‘My lord!’ he said, looking up, ‘I am . . . I am speechless!’
Which elicited its own burst of laughter from those who knew the man. ‘However,’ added Carullus, lifting a hand, ‘I do have a question I must ask.’
‘Speechlessly?’ said Styliane Daleina, from behind her husband. Her first comment, softly spoken, but everyone heard it. Some people did not need to raise their voices to be heard.
‘I lack that skill, my lady. I must use my tongue, though with far less skill than my betters. I only wish to ask if I may decline the promotion.’
Silence fell. Leontes blinked.
‘This is a surprise,’ he said. ‘I would have thought . . .’ He let the sentence trail off.
‘My great lord, my commander . . . if you wish to reward an unworthy soldier, it will be by allowing him, at any rank at all, to fight at your side in the next campaign. I do not believe I am saying anything untoward if I suggest that Calysium, with the Everlasting Peace signed in the east, will be no such place. Is there nowhere in . . . in the west where I might serve with you, my Strategos?’
At the reference to Bassania, Rustem heard the Senator beside him shift a little, uneasily, and clear his throat softly. But nothing of note had been said. Yet.
The Strategos smiled a little now, his composure regained. He reached down, and in a gesture almost fatherly, ruffled the hair of the soldier kneeling before him. His men loved him, it was said, the way they loved their god.
Leontes said, ‘There is no campaign declared anywhere, chiliarch. Nor is it my practice to send newly married officers to a war front when there are alternatives, as there always are.’
‘Then I can be attached to you, since there is no war front,’ said Carullus, and he smiled innocently. Rustem snorted; the man had audacity.
‘Shut up, you idiot!’ The entire room heard the redhaired mosaicist. The laughter that followed affirmed as much. It had been intended, of course. Rustem was quickly coming to realize how much of what was being said and done was carefully planned or cleverly improvised theatre. Sarantium, he decided, was a stage for performances. No wonder an actress could command so much power here, induce such prominent people to grace her home—or become Empress, if it came to that. Unthinkable in Bassania, of course. Utterly unthinkable.
The Strategos was smiling again, a man at ease, sure of his god—and of himself, Rustem thought. A righteous man. Leontes glanced across at the mosaicist and lifted his cup to him.
‘It is good advice, soldier,’ he said to Carullus, still kneeling before him. ‘You will know the pay difference between legate and chiliarch. You have a bride now, and should have strong children to raise soon enough, in Jad’s holy service and to honour his name.’
He hesitated. ‘If there is a campaign this year—and let me make it clear that the Emperor has offered no indications yet—it might be in the name of the poor, wronged queen of the Antae, which means Batiara, and I will not have a newly married man beside me there. The east is where I want you for now, soldier, so speak of this no more.’ The words were blunt, the manner almost paternal—though he wouldn’t be older than the soldier before him, Rustem thought. ‘Rise up, rise up, bring us your bride that we may salute her before we go.’
‘I can just see Styliane doing that,’ the Senator beside Rustem murmured under his breath.
‘Hush,’ said his wife, suddenly. ‘And look again.’
Rustem saw it too.
Someone had now come forward, past Styliane Daleina, though pausing gracefully beside her for an instant, so that Rustem was to carry a memory for a long time of the two of them next to each other, golden and golden.
‘Might the poor, wronged queen of the Antae have any voice at all in this? In whether war is brought to her own country in her name,’ said this new arrival. Her voice—speaking Sarantine but with a western accent— was clear as a bell, bright anger in it, and it cut into the room like a knife through silk.
The Strategos turned, clearly startled, swiftly concealing it. An instant later he bowed formally and his wife—smiling a little to herself, Rustem saw— sank down with perfect grace, and then the entire room did so.
The woman paused, waiting for this acknowledgement to pass. She hadn’t been at the wedding ceremony, must have just this moment arrived. She, too, was clad in white under a jewelled collar and stole. Her hair was gathered under a soft hat of a dark green shade and as she shed an identically hued cloak now for a servant to take, it could be seen that her long, floor-length garment had a single vertical stripe down one side, and it was porphyry, the colour of royalty everywhere in the world.
As the guests rose in a rustle of sound, Rustem saw that the mosaicist and the younger fellow from Batiara who’d saved Rustem’s life this morning remained where they were, kneeling on the dancer’s floor. The stocky young man looked up, and Rustem was startled to see tears on his face.
‘The Antae queen,’ said the Senator in his ear. ‘Hildric’s daughter.’ Confirmatory, but hardly needed: physicians draw conclusions from information gathered. They had spoken of this woman in Sarnica, too, her late-autumn flight from assassination, sailing into exile in Sarantium. A hostage for the Emperor, a cause of war if he needed one.
He heard the Senator speak to his son again. Cleander muttered something fierce and aggrieved behind him but made his way out of the room, obeying his father’s orders. The boy hardly seemed to matter just now. Rustem was staring at the Antae queen, alone and far from her home. She was poised, unexpectedly young, regal in her bearing as she surveyed a glittering crowd of Sarantines. But what the doctor in Rustem—the physician at the core of what he was—saw in the clear blue northern eyes across the room was the masked presence of something else.
‘Oh dear,’ he murmured, involuntarily, and then became aware that the wife of Plautus Bonosus was looking at him again.
A feast for fifty people was not, Kyros knew, particularly demanding for Strumosus, given that they often served four times that number in the Blues’ banquet hall. There was some awkwardness in using a different kitchen, but they’d been over here a few days earlier and Kyros—given larger responsibilities all the time—had done the inventory, allocated locations, and supervised the necessary rearrangements.
He’d somehow overlooked the absence of sea salt and knew Strumosus wouldn’t soon forget it. The master chef was not—to put it mildly—tolerant of mistakes. Kyros would have run back to their own compound to fetch it himself, but running was one thing he wasn’t at all good for, given the bad foot he dragged about with him. He’d been busy by then with the vegetables for his soup in any case, and the other kitchen boys and undercooks had their own duties. One of the houseservants had gone, instead— the pretty, dark-haired one the others were all talking about when she wasn’t nearby.
Kyros seldom engaged in that sort of banter. He kept his passions to himself. As it happened, for the last few days—since their first visit to this house—his own daydreams had been about the dancer who lived here. This might have been disloyal to his own faction, but there was no one among the Blue dancers who moved or sounded or looked like Shirin of the Greens. It made his heartbeat quicken to hear the ripple of her laughter from another room and sent his thoughts at night down corridors of desire.
But she did that for most of
