Sailing to Sarantium is a small story. Its hero, Crispin, is unassuming as heroes go. He's a skilled mosaicist, an artist who makes pictures with decorative tiles, and responds to a request from a distant emperor to travel to the imperial capital and work on the new sanctuary there. Hardly the makings of high adventure. But then again, Guy Gavriel Kay could write about a peasant going to pick up a pail of water and you'd probably hang on every word.

If you don't know Kay, you should. His pedigree is impeccable, starting with a well-loved fantasy debut, the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road), and a compilation he did with Christopher Tolkien called The Silmarillion. Sailing to Sarantium, the first half of the Sarantine Mosaic series, evokes his other historical fantasy titles, such as A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan, and is a well-researched analog to the Byzantine Empire and fifth-century Europe--with all its political and religious machinations.

Despite its seemingly prosaic cast and quest, Sailing to Sarantium is a charmer, another Kay classic. As usual, the character descriptions are subtle and precise--the mosaicist, Crispin, is a shrewd, irascible, and intensely likable man who is fiercely devoted to his art but troubled by guilt and loss. Reluctantly surrendering to events, he agrees to travel to Sarantium to work for the emperor. ("Sailing to Sarantium," we learn, is an expression synonymous with embracing great change.) As Crispin moves from roadside quarrels to palace intrigue, Kay gracefully shifts perspective from character to character, moving forward and backward in time and giving a rich sense of the world through the eyes of soldiers, slaves, and senators. --Paul Hughes


From Publishers Weekly
Heavy of character and light of plot, Kay's (The Lions of Al Rassan) new series opens with the heady scents of sex, horseflesh and power. In the Holy City of Sarantium, the wily, murderous new emperor, Valerius II, stiffs his soldiers of their pay in order to build a fabulous monument to immortalize his reign. To adorn his temple, he summons a renowned elder mosaicist, who entreats his brilliant, younger partner, Caius Crispus of Varena, to make the journey to Sarantium in his stead. Crispus, who lost his zest for life after his beloved wife and daughters died of the plague, makes the journey under protest. His besieged country's young queen forces him to carry a dangerous, private message to the emperor, the contents of which could cost him his life. En route to Sarantium, Crispus becomes involved with mystically souled mechanical birds created by the magician Zoticus; encounters an awe-inspiring pagan god; saves the life of a beautiful, enslaved prostitute; and demonstrates that decency brings out the best in hired workers. At his destination, he learns to trust his own instincts, especially where knife-wielding assassins and powerful women who use their sexuality as a weapon are concerned. Kay is at his best when describing the intertwining of art and religion or explicating the ancient craft of mosaic work. The slow pace of the novel and the sheer volume of its characters (if ever a book cried out for a listing of dramatis personae, this is it) are dismaying, however, and don't augur well for future installments in the series. Rights: Westwood Creative Artists. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Summoned to the court of the Emperor of Sarantium, Crispin, a mosaicist from faraway Varena, encounters a city filled with beauty and treachery beyond his wildest imaginations. Caught in a web of political intrigue and religious controversy, Crispin attempts to retain his artistic vision even as he lays to rest the ghosts of his embittered past. With consummate skill and a flair for leisurely storytelling, the author of The Lions of Al-Rassan (HarperCollins, 1995) begins a new series set in a fantasy version of the Byzantine Empire. This evocative tale of one man's rendezvous with his destiny is a priority purchase for fantasy collections.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The title page imparts that this is "Book One of the Sarantine Mosaic." Kay has embarked on yet another fantasy saga, set several centuries earlier in the same world as his masterpiece, The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995). The historically knowledgeable will recognize that Sarantium essentially equals Byzantium during the reign of Justinian and Theodora, who appear under other names, along with Belisarius, Procopius, Hagia Sophia, the Visigoths--the whole kit and caboodle. The protagonist is a mosaicist from Rhodius (Visigothic Rome) who travels to Sarantium to work on the Great Temple (i.e., Hagia Sophia) because he has lost his family in the plague and feels he has nothing more to lose should Sarantium change him. The characterization is up to Kay's usual high standard, and he has adapted real-world history so well for his world-building purposes that even those who know what he is borrowing will admire it. A good book that bodes very well for the series it inaugurates. Roland Green

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review

Art for Fantasy's Sake

Guy Gavriel Kay's career in fantasy began with his editorial contributions to J.R.R. Tolkien's posthumous epic, The Silmarillion. Since then, he has established himself as a remarkable and original fantasist in his own right, having published more than half a dozen large, ambitious novels in the last 15 years. His latest, Sailing to Sarantium, is the first in a projected two-volume sequence called the Sarantine Mosaic, an intricate, richly imagined work that reinforces Kay's position as one of the finest contemporary practitioners of classical high fantasy.

In the manner of his previous two novels, A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of AL-Rassad, Kay has once again used an actual historical setting — the early Byzantine Empire under Justinian I — as the basis for his fiction. In his new novel, Byzantium is transformed into Sarantium, and Justinian is reimagined as Valerius II, ruler of a beleaguered empire surrounded on all sides by pagan and barbarian hordes, and threatened from within by a complex series of political divisions, religious controversies, and palace intrigues. Valerius — a shrewd, resourceful ruler — is driven by two equally grandiose ambitions: to restore the remote western province of Batiara to Sarantine dominion and to build a monumental new cathedral in honor of the reigning deity of Sarantium, the sun god known as Jad. These twin ambitions stand at the novel's heart, and they are the motivating forces behind all its most significant events.

As Sailing toSarantiumopens, a master mosaicist and Batiaran citizen named Caius Crispus — commonly known as Crispin — accepts an imperial invitation to travel to Sarantium to help create a mosaic for the newly constructed Jaddite cathedral. The invitation is actually intended for Crispin's partner, Martinien, who is old, settled, and unwilling to leave his home. Crispin, who has recently lost his wife and two daughters to an outbreak of plague, travels to Sarantium in Martinien's place, hoping to find, through the practice of his craft, a renewal of his lost sense of purpose. To complicate matters further, he is also charged — by Gisel, the besieged young queen of Batiara — with delivering a dangerous and desperate message intended for Valerius alone.

Crispin's journey takes him through lawless territories still dedicated to forbidden pagan practices. During the course of that journey, he rescues a young slave girl about to be sacrificed in an annual blood rite, encounters the earthly manifestation of a primordial god of the forest called a zubir, and is beaten senseless by the imperial soldiers sent to escort him to the emperor. Once he arrives in Sarantium, complications continue to accumulate.

Crispin, an outspoken, acerbic man with little left to lose, manages, in his first appearance before the emperor, to challenge a number of commonly held aesthetic assumptions, to secure the dismissal of the reigning chief mosaicist, and to alienate some significant members of the imperial court. Within days of his arrival, he becomes the target of two attempted assassinations and an equally dangerous attempted seduction. Caught in a web of conflicting agendas and incomprehensible intrigues, he must struggle to survive while simultaneously struggling to shape his vision of the mosaic he has been commissioned to create, a mosaic that, should he live to complete it, will be his own greatest legacy to the Sarantium of the future.

Kay enlivens and enriches his fictional portrait of the Byzantine world by showing us that world from the shifting perspectives of cooks, queens, slaves, sorcerers, soldiers, artisans, politicians, and charioteers. (His accounts of chariot racing in the Hippodrome are particularly vivid and well rendered.). Despite the deliberate lack of closure, Sailing to Sarantium is both absorbing and satisfying. If the second volume — which will, I hope, appear before too much time has passed — is as good as the first, then the Sarantine Mosaic could stand as a benchmark work, one that helps to raise the standards in a genre too often populated by the dull, the derivative, and the second-rate.
—Bill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. He is currently working on a book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub.
Barnesandnoble.com

ANNOTATION

The 1999 Best Novel World Fantasy Award Nominee.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Crispin is a mosaicist, a layer of bright tiles. Still grieving for the family he lost to the plaque, he lives only for his arcane craft. But an imperial summons from Valerius the Trakesian to Sarantium, the most magnificent place in the world, is difficult to resist.

In a world half-wild and tangled with magic, a journey to Sarantium means a walk into destiny. Bearing with him a deadly secret and a Queen's seductive promise, guarded only by his own wits and a talisman from an alchemist's treasury, Crispin sets out for the fabled city. Along the way he will encounter a great beast from the mythic past,and in robbing the zubir of its prize he wins a woman's devotion and a man's loyalty—and loses a gift he didn't know he had until it was gone.

Once in this city ruled by intrigue and violence, he must find his own source of power. Struggling to deal with the dangers and seductive lures of the men and woman around him, Crispin does discover it, in a most unusual place—high on the scaffolding of the greatest artwork ever imagined....

Author Biography: Guy Gavriel Kay's distinguished literary career began when he helped complete Tolkien's posthumous masterpiece, The Silmarillion. Kay's own epic trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry appears on "The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List." Subsequently the author of Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, and The Lions of Al-Rassan, he has been both a winner of the Prix Aurora Award and a World Fantasy Award nominee. His works have been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Toronto.

SYNOPSIS

Guy Gavriel Kay's career in fantasy began with his editorial contributions to J.R.R. Tolkien's posthumous epic, The Silmarillion. Since then, he has established himself as a remarkable and original fantasist in his own right, having published more than half a dozen large, ambitious novels in the last 15 years. His latest, Sailing to Sarantium, is the first in a projected two-volume sequence called the Sarantine Mosaic, an intricate, richly imagined work that reinforces Kay's position as one of the finest contemporary practitioners of classical high fantasy.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booklist

The characterization is up to Kay's usual high standard, and he has adapted real-world history so well for his world-building purposes that even those who know what he is borrowing from will admire it.

Calgary Herald

Kay's writing is of the literate, pageturning variety that is crafted with great care to weave together its underlying themes.

Evening Telegram

Sailing to Sarantium is simply one of the most beautifully written books I have read in ages. indescribably elegant, a pleasure to read.

Star Toronto

For Kay, such familiar devices as the telepathic whisper or the lumbering monster are not intended as the main course. They're the potent spices Kay adds judiciously to heightenour appreciation [of] his tale's richer tastes and motifs. Sailing to Sarantium confirms, yet again, Kay's status as one of our most accomplished and engaging storytellers.

Winnipeg Manitoba