Gauvard was weeping now, Silvy saw. He had become increasingly emotional from the time they’d come to stand here in the wind, before sunrise, waiting for the city to come into view. And now it had, with the light.

“We cannot forget that beauty,” Gauvard Colle whispered.

Thierry looked at him, then back at the glory growing nearer, brighter, with the god’s sun behind all its domes, the water sparkling as with diamonds upon blue. The phrase was a quotation, he knew, from the older man’s tone. He would ask about it later. He put a hand on his friend’s shoulder, and simply looked and breathed. Salt air and glory. He thought he saw dolphins. He never had, before.

Orane was his love, always would be, but this…this was splendour and richness, gold and silver, and awareness of time and loss. Another half a dozen passengers had by now come to the prow. The four of them stayed close to each other.

“You did not lie, uncle,” said Medor.

“We are not even there yet,” Gauvard said softly, scarcely audible in the sea wind. “And you must try to imagine it a thousand years ago in its majesty, the Great Sanctuary newly risen, the Hippodrome we can see beside it flourishing, not a ruin. Imagine…picture in your mind fifty thousand people, and the emperor, cheering for the chariots.”

“I can’t,” Silvy said. “It is beyond me.”

“This city is beyond all of us,” Gauvard said. He wiped at his eyes. “I cannot say how happy I am to be back.”

This was not a person, whether man or woman, who spoke of happiness, Silvy thought. They had grown close, beginning with a moment by a riverbank years ago. She laid her head against Gauvard’s shoulder and watched Sarantium come to them.

—

There were, even after decades, people who remembered Gauvard Colle. Some knew him as a person who could access the half-world, and that was important here, Thierry came to realize. Others recalled him in different ways: sensuous, adventurous. Gauvard had had lovers here, men and women, and some who slipped between the two, as he did. One, who had been more than merely a lover, was recently dead, they learned.

It had been a long time since he’d been here. People leave us. We leave them. Thierry’s mother and father had died two years before, within months of each other. He would not have come east had they still been alive.

People Gauvard knew gladly helped them find a house in a district not far from the imperial palaces. Not the best neighbourhood, not the worst. You could, Thierry learned, buy many different things here, including varieties of love, if desired.