by Tom Harper
‘Whoever fired the arrow must have come up through one of the other buildings and along the roof,’ I told the captain. We were in the workshop, and I kicked up great clouds of bone shavings striding around the room in thought, while the Varangian leaned on the table and played with a small chisel that was like a toy in his hands.
‘And will you spend your day asking every shopkeeper on the street whether he saw a fearsome assassin wander up his stairs, with a mythical weapon and a bunch of dates?’
I thought on this. ‘No,’ I decided. For three gold coins a day, I reasoned, such errands should be beneath me: Krysaphios would not want his treasure squandered. ‘You can do it.’
The captain’s red face flushed darker, and with a sudden movement he drove the chisel hard into the table. The fine point snapped at the impact. ‘Take care, Master Askiates,’ he bellowed, hurling the broken tool into a corner. ‘The Varangians serve to protect the Emperor’s life and to destroy his enemies. I have fought at his side in a dozen desperate battles, where the blood ran like rivers in the wilderness and the carrion-birds feasted for weeks. I will not be found begging gossip off merchants.’
Sunlight shone through the windows, and myriad fragments of dust and ivory swirled in the light as the Varangian and I stared at each other in silence. He glared at me with fury, one hand on the mace at his belt, while I levelled my eyes and tensed my shoulders. And in the brittle hush between us, there came the slight sound of an unguarded sneeze.
We both spun to the stairs from where it had come. There, just beyond a shaft of light and dust, was one of the carver’s young daughters, sitting on the bottom step and chewing a length of her dark hair. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her dress, and twisted her hands in her skirt as she looked shyly across at me.
‘I was on the roof yesterday,’ she said quietly. ‘Mamma doesn’t let me, but I was.’
At these simple words I almost jumped across the room, but I controlled myself enough to walk slowly over to her, a broad smile fixed intently on my face. I knelt down in front of her so that our heads were almost level, stroked her arm, and pushed some of the hair out of her face.
‘You were on the roof yesterday,’ I repeated. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Miriam,’ she said, looking down at her hands.
‘And what did you see on the roof yesterday, Miriam?’ Although I had assumed an easy, carefree tone, my face must have shown that every sinew in my body was tensed with expectation.
And doomed to frustration; she shook her head, and giggled softly to herself. ‘My friends,’ she said. ‘We play.’
‘Your friends,’ I echoed. ‘Other children? How about a man, a man carrying a big bow and arrow, like a soldier. Like him, perhaps,’ I added, gesturing to the Varangian behind me.
But again she shook her head, more vigorously this time. ‘Not like him. We played. Then Mamma found me and was cross. She hit me. I got a bruise.’ She began to lift her skirts to show me, but I hastily tugged them down over her legs: there were certain things I did not need evidenced.
‘And was this long before you watched the big procession?’
She considered this seriously for a moment. ‘No. She hit me and then we looked at the purple man on the horse.’
She seemed as though she might say more, but at that moment we heard her name being called from above, her mother sounding far less demure than when she’d spoken with me. Miriam hopped up off her seat, opened her eyes very wide and put a finger to her lips, then turned and ran up the stairs. Her bare feet made no sound on the smooth stone.
‘Well,’ said the captain, folding his arms over his barrel of a chest. ‘He shoots like lightning, he eats dates – and he’s invisible. How do you unveil an invisible man, Askiates?’
‘I’m leaving,’ I said shortly, ignoring his taunts. ‘There are men I must see.’
‘Not invisible men, then?’ Clearly he found this infinitely amusing.
‘Not invisible men.’
‘Aelric and Sweyn will go with you. The eunuch commands that you be guarded at all times.’
‘That’s impossible.’ I wondered how much Krysaphios wanted me guarded, and how much watched. ‘The men I am seeing are not those who would speak freely in front of palace guards.’ Nor indeed welcome their company at all.
I expected the captain to protest, to offer the argument that those who would avoid the guards were those who ought most encounter them, but he did not; instead he merely shrugged his shoulders.
‘As you choose,’ he grunted. ‘But if you want to give the eunuch his report, you will be back at the palace by nightfall. Otherwise the Watch will have you – and have you flogged for breaking the curfew.’
The thought did not appear to trouble him.
γ
I crossed the road, turned onto a side-street and plunged down the hill, heading for the merchant quarters and the Golden Horn. The path was steep and winding, frequently breaking into short flights of stairs where the slope was too treacherous, and I was grateful that the ashen skies had not yet delivered up their rain or I would have been upended many a time. The walls around me were sheer and tall, broken seldom by doors and never by windows: they were the fortified courtyards of Venetian traders, who kept their wares, like their lives, locked away from sight. Occasionally a slave or a servant slipped through one of the stout bronze gates, but more often the street was deserted.
Gradually, though, my surroundings became less imposing, the buildings first unassuming, then modest, and finally humble. Shops appeared, crowding the alley with wares and smoke and the shouts of their owners, boasts of quality and promises of bargains unimaginable. Now I had to push my way through, resisting every manner of blandishment and enticement, while the upper storeys of the buildings reached closer and closer together, until I could imagine myself in the high basilica of an enormous church. So, at last, I came to the house of the fletcher.
‘Demetrios!’ As I stooped under his lintel, he put down the fistful of feathers he held and rose, limping out from behind his table to embrace me like a brother.
‘Lukas.’ I clapped my arms around his back, then retreated a step to let him take the weight off his twisted leg. ‘How does the trade go?’
Lukas laughed, pulling a bottle and two cracked mugs from under his table and splashing out generous measures of wine. ‘Well enough to give you a drink. As long as Turks and Normans keep their women mothering sons, there’ll be targets enough for my arrows.’ He leaned forward. ‘And there are rumours, Demetrios – rumours of a new war, of a great barbarian army coming to drive the Turks back to Persia.’
‘I’ve heard those rumours too,’ I acknowledged. ‘But I’ve heard them every month since you and I fought by the Lake of Forty Martyrs, and all I’ve ever seen come were adventurers who turned on us as soon as they had our gold, or visionary peasants.’
Lukas shrugged, and poured more wine. ‘Barbarians or no, I’ll still have a living. My masters at the palace have never reduced their order in a dozen years.’
We talked on for some minutes, swapping memories old and new, some shared but mostly separate, until – in a silence – I pulled Krysaphios’ mysterious missile from the folds of my cloak.
‘What do you make of this?’ I passed it to Lukas. ‘Could you make me a bow that could fire it, and with enough venom to pierce a steel hauberk?’
Lukas took the arrow in his hands and examined it closely, squinting in the dull light. ‘A bowyer could build you a bow that would fire it,’ he said, carefully. ‘If you wanted a toy, a plaything for your daughter. Perhaps she needs to fend off importunate suitors?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘But this arrow would make a dangerous toy – someone could injure themselves on it.’ He stroked a finger over the encrusted blood. ‘Indeed, it seems someone has.’
‘Someone has,’ I agreed.
‘Someone, perhaps, who was wearing a steel hauberk?’ Lukas watched me shrewdly.
‘Perhaps.’
Lukas handed
back the arrow. ‘No. If you fired that from a bow, you would be lucky to see it stick in a tree. There’s no weapon I know that could make it so lethal.’
I put the arrow back in my cloak, glad at least that the Varangian captain was not there to scorn this latest failure.
Lukas asked me to stay, but the day was drawing on and I did not want the first day of Krysaphios’ gold to have yielded nothing. For three hours I tramped the streets of the Platea, hunting out every mercenary and informer I could remember in all the holes they frequented. None could conceive of such a weapon as I sought, though all expressed interest in owning one should I find it. Some tried to guess my true purpose; others blustered, and swore they could cut down a man, hauberk or no, for a fair price. One was mad, and tried – without conviction, thankfully – to stab me. At length, sitting on my own in a grim little tavern chewing some pork, I decided that if the collective memory of the brigands and hired swordsmen I’d seen could not solve this riddle, the answer must lie further afield, beyond the realm of our Byzantine knowledge.
I was right: it did. But not so very far beyond our realm. It resided, I discovered, in a small tavern behind the quay of the Hebrews, in the person of a very short, very round man, with oily skin and a miserable vocabulary.
It was pure chance that I found him. I had gone to the tavern to find a soldier named Xerxes, a Saracen I had half-known in worse times. If the weapon came from the east, I hoped he might know it. He did not, but before I could make excuses he had brought me to his table and forced me to join him in the rough wine he was drinking. It tasted like stewed pine-bark, and I held the cup well in front of my mouth to hide my grimace as he introduced the companion he drank with, a fat Genoese named Cabo who shook my hand vigorously and blew spittle in my face.
‘Demetrios used to sell his sword-arm,’ explained Xerxes, resurrecting a past I preferred to forget. ‘Now he sells his brain. I don’t know which earns him less.’
‘Never as much as it’s worth,’ I assured him, though three gold pieces were already coming to seem overgenerous.
‘Cabo’s much cleverer,’ Xerxes told me. ‘He was in the business too. Now he’s a respectable merchant.’
‘What do you trade?’ I asked. I hardly cared, but talking kept me from having to drink.
Cabo gave a knowing leer from under thick eyebrows. ‘Silks. Gems. Gold. Weapons. Whatever men will buy.’
‘Cabo doesn’t like the imperial monopolies,’ added Xerxes with a wink. ‘He thinks they’re an abomination before your God. He’s like an evangelist.’
‘Weapons,’ I murmured, ignoring Xerxes. ‘I’m seeking a weapon.’
Cabo’s head lifted a fraction; his eyelids drew closer.
‘Are you?’ said Xerxes. ‘Returning to your old ways?’
‘A sword for ten gold pieces.’ Cabo spoke slowly, and I guessed he would have just enough Greek to haggle for the goods and officials he needed. Drink and women too, perhaps.
‘That’s more than a legal profit,’ I observed. ‘And I already have a sword. I need a bow.’
‘A bow for five gold pieces. Scythian. Very strong.’
‘The bow I need must be very strong. Stronger than any bow yet made, yet short enough to fire an arrow no longer than man’s arm. Strong enough to fire through steel.’
‘And to sink a trireme with one stroke, and to fly as far as the moon,’ said Xerxes. ‘Cabo is a businessman, Demetrios, not a conjurer. You’ve sold your brain once too often – there’s nothing left.’
‘I can sell you such a weapon.’ Cabo wiped the perspiration from his bald skull, and rested his fingers on the table, perhaps noticing that the cup had started to tremble in my hand. ‘For seven pounds of gold.’
‘Seven pounds of gold? You could buy an army with that?’ Xerxes thought it a jest and waved for more wine, but I was deaf to his interruption.
‘Do you have the weapon now?’ I asked.
Cabo shook his head. ‘Maybe in six months. Maybe in eight.’
‘And what would such a weapon be like?’ I did not try to hide my overweening interest; I hoped it would convince him my intentions were serious.
Cabo, for his part, did not hide his suspicion, but he had a merchant’s instincts and could not resist. ‘It is called tzangra, a crossed bow. Like a ballista, but a man can hold it himself. It will break open armour for you, if that is what you need.’
‘And by what miracle of invention does it do that?’ My blood and my breath both beat faster.
Cabo creased his forehead as he deciphered my question, then grinned and tapped the side of his head. ‘By magic.’
‘Genoese magic?’ I had never heard of such a weapon among our people.
Cabo nodded.
‘And do all men have them in Genoa?’
A shake of the head. ‘Very expensive. Difficult to make. But possible to get, if you want. If you pay. Five pounds of gold now. Two more when I have it.’
I left his offer unanswered for a moment, feigning consideration while the sweat began to bead again on Cabo’s scalp. At last: ‘I shall think on it.’
‘Why? Did you leave your five pounds of gold at home?’ Xerxes was petulant; perhaps he worried that I truly might have such riches at my command.
‘I gambled it on a horse at the hippodrome,’ I told him. ‘I need to collect my winnings.’
As I rose to leave, a final thought struck me.
‘Tell me, Xerxes,’ I said, dropping a copper coin onto the table for my part of the wine. ‘It’s been too many years since I retired. Where do the foreign mercenaries ply their trade now?’
‘In Paradise,’ said Xerxes sullenly. ‘On the road to the Selymbrian gate.’
‘Who’s the best?’
Xerxes shrugged. ‘None of them. You know what they do. Every week there’s a new cock on the dunghill. Go there and ask: someone will find you. Or cut your throat.’
At that Cabo laughed, spraying wine all across the table.
Dusk was falling without a sunset as I entered the street. I was weary – it had been an age indeed since I had covered so much ground in a day, and unearthed so many long forgotten acquaintances, but the relief of having found even a single link in the chain helped my tired legs mount the hill, past the walls of Ayia Sophia and into the broad arcades of the Augusteion. A dozen ancient rulers gazed down on me from their perches: some benevolent, some wise, some forbidding, each as he would have history know him, but I ignored them all. I passed the great gate on my right, and made for a small doorway in the far corner of the square where two Varangians stood, crested plumes on their helms and axes. One of them, I saw, was Aelric, the guard who had stood on the patch of blood for me that morning.
He raised his axe in greeting. ‘Come for the eunuch? They said you might.’ He looked up at the fading sky. ‘And never too soon.’
‘I’m here to see Krysaphios. He will want to know my progress.’
‘More than ours, I hope.’ Aelric gave a mock frown. ‘I never climbed so many steps as I did today. Sigurd had us up every house on the street asking if they’d allowed an assassin past.’
‘Sigurd?’
‘The captain. He said you ordered it.’
‘Did he? Did you find anything of interest?’
Aelric shook his grizzled head. ‘Only a girl suckling her child, who didn’t pull her dress up in time when we came in. Nothing to interest the eunuch.’
‘Speaking of whom . . .’
Leaving his companion on guard, Aelric led me through the door into a narrow arcade lining an orchard. The fruit trees were barren now, their branches spiny and white, but birds still called from them. We passed an enormous hall on our left, its vast doors fastened shut, and came through into a second atrium, where we skirted along another, broader corridor. We turned again, and soon I was lost in a labyrinth of halls and passages, columns and porticoes; of fountains, gardens, statues and courtyards. The very air itself was bewildering, sweet as honey and scented with incense and roses; w
arm as a summer’s day, though outside we were in the depth of winter. The trickling of streams, the murmur of conversation and the chime of hushed instruments filled my ears; golden light spilled from the doorways we passed, framing the images of this separate world like icons. Every room was thronged with people: senators dressed in the robes of the first order; generals in their armour; scribes and secretaries under mountains of parchment. I saw noblewomen laughing in discrete circles, and petitioners with the drawn look of those who have waited long hours in vain. It was like a vision of Paradise, and through all of it I moved silently, unseen and unheeded.
At length Aelric brought me to a stone courtyard. It seemed older than the parts we had been through: here the mosaics were cracked and the walls were bare, save for the carved heads of imperial ancestors in their shallow niches. The sounds of the palace were dulled, and the perfumes in the air now had to contend with the stink of the city. The arcades were empty, excepting a lonely figure sitting on a marble bench, who rose gracefully to his feet as I approached. Aelric, I suddenly realised, had vanished.
‘The Varangian captain thinks you are a fool, who dissipates his time in conversation with tradesmen.’ Krysaphios stepped languidly towards me. A lamp burned from its bracket in a pillar beside him. ‘And then provokes his employer by abandoning the escort I ordered.’
‘If the Varangian captain knew the least thing about finding a murderer,’ I said slowly, ‘then I might have cause to care what he thought.’
‘He says you had his men banging on doors asking futile questions all afternoon,’ Krysaphios pressed. ‘The imperial bodyguard. I wonder, Askiates, if you have sufficient imagination for your task.’
‘Imagination enough to find a weapon that no-one else knew.’ Briefly I described the tzangra of which the Genoese Cabo had spoken. ‘And I imagine that this foreign weapon had foreign hands on the string.’
‘A mercenary?’ Krysaphios thought on this. ‘Possibly. You yourself would know of such things, would you not?’ He watched the guarded anger sweep my face. ‘I know your story, Demetrios Askiates. I may not know the least thing about finding a murderer, but I am accomplished in the art of pinning a man to his past. Even a past he would rather forget – or hide.’