Their bows swung level, side by side they drew back the arrows, but they hesitated, unwilling to shoot their friend to get to Hagen. The man in Hagen’s arms screeched and kicked and pounded him over the head with his fists. Hagen’s forearm hurt where the arrow had gone through it. He braced his feet and swung the man in his arms like a whip at the two bowmen before him.
The effort drove him to his knees, but all three of the Greek soldiers went flying. Like a fool the first to gain his feet kept on trying to use his bow, scrabbling for another arrow from the case on his belt, and Hagen staggered up and wrenched out his sword.
He shouted. The feel of the sword in his hands was like a jolt of strong liquor. The bowman, his arrow still unnocked, whirled to run, and Hagen struck him down, cleaving down into his head with the blade so that half his face fell off.
The other two men came at him from opposite directions, wielding short-handled double-bladed axes. The taller of these hewed at him, and when Hagen fended off his blows with the flat of his sword, the shorter man attacked his back.
Hagen dodged, running out from between them, and they dashed after him. He stopped and they ran to catch him between them again, and he leapt away. Like this they crossed the flat rooftop, going from side to side, a short dash, the two men splitting up to go on either side of him, another dash. The roof was sound, at least, but the two Greeks were clever and would not be run off the edge, and they were improving their tactics as he let them work at it.
The shorter one was quick but he always struck left. The tall one was slow. Hagen dodged again, waiting for an opening.
A yell from across the alley startled him; he jerked his head around to see, in a window of the second story of the building next door, a gasping shouting group of men, among them Nicephoros, watching the fight. They cheered as they saw him turn. Distracted, he stared at them an instant too long, and the man behind him struck.
The blow went short, and the Frank flinched from it, but the upper tip of the curved axe blade sliced across his back. He bolted off into the center of the roof, doubled up with pain, clutching the sword with both hands for fear of dropping it.
He yelled; he beat at the air with the sword, driving back the fear and weakness lurking in the wound. The two axes circled him. He howled again, jumped into the air as high as he could.
They came at him again, the tall one first, cutting high and low, while the little one scurried around and rushed at his back and yelled.
All his nerves jumped, but the shout behind him told him to expect an attack from the man in front of him. When the tall man lunged, Hagen hit him with a counterstroke across the spine that broke the tall Greek nearly in half.
Hagen screamed, triumphant, and jumped on the fallen man and hewed off his head. The little man turned and ran. Hagen started after him but his foot slipped on the blood and he went to his knees. Nimble as a tumbler, the little man leapt from the rooftop and raced away down the street.
Out of breath, Hagen made no effort to follow. The battle-rage that had sustained him ebbed swiftly away. His back hurt and his arm was bleeding a lot. Living in the City had softened him and he felt sick to his stomach. He walked over to look at the two men he had killed; one of them wore a lot of fancy rings, but he took nothing; he wanted nothing to remind him of this. He climbed down from the rooftop and went up toward the street.
The girl was gone. He growled, remembering her; he was in a mood now to bite those breasts off. Nicephoros was coming out of the door.
Seeing Hagen, he came forward, with both hands outstretched. “How badly are you hurt? Oh, my God, Redeemer of all. Let’s get out of here. Chair! Chair!”
“I’m all right,” Hagen said.
The cut in his back was painful but shallow. It was the hurt in his arm that felt bad to him, oozing, itching already.
Two of the City cursores were standing by Nicephoros’s chair, talking to him, and when Hagen came up, they both stared at him. One of the bearers was bringing his horse for him and Hagen turned to mount.
Nicephoros said, “He was magnificent, I cannot tell you how courageous and great of arms he is. Achilles would have turned and run from him. His voice was the bellow of a volcano as it roars the fury of the Almighty.”
“Come on,” Hagen said.
The bearers set off at their smooth flowing trot. Hagen’s horse was practiced at keeping pace with the chair, staying just to the left side of it, and went along without any urging of Hagen’s.
“You were magnificent,” Nicephoros told him yet again, just as jubilantly.
“They were Greeks,” Hagen said. “You people have no gift for it.”
He told himself that it had been a good fight. He had taken wounds, but they had set on him unexpectedly, and he had killed two out of three of the men. The last had fled from the prospect of facing him alone.
He was tired. Had he been forced to fight another few moments, he might have gotten too tired to do it. He was turning Greek: he was getting soft. His mood sank again, as if lowering clouds of menace pressed down on him. He thought again of John Cerulis as a vast stinking fog that closed down on the City and invaded through the breath. The sense gnawed him of business undone, of something owed, of something to be justified. Why had he given up the list to John Cerulis? He had held her in his arms for twenty minutes only before they slew her. His heart ached for her like a raw wound. He followed Nicephoros up to the Palace and the gate shut on him.
The physician put Hagen’s arm to soak in holy water and plastered the gash on his back with a bandage on which an appropriate Biblical verse was written. While the Frank sat on a bench in the sunny little sheltered courtyard, he could hear Nicephoros in the room behind him, describing the fight on the rooftop to someone else.
“Never a move wasted! He moved more like a great cat than a man—it was beautiful, a sort of dance. Makes you understand why it was so popular, when it was part of the Games.”
Through the door behind Hagen a tide of people spilled—pages, one with a fan, one with a sunshade trimmed with ostrich plumes, and after them two women in sumptuous dress, and a crowd of others Hagen could not see—he knew the Empress was coming. A moment later he heard her voice.
“Who were they? Did you recognize any of them?”
Hagen wiggled his arm in the basin of water; the wound felt good, drawing and tightening as it healed. His whole body ached, every muscle sore, and he was still tired.
Constantinople was corrupting him, yet he could not go. He had a debt here, an obligation. Over and over in his mind he rode double down that dark road, he stopped with Theophano for that last kiss. Over and over, the arrow came. She was gone; she had given her life for something else, something he did not understand, and he had interfered and made a nothing of her sacrifice.
Deep in this black daydream, he caught a dazzling glimpse of gold, and stood up to face the Empress.
“Let me kill him,” he said to her. “I could reach him even if a hundred men surrounded him, and I would gladly die doing it.”
Her eyes were brilliant green, more wonderful than jewels. She laid her hand on his arm and gently urged him down again on the bench. “Tend your wounds. You have earned our deepest gratitude. They certainly meant to shoot Nicephoros through the window, had you not acted.”
“Give me John Cerulis.”
“My boy, my boy.” She put out one hand, and her people encircled her, one bringing a chair, another the sunshade, the others straightening her silken skirts and her sleeves and her hair. “You must have faith in God, Hagen.”
“Maybe God wants me to kill this pig.”
“I feel not, my boy.”
“He is killing as he chooses, you know—he will take you when he chooses. Will you not defend yourself? Let me have him.”
“Sin cannot have consequences of virtue. My champion is Christ Himself, as I am His Basileus.”
Hagen’s head sank down between his shoulders; he felt himself smothering in the soft luxury of this place, where a woman could be king.
She said, “When you were travelling with John Cerulis, did you find anything remarkable? Anything at all? Did you talk with him?”
“I talked to him once or twice.” He struggled to recall what they had said. “He seemed interested mostly in his food and drink and poetry.”
“Can you remember anything he said—anything at all?”
“He is a serpent. He believes nothing but evil speech. He—”
Now Hagen thought of something and laughed. He raised his head, his gaze meeting the Empress’s, intense and smiling at him. “He wanted to know about the favor that Michael wore, in the race that time—a scarf he wore on his arm. I told him it was a signal that the race was fixed.”
For an instant her eyes were wide and fierce; then, like water bubbling up, her laughter rose. “And he believed you?”
“Yes. He believes all poison, nothing healthy will he hold in mind, but all wickedness. I told him the yellow scarf meant there was no fix, but a red one meant there was.”
She laughed, long and richly, and he saw again what a beautiful woman she was, and wondered if she had men. He guessed not. She would give no man that power over her. He imagined seducing her; she loved luxury and touching, it would not be so hard. Then again he imagined being seduced by her, and saw that it would be like being eaten alive, and in a sudden cool reality knew why she had no men.
She was watching him with a broad smile on her face. “I beg your pardon. There was an attempt to fix one of the races—did you know that? While you were away. Fortunately Ishmael would not be bought.”
“Ishmael.” He remembered Ishmael, wishing this world away, and saw a connection there.
“How do your wounds feel? Will you heal swiftly, do you think?”
He moved his shoulders, putting off useless considerations. His back hurt when he shifted. “God willing.”
“God willing.” She leaned forward and laid her hand against his face, a maternal sort of blessing. He bowed; when he raised his head again she was going.
Nicephoros said, “Here, at the top of the wall.”
He started up the steps that climbed the inside of the huge land wall, with one hand holding fast to an iron railing bolted to the bricks. Hagen went up after him.
The wall was made of the same dark yellow stone and darker brick the rest of Constantinople was built of. It rose up out of a thicket of sharp-smelling myrtle, rising twenty-five feet high to a top surface broad and smooth enough to ride a horse on. Nicephoros reached it and walked along it, going the opposite way from the closest tower, toward the Sea of Marmora. He beat his arms around him as he walked; the night wind was coming up. Hagen went along behind him, wondering why Nicephoros had brought him here.
They walked about a hundred feet along the top of the wall. The sun had just gone down. The twilight was rising off the sea like a transparent veil. Here the wall broke steeply downwards, down a short difficult slope toward the beach, and on the outward side was nothing but thickets and overgrown trees and wild meadows, while on the inside were groups of little houses, surrounded by gardens and goat pastures, in which, now, as the twilight deepened, one window after another grew yellow with the light of lamps. Nicephoros stopped.
“It was here,” he said, “that the Virgin Mary appeared on the walls, when the Arabs and their fleet were besieging the City; she came to warn us that the infidels were launching a surprise attack. You can see that cove, down there, where they came ashore in little boats.”
He pointed down the hillside toward the sea. Hagen nodded; he had been at the siege of Milan, and he saw the possibilities of an attack up this slope.
Nicephoros was looking from one side of the wall to the other, from the wilderness to the City, his head moving steadily back and forth. He said, “I have been thinking of becoming a monk.”
“A monk!”
The Treasurer sighed. With one hand he rubbed quickly at his huge arched nose. “I come here, you see, because to me this is the edge of the Empire. Not—we have territories outside the walls, of course, but they are ancillary. It is here that Constantinople ends.”
Hagen put his back to the brambly wilderness and stared into the great City. Here, close to the wall, the houses were sparsely scattered among fields and meadows, but as the slope mounted, rising and falling in a succession of hills that climbed toward the great summit of the headland where the Palace stood, the buildings thickened and gathered to a solid mass of worked stone and tile roofs and domes. Over there he could see the Mesê, where now the streetlamps were being lit, starting at the Charisian Gate. The smoky orange flames in pairs mounted halfway up the uneven slope, and as he watched, more appeared, rising through the gathering dusk like a bed of fallen stars.
He said, “To me, this City is like a woman, who turns her back on me, but flirts with me over her shoulder, and seems ugly and plain at first, but becomes more beautiful than any other, and is good to me and foul to me—”
He stopped. He did not want to say what he felt, that the City’s fascination frightened him. He thought of Theophano. In his memory she was pure and white and good as the Virgin herself, who had come here to warn her people against evil, and he ached for what he had lost.
Nicephoros was saying, “Indeed. Well: corroboration from an unexpected source. I too feel her to be an illusion.”
He locked his hands behind his back, looking out over the land wall into the thorny thickets and tumbled boulders. Hagen could hear the surf on the beaches of Marmora, and he could make out also the sounds of animals in the wild brush, the birds hopping from branch to branch, the first faint piping of the night frogs and the little tree-toads. Above the brush, the bats whirled and dove after insects invisible in the gathering darkness, and something larger was crashing through the brush almost directly below him, browsing. A deer, or a wild goat, perhaps.
Beside him the Treasurer’s voice began again, freighted with meaning.
“Life, my friend, is a castle of illusion. The only reality is death. We may strive against it all we will, and imagine great bulwarks of art and science and faith to put it off, but in the end it takes every one of us. Christ Himself could not elude death.”
Hagen glanced at him, wondering; he saw the Treasurer’s face fixed in an expression of fierce decision.
“Yet even Christ had to live in the illusion,” Nicephoros said. “He lived thirty-three years upon this earth, awaiting the moment of His Godhead, and while He lived, He lived in the Empire.”
At that he caught a quick breath, as if he had walked into something. Hagen kept still. In Nicephoros’s voice more than his words he sensed a struggle going on.
“If one must live in the illusion, even when the reality is elsewhere, then what matters is the quality of the illusion. There is this, or that.” He indicated first the wilderness, and then the City. “There is the brutish life of savages, or the rational, humane life of Christian men.”
Hagen said, “You think too much, Nicephoros, and act too little.”
“Ah, yes. One might expect such criticism from such as yourself, my dear barbarian—in your smaller sphere, you may brawl and blunder as you will, harming no one but yourself. But my failures are disaster for the Empire.”
“Then why are you becoming a monk?”
“I—” Nicephoros lifted his arms and let them fall. His gaze swiveled from the wilderness to the City and back again. Finally he turned to Hagen once more, and his face was grave and eaten with doubts. “As long as she needs me, of course, I will stay.”
“Nicephoros, if you give it up, if all men of heart and mind give it up, who will do it?”
“Clowns, and fools, and wicked sinners,” said Nicephoros. “Which is very little change, it seems to me.”
; Then suddenly he was weeping. Hagen stepped back, surprised at the vehemence of the other man’s tears.
“I am sorry.” The Treasurer struggled for composure. “A friend of mine died recently, I am not myself.” His eyes burned lunatic bright behind their gloss of tears. Under his breath, he whispered, “But I am alive! Alive.”
Hagen looked toward the City again. He was resisting the impulse to touch this Greek whose passions contended so nobly, who struggled so stubbornly to make sense of the inconceivable. Beside him, Nicephoros, with a certain superb practicality, blew his nose.
“You drove the Arabs back,” Hagen said. “The City will survive this, too.”
Nicephoros was putting away his napkin. He said, “It was my fault the Arabs came at all. I am not much of a soldier—she gave me an army, and I lost it.” He threw back his shoulders, lifting his chest, bracing himself into a manly stature, like putting on a uniform. “Well: let us go back. There is much to do before dinner.”
“As you will, Nicephoros.”
They went down from the wall; they went back into the bosom of the City, glowing with the lights of the evening.
26
Ishmael was not at the underground stable of the Hippodrome, nor at the tavern where the racing teams gathered; no one there had seen him for days. Hagen went down into the City and found the charioteer’s house.
He banged on the door with his fist; there was no answer. He stood there staring at the blank panel, wondering what he was doing here: Ishmael was no matter of his. None of this was any matter of his. Yet he knocked again on the door, and this time, someone answered.
“Yes?” The door opened a crack. A woman peered out, covering her face with the flat of her hand. “Yes? Yes?”
“I am looking for Ishmael.” He struggled to remember the rest of the charioteer’s name, and it leapt into his memory, the reverse of his own. “Mauros-Ishmael.”
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