The Golden Horn (29 page)

o0o

All the sick in Saint Basil’s lay in the centermost of
its wards, the women set apart from the men by a curtain. Of the healers who
had labored there when the City was whole, only Master Dionysios remained, and
Thomas, and Alf; and two frightened but loyal students. All the rest had fled.

“This is ridiculous, you know,” said the woman
Alf was tending. She had been a tavern keeper until a Frankish sergeant beat
her senseless for refusing to serve him in the cup he proffered, a chalice from
Holy Apostles. “The devils will set fire to us, and here we’ll be
like rats in a trap.”

A man’s voice called through the curtain, as calm as
hers. “It won’t happen. They must think we’ve got real
treasure here, with the Emperor’s axemen guarding us. We’re a nut
they’ll crack before they try to light any fires.”

“Maybe they’ll take pity on us,” said a
boy’s breaking voice.

“Them?” The man laughed until his breath caught
and he choked.

“They don’t pity anything,” the woman said
for him. “They’re devils, I say. Devils straight out of Hell.”

Another of the women stirred on her cot. “We should
surrender. Why are we fighting them? We’ll only make them angrier.”

“Would you rather be alive now or dead two days since?”
Master Dionysios examined the last speaker with a hard eye and gentle hands. “Well,
mistress, you’ll walk out of here if I have anything to do with it.”

“They do admire courage,” Alf said softly, as if
to himself. He rose from the tavern keeper’s side and passed on to her neighbor.

o0o

Slowly the Varangians gave way before the enemy. There were
but six now, Grettir fallen with Sigurd and Eirik before the Latin swords; and
Halldor had dropped his axe to wield his sword awkwardly left-handed, with an
arrow in his right shoulder. Edmund sang no longer. He had no breath to spare
for it.

A bolt caught Ulf in the throat. He toppled, taking a Latin
with him, gripped in a death-embrace. Wulfmaer howled in grief and rage and
flung himself forward.

Thea hauled Edmund back by the belt. The three who remained,
with Edmund, held the door into Saint Basil’s.

Halldor reeled and fell. Thea’s arm was leaden; she
breathed in gasps. Her body ached and burned under the Varangian armor. Before
her she saw not human forms but a thicket of blades.

Haakon loosed a gurgling cry; and her left side, her sword side,
was empty. On her right, young Edmund hacked and cursed and wept without
knowing what he did.

In the garden, a shout went up. The enemy had broken through.

Thea kicked open the door she guarded and flung Edmund through
it. He tumbled headlong down the steep stair. She whirled her axe and sent it
flying, mowing down the startled Franks; slammed the door upon them and shot
the bolt. It was a full second before the first body crashed against it.

She was already at the stair’s foot, dragging Edmund
to his feet. He swore and struck at her with his fist, bruised and winded but
unharmed. She cuffed him into submission. “The hellhounds have got into
the garden. Move, or they’ll find the wards before we do!”

Without a word Edmund bolted down the passage. Thea ran fast
upon his heels.

Behind them, the enemy hurtled through the door.

Both forces met in the wide passage outside of the innermost
ward. No gate or door stood in their way there; but a pair of Varangians held
the entry, one armed with his axe, the other with a sword. Beyond them the
attackers could see what precious hoard they guarded: a roomful of the maimed
and the dying, a child or two, and three weary men in blue.

The Latins gaped. For this, they had forsaken the rich
plunder of Byzantium?

With a howl of frustrated rage, one of the captains charged.
His pike pierced through Edmund’s guard and clove his mail, striking him
to the heart.

He fell against Thea, staggering her with his dead weight.
Her eyes flared green in the Varangian face; her lips drew back from sharp
witch-teeth.

Alf saw the crossbow raised, the finger tensing on its
trigger. “Thea!” he cried sharply.

She turned, startled. The quarrel, aimed for her heart,
plunged deep into her side, piercing the mail, driving her back, sprawling,
shifting and changing under the shock of the blow. It was Thea whose body Alf
caught, the helm falling from her head, her hair tumbling over his hands to
mingle with her blood.

Very gently he laid her down. No one had moved, save by instinct,
to shape the sign of the cross.

Deep within him something broke. He took up the sword that
had fallen from Thea’s hand.

In silence more terrible than any cry, he sprang upon the
bowman. The man fell with his head half severed from his shoulders; Alf drove
deep into the ranks, crowded as they were, and hampered by the narrowness of
the passage. They closed in about him. He backed to the wall, holding them off
with a circle of steel.

Alf.
Thea’s
mind-voice was feeble.
Alf, don’t!

He faltered. A pikestaff swung around and struck him hard on
the side of the head. He staggered, but kept his feet and his sword. With a
panther-snarl he slipped beneath the pike and hewed its wielder down.

Stop!
Thea cried through
the haze of her pain.
Stop, you fool!
They’ll kill you!

“I want them to,” he said aloud, fiercely.

A scarlet figure wavered in his vision, with a host of
shadows before and behind it. Thea beat her way through the massed Franks,
armed only with her fists and the dying flare of her power on which no weapon
could bite, and threw herself upon him.

The sword dropped from his numbed hand. He saw her face,
white as death, and her wild eyes. The ring of steel drew in upon them both.

“That,” said Master Dionysios, “will be
quite enough.”

The Latins could not understand his Greek, but his tone was clear.
He made his way through them by the path Thea had opened, and glared at them
all impartially.

One or two men raised their weapons. But a helmed knight struck
the blades down. “No. Enough. He can’t fight; he hasn’t even
a knife.”

Alf crouched at the knight’s feet, holding Thea close,
eyes burning with wrath thwarted but far from quenched. “Murderer,”
he hissed in the
langue d’oeil.

The knight’s blank helm betrayed no emotion at all. He
seemed to be scrutinizing the upturned and hating face, pondering it. “You
speak Frankish, do you? Tell the old man we’re claiming this house in the
name of the Crusade.”

Alf bent over Thea’s body, probing her side. Mail and
the fading remnants of her power had slowed the quarrel, but it had gone deep,
nearly to her back. The black bolt stirred slightly with an indrawn breath; the
point of it grazed the farther side of her lung.

A mailed foot drove into his hip. He surged upward.

Dionysios seized his arm and clung grimly. “Kill
yourself if you like, you young lunatic, but don’t drag us into it. Tell
the beast he can have what he pleases if he leaves the sick and the medicines
alone.”

There was a long pause. All shuddered and looked about as if
he could not remember where he was. Slowly he repeated the Master’s words
in Frankish.

The knight unfastened his helm and handed it to a man-at-arms,
baring a lined ageless face, tired and sweating and somewhat pale. “You’ll
look after our wounded, then. These” —He indicated Alf, and Thea
whom he had gathered into his arms— “we take.”

“The woman is mortally hurt,” the Master
snapped.

“The boy is a doctor. Is he not?” The knight
turned away as Alf choked on the Greek, beckoning to one of his men. “Bind
them.”

Dionysios stood his ground. “The woman will die. I
will not have it. Get out of my hospital!”

“Bind them,” the knight repeated implacably.

House Akestas was a smoking ruin, black and hideous in the
rain. It stank of burning and of charred flesh.

Jehan stood in the half-burned garden, cowled against the drizzle.
His face was as bleak as the sky. “Sometimes,” he said to it, “it’s
perilously easy to hate my own people.”

His escort of Flemings prowled through the rubble, pausing now
and then to take up something of interest, skirting the occasional beds of
coals. Even in the rain the embers smoldered unabated, as if they disdained to
die.

A shout brought him about. Part of the stable stood intact, set
apart from the house as it had been. His squire struggled with someone there, a
scarecrow figure, very small and very black. Jehan strode toward them.

Odo’s captive was a boy, ragged and covered with soot,
who struggled and bit and cursed in half a dozen languages. Even the squire’s
hard blow neither stilled nor silenced him; but when he saw Jehan he froze. To
his wide eyes, the priest seemed a giant.

Odo shook him roughly, nursing a bitten hand. “The
little beast was rooting in the straw.”

“Wet, probably, and cold,” Jehan said, speaking
Greek—it would not hurt Odo to exercise his brain a little. “Look;
his teeth are chattering. He’s thin as a lath, too. He was on short commons
well before we closed down the markets.”

“Please,” the child whined. “Please, noble
sirs. You don’t want me. I’m too thin, no meat on my bones, see. Just
skin.”

Jehan laughed without mirth. “So we eat little
children, do we, lad? What else do we do?”

“Kill,” the boy answered with sudden venom. His
voice slid back into its whine; he cringed in Odo’s hands. “Please,
great lord, holy Patriarch, I’m worth nothing, I never was. Don’t kill
me.”

“Why should I want to?”

That, the boy seemed to think, was unanswerable.

Jehan freed him from Odo’s grasp and held him lightly
but firmly. His arms were no bigger than sticks. “If you can tell me
something, I’ll let you go. I’ll even give you money.”

The black eyes narrowed. “Show me.”

Jehan took a bit of silver from his pouch. The boy swallowed.
It was more money than he had ever dreamed of. His fingers itched to snatch at
it. But Jehan’s grip was too strong.

“Here. This for the truth.” He held the coin up
in front of the child’s eyes. They fixed on it, fascinated. “Did
you see what happened to this house?”

The urchin’s eyes flickered. Fear, or the effort of
inventing a lie?

Fear, Jehan decided. The emaciated body shook with it; the dark
cheeks greyed. He tried in vain to break away.

Jehan turned the coin until it glittered. “Tell me.”

It took a long while, for the boy was truly terrified, more
of the memory than of the man who held him. But greed in the end was stronger
than fear. With his gaze riveted on the coin, he said, “It was an angel.”
Pressed, he went on in fits and starts. “I was hiding. I peeped out. The
dev— Your people were all over, killing and stealing and doing things to
people. Some were in the house. Then there was nobody in the street, or nobody
much. And he came out. He was an angel, like in church.”

Have you ever been in one?
Jehan wondered. But he said, “Go on. What was he like?”

“An angel. All white. He—I think he had people
with him. I didn’t notice them much. He came out of the house. He stood and
he shone. And the fire came down.”

Jehan gripped the boy till he yelled, then let go. The
urchin snatched the coin and bolted. Jehan hardly noticed him. “Fire,”
he said slowly. “Fire came down.”

“A patent lie,” Odo declared. “The looters
must have torched the place.”

“What?” Jehan had forgotten the squire was
there. “What? Set fire to it? No. Not they. There are bodies in those
ruins. Several bodies, if my nose is any guide. And an... angel. He would look
like that when his power was on him. He lives, then. Thank God. But why destroy
House Akestas?”

“Divine vengeance?” Odo suggested, not quite
flippantly.

“I hope not,” Jehan said. “For his sake
and for all our sakes, I hope not.”

o0o

Jehan almost wept when he saw Saint Basil’s. It was
beautifully, blessedly intact, save for the splintered outer gate; although
Latin guards stood there, the courtyard was whole, untouched.

They let him in readily, with proper respect for his priesthood.
Wonder of wonders, he thought, they were both sober and sane. Nor had they
plundered within. Part of the hospital was a barracks, but a well-disciplined barracks;
the rest kept to its old function. And there, bending over a wounded soldier,
was Master Dionysios, as brusque and grim-faced as ever, tyrannizing over the
conquerors as he always had over his own people. Even the Frankish surgeons
seemed content to bow to his rule.

As Jehan approached him, a shrill cry echoed through the room.
Anna ran down an aisle among the beds, her braids flying, to fling herself into
Jehan’s arms. She was babbling like a mad thing, too swift and incoherent
for him to follow.

He held her for a long while. They were all staring at him. Latins,
he noticed, lay beside Greeks, all mingled and apparently amicable.

Anna had fallen silent, weeping; her whole body shook, although
she made no sound. He sat with her on the side of an empty bed.

She stiffened in his arms. He loosed his hold; she sat on
his lap, looking into his face, letting the tears fall where they would. “Mother
is dead,” she said very calmly. “So is Irene. So is Corinna. The
Latins killed them. Alf made our house a pyre for them.”

Jehan had known how it must be. But it was the worst of all the
past days’ horrors to hear it from her in that quiet, child’s voice
ancient with suffering, all her world destroyed in a handful of days.

And no hate; before God, no hate. She had gone past it.

She regarded him with grave concern. Her tears had stopped; his
had only begun. She wiped his face with a small warm hand. “Don’t
cry, Father Jehan. You’ve won. You should be glad.”

“I haven’t won. No one has, except maybe the
Devil. We found the greatest city in the world; we’ve made it an outpost
of Hell.”