Rustem was a physician, and had spent too much time in Ispahani to be shocked or startled by iron rings set into bedposts or the other, more delicate devices he found in the room they showed him to in the Senator's small, elegant guest-house near the triple walls.
This was, he concluded, a bedroom wherein Plautus Bonosus was evidently inclined to amuse himself away from the comfort-and the constraints-of his family.
It was hardly unusual: aristocrats all over the world did variants of the same thing if they lived in circumstances that allowed for some privacy. Kerakek had no such houses, of course. Everyone in a village knew what everyone else was doing, from the fortress on down.
Rustem placed the series of thin golden rings-designed, he had belatedly realized, to fit over the shafts of variously sized male sexual organs-back into their leather bag. He pulled the drawstrings closed and replaced the bag beside the silken scarves and lengths of thin cord and a number of more obscure objects in the brass-lined trunk from which he'd taken it. The trunk hadn't been locked, and the room was now his own, as a guest of the Senator. He'd felt no guilt about looking around while arranging his own belongings. He was a spy for the King of Kings. He needed to become skilful at this. Scruples would have to be expunged. Would Great Shirvan and his advisers be interested to learn of the night-time inclinations of the Master of the Sarantine Senate?
Rustem closed the trunk and glanced over at the subsiding fire. He could stoke it himself, of course, but he made a different decision. The objects he had just observed and held had induced unusual feelings, and an awareness of just how far away he was from his own wives. Despite the fatigue attendant upon a long and turbulent day-with a death at the outset-Rustem noted, with professional expertise, the signs of arousal within himself.
He went to the door, opened it, and called down for someone to build up the fire. It was a small house. He heard an immediate reply from below stairs. With some satisfaction he saw the young serving girl-Elita, she'd named herself earlier-enter the room, eyes deferentially lowered, a few moments afterwards. He'd thought it might be the rather officious steward, but that fellow was clearly above such duties and probably asleep already. The hour was late.
Rustem sat in the window seat and watched the woman attend to the flames and sweep the ashes. When she'd done and had risen to her feet, he said mildly,'I tend to be cold at night, girl. I should prefer you to stay."
She flushed, but made no demur. He'd known she wouldn't, not in a house of this sort. And he was an honoured guest.
She proved to be soft, agreeably warm, compliant if not truly adept. He preferred that, in a way. If he'd wanted extreme carnal experience he'd have inquired after an expensive prostitute. This was Sarantium. One could get anything here, word was. Anything in the world. He treated the girl kindly, letting her stay in the bed with him after. Her own was certainly going to be no more than a pallet in a cold room below, and they could hear the wind outside.
It did occur to him, as he felt his mind beginning to drift, that the servants might have been instructed to keep a watchful eye on this visiting Bassanid-which would explain the girl's acquiescence as easily as anything else. There was something amusing in that, and something disturbing, too. He was too tired to sort it through. He fell asleep. He dreamed of his daughter, the one he was losing as the King of Kings raised him to glory and the priestly caste.
The girl, Elita, was still with him some time later when the entire house was roused by an urgent pounding and a shouting at the door in the depths of the night.
Moving in a litter through darkness from the Imperial Precinct to her own city home, an unexpected escort riding beside her, Gisel decided, long before they arrived, what she intended to do.
She thought that she might in time be able to reclaim some pride in that fact: it would be her choice, her decision made. That didn't mean that anything she did would necessarily succeed. With so many other plans and schemes now in place-here and back home-the odds were overwhelmingly against her. They always had been, from the time her father died and the Antae had reluctantly crowned his only living child. But at least she could think, act, not bob like a small boat on the great wave of events.
She had known, for example, exactly what she was doing when she sent an angry, bitter artisan halfway across the world with a proposal of marriage to the Emperor of Sarantium. She remembered standing before that man, Caius Crispus, alone at night in her palace, letting him look- demanding that he gaze his fill of her.
You may tell the Emperor you have seen the queen of the Antae very near…
She flushed, remembering that. After what she'd encountered in the palace tonight, the measure of her innocence was clear. It was past time to lose some of that innocence. But she couldn't even really say what plan tonight's decision-with the unworthy thread of fear still in it-might further. She only knew she was going to do it.
She lifted the curtain a little, could see the horse still keeping pace beside her litter. She recognized a chapel door. They were nearing her house. Gisel took a deep breath, tried to be amused at her fear, this primitive anxiety.
It was simply a question, she told herself, of putting something new into play, something that came from her, to see what ripples it might create. In this tumble and rush of huge events, one used whatever came to hand or mind-as always-and she had decided to treat her own body as a piece in the game. In play.
Queens lacked, really, the luxury to think of themselves otherwise. In an elegant room in a palace tonight, the Emperor of Sarantium had taken away from her any lingering illusions about consultation, negotiation diplomacy, anything that might forestall for Batiara the iron-edged truth of war.
Seeing him in that exquisite small chamber with his Empress, seeing her, had also removed certain other illusions. In that astonishing room, with its fabrics and wall hangings and silver candlesticks, amid mahogany and sandalwood, and leather from Soriyya, and incense, with a golden sun disk on the wall above each door and a golden tree wherein sat a score of jewelled birds, Gisel had felt as if the souls in the room were at the very centre of the spinning world. Here was the heart of things. Sudden, violent images of the future had seemed to dance and whirl in the fire-lit air, hurtling past at a dizzying speed along the walls while the room itself remained, somehow, motionless as those birds on the golden branches of the Emperor's tree.
Valerius was going to war in Batiara.
It had been resolved in his mind long ago, Gisel finally understood. He was a man who made his own decisions, and his gaze was on generations yet to be born as much as on those he ruled today. She had met him now, she could see it.
She herself, her presence here, might be of assistance or might not. A tactical tool. It didn't matter, not in the larger scheme. Neither did anyone else's views. Not the Strategos's, the Chancellor's, not even Alixana's.
The Emperor of Sarantium, contemplative and courteous and very sure of himself, had a vision: of Rhodias reclaimed, the sundered Empire remade. Visions on this scale could be dangerous; such ambition carried all before it sometimes. He wants to leave a name, Gisel had thought, kneeling before him to hide her face, and then rising again, her composure intact. He wants to be remembered for this.
Men were like that. Even the wise ones. Her father no exception. A dread of dying and being forgotten. Lost to the memory of the world as it went mercilessly on without them. Gisel searched within herself and found no such burning need. She didn't want to be hated or scorned when Jad called her to him behind the sun, but she felt no fierce passion to have her name sung down the echoing years or have her face and form reserved in mosaic or marble forever-or for however long stone and glass could endure.