fierce man acclaimed by everyone as the finest chef in all the Empire was preparing Kasia’s wedding feast.
It was hard to believe. Mostly, she didn’t believe it, moving through events as in a dream, as though expecting to wake up in Morax’s inn in a chill fog with the Day of the Dead still to come.
Kasia, who had been seen as the clever one by her mother, and unmarriageable, the daughter sold to the slavers, was aware that all of this extravagance had to do with the people they knew: Crispin and his friends Scortius the chariot-racer and Shirin, into whose house Kasia had moved when the betrothal was announced early in the winter. Carullus had actually met—twice now—with the Supreme Strategos himself and had achieved a success regarding the arrears of soldiers’ pay. There was a rumour that Leontes might even make an appearance at the tribune’s wedding party. At her wedding party.
The other part of this exaggerated attention had to do, she’d come to understand, with the fact that for all their vaunted cynicism (or perhaps because of it) the Sarantines were almost unfailingly intense and emotional by nature, as if living here at the centre of the world heightened and added significance to every event. The notion that she and Carullus were marrying for love, having chosen each other freely, held extravagant appeal for those surrounding them. Shirin, witty and ironic as she was, could go misty-eyed at the very thought.
Such marriages tended not to happen.
And it wasn’t happening here, whatever people were thinking, though Kasia was the only one who knew that. She hoped.
The man she desired—and loved, though something in her fought the word—was the one who would stand with them today in the chapel holding a symbolic crown over his friend’s head. It wasn’t a truth she liked, but it didn’t seem to be something she could do anything about.
Shirin would stand behind Kasia with another crown, and an elegant gathering of white-clad people from theatre and court and a number of rather more bluff military men would smile and murmur in approval and then they would all come back here to eat and drink: fish and oysters and winter game and wine from Candaria and Megarium.
What woman, really, married purely by choice? What sort of world would it be if that could happen? Not even aristocrats or royalty had such a luxury, so how could it descend to a barbarian girl who had been a slave in Sauradia for a bitter year that would linger in the soul for who knew how long?
She was marrying because a decent man wanted her and had asked. Because he offered the promise of shelter and support and some real kindness was in his nature, and because, failing this union, what life was there for her? Dependent on others all her days? Servant to a dancer until the dancer made her own prudent choice of husband? Joining one of the sects—the Daughters of Jad—who took eternal vows to a god in which Kasia didn’t really believe?
How could she believe, having been offered as a sacrifice to Ludan, having seen a zubir, creature of her tribe’s long faith, in the depths of the Aldwood?
‘You look beautiful,’ Shirin said, turning from a conversation with the chef to look at Kasia in the doorway.
Kasia smiled warily. She didn’t really believe it, but it might even be true. Shirin’s house was efficiently run by her servants; Kasia had been living with her through the winter more as a guest and friend than anything else and she’d eaten better food and slept in a softer bed than ever in her life. Shirin was quick, amusing, observant, always planning something, very much aware of her position in Sarantium: both the implications of renown and the transitory nature of it.
She was also more than any of these things, because none of them spoke to what she was on the stage.
Kasia had seen her dance. After that first visit to the theatre, early in the winter season, she had understood the other woman’s fame. Seeing the masses of flowers thrown down onto the stage after a dance, hearing the wild, shouted acclamations—both the ritual ones of Shirin’s Green faction and the spontaneous cries of those who were simply enraptured with what they’d seen—she had felt awed by Shirin, a little frightened by the change that took place when the dancer entered this world, and even more by what happened when she stepped between the torches and the music began for her.
She could never have exposed herself willingly the way Shirin did each time she performed, clad in streaming silks that hid next to nothing of her lithe form, doing comical, almost obscene things for the raucous delight of those in the less expensive, distant seats. But nor could she ever in her life have moved the way the Greens’ dancer did, as Shirin leaped and spun, or paused with arms extended like a sea-bird, and then gravely stepped forward, bare feet arched like a hunter’s bow, in the older, more formal dances that made men weep. Those same silks could lift like wings behind her or be gathered into a shawl when she knelt to mourn a loss, or into a shroud when she died and the theatre grew silent as a graveyard in a winter dark.
Shirin changed when she danced, and changed those who saw her.
Then she changed back, at home. There she liked to talk about Crispin. She had accepted Kasia as a house-guest as a favour to the Rhodian. He knew her father, she’d told Kasia. But there was more to it than that. It was obvious that he was often on the dancer’s mind, even with all the men—young and less young, many of them married, from court and aristocratic houses and military officers’ quarters—who regularly attended upon her. After those visits Shirin would talk to Kasia, revealing detailed knowledge of their positions and ranks and prospects: her finely nuanced social favours were part of the delicate dance she had to perform in this life of a dancer in Sarantium. Kasia had the sense that however their relationship had begun, Shirin was genuinely pleased to have her in the house, that friendship and trust had not before been elements in the dancer’s life. Not that they ever had been in her own, if it came to that.
During the winter Carullus had come by almost every day when he was in the City. He’d been absent a month amid the rains, leaving to escort—triumphantly—the first shipment of the western army’s arrears to his camp in Sauradia. He was thoughtful when he came back, told Kasia there seemed to be very strong indicators that a war was coming in the west. It was not precisely surprising, but there was a difference between rumours and onrushing reality. It had occurred to her, listening, that if he were to go there with Leontes he could die. She’d taken his hand as he talked. He liked it when she held his hand.
They’d seen little enough of Crispin during the winter. He had apparently chosen his team of mosaicists as quickly as possible and was up on his scaffolding all the time, working as soon as the morning prayers were done and into the night, by torchlight aloft. He slept on a cot in the Sanctuary some nights, Vargos reported, not even returning to the home the Chancellor’s eunuchs had found and furnished for him.
Vargos was working in the Sanctuary as well, and was their source for the best stories, including the one about an apprentice chased by Crispin—the Rhodian roaring imprecations and waving a knife—all around the Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom, for having let something called the quicklime be spoiled one morning. Vargos had started to explain about the quicklime, but Shirin had pretended to scream with boredom and had thrown olives at him until he’d stopped.
Vargos came by regularly to take Kasia to chapel in the morning if she’d go with him. Often she did. She was working to accustom herself to the noise and crowds, and these morning walks with Vargos were a part of that. He was another kind man, Vargos. She’d met three of them in Sauradia, it seemed, and one of them had offered marriage to her. She didn’t deserve such fortune.
Sometimes Shirin came with them. It was useful to make an appearance, she explained to Kasia. The clerics of Jad disapproved of the theatre even more than they disliked the chariots and the violent passions and pagan magic
