Blood Feud (17 page)

The Varangians would stand by their own in a casual way, I knew, always good for the price of a meal or a drink, maybe even for odd jobs around the barracks. But I had no stomach for hanging around other men’s camp fires.

So what should I do now? What road was I to follow?

I remember standing in the narrow crowded street, leaning on my staff – for my knee was barely up to my weight as yet – and wondering what I should do from that moment forward, with the unlived part of my life, long or short, that lay ahead of me. The slow fire that I had lacked and longed for, was burning in my belly now, and the only thing that seemed to me worth doing was to hunt down and kill Anders Herulfson, if by any wild chance he was not dead already. But I had enough sense left to know that, even with a sound knee, to go hunting a man who had almost certainly been dead for months, through the enemy mountains of Thrace would be to run mad. If he lived, he would have a far better chance of finding me; and I knew that I could trust him to come seeking . . . Dark Thorn had said that I had the mark of the Blood Feud on my forehead . . .

What in God’s name should I do?

I realized suddenly that I was standing almost in the
doorway of a little church. And – maybe it was in part to get away from the crowds, for after the months within the long halls and cloistered courts of the old hospital, the constant swirling come and go of the open city made my head swim – I did a thing that I have done all too seldom in my life; I went inside to ask my way.

It was cool and full of shadows inside; faintly smelling of stale incense and candlewax and the coldness of old stone. There was a shimmer of candles before a picture of a woman’s face – just the face, dark and almond-shaped, with full dark eyes and a grave mouth, and all the rest of the picture covered with smoky silver. I knew that it was a picture of Christ’s Mother, but she reminded me of someone else. I could not think who. I suppose I prayed, though I did not think of it as praying at the time, standing before her, my hands clasped on my staff.

I said, ‘Lady, once, for a friend’s sake, I took an oath to Thor in a God-House of the Northmen in Kiev, and it may be that for that, I am damned. But if I am not damned, let you ask your Son for me, that He will show me what I must do when I go out from here; for I do not know. I do not know at all.’

I did not even add a candle to those glimmering before the picture, though I had the price of one; the remains of my last pay. But in a while, I turned and went back into the street.

After the shadows and the cold incense smell and the quiet within the church, the sights and sounds and smells of the outside world fell on me like a shout. A sudden gust of wind, warm with the last lingerings of summer, came up the street, raising a little dust cloud and scattering a waft of mingled scents from an unseen garden behind the high wall that joined the church. Somebody must have been watering the grass, for it was the green scent of rain on parched earth and the leaves of trees. And all at once I was filled with an aching
longing for open country; and memory flung up in my mind the day almost a year ago, when I had followed the Emperor in his hunting, and the smell of the world after the autumn rain – and I knew who it was that the smoke-darkened face set in dim silver had reminded me of. The girl of the wild olive tree, the girl with the tame gazelle. Standing there in the crowded and noisy street, I remembered her quietness, a cool quietness like shade on a dusty road . . .

She had brought milk for the fawn; so maybe they had cattle on the farm. If not, I could learn to tend goats. Maybe they needed a goat-herd – or someone to do odd jobs and help with the olive harvest . . .

And so, for the second time in my life, the wind set me on the road I was to follow.

I BOUGHT BREAD
and black figs at a market stall, and added them to my few possessions bundled in a cloak, and set out.

I went out through the Kirkoporta, the small gate close beside the Blachernae Palace, my shadow already beginning to lengthen behind me, and headed westward into the rolling country. It had not seemed far, that evening coming the other way, with the dead cheetah lying across my horse’s withers, but it was a long way now, on foot; and I spent the night on the road, in the corner of a disused cattle fold; and it was not far short of noon next day when I came to the place where the track branched below the farm. I took the right-hand fork, then came up through the almond trees, past the walled olive garden. In the heat of the day, no one seemed to be about, save for an old man snoring in the shade, and the cicadas loud as always among the olive trees.

Fat Cloe came from one of the outbuildings as I reached the farm courtyard, shooting before her a flurry of hens that had evidently got somewhere they should not have been. She gave them a final shoo and abandoned them at sight of me; and standing hands on hips, demanded my business. She did not recognize me. I had not thought she would.

‘I came to speak with the lady,’ I said.

‘Eh? Speak up, whoever you are – everybody mumbles these days.’

I remembered that Cloe was deaf, and asked again more loudly, for the mistress, the one with the fawn.

‘There’s no need to shout!’ said the fat woman. ‘If people don’t mumble, they shout! It will be the Lady Alexia you’re meaning?’

I nodded. I did not know her name, but I knew it must be the Lady Alexia I was meaning.

‘She’s not here,’ said the woman. ‘She’s in the city.’

‘I’ve just come from there . . .’

‘So you’ve had a long walk for nothing.’ And then I suppose she saw that I was tired and wayworn, and maybe I looked as lost as I suddenly felt; and her face grew kinder. ‘Aye, and on that leg – too long a walk, by the looks of you. Sit down in the shade and cool your throat for a start.’

There was a bench under the oleander, and I sat down thankfully, stretching my aching leg out in front of me; and she brought me ice-cold water in an earthen cup, and I drank, and gave the cup back to her. ‘I thought she would be here – it’s still hot weather –’

She sat down also, and returned to the basket of almonds she must have been shelling when the hens interrupted her. ‘Oh no.’ She cracked an almond with a stone, and began breaking off the brown shards of husk. ‘Even in the summer she’s to and fro between here and the city.’

‘And she’s there now?’ I said, stupidly.

‘Aye, with her father. He cannot spare her for long; and himself, he seldom has time to come out here at all. So many sick folk there are in the City; and no finer doctor, they tell me, than Alexius Demetriades, in all Constantinople.’ She checked, and looked up from her task. ‘It was not really him you wanted, for that leg of yours?’

I shook my head. ‘I doubt there’s any more to be done about that. I came because I thought – I hoped the Lady Alexia might need some work doing – I needed work, and I remembered her – and this place.’ I sounded confused in my own ears, but I was so tired.

She let out a screech like a pea-hen. ‘Husband!’ and a little man as lean and sharp-angled as a cicada appeared, yawning, from another doorway, and grunted inquiringly.

Cloe jerked her head in my direction. ‘He’s come looking for the Lady Alexia – wants work.’

The little man looked me up and down, and I got wearily to my feet to be looked at. It seemed the best thing to do.

‘I’m good with livestock,’ I said, ‘and I can turn my hand to most things about a farm.’

He pulled at his scraggy beard. ‘Does the Lady Alexia know you?’

‘She only saw me once, and it was almost a year ago; but I think she would remember me. One of the Emperor’s cheetahs ran wild after a day’s hunting and –’

‘And some hairy-heeled Viking of the Emperor’s new Barbarian Guard saved her when she was attacked by it.’

‘It was the gazelle that it was really attacking,’ I said.

Cloe let out a squeal. ‘He could be the one! Now I come to look at him, he could so!’ I have noticed the same thing about some other deaf people, that they can hear none so ill when they want to.

There was a small silence, while the old man took another stare at me. ‘Are you telling me you’re one of the Barbarian Guard? You don’t look like it.’

‘Not now,’ I said. ‘I did – I was, until I got this knee fighting in Thrace in the spring.’

He considered, still tugging at his beard. ‘Easy enough to come here with an old soldier’s hard-luck story –’

‘Don’t you believe me, then?’

He sniffed. ‘I wouldn’t say I don’t, and I wouldn’t say I do. Either way it makes no odds; I’ve two men under me, and I can manage with that – just about. I won’t say I couldn’t do with another hand, but I’m not my own master, to take on extra men without the word of the Lady Alexia or her father.’

‘I’m sorry I woke you from your noon sleep for nothing. I’ll go.’

‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘You want the Lady Alexia – you go
back to the city and speak with her, and bring me back a bit of parchment with her name writ on it by herself. I can’t read, but I know how the Lady Alexia writes her name – and I’ll find you work on the farm – so that you do it properly.’

‘How shall I find the Lady Alexia in the city?’

‘The Street of the Golden Mulberry Tree, close by the Hippodrome. It’s the last house on the right-hand side, going up. But anyone round that way will tell you, if you ask for the House of the Physician.’

‘I’ll be on my way,’ I said.

‘You do that.’

Cloe cut in, picking up her basket of almonds and lumbering to her feet. ‘But not before you’ve some food in your belly and a night’s sleep behind you. For shame, Michael, we don’t need the mistress’s word to give a night’s shelter to a guest.’

She was kind, fat Cloe. She fed me and gave me some broken harness to mend, and an old rug in a corner under the vine arbour for my night’s sleep. And in the morning she gave me bread and olives and a draught of thin wine to see me on my way, and said, ‘Do not you be cast down. If your story is true, and I’m minded that it is, the more I look at you, the Lady Alexia will remember and be grateful, and her father will help you. They are not folk to let a debt go unpaid.’

She meant it so kindly. Only I had not thought of it like that – not as claiming gratitude and the payment of a debt. It had been only that the wind had smelt of rain on parched grass, and the dark quiet face of the Madonna had brought the girl with the fawn back into my mind, and with it the idea that she might have work for me on the farm – the kind of work that my hands and heart knew. Cloe’s kindly meant words took me like a blow in the belly. I was sick and wretched, and something that had been clear and simple had become tangled and muddied. (So much for my prayer in the little dark church, so much for the summer-scented wind that
I had taken for something more than it was. I was glad that I had not wasted good money on that candle!) But when I had forced down the food that I no longer wanted, and remembered to thank the woman for it, I set out for the city, all the same.

Starting early in the day, I got a lift in a market-cart for a good part of the way, and it was not much past noon when I came in through the side arch of the Golden Gate.

The crowds in the Mesé, that runs magnificently from end to end of the city, seemed somewhat thinner than usual; and I wondered why, until I came close to the towering colonnaded walls of the Hippodrome and heard the roar of the crowd within, and then I realized that it must be a chariotracing day, and half the city had gone to shout for the Blue or the Green. Later, there would be faction-fighting in the streets, there always was, and is, on a race day. But for the moment, it was oddly peaceful.

I turned up one of the side streets just short of the Church of the Holy Wisdom, then into another, passed under the striding arch of a white stone aqueduct, and found myself in a part of the city where I had seldom been before. A man in the doorway of a perfume shop told me which way to go, and so I came to a quiet street running uphill towards a slim pencilling of cypresses clustered about the pinkish dome of a church.

The Street of the Golden Mulberry Tree, said a passer-by; yes, this was it.

But I turned and drifted off again, up one street and down another; sat for a while on the steps of another church, watching the sparrows foraging among the dry horse-dung in the roadway, and listened to a travelling astrologer at one street corner and a seller of fermented mares’ milk at another, both crying their wares. And it was early evening when, despite myself, I came back to the Street of the Golden
Mulberry Tree, and began slowly to make my way up it towards the last house on the right. The streets were already in shadow, though the upper storeys of the houses still caught the leas of the sunlight, thick as run honey. The last house of all, the House of the Physician, stood tall and narrow above the rest, even in the street of tall and narrow houses. Save for an arched doorway, it showed, like most houses in the city, only a blank wall to the street on the ground-floor and the floor above. One small window above that, and then on the two top storeys, broke out as a plant breaks into flower, into a riot of overhanging windows and delicate traceried balconies set with pots of trailing bright-coloured flowers that spilled over the balustrades. I stood beneath it, with my head tipped far back to look up, as though into the branches of a tree.

It seemed that I had a long journey behind me, and now that it was over, I did not know why I had come. It would be so easy to cross the narrow street to the arched doorway, and knock, and ask to speak with the Lady Alexia. But I could not do it. If I did, she would help me, I knew that; but she would think that I had come with my hands held out because I was down on my luck and hoped that she would think she owed me something for the day I had killed the cheetah. Worse still. I should never be quite sure within myself that it was not true. Next time she went out to the farm, they would tell her that I had been there asking for her; but that would not matter, because by then, I should be somewhere else. Where, I did not know, did not care; but I wouldn’t go asking my way in a church again . . .