by Tom Harper
‘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 spoke 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.
6
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?’
He glanced down below the prisoner’s waist, and allowed derision to enter his face; I shot a quick glance at Krysaphios, but his smooth face remained wholly opaque. ‘I could make you quite valuable,’ Sigurd said with a leer. ‘Not like some Armenian boy whose parents have simply squeezed his balls back where they came from. I can turn you into a carzimasian, as pure as a girl with not a shred of your flesh remaining. You’d fetch a higher price then than you ever did as a mercenary.’
He affected to tire of his monologue and fell silent. Even the priest, who had translated every word, seemed to be shivering: I think Krysaphios was the only one of us who did not cower at Sigurd’s threats. Certainly the Bulgar was paying attention, his eyes fixed in terror on the evil curve of Sigurd’s axe which jerked and twitched bewitchingly as he spoke. The axe which was now raised as high in the air as the dungeon would allow, hovering over Sigurd’s shoulder like a vengeful angel waiting to strike.
‘No,’ I protested, but my mouth was dry and the words barely scraped forth. And too late: the axe swung down in a flashing arc and struck thick sparks from the stone floor; the prisoner screamed like an animal and thrashed about in his chains. Fresh blood ran down his wrists and the priest yelped in horror. But no blood fountained from the Bulgar’s groin, and no gruesome lump of flesh was lying limp on the floor. The axe must have passed inches before his body.
Sigurd lifted his blade from the stone and eyed it curiously. ‘I missed,’ he said, surprised. ‘Shall I try again?’
He had to kick the priest to translate this, but even before he had spoken a torrent of words began to spew out of our prisoner. The shock of his near emasculation had shaken something loose within him: he sobbed and ranted as though a demon possessed him, and I was glad of the chains which restrained him. Only after much soothing talk, and after Sigurd had retreated well into a corner, did he slow his speech enough that the translator could make sense of it.
His name, he said, was Kaloyan. Yes, he had worked for the pimp Vassos, mostly collecting debts and beating girls who no longer wished to work for him, sometimes protecting them from men who became angry or refused to pay. Occasionally he would do something else, something more dangerous, for Vassos was a man with ambitions and he enjoyed the thought of having a private army. Mostly, though, they were a ragged bunch of former soldiers and strongmen, who drank and brawled with each other when not called upon to fight professionally. Until, that was, the monk arrived.
‘Describe him,’ I said tersely, my fingers clutching the hem of my tunic in anticipation.
‘He cannot,’ answered the translator after a brief exchange. ‘He says the monk always wore a hood, always, even in the forest.’
‘In the forest?’ I realised I was disrupting the story. ‘Never mind. What did the monk want?’
‘The monk wanted five men. The pimp provided them, Kaloyan was one. He took them to a house in the forest, where for two weeks he trained one of them in the use of a stran
ge weapon, a barbarian weapon the like of which Kaloyan had never seen.’
‘Was it a tzangra?’ I asked, describing it as best I could.
‘Yes,’ said the interpreter. ‘Just so. It could shoot through steel. Kaloyan wanted to try it, but the monk guarded it jealously and let no-one but his apprentice use it. Once one of Kaloyan’s companions tried to steal it while the monk was sleeping. He did not leave the forest alive.’
‘So Kaloyan was not the assassin.’ I could not know whether to be elated or confused by how close I had come. ‘Does he know the one who was?’
I saw the Bulgar shake his head weakly. ‘He never knew him before,’ the priest confirmed. ‘Vassos found him somewhere in the slums.’
‘Did the monk say what he purposed with the weapon? Why he went to so much trouble to train another man in its use?’ My questions were coming faster now, for every word the Bulgar spoke demanded explanation, and the frustration of the long pauses while the interpreter spoke first with the prisoner and then formed his phrases was beginning to wear on me.
‘The monk never told them his purpose, and he did not welcome questions. All he said was that he had a powerful enemy whom he wanted removed, and he could not do so himself.’
Another thought struck me. ‘So if he trained only one of them in the use of the tzangra, what were Kaloyan and the others for? Did he fear for his safety?’ Did the monk have other enemies of whom we knew nothing?
‘Not for his own safety.’ The interpreter puzzled at something the Bulgar had said. ‘He was afraid that the apprentice would flee away if he had the chance.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Surely the monk paid well enough, if he could afford a quartet of bodyguards.
An even longer pause. ‘Because of his age. He was little more than a boy, the Bulgar says, and wild, untameable.’
I heard the ringing thud of metal on stone as an axe-head fell to the ground. The interpreter flinched; the Bulgar screamed, though it was only Sigurd dropping his weapon. It was some moments before there was calm again, and all that time I strained with a burning impatience to ask my final question.