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Pardos continued upward without answering.
Above him, he felt the platform shift as Crispin came to the edge and looked
down.
'Who are you?' Another silence, followed by: 'Pardos? Pardos?'
Pardos didn't speak, kept climbing. His heart was full. He reached the top and
stepped over the low rail and onto the platform under the mosaic stars of a
dark blue mosaic sky.
To be enveloped in a hard embrace that almost toppled them both.
'Curse you, Pardos! What took you so long? I've needed you here! They
wrote that you left in the fucking autumn! Half a year ago! Do you know how
late you are?'
Ignoring for the moment the fact that Crispin, on departing, had explicitly
refused accompaniment, Pardos disengaged.
'Do you know how late you are?' he asked.
'Me? What?'
'Wedding,' said Pardos happily, and watched.
It gave him even greater pleasure, later, to recollect the appalled dawning of
awareness on Crispin's unexpectedly smooth-shaven features.
'Ah! Ah! Holy Jad! They'll kill me! I'm a dead man! If Carullus doesn't,
bloody Shirin will! Why didn't one of those imbeciles down there tell me?'
Without delaying for the extremely obvious answer, Crispin rushed past Pardos,
vaulted recklessly over the railing and began hurtling down the ladder,
sliding more than stepping, the way the apprentices did when they raced each
other. Before following, Pardos glanced over at where Crispin had been
working. He saw a bison in an autumn forest, huge, done in black, edged and
outlined in white. It would be very strong, that way, against the brilliant
colours of the leaves around it, a dominant image. That had to be deliberate.
Crispin had taken the apprentices once to see a floor mosaic at an estate
south of Varena, where black and white had been used against colour in this
way. Pardos went back down, feeling suddenly thoughtful.
Crispin was waiting at the bottom, grimacing, dancing from foot to foot in his
impatience. 'Hurry, you idiot! We're so late it kills me.
It will kill me! Come on! Why did you take so poxed long to get here?'
Pardos stepped deliberately down off the ladder. 'I stopped in
Sauradia,' he said. 'A chapel by the road there. They said you'd been there
too, earlier.'
Crispin's expression changed, very quickly. He looked intently at
Pardos. 'I was,' he said after a pause. 'I was there. I told them that they
had to ... Were you ... Pardos, were you restoring it?'
Pardos nodded slowly. 'As much as I felt I could, on my own.'
Crispin's expression changed again, warming him, sunlight on a raw morning.
'I'm pleased,' his teacher said. 'I'm very pleased. We'll speak of this.
Meanwhile, come, we'll have to run.'
'I've been running. Through the whole of Sarantium, it feels like.
There are a group of young men outside, rich enough not to care about the law,
who are trying to kill me and this Bassanid doctor.' He gestured at the
physician, who had approached with the artisan brothers. The twins' faces were
a paired study in confusion. 'They killed his manservant,' Pardos said. "We
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can't just walk outside.'
'And my man's body will be thrown into the street by certain of your most
pious clerics if he is not claimed by midday.' The doctor spoke excellent
Sarantine, better than Pardos's. He was still angry.
'Where is he?' Crispin said. 'Sosio and Silano can get him.'
'I have no idea of the name of-'
'Chapel of Blessed Ingacia,' Pardos said quickly. 'Near the port.'
'What?' said the twin named Sosio.
'What were you doing there? said his brother in the same breath.
'It's a terrible place! Thieves and whores.'
'How do you know so much about it?' Crispin asked wryly, then appeared to
recollect his urgency.
'Get two of the Imperial Guard to go with you. Carullus's men will all be at
the accursed wedding by now. Tell them it is for me, and why. And you two,' he
turned to Pardos and the doctor. 'Come on!
You'll stay with me for the morning, I have guards.' Crispin snapping orders
was something Pardos remembered. His moods had always changed like this.
'We'll go out a side door and we have to move! You'll need something white to
wear, this is a wedding! Idiots!' He hurried off;
they followed quickly, having little choice.
Which is how the mosaicist Pardos of Varena and the physician Kustem [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]