You didn’t ask my permission and you don’t fucking deserve her, you military lout.’
He was grinning widely by then, and he reached a hand across the table and gripped the other man’s shoulder hard.
‘Of course I deserve her,’ Carullus said. ‘I’m a man with a brilliant future.’ But he, too, had been smiling, with unconcealed pleasure.
The woman in question was of the northern Inicii, sold by her mother into slavery a little more than a year before, rescued from that—and a pagan death—by Crispin on the road. She was too thin and too intelligent, and too strong-willed, though uneasy in the City. On the occasion of their first encounter she had spat in the face of the soldier who was now grinning with delight as he announced that she’d agreed to marry him.
Both men, in fact, knew what she was worth.
And so, on a bright, windy day at the beginning of spring, a number of people were preparing themselves to proceed to the home of the principal female dancer of the Green faction where a wedding was to commence with the usual procession to the chosen chapel and then be celebrated with festivity afterwards.
Neither bride nor groom was in any way from a good family—though the soldier showed signs of possibly becoming an important person—but Shirin of the Greens had a glittering circle of acquaintances and admirers and had chosen to make this wedding the excuse for an elaborate affair. She’d had a very good winter season in the theatre.
In addition, the groom’s close friend (and evidently the bride’s, it was whispered by some, with a meaningful arch of eyebrows) was the new Imperial Mosaicist, the Rhodian who was executing the elaborate decorations in the Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom—a fellow perhaps worthy of cultivation. There were rumours that other significant personages might attend—if not the actual ceremony, then the celebration in Shirin’s home afterwards.
It had also been widely reported that the food was being prepared in the dancer’s kitchen by the Master Chef of the Blue faction. There were those in the City who would follow Strumosus into the desert if he took his pots and pans and sauces.
It was a curious, in many ways a unique event, this celebration orchestrated by Greens and Blues together. And all for a middle-ranking soldier and a yellow-haired barbarian girl from Sauradia just arrived in the city with a completely unknown background. She was pretty enough, it was reported by those who’d seen her with Shirin, but not in the usual way of those girls who made a surprising marriage for themselves. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she was wedding a really significant fellow, was it?
Then another rumour started that Pappio, the increasingly well-known Director of the Imperial Glassworks, had personally made a bowl commissioned as a gift for the happy couple. It seemed he hadn’t done any actual crafts-manship himself for years and years. No one could understand that, either. Sarantium was talking. With the chariot races not beginning again for some few days, the event was well timed: the City liked having things to talk about.
‘I’M NOT HAPPY,’ said a small, nondescript artificial bird in an inward, patrician voice heard only by the hostess of the day’s affair. The woman was staring critically at her own image in a round, silver-edged mirror held up by a servant.
‘Oh, Danis, neither am I!’ Shirin murmured in silent reply. ‘Every woman from the Precinct and the theatre will be dressed and adorned to dazzle and I look like I haven’t slept in days.’
‘That isn’t what I meant.’
‘Of course it isn’t. You never think of the important things. Tell me, do you think he’ll notice me?’
The bird’s tone became waspish. ‘Which one? The chariot-racer or the mosaicist?’
Shirin laughed aloud, startling her attendant. ‘Either of them,’ she said inwardly. Then her smile became wicked. ‘Or perhaps both, tonight? Wouldn’t that be something to remember?’
‘Shirin!’ The bird sounded genuinely shocked.
‘I’m teasing, silly. You know me better than that. Now tell me, why aren’t you happy? This is a wedding day, and it’s a love match. No one made this union, they chose each other.’ Her tone was surprisingly kind now, tolerant.
‘I just think something’s going to happen.’
The dark-haired woman in front of the small mirror, who did not, in fact, look at all as if she needed sleep or anything else beyond extremes of admiration, nodded her head, and the servant, smiling, set down the mirror and reached for a bottle that contained a perfume of very particular distinctiveness. The bird lay on the tabletop nearby.
‘Danis, really, what sort of party would this be if something didn’t happen?’
The bird said nothing.
There was a sound at the doorway. Shirin turned to look over her shoulder.
A small, rotund, fierce-looking man stood there, clad in a blue tunic and a very large bib-like covering tied at his neck and around his considerable girth. There were a variety of foodstains on the bib and a streak of what was probably saffron on his forehead. He possessed a wooden spoon, a heavy knife stuck into the tied belt of the bib, and an aggrieved expression.
‘Strumosus!’ said the dancer happily.
‘There is no sea salt,’ said the chef in a voice that suggested the absence amounted to a heresy equivalent to banned Heladikian beliefs or arrant paganism.
‘No salt? Really?’ said the dancer, rising gracefully from her seat.
‘No sea salt!’ the chef repeated. ‘How can a civilized household lack sea salt?’
‘A dreadful omission,’ Shirin agreed with a placating gesture. ‘I feel simply terrible.’
‘I request permission to make use of your servants and send one back to the Blues compound immediately. I need my undercooks to remain here. Are you aware of how little time we have?’
‘You may use my servants in any way you see fit today,’ Shirin said, ‘short of broiling them.’
The chef’s expression conveyed the suggestion that matters might come to that pass.
‘This is a completely odious man,’ the bird said silently. ‘At least I might assume you don’t desire this one.’
Shirin gave a silent laugh. ‘He is a genius, Danis. Everyone says so. Genius needs to be indulged. Now, be happy and tell me I look beautiful.’
There was another sound in the hallway beyond Strumosus. The chef turned, and then lowered his wooden spoon. His expression changed, grew very nearly benign. One might even have exaggerated slightly and said that he smiled. He stepped farther into the room and out of the way as a pale, fair-haired woman appeared hesitantly in the doorway.
Shirin did smile, and laid a hand to her cheek. ‘Oh, Kasia,’ she said. ‘You look beautiful.’
Chapter III
Earlier that same morning, very early in fact, the Emperor Valerius II of Sarantium, nephew to an Emperor, son of a grain farmer from Trakesia, could have been seen intoning the last of the antiphonal responses to the sunrise invocation in the Imperial Chapel of the Traversite Palace where he and the Empress had their private rooms.
The Emperor’s service is one of the first in the City, beginning in darkness, ending with the rising of the reborn sun at dawn when the chapel and sanctuary bells elsewhere in Sarantium are just beginning to toll. The Empress is not with him at this hour. The Empress is asleep. The Empress has her own cleric attached to her own suite of rooms, a man known for a relaxed attitude to the hour of morning prayer and equally lenient, if less well-publicized, views regarding the heresies of Heladikos, the mortal (or half-mortal, or divine) son of Jad. These things are not spoken of in the Imperial Precinct, of course. Or, they are not spoken