The Belt of Gold (7 page)

She flung up her arm, as if to strike, and her lips snarled; she saw in this brute before her the eternal enemy of her City.

“When Constantinople falls, then night will come, finally and forever, night without end.”

Around her, in the hush after her voice ceased, her women smiled on her, adoring, themselves made great in her. The barbarian was impressed. She saw it in his eyes. His wide mouth lost its smile. Now he even took a step backward, and went down on one knee to her.

He said, “Hail to you, Basileus, and glory to your City.”

She nodded, pleased with this natural tribute from a creature unschooled in flatteries. He was falling into her power. She saw uses for him that made her hungry to control him.

She said, “You have my blessing, Hagen. God has sent you here. You must see that the death of your brother is but part of something much, much larger, in which you should tread warily, lest you do damage utterly beyond your ken.”

He said, “I have sworn a blood oath, lady. Yet I will give heed to you.”

“Excellent. In due course, I tell you, in Christ's name, your oath shall be fulfilled. Your brother's blood was spilled in my behalf, protecting this innocent young creature whose tasks are mine, and I am aware of my duty to you.”

She put out her hand to him; he was supposed to kiss her seal-ring. Instead her long white hand disappeared into his in a hard clasp that let her feel every rough callus on his palm.

“Done,” he said, as if they had made a bargain, and he got up off his knee.

“Now, come talk to me about your King Charles, who I understand now wants to call himself emperor.”

She gestured; her servant brought her the dish of octopus. The big Frank folded his arms over his chest and looked around him at the room.

“He was crowned emperor in Rome,” he said, as he surveyed the place. “In the way of things, he will get whatever he can take and hold. As for myself, I only call him King because I have to—he is of no better blood than I am, Charles. His father was only the chief of the royal household, until the Pope came over the mountains.”

“Oh? Where is the real King, then?”

“They threw him into a monastery,” he said, and smiled at her. He had a way of smiling that suggested more intelligence than he had yet evinced to her. “Here you blind them, there we cut their hair off. It's the same thing.”

“I doubt it much.” She hoped her women were attending to this, since it proved her point about force as a means of statecraft. “Why was the deposed King superior to Charles, in your view?”

“His blood was royal. Charles's birth is no better than mine.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I mean it,” he said.

“But your blood doesn't matter, does it, compared to the individual quality of the man? Charles has the name of being an exceptional man, for a barbarian.”

He stared at her a while, his arms folded over his chest, and the lids of his eyes lowered. He said, “Meaning that you are not of the blood royal, lady?”

She grunted. Too late, she saw that she had lost some prestige with him, violating some arcane barbarian idea about kings. She pushed away the half-eaten dish and gestured to her women, who rushed in around her, tending her hair, her clothes, her cosmetics. In the center of this bustle, she faced this brute she meant to domesticate and said, “Meaning things are not so simple here as they are in your fens and woodlands. Theophano. You will escort our new friend to suitable quarters and see that he is attended as befits one whose birth is equal to a king's.” She gave Hagen a level stare, annoyed with herself; had she had him believe she was descended from the gods, she could have gotten anything from him. “You may attend us in the morning ceremonial.”

He bowed his head to her, saying nothing. Theophano already stood at the door behind him, impatient to get him out of here, and he turned and went after her. The door shut.

Irene said, “God, my only Glory. How can this Charles hope to manage with men like that around him?”

Helena brought her a cup of wine. “I thank God we are Romans.”

“He was sent to remind us why we must keep the City safe,” said Ida, who stroked one hand over the Empress's hair and down her shoulder, a loving, possessive caress. “You were wonderful. Even he felt it.”

Irene sipped the wine. “Nonetheless I feel he is insufficiently impressed.”

Helena said, “He is a barbarian.”

“Such as he have served Rome in the past.” Irene put out the cup and someone took it. “Clearly God sent him to me, as Ida says. Glory to God.”

“Glory,” they murmured, “glory, glory,” but their eyes were on Irene, and not on Heaven.

Following after the girl Theophano, Hagen thought back over what had passed between him and the Empress. He had carefully avoided making any promises to her, but somehow she was giving him space in her Palace, making deals with him, inviting him into her following. Her whole manner toward him made him uneasy.

Still, it was shelter, and he had learned some names: John Cerulis, and someone named Karros. He went after Theophano across a dark courtyard and down three wide shallow steps onto a terrace.

This was a garden, adorned with statues and a fountain, and all around it torches in iron standards held back the night. He followed Theophano through the yellow haze of the torchlight. Other people moved past him, some carrying dishes or books or jugs from the fountain, others idle strollers, who stared at him with curiosity bright on their faces.

The Palace was huge. At the edge of the terrace, he paused to look behind him, and saw the great curved wall of the Hippodrome looming up in the darkness, connected by the tower of the Imperial balcony to the many-leveled building he had just left.

The ground sloped away across the whole headland; retaining walls and buttresses and pavements tamed it all into a descending sweep of terraces. Besides the sprawling Palace behind him, other buildings studded the grounds. Open walkways connected them, some bordered with gardens, and others with rows of white columns. The fountain before him was made in the shape of a great fish that spouted water from its back, and other monstrous shapes formed some of the columns of the building directly before him.

The people who swarmed through this complex seemed somehow too small for the place, as if it had been made for giants. The torches fluttered in the wind with a hissing roar of flame. Music sifted through the air, and somewhere nearby people were laughing. Hagen stood still, enjoying the sight, moved again to admiration of these people who had the grace and good luck to live like this.

Theophano came back to him, frowning, impatient. “Are you coming?”

“Yes, yes.” He went after her along a walk of brickwork. “We don't have anything like this in Frankland.”

She gave him a look of pity mixed with amusement. “I can see that very well. Come along.”

Opening a door, she led him into a large empty hall, half-lit by candles on the walls. “This is the Triclinium. This is where we eat.”

All the tables and benches had been shoved back off to one wall. At the far end of the room from Theophano and Hagen, a man with a mop was sloshing water over the black and white tiles of the floor. Theophano crossed the hall swiftly to the far side, Hagen on her heels.

“Why did you run away, at the inn?” he asked. “Why didn't you come and get me so I could help Rogerius?”

“I was naked!” She shook her head; her hair ribbon fluttered over her shoulder. “I looked for you, I did, really, but I had no clothes on, and it was I they wanted—I had to escape. I had some thought of leading them off, but it all happened too fast to make plans.”

She led him across a semicircular pavement, another fountain in the center of it, where people were crowded on benches, talking, walking up and down, hailing one another. Someone called to Theophano as she passed and she raised her hand in answer without slackening her steps. In the wall at the far side she opened a door and stood aside to let Hagen through.

“You are fortunate the Basileus likes you. That was most presumptuous of you, talking to her the way you did. It's an offense to everyone. I wouldn't talk like that to your little barbarian King.”

“I don't see any offense in talking honestly to anybody, even a Basileus.”

They were inside a long corridor that led off through the dark. On one side was a series of doors, and on the other the wall was broken up into great windows that let in the light from the terrace outside. Theophano went swiftly along the corridor opening each door as she came to it, looking through and moving on. After she had inspected three or four rooms this way, she found one she liked and went in, motioning to Hagen to follow her.

“Here. You can stay here, if it suits you.”

The room was large and airy, the wall opposite the door being open to another terrace; the golden light of more torches outside spilled into the room, showing Hagen the square lines of a table and the foot of the bed. He nodded. “Help me find a candle.”

Instead, she clapped her hands, and at once a man with an embroidered coat appeared from the corridor, bowing. She gave him crisp orders and he hurried off. Theophano loitered in the doorway, her hands behind her.

“Did you—” Her voice quivered. “Bring my clothes?”

He sat down on the bed. The light from the terrace glowed on her face, gilding her cheekbones and nose, leaving her wide-spaced eyes deep in the shadow. “As it happens, I did. They're in my packs, at the inn where I was staying. What about my horses? Where can I stable them here?”

“Oh—take them to the Hippodrome.” She discarded that topic with a little twitch of her right hand, which dove away immediately behind her again. She touched her lower lip with her tongue. He thought, She wants to ask me something, but she's afraid of telling me too much, and guessed it was the paper he had found that was on her mind. He smiled at her.

She said, “Well, I'm glad you did. Did you bring—my shoes, too?”

He said, “I brought everything.”

She moved a little, bringing her face more fully into the light; her eyes were bright with a sudden desperate interest. The servant came in with a candle, a pile of linen, a jug, a bowl, a chamber pot. Quickly he dispersed these things around the room.

“Good night,” Theophano said, but she did not go.

Hagen got up and went to the far wall, which opened on to the terrace beyond. The air was warm and smelled of the sea. A door stood ajar under a hanging drapery, so that he could close the room if he wished. From here he could see all the way to the tip of the headland, where a lighthouse stood, its great flame curling and leaping into the night sky.

“Will that be all, my lord?” the servant murmured.

Hagen glanced around him. Theophano had gone. He nodded to the old man behind him. “Yes, thank you.”

7

He had the list. She was sure of it, as sure as if he had told her outright.

She walked down the slope past the Triclinium, through the grove of mulberry trees that fed the palace silkworms, her hands winding together as she thought. If she could retrieve the list somehow she might restore herself in the Empress's sight.

With the help of some of the guards she could probably take it back by force. She imagined that, the fighting, and remembered with a cold shiver the fierce fighting in the little room of the inn at Chrysopolis and knew at once that was not the way. Besides, he had said something about his packs; he did not have the list with him, and in fact from the way he had phrased things she guessed he understood, in some dim brute fashion, that the paper was of value, and would conceal it.

At the edge of the mulberry trees, she paused to look down over the lawns and gardens before her. The large important buildings of the Palace were nearly all above the place where she was standing; this area below was given up to pavilions and fountains and walkways among the plantings. At the very end of the whole complex stood the Pharos, with its tossing head of flame.

Down there also was the Bucoleon, the little old ramshackle palace that Prince Michael occupied. A screen of tall cypress hid it from Theophano's view, but she imagined she could see the faint flicker of torchlight, and hear the sounds of laughter and music.

Her spirit leapt. She needed that, some amusement, some respite. Her intertwining hands parted. Gathering up the skirt of her gown, she hurried down past the cypress, down toward the lights and joyous sounds of the party.

Hagen saw her go. He stood near one of the fountains on the level above her and watched her, light-footed and graceful in her white gown, running away through the line of cypress trees.

He drank some water from the fountain and wandered off, looking curiously all around him. There were few people outdoors now, in the full night, but the rings of torches that lit up every garden and courtyard still blew like red-gold rags in the wind off the sea. He found a tiny pavilion of white columns, half-hidden in the middle of a garden whose voluptuous waxy flowers were wide open to the wind, casting a perfume so thick and sweet it rolled his stomach. Inside the little pavilion was nothing but an overturned chair, and near the way out, a glove too small for a man's hand.

He drifted away across a broad pavement, studded with strange trees in stone pots, and went down three steep little steps onto another walkway. No one stopped him; no one challenged him. As he walked through the darkness, he saw a few other people, a servant climbing up from a fountain, a girl who darted out of the bushes, giggled, and raced away on bare feet. Apparently, anyone who wished could roam at will through the palace complex. He opened doors and peered into dark hallways, saw empty rooms full of things worth stealing, but there were no guards.

Were they so trusting, or merely sure of themselves? Carefully he shut all the doors behind him.

Twice the walks he followed led him out unexpectedly on to some parapet that overlooked the sea. The second time he leaned against a railing of stone and looked west.

In Rome he had seen the wreckage of buildings like these, huge archways, walls, broken columns, monstrous remnants of an age of heroes. The current occupants of the Holy City lived among them in smoky hovels and were chopping up the marble to burn for lime. King Charles had said, “This was the real Rome, what's left of it, and not—” and waved away toward the Lateran palace, the Pope's residence, with a sniff of contempt. Hagen had not understood it then. Now he understood.

She had mentioned Rome, and other places he had never heard of. Troy, and some place whose name he had forgotten. He imagined suddenly that once the whole world had been ordered within the walls of cities like this one, where the people lived like this; but it had gone now, all but Constantinople, because—

He did not want to think about the reasons why. The people here thought the barbarians had ruined it all, and he was a barbarian, to their eyes.

To his own, now. He knew himself a different man from this, a creature from the outer darkness, whose clumsy hands could only break, not build.

In the west the twin stars, the Gateway, as his people called them, were disappearing into the mist along the horizon; soon they would be washed in the limitless sea. Here, he supposed, they called them something else, the right name, a name lost to him, or never known. He felt alone and out of place here, less than a man.

That feeling drove him on, walking along the narrow, steeply descending walk. The sea had splashed it, making the stone slippery under his feet, but he did not slow; he plunged through the gap in a hedge, and came out on a windblown lip of rock below the lighthouse.

The flames in their brass bowl hissed and thundered above his head. He went by the lighthouse, plowing through a tangle of brush, and there before him was an open courtyard full of people.

He stopped. In the hazy torchlight, half a hundred men and women sat or stood around a semicircular pavement, drinking, laughing, leaning on one another. In the center of the pavement was a statue, so worn and cracked with age he could not easily make out the subject: two great breasts locked in a lewd embrace. Behind the torchlight was a long low building half-buried in the brush.

As he stood there watching, a man with a grey beard walked into the midst of the other people, and they crowed and clapped and gathered around him, and striking a pose, he began to speak in rolling tones. The words were Greek, but strange and oddly accented, like the speech of bards, and Hagen had to go down closer to hear it better.

The Greeks sat down in a semicircle around the man who was speaking—or reciting, Hagen guessed, certainly performing in some way. He was telling a story about a band of men taken prisoner by a one-eyed giant, and that held Hagen's interest; he loved tales about monsters. In Jerusalem once he and Rogerius had spent the whole night buying wine for a drunken monk, who repaid them with stories of giants and pygmies, black men and yellow men, men with two heads, men with their faces in their chests, men with one leg, who hopped about and when the sun shone bright held a huge foot over their heads as sunshades.

The monster in the Greek story was less interesting. The crafty leader of the captive band burned out the giant's eye with a fiery stick, and tying his men under the bellies of the Cyclops's sheep, he got them past the monster and out of the cave. There were other Cyclops living nearby but the leader of the Greeks tricked the poor blind creature and no one came to his help. The poem ended in a patter of applause. Hagen turned to go, and then he saw Theophano.

He stopped where he was. She was standing near the doorway to the old building behind the courtyard, with two or three other women. These women all moved closer together, and he saw that in their center was a man.

Tall and massively built, the man came out into the courtyard, ignoring the women, who hung on him adoringly. Even Theophano was gazing on him with a look of rapture. Hagen grunted, half-amused; where was all that pride now? Having never seen Prince Michael before at a close distance, he recognized the man as much by his haircut as anything else; unlike the other men who wore their hair loose and flowing, this one had his head close-cropped, so that the charioteer's cap would fit. Around his waist he wore the heavy golden belt of the champion.

He paid no more heed to the worshipful women around him than to the air he breathed. Theophano gave up. Drawing back, she remained a moment with her wistful gaze upon him, her hands at her sides, and turned away. Watching from the shadows, Hagen thought she was the most beautiful of them all; had he been Michael, he would have taken her into the house and let her prove her adoration. Her black hair was gathered up in a cluster of ringlets at the back of her head, secured by a long ribbon that fluttered down over her shoulder. If he tugged on the ribbon, Hagen imagined, all that perfumed hair would come tumbling down—

She felt his look upon her; she raised her head and saw him there.

He backed up a step, embarrassed, as if she could see what he was doing to her in his mind. She was coming toward him. He began to move away, back into the darkness, but she smiled, and the smile held him. He stood waiting for her, at the edge of the shadows.

Theophano crossed the courtyard, circling the people who listened to Romulos recite Homer; she wondered what Hagen was doing here. She realized she was foolish to believe he would stay neatly put away in the room she had found for him. If Michael saw him here, the Prince would chase him off. Michael never let strangers stay within the bounds of his palace.

“Hello,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking around. Should I go?”

“Well—” She thought of the list he had; she should be trying to get it back. Not tonight. Tonight she wanted to do nothing but enjoy herself. “No, no,” she said. “Stay and have a cup of wine, listen to the poem.”

“I've been listening,” he said.

“Oh? Do you understand it?” She moved sideways a little, toward a stone bench under the trees, and he went with her. Perhaps he was lonely. She could give him a little companionship, she decided; after all, he had saved her life once. She beckoned to a servant with a tray of wine cups. Hagen sat down beside her.

He said, “The Greek's a little odd. It sounds beautiful.”

“You think so?” That surprised her; it seemed a refinement beyond the barbarian mind.

“Yes. But my sympathies are with the Cyclops.”

“They are! But why?”

“He's a barbarian, like me,” Hagen said.

“Oh, it isn't like that.”

At once she saw that it was, that poor old Polyphemus groaning in his cave was the popular figure of a barbarian, hairy and strong and stupid. “Nobody is killing me!” Hagen was not stupid; Hagen resented it, and with good reason. She wondered, unsettled, if she had been rude to him, condescending, and was ashamed of herself. She put her hand on his, where it rested on the stone bench, and sought words to make it better between them.

“But you are more like Odysseus, aren't you—wandering the world on your way home.” There, that would serve. She smiled, pleased with herself, her tact, her generosity. “Do you have a pretty wife at home, too, weaving all day and picking it out again at night?”

Under her hand, his hand moved, turning over, and he gripped her fingers. “Why, are you looking for a man? I saw you trying for him.” He nodded out across the courtyard toward Michael.

She yanked her hand out of his grip, her ears hot with embarrassment. “Michael doesn't love anyone but his horses.”

“Michael is a fool,” Hagen said. “You're much prettier than a horse.” He caught her by the hand again, his long smile on his face, his eyes bright.

“I'm not sure that's a compliment.” With some difficulty she freed herself from his grasp.

“Who the hell are you?”

Absorbed in the talk with Hagen, she had not seen Michael coming up to them; she started all over, and Hagen took her hand again.

“Oh! Michael,” she said. “You frightened me.”

The charioteer stood before them, his feet widespread, his chest thrown out, his hands on the golden belt at his waist. “Who the hell is this? What are you doing bringing peasants into my house?”

Hagen did not get up; he sat there looking Michael over at his leisure, all the good nature gone from his face. Alarmed, Theophano got swiftly to her feet, remembering how on the porch of the church on the Chalcedon road Hagen had drawn his sword against four men.

“Michael,” she said, “he is the guest of the Basileus—”

“I don't want the low-born here!”

Hagen got up. He was even taller than Michael, seeming slender next to the Prince's heavy-muscled chest and shoulders. He said, “What's wrong, horse-boy—can't you bear the competition?”

Theophano pushed in between them, her heart pounding. “Please, can't you have some courtesy—”

“Get out of my house,” Michael said, and wrapped his arm around her and pulled her around behind him.

The big Frank grunted at him. “You've got a cheap courage, horse-boy. I suppose it goes with the language.”

He turned away, walking off, long-strided, unhurried, going away through the trees. The Prince snarled something under his breath. His hand slipped down Theophano's arm and left her.

“Michael,” she said, “that was crude and boorish.”

Suddenly there were tears in her eyes; she saw more of the barbarian in Michael now than in Hagen.

The Prince laughed at her. There was a rough edge to his mirth; he glared over her head at the absent Frank. “You can do better than that—consorting with peasants.”

“He's not a peasant! He's a Frankish nobleman. He is the Basileus's guest.”

“He's half in love with you.”

“He is not. He knows no one else, he was lonely.”

“I won't have you giving yourself to men who don't deserve you, that's all. Come on with me.”

“I wasn't giving myself to him. I—”

“Theophano, keep your voice down, you're attracting attention.”

She bit her lip, aware that he was right: everybody was looking at them, she was making tomorrow's gossip. She saw no virtue in being Roman if people still behaved like brutes.

“Come,” he said, soft. “Get yourself under control.”

“Pagh.” She jerked herself around and walked off, her face hot, and went away into the dark.