The Belt of Gold

by Cecelia Holland

  Theophano stood up, her hands on her thighs. “Augustus, Beloved of God, your kindness is a blessing from Heaven. I swear to you, I shall be worthy of your generosity—”

  “Yes, yes, my girl. You will always do your best.” It would have been best if she had died with Shimon, especially since she had mishandled the list. If John Cerulis’s soldiers had overcome the barbarians, they certainly had the list by now. She waved away Theophano, still brimming over with promises, and with a gesture dismissed her. The girl’s voice ceased abruptly and she hurried out of the room.

  Irene walked the length of the carpet. This was her personal library, long and narrow, lined with books. The silk curtains over the windows painted the sunlight as it streamed through the eastern side of the room and laid strips of transparent purple and yellow color over the heavy cream-colored carpet, a gift from the upstart ruler of Merv and Baghdad. In the end window, which the early sun as yet only grazed, hung a string of silver bells that chimed as the wind turned it. She stood listening to this random music, thinking of John Cerulis, who wanted her throne.

  He would be there, in the Hippodrome, in the enclosed box his family had kept for generations. When she came out into the Imperial balcony, he would bow, and she would lift her hand, accepting his greeting, while in the background his people and her people killed one another.

  His people did. Her people—possibly she should not have used Theophano, who was young and more passionate than wise. Of course that had been her credential, her willingness to supply passion in the right places.

  Damn that list. Who had it now? She imagined the barbarians finding it, musing over it like apes with the tools of Archimedes, using it thereafter for an outhouse wiper, that precious piece of paper that had cost so much in blood and time and Irene’s concentration.

  She turned around, abrupt, decisive, putting that image out of her mind. It was time to do other things. With a clap of her hands, she summoned her pages out of the corners, ready for her commands.

  4

  Race day. He knew it as soon as he woke up, before he even opened his eyes.

  He got out of bed, his body so charged with excitement that it seemed an effort to keep his feet solidly on the floor. His servant brought him his clothes. In silence Michael allowed himself to be dressed. His body felt like a cold case for the fiery life within. The servant who put clothes on the case and the other servants who brought in his breakfast and opened the windows and took away his chamber pot were only shadows at the periphery of the world.

  In what he always thought of as his mundane life, he was a prince, with obligations at court. Dressed in his court clothes, he walked from his quarters in the Bucoleon Palace, an old rambling building at the very tip of the Imperial Rock, up the terraced slope to the Church of the Holy Wisdom, where with thousands of shadows round him he heard the Word of Christ and received communion. He prayed for the continuance of the Empire and good health and long life for his cousin the Basileus, but he asked for nothing for himself. He knew that he needed no help from Jesus Christ to win.

  Outside the church, on the porch, his uncle Prince Constantine met him. They did not speak, but Constantine took Michael’s hand and wrung it with a fierce grip and looked into his eyes and nodded, and Michael saw his excitement and managed to smile at him. Constantine was too old to race anymore, but once he had driven in the Hippodrome, although never with the success of his nephew Michael. He had won once or twice—one year he had taken two challenges for the Golden Belt. Now he lived through Michael, advising him, helping him with the horses, thrashing out strategies, keeping quiet when—rarely, but sometimes—Michael lost.

  They went back down through the Palace grounds toward the lower entrance to the Hippodrome, but before they reached it, a page came from the Empress and ordered Michael into her presence.

  He could not argue; all that did was waste more of the precious time she was already stealing so much of, so Michael went off immediately to the Daphne Palace, which was in any case hard by the Hippodrome wall.

  His cousin was waiting in her morning chamber, surrounded by her women, who were preparing her for her appearance at the races. While they brushed her hair and smeared cream on her cheeks and put on bits of jewelry for her to examine in her mirror, Michael stood before her, listening with no attention to her long rambling discourse on the necessity of serving the Empire.

  Michael had no interest in serving the Empire, and very little interest in his cousin Irene, and all the while she talked, he clenched his fists against the pressure to be gone that swelled unbearably in his veins and muscles. He could feel nothing but the longing to go to the Circus, to change these jeweled silks for his charioteer’s leather coat and cap, to take the reins in his hands, to drive the four half-wild horses out on to the raked sand. To see beside him the other fiery teams, the white-ringed eyes of his rivals. To race. To win.

  His cousin said, “Michael, you are not heeding me.”

  “Your pardon, most excellent and adored lady.” Michael bowed.

  She smiled at him. The women who tended her were piling up her thick fair hair in curls and tendrils above her forehead; a tall dark-haired older woman thrust a diamond comb into this mass to hold it all in place. Irene was fifty, but she was still the most beautiful woman Michael had ever seen. Her eyes were wonderfully green, their direct and artless expression making a lie of her Imperial detachment. She said, “Will you win today, darling?”

  “Yes.”

  “What of Mauros-Ishmael?”

  Michael pressed his lips together, considering what he might say to this, but his face revealed his thoughts adequately enough; the Empress laughed, cool and lilting, like a girl’s laugh. She took a scarf from her sleeve.

  “Wear this on your arm, darling—perhaps it will bring you the favor of the Divine Judge.”

  “Most mighty lady.”

  Taking the scarf, he went down on his knees before her, as ceremony demanded, and bowed his head to hide his face from her; he knew she did not give him this token from love or kindness. It was a signal to someone, part of the endless game of intrigue and deceit she played. Often she involved him in some way, as she did now, which he had to put up with, part of the annoyance of being a member of the Imperial family.

  He left her. With six of his cousin’s servants attending him, he walked away through the Daphne Palace to the two-story tower called the Kathismus, which housed the narrow stairway leading from the Empress’s private quarters to the Imperial balcony of the Hippodrome.

  At the entrance to the Kathismus, Irene’s servants left him, and he climbed the stairs alone. The door at the top was open, and he walked forth into the Imperial box.

  The silk curtains were still drawn, the great floating silk ceiling of the pavilion was in place, the full sun shining through, filling the balcony with violet light. He parted the curtains. There far below him the track lay, an ellipse of golden sand, split down the center by the narrow spina of brick. Along this center island, centuries of emperors had set up trophies to their glory; at the far end of the spina, red in the sun, was a sandstone needle someone had long ago pillaged out of Egypt, and closer stood another column of porphyry, and there almost directly opposite him a bronze column wrapped around with three serpents, tongued and fanged. Standing there, looking down the dizzying swoop of seats to the track, Michael thought, again, how deceiving it was to be emperor.

  He climbed down through row on row of stone benches, down to the level of the track, and walked along the sand a little way, to the curve in the wall, where two doors of wood opened into the stables under the southwestern end of the enormous structure. The guardsman there saluted him as he passed.

  “May God be with you, Prince—my money is.”

  The Hippodrome was built on the edge of the same bulging rock that lodged the whole Palace, but the hillside there being insufficient to support the whole length of t
he circus, the southwestern end had been built up with a huge curving wall of brick. Inside this wall were the stables for the racehorses, as well as, in another section, the Imperial menagerie.

  From the doorway off the track a ramp led down into the dark cavernous smelly barns. Only a few lanterns lit the place, because of the threat of fire, and by each one stood a boy whose sole duty was to tend the flame and keep it where it belonged. The air, heated by a hundred bodies, was sharp with ammonia and sweet from the cooked grains of wet mashes. The horses were eating now, and from every stall came the steady champ-champ of their jaws, their snorting and sighing, the clunk of hoofs on the wooden walls, and the whispering swish of their tails.

  Michael went through the first of the five corridors, into the broad open area where all five met, and where the equipment rooms were, and there turned into the third corridor, where his horses were kept. The four animals he would drive today were eating the small measures of grain they were given on race mornings. They stood in their adjoining stalls, their heads deep in their feed buckets, and Michael could hear the sweep of their tongues on the wood, licking up the last grains of oats. He leaned over the door of Folly’s stall and the big bay gelding darted its head at him, its teeth snapping an inch from his hand. The horse’s sides already gleamed with a fine sheen of sweat.

  “He knows,” said the horse’s groom, Esad, who came by Michael with a bucket of water. Setting the bucket down, he unlatched the stall door and swung it open, murmuring in a soft voice to his charge.

  Michael went on; Folly was less liable to strike out when Esad was alone with him.

  The next horse was the mare, Rayda, a Persian-bred, as mild as milk. Even she was excited today, and rubbed her head against Michael’s arm. Her eyes glowed. He pulled on her long forelock, which her groom kept braided.

  Beyond her in the next stall the black horse Demon was banging on the wooden wall and nickering; when Michael put out his hand to him, the black horse whirled around in his stall, half rearing. His mane rippled like a sea wave.

  “Happy, old boy? This is your day, isn’t it?” Michael patted the thick black neck.

  In the last stall, the fourth horse of his team stood hipshot, his head drooping, asleep. Nothing ever excited the Caliph. Michael looked in to be sure the big grey gelding had eaten all his grain and backed away to leave the horse to his own ways of making ready for the race.

  Down the row of stalls, Demon reared up, braying a war cry that rang away down the corridor, and drew a rush of stablemen. Michael walked off. The grooms could manage these petty excitements better without him. He still had to inspect his harness and his car, which superstitiously he did with his own hands before every race.

  The cars were housed in a room at the front of the stable, in the wide, dirt-floored area where the corridors met, which the racing people all called the Apron. The stablemaster, having heard that he was come, waited at the door to open it for him, and while he struggled with the lock, Michael glanced around him, casual as a falling leaf, toward the Apron’s far side.

  Over there, in front of the second corridor, they were already drawing their car up and down the aisle. Four men pulled on the traces, while a fifth went along on hands and knees, packing grease around the axle turnings. Off to one side stood a man who stared frankly across the wide room at Michael.

  When the Prince’s gaze fell on him, this man smiled, a broad toothy grin, and waved at him.

  Michael glared coldly back at his rival. Mauros-Ishmael acted sometimes as if this were all some great joke. Suddenly Michael wanted to crush the younger man, walk on that smile, and laugh at his agonies. A trickle of sweat ran down his spine. He fought off a violent surge of panic: Mauros-Ishmael was young, strong, a brilliant driver, and he had a magnificent team. The terror subsided. Cool and calm again, Michael stood far above it all, and ready. He knew he was going to win.

  He was still looking at Mauros-Ishmael. It seemed hours had gone by while their eyes were locked together in this piercing stare. Now one of the grooms was pulling on his arm.

  “My prince—you dropped this.”

  It was the yellow scarf his cousin the Empress had given him. Michael stuffed it into his sleeve and went toward the storeroom, to look over his car.

  5

  Having nothing else to do, Hagen did not mind waiting for hours to get into the Hippodrome. The crowds amazed him. Some of these people, the ones at the head of the two lines, had waited for days to get the best seats; they brought food in baskets, jugs of wine, blankets to sleep on. Their voices were strident with excitement. Their children climbed and ran and fought and wailed around their knees, while the parents argued at the tops of their voices over the various drivers and teams of horses. All around Hagen, the Greeks made bets with the fervor of men seeking Heaven. They swore and laughed and sang songs in honor of their favorites, and hated anyone who disagreed with them.

  There were two factions, Hagen gathered, from what he overheard, and everybody in the waiting crowd wore his faction’s colors, blue or green. They banded together, all the greens in one line, all the blues in the other. Two teams in each faction raced today. The Blues had some local hero, a driver who seemed to be related to the Empress, and also had brought in a team from Nicomedia; and the Greens were putting up a team from Thessalonica as well as their home team from Constantinople, whose driver was named Mauros-Ishmael, Black Ishmael.

  Since Hagen had by chance come to stand in the Blue line, he heard wonderful things about the Prince, who was the favorite to win. The bet-takers, working their way up and down the line, were calling out the odds on their teams, and Prince Michael was never offered at more than one to one. Being champion, he wore the Golden Belt, which was the object of winning the race.

  The lines clogged the whole street outside the Hippodrome and wound away into the City. The high brick wall of the racecourse curved around to the southwest, and the street travelled along its foot, going steeply downhill, and at the foot of the hill opened out on to a flat wide pavement. All along this way, the Hippodrome wall was cut into a series of arches, leading into caverns and alleys and rooms beneath the wall.

  Here, the whores sauntered up and down, and Hagen, wandering around while he waited for the racecourse to open its gate, saw more than one man pay his penny and take what he had purchased in the shadow at the back of an arch.

  Here also were rows of cages and fenced enclosures, full of extraordinary animals. Hagen had seen a giraffe in Antioch, but he had never come upon an elephant before, and he stood on his toes to look over the wall into its pen, amazed at the size and weight of this beast that before he had known only in tales. A swarm of little boys scrambled up the wall and threw scraps into the elephant’s straw, and the vast creature groped among the wisps with its long nose and neatly picked up tiny bits.

  While Hagen stood gaping at this, a wild-eyed man in a hooded cloak gripped his arm and whispered in his ear. “I can tell your future!”

  “What?” Hagen asked.

  “I can tell you the future! Will you be rich? Will you live to a great age? I have the secrets of the cosmos—here!” The man tapped his forehead. “Two irenes.”

  Hagen grunted at him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the future. “Leave me alone.”

  “Wait! Are you married?” The man seized his hand and tried to turn the palm up. “You will marry an heiress. A fortune shall be yours! You will be emperor—”

  “Get away from me!”

  “One irene!”

  Hagen cocked his fist. The soothsayer ducked away from the threatened blow. “Half! A farthing!”

  Hagen laughed at him, turning away.

  “Ten pence!”

  Still laughing, the Frank walked off, away from the animal pens, back toward the crowd waiting to get into the track. As he climbed the slope, a man in a monk’s robe hissed at him from the shadow of an arch.

&nb
sp; “You! Pilgrim! I have pieces of the True Cross—”

  Hagen ignored that. Ever since he came through Italy people had been trying to sell him relics. Behind him, the monk cursed him in a voice much thickened with wine.

  Finally, at noon, the lines began to move, creeping forward, two sluggish ropes that wound up the hill and through the double gate. Once inside, the orderly lines dissolved as people battled for the good seats and shoved and pushed and elbowed their way on to the great stone benches that rose like a frozen wave above the long sides of the racecourse. Hagen separated himself from this confusion as soon as possible and climbed up to the top of the circus, where he could see everything and still be by himself.

  He was tired; Rogerius haunted him. Everything he did reminded him of other times when he had done the same thing with his brother there beside him. He found himself listening for his brother’s voice. Out in the City, once, passing a little old Greek church, he had nearly gone in, because Rogerius would have insisted on it.

  Now he sat down on the very top bench of the Hippodrome and stared out across the flood of strangers and wished Rogerius were here.

  It was a beautiful racecourse. The oval was covered with coarse sand; down the center ran a low wall of brick, studded with curious shafts of stone and statues of people and animals. Up here, at the top, there were more statues. The whole top tier was crowded with them, old, battered, in no order, some reduced to pieces of pieces, an arm, a foot, a horse’s head. He roamed among them, fascinated by the variety and number of them. Below him, the living, raucous crowd rapidly filled up the whole Hippodrome.

  He had never seen so many people all in one place, not at the Marchfield where the lords of the Franks assembled to give and hear counsel; not at the hostings of King Charles; yet those numbers had been marshalled up by great effort for grand purposes, and these people had come in off the streets, to see a horse-race.