“What is this?” said her intended victim, outrage in his voice.
She startled. But it was not Theophano who had drawn his anger this time.
In through the masses of the supper guests, a very dirty man was coming. From head to toe he was disgusting. His clothes were filthy rags, and his feet were bare, and his face and hands and all other visible skin were smeared with mud and dung. As he came in across the room, all those within fifteen feet of his passage shrank away from him. Their voices stilled, and the silence spread like ripples through a pond, until, when he reached the front of the room and stood there before John Cerulis, the entire room was still.
John pressed a scented napkin to his nose and mouth. “Who are you?”
Theophano’s stomach turned. The man’s stench was appalling; she had never smelled anything so awful. Beside her, John Cerulis lifted his hand, and from the side of the room several of his guards rushed forward, holding their noses.
“Where did you come from?” John demanded. “Who let you in here? Speak!”
“Stop where you are,” cried the filthy creature. “If you lay hands on me, know that you obstruct a messenger of the Basileus!”
Theophano bit hard on her tongue, to keep back a burst of laughter. It was one of Irene’s jokes. She moved her head as far away as possible from the source of the odor. John Cerulis was pale as paper; his hand with the napkin dropped to the table.
“You come from the Palace?”
“Indeed,” said the filthy man. “She who rules the world has sent me here, John Cerulis, to command your attendance on her at the first of the qualifying races in the Hippodrome, to share the Imperial box with your Basileus and with the ambassador of the Caliph.”
The filthy man spat on the floor, grinned, turned, and walked away. No one spoke. Even the servants recoiled from him as he passed through their midst. Reaching the door, he went out.
John Cerulis was absolutely still. The insult had peeled away his smile; he looked as if he had just swallowed a needle that was stabbing him even now in the bowels. Slowly he lifted the perfumed napkin to his nose and inhaled.
“She is the Devil’s own daughter.”
Theophano kept her mouth shut. A gesture from John brought his fat bodyguard Karros leaping up to his side.
“Go,” John said, in an undertone. “Destroy that—thing, before he can boast of his offense to me. Go!”
Karros saluted him and strode off, his hand on the ornamented hilt of his sword. Slowly John’s head turned, sweeping his gaze across the room, looking, Theophano knew, for anyone who was laughing at him.
No one spoke; all struggled to look enraged for their master’s sake. Theophano looked away from him. There, among the line of the guards, was Hagen, his hand covering his mouth. She guessed he hid a smile. She glanced at John, and found him watching her with eyes that glittered like a dagger blade.
“You think to see me humiliated.”
“Oh, no, Patrician, I—”
“Well, you are wrong. You and your upstart mistress—know this, foolish one. I shall never sit there in her company and be condescended to! I shall never join with other lackeys in increasing her pride! Not I!”
“You cannot refuse the command,” Theophano said.
“I can—if I am not within the City.” He sniffed the perfumed napkin again, his gaze still burning on her. “And so I shall leave the City. We shall take up your suggestion, laughter-loving Theophano. We shall go to find this holy man who will make me emperor.”
“As you wish, Most Noble.”
“And in the country,” he said, showing his eyeteeth in a nasty smile, “many things may happen, hmm? And be hidden from all but the eyes of God. Hmm?”
“Are you threatening me?” she said evenly.
“I have no need to threaten, lovely, foolish Theophano. As you yourself said, your life is between the blades. And the blades are closing. Closing. Perhaps the wild uncouth barbarian can be persuaded to entertain us all with his revenge on the murderess of his brother? A public execution? Hmm?”
His smile grew wider and more unpleasant; he reached out with one hand and stroked her cheek lightly with his fingernails. Against her will, she turned her head, looking across the room, toward the wall where she had last seen Hagen standing.
He was gone. John Cerulis’s laughter, like glass breaking, clattered in her ears. She thought again of slaying him, but her mind would not confine itself in those comforting daydreams; her rebellious mind turned ever toward Hagen. She wondered if she would ever see him again. She longed to see him again, even if it meant her death. She leaned back against the back of her chair, torn with anxious longing.
It was Esad who, especially decorated for the task, had taken Irene’s invitation to John Cerulis. As soon as he got outside the nobleman’s palace, he knew someone was following him.
He looked around over his shoulder into the dark street and saw nobody, and his steps quickened. When the order came for this, he had thought it funny; the heavy purse that accompanied the order made daubing himself with horse dung a relatively harmless inconvenience. Now he knew he should have thought twice.
He moved through the narrow twisting streets toward the Forum of Theodosius, greatest of the wide squares that were strung like beads along the Mesê; the street was lit at night with rows of torches, and there, he thought, his heart jumping, he might find some safety. Behind him footsteps pattered on the stone, pursuing. He broke into a run. The footsteps ran also, coming closer. Panting with fear, he dashed out into the center of the great square, deserted now that night was come, and whirled in a circle, looking all around him.
On the roof of every shop, a yellow smoking torch flared. In the light, he saw only the broad flat pavement, a few wagons, a scattered heap of donkey dung. Then from the unlit lane he had just left, a tall figure stepped.
It was the white-haired barbarian, and he was coming after Esad with a look of purpose on his face. In a pell-mell rush of memories, Esad felt again the whip around his throat, the heavy hands on his body, and whirled and ran up the Mesê.
The barbarian was chasing him. The barbarian was gaining on him. His lungs on fire, his mind white with fear, Esad raced up the wide street, between the colonnades and the yellow torches, up toward the Palace. His eyes darted from side to side, looking for a cursor, for anyone who might help him, but the great street was deserted; among the fluted columns only shadows moved. He stumbled and went flat on his face, his knees and hands scraping over the pavement, and the barbarian caught him.
He screamed. The barbarian hoisted him up onto his feet and held him fast.
“Don’t be stupid,” the barbarian said in his ear, and shook him hard. “I’m trying to help you. God’s blood, you stink.”
Esad flung off the heavy hand on his arm. “Help me! What are you chasing me for?”
The barbarian smiled at him. “Let me walk you back to the stables. Or better, to the baths. Pagh!” He held his nose.
“I don’t need you!”
“You don’t? Well, then, I’ll be on my way, which happens to be the same way you’re going, isn’t it.”
Esad cast a look over his shoulder. The street swept down behind him into the broad square of the Forum; he could see nothing menacing there.
Except, now that he looked, a man who had not been there before was walking innocently along the side of the Mesê, and while he watched disappeared behind the columns. He faced front again.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, loud. “Not even John Cerulis would dare lay hands on a messenger of the Basileus.”
The barbarian said nothing, only walked along beside him, a few feet to the side, out of the stench. Esad was used to it; he mucked stalls for a good part of every day anyway. It had seemed such an amusing thing, when the order came, and the purse was heavy, a month’s pay in silver. Surely nobody would
harm an Imperial messenger.
His back crawled. He could not resist looking behind him again.
Now the street looked entirely empty. But columns lined it, the walkways on either side where the jewelers kept their shops, and any number of men might hide there, even with the streetlamps lit.
“I don’t need you,” he said again, to the barbarian.
The white-haired man didn’t bother looking at him; he smiled wide as he walked.
If someone were coming after him—Esad glanced over his shoulder again—surely John Cerulis would send a pack? He thought of the two times he had taken the measure of the barbarian; his fingers went to his neck, still tender from the lash. On the big man’s hip the long sword hung, its hilt wrapped in worn leather, like any common tool.
“Why are you doing this for me?”
The barbarian said nothing for a moment, striding along beside Esad, his arms swinging loose at his sides. Finally, he turned to look down at the groom.
“I don’t know. I don’t like you, I don’t like your master, but I don’t like the man behind us a lot more than I don’t like you.”
“I don’t understand you—can’t you speak properly?”
“I don’t understand it either. I wish he would jump me and get it over with.”
“I thought you said it was I he’s after.”
The barbarian said nothing more. They were coming to the great square before the Palace wall, rising sheer and white into the night sky. The Mesê ended at the Chalke, and before the huge bronze doors they stopped. The barbarian looked behind them. The Mesê swept away from them into the City, a ribbon of marble blue-white in the moonlight, studded with torches.
“Good night,” said the barbarian, and walked away. Esad gaped after him; the ignorant, arrogant peasant, he was actually going in through the Chalke, banging on the bronze to wake up the half-drunken gateman. Esad shook his head, considerably uplifted by this evidence of the barbarian’s inferiority.
A sound behind him startled him; he jumped a foot, and then, as if his reason lost its balance, he was overcome with fear. He ran all the way down the wall street toward the Hippodrome door, and dashed inside, into the warmth and safety of the barn.
Karros watched the two men from behind a statue on the Mesê. When the white-haired barbarian went in through the Chalke, leaving the filthy groom alone and vulnerable, Karros almost went after him, but the groom sprinted away before he could get within striking distance. Karros relaxed, leaning against the pedestal of the statue, his eyes reflective on the Palace wall before him.
He had been right to come alone. He congratulated himself on his craft and foresight. Had he brought any of his men with him, they would have seen that he was afraid of the barbarian, he would have lost stature in their eyes.
As it was, being alone, he enjoyed a comfortable latitude of choice.
Of course he had been wise not to attack the groom, in spite of his orders; outnumbered two to one, he would have been mauled. Not even John Cerulis would have expected him to take on two men by himself.
Anyway, he could manage John Cerulis.
It was the barbarian who caused him problems. Karros had to kill him—this business of walking the groom back to the Palace, that proved it, proved he was no friend of John Cerulis. It proved as well he meant to stand against Karros in everything. But he was tough, the big man. To kill him, Karros had to catch him drunk, his back turned, his breeches down around his ankles, his shirt pulled over his head, his sword fifty feet away. Karros had not gotten where he was by taking unnecessary chances.
Make friends with him. Then kill him.
He padded away through the Forum of Theodosius, through the City sleeping and quiet. It was cold, for mid-June. Karros began to think of a cup of heated wine and his fur slippers. In an alley behind the fishmongers’ stalls, he killed a cat and smeared the blood along his sword blade, to prove to his master that he had slain the filthy groom, and went happily home again.
15
The public baths were in the Zeuxippus district, below the Hippodrome on the western slope of the City. The front entrance was always swarming with whores and fortune-tellers, and the City Prefect, anonymously hooded and cloaked, made his way around to the little door at the rear where the privileged could go in undisturbed. A knock brought the porter to admit him; he dropped a coin into the discreetly cupped palm and went by him and down a corridor to the disrobing room.
The great building in which the baths were housed was one of the oldest structures in Constantinople. The murals on the wall of the disrobing room showed people in styles of dress that no one had worn since the days of Justinian and Belisarius and the Reconquista. A number of other men were taking off their clothes there, but none of them was Nicephoros. The Prefect, with the help of an attendant, stripped himself to the skin, wrapped a white cloth around his loins, and walked down the slippery puddle-strewn corridor to the first of the three bathing rooms, the warm room.
An earthquake in the reign of Phocas had ruined this part of the ancient structure, and the tepidarium was much newer than the rest of the bath. The walls were sheathed in slick white tiles with a narrow band of blue around the top and the bottom. Wooden benches along all four sides allowed men to sit down and chat or daydream or even read while their bodies got used to the warmth. Now there were so many men in the tepidarium that the Prefect could not find a place on the bench, and his health requiring that he allow his flesh to warm gradually, he was forced to spend this period walking slowly up and down the center of the room; his only consolation was that exercise and stringent diet had kept his body smooth and slim and he could be proud of the figure he cut. He let his towel drape itself attractively over his hips and kept an eye out for amorous homosexuals, although this being the middle of the day anyone with a prurient interest would, by unspoken custom, be expected to keep still.
He noticed, through the tail of his eye, a number of appreciative glances at his excellent legs and shapely chest and arms. His spirit buoyed by this, he went on into the caldarium, the hot room.
This room, much larger than the tepidarium, was dominated by the enormous pool in the center, kept so hot that the greenish surface of the water released a constant mist of steam into the overheated air, and droplets of water condensed instantly on his flesh. Skylights in the roof let in enough light to give the place a milky luminescence. Through this swirling mist of steam and veiled sunlight the other men moved like shadows; their heads bobbed in the bath, and along the sides, on the benches, they seemed like parts of the wall.
The Prefect gave his towel to an attendant and walked down into the water. The heat made him gasp. Bravely he forced himself down until he was submerged up to the neck, and turned around three times, saying the appropriate prayers to Saint John, the patron of the baths, before he climbed out again and with a sigh of relief sat down on the bench.
Almost at once a body hove through the mists and dropped down beside him with a grunt. It was Nicephoros, his towel tied around his waist. Dressed, he always looked lean, perhaps a function of his height and his bearing; without the disguise of clothes his body was shapeless and pudgy, his abdomen a round womanish bulge covered with hair, his arms droopy with flab. The Prefect shook his head.
“Nicephoros, you ought to take care of yourself.”
The Treasurer stretched out his legs. “I haven’t the leisure.” He twitched and shifted on the bench, settling himself, emitting little groans and grunts as he moved. The Prefect fought off a stab of the mild alarm that had nagged him since Nicephoros’s request for this meeting; he reminded himself of all the good things Nicephoros had done for him.
“Ah.” Nicephoros sighed, leaning back against the wall. A river of sweat streamed down his chest and over the side of his belly, sweeping the black hair flat. “I should come here more often.”
“You should. And perhaps leave off those swe
ets that the Empress—”
“Peter,” Nicephoros said, “if I were you, I would not take unnecessary liberties with my tolerance of insult. I want to know what you did with the money with which you were supposed to pay the charioteers.”
The Prefect stiffened; he felt as if a blow had fallen on his back. Swiftly he looked around him. No one was near enough to eavesdrop. Facing Nicephoros again, he tried his smile on.
“Nicephoros, you know my budget has been curtailed. There is no money for anything.”
“Peter, don’t lie to me. The money for the charioteers was there. I looked it up. You had it, but you did not pay them, and now you have it no longer. Why not?”
“I’m sorry, Nicephoros. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Really.”
“And I’m offended that you take advantage of our friendship to broach such a matter with me. Don’t you trust me?”
“Hunh,” said Nicephoros, and wiped his face on his towel.
This response encouraged the Prefect; he kept up the attack. “If you are accusing me of something, Nicephoros, I would be very pleased if you would come out and say so, or better yet—”
“I am not accusing you, dear boy,” said Nicephoros, shifting on the bench again, and shooting a furious look at the Prefect. “The Basileus has asked me to find out what you are doing that makes it impossible for you to deal with her face to face.”
The Prefect shut his mouth. He swiveled his face forward, toward the bath, the green water, the wraiths of rising steam.
“I must say, Peter, I do owe you a certain gratitude, since in misuse of your office you left sufficient evidence that I wasted very little time in uncovering the truth.”
“Nicephoros, I swear to you—”
“I know you keep a very fine house, Peter, is that it? When the rest of the City suffers through hard times, you could not lower even a little your expectations of life?”
The Prefect said nothing. Bitterly he stared at the bath, reminding himself that this confrontation was no doubt inevitable, but why did it have to be Nicephoros, whom he trusted? He would rather have been called before the Parakoimomenos, or the Basileus.
The Belt of Gold Page 18