The Belt of Gold (29 page)

“I will,” he said. “I'll do what I can.”

“Thank you,” Nicephoros said, and now, to Hagen's surprise, he bowed.

In the morning Irene performed the sacred ritual of the well of Saint Stephen, carrying water in a procession around the Church of the Holy Wisdom, and sending off little phials to all parts of the City and to the rest of the Empire, to purify the altars everywhere. In the heat of noon she went into the little garden below the Daphne and there was served her dinner, and while she was there, the Frank Hagen came to her, and knelt down before her, and asked her to be allowed to kill John Cerulis.

“Is it so easy for you to kill another human being, Hagen?” she said. “Has the death of dear Theophano taught you no respect for life?”

“He is killing everywhere,” Hagen said. “This isn't a murder, this is the uprooting of a weed, Basileus.”

That amused her, but she did not laugh, not wanting to seem frivolous; the issue was a serious one, after all. Her women were moving around her, serving her a selection of dishes in the Arab style, the Caliph having sent her a new cook along with the menagerie. She had sent back the leopard and the tiger but kept the cook. Little Philomela sank down beside her and laid her head on Irene's knee, and the Empress fed her a stuffed onion.

“Hagen,” she said, “God chose me to be Basileus. God will protect me and those whom God desires to live. Those who have lost God's sanction, those will die, and John Cerulis is but an instrument. So it is with evil; foul though the intent, the act cannot but be the will of God.”

Out there, beyond the low wall at the edge of the garden, she saw someone walking; for an instant her eyes followed him. It was Prince Constantine, whom she had not punished for his triflings with the horse-race.

She said, still watching her cousin, “You know, Hagen, you are in many ways still a boy, impetuous and narrow. When you have come to my years, you will see how little one must interfere with the flow of things. What is meant, will be, my dear. Success in life is a question of finding out what is meant, and then fitting oneself to God's will.”

She smiled at him. Hagen did not look convinced; he was standing up, his hands against his thighs, his face rumpled with dissatisfaction.

“Are you going to guard Nicephoros?”

“Someone must,” he said.

“Excellent. Leave the rest to God, Hagen. Have faith.” Now she was too amused not to laugh, and she did laugh. “Didn't you listen to the holy man?”

He grunted at her. “Give me leave.”

“You have my leave, dear one.”

He walked away; she leaned on her elbow on the side of her chair, watching him go, his long shapely arms accented by cuffs of silver on his wrists. She decided to get him some jeweled rings for his upper arms, perhaps some sort of collar. He was wearing the garnet she had given him. She loved garnets, light-shattering, imperial. The women hovered around her; one was daubing scent inside her elbow, a whiff of rose, of almond, the aromas of fine poison. Her gaze drifted across the wall again, but Prince Constantine was gone from sight. She smiled, thinking again of fine poison.

Ishmael loitered in the Apron, watching the grooms and stableboys rush in and out with buckets and nets full of hay and leather measures of grain, back and forth down the aisles full of horses. His head was throbbing. He had drunk himself to sleep the night before. His wife had nagged him out of bed this morning and so he had come down here, but there was nothing for him here, not anymore.

Down the aisle behind him, a horse was fretting and neighing, but it was Folly, Michael's inside wheeler, who was crazy anyhow, and it had been going on since he got here; he paid no heed. Ever in his mind he saw the City of God descending, pure white in the sunlight, its towers and rooftops, its streets of solid gold.

Behind him a man shrieked. That brought him up, his back prickling, whirling around.

Down the aisle from Michael's horses came the groom Esad, screaming. “Constantine!” he bellowed, running past Ishmael, and seized a horse-boy by the shoulders, spun him toward the door, and shoved him.

“Go get the Prince—get Michael, damn you, fast!”

The boy raced off. Esad rushed to the wall and tore a whip and a leadrope down from their pegs.

Ishmael leapt up. “What's happening? What's going on?”

“Constantine!” Esad ran into the aisle again with the whip and the leadrope, and Ishmael, with a dozen other men, hurried after him.

Two of the torches in the aisle had gone out. Only the one in the blank wall at the far end burned, and against its fitful light the tossing mane and head and neck of the horse Folly were framed in a stark silhouette. Esad raced to this horse's stall, the rest of the horsemen on his heels, and flung open the door.

The horse charged. It was notoriously jealous of its stall and could not bear even its groom inside for very long, but Ishmael had never seen it so furious as this. Esad wasted no time. Two steps into the stall, he dropped the leadrope and laid on the horse with the whip, and the great beast reared up into the air, striking out with its forefeet, its eyes glaring, ashimmer, in insane fury.

Then someone behind Ishmael screamed “Constantine!” and pointed.

Ishmael saw it at once. There behind the horse, against the wall, half-buried in the straw, lay a motionless body, facing the door. It was Constantine.

Ishmael dashed into the stall, where the horse, towering over Esad, was squealing in piercing blasts. Its forefeet struck down through the air. Scooping up the leadrope from the floor, Ishmael darted to one side. The horse wheeled after him, its head darting, its teeth snapping closed on his arm.

Esad brought the whip down butt first over the horse's poll, and it let go, half rearing again, and lunging sideways away. Ishmael leapt on it. He whipped the leadrope around its neck and flipped another loop over its nose, and gripping the horse hard by the head he forced it down and dropped it on its side on the straw. His arm throbbed, where the horse had bitten him.

The others thundered into the stall and lifted Constantine out. The horse was trembling violently, its spirit outraged. Ishmael stroked its neck in a quick sympathetic caress, his fingers slipping on the scum of sweat and blood and grime that lay over the brute's skin. Constantine had been here a long while; and he was dead, certainly. What a fool, to have entered this horse's stall without a whip.

An instant after the thought formed, he suspected something deeper. He got up. Folly lay there shuddering on the straw, half-invisible in the dark, except for the mad white glare of its eye. Ishmael went out of the stall and locked it. Pulling up his sleeve, he inspected the bruise forming on his upper arm. The cloth had protected him from any real damage.

In the Apron a thick ring of men surrounded Constantine's body on the ground. Esad was kneeling over him, and there in the crowd was Hagen, the Frank.

Ishmael went up beside him, and the Frank said, “Him, too. God's blood, I don't understand this.”

“What?” Ishmael looked up at him.

“There are dead people all over the City,” Hagen said. “I don't understand how he fits into it, though.”

Ishmael shivered from head to toe, chilled down to his soul. A surge of revulsion and dread ran hard on the heels of the cold. The Heavenly City blazed in his mind. He spun around and walked out of the stable, out to the street.

Hagen followed him; side by side they walked through the warm windless sunshine, each in his own thoughts. Finally Hagen turned to him.

“Was there any sign of murder—did he show a wound?”

“I didn't see,” Ishmael said. There was a mob ahead of them, crowded around the great gate into the Hippodrome, and he bent his steps that way. “No, of course not; all someone would have to do is knock him on the head and pitch him in there with Folly. Everybody knows that horse. He would trample anything in the stall.”

“Even Michael?”

“Michael. You don't think Michael had anything to do with Constantine's death? Look!”

They were coming up behind the crowd at the gate. There on the tall part of the planks hung a belt of gold links, with a huge oval clasp: Michael's championship belt. Ishmael's mouth fell open. Now he knew why the crowd was here. More, he knew why that which drew the crowd was here; his stomach churned.

“What is it?” Hagen peered at the gate where the great placard was nailed up; of course he could not read. “What does that say?”

“There will be a race for the Golden Belt,” Ishmael said, his voice flat. “On Saint Febronia's Day.”

“A race between you and Michael?” Hagen put his hands on his hips. “When is Saint Febronia's Day? Oh.” He remembered, understanding on his face like the sun rising.

“She wants to take the mob's attention from this holy man,” Ishmael said. “So she is proclaiming a race.” He turned away from the gate and went off down the street. “Let's go get a drink.”

“I think I undervalue her,” Hagen said. “Can you beat Michael this time?”

“I'm not going to try,” Ishmael said.

“What?”

Avoiding the big Frank's eyes, Ishmael turned into the tavern and made for his favorite table in the front of the room by the door. At least he still had credit here. It made no difference if he raced; they would not pay him anyway. Sitting down, he buried his head in his hands. How false the world was, how full of sin and disappointment. Constantine murdered, lying there in the straw while mad old Folly stamped and beat and kicked him to a pulp. All false, all sinful; he could bear it no more.

And time was coming to an end. The Heavenly City would descend, and take all those chosen of Christ up to Heaven, and the sins of the damned would drag them down to Hell.

Hagen put a cup in front of him and poured the pale red wine into it. “What do you mean, you won't race?” He sat on the bench with the corner of the table between them.

“Oh, God, Hagen—” Ishmael ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Yesterday—did you see it? In the sky?”

“I saw nothing in the sky but clouds.”

“Your eyes are blinded with sin.”

“One of us is blind, if you saw anything in the sky but clouds.”

An unaccountable rage mounted in Ishmael's heart, red and hot as a flame. “What would a barbarian know about God?”

Hagen smiled at him, uninsulted. “You think this Daniel is bringing with him the Heavenly City. You know he is in the power utterly of John Cerulis, who is as wicked a man as any I have ever seen—”

“God chooses His instruments as He will.”

“What sense does it make to choose John Cerulis?”

“You belittle God—you try to fit God into the puny human frame of reason! No! God's way is beyond our knowledge—” As he spoke, Ishmael felt mounting in his heart the almost unbearable longing for that wonder, a place where the iron claws of time and consequence mattered not. He shut his eyes again. “We are whatever God wishes of us.”

Hagen snorted at him, sipped his wine, and pushed the cup at Ishmael. “Drink. You are too sober.”

“God's day is coming!”

“You people here—you glorify everything.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ishmael, listen. My grandfather was not Christ's man. He sacrificed horses on the solstice and prayed to oak trees. My father used to say, ‘Leave a little for the old gods.' You people here, you have given up everything to Christ—”

“You blaspheme. Christ is all, we owe all to Christ.”

“Maybe, but it strikes me that if Christ were everything, there would be no reason for Him to be jealous, and yet He is jealous.”

Ishmael's temper burst like a blister. “You pitiful creature. You blasphemer—you want me to spend my soul on horse-races, when the end of the world is at hand! Some devil sent you—some devil speaks through you, to seduce me from the right way. Get away from me, Satan!”

As he spoke, he put Hagen away from him, by getting up, by running out the door.

In the street, it was no different; people bustled here and there, on their trivial daily business, all unseeing that the day of the Lord was at hand. He ran away down the street, the air itself an irritation, running away to the Heavenly City.

Michael knew who had killed Constantine, and he understood why. He sat down beside his uncle's body, laid out on the floor of the stable, there in the straw with the dung and the mud. The horse had beaten Constantine's bones to bits, inside the bruised casing of his flesh; his head was all misshapen. Michael put his thumb down on each of his uncle's eyelids and firmly pressed them closed.

It was unjust, somehow—she had taken advantage of the purge, of the horror in the City, to slip one more body in; nobody would care, so many were dying. Unjust and pitiful. And yet had he himself not cast out this kinsman? Constantine had violated what was sacred—his honor, his reputation and the reputation of the races, the only thing that mattered. Michael had given up his bond with Constantine; he had no right now to be angry that she had punished him.

He thought, In a world more like the Hippodrome, such things would not happen. He wished she had not thrown the body into the stable. Wished she had not used mad old Folly to do her dirty work. Yet there was a certain roundness to it, a fitness. He knew why she had done it. He told himself again it was no business of his, not anymore. Getting up, he walked away through the stable.

25

If the Empress spent her days in ritual and procession, Nicephoros her minister spent his rushing from one place to another, meeting with other officers, working out practical ways of meeting the demands of life in Constantinople. Hagen escorted him through the streets to a palace or a public building, and then lazed around outside for hours, half-asleep in the sunshine, bored and low of humor.

He supposed this was a fit punishment. If he had not given John Cerulis the list, people would not be dying now all over the City, and Nicephoros would not need protection.

He brooded on that, how it was his fault these people were dying, and his grey mood turned black. He felt John Cerulis like a poisonous vapor that was slowly spreading over the City. The Empress with her empty babble of God and doing what God intended could not stand against this infection; in the end it would destroy them all.

One afternoon, while Nicephoros met with other officials inside, Hagen stood outside on the steps, wondering if he ought not to kill John Cerulis at once, and tell the Empress later—thinking, too, of Theophano, who had sacrificed herself without hesitation for the greater good of all—and a woman passed by on the street.

She slowed; she gave him a warm look. He smiled at her, and she stopped at once and beckoned to him, nodding toward the narrow alley between the square two-story building where Nicephoros worked and the low flat-roofed warehouse next door to it. Hagen started after her, and she darted into the alley with such a teasing laugh that he broke into a run.

In the alley, she turned to face him, and with her hands pulled open the front of her dress. Out popped the most beautiful breasts he had ever seen, large globes perfectly shaped, with nipples as tight and pink as little pursed lips. He had them almost in his hands when it crossed his mind that this was all too easy.

At that moment his ear caught the scrape of a boot on a roof tile, almost directly above him. He flung himself sideways; as he moved an arrow zinged past his shoulder and shattered on the hard ground.

He rolled over and over until he came up against the warehouse wall at the side of the alley. The woman was scurrying toward the street. He slung his legs out and tripped her. She fell flat on her face with a scream, and rolled over; he got to his hands and knees and peered upward.

A man with a bow was looking down at him from the flat roof of the warehouse. Seeing Hagen, he raised the bow, drawing up the arrow to his cheek. Hagen leapt up straight at him. Catching the overhanging eave of the roof with both hands, he swung himself up toward the bowman, who shot.

The arrow flashed past Hagen's head, and the archer turned and ran, but as Hagen got up to his feet another arrow came from the side and took him through the forearm. There were two more bowmen halfway across the roof. He pulled the arrow out of his arm and flung it down.

The man directly in front of him was nocking another shaft, his face desperate. Hagen lunged at him. The other two raised their bows at him, and Hagen plowed into the man in front of him and took him cleanly off his feet. The bow clattered away. The archer struck with his fists at Hagen, but the Frank only lowered his head and heaved the bellowing soldier up across his chest, both arms tight around him, and charged across the roof at the other two.

Their bows swung level, side by side they drew back the arrows, but they hesitated, unwilling to shoot their friend to get to Hagen. The man in Hagen's arms screeched and kicked and pounded him over the head with his fists. Hagen's forearm hurt where the arrow had gone through it. He braced his feet and swung the man in his arms like a whip at the two bowmen before him.

The effort drove him to his knees, but all three of the Greek soldiers went flying. Like a fool the first to gain his feet kept on trying to use his bow, scrabbling for another arrow from the case on his belt, and Hagen staggered up and wrenched out his sword.

He shouted. The feel of the sword in his hands was like a jolt of strong liquor. The bowman, his arrow still unnocked, whirled to run, and Hagen struck him down, cleaving down into his head with the blade so that half his face fell off.

The other two men came at him from opposite directions, wielding short-handled double-bladed axes. The taller of these hewed at him, and when Hagen fended off his blows with the flat of his sword, the shorter man attacked his back.

Hagen dodged, running out from between them, and they dashed after him. He stopped and they ran to catch him between them again, and he leapt away. Like this they crossed the flat rooftop, going from side to side, a short dash, the two men splitting up to go on either side of him, another dash. The roof was sound, at least, but the two Greeks were clever and would not be run off the edge, and they were improving their tactics as he let them work at it.

The shorter one was quick but he always struck left. The tall one was slow. Hagen dodged again, waiting for an opening.

A yell from across the alley startled him; he jerked his head around to see, in a window of the second story of the building next door, a gasping shouting group of men, among them Nicephoros, watching the fight. They cheered as they saw him turn. Distracted, he stared at them an instant too long, and the man behind him struck.

The blow went short, and the Frank flinched from it, but the upper tip of the curved axe blade sliced across his back. He bolted off into the center of the roof, doubled up with pain, clutching the sword with both hands for fear of dropping it.

He yelled; he beat at the air with the sword, driving back the fear and weakness lurking in the wound. The two axes circled him. He howled again, jumped into the air as high as he could.

They came at him again, the tall one first, cutting high and low, while the little one scurried around and rushed at his back and yelled.

All his nerves jumped, but the shout behind him told him to expect an attack from the man in front of him. When the tall man lunged, Hagen hit him with a counterstroke across the spine that broke the tall Greek nearly in half.

Hagen screamed, triumphant, and jumped on the fallen man and hewed off his head. The little man turned and ran. Hagen started after him but his foot slipped on the blood and he went to his knees. Nimble as a tumbler, the little man leapt from the rooftop and raced away down the street.

Out of breath, Hagen made no effort to follow. The battle-rage that had sustained him ebbed swiftly away. His back hurt and his arm was bleeding a lot. Living in the City had softened him and he felt sick to his stomach. He walked over to look at the two men he had killed; one of them wore a lot of fancy rings, but he took nothing; he wanted nothing to remind him of this. He climbed down from the rooftop and went up toward the street.

The girl was gone. He growled, remembering her; he was in a mood now to bite those breasts off. Nicephoros was coming out of the door.

Seeing Hagen, he came forward, with both hands outstretched. “How badly are you hurt? Oh, my God, Redeemer of all. Let's get out of here. Chair! Chair!”

“I'm all right,” Hagen said.

The cut in his back was painful but shallow. It was the hurt in his arm that felt bad to him, oozing, itching already.

Two of the City
cursores
were standing by Nicephoros's chair, talking to him, and when Hagen came up, they both stared at him. One of the bearers was bringing his horse for him and Hagen turned to mount.

Nicephoros said, “He was magnificent, I cannot tell you how courageous and great of arms he is. Achilles would have turned and run from him. His voice was the bellow of a volcano as it roars the fury of the Almighty.”

“Come on,” Hagen said.

The bearers set off at their smooth flowing trot. Hagen's horse was practiced at keeping pace with the chair, staying just to the left side of it, and went along without any urging of Hagen's.

“You were magnificent,” Nicephoros told him yet again, just as jubilantly.

“They were Greeks,” Hagen said. “You people have no gift for it.”

He told himself that it had been a good fight. He had taken wounds, but they had set on him unexpectedly, and he had killed two out of three of the men. The last had fled from the prospect of facing him alone.

He was tired. Had he been forced to fight another few moments, he might have gotten too tired to do it. He was turning Greek: he was getting soft. His mood sank again, as if lowering clouds of menace pressed down on him. He thought again of John Cerulis as a vast stinking fog that closed down on the City and invaded through the breath. The sense gnawed him of business undone, of something owed, of something to be justified. Why had he given up the list to John Cerulis? He had held her in his arms for twenty minutes only before they slew her. His heart ached for her like a raw wound. He followed Nicephoros up to the Palace and the gate shut on him.

The physician put Hagen's arm to soak in holy water and plastered the gash on his back with a bandage on which an appropriate Biblical verse was written. While the Frank sat on a bench in the sunny little sheltered courtyard, he could hear Nicephoros in the room behind him, describing the fight on the rooftop to someone else.

“Never a move wasted! He moved more like a great cat than a man—it was beautiful, a sort of dance. Makes you understand why it was so popular, when it was part of the Games.”

Through the door behind Hagen a tide of people spilled—pages, one with a fan, one with a sunshade trimmed with ostrich plumes, and after them two women in sumptuous dress, and a crowd of others Hagen could not see—he knew the Empress was coming. A moment later he heard her voice.

“Who were they? Did you recognize any of them?”

Hagen wiggled his arm in the basin of water; the wound felt good, drawing and tightening as it healed. His whole body ached, every muscle sore, and he was still tired.

Constantinople was corrupting him, yet he could not go. He had a debt here, an obligation. Over and over in his mind he rode double down that dark road, he stopped with Theophano for that last kiss. Over and over, the arrow came. She was gone; she had given her life for something else, something he did not understand, and he had interfered and made a nothing of her sacrifice.

Deep in this black daydream, he caught a dazzling glimpse of gold, and stood up to face the Empress.

“Let me kill him,” he said to her. “I could reach him even if a hundred men surrounded him, and I would gladly die doing it.”

Her eyes were brilliant green, more wonderful than jewels. She laid her hand on his arm and gently urged him down again on the bench. “Tend your wounds. You have earned our deepest gratitude. They certainly meant to shoot Nicephoros through the window, had you not acted.”

“Give me John Cerulis.”

“My boy, my boy.” She put out one hand, and her people encircled her, one bringing a chair, another the sunshade, the others straightening her silken skirts and her sleeves and her hair. “You must have faith in God, Hagen.”

“Maybe God wants me to kill this pig.”

“I feel not, my boy.”

“He is killing as he chooses, you know—he will take you when he chooses. Will you not defend yourself? Let me have him.”

“Sin cannot have consequences of virtue. My champion is Christ Himself, as I am His Basileus.”

Hagen's head sank down between his shoulders; he felt himself smothering in the soft luxury of this place, where a woman could be king.

She said, “When you were travelling with John Cerulis, did you find anything remarkable? Anything at all? Did you talk with him?”

“I talked to him once or twice.” He struggled to recall what they had said. “He seemed interested mostly in his food and drink and poetry.”

“Can you remember anything he said—anything at all?”

“He is a serpent. He believes nothing but evil speech. He—”

Now Hagen thought of something and laughed. He raised his head, his gaze meeting the Empress's, intense and smiling at him. “He wanted to know about the favor that Michael wore, in the race that time—a scarf he wore on his arm. I told him it was a signal that the race was fixed.”

For an instant her eyes were wide and fierce; then, like water bubbling up, her laughter rose. “And he believed you?”

“Yes. He believes all poison, nothing healthy will he hold in mind, but all wickedness. I told him the yellow scarf meant there was no fix, but a red one meant there was.”

She laughed, long and richly, and he saw again what a beautiful woman she was, and wondered if she had men. He guessed not. She would give no man that power over her. He imagined seducing her; she loved luxury and touching, it would not be so hard. Then again he imagined being seduced by her, and saw that it would be like being eaten alive, and in a sudden cool reality knew why she had no men.

She was watching him with a broad smile on her face. “I beg your pardon. There was an attempt to fix one of the races—did you know that? While you were away. Fortunately Ishmael would not be bought.”

“Ishmael.” He remembered Ishmael, wishing this world away, and saw a connection there.

“How do your wounds feel? Will you heal swiftly, do you think?”

He moved his shoulders, putting off useless considerations. His back hurt when he shifted. “God willing.”

“God willing.” She leaned forward and laid her hand against his face, a maternal sort of blessing. He bowed; when he raised his head again she was going.

Nicephoros said, “Here, at the top of the wall.”

He started up the steps that climbed the inside of the huge land wall, with one hand holding fast to an iron railing bolted to the bricks. Hagen went up after him.

The wall was made of the same dark yellow stone and darker brick the rest of Constantinople was built of. It rose up out of a thicket of sharp-smelling myrtle, rising twenty-five feet high to a top surface broad and smooth enough to ride a horse on. Nicephoros reached it and walked along it, going the opposite way from the closest tower, toward the Sea of Marmora. He beat his arms around him as he walked; the night wind was coming up. Hagen went along behind him, wondering why Nicephoros had brought him here.