This was one of the hard things Crispin had learned on his journey, leaving home in bitterness and arriving in another state he could not yet define. Seeing was indeed at the heart of this craft of light and colour- it had to be-but it was not all. One had to look, but also to have a desire, a need, a vision at the base of that seeing. If he was ever to achieve anything even approaching the unforgettable image of Jad he'd seen in that small chapel on the road, he would have to find within himself a depth of feeling that came-somehow-near to what had been felt by the unknown, fervently pious men who had rendered the god there.
He would never have their pure, unwavering certainty, but it seemed to him that something that might be equal to it was within him now, miraculously. He had come out from behind city walls in the fading west, carrying three dead souls in his walled heart and a birdsoul about his neck, and had journeyed to greater walls here in the east. From a city to the City, passing through wilderness and mist and into a wood that terrified- that could not but terrify-and out alive. Granted life, or-more truly, perhaps-with his life and Vargos's and Kasia's bought by Linon's soul left there on the grass at her own command.
He had seen a creature in the Aldwood he would have in him all his days. Just as Ilandra would be with him, and the heartbreak of his girls. You moved through time and things were left behind and yet stayed with you. The nature of how men lived. He had thought to avoid that, to hide from it, after they'd died. It could not be done.
"You do not honour them by living as if you, too, have died," Martinian had said to him, eliciting an anger near to rage. Crispin felt a deep rush of affection for his distant friend. Just now, high above the chaos of Sarantium, it seemed as if there were so many things he wanted to honour or exalt-or take to task, if it came to that, for there was no need for, no justice in, children dying of plague, or young girls being cut into pieces in the forest, or sold in grief for winter grain.
If this was the world as the god-or gods-had made it, then mortal man, this mortal man, could acknowledge that and honour the power and infinite majesty that lay within it, but he would not say it was right, or bow down as if he were only dust or a brittle leaf blown from an autumn tree, helpless in the wind.
He might be, all men and women might be as helpless as that leaf, but he would not admit it, and he would do something here on the dome that said-or aspired to say-these things, and more.
He had journeyed here to do this. Had done his sailing and was still sailing, perhaps, and would put into the mosaics of this Sanctuary as much of the living journey and what lay within it and behind it as his craft and desire could encompass.
He would even have-though he knew they might maim or blind him for it-Heladikos here. Even if only veiled, hinted at, in a sunset shaft of light and an absence. Someone looking up, someone tuned to images in a certain way, could place Jad's son himself where the design demanded he be, falling into the fallen west, a torch in his hand. The torch would be there, a spear of light from the low sunset clouds shooting up into the sky, or from heaven descending to earth where mortals dwelled.
He would have Ilandra here, and the girls, his mother, faces of his life, for there was room to place such images and they belonged, they were part of the sailing, his own and all men's journey. The figures of men's lives were the essence of those lives. What you found, loved, left behind, had taken away from you.
His Jad would be the bearded eastern god of that chapel in Sauradia, but the pagan zubir would be here on the dome, an animal hidden among the other animals he would render. And yet not quite so: only this one would be done in black and white stone, after the old Rhodian fashion of the first mosaics. And Crispin knew-if those approving his charcoal drawing could not-how that image of a Sauradiari bison would show amid all the colours he was using here. And Linon, shining jewels for her eyes, would lie in the grass nearby-and let men wonder at it. Let them call the zubir a bull if they would, let them puzzle at a bird on the grass. Wonder and mystery were a part of faith, were they not? He would say that, if asked.
On the scaffold, he stood alone and apart, eyes to the brickwork, running his hands across and across like someone blind-and aware of that irony, as ever when he did this-gesturing below at intervals for the apprentices to wheel the scaffold for him. It swayed when it moved, he had to grip the railing, but he had spent much of his working life on platforms such as this and had no fear of the height. It was a refuge, in fact. High above the world, above the living and the dying, the intrigues of courts and men and women, of nations and tribes and factions and the human heart trapped in time and yearning for more than it was allowed, Crispin strove not to be drawn back down into the confusing fury of those things, desiring now to live-as Martinian had urged him-but away from the blurring strife, to achieve this vision of a world on a dome. All else was transitory, ephemeral. He was a mosaicist, as he had told people and told people, and this distanced elevation was his haven and his source and destination, all in one. And with fortune and the god's blessing he might do something here that could last, and leave a name.
So he thought, was thinking, in the moment he glanced down from so far above the world to check if the apprentices had locked the scaffold wheels again, and saw a woman come through the silver doors into the sanctuary.
She moved forward, walking over the gleaming marble stones, graceful, even as seen from so high, and she stopped under the dome and looked up.
She looked up for him and, without a word spoken or a gesture made, Crispin felt a tugging back of the world as something fierce and physical, imperative, commanding, making a mockery of illusions of remote asceticism. He was not made to live his life like a holy man in an untouchable place. Best he acknowledge it now. Perfection, he had just been thinking, was not attainable by men. Imperfections could be turned into strengths. Perhaps.
Standing on the scaffold, he laid both hands flat for a moment more against the cold bricks of the dome and closed his eyes. It was extremely quiet this high up, serene, solitary. A world to himself, a creation to enact. It ought to have been enough. Why was it not? He let his hands fall to his sides. Then he shrugged-a gesture his mother knew, and his friends, and his dead wife-and motioning for those below to hold the platform steady, he began the long climb down.
He was in the world, neither above it nor walled off from it any more. If he had sailed to anything, it was to that truth. He would do this work or would fail in it as a man living in his time, among friends, enemies, perhaps lovers, and perhaps with love, in Varena under the Antae or here in Sarantium, City of Cities, eye of the world, in the reign of the great and glorious, thrice-exalted Emperor Valerius II, Jad's Regent upon earth, and the Empress Alixana.
It was a long, slow descent, hand and foot, the familiar movements, over and again. Out of careful habit he emptied his mind as he came down: men died if they were careless here, and this dome was higher than any he had known. He felt the pull, though, even as he moved: the world drawing him back down to itself.
He reached the wooden base of the rolling platform, set on wheels upon the marble floor. He swung around and stood on the base a moment, that little distance yet above the ground. Then he nodded his head to the woman standing there, who had neither spoken nor gestured but who had come here and had claimed him for them all. He wondered if, somehow, she had known she was doing that. She might have. It would sort with what he knew about her, already.