Nine for the Devil

by Mary Reed

  “He wanted to gauge your interest in deposing Justinian?”

  “What else? He told me Justinian didn’t even try to rule. He sat up all night without any guards, just decrepit old priests, studying the holy books. In effect he explained to me exactly when and where the emperor could be assassinated and how simple it would be.”

  John looked around at the bodyguards. They gave no evidence of listening but had doubtless taken interest in the entire conversation. How might they feel about serving an emperor rather than a general?

  “He hated Theodora even more,” Germanus continued. “He hated them both. Murdering her would be a blow against Justinian. It would weaken him.”

  “People with grievances like to talk about revenge, even when they know they can’t take it.”

  “In Libya, Artabanes personally stabbed a tyrant in the tyrant’s own banqueting hall. He’s a courageous man.”

  John questioned Germanus further but having delivered his prepared speech the general remained affable but effectively as silent as the bronzes. Christodorus might have ventured to guess what he was thinking.

  John did not and took his leave.

  Chapter Eighteen

  As John walked toward the Chalke Gate he formed the impression he was being followed.

  It was a sense an inhabitant of the palace soon developed.

  He turned and went through an archway leading to the square of the Augustaion in front of the Great Church.

  His pursuer had no intention of merely following. A towering, granite column of a man—the largest of Germanus’ guards—overtook him and spoke. “Lord Chamberlain.”

  John stopped. “There was something your employer forgot to tell me?”

  “That’s right. He is worried about your safety.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Passersby streamed around the two men as if they were two rocks in a river.

  “A high official should not be walking around alone, Lord Chamberlain. You never know who might be lurking around the next corner. Especially when you start asking powerful people the wrong questions.”

  “Is that what Germanus said?”

  “An intelligent man like you can deduce the answer.” The guard turned and plowed his way back through the crowd.

  The man’s words puzzled John. He had been threatened too many times to be concerned about threats to himself. What he worried about was Cornelia and his daughter and grandchild.

  He followed the retreating guard out through the archway. He would have preferred to return home to see if there had been any word from Cornelia, but after talking to Germanus he knew there was one more stop to make.

  He had seen the sun rising over the palace gardens as he began the day’s investigations, and before he was done he would see it drop below the rooftops of the city toward which it was falling even now, stretching the shadows of buildings, statuary, pillars and pedestrians and stray dogs in the direction of the Sea of Marmara as if the shadows intended to drown themselves in the dark waters as night closed in.

  ***

  Germanus stamped into the atrium of his house, cursing effusively. The servant who had met John at the door earlier shrank away.

  “You never should have told him I was at the Zeuxippos baths,” Germanus thundered.

  The servant had simply offered the usual report on who had called at the house and the general had started shouting.

  “But what else was I to do?” The servant’s voice quavered. “He was acting under Justinian’s orders. He showed me the seal.”

  “Next time tell him you don’t know where I’ve gone. Or that I’m off hunting in the Cypress Forest. Send him up the Bosporos looking for me. Tell him I’ve set sail for Egypt!”

  “I tried to get rid of him as quickly as possible. I didn’t want him to run into—”

  “No, certainly not! And what about our other visitor?”

  “Gone to see the lawyer.”

  “Again? What good will that do? I hope the lawyer knows enough to keep his mouth shut. I don’t like all this running around. Too much risk of being seen.”

  The servant was visibly trembling and Germanus softened his tone. “You did well to keep the Lord Chamberlain out. No one is to get past the atrium, and if possible not even that far. Maybe you should say my cook has the plague.”

  The huge guard who had spoken to John loomed in the entranceway.

  “You had a word with him?” Germanus asked.

  “Yes. I would have preferred to show him some steel to make the point clearer.”

  “The Lord Chamberlain’s no fool. Steel isn’t necessary. Yet. Come with me.”

  The two men made their way down a long many-doored hallway decorated with wall paintings and through the storage areas at the back of the house to a walled courtyard in which laborers were unloading sacks and crates from the back of a cart. An archway in the high wall opened onto a narrow alley. Two sentries were posted by the archway.

  Germanus looked up and down the alley, which came to a dead end a short distance from the archway. “I want you to make sure that anyone coming in by the back way isn’t being followed,” he instructed the towering guard beside him. “Put someone out on the street to watch whoever approaches. Disguise him as a vendor or a beggar. And keep an eye out for people lurking around.”

  “You think the house is being watched?”

  “I hope not. I don’t like being visited by high officials carrying out imperial investigations.”

  “There’s nothing you’ve done that anyone could prove was illegal.”

  “Since when does the emperor have to prove anything? The less he knows the better.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Peter was awakened by the banging of a door.

  He turned his head to look at the window. Movement was difficult. His skull seemed to weigh as much as the dome of the Great Church. In the darkening sky above the dome he could make out a star.

  Had the master returned home?

  Peter thought about stars. Some said they were angels but there was nothing angelic about those cold, hard, sharp points of light. They were jewels on a rich man’s robe, caught in the church lights during a night vigil.

  The pain in his broken leg waxed and waned like the unseen moon. A throbbing pain, as deep and intense as pain could possibly be. It brought tears to his eyes.

  It wasn’t time for him to die. He must remain to see the master through this latest trial. He didn’t like to think about him going around the palace, questioning powerful people, any one of whom would not suffer for having him killed if it suited them. The master was a powerful man himself, but an outsider. Not to mention a Mithran. What would the Lord think about Peter having spent so many years serving a Mithran?

  “Please, Lord,” Peter muttered. “Keep the master safe. His beliefs may be wrong but you should know him by his works, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  A noise interrupted his thoughts. Or had it awakened him? What had he heard?

  “Hypatia?” He was startled at how weak his voice sounded.

  There was no answer.

  He had the impression Hypatia had opened the door a crack, peered in at him, and shut the door. It might have been his imagination. The girl was always underfoot. He ought to make it plain to Lady Anna that Hypatia was not to interfere in his kitchen. Her duty was to grow the herbs Peter needed. She was not a cook. It would not do for her to be in the way while he was standing watch on the pot boiling over the hot coals.

  No. That had been years ago. Both he and Hypatia had been Lady Anna’s slaves before her death freed them and they came to work for John.

  The potions Gaius had given him were making Peter light-headed.

  “How can I manage in such a state? What was the scoundrel thinking of? Doe
s he imagine I can lie around like the idle aristocrats he treats?”

  He closed his eyes.

  He remembered a young servant he used to meet at the back of a garden at the house he worked in years ago. He could feel the soft flesh of her rounded arms and her warm breath.

  She would be an old woman now. He felt a sadness deeper even than the agony in his leg. What kind of a world was it where such beauty withered away?

  Peter had never known a woman for long. For much of his life he had been on the move, as a camp cook, constantly on the march, as a servant moving from one household to another. He had always thought that some day he would find himself in the right situation and the right woman would present herself. But it had never happened. And without ever being aware of it, he had finally stopping thinking about it.

  Now he was an old man and it was too late.

  “Too late,” he whispered. Yet there was nothing one could miss in life that meant anything compared to the glories waiting in heaven. “I have always served you, Lord, to the best of my ability.”

  Peter felt himself drifting. His bed might have been floating on the Marmara. How long had he been in bed? He was useless, and just when the master needed him. The least he could do was make him a decent meal. Hypatia would insist on overspicing the dishes.

  His leg didn’t pain him as much. He shifted, experimentally, and found his body no longer felt as inert and heavy. He pushed the coverlet down, took a breath, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The splinted leg stuck straight out, which made it awkward when he stood, bracing himself against the wall with one hand.

  He hobbled toward the door. Obviously Gaius had overreacted. Peter was perfectly able to put weight on the supposedly broken leg.

  He was standing next to his cooking brazier before he knew it.

  “Let’s see,” he clucked to himself. “A dish needing only one pot. I can’t be standing too long. What’s on hand?”

  He found several eggs lined up on the windowsill and a basket under the table containing a cabbage. The wine jug was full and neither the master nor Hypatia had eaten any of the cheese intended for breakfast.

  He sang a hymn. His voice was the creaking of a cart wheel.

  “Why do you veil your faces?

  “Let your hearts be uplifted!

  “For Christ, Christ has arisen!

  “Glorious and gleaming,

  “Christ, Christ is born

  “Of He who gave light.”

  Wasn’t the master’s god, Mithra, the lord of light?

  It was something to consider.

  But first the evening meal must be prepared.

  He chopped happily at the cabbage and tossed its shredded remains into the large pot simmering over the glowing coals. He splashed in some wine, added cheese and eggs, and leftover scraps of the swordfish that had caused so much trouble. He took a clove or two from the string of garlic hanging from a ceiling hook and tossed them into the now bubbling mixture.

  Then he was back in bed, once again feeling the warm breath of the long ago servant girl as they sat together in the cool grass behind a hedge.

  Or rather, it was Hypatia’s warm breath, her face bent down close to his. But it had been the servant girl’s lips touching his cheek, not Hypatia’s. Surely.

  “What are you looking so glum about, Hypatia?” Peter asked, but she drew away as if she hadn’t heard.

  He hadn’t managed to speak. He made a determined effort.

  This time she heard. “Peter, you were so still I was worried. What are you saying?”

  “The evening meal. I started it. It’s on the brazier.”

  “What do you mean? I’ve just been in the kitchen, and there’s nothing…” Her voice trailed off. “Oh, I see. Yes. Thank you, Peter.”

  She turned and left the room and Peter could hear her sobbing for some reason in the hallway.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was twilight by the time John reached Artabane’s house, a one story villa in the classic Roman style, not far from the northern wall of the Great Palace.

  “Close enough so the Great Whore could keep an eye on me,” Artabanes explained in slurred tones when John noted the convenient proximity.

  The Armenian was a lean, sinewy man, clean-shaven. If he’d been sober he would have been handsome. Now his deep set eyes were bloodshot, his finely chiseled features flushed, his narrow lips slack.

  The dignified, gray-haired servant who answered the door had been turning John away because his employer was too ill to see anyone when Artabanes came lurching across the atrium, as if engaged in a slow corybantic dance, utterly intoxicated.

  “John? John the Eunuch, isn’t it?” Artabanes said heartily. “Pay no attention to my servant’s lack of manners. Welcome. I was just out in the garden communing with nature.”

  “That part of nature which grows on vines,” muttered the servant.

  John raised an eyebrow at the disrespectful remark.

  “He is a difficult master, sir,” the servant said. “He’ll forget everything said before he’s in bed tonight, if not sooner. If he manages to make it to the bed for a change.”

  Artabanes stumbled forward and grasped John’s arm. “Let me show you the way to the garden.” Leaning heavily on John, he pointed toward the left side of the atrium. “This side, please.”

  John saw the tiled floor was bisected by a broad black marble stripe leading from the street door, across the atrium, and into the garden beyond.

  Artabanes noticed where John directed his gaze. “That’s the border, Lord Chamberlain. Beyond lies enemy territory.”

  “Enemy?”

  “The bitch. My former wife. The harpy Theodora forced me to live with. I may be imprisoned here but I won’t live with her except in disharmony. I divided the house in two. She stays on her side, I stay on mine.”

  Once the entrance to the garden was reached, the symbolic frontier continued with a knee-high hedge that crossed the open space and then reverted to a black marble stripe when the green barrier reached the edge of the portico on the far side. The height of the hedge gave an indication of how long Artabanes and his wife had lived under these peculiar circumstances.

  “Do the servants have access to both sides of the house?”

  “I caught one of hers stealing a fig from my tree. I had the villain scourged. Does that answer your question? Her servants are forbidden to speak to mine or to me.”

  John reflected that there were worse penalties for straying across borders. “Who announces guests when your wife has visitors?”

  “My former wife, you mean? The servant who let you in, Augustine, is our ambassador. He handles diplomatic missions when necessary.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Here, sit down.” Artabanes collapsed onto a bench, forgetting to let go of John’s arm and nearly pulling the Lord Chamberlain down on top of him. John freed his arm and positioned himself as far away from Artabanes as possible, which proved to be not far enough to escape the miasma of sour wine the man emanated.

  “Not that she has many visitors,” muttered Artabanes. “Why would she? She’s not from Constantinople. She was happy enough to stay in Armenia, until I made a name for myself, until she realized I might suddenly have a few more coins than her suitors. I’ll wager that surprised her. Then she was on the trot to Constantinople, weeping and wailing to the Great Whore. The Lesser Whore, that’s what my former wife is.”

  “Theodora decreed you were not divorced under Roman law,” John pointed out.

  “Roman law! I repudiated the bitch. That’s the way we do it in Armenia. Repudiate and be damned!” Artabanes spat. “While I’m off spilling my blood on the battlefield, back home half the nobility is spilling its seed into her. What’s Roman law have to say about that?”

 
He reached under the bench and pulled out a jug of wine, lifted it to his lips, and drank. John was thankful his host didn’t offer him any. He could hear a few bees buzzing in the gathering darkness. Like John they were putting in a very long day.

  Artabanes belched. “So the empress ordered me to share this miserable excuse for a house with the bitch. But what can I do? She sentenced me to years of torture is what it amounted to. Don’t feel sorry for me. You’re suspected too, Lord Chamberlain. She made no secret of her enmity toward you. It’s a miracle you’re still alive.”

  Artabanes might be preposterously intoxicated but he was not entirely without sense.

  “Until Justinian is satisfied we’re all liable to be executed,” John observed

  “We both have reason to wish the Great Whore gone. I wish my cursed wife was gone!” He gestured wildly with his jug, splashing wine on his tunic. “I shall renounce her for a second time tomorrow and leave the city and be a soldier again!”

  “I would advise against it, Artabanes. The empress hasn’t been dead long. Justinian might be inclined to enforce her wish you live with your wife.”

  The general hiccuped and turned bloodshot eyes to John. “I know why you’re here. Oh, yes. But note this well. Theodora gave me an excellent defense by her own actions. Even if I managed to murder the entire court without being suspected I still could not marry the woman I love above all others. It’s too late. She’s married Praejecta off. Married her to the son of one of those plotters executed after the Nika riots. My beautiful treasure handed over to a traitor’s son.”

  He lifted the jug to his mouth again, found it empty, and flung it clumsily into his wife’s half of the garden.

  “Then again, I might kill my beloved’s husband,” he continued, bleary eyes brightening. “The idea has crossed my mind once or twice, I confess. Yes. A blade between the ribs. The soldier’s way. None of this poisoning business. That’s for women and eunuchs. But sssh, don’t say it too loudly. Spies, you know. Spies everywhere. Might give the bitch ideas.”