The Golden Horn (9 page)

Thea attached herself to Jehan soon after he began, still in
her boy’s clothes but without her cap. “I thought you’d be helping
Alf,” he said.

She handed him the knife he had been reaching for. “He
doesn’t need any help.”

“And you think I do?”

“l have no talent at all for healing,” she said,
“but I’m good at holding heads and at talking sense into people.”

“And at keeping fire away from hospitals?”

“Maybe.”

“Well enough then,” he said. “If anyone
asks you, you’re my apprentice.” He had a glimpse of her swift smile
before she bent to comfort the child who lay at their feet, his eyes fixed in
terror upon Jehan’s knife.

o0o

Alf saw the sunrise from the roof of Saint Basil’s,
whither Master Dionysios had driven him with orders that he not return until he
had rested and eaten. Food, he could not face; his body, stronger than a man’s,
was not yet desperate for sleep. Others of the healers tossed and murmured
under a canopy drenched with water to keep off the fire, with Jehan among them,
sleeping like the dead.

He sat on the roof’s edge and clasped his knees. The
dawn light seemed a feeble thing beside the fire that raged still in the City.
It had retreated somewhat from the hospital, feeding now to the southward;
flames had crept forth to lick the dome of Hagia Sophia. All between blazed or
smoldered or crumbled in ruins: tenements, gardens, palaces, churches, and the
arches and columns of the fora.

“People are saying that it’s the wrath of God,”
Thea said, settling beside him.

“The wrath of man can be well-nigh as terrible.”

She leaned against him and laid her head on his shoulder. “If
you’re tired,” she said, “I can shield us alone for a while.”

He sighed. “I’m not as tired as that. House
Akestas is safe; Saint Basil’s will be now, I think.”

“Unless the wind changes.”

“Pray then. God ought to hear one of us.”

She was silent. His arm had settled itself about her
shoulders; he seemed unaware of it, staring out again over the ravaged City.
His eyes were bleak. “All our power,” he murmured, “great
enough in old days to make us gods. But neither of us can do more here than
keep the fire away from a pair of houses.”

“Have you tried?”

“A little.” He shivered. “Not enough to do
any good at all.”

“It’s too big now for only two of us, and one
all but untrained.”

“I know that. It’s only…I saw this, Thea.
I saw it. And when it started, when I could have done something, I couldn’t
move. I could only stand and gape like a fool.”

“When I was in Rhiyana,” she said, “the
King’s sister fell ill. She was mortal, you see, and not young. Gwydion
has great powers of healing, almost as great as yours, and his Queen has no
less. They stayed with the Lady Alianora through every moment of her sickness
and did everything they could do. But she died. We all mourned her, Gwydion
most of all. She had been his favorite, his little sister who loved her
changeling brother more than anyone else in the world. But…she died. Some
things none of us can change.”

“Death and fate and the destruction of cities. I can
bear that because I must. What’s unbearable is that I have to know it all
before it happens.”

“
Have
to, Alf?”

“I’ve always been able to see at will in that
place inside of me where my power lies. It looks like a tapestry with its edges
stretching away into infinity. But when fate is strong or disaster imminent and
inevitable, I can hardly think or feel or see. I only know what must be, and
what no effort of mine can change.”

“It’s been heavy on you ever since Jerusalem.”

He nodded. “When Morwin died, he wanted me to find peace
in the Holy City. For a little while I did find it. But I forgot what I should
have known, that neither happiness nor peace can long endure. Not in this
world.”

“Of course not. We need to be miserable to know what
it really is to be happy.” She rose, drawing him with her. “We can’t
work as much of a miracle as this city needs. But we can do more than most.
Especially when we’ve put a little food in our stomachs.”

“I’m not—”

“Hungry,” she finished for him. “You never
are. But you’re feeling very, very sorry for yourself. How much sorrier
you’d feel if you’d lost your house and all you owned, and most of
your family, and a good part of your skin besides.”

He started as if she had slapped him; flushed, and paled. “I
could learn to hate you,” he said.

“You could. I’m too fond of telling the truth,
aren’t I, little Brother?”

“And I can’t become a falcon to fly away from
it.”

That struck home, but she laughed. “See? You’ve
caught it from me. Come down with me and be kind to your poor body for once,
the better to fight the rest of this battle.”

He hesitated. She turned her back on him and began to pick
her way among the sleepers.

As he followed her, the sun climbed at last over the rim of the
world, its great orb the color of blood or of fire.

The fire was dead. The last embers smoldered sullenly, while
here and there among them figures moved, searching for the dead, beginning the
long labor of clearing away the ruins and building anew where they had been.
Even lamentation was muted, cursing subdued, numbed by the immensity of the destruction.

Alf lay in his own bed in House Akestas, its softness
strange after so many nights of catching what rest he could wherever he might.
To be clean, to breathe air that bore no taint of smoke, to have no pain about
him but only the peace of a sleeping household—he could not yet believe
that it was so. In a little while Master Dionysios would wake him, or a bolt of
agony would pierce through all the levels of his sleep and thrust him back into
the battle.

His mind slid away from remembrance. He had passed beyond weariness
to a state like drunkenness, all his inner defenses weakened or cast down. His
body seemed made of air, the hand he raised before his face a thing of mist and
moonlight. It turned, flexed—wonderful creation, so to yield to his will.

His eyes ran from it along his arm to his shoulder, down the
long line of his body to his distant feet. He did not often stop to consider
himself. Feet had to be shod or sandaled for walking; hands served one’s
needs; hair had to be washed and cut and kept out of one’s face.
Everything between, one kept clean and fed and covered as much as one might,
and tried to forget.

It was not an ill body. Somewhat too thin perhaps, but strong,
with few enough needs. Its curse it shared with his face: its moon-white skin that
could endure no sunlight without the shielding of power, and its beauty. He had
seen its like along the Middle Way, in old gods and in the marble
kouroi
that smiled inscrutably upon the City,
shameless in their nakedness.

He breathed deep. The air smelled of roses and of rain.
Idly, without thought, he let his hand follow the lines of hip and thigh. There
was a lazy pleasure in it, in tracing the planes and angles, the taut play of
muscles beneath the skin, so different from a woman’s smooth curves. From
one woman’s, from one body he had never had the courage to learn, nor the
will to cast away.

He was on his feet. Supple and serene this body was, when the
clamoring mind would let it be. It could glide, it could turn. It could dance,
great sensuous sin, to the music that was in it. Heart and blood, lungs and
brain, set the measure, ceaseless, complex, inescapable. He spun; his hair
whipped his shoulders, scarred flesh oblivious, whole flesh struck with a lash
of pleasure. His eyes blurred darkness into light, and light into nameless
splendor, and nameless splendor into the sheen of bronze and gold.

He dropped exhausted. The glory died. He was mere mud, sweat
and earth shaped in a form that men’s eyes reckoned fair. Fair and foul,
stained with sin and the will to sin, centered on flesh, who had vaunted his
knowledge of God. He had never known more than his own vanity.

His fingers raked his hair. Thick as a woman’s, fine
as a child’s, tear it, tear it out. The face, the beautiful beardless
face, rend it, mar it—

“Alfred!”

All his body snapped taut, arched back from the vise that bound
his wrists. It tightened into pain, into agony. Without warning it let him
fall. His dream, formless light, had taken flesh; it glared down at him, bronze
and gold and unbearably beautiful.

He swallowed. His throat ached. She was splendid in her anger,
and surely she knew it; she was always angry.

“You always give me reason to be.” Thea dragged
him up and shook him. “Idiot! How long since you slept? How long since
you ate?”

“You made me,” he said, “or Jehan. I
forget.” He willed her into focus. “You went away.”

“I’ve come back.” She was still holding
him. He touched her cheek. For all the fire of her temper, it was cool, and she
did not shake him off. It was he who drew back, who gathered himself together,
who found a blanket to cover his nakedness.

“I ate,” he said with care, with a touch of
bitterness. “Sophia saw to it. I drank honeyed milk with the rest of the
children. No wine, milady nurse.”

“No sleep, either, and no sense at all.”

He lay where she willed him, where his own will would have him.
Her temper was shifting, changing. Her eyes were more gold than bronze. She was
as bare as he, and he had not even seen. She bent over him.

He thrust her back, spinning her about, felling her with force
that shook them both. He had forgotten how hideously strong he was.

He fell to his knees beside her, choking on self-disgust. He
had bruised her, hip, breast, cheekbone.

She sat up. He could not read her eyes within the tangle of her
hair. He smoothed it away from her face. His fingertips brushed her cheek; the
hip he had dashed against the floor; and, hesitantly, her tender breast. His
hand might have lingered there; he forced it to fall. “I’m sorry,”
he said, meaning more than the simple words, the simple wounding. “I’m…most…sorry.”

She shook her head. “Don’t be.” Her
gentleness was worse than any scolding, her kiss more terrible than a blow,
chaste on his stiff cheek. “Sleep now,” she said, “and
forget. We all have our midnight madnesses.”

“I—” His voice died. She began to walk
away. The words fought free. “I love you, Thea.”

She was gone. He sank down where she had left him, drawing
into a knot, trembling deep within. So easily it had come out, so suddenly and
so irredeemably. And she had not even stayed to hear.

In a moment he would laugh. In a moment more, he would weep.

Sophia closed her account book firmly and laid her pen
aside. “No more today,” she said to the house steward. He bowed with
Arab formality and withdrew.

Once he was well gone, she indulged in a long delicious yawn
and stretched until her bones cracked. Voices from outside came clearly to her
ears as they had throughout the morning; she rose and sought the window.

In the garden below, her guest and her children sat in a circle,
three dark heads and Alf’s fair one. They all had pens, even Nikki, and
writing tablets; when Alf spoke they wrote. Greek now. It had been Latin
earlier.

The cadences were familiar. Homer?

Alf paused. The girls continued to write; he bent toward Nikki.
From her vantage directly above them, she could see the tablet in her son’s
lap. The scribbles on it looked remarkably like letters.

Her fingers clenched on the window frame. No, she thought. They
had all told her, doctors, priests, astrologers: he would never speak or read
or write. “Raise him as you may,” the most learned of the doctors
had told her in ill-concealed pity. “Train him as you would a puppy or a
colt, else he will run wild. More than that, short of a miracle, none of us can
do.”

For a moment Alf’s hand guided Nikki’s. He drew
back.

Nikki paused, head cocked. Suddenly he nodded and bent over his
tablet. If he had been any other child, and if any word had been spoken, she
would have said that he had been instructed; had questioned and been answered;
and had returned to his task with new understanding.

She drew a breath to calm herself. She hoped for too much;
it made her see only what she wished to see. What could one young Latin do,
however brilliant he might be, where all the wise men of Byzantium had failed?

In the garden Anna said, “There. All done. Now will
you teach me a new song? You promised!”

Though Alf’s voice was stern, Sophia could have sworn
that there was a smile in it. “Patience is part of your lesson, demoiselle.
Come, let me see if anything written in such haste can be perfect.”

“It is,” Anna insisted. “Alf, what’s
dem—demi
—”

“That means ‘young lady’ in Frankish,”
Irene informed her virtuously, “and he’s being much more polite
than you deserve.”

“Every man owes a lady courtesy,” said Alf in a
tone that so withered Irene’s pretensions that Sophia stifled laughter. “Yes,
Anna, it seems that you’ve done the impossible. There’s not even an
iota out of place. However—”

It was Irene who cut him short. “Then you’ll
sing for us? A new song, please.”

“Ah,” he said. His voice had deepened a full
octave. “A conspiracy. For that I should give you ten more lines apiece,
to teach you how to treat your master.” As they burst into loud protests,
he added, “But since we’ve already had our full hour and more, just
this once I will yield to your impudence.”

Even Nikki laid aside his tablet, leaning forward eagerly. Alf’s
voice in song was at once deep and clear: like the rest of him, an uncanny
mingling of potent maleness and almost feminine beauty.

It caught Sophia and held her fast. She did not move when
all too soon it fell silent, but stood by the window, gazing out with eyes that
saw only sunlight.