Chapter forty-three

Visnea to Ortia

 

The Emperor was proud of his boast that now he could send a letter from Visnea to Ortia in just over two days. He could, of course, send messages by mail paper, but that would only make economic sense if orders needed to be acted on immediately and they seldom did.  It was cheaper to put a messenger on a fast horse and send him along the long straight road to the eastern capital. There were now changing posts all the way along the route, where an old horse could be left and a new one acquired.

The messenger was off on the road as early as possible the next day after the Emperor’s meeting with Senator Antonius. He rode off alone, as the way was now as safe as any in the civilised world. In any case, this was a brave and resourceful rider, too swift to be caught, on the army’s fastest and most agile horses. He carried an important message.

The long hours of June daylight allowed the rider to make excellent progress from post to post during the day, always choosing the fastest horse; and now there were small military encampments allowing him to rest that night in reasonable comfort. He spoke to hardly anyone, however, and the few that saw him couldn’t help but notice that he seemed to have some skin condition. Every now and then it made him lift his hand up to his face as if to scratch it. Every time, though, he forcibly stopped himself. Anyway, before they knew it he was gone again in the glow of the earliest morning.

He arrived outside the white city at daybreak on the third day, long before the day guards had taken up their positions.  The night watchman at the western gate welcomed him in with a yawn – visitors from West Visneoria had become quite commonplace and so he gave it almost no thought. He directed the messenger to the General’s headquarters and then happily went back to complete the rest of his shift.

The messenger passed on the detailed message cum orders from the Emperor to the Dictator of Ortia and then retired to rest in the officer’s barracks.

 

***

He slept for four or so hours and then got up to continue his mission. He had one more job to do before he could leave Ortia; he needed to talk to the high priestess.  She wasn’t expecting him but he was sure that she would talk to him.

The messenger found his way to the network of streams and ponds that made up the edges of the temple complex. He found a small pond near the main temple building and knelt by it, gratefully lowering his face in the water. He rubbed off the mage-elixir disguise, which had been burning his face for two days, and lifted his head up into the fresh bright air.

‘My lord’ said Aquilegia, who had sensed his presence at the moment he had entered the city. She had been waiting for him.

Pallatian stood up and smiled at her, the front of his hair dripping. He neither bowed nor nodded to her, but then neither did she to him.

They stood in silence for a while, neither friends nor enemies, just the separate embodiments of ancient establishments whose paths were temporarily entangled.

‘The Lady is concerned’ said Aquilegia

‘I know’ said the Emperor, ‘that is why I am here’

Aquilegia nodded.  Pallatian continued.

‘I need some explanations of her behaviour – it has caused me considerable trouble’

This fact seemed of little interest to the High Priestess.

‘You know what is required by you?’

‘Yes, I do – but I cannot see why? What is so important about Citizen Marthian?’

‘She may save us all’

Pallatian tried to grasp how this might be so – Marthian was just a young elf-wife[1]; capable, clearly, but not strikingly so. He began to wonder if this was something to do with gender. This was a difficulty for him as he had spent his whole life surrounded by males, most of whom were secure in their sense of superiority. The empire permitted their citizens, of either sex, to try almost anything, but most leaders were male and built from ancestry and money.

 ‘How do you know that she will save us?’  

‘I do not – only the Lady knows these things’

Pallatian waited for something a little more helpful.

‘Do you seek an audience with her?’

‘Is it safe?’ he asked, wishing immediately that he hadn’t.

‘Yes, unless you are wilful enough to anger her, my lord’

Pallatian seemed very small standing close to the presence of the Lady. He imagined the wrath of a god as an unbearable, uncontrollable, energy, and realised that despite his temporal powers, he had no defence against it. However, he was Emperor of all the Visneorians and that would surely be enough.

‘I will endeavour not to be wilful, High Priestess’ he replied and then he surprised himself by saying, ‘although some have said that I am’. He was finding the atmosphere of the temple strangely enervating.

Aquilegia nodded distractedly – she took his comments to be an agreement.  ‘Follow me, then’ she said, and they entered the temple.

She ushered him through the corridors and rooms to where the Lady dwelt; the lake that contained her, or perhaps was her, it was hard to tell. The lake was flat and calm, but it was hard to look into it – its colours shifted continuously. The Emperor looked up – expecting to see a glass roof of some kind, but there was nothing, just a few white clouds in the sunny sky. He knew this couldn’t really be literally true – he had looked down from the city walls on to the complex, and there was no opening in the roof at all. It seemed this was a spiritual truth.

Without warning Aquilegia embraced him and dropped with him into the water.  He noticed, with interest and without any fear, that the water was not wet or cold. Then he lost all sense of the present.

The Lady gave him a vision of the net that is the future and the river that is the past. She guided him through the reticulating tomorrows – and so many of them had a dusty plain where Ortia had been, and beyond that there was fire and death and the end; and somehow at the end of every evil way there was a vision of a green snake burning; and despite his power and knowledge he had no idea what any of it meant. Hard as he tried, however, he could discover no details of his own life or of those dear to him, as the Lady hid all of those things from him. All he saw was the broad outlines of future worlds, an in all the better ones Marthian was Ortia’s proconsul.  The Lady allowed him just long enough with her to reveal this version of the truth and then she let him go.

Aquilegia pulled him out of lake and dropped him from her embrace. He found himself gasping for air even though now he was on dry land.  He said nothing more to the High Priestess – he was too immersed in his own thoughts. She led him out of the temple and then left him by the little ornamental pond where she had found him. He hastily reapplied his mage-elixir mask. It was time to go.

He recovered his horse, and slipped out of the northern gate. No-one cared where he was going; to the few that asked he said that he was delivering a message to Amansk.  Where exactly he planned to ride to he hadn’t in fact quite decided. That’s the problem with the future, even when you’ve been shown its general shape: it’s like a tangled ball of string –no-one knows from which knot to start unravelling it.

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[1] Used in the Old Ethian sense of elf female, as in midwife.  In Visneorian it would be rendered as femina