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Avtokrator, his wife, and the Sevastos, though, carried them in as much
comfort as was to be found in the cramped confines of a war galley.
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Maniakes knocked at the door to the cabin his cousin was using. When Rhegorios
opened it, Maniakes said, "I didn't expect you to be on board ahead of me and
Lysia both."
"Well, life is full of surprises, isn't it, cousin your Majesty brother-in-law
of mine?" Rhegorios said, stringing together with reckless abandon the titles
by which he might address Maniakes. He had a habit of doing that, not least
because it sometimes flustered Maniakes, which amused Rhegorios no end.
Today, though, the Avtokrator refused to rise to the bait. He said, "Lysia and
I
have our own reasons for wanting to be out of Videssos the city, but you're
popular
here. I'd think you'd want to stay as long as you could."
"Any fool with a big smile can be popular," Rhegorios said with an airy wave
of his hand. "It's easy."
"I haven't found it so," Maniakes answered bitterly.
"Ah, but you're not a fool," Rhegorios said. "That makes it harder. When a
fool goes wrong, people forgive him; he isn't doing anything they didn't
expect. But if a man with a reputation for knowing what he's doing goes
astray, they're on him like a pack of wolves, because he's let them down."
Lysia boarded the
Renewal then, which should have distracted Maniakes but didn't. A great many
people in Videssos the city reckoned he had gone wrong by falling in love with
his cousin. The feeling would have been less powerful had it been more
rational. Getting away from the capital, getting away from the priests who
still resented the dispensation he'd haggled out of Agathios, was nothing but
a relief.
Thrax shouted orders. Longshoremen ran out to cast off lines. Sailors nimbly
coiled the ropes in snaky spirals. They stowed the gangplank behind the
cabins;
Maniakes felt the thud through the soles of his feet when it crashed down onto
the deck planking.
A drum began to thud, setting the pace for the rowers. "Back oars!" the
oarmaster shouted. The oars dug into the water. Little by little, the
Renewal slid away from the wharf. Maniakes inhaled deeply, then let out a
long, glad sigh. Wherever he went, and into whatever sort of battle, he would
be happier than he was here.
Coming into Lyssaion was like entering another world. Here in the far
southwest of the Videssian westlands, the calendar might still have said early
spring, but by all other signs it was summer outside. The sun pounded down out
of the sky with almost the relentless authority it held in the Land of the
Thousand Cities. Only the Sailors'
Sea kept the weather hot rather than intolerable.
But even the sea here was different from the way it looked in Videssos the
city.
Back by the capital, the seawater was green. Off Kalavria, in the distant
east, it was nearer gray. You could ride out from Kastavala over to the
eastern shore, and look across an endless expanse of gray, gray ocean toward
the end of the world, or whatever lay beyond vision. No ship had ever come out
of the east to Kalavria. Over the years, a few ships had sailed east from the
island. None of them had come back, either. Here, now... here the water was
blue. It was not the blue of the sky, the blue enamel-makers kept trying and
failing to imitate in glass paste. The blue of the sea was darker, deeper,
richer, till it almost approached the color of fine wine. But if, deluded, you
dipped it up, you found yourself with only a cup of warm seawater.
"I wonder why that is," Rhegorios said, having made the experiment.
"To the ice with me if I know." Maniakes spat in rejection of Skotos, whose
icy hell held the souls of sinners in eternal torment.
"Phos is a better wizard than all the mages ever born put together," Rhegorios
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said, to which his cousin could only nod.
Against bright sky and rich blue sea, the walls of Lyssaion, and the buildings
that showed over them, might have been cast of shining gold. They weren't, of
course;
such a test of man's cupidity could never have been built, nor survived long
if by some miracle it had been. But the yellow-brown sandstone shone and
sparkled in the fierce sunlight till the eye had to look away lest it be
dazzled.
Till two years before, Lyssaion had been nothing but a sleepy little town that
baked in the summer, mostly stayed warm through the winter, and, in times of
peace, sent goods from the west and occasional crops of dates to Videssos the
city. The palm trees on which the dates ripened grew both near and even within
the city, as they did
in the Land of the Thousand Cities. Maniakes found them absurd; they put him
in mind more of outsized feather dusters than proper trees.
Lyssaion had been so unimportant in the scheme of things that the Makuraners,
when they overran the Videssian westlands, hadn't bothered giving it more than [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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