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stripped from them.
Crispin found that he was having trouble breathing. Very carefully, with
another glance at the couch, he shifted the paper a little and read on, in
disbelief.
She will have congress with these men, insatiably, sometimes two of them at
one time using her like a whore in her own bath while the other women fondle
themselves and each other and offer lewd, lascivious encouragement. A virtuous
girl from Eubulus, the official told me in great secrecy, was poisoned by the
Empress for daring to say that this conduct was impious. Her body has never
been found. The unspeakable whore who is now our Empress always has her holy
men detained outside the baths in the morning until after the soldiers have
been dismissed through a hidden inner door. She then greets the clerics,
half-naked, the reek of carnality about her, making a mockery of the morning
prayers to holy Jad.
Crispin swallowed hard. He felt a pulse throbbing in his temple. He looked
over at the sleeping man. Pertennius was snoring now. He looked ill and grey
and helpless. Crispin became aware that his hands were shaking. He released
the sheet of paper when it began to rattle in his grasp. He felt rage and fear
and-beneath them both like a sounding drum- a growing horror. He thought he
might be sick.
He ought to go, he knew. He needed to go from here. But there was a power to
this exquisitely phrased vituperation, this venom, that caused him-almost
without volition, as if he'd been rendered subject to a dark spell-to leaf to
another page.
When the Trakesian farmer who foully murdered to claim the throne for his
illiterate relative was finally seated there in his own right, though not his
own peasant name (for he abandoned that as a vain effort to abandon the dung
smell of the fields), he began to more openly practise his nighttime rites of
daemons and black spirits.
Ignoring the desperate words of his holy clerics, and ruthlessly destroying
those who would not be silent, Petrus of Trakesia, the
Night's Emperor, turned the seven palaces of the Imperial Precinct into unholy
places, full of savage rituals and blood at darkfall.
Then, in a vicious mockery of piety, he declared an intention to build a vast
new Sanctuary to the god. He commissioned evil, godless men--foreigners, many
of them-to design and decorate it, knowing they would never gainsay his own
black purposes. It was truly believed by many in the City in this time that
the Trakesian himself conducted rituals of human sacrifice in the unfinished
Sanctuary by night when none were allowed but his own licensed confederates.
The Empress, besmeared with the blood of innocent victims, would dance for
him, it was said, between candles lit in mockery of the holiness of Jad.
Then, naked, with the Emperor and others watching, the whore would take an
unlit candle from the altar, as she had done in her youth on the stage, and
she would lie down in sight of all and . . .
Crispin crammed the papers back together. It was enough. It was more than
enough. He did feel ill now. This unctuous, watchful, so-
discreet secretary of the Strategos, this official chronicler of the wars of
Valerius's reign and his building projects, with his honoured place in the
Imperial Precinct, had been spewing forth in this room the accumulated filth
and bile of hatred.
Crispin wondered if these words were ever meant to be read. And when?
Would people believe them? Could they shape, in years to come, an impression
of truth for those who had never actually known the people of whom these ugly
words were written? Was it possible?
It occurred to him that if he but walked from here with a randomly chosen
sheaf of these papers in his hand Pertennius of Eubulus would be disgraced,
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exiled.
Or, very possibly, executed. A death to Crispin's name. Even so, it stayed in
his mind to do it, standing there over the cluttered table,
breathing hard, imagining these pages as crimson-hued with their hatred,
listening to the sleeping man's snores and the snap of the fire and the faint,
distant sounds of the night city.
He remembered Valerius, that first night, standing under the stupendous dome
Artibasos had achieved. The intelligence and the courtesy of the Emperor as he
patiently watched Crispin come to terms with the surface he was being given [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]