"Be gentle with it, your Majesty," Kameas said. "The cloth is fragile these days."
"As you say," Maniakes answered. "How old is it, anyhow?"
The vestiarios' shrug made his several chins wobble. "I apologize, your Majesty, but I cannot tell you. My predecessor at this post, the esteemed Isoes, was himself ignorant of that, and told me his predecessor did not know the answer, either. I also cannot tell you how long the answer has been lost. That might have happened in the days of Isoes' predecessor, or it might have been a hundred years before his time."
Maniakes fingered the silk. He doubted the mourning robe had been new in his grandfather's days, but had no way to prove that. Kameas also brought him polished black leather covers for his boots. Strips cut in them let a little of the imperial crimson shine through; even in mourning, the Avtokrator remained the Avtokrator. But, looking down at himself, Maniakes saw that he made a somber spectacle indeed.
The other mourners in the funeral party-Kourikos and Phevronia, the elder Maniakes, Parsmanios, Rhegorios, Lysia, and Symvatios-wore unrelieved black. The horses drawing the wagon on which the sarcophagus lay were also black-though Maniakes knew a groom of the imperial stables had carefully painted over a white blaze on one of the animals.
Also in black surcoats, with black streamers hanging from their spears, were the guardsmen who marched with the mourners and the funeral wagon. For the day, the parasol-bearers who preceded the Avtokrator in all his public appearances carried black canopies rather than their usual colorful ones.
As the funeral party approached the plaza of Palamas, Maniakes saw it was packed with people; the folk of Videssos the city were eager for any spectacle, no matter how sorrowful. Some of the people wore black to show their sympathy for the Avtokrator. Others had dressed in their holiday best: for them, one show was as good as another.
At the edge of the plaza nearest the palace quarter waited the ecumenical patriarch Agathios. His regalia had not changed; he still wore the blue boots and a cloth-of-gold robe encrusted with pearls and gems, as he would have at a wedding or any joyous occasion. But his face was somber as he prostrated himself before Maniakes. "Your Majesty, I beg you to accept my condolences for your tragic loss."
"Thank you, most holy sir," Maniakes answered. "Let's get on with it, shall we?" As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them; Agathios looked scandalized. Maniakes had not meant anything more than wanting to have the funeral over so he could grieve in private, but anything an Avtokrator said that could be misinterpreted probably would be, and he knew too well he had left himself open to such misinterpretation.
Without a word to Maniakes, Agathios turned away and took his place at the head of the mournful procession. He called in a great voice to the crowds filling the plaza of Palamas. "Stand aside, people of Videssos! Make way for the last journey of Niphone, once Empress of the Videssians, now bathed in Phos' eternal light."
"May it be so," the people answered, their voices rising and falling like the surf that beat against the seawall. As best they could, they did clear a path through the plaza. Where their own efforts were not enough, the guards moved them aside with their spearshafts.
Even as the people moved back to make way for the funeral procession, they also pushed forward to speak a word of consolation to Maniakes or to his family. Some of them also pressed forward to get a glimpse of Niphone, who lay pale and still and forever unmoving inside the sarcophagus.
"I pray she knew she gave you a son," a man said to Maniakes. He nodded, though Niphone had known nothing of the sort.
A few of the folk in the plaza kept their hands at the hems of their tunics, ready to use the garments to help catch any largess the Avtokrator might choose to dispense. That thought had never entered his mind, not for today's occasion. He shook his head, bemused at the vagaries of human nature to which his position exposed him.
Though the plaza of Palamas was far wider than Middle Street, the procession had better going on the capital's main thoroughfare. The crowds there stayed off the street itself and under the covered colonnades to either side. When Maniakes glanced up, he saw a goodly number of people atop the colonnades as well, peering down at him and at the woman who had given him two children in just over a year and a half and now would give no more ever again.
Maniakes slowly walked past the government office buildings. Faces stared out at him from almost every window as clerks and bureaucrats escaped their scrolls and counting boards for a little while. The farther he went, the harder keeping up a dignified front before the people became.
In the Forum of the Ox, the crowds grew thick and hard to manage once more. The forum had once been the chief marketplace of Videssos the city for cattle and all other goods, a position long since usurped by the plaza of Palamas. Now most of what was bought and sold here was not fine enough to succeed in the newer square close by the palaces. The Forum of the Ox, even packed as it was now, seemed tired and sad and shabby and rundown.
Again the ecumenical patriarch appealed to the crowd to stand back and let the funeral procession pass. The people responded more slowly than they had in the plaza of Palamas. That was partly because the Forum of the Ox was even more crowded than the plaza had been, and partly because the people who crowded it looked to be less inclined to listen to requests from anyone than were the more prosperous Videssians who frequented the plaza of Palamas.
Little by little, the procession inched its way across the square and back onto Middle Street. After a couple of short blocks, the parasol-bearers followed Agathios south down a narrow, twisting lane that led toward the temple dedicated to the memory of the holy Phravitas.
As was true on a lot of such lanes, second- and third-story balconies grew close to each other above the street until they all but cut off light and air from it. Maniakes remembered thinking when he first came back to Videssos the city that the ordinance mandating balconies to keep a proper distance from one another had not been enforced during Genesios' reign. It didn't look as if building inspectors were doing much better now that he wore the red boots. He exhaled through his nose. He had had a few more immediately urgent things to worry about than whether balconies conformed to law in all particulars.
Legal or not, the balconies were jammed full of people. When Maniakes looked up to the narrow strip of sky between them, he saw dozens of faces staring down at him. One of those faces, a woman's, up on a third-floor balcony, was not only staring but deathly pale, pale as Niphone, pale enough to draw Maniakes' notice even in the midst of the crowd, even in the midst of his sorrow.
The woman leaned over the wooden rail of the balcony. Her mouth opened wide. Maniakes thought she meant to call something to him, although he would have had trouble hearing her through the noise of the crowd. Perhaps that was what she intended, but it was not what happened. She choked and gagged and vomited down onto the funeral procession.
The stinking stuff splashed the sarcophagus, the funeral wagon, and one of the guardsmen. He leapt aside with a cry of disgust. Maniakes pointed a furious finger up at the woman. Afterward, he regretted showing his anger so openly, but that was afterward.
The guard's was not the only disgusted cry to go up. Other cries rose, too, cries of "Shame!" and "Sacrilege!" and "Profanation!" and, inevitably, "Blasphemy!" Those cries rang loudest from the balconies, and loudest of all from the balcony where the luckless woman stood. Other people standing there with her seized her, lifted her, and, while she screamed, flung her down to the cobbles below. The scream abruptly cut off.
Maniakes whirled and stared in horror at the body of the woman who sprawled only a few feet behind him. By the unnatural angle at which her head joined her body, her neck was broken. She would never rise from the street again. Maniakes' hand drew the sun-sign over his heart. "By the lord with the great and good mind," he cried, his voice full of anguish, "must even the funeral of my wife grow wrong?"
But other shouts went up from the crowd, shouts of fierce exhilaration: "Death
to defilers!" "She got what she deserved!" "We avenge you, Niphone!" and even, "Thou conquerest, Empress Niphone!"
Far from being ashamed at what they had done, the men who had thrown the woman to her death raised their arms in triumph, clenched fists pumping the air. The cheers that echoed up and down the narrow street said not just they but also the city mob thought of them as heroes.
Maniakes looked helplessly toward his father. The elder Maniakes spread his hands, as if to ask What can you do? The Avtokrator knew the answer to that only too well: not much. If he sent his guardsmen into that building after the killers, they would have to fight through the crowd to get inside, fight their way upstairs, and then come down with their prisoners to face the wrath of the mob again. Having the capital erupt in riots was not something he could afford, not with all the other bitter troubles the Empire had these days.
"Forward!" he shouted, and then again: "Forward! Let us grant Niphone such dignity as we can, such dignity as she deserves."
That reached the crowd. Their baying, which had reminded him of nothing so much as a pack of wolves in full cry on a winter's night, eased. Still shaking his head in amazement and disbelief, he hurried on toward the temple dedicated to the memory of the holy Phravitas.
If that temple wasn't the oldest building in Videssos the city, it was among them. In the High Temple and shrines modeled after it, the altar stood under a dome at the center of the worship area, with pews approaching it from each of the cardinal directions. The temple of the holy Phravitas conformed to a more antique pattern. It was a rectangular building of red brick, the bricks themselves darkened and smoothed by age. Its entrance was at the west side; all seats faced the east, the direction from which Phos' sun rose each day.
Agathios strode to the altar, his gleaming robes swirling about him. The senior priest normally responsible for the temple bowed low to his ecclesiastical superior and kissed his outstretched hand in token of submission. Maniakes' guardsmen lifted Niphone's sarcophagus off the wagon that had borne it hither and carried it to a black-draped bier by the side of the altar.
Maniakes and his family took their places in the pews nearest the holy table. When other mourners, some nobles, some simply townsfolk, had filled the rest of the seats, Agathios raised his hands to the heavens, not in triumph but in supplication. That was the signal for those in the temple to rise once more.
"We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind," Agathios intoned, "by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor."
By its very familiarity, repeating the creed helped steady Maniakes: Not that his grief diminished, but it was channeled into pathways where his mind regularly traveled. The ecumenical patriarch gestured. Maniakes and his companions sat back down. Being in a temple-even if not the one where he usually prayed-and listening to the patriarch also helped transmute anguish into routine, which was easier for the mind to grasp and deal with.
Agathios said, "We are gathered here today to commend to Phos and his eternal light the soul of our sister Niphone, who died in the most noble way given to a woman: that is to say, in bringing new life into our world."
Phevronia sobbed noisily. Kourikos patted his wife's shoulder, doing his best to comfort her. His best struck Maniakes as ineffectual, but then, Phevronia had a right to her sorrow. Losing parents was hard. Losing a spouse was harder. Losing a child, especially a child in what should have been the prime of life, turned the natural order of things on its head.
Maniakes wondered if he ought to be angry with Niphone's mother and father for making her feel she had to bear him a son so as to keep alive her family's influence over the imperial line. He had tried calling up that anger, it would have made his grief easier to bear. He hadn't managed it, though. Many would have taken the same risk Niphone had, and she had done it of her own free will.
"Surely the good god will demonstrate his bounteous compassion and will suffer our sister Niphone to cross the bridge of the separator unharried by the demons who mount up from the eternal ice," Agathios said. "Surely she shall have no part of Skotos and his devices." The ecumenical patriarch spat in rejection of the dark god. Maniakes and the other mourners imitated him.
Agathios went on for some time, describing Niphone's manifest virtues. He had spoken with Maniakes about those, and with Kourikos and Phevronia, and with Nikaia, the abbess of the convent dedicated to the memory of the holy Phostina. So far as Maniakes could tell, every word he said was true.
If Niphone had all those virtues, why did she have to die so young? That was a silent scream inside Maniakes, the way, no doubt, it had been a silent scream in every generation of mankind all the way back to Vaspur the Firstborn-of whom Agathios did not think in those terms. If the ecumenical patriarch had any new light to shed on the question, he did not show it to Maniakes. After praising Niphone and reassuring everyone who heard him that Phos had indeed taken her soul into the realm of eternal light, after leading his listeners in Phos' creed once more, Agathios said, "And now let her discarded earthly remains be consigned to their final resting place."
That was the signal for Maniakes, Kourikos, and Phevronia to come forward and stand by the sarcophagus. Before the guardsmen lifted it from the bier, Maniakes looked into it one last time. Niphone seemed at peace. He had seen too many dead men on the battlefield to lie to himself by thinking she merely looked asleep, but he could hope she had indeed passed over the bridge of the separator.
The priest who normally presided at the temple dedicated to the memory of the holy Phravitas handed Agathios a lighted torch, murmuring, "The lamps in the memorial chamber below have been kindled, most holy sir."
"Thank you, holy sir," the patriarch answered. He gathered up Niphone's closest survivors and the guardsmen by eye, then went down a stone staircase to the chamber below the temple.
When Genesios toppled Likinios, he had thrown the dead Avtokrator's body and those of his sons into the sea and sent their heads far and wide to prove they were dead. After Maniakes cast down Genesios in turn, the tyrant's head had gone up on the Milestone and his body was burned. The imperial tombs, then, had not had anyone inhumed in them for some years.
The chamber was very quiet. The thick, still air seemed to swallow the sound of footsteps. Lamplight played off marble and cast flickering shadows on inscriptions and reliefs of Avtokrators and Empresses who had been dead for decades, centuries, even a millennium. On some of the oldest inscriptions, the Videssian was of so antique a mode that Maniakes could hardly read it.
Amid all the whiteness of the marble, one space in the back of the chamber gaped black. Quietly grunting with the effort, the guardsmen slid Niphone's sarcophagus into it. Agathios said, "In a year's time, your Majesty, you or the Empress' sadly bereaved parents may set a memorial tablet here, one properly describing her courage and virtues. Please know that I share your sorrow and offer you my deepest and most sincere sympathy."
"Thank you, most holy sir," Maniakes answered. Kourikos and Phevronia echoed him. Even as he spoke, though, the Avtokrator wondered how sincere Agathios truly was. He had said all the proper things, but said them in a way that suggested duty more than piety. Maniakes sighed. The patriarch was at least as much a political creature as he was a holy man.
"It's over," Phevronia said in a dazed, wondering voice. "It's over, and there's nothing left of her, not any more, not ever again."
She was right. It was over. Nothing was left. Feeling altogether empty inside, Maniakes started back toward the stairs. Agathios hurried to get in front of him, to lead the upward-bound procession as he had the one going down. The guardsmen came next. More slowly, Kourikos and Phevronia followed, leaving the chamber under the temple dedicated to the memory of the holy Phravitas empty until the next time someone from the royal house died.
Kameas said, "May it please your Majesty, a messenger has just come bearing word from Abivard the Makuraner general."
"What can he want of us now?" Mania
kes wondered. He had trouble concentrating on the affairs of Videssos; he had laid Niphone to rest only a few days before. Gamely he tried to bring his mind to the business at hand. "Have him enter, esteemed sir."
The messenger prostrated himself, then handed Maniakes a rolled parchment sealed with ribbon and wax. As he broke the seal, he wondered if he would be able to make sense of the letter inside. He spoke Makuraner fairly well but didn't read it Abivard, though, must have had a local translate his thoughts for him, for the missive was written in Videssian: "Abivard the general serving the mighty Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, to Maniakes styling himself Avtokrator: Greetings. I learn with sadness of the death of your wife. Accept, please, my condolences on this, your personal loss; may the Prophets Four guide her to union with the God."
Maniakes turned to Kameas. "Bring me sealing wax, please, esteemed sir." As the vestiarios hurried off to get it, Maniakes inked a reed pen and wrote rapidly on a sheet of parchment: "Maniakes Avtokrator to the Makuraner general Abivard: Greetings. My thanks for your kind personal wishes. My own wish is that you and your army would withdraw from lands to which you have no right. I speak there both as Avtokrator of the Videssians and in my own person. It was for that purpose that I sent the eminent Triphylles as ambassador to Sharbaraz King of Kings. Have you yet any word of the progress of his embassy?"
He rolled up the parchment and tied it with one of the ribbons he normally used for decrees. Kameas returned with a stick of the crimson sealing wax reserved for the Avtokrator alone. The eunuch handed the wax to him, then picked up a lamp. Maniakes held the lamp to the flame. Several drops fell onto the ribbon and parchment. While they were still soft, Maniakes pressed his sunburst signet into them. He withdrew the ring, waved the sealed letter in the air to make sure it hardened properly, and gave it to the messenger. "Be sure this reaches Abivard, by whatever means you have of arranging such things." He didn't need to know the details, and so did not inquire after them.
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