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servants the Chancellor's eunuchs had assigned to him, and there had been
questions in her eyes that made him deeply uneasy. And then one night Carullus
had found him drinking in The
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Spina and announced he was going to marry her.
A declaration that had brought them all here now, a gathering winding towards
its twilit end and the bawdy, age-old songs that would precede the curtained
wedding bed, sprinkled with saffron for desire.
He looked over towards Shirin again, by the far wall. Someone else had joined
Pertennius now, he saw, grinning. Another smitten suitor, one had to assume.
They were legion in the City. You could make up a regiment of those who longed
for the Greens' dancer with an aching need that led to bad verse, musicians on
her porch in the middle of the night, street fights, tablets of love bought
from cheiromancers and tossed over the wall into her courtyard garden. She had
shown some of these to Crispin: Spirits of the newly dead, journeyers, come
now to my aid! Send sleep-destroying, soul-ravaging longing into the bed of
Shirin, dancer of the Greens, that all her thoughts in the dark be of yearning
for me. Let her come forth from her doors in the grey hour before sunrise and
make her way boldly, unashamed, with desire, to my house . . .
One could be afraid and disturbed, reading such things.
Crispin had never touched her, nor had she made overtures to him that went
beyond teasing intimations. He couldn't have said why, in fact:
they were bound to no one and shared a secret of the half-world with no other
people alive. But there was still something that kept him from seeing
Zoticus's daughter in a certain light.
It might have been the bird, the memory of her father, the dark complexity of
what they shared. Or the thought of how weary she must be of men pursuing her:
the crowds of would-be lovers in the street, those stone tablets in the garden
invoking named and nameless pagan powers, merely to bed her.
Not, Crispin had to admit, that he was above being amused just now, seeing her
cornered by suitors in her own house. A third man had joined the other two. He
wondered if a fight would start.
'She says she will kill you immediately after she kills these two merchants
and the wretched scribe,' said the bird. 'She says for me to scream in your
head when I say this.'
'My dear, dear Rhodian!' said a polished, rich voice at that same moment,
approaching from the other side. 'I understand you intervened earlier to save
this visitor to our city from harm. It was very good of you.'
Crispin turned, saw the Master of the Senate with with his wife, the
Bassanid beside them. Plautus Bonosus was well known, both for his private
weaknesses and his public dignity. The Senate was a purely symbolic body but
Bonosus was said to conduct its affairs with style and order, and he was known
for a man of discretion. His handsome second wife was impeccably proper, still
young, but modest and dignified before her time. It crossed Crispin's mind
briefly to wonder what-if anything- she did co salve herself while her husband
was out at night with boys. He couldn't readily imagine her yielding
to passions. She smiled politely now at the two chariot-racers nearby, in the
midst of their admirers. Both of them bowed to her and to the Senator. A
little distracted, Scortius took a moment to resume the thread of his
argument.
Crispin saw Pardos detach himself from those around the charioteers and come
nearer. There had been changes here in half a year, but these he would sort
through when he had time alone with his former apprentice. He did know that
his feelings when he'd seen that it was
Pardos on the ladder this morning had been those of unalloyed pleasure.
It was rare to find or feel anything unalloyed here amid the mazelike
intricacies of Valerius's city. A reason he still preferred to try to live on
his scaffolds overhead, with gold and coloured glass and an image of the world
to make. A wish, but he knew the City and himself well enough by now to
realize it wouldn't happen. Sarantium was not a place in which one found
refuge, even in pursuit of a vision. The world claimed you here, caught you up
in the swirling. As now.
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