The Sarantine Mosaic Read Online Free PDF Page A

turned towards him, dark eyes wide. She has been on the stage since she was seven years old. She holds the pose a moment, then laughs.
    The soft-featured man, clad only in a dove-grey tunic with no undergarments in the aftermath of lovemaking, shakes his head. His own sand-coloured hair is thinning a little but not yet grey. ‘Our beloved Emperor is dead, no heir in sight, Sarantium in mortal peril, and you idly torment a grieving and troubled man.’
    â€˜May I come and do it some more?’ she asks.
    She sees him actually hesitate. That surprises and even excites her, in truth: a measure of his need of her, that even on this morning …
    But in that instant there comes a sequence of sounds from the street below. A lock turning, a heavy door opening and closing, hurried voices, too loud, and then another, flat with command. The man by the beaded curtain turns quickly and looks out again.
    The woman pauses then, weighing many things at this moment in her life. But the real decision, in truth, has been made some time ago. She trusts him, and herself, amazingly. She drapes her body—a kind of defending—in the bed linen before saying to his nowintent profile, from which the customary genial expression has entirely gone, ‘ What is he wearing? ’
    He ought not to have been, the man will decide much later, nearly so surprised by the question and what she—very deliberately—revealed with it. Her attraction for him, from the beginning, has resided at least as much in wit and perception as in her beauty and the gifts thatdrew Sarantines to the theatre every night she performed, alternately aroused and then driven to shouts of laughter and applause.
    He is astonished, though, and surprise is rare for him. He is not a man accustomed to allowing things to disconcert him. This happens to be one matter he has not confided in her, however. And, as it turns out, what the silver-haired man in the still-shaded street has elected to wear as he steps from his home into the view of the world, on a morning fraught with magnitude, matters very much.
    Petrus looks back at the woman. Even now he turns away from the street to her, and both of them will remember that, after. He sees that she’s covered herself, that she is a little bit afraid, though would surely deny it. Very little escapes him. He is moved, both by the implications of her voicing the question and by the presence of her fear.
    â€˜You knew?’ he asks quietly.
    â€˜You were extremely specific about this apartment,’ she murmurs, ‘the requirement of a solarium over this particular street. It was not hard to note which doorways could be watched from here. And the theatre or the Blues’ banqueting hall are sources of information on Imperial manoeuvrings as much as the palaces or the barracks are. What is he wearing, Petrus? ’
    She has a habit of lowering her voice for emphasis, not raising it: training on the stage. It is very effective. Many things about her are. He looks out again, and down, through the screening curtain at the cluster of men before the one doorway that matters.
    â€˜White,’ he says, and pauses before adding softly, no more than a breath of his own, ‘bordered, shoulder to knee, with purple.’
    â€˜Ah,’ she says. And rises then, bringing the bedsheet to cover herself as she walks towards him, trailing itbehind her.
    She is not tall but moves as if she were. ‘He wears porphyry. This morning. And so?’
    â€˜And so,’ he echoes. But not as a question. Reaching through the beads of the curtain with one hand, he makes a brief, utterly unexceptionable sign of the sun disk for the benefit of the men who have been waiting in the street-level apartment across the way for a long time now. He waits only to see the sign returned from a small, iron-barred guard’s portal and then he rises to cross towards the small, quite magnificent woman in the space between room and