Sarantium these things were to be found, men said. In Sarantium, everything on earth was to be found, from death to heart’s desire, men said.
He was going, it seemed. Sailing to Sarantium. Walking, actually, for it was too late in the year for a ship, but the old saying spoke of change, not a means of travel. His life was branching, taking him towards whatever might come on the road or at journey’s end.
His life. He had a life. The hardest thing was to accept that, it sometimes seemed. To move out from the rooms where a woman and two children had died in ugly pain, stripped of all inherent dignity or grace; to allow brightness to touch him again, like this gift of the morning sun.
In that moment, he felt like a child again himself, seeing a remembered stone wall come into view as the path curved and approached it. Half amused, half genuinely unsettled, Crispin added a few more inward curses to his emergent litany against Martinian, who had insisted that he make this visit.
It seemed that Zoticus, the alchemist, much consulted by farmers, the childless and the lovelorn, and even royalty on occasion, dwelled in the selfsame substantial farmhouse with an attached apple orchard where an eight-year-old boy had heard birds discussing with well-bred anticipation the consumption of his eyeballs and brain matter.
‘I will send to tell him to expect you,’ Martinian had said with firmness. ‘He knows more useful things than any man I know, and you are a fool if you undertake a journey like this without first speaking with Zoticus. Besides, he makes wonderful herbal infusions.’
‘I don’t like herbal infusions.’
‘Crispin,’ Martinian had said warningly. And had given directions.
And so here he was, cloaked against the wind, pacing alongside the rough stones of the wall, booted feet tracing the vanished, long-ago bare footsteps of a child who had gone out from the city alone one summer’s day to escape the sorrow in his house.
He was alone now, too. Birds flitted from branch to bough on both sides of the road. He watched them. The hawk was gone. A brown hare, too exposed, made swift, deliberately jerky progress across the field on his left. A cloud swept across the sun and its elongated shadow raced over the same field. The hare froze when the shadow reached it and then hurtled erratically forward again as light returned.
On the other side of the road the wall marched beside him, well built, well maintained, of heavy grey stones. Ahead, he could see the gateway to the farmyard, a marker stone opposite it. Unused though it now was, this had been a road laid down in the great days of the Rhodian Empire. In no great distance—a morning’s steady walking—it met the high road that ran all the way to Rhodias itself and beyond, to the southern sea at the end of the peninsula. As a child, Crispin used to enjoy the sensation of being on the same road as someone gazing into those distant ocean waters.
He stopped for a moment, looking at the wall. He had climbed it easily that morning long ago. There were still apples in the trees beyond. Crispin pursed his lips, weighing a thought. This was not a time to be duelling with childhood memories, he told himself sternly, repressively. He was a grown man, a respected, well-known artisan, a widower. Sailing to Sarantium.
With a small, resolute shrug of his shoulders, Crispin dropped the package he was carrying—a gift from Martinian’s wife for the alchemist—onto the brown grass beside the path. Then he stepped across the small ditch, pushed a hand through his hair, and proceeded to climb the wall again.
Not all skills were lost to the years, and it seemed he wasn’t so old after all. Pleased with his own agility, he swung one knee up, then the other, stood on the wide, uneven top of the wall, balanced, and then stepped—only boys leaped—across to a good branch. He found a comfortable spot, sat down and, pausing to be judicious, reached up and picked an apple.
He was surprised to find his heart was racing.
He knew that if they saw this, his mother and Martinian and half a dozen others would be performing a collective rueful headshake like the Chorus in one of those seldom-performed tragedies of the ancient Trakesian poets. Everyone said Crispin did things merely because he knew that he shouldn’t do them. A perversity of behaviour, his mother called it.
Perhaps. He didn’t think so, himself. The apple was ripe. Tasty, he decided.
He dropped it onto the grass among fallen ones for the small animals and stood up to cross back to the wall. No need to be greedy or childish. He’d proven his point, felt curiously pleased with himself. Settled a score with his youth, in a way.
‘Some people never learn, do they?’
One foot on a branch, one on top of the wall, Crispin looked down very quickly. Not a bird, not an animal, not a spirit of the half-world of air and shadow. A man with a full beard and unfashionably long grey hair stood in the orchard below, gazing up at him, leaning on a staff, foreshortened by the angle.
Flushing, acutely embarrassed, Crispin mumbled, ‘They used to say this orchard was haunted. I . . . wanted to test myself.’
‘And did you pass your test?’ the old man—Zoticus, beyond doubt—queried gently.
‘I suppose.’ Crispin stepped across to the wall. ‘The apple was good.’
‘As good as they were all those years ago?’
‘Hard to remember. I really don’t—’
Crispin stopped. A prickling of fear.
‘How do . . . how did you know I was here? Back then?’ ‘You are Caius Crispus, I presume? Martinian’s friend.’
Crispin decided to sit down on the wall. His legs felt oddly weak. ‘I am. I have a gift for you. From his wife.’
‘Carissa. Splendid woman! A neckwarmer, I do hope. I find I need them now, as winter comes. Old age. A terrible thing, let me tell you. How did I know you were here before? Silly question. Come down. Do you like mint leaves in an infusion?’
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
