days later, came word of a different sort of death.
It would be dishonest to say that many people would mourn the sudden passing of the violent, uncontrollable Teobaldo Monticola. But there were issues associated with his death.
Two of the Patriarch’s advisers were quick to point out the obvious: there was no clear leader to follow him in Remigio, because Monticola’s son and heir would have also died this spring. In the east, was how they put it.
Scarsone Sardi wasn’t impressed by this evasion, though he knew why they did it. Trussio Monticola had fallen as a hero of Jad in Sarantium. His father’s other sons were very young, only just legitimized following a marriage to their mother. So Remigio was exposed to many possible futures, and yes, being governed from Rhodias was certainly one of them.
The High Patriarch could generously take on the task of protecting the boys and their poor mother in the god’s holy name—and obtain control of a good port and harbour in the process.
This was, however, before another letter arrived from an unexpected source, changing all such calculations.
It was a turbulent time. Looking back, Scarsone Sardi would remember that spring as a blur of prayer and activity, during which—it could be said—he himself changed greatly.
It unsettled people, that changing, which was not always wise (or safe) in a place housing the sorts of ferocious ambition Rhodias did, but the young High Patriarch came to feel that this was not a concern.
The fall of the City of Cities was. He remained acutely aware that how he was judged by the god, and generations to come, might turn on his response.
He never did rally the west to the rescue of Sarantium. There were too many conflicting goals and desires at various courts, too many hatreds embedded, too much fear of the Asharites, also. Any war in the east would be ferociously dangerous. They needed to have defended the city properly before, not try to reconquer it.
No mighty, unified, avenging force of Jad ever went east.
Scarsone Sardi did what he could. He cajoled and commanded and scorned. He wrote letters, thundered denunciations and bans. He summoned kings and princes to Rhodias. Sometimes they came. They spoke proper words, committed to nothing at all. He never in his life used the word Asharias—the infidels’ new name for the city that had been Sarantium. He refused to let it cross his lips or have anyone speak it in his presence.
He invited the empress mother of Sarantium to come live in a palace in Rhodias, once it was confirmed she’d escaped the sack and burning. She declined, choosing a Daughters of Jad retreat in Dubrava across the water. Nearer home, perhaps. Nearer what had once been home. She was an arrogant, bitter woman, Scarsone was told. It was likely for the best that she wasn’t in Rhodias.
Scarsone Sardi would go to his god able to declare with truth that he had tried. That he’d changed from a dissolute man placed on the throne in Rhodias because he was seen as easy to control, indifferent to the complexities of the world so long as he had a ripe companion for his bed and comforts and entertainments to hand.
He didn’t ever reject the pleasure of a woman or a boy at night, he took the view that Jad would want him to have some easing of his great burdens, but his working days in the palace were long and became disciplined. Rhodias and the Jaddite world found itself with a spiritual and political leader of determination and all the signs of piety.
This disappointed his Uncle Piero and his Sardi cousins, of course. There were (as there always are) rumours of various sorts when the High Patriarch died suddenly, twelve years later, in the middle of a winter feast.
His monument in its chapel in the sanctuary was magnificent. One of the best things the great Matteo Mercati ever did, was the general opinion.
* * *
Folco’s letter to their smaller force that was to join him at Bischio was addressed to the civic administrator, who was Antenami Sardi, of course. When Boriforte brought it to him, he saw that it had been opened, which angered him, but then he saw the other man’s face. He said nothing, read the letter.
He made himself draw several breaths before trying to speak. He failed, he had no words. He read the letter again. His hand holding it was shaking. Boriforte was silent. What Folco d’Acorsi had just told them altered the world, far away and here at home. Sarantium had fallen, and Teobaldo Monticola was dead.
Folco was taking his army home; he would not make war this year. He wrote that he could not tell the Sardi family and Firenta what to do, but he advised them to go home also and mourn for the fallen city. He said he had written Antenami’s father directly, and they would make arrangements regarding his fee.
Antenami looked up. He still wasn’t ready to speak, to frame thoughts. Sarantium had been under threat for so long it had come to seem an element of the world. It would always be threatened, always be requesting aid, it would not—it could not—fall.
“I should not have opened the letter,” Boriforte said. “I’m sorry. I saw it was from Folco and . . .” He trailed off.
“It doesn’t matter,” Antenami said. It did and it didn’t. But mostly, right now, it didn’t. “Monticola is dead,” he said. Another colossal thing, something that was only smaller next to the news from the east.
“He . . . doesn’t say how,” Boriforte said.
“He doesn’t. I’m certain . . . well, we’ll all know soon enough, I’m sure.”
Boriforte nodded his head. He was visibly shaken. Antenami imagined he seemed much the same.
“Do we turn back?” the other man asked him.
“How do we not?” he replied.
It was late in the morning, a beautiful day. They were not far south of Dondi, close to Bischio. Dangerously close, Antenami had thought, but Boriforte appeared to know what he was doing in this regard. He had taken a strong position on a rise of land, in the event the city recklessly tried a sally against them. He had the smaller cannons aligned and ready to fire. Antenami had asked what would happen if Teobaldo Monticola sent a part of his force ahead to attack them, take the artillery. Folco won’t let that happen, he’d been told.
Monticola was dead. Bischio would have no feared commander defending it.
Didn’t matter. They wouldn’t have one attacking it, either.
“Ensure the courier gets food and drink,” he said.
“Of course,” said his commander. Boriforte looked curiously childlike, as if he might be about to weep. That, thought Antenami, would be embarrassing. He kept telling himself to breathe deeply.
He said, “Why don’t you and I ride back to Dondi? They should be told. Perhaps we can pray with them in their sanctuary.”
“I’d like that,” said Ariberto Boriforte. “Should we also send word to Bischio?”
Antenami considered it. “It is a good thought. They will have a messenger coming there, I am sure of it, but I think it would be right to let them know we are not going to be attacking now. It . . . yes, we should do that.”
The other man nodded.
“Will you choose a messenger, write a note?” Antenami asked. Boriforte nodded again.
He didn’t like Ariberti Boriforte. The man was a fool, and not especially trustworthy, but he was still someone living out his allotted days under the god’s sun as best he knew how. As are we all, thought Antenami.
That felt sanctimonious, even as a thought, but how were you supposed to be after tidings such as this? His father might have an answer. In the meantime, there was nothing wrong with prayer, and much that felt right. The two of them, with a small escort, headed north to Dondi a little later.
But just as they set forth Boriforte held up a hand and they stopped. There was a breeze, young leaves on the trees.
“Listen,” Boriforte said.
A moment later Antenami Sardi heard it too, coming from the south. All the bells of Bischio were ringing, distant, unseen, sending sorrow out over the countryside. They knew.
* * *
Jelena did not go into the sanctuary with everyone else when the news came to Dondi. Antenami had brought it to them, in fact. He was in there, praying with the others.
It wasn’t that she never went into a sanctuary, it didn’t threaten her to be inside a Jaddite holy place, it just wasn’t somewhere for her to find comfort or guidance. All around her now were people who did need, in a time of fear and sorrow, that domed space and altar and sun disk and the rituals enacted there. It made her feel detached, unconnected, and she felt too much so most of the time.
She shared the sorrow, of course. She had a frighteningly vivid image in her mind of what it might have been like when those fabled walls were breached and attackers, repelled for so long, broke through like a river might when a dam broke.
But images of floodwaters, however destructive, didn’t carry the full horror. Even if she stood, or tried to stand, apart from the wars of Jad and Ashar in the world, she lived in Batiara, in this city, among these shaken children of Jad, and some allegiance, some affinity had to slip into a person.
Into her, at any rate. She didn’t know any Asharites, and only a few Kindath. Her world was the Jaddite world and for the most part it tolerated her, allowed her the life she seemed to be in the midst of making for herself.
She could grieve with them. Surely anyone could, for the loss of life and what would have been terrible destruction. Changes would come from this. There was no way that she—a young healer in a small city in Batiara—could know what those would be, but the fall of Sarantium would surely shake the world.
She had intended to go east some day, perhaps, if circumstances allowed, as far as the great city: see the mighty sanctuary Valerius had built a thousand years ago, the even older walls, the place where chariots had raced before fifty thousand people (fifty thousand!), the palaces and gardens, the sea where dolphins had been said to carry souls when men and women died.
That last was a belief that pagans held, it was a heresy now. She didn’t believe it herself, not truly, but it was closer to her sense of the world, how everything could be numinous, holy, engaged in the unfolding story.
Her own changes, Jelena thought, plans needing to be altered, were a small thing. She might see that city one day—or not. She did decide, listening to bells ringing through Dondi and the chanting from within the sanctuary as she sat in a courtyard nearby, that she was still going to go east.
And yes, a conversation with a ghost outside the walls was part of this. Who ignored words from the half-world?
She waited for the services to end. She was standing outside the sanctuary, waiting for Antenami, when they did. He saw her immediately. He was, she thought, a decent man, possibly growing into an important one.
He walked over to her. I can give you an escort anywhere you like, he’d said when they’d last talked, when he was here to save them from attack. She had told him she would not be a mistress, that she was going to Sauradia. Perhaps even to Sarantium, if events allowed one day. She remembered saying that.
Not a hard thing to remember. It wasn’t long ago, in that time before the world changed.
* * *
• • •
IT WAS POSSIBLE, he thought, walking towards Jelena through a square crowded with grieving people, that he was in love with this willful, solitary woman who had saved—and altered—his life.
It was also possible this was just passion shaped by how they’d met, when he’d nearly died, and the lovemaking that had followed when he was healed. Lovemaking as a part of healing?
On the other hand, that wasn’t, Antenami Sardi thought, such a terrible reason to fall in love with someone.
“This is very bad,” he said to her, after they greeted each other.
“Of course it is,” she replied.
People were all around them. The square was crowded. It was an oddly private moment, despite that. You could be alone in a crowd, he thought. They stood close, to hear each other over the voices and the bells.
He said, “Forgive me, but this is not a time for you to go to Sauradia.”
She nodded. He’d been afraid she’d resist. He had no way of stopping her, of course.
“I know,” she said. A faint smile. “I’m stubborn but—”
“We have no idea what will happen, over that way.”
“I know,” she said again. “I think, if you are still willing, I’d like an escort after all. To Firenta, if you are really heading back, and then home to Varena from there. Is that all right?”
He hadn’t expected this. “You know it is. I may try to persuade you to stay with me.”
“I might for a little, then.”
“As . . . a thank you?”
* * *
• • •
JELENA HEARD THE note in his voice. She said, and found it was true, “No, I’ll stay because I like being with you.”
He flushed. A scion of the Sardi family, wealthiest bankers of their day, ruling Firenta, one of them as High Patriarch . . .
He said, “I’m going to leave Boriforte to bring the army and the cannons. I’m riding home with half a dozen men. You’ll come with us. Can you be ready by morning?”
She nodded. “But if you are going fast, I have to warn you, I don’t ride well.”
“I can teach you. I know horses.”
