by Tom Harper
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. Although his green cloak and high boots seemed expensive, his accent was rustic.
‘We heard rumours that the Emperor’s enemies could be found here,’ said Sigurd evenly. ‘We came to find them.’
The man on the horse squinted. ‘Did you find them?’
‘None. Yet.’
I think Sigurd meant it as a threat, but it drew a laugh from our visitor. ‘I am Kosmas, and no enemy of this or any other Emperor. I am the forester, and I manage this estate for my mistress, the owner.’
Sigurd moved his head in a broad are, deliberately studying the ramshackle landscape. ‘Does she pay you well for it?’
‘Enough that I do not tolerate uninvited guests. If you have found all there is to find, which is nothing, you should go.’
I could see Sigurd boiling up to resist the man’s demand, and did not want a confrontation here. ‘Tell me, forester,’ I broke in, ‘who is this inhospitable mistress?’
‘My mistress, who is most hospitable to those she invites, is the noble lady Theodora Trichas. Wife of the Sebastokrator Isaak, and sister-in-law to the Emperor Alexios Komnenos.’ He smiled. ‘Hardly a family to be harbouring traitors and treachery.’
That was so optimistic as to be laughable. But we left anyway.
The long ride back was silent, and the arrival stormy. The road grew ever busier as we neared the city, and though we chose one of the lesser gates so as to arrive inconspicuously, we still found a mass of people jostling to get in. The watchmen were ill at ease, barking questions at the entrants and searching their belongings with brusque contempt; most of those around us seemed to have come in from the country, and many must have carried the greater part of their belongings on their backs. We might have been there until nightfall if Sigurd had not managed to push and kick a path through for us, and fortunately the guards recognised him. When the last of our company was within the walls, he called a halt.
‘We’ll take the boy to the palace and keep him in the gaol,’ he declared. ‘If he’s well enough to escape once, he’s well enough to get out of that monastery.’
‘If you put him in there, he’ll die in a week.’
‘And that will be no loss to me.’ Sigurd snapped his reins angrily. ‘Let disease take him, if God wills it.’
‘Disease is my least concern. Have you forgotten what happened to the Bulgar? The monk, or his agents, can enter the gaols at will it would appear.’ Although few seemed to care about the Bulgar’s death, it troubled me every time I thought on it. How had an assassin crept into the depths of the palace, through a locked gate and past a legion of Varangians? None of the enquiries that Krysaphios, Sigurd or I had made could answer it.
‘We’ll be more careful this time,’ said Sigurd. ‘For all it matters.’
‘Do you want me to go to the chamberlain over this? He has given me the prerogative. I say the boy does not go into the gaol.’
Sigurd glowered. ‘And where will you take him then, Demetrios? Into the monastery, to the care of monks and women? Will God protect him there?’
That thrust me onto the defensive. I had had all day to ponder it, but my thoughts had been ever distracted by other questions. Now I floundered for a solution, while Sigurd watched with a sneer on his lip.
I spoke the first thought I had. ‘He will come to my house.’
‘To your house?’ Sigurd looked delighted with my folly. ‘Your castle? Your tower, surrounded by water and guarded by a thousand archers? Or your tenement, where the boy could slit your family’s throats and escape over the rooftops in a second?’
They were all sound objections, but I would not give him the victory of acknowledging so. ‘If the boy wants to escape, he will succeed eventually. Unless we put him in the prison, in which case he will die. You will lend me two of your soldiers to watch my door. As for my family . . .’ I hesitated. ‘I will see they are safe.’
Sigurd stared at me in angry silence.
‘The boy is no more the monk’s ally than was the whore he used. Perhaps a little affection and charity will coax more information from him.’ I raised my hands. ‘Or, I can talk to Krysaphios.’
‘Take care,’ Sigurd warned. ‘You might get your way with him for now, but who will you turn to when he loses patience? Take the boy; I will leave you Aelric and Sweyn – for the moment.’
He kicked his horse and cantered off, followed closely by all but a pair of his men.
‘I must go too,’ said Father Gregorias. He looked desperate to be parted from his mount. ‘I am needed at my church.’
‘You are needed with me,’ I answered. ‘How else am I to talk to the boy?’
‘Call in the doctor. She speaks his tongue.’
And meek though he was, he left me. With two reluctant Varangians, and a boy none of us could comprehend.
I led my companions back to my house, and realised I had nowhere to stable the horses.
‘We should take them back to the palace,’ said Aelric. ‘The hipparch will want them immediately.’
‘I can go,’ I offered. ‘I ought to report to Krysaphios.’
Aelric shook his grizzled head. ‘You can’t go alone. It’s getting dark, and the Watch will have you locked up for a horse thief if they see you. And I can’t come with you: you don’t want to leave Sweyn alone with your daughters.’
I smiled wearily. ‘My daughters are with their aunt, my sister-in-law.’ I would have to leave them there another night, though they would return primed with even more disdain for my disreputable profession, and for my paternal failing to find them suitable families of their own.
‘Then you and I can guard the boy, and Sweyn can return our mounts.’ Aelric swung himself down from the beast and strode over, lifting Thomas onto the ground. I dismounted, and handed both sets of reins to the taciturn Sweyn.
‘Get back quickly,’ Aelric told him. ‘You don’t want to rely on my old eyes all night.’
‘Not if last night is any guide,’ I said, as the horses vanished around the corner. I had not yet raised his failure to stop Thomas escaping the stable, for fear of provoking Sigurd to still greater wrath, but I had not forgotten. Nor forgiven it.
Aelric looked me in the eye. ‘We all have lapses, Demetrios. You were kind to hide mine from the captain. But the boy is safe, and no harm was done. If I’ve learned one thing from my life, it’s that when I escape the worst consequences of my mistakes, I should thank my God and forget it.’ He clapped me on the arm. ‘Now let’s get the boy out of the street, before some arbalest-wielding monk gallops past and puts an arrow in him.’
We climbed the stairs to my home, keeping Thomas always between us.
‘Is this the only entrance?’ Aelric asked, as I unlocked my heavy door.
‘There is a way out onto the roof inside.’ I crossed my threshold, bending to pick up a scrap of paper which someone had pushed under the door. ‘Unfortunately, it only bolts from the inside. This house wasn’t built to be a prison.’
‘But are we here to keep the boy in, or others out?’ Aelric crossed the room and rattled the shutters. ‘At least you’ve got bars on the windows.’
‘A sensible precaution for a man with young daughters.’ My skills as a bounty-hunter and a searcher had allowed me to move my home away from the more dangerous corners of the city, but not always their inhabitants.
Aelric continued prowling around the house while I unfolded the paper. ‘The merchant Domenico wishes to see me at his house in Galata.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’ I put the paper on a table. ‘Perhaps he wants to sell me an arbalest.’
‘If that’s so, you’d better see the eunuch first to collect your pay,’ Aelric chuckled. He poked his head around one of the dividing curtains. ‘Who sleeps in here?’
‘My daughters.’ Although they were away, I did not want Aelric or Thomas staying in that room. But I had yet to consider how I would manage that combination in my ho
usehold. ‘The boy and I can sleep in my room; you can sleep on the bench in here.’
‘I’ll get a palliasse from the barracks tomorrow.’ Aelric was clearly unimpressed at the prospect of another night of hardship.
In the absence of my children, I chopped up some leeks and onions, and mixed in some Euxine sauce which a former client had sent me. Sweyn returned with bread he had had from the palace kitchens, and the four of us shared a coarse meal by the light of my candle. Then Aelric took the bench and pushed it against the bolted roof door, while Sweyn descended to the street.
‘Better to guard at a distance,’ he explained solemnly. ‘Otherwise, if you miss them, it’s too late.’
I retired to my bed chamber with the boy and lay down on the bed, gesturing that he could share it. Instead of gratitude, though, he recoiled, cowering by the wall like a cornered hare, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. He stared at me with bitter eyes, and his legs, I saw, were trembling.
‘Do you take me for some sort of pederast?’ I was angry and embarrassed. At the tone of my voice he cringed still further; a tear ran down his cheek.
With a sigh which might have been exasperation or pity, I rolled off the bed and stood on the far side, pointing first to him, then to it, then to myself and then to the floor.
Still he did not move.
‘Very well.’ If words and signs would not suffice, he would have to judge me by my actions – or stay cramped in his corner all night. Very deliberately, I laid out a blanket on the floor, reclined myself on it, and blew out the candle. Then I listened in the darkness.
It must have been a full half an hour before I finally heard the boy creep into the bed above me. And it was long after that that I at last fell asleep.
ι β
Early the next morning I went straight to the palace, thinking Krysaphios would demand to know my progress immediately. He did not. Instead, a clerk directed me into a long arcade lined with benches, where scores of petitioners had already gathered, some so settled they seemed scarcely different from the marble statues around them, as if a gorgon had come and gazed on them. I tried to explain my importance to the clerk but he would not hear me: promising that my name would be noted, he vanished.
I leaned against a cold pillar – the benches were all occupied – and waited. The pale sun moved above the fountain behind me; clerks and secretaries, men and eunuchs, bustled about, talking in urgent voices and ignoring the supplicants who lined their way. In over an hour, I did not see one of them granted an entrance. And an entrance to what? I wondered. I doubted the Emperor Alexios, or even his chamberlain Krysaphios, awaited me on the other side of the doors at the end of the passage. They would admit to another secretary, who might direct me to yet another vestibule or atrium, where another clerk would take my name and ask me to wait. In these heavenly surroundings men moved like the stars, their path prescribed by a higher law and destined never to deviate, nor to touch another body.
I would go, I decided. The thought of the boy and the two Varangians in my house made me anxious, and the eunuch’s gold made me only less tolerant of time wasted. I pushed myself away from my column, and for a moment thought that I had committed some grave offence: there was an almighty clash of cymbals from the far end of the corridor and a great commotion all about me. Men who had not twitched a muscle all morning were suddenly off their seats and on their knees, touching their foreheads to the ground and trying to mumble the words of an adoring hymn. I could hear the tramp of many footsteps, stamping out a rhythm over which rose the plangent cadences of flutes and harps. I knelt; but did not make my bow so low that I could not see who was coming.
First there was a company of Varangians, though none that I recognised. Their burnished axes were held over their shoulders, the hafts capped with the plumed feathers of great birds, and even in the wan light their armour gleamed. Behind them came the musicians, their faces pursed in concentration, and then a priest, swinging a censer before him and filling the air with its rich perfume. Finally came their master. The pointed toes of his mismatched boots moved serenely over the floor, as though he did not touch it; his head, under its pearl-crusted crown, was bowed in solemn contemplation and glowed with the radiance reflected up from his golden robes. It was far removed from when I had last seen him, in a simple, white dalmatica standing before his unsettling mosaic. The Sebastokrator Isaak. Whose wife’s decrepit hunting lodge, I thought, I had visited only the day before.
As he came level with me, I saw my chance.
‘May you live a thousand years, Lord,’ I called. ‘It is Demetrios. I must speak with you.’
Not one hair on his beard moved, and his eyes remained fixed on whatever it was that he could see that other men could not. Then he was past me, and the space was filled with his retinue, dozens of nobles following like crows after an army. He was long disappeared behind the bronze doors before the last of them had passed.
As soon as the way was clear I made to go, but again I was delayed, this time by a stout, dwarfish slave tugging on my elbow.
‘Come with me,’ he said, his eyes very bright. ‘You are summoned.’
‘Where?’
But he had slipped behind the column, and I had to make haste to find him again. He led me to a door – not the great doors that the Sebastokrator had entered, but a small door more suited to his height than mine, set into the wall a little to the side of the main gate. Nor did it lead into any jewelled hall, but into a tight, low-roofed passage whose lamps gave little protection against the erratic steps and turns which beset it. We met no-one, until suddenly the way ended abruptly in a stone wall.
‘To your right,’ whispered the dwarf.
I stepped to my right, and suddenly I was out of the tunnel and in a bright, airy room. Its high-domed roof was set with many windows, and painted with ancient kings, while the light from the gilded walls shone like an eternal dawn. I blinked, and looked back, but behind me there seemed only solid masonry. Of my shrunken guide, and the passage by which I had come, there was no sign.
‘Demetrios.’
I looked back to the centre of the room, where two men stood ringed by marble columns. One was Krysaphios, more immaculately dressed than ever; the other . . .
For the second time that morning, I prostrated myself before the Sebastokrator. He took my homage with a smile, then gestured me to rise and approach.
‘I summoned you, Demetrios, when I saw you in the hallway. I have come with tidings which concern you – and I am quick to share with those who will find use in it.’ He lowered his chin and stared at me. ‘Terrible news has reached me from my wife. Her forester has reported that a monk and a company of Bulgars broke into her hunting lodge in the great forest; I fear they used it to concoct the plot which almost murdered my brother. I rushed immediately to tell the chamblerlain, for my conscience cannot bear the burden that I may have given succour to my brother’s enemies, however unwittingly.’
Now it was my turn to eye him sceptically. ‘Did your wife’s forester also relate how a dozen Varangians were at the house yesterday, and discovered all this before an inhospitable steward named Kosmas evicted us?’
The Sebastokrator did not flinch. ‘I did not know that, Demetrios. This message only came this morning. I think it took many days to reach me. I would have sent a messenger to you, but I thought it wisest to tell the chamberlain first. I feared that he might see me more readily than you.’
‘Indeed,’ said Krysaphios. ‘Sometimes I have more urgent matters to attend than belated, inconclusive gossip.’ He was looking at me, but I felt he spoke to the Sebastokrator.
‘More urgent matters?’ Isaak made to defend me. ‘What could be more urgent than the safety of the Emperor?’
‘The safety of the empire, as you well know, Lord.’
‘They are the same. And where is my brother?’
‘He is at the walls, seeing to the defences. The masons have been labouring since dawn to put them in good repair.’
&n
bsp; ‘Why?’ I broke in. Did this bear on the crowds I had seen pouring in from the country the night before?
‘Because we may soon be attacked,’ snapped the eunuch. ‘Why else? But that is not your concern, Demetrios. Your concern is that if a barbarian army does besiege our gates, there is not a homicidal monk at large who could destroy the Emperor when he is most needed. I do not think you will snare him by loitering in this room.’
He jerked his wrist, and the doors behind me opened noiselessly. Taking his meaning, I bowed low and left, passing a host of musicians and sycophants loitering in the next chamber. As I walked in they leapt to attention, and as quickly forgot me when they saw who I was.
As I was already at the palace, I sought out the archivist at the imperial library, for there was a small detail I wished to know better. He was a fastidious man, and would not let me touch his precious books and scrolls, but insisted I wait in the scriptorium among the rows of monks hunched over their desks, while his acolytes searched through piles of parchments and papers. It was a bright room, lit by enormous arched windows at either end; the only sound within was the reed pens scratching like chattering insects.
After a wait, which could have been minutes or hours, I saw one of the assistants emerge from the rampart of shelving and whisper something in the archivist’s ear. The old man nodded slowly, then shuffled across the room to where I stood.
‘We have found what you sought,’ he whispered to me. His voice was like the rustle of dry papers. ‘This Saint Remigius you ask of is not known in our church, but he has much importance to the barbarian Franks.’
Again the Franks. The boy had said that the monk prayed in their language; now it seemed he venerated their saints also. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What is this Remigius’ story?’
The archivist clasped his hands together so that they disappeared in his long sleeves. ‘After the fall of the West, when the barbarians had made themselves masters of Roman Gaul, and paganism and heresy were rife, Remigius converted their king to the true faith. Thus the Franks were saved for Christ.’