The Mosaic of Shadows

by Tom Harper

  ‘Move, and you lose your head,’ he said, breathing hard.

  I looked around, dazed. ‘Is this the Bulgar? Is this the man Vassos brought us to find?’ I shook my head, trying to clear some of the pain. ‘Where is Vassos?’

  Sigurd glanced around the square, and swore so angrily that I thought he might decapitate the captive in sheer frustration. Vassos was gone, presumably slipped away in the struggle.

  ‘This is the Bulgar,’ said Sigurd. ‘Or at least, so the pimp told us. That was when we started running. None too soon,’ he added, with a reproving glance in my direction.

  I was heartfelt in my agreement. ‘Not a moment too soon. You saved my life.’

  ‘Saved you from yourself,’ muttered Sigurd. ‘Carrying a mace doesn’t make you a Varangian, Demetrios. You were a fool to charge in.’

  A groan from within the fountain reminded me what had prompted my impulse; I crossed to where the Bulgar had stood on its lip and peered down. The figure I had seen was still there, and I doubt he had moved an inch since I joined the battle, for his bare limbs and white tunic were covered in blood, and there were deep gashes in his leg. He lay with his knees pulled into his chest and his arms clasped about his head, making not the least sound.

  ‘I saved someone in my turn, at least.’ I stepped into the fountain and knelt beside him, lifting one shoulder as tenderly as I could to glimpse his face. He whimpered as I prised his hand from his eyes, but as it came away I almost lost my grip so great was my shock. This creature, this man whom the Bulgar warrior had been dismembering when I attacked, was not a man at all, but a mere boy whose hollow cheeks still bore the downy hairs of the first beard. He was solidly built for his years, but those must have been fewer even than the girl Ephrosene’s.

  ‘A child,’ I murmured, astounded. ‘The Bulgar was trying to kill a child.’

  ‘Maybe he tried to pick his pocket,’ said Sigurd. ‘There’s a purse on the ground over here.’ He stooped to pick up the leather bag and hooked it onto his belt. ‘Not that the whoreson will be needing it now. Maybe the boy fucked his sister. Who cares.’

  I was about to argue the point, but Sigurd had already forgotten the boy in the fountain and stepped back to regard his captive.

  ‘Get him to his feet,’ he ordered. ‘And bind his arms behind his back. I’m going to march you all the way to the palace with my axe at your neck,’ he told the Bulgar. ‘If you so much as stumble your head will lose the company of its shoulders.’

  ‘What about the boy?’ I asked. ‘He needs help – he’ll bleed to death otherwise.’

  ‘What about the boy?’ Sigurd shrugged. ‘I’ve already detached one of my men trying to redeem a petty whore, and had that pimp Vassos escape from me. I’ll see this Bulgar at the palace in chains whether he’s the man who tried to kill the Emperor or a pilgrim who got lost on his way to the shrine. I won’t lose him by using my men as stretcher-bearers for a pickpocket who chose his target poorly. And you,’ he added, stabbing a finger into my chest, ‘should clean that blood off your face and come with us, if you want the eunuch to think he spends his gold wisely.’

  ‘I’ll come to the palace in my own time,’ I said fiercely, taking a step backwards. ‘And that will be when I’ve found this boy a clean bed and a doctor. On my own, if I have to.’

  ‘On your own, then. If you go south down that street, you should meet the Mesi.’ Sigurd picked his mace out of the dust, scowling to see the gash in its handle, and returned it to his belt before prodding the prisoner forward. With his lieutenants flanking the captive, he marched away, and I was alone in the square.

  My head was wracked with pain, and my right arm still numb, but I somehow managed to lift the boy into my arms and carry him out of the basin where he lay. My steps were awkward and faltering; I feared that at any moment I would topple forward and do the child yet worse injury, but with frequent recourse to the support of the surrounding walls I made some headway out of the square and down the hill. Now I could see a sliver of the main road at the end of the alley, and I hurried as best I could to reach it. Although it was a cool day and I was still in the shade of the buildings, sweat began to sting my eyes and trickle down my nose; my beard itched unbearably. My arms and back too demanded that I pause, that I sit down and rest them if only for a minute, but I suspected that once the boy was on the ground I would never raise him up again. I cursed Sigurd and his heartlessness; I cursed Vassos and his Bulgarian thug, and I cursed myself for risking my commission with the palace just to carry a dying boy a hundred paces closer to death.

  In a haze of pain and fury, I reached the road. There I succumbed, and collapsed against a stone which proclaimed I was exactly three miles from the Milion.

  ‘Are you well?’

  I opened my eyes, which had drifted shut for a second. I was sitting at the edge of the Via Egnatia, my back supported by the milestone, with the boy’s head resting in my arms. His face seemed peaceful – more peaceful than the rest of his ravaged body, at least – but pale, and clammy. When I touched a hand to his cheek it was fearfully cold.

  ‘Are you well?’

  I looked up to meet the insistent voice. It was a drayman, his face shaded by a broad-brimmed hat, standing before a cart loaded with clay pots. He spoke in a kindly voice which, after a moment’s confusion, I answered.

  ‘Well enough. But the boy is in a perilous state. He needs a doctor.’

  The drayman nodded. ‘There is a doctor at the monastery of Saint Andrew. I can carry your boy there on my cart – my journey passes it. I am going to the cemetery.’

  ‘I’m trying my best to avoid the cemetery,’ I said with feeling. ‘But I would be grateful to go as far as the monastery.’

  We lifted the boy carefully onto the cart, laying him over the jars of incense and unguents, and set off, travelling as quickly as we dared without aggravating his wounds on the rutted road.

  ‘What are your perfumes for?’ I asked the drayman, thinking the least I could do was reward his help with conversation.

  ‘For the dead,’ he said solemnly. ‘The embalmers use them.’

  We walked the rest of the way in silence, though mercifully it was a short enough journey. The drayman pulled his cart through the low arch of the monastery gate into a cloistered, whitewashed courtyard, and we laid the boy out on the flagstones. I gave the man two obols for his aid; then he left me.

  A monk appeared and stared at me disapprovingly.

  ‘We are at prayer,’ he told me. ‘Petitioners are heard at the tenth hour.’

  ‘My petition may not wait that long.’ Too exhausted to argue more decisively, I merely jerked my thumb to where the boy was lying. ‘If the Lord will not hear my plea until then, perhaps your doctor will.’

  It may have been a blasphemous suggestion, but I was past caring. The monk tutted, and hurried away.

  The tinny bell in the dome of the church struck eight, and monks began streaming out of the chapel in front of me. All ignored me. I watched them pass with ever-mounting fury, until I thought I would roar out my opinion of their Christian charity to their self-regarding faces. But just then a new figure appeared, a servant girl in an unadorned green dress, with a silken cord tied around her waist. I was surprised to see her, for I would have thought the novices could do whatever chores she performed, but she seemed to have noticed me and for that I was grateful.

  ‘You asked for a doctor?’ she said, looking down on me with none of the humility or reserve expected of her sex and her station. I did not care.

  ‘I did. Can you find me one?’ I forsook the usual forms of courtesy. ‘This boy is dying.’

  ‘So I see.’ She knelt beside him to put two fingers to his wrist, and laid her palm against his forehead. Her hands, I noticed, were very clean for a servant’s. ‘Has he lost much blood?’

  ‘All you can see.’ One entire leg was cased in crusted blood. ‘And more. But fetch me a doctor – he will know what to do.’

  ‘He will indeed.’ She spo
ke as immodestly as her apparel, this girl, for she wore no palla to wrap her head and shoulders. Though truly, she could not be called a girl, I realised, for her uncovered face and bright eyes held a wisdom and a knowledge that only age can inscribe. Yet she wore her black hair long, tied behind her with a green ribbon like a child’s. And like a child, I saw, she showed no sign of obeying me, but continued to stare with the tactless fascination of the young.

  ‘Fetch me the doctor,’ I insisted. ‘Every minute brings him closer to death.’

  At last my words showed some effect: the woman stood and looked towards an open doorway. But instead of hurrying away she turned, and with astonishing termerity began to upbraid me.

  ‘Make haste,’ she commanded. ‘You’ve carried him this far, you can carry him these last few paces. The monks here are afraid to touch the dying – they think it pollutes them. Bring him inside where we can wash his wounds and get some warmth into him.’

  I was almost dumb with surprise. ‘Surely only the doctor will know if it’s safe to move him.’

  She put her hands on her waist and stared at me in exasperation. ‘She will, and it is,’ she said curtly. ‘I am the doctor, and I say bring the boy inside so I can clean and bind his wounds before he slips beyond us.’ Her dark eyes flashed with impatience. ‘Now will you do as I say?’

  With the colour of shame rising under the bruises on my face, I humbly obeyed. Then, when that was done, I fled to the palace.

  ς

  I had never seen the dungeons of the palace before, and I would not hurry to see them again. A guard led me down a twisting stair, deep underground, to a chamber lit only by torchlight. Massive brick piers rose out of the floor and arched overhead like the ribs of a great sea-beast, while on the walls between them hung scores of cruelly shaped instruments. In the middle of the room were a roughly hewn table and benches, where a group of Varangians sat and diced. Even seated, they had to take care to keep their heads from cracking on the black lamps above them.

  Sigurd threw a handful of coins onto the table and looked up. ‘You’re here,’ he grunted. ‘Finished playing the Samaritan, have you?’

  ‘The boy’s with a doctor,’ I answered coolly. ‘Where’s the Bulgar?’

  Sigurd tossed his head towards a low archway behind him. ‘In there. Strung up by his arms. We haven’t touched him yet.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have waited for me. His knowledge may be urgent.’

  Sigurd’s face stiffened. ‘I thought the eunuch paid you by the day. Anyway, we didn’t wait for you – we waited for the interpreter. Unless, of course, you speak the Bulgars’ language?’

  I shrugged my surrender, though Sigurd had already turned back to his game. He did not invite me to join it, and after a moment of awkward pause I retreated out of the lamplight into a dim corner. There I kept silent, and tried not to hear the dismal sounds drifting into the guardroom.

  You could not measure time in that mournful place, but I must have spent almost an hour watching Sigurd’s humour rise and fall in balance with the number of coins in the pile before him. Then there came a sound from above, and I peered up the curling stair to see a constellation of tiny flames descending, dozens of lamps processing down like a swarm of fireflies. Slaves in silken robes held them aloft, unwavering despite the uneven ground beneath: they filed along the periphery of the vault until they were like an inner wall of shimmering silk and fire around us. At their tail came two who did not carry lamps, one in the crimson mantle of a priest; the other in a rich gown of blazing gold threads: Krysaphios.

  All the Varangians were on their feet, the silver and dice swept invisibly into their pouches.

  ‘My Lord,’ said Sigurd with a bow. He wore humility clumsily, I thought.

  ‘Captain,’ answered Krysaphios. ‘Where is the prisoner?’

  ‘In the next room. Contemplating his wickedness alone. We need an interpreter.’

  ‘Brother Gregorias has devoted his life to the Bulgar tongue.’ Krysaphios indicated the priest beside him. ‘He has transcribed the lives of no fewer than three hundred saints for their edification.’ That, I thought, should give him the requisite vocabulary of torment. ‘If your prisoner has anything to say, he will decipher it.’

  ‘The prisoner will talk,’ said Sigurd grimly. ‘Once I’m done with him.’

  We left the eunuch’s silent retinue in the main chamber, and stooping passed through a low tunnel into the adjoining cell. I followed Sigurd, Krysaphios and the priest Gregorias in. Here the air was closer and more unpleasant; but more uncomfortable still, I suspected, was the prisoner. His arms were hung on thick hooks above him in the ceiling, so that only his toes touched the floor: he swayed a little backwards and forwards, and moaned gently. His clothes had been torn away, leaving only a narrow strip of linen around his hips, and his wrists bled where the shackles bit into them so that he seemed to me uncannily like Christ in torment on his cross. I shivered, and banished that blasphemous thought immediately.

  ‘Demetrios.’ I saw Krysaphios staring at me. ‘You are the paid expert in these matters – find out what the man knows.’

  I was an expert in quizzing petty thieves and informers in the marketplace, not tearing out confessions in the imperial dungeons. But before my patron I could not be seen to falter. I stepped forward and immediately found that I did not know where to look, whether to the priest or the prisoner. My eyes darted dumbly from one to the other, and I could mask my confusion only by crossing my arms over my chest and taking deep, contemplative breaths.

  ‘A monk hired you from a man named Vassos,’ I began at last, addressing the wretched Bulgar. No sooner had I spoken, though, than my thought was disrupted by the quiet monotone of the priest, intoning crude foreign syllables into the captive’s ear. I stammered a little, and began again.

  ‘Three weeks ago this monk contracted you to murder the Emperor. You were to use a strange device, a barbarian weapon they call a tzangra, to murder him in a public street, on the feast-day of the holy Saint Nikolas.’

  There was a pause while I waited for the translation to catch up with the commanding gaze I had fixed on him. The priest went silent, and four pairs of ears were poised for an answer. Only the chime of Sigurd’s ringed armour broke the hush in the room.

  The Bulgar lifted his face, and looked at us all contemptuously. He spoke one word, and none of us needed the priest to explain its meaning. ‘No.’

  I sighed theatrically. ‘Ask him if he follows our faith,’ I told the priest.

  The Bulgar ignored the question, but after some urging from the interpreter he acknowledged that he did.

  ‘Tell him, then, that he has sinned,’ I continued. ‘But tell him that Christ preaches forgiveness to those who confess their sins. Tell him that in Vassos and the monk he has served evil masters, masters who have betrayed him. We can help him.’

  ‘We can help him screaming to his grave,’ interrupted Siguard, but I waved him to be silent and hoped the priest would not translate his words. Nonetheless, I saw the Bulgar’s eyes dart towards the Varangian as he spoke.

  ‘As long as he stays silent, he will never escape this dungeon.’ Although the prisoner’s continued silence frustrated me, I was at least learning to speak over the constant murmur of the translation. ‘But the monk and Vassos are free to drink and whore and contrive their plots. Why should he suffer while men of far greater evil do not?’

  There was a rustling of silk as Krysaphios stirred. ‘You do not seem to have his ear, Demetrios,’ he observed. ‘Or perhaps the finer points of your rhetoric are lost in the foreign tongue.’

  I worried that none of my companions understood the time it takes to pry information from an unwilling informant, however helpless and confined he might be. Krysaphios must be accustomed to seeing his will executed immediately, not waiting for an immigrant criminal to choose to speak. I feared he would soon demand more corporal approaches.

  ‘Tell us how you attempted to kill the Emperor,’ I insisted, renewed
urgency in my voice. ‘Tell us what the monk wanted, why he bought you to do this terrible thing.’

  The Bulgar’s head had sagged while Krysaphios and I argued, but now he lifted it again. He opened his mouth and swallowed; I thought he would speak, and was about to call for water when – with a convulsive jerk of his body – he spat. There was little strength in the effort, and near as I was it still landed short of me.

  I stepped backwards, and gave a tired sigh of frustration. This would take many hours, and they would feel all the longer for having Krysaphios at my shoulder.

  Too long, it seemed, for one man: as the Bulgar’s spittle struck the floor, I heard a growl from behind me. With a single stride Sigurd had crossed to the prisoner and kicked his feet from under him; the Bulgar swung back like a pendulum, and screamed as the manacles bit deeper into his wrists. The cloth was ripped from his waist so that he hung naked and exposed, while Sigurd pressed his face very close to the man’s throbbing cheek. The axe glinted in his hands.

  ‘My friend Demetrios appeals to your sense and reason,’ he hissed angrily, not waiting for the interpreter to follow his words, ‘but I appeal to something to which you might actually pay heed. You tried to kill the Emperor, you Bulgarian piece of filth. You would have lifted a usurper onto the throne. Do you know what we do to usurpers in this kingdom?’ He let the axe slide like a razor over the man’s face. ‘We pull out their eyes and slice open their noses, so they are too deformed for any man to acclaim them Emperor.’ He stepped back thoughtfully, then almost casually drove a fist into the man’s taut stomach. He howled again and rattled in his chains. ‘Did you tell him that, priest?’

  The interpreter nodded violently, trembling under Sigurd’s savage gaze.

  ‘Then tell him also,’ he continued, ‘that if we really want to be sure that the usurper will never trouble us again, we don’t stop with his face. Oh no.’ He laughed malevolently. ‘We take away his manhood, make sure that he’ll be forever barred from becoming Emperor, and barred from inflicting any vengeful bastards on us either.’ He took his axe in both hands and looked at it thoughtfully. ‘Of course you could never have sat on the throne, Bulgar, but perhaps I should practice for when I catch the man who would. Shall I do that? Shall I turn you into a eunuch? Condemn you to playing the bitch if ever you want the least pleasure again in your miserable life?’