by Judith Tarr
“Come,” she repeated. “It’s all been seen to. Get in.”
He looked down at the woman. She was small even for an easterner; her head came barely to his shoulder. “I’ll walk,” he said.
“You’ll do no such thing. Get in.”
“But—”
“Get in!”
She was small, but she had a giant’s strength of will. He smiled his wry smile, bowed and obeyed. She settled opposite him. With a smooth concerted motion the bearers raised the litter to their shoulders and paced forward. The escort fell into place about it with Sophia’s maid trudging sullenly behind.
The house of Bardas Akestas stood at the higher end of a narrow twisting street in the shadow of the Church of the Apostles, a bleak forbidding wall broken only by a grating or two and a gate of gilded iron. Even as the bearers paused before it, the gate burst open, releasing a flood of people.
There were, Alf realized afterward, less than half a dozen in all: three children of various sizes and sexes, an elderly porter, and a mountainous woman with a voice as deep as a man’s.
They overwhelmed the arrivals with shouts and cries, sweeping them into a sunlit courtyard. The light was dazzling after the high-walled dimness of the street, the children’s joy dizzyingly loud. Alf made himself invisible in his corner of the litter and waited for his head to stop reeling.
“Come now,” a new voice said over the uproar, deep and quiet. “What is all this?”
At once there was silence. The speaker came forward, a short broad man in a grey gown. The servants stepped back; the children leaped to attention. Sophia stepped from the litter, smoothed her skirts, and said, “Good day, Bardas.”
“Sophia.” He was as unruffled as she. “How was your journey?”
“Bearable,” she replied.
The smaller of the two girl-children wriggled with impatience. “Father,” she burst out at last. “Mother’s home. Mother’s home!”
Sophia swayed under a new assault. Over the children’s heads she smiled at her husband; he nodded back briskly, but there was a smile in his eyes.
The elder girl had greeted her mother with a warm embrace, but dignity forbade her to join in the others’ exuberance. While Nikki clung tightly to his mother’s skirts and Anna babbled whole months’ worth of happenings in one breathless rush, she stood aloof, trying to imitate her father’s lofty calm. Her eyes were taking it all in, litter, bearers, and escort; the servants coming from everywhere to greet their mistress; plump Katya the maid deep in colloquy with the towering nurse; and if that was not she sitting in the litter, then—
“Mother,” she said suddenly, “who is this?”
Sophia nodded in response to Anna’s flood of news, lifted Nikki in her arms, and turned toward the litter. Its occupant emerged slowly and somewhat unsteadily: a tall thin figure in pilgrim’s dress, with a terribly ravaged face and clear pale eyes gazing out of it. Irene forgot her dignity and loosed a little shriek; Nikki hid his face in his mother’s shoulder.
“My guest,” said Sophia. “Alfred of Saint Ruan’s in Anglia, who has come up from Jerusalem to see our City.”
They all stared, save Bardas who bowed and said, “Be welcome to House Akestas.”
Alf returned the bow with grace and precision; straightened and swayed. Several of the servants sprang to his aid. Gently but firmly they bore him into the cool shade of the house.
4.
Anna opened the door as quietly as she could and peered around it. The room was dim and cool and smelled of the roses that grew up over the window from the garden outside. There was no one there except the stranger in the bed.
He seemed to be asleep. She edged into the room, her bare feet silent on the carpet that had come from Persia, and tiptoed to the bed. Her heart was hammering. But curiosity was stronger than fear, even fear of her father’s reprimand.
She looked at the pilgrim’s face. It glistened with the salve the servants had spread on it over a patchwork of purple and scarlet.
His eyes opened in the midst of it and stared at her. She almost turned and ran. But they were very quiet eyes, and very kind, and that was a smile on the blistered and bleeding lips.
She winced to see it. “Does it hurt?” she asked.
“No more than it ought.”
She liked his voice. It made her think of one of the bells in church, the deep clear one that rang on holy days. “Then it must hurt a great deal,” she said, “because it looks horrible.”
“It will heal.” He sat up. He was wearing a linen tunic; it was too wide, a little in the shoulders, much more in the middle. “I’m glad you came to visit me. I’m not nearly as ill as everyone seems to think.”
His eyes invited her; she perched on the edge of the bed. “I’m not supposed to be here. I just wanted to look at you without everybody pushing and shoving.”
“Why?” he asked.
She shrugged and looked at her feet. “I don’t know. I guess because I’ve never seen a Latin up close before.”
“Do I disappoint you?”
“A little. You’re so clean. And you speak Greek. And you’re not wearing a mail-shirt. Don’t you own one?”
He shook his head. “I’m only a poor pilgrim. Armor is for knights.” I
“You aren’t a knight?”
“Oh, no. I was a monk before I was a pilgrim. Never a knight.”
“Oh.” She was disappointed. “You’re hardly a barbarian at all.”
He laughed. His laugh was even better than his voice, like a ripple of low notes on a harp; “But surely,” he said, “I look like one.”
“You won’t when it heals. The statues on the Middle Way have noses just like yours. Are you handsome under the burns?”
He would not answer, except to shrug a little.
“Mother says you are. Irene wants you to be. Irene is thirteen and getting silly. She’s always looking at this boy or that, and sighing, and quoting poetry.”
“That seems silly to you?”
“Well, isn’t it? She tells me to wait. Three more years and I’ll know what she’s feeling.” She shuddered. “I hope not.”
“Maybe you’ll escape it. I did for a long time.”
“Well. You’re a man. Men are slower, Mother says.” She looked at him, narrowing her eyes until he blurred. “Do you quote poetry at girls?”
“Not…quite.” He sighed. “I haven’t got that far yet. Maybe I never will. It was only one woman, you see. I lost her.”
“Because you burned your face?”
“It’s the other way about. She went away, and I stopped caring what happened to me.”
“Irene should hear you. She’d write a poem.” Anna brought her eyes back into focus. He had stood up and gone to the window. His tunic was too short as well as too wide. It showed a great deal of him; she observed it with interest. “Why did the woman go away?”
He spoke mostly to the roses and partly to her. “She’d just learned that all her kin were dead. I couldn’t comfort her as…as she wanted. We quarreled. She left. I left soon after. That was all. Life is like that. Love is like that, I suppose.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “But I’m sorry she left.”
“Thank you,” he said, turning back. He had plucked a rose; he gave it to her. She buried her nose in it.
When she looked up, Nikki was standing just inside the door with his thumb in his mouth and his big eyes fixed on Alf.
Alf stood very still. Anna opened her mouth to say something, and shut it again. Nikki hesitated. After a long while he left his place by the door and inched toward Alf, sidling, stopping, never taking his eyes from the other’s face.
Very slowly Alf sank to one knee. Nikki stopped as if about to bolt. Alf was still.
He edged forward again. Alf hardly breathed.
Once more Nikki stopped. His hand crept out. It halted just short of Alf’s face. Drew back a little. Darted out, a quick, frightened touch. It must have hurt; Alf’s eyes winced. But he did not
flinch away, even by a hair’s breadth.
More boldly now, Nikki explored him with hands and eyes, nose and tongue. He knelt patiently even when Nikki pulled his hair. He did not try to say anything, except with his eyes.
Suddenly Nikki froze. His eyes were wide, his mouth open slightly. Alf had not moved. Nikki made a small hoarse sound.
All at once he flung himself at Alf, clinging as he had clung to Sophia. Alf held him and patted him and looked at Anna over the tousled dark head.
She stared back. “He likes you. He doesn’t like anybody except Mother.”
“And you,” said Alf, “and Irene, and your father.”
“Sometimes. He can’t talk, you know, though he’s almost five. It’s because he can’t hear; God closed his ears before he was born. We’re all sinners, Uncle Demetrios says, and he’s our punishment. I almost hit Uncle Demetrios once for saying that. Father gave me a tanning, but afterward I heard him say that I had more sense in one eyelash than Uncle Demetrios had in his whole head.”
“I think I would agree.” Alf sat on the floor with Nikki in his lap. “There’s no sin in your brother. Only God’s will, for His own reasons; who are we to ask what they are?”
“That’s what Mother says.”
“Your mother is a very wise woman.”
“She has to live up to her name, doesn’t she?”
“And you try to live up to her.”
“I don’t do very well. She’s a great lady; I, says my nurse, am a perfect hellion. Someday I’d like to forget I’m a girl and travel about and see all the things I’ve heard about in tales.”
“Maybe you will.”
“You have, haven’t you? Did you walk all the way from Anglia?”
“Sometimes I rode. Sometimes I went by sea.”
“Where? When? What was it like? Tell me!”
Her eagerness made him smile. He sat on the bed; she sat beside him, and he began to talk. He was better than any storyteller in the bazaar; she forgot time and duties and even old terrors in listening to him.
The light in the window had shifted visibly westward when Alf paused. Anna waited for him to go on, but his eyes were fixed on the doorway.
She turned to look, and paled. A dreaded presence loomed there. “Anna Chrysolora!” thundered her nurse. “What did your father tell you about intruding on our guest?”
Alf rose with Nikki in his arms. “But, madam, she was not—”
“You, my boy, were told to rest; and look at you.” Corinna drew herself up to her full height. She was somewhat taller than he and thrice as broad. She planted a fist on each massive hip and glowered at them all. “Just look at you. What the master will say, I don’t like to think. Anna, Nikephoros, come here.”
They came, even Nikki, dragging their feet. Alf stood alone and defenseless in his ill-fitting tunic.
“To bed with you,” Corinna commanded. Her tone would have done justice to a sergeant-at-arms. He went meekly, to suffer the indignity of her tucking him firmly in. “There now. You stay put until you’re given leave to get up. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Good.” She swept up the children and bore them away, leaving him alone, half stunned, and beginning to shake with uncontrollable mirth.
5.
The dome of Holy Wisdom hung weightless in the air, held to earth by columns of light. Beneath the dome and among the pillars swirled a sea of people, overlaid with a manifold mist of incense, perfume, and humanity, eddying here and there as a priest or a potentate swept by.
At this hour between services, most of those in Hagia Sophia were pilgrims and sightseers. Hawkers of relics moved brazenly among them, offering for sale splinters of the True Cross, threads from the Virgin’s robe, and bits of bone and hair from the bodies of innumerable saints. The few Latins in the throng were fair prey for these, wide-eyed barbarians that they were, and ignorant of Greek besides.
One walked alone, a clear target: a burly young man, cleaner and better kempt than most, gazing about with a child’s pure wonder. Under the great dome where Christ the King sat on his throne, he stood with his head thrown back in rapture.
“Twigs from Saint Bacchus’ vine, Saint Andrew’s fingernails, a lock of the Magdalene’s hair—cheap, holy Father, cheap at the price!”
The man was like a buzzing fly, barely noticed at first but maddening in his persistence. His victim tumbled headlong from heaven into the world’s mire, and crouched there stunned.
“Relics, holy relics, more precious than gold. Filings from Saint Peter’s chains—a chip from Simon Stylites’ column—”
The lion in repose is a great, slow-seeming, indolent beast. But aroused, he is terrible. The young Latin woke all at once to a roar of Greek, both fluent and scathing.
When his tormentor had fled, taking his wares and his ragged langue d’oeil, the young man stood a moment, shaking with fury. Slowly his tension eased. His face regained its amiable, slightly foolish expression; he sighed and shrugged. The house of light had turned to mere stone, and no force of will could change it back again.
That was the way of the world. And since heaven was denied him, he focused upon earth: the ebb and flow of people through the wide space, the flow of light and line about and above them.
He began to walk slowly, aimlessly, as a sightseer will. His size won him easy passage; his race and his priestly tonsure won him hard looks and hostile gestures and once a muttered curse.
Beneath one of the four lesser domes, under a haloed angel, he paused again. These easterners were small people; he, tall even for a Norman, could see easily over their heads. But not far from him stood a Greek quite as tall as himself though considerably less broad. He could see no face, only a long body robed in silver-grey, and a grey hat beneath which he glimpsed long white-fair hair.
The Greek shifted slightly, tilting his head back as if to gaze at the ornamented ceiling. Even from behind he seemed rapt yet not solemn, glowing with awe and wonder and heartfelt delight.
The watcher drew a slow breath. That turn of the head—that lift of the shoulder—surely he was dreaming or wishing, as he had dreamed and wished for so long, and seen what he longed to see in every tall pale stranger. And yet—
“Alf?” he wondered aloud. “Brother Alfred?”
The other turned with swift, feline grace. A fair face, a flash of silver eyes, a sudden brilliant smile. “Jehan de Sevigny!” Even the voice was the same, and the touch, the hands much stronger than they looked, holding him fast.
He knew he was grinning like an idiot; paradoxically, his eyes had blurred with tears. “Brother Alf. I never thought—how did you—I thought you were in Jerusalem!”
“I was.” Alf drew him away from the jostling crowd into the quiet of a side chapel. Jehan’s eyes cleared; he looked hard, drinking him in, incredulous still. But— “God in heaven! What ever did you do to your face?”
Alf raised a hand to it. “I did battle with the sun,” he replied, “and he won.”
“I’ll wager he did.” Jehan scowled formidably at his old friend and teacher. “Have you been in agony ever since you left Anglia?”
“Only this once,” Alf said.
“But—”
“l have my defenses, as you well know. A few days ago I forgot them. Foolish, and dangerous besides, but in the end it led to good fortune. I’m a guest now in the City, and I’m most well tended.”
“You look it,” Jehan admitted. “Except for your face.”
“Another day or two and you’d never have noticed anything at all.”
“Oh, I would have.” Jehan took him in again and felt his grin return, wider than ever. “Brother Alf. Brother Alf. It’s so good to see you!”
“And you.” Alf measured him with an admiring eye. “You’ve grown.”
“I’m as tall as you now.”
“But wide enough for three of me. I see they knighted you.”
“Last year. Bishop Aylmer did it before I left for the Crusade. He made me a
priest, too. Might as well get it all done at once, he said.”
Alf smiled, remembering the dark grim-faced bishop who had accepted an elf-priest with no reservations at all. “Is he well?”
“Well enough, though he’s gone a bit grey. Grief, I think. We were with my lord Richard when he died.” Jehan spoke quietly, but his eyes were dark with old sorrow. “Magnificent fool that he was, to take an arrow in the vitals fighting for a treasure that wasn’t there. As soon as he realized that he wasn’t going to get up from his bed, he told us to stay well out of brother John’s way and sent us to Rome to bring Anglia’s greetings to the new Pope. We’ve been serving Innocent ever since. A great man, that. Young too, for a Pope, and a bit more of a politician than a priest ought to be. Though l should talk, when I’ve been squire to Anglia’s infamous Chancellor.”
“Infamous only in the new King’s eyes. Is it true that John has weeded out all of Richard’s old friends?”
“Most of them. The last I heard, Father was in Rhiyana visiting Mother’s family. Purely for courtesy, you understand. But it’s been a long visit. Years long.”
“Like yours in Rome.”
Jehan nodded. “We were in Rhiyana ourselves for a while. The King sent you his love. Now how did he know I’d be seeing you?”
“Witchery, of course.”
“Of course,” Jehan said with a crooked smile. “His court is even more wonderful than legend makes it. All those Fair Folk…there’s magic everywhere and a wonder at every turning, and Gwydion on his throne above it all, looking not a day over twenty-two. He told me he’d been cured of errantries, at least until he could think of a better one than peacemaking between Gwynedd and Anglia.”
“And, l trust, until he was cured of the wounds he took on that venture.”
“Well. His leg had knit by then, and he’d lost his limp. His hand was taking longer. He could use it, but only just; it was stiff, and twisted a little. So, he’d say when people looked at it, at least he still had it, thanks to a witch-priest from Anglia; and he was learning to be a right-handed man. His brother would scowl whenever he said that, and thunder would rumble away somewhere. They’re twins, you know, as like to look at as two peas. But Prince Aidan is as wild as his brother is quiet. Only Gwydion and that splendid Ifrit princess Aidan brought out of Alamut can even begin to control him.”