Free Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay Page A

Batiara held their wretched little court—was three days’ ride farther west, two if he hurried. He had not the least interest in hurrying. Tilliticus waited out the rain, drinking morosely by the harbour. His injuries allowed him to do that, he decided. This had been a
very
difficult run. His shoulder still hurt.
    And he had
liked
that girl in Trakesia.

    In the good weather Pardos was outside at the oven making quicklime for the setting bed. The heat of the fire was pleasant when the wind picked up, and he liked being in the sanctuary yard. The presence of the dead under their headstones didn’t frighten him, or not in daylight at any rate. Jad had ordained that man would die. War and plague were part of the world the god had made. Pardos didn’t understand why, but he had no expectation of understanding. The clerics, even when they disagreed about doctrine or burned each other over Heladikos, all taught submission and faith, not a vainglorious attempt to comprehend. Pardos knew he wasn’t wise enough to be vain or to comprehend.
    Beyond the graven, sculpted headstones of the named dead, a dark earth mound rose—no grass there yet—at the northern end of the yard. Beneath it lay bodies claimed by the plague. It had come two years ago and then again last summer, killing in numbers too great for anything but mass burial by slaves taken in war. There was lime ash in there, too, and some other elements mixed in.They were said to help contain the bitter spirits of the dead and what had killed them. It was certainly keeping the grass from coming back. The queen had ordered three court cheiromancers and an old alchemist who lived outside the walls to cast binding spells as well. One did all the things one could think to do in the aftermath of plague, whatever the clerics or the High Patriarch might say about pagan magics.
    Pardos fumbled for his sun disk and gave thanks for being alive. He watched the black smoke of the lime kiln rise up towards the white, swift clouds, and noted the autumn reds and golds of the forest to the east. Birds were singing in the blue sky and the grass was green, though shading to brown near the sanctuary building itself where the afternoon light failed in the shadow of the new walls.
    Colours, all around him in the world. Crispin had told him, over and over, to make himself
see
the colours. To think about them, how they played against each other and with each other; to consider what happened when a cloud crossed the sun—as now—and the grass darkened beneath him. What would he name that hue in his mind? How would he use it? In a marinescape? A hunting scene? A mosaic of Heladikos rising above an autumn forest towards the sun?
Look
at the grass—now!—before the light returned. Picture that colour in glass and stone tesserae. Embed it in memory, so you could embed it in lime and make a mosaic world on a wall or a dome.
    Assuming, of course, there ever emerged a glassworks again in conquered Batiara where they made reds and blues and greens worthy of a name, instead of the muddied, bubbled, streaked excrescences they’d received in the morning shipment from Rhodias.
    Martinian, a calm man and perhaps prepared for this, had only sighed when the urgently awaited sheets of new glass were unwrapped. Crispin had foamed into one ofhis notorious, blasphemous rages and smashed the topmost dirty brown sheet of what was supposed to be red, cutting one hand. ‘
This
is red! Not that dungheap colour!’ he had shouted, letting drops of his blood fall on the brownish sheet.
    He could be entertaining in his fury, actually, unless you happened to be the one who had given him cause to lose his temper. When they had their beer and crusts of bread at lunch, or walking back towards Varena’s walls at sunset after work, the labourers and apprentices would trade stories of things Crispin had said and done when angry. Martinian had told the apprentices that Crispin was brilliant and a great man; Pardos wondered