The Mosaic of Shadows (17 page)

I turned my attention to the corner where we had found the boy in the night. His behaviour was a mystery, for if he had wanted to escape he would surely not have come in here. And he would be desperate indeed to try to run in a storm, in the midst of a forest with his legs bandaged and his arms tied before him. He would not have survived a day. So why had he risked so much coming here, when an overzealous Varangian might easily have cut him down in the dark?

I looked to the floor. The mosaic tiles were loose, cracked open by the bush which had pushed through them. I squeezed my thumb under one and tugged, watching as it came away in my hand. Mortar trickled off it in a fine powder, turning to a grey paste again on the wet floor.

I prised away half a dozen more tiles, looking particularly for those which were already loose. They would be the ones nearest the stem of the plant, I guessed, and I scratched my arms several times reaching under its branches to grasp them. Perhaps it was a futile exercise in eliminating an unlikely possibility, but this whole expedition had been just such a task: what were a few more wasted minutes?

And then I saw why the boy had risked so much to come here. A black tile – the stripe in the side of a tiger – came free, and as I poked my finger in the cavity beneath I felt the cold surface of polished metal. It was a ring, the gold barely tarnished by its underground sojourn, set with a red stone which was probably a garnet. A sinuous black crack was cleft through the gem, almost like a snake, and written around the shank in clumsy, Latin lettering was an inscription.

‘The captain says breakfast is cooked, if you want any.’

I looked around to see Aelric. ‘Tell Sigurd I’ve found something,’ I ordered. ‘Tell him to send the boy here with the interpreter.’

I rinsed the dirt from my hands in a puddle while I waited, and rubbed the ring on the hem of my tunic before folding it into my fist as Thomas stumbled in. His face was set firm in a hard scowl, and his bandages were caked with mud.

‘Ask him what he was doing here last night,’ I instructed Father Gregorias. ‘Did he really think he could escape us?’

‘He says he was called by nature.’

‘And his modesty was such that rather than relieve himself against a wall, he walked two hundred yards through a driving storm to piss in here?’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Ask him if he was looking for this?’

As I spoke, I opened my hand to reveal the ring, keeping my eyes always fixed on Thomas’s face. He may have learned his craft in the slums of the city, but he could not hide the surprise of recognition which flashed across his features.

‘Where did you find that?’ asked the priest, irrelevantly.

‘Under a stone. What does the inscription say?’

The little priest took it in his hands and squinted at it. ‘Saint Remigius, lead me in the way of truth,’ he read.

I had never in all the feasts and liturgies heard of this Saint Remigius, but I recognised the trinket clearly enough. It was a pilgrim’s ring, the sort sold by hawkers and peddlers near the shrines of the sanctified. Had the boy left it here? His parents had been pilgrims, I remembered: was it theirs?

‘Ask him if it was his mother’s.’

The boy’s cheeks coloured, and he spoke angrily at some length. I twisted the ring in my hands while I waited, until the priest was ready to translate.

‘He says it is his. The monk who brought him here wore it on a cord about his neck. One night the boy managed to cut the cord and hide it. The monk was furious and searched everywhere, but eventually he accepted that it must have worked loose and fallen somewhere in the grounds. The boy never had the chance to retrieve it from its hiding place.’ The priest cleared his throat. ‘According to the boy, he remembered this in the middle of the night and came to fetch it for you.’

What devotion. ‘Tell him I do not believe him.’

The boy muttered a few short words, which Father Gregorias seemed challenged to translate.

‘He says you . . . He insists it is the truth.’

‘Am I to think he would simply have presented me with this ring in the morning?’ I rolled my eyes. ‘If he stole it once, he would not lightly surrender it.’

The priest was translating my words as I spoke, but they wrought no change in the boy’s hardened face. I began to doubt I would achieve much by continuing this bout of contradiction and denial.

‘Whatever his purposes,’ I shrugged, ‘you may tell him that by running away in the night he has done nothing to help his fate with us. Nor has he helped his wounds to heal by splashing them through mud.’ I looked at his shabby clothing and the soiled bandages. ‘I saw a spring in the gardens; we had best use it to clean him.’

We walked around the house – Aelric, the priest, Thomas and I – and down some stairs into a sunken, walled orchard. In its centre was a low plinth, from which a stone channel ran between the trees back to the cistern under the house. The channel was broken, feeding only into a boggy patch of ground, but the spring still rose, and fed enough water over the moss-grown lip of the trough that I could splash it over Thomas’s leg.

I had just dried him with my cloak, and was wrapping on the fresh bandages which Anna had given me, when he spoke unexpectedly.

‘What was that?’ I asked, pulling the linen tight.

Gregorias translated. ‘He said this was where the monk brought him to practise with the arbalest. They would spend much of the day shooting at targets against the far wall over there.’

I tied a knot, then paced down the garden to the wall which the boy had indicated. Like all this estate, weeds and lichens had made it their own, but there were many places where the stone showed through, clean and sharp, and pitted with white gouges. Many arrows must have struck here, each drawing the boy’s eye closer to the true aim which would see his bolt strike home on the Emperor. It was as well he had not practised any more.

A shout from above interrupted my thoughts; I raised my head over the parapet and looked out across the broad enclosure. One of our sentries had issued a challenge to a man now riding between the gateposts on a handsome white mare. I saw Sigurd emerge from the stables and move quickly to meet him, with the rest of his company spread in a purposeful line behind. I ran to join them.

The man on the horse seemed untroubled by the cordon of Varangians, every one of them with an axe in their hands. In fact, there seemed to be an arrogant amusement on his face as he looked down from his mount.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. Although his green cloak and high boots seemed expensive, his accent was rustic.

‘We heard rumours that the Emperor’s enemies could be found here,’ said Sigurd evenly. ‘We came to find them.’

The man on the horse squinted. ‘Did you find them?’

‘None. Yet.’

I think Sigurd meant it as a threat, but it drew a laugh from our visitor. ‘I am Kosmas, and no enemy of this or any other Emperor. I am the forester, and I manage this estate for my mistress, the owner.’

Sigurd moved his head in a broad are, deliberately studying the ramshackle landscape. ‘Does she pay you well for it?’

‘Enough that I do not tolerate uninvited guests. If you have found all there is to find, which is nothing, you should go.’

I could see Sigurd boiling up to resist the man’s demand, and did not want a confrontation here. ‘Tell me, forester,’ I broke in, ‘who is this inhospitable mistress?’

‘My mistress, who is most hospitable to those she invites, is the noble lady Theodora Trichas. Wife of the Sebastokrator Isaak, and sister-in-law to the Emperor Alexios Komnenos.’ He smiled. ‘Hardly a family to be harbouring traitors and treachery.’

That was so optimistic as to be laughable. But we left anyway.

The long ride back was silent, and the arrival stormy. The road grew ever busier as we neared the city, and though we chose one of the lesser gates so as to arrive inconspicuously, we still found a mass of people jostling to get in. The watchmen were ill at ease, barking questions at the entrants and searching their belongings with brusque contempt; most of those around us seemed to have come in from the country, and many must have carried the greater part of their belongings on their backs. We might have been there until nightfall if Sigurd had not managed to push and kick a path through for us, and fortunately the guards recognised him. When the last of our company was within the walls, he called a halt.

‘We’ll take the boy to the palace and keep him in the gaol,’ he declared. ‘If he’s well enough to escape once, he’s well enough to get out of that monastery.’

‘If you put him in there, he’ll die in a week.’

‘And that will be no loss to me.’ Sigurd snapped his reins angrily. ‘Let disease take him, if God wills it.’

‘Disease is my least concern. Have you forgotten what happened to the Bulgar? The monk, or his agents, can enter the gaols at will it would appear.’ Although few seemed to care about the Bulgar’s death, it troubled me every time I thought on it. How had an assassin crept into the depths of the palace, through a locked gate and past a legion of Varangians? None of the enquiries that Krysaphios, Sigurd or I had made could answer it.

‘We’ll be more careful this time,’ said Sigurd. ‘For all it matters.’

‘Do you want me to go to the chamberlain over this? He has given me the prerogative. I say the boy does not go into the gaol.’

Sigurd glowered. ‘And where will you take him then, Demetrios? Into the monastery, to the care of monks and women? Will God protect him there?’

That thrust me onto the defensive. I had had all day to ponder it, but my thoughts had been ever distracted by other questions. Now I floundered for a solution, while Sigurd watched with a sneer on his lip.

I spoke the first thought I had. ‘He will come to my house.’

‘To your house?’ Sigurd looked delighted with my folly. ‘Your castle? Your tower, surrounded by water and guarded by a thousand archers? Or your tenement, where the boy could slit your family’s throats and escape over the rooftops in a second?’

They were all sound objections, but I would not give him the victory of acknowledging so. ‘If the boy wants to escape, he will succeed eventually. Unless we put him in the prison, in which case he will die. You will lend me two of your soldiers to watch my door. As for my family . . .’ I hesitated. ‘I will see they are safe.’

Sigurd stared at me in angry silence.

‘The boy is no more the monk’s ally than was the whore he used. Perhaps a little affection and charity will coax more information from him.’ I raised my hands. ‘Or, I can talk to Krysaphios.’

‘Take care,’ Sigurd warned. ‘You might get your way with him for now, but who will you turn to when he loses patience? Take the boy; I will leave you Aelric and Sweyn – for the moment.’

He kicked his horse and cantered off, followed closely by all but a pair of his men.

‘I must go too,’ said Father Gregorias. He looked desperate to be parted from his mount. ‘I am needed at my church.’

‘You are needed with me,’ I answered. ‘How else am I to talk to the boy?’

‘Call in the doctor. She speaks his tongue.’

And meek though he was, he left me. With two reluctant Varangians, and a boy none of us could comprehend.

I led my companions back to my house, and realised I had nowhere to stable the horses.

‘We should take them back to the palace,’ said Aelric. ‘The hipparch will want them immediately.’

‘I can go,’ I offered. ‘I ought to report to Krysaphios.’

Aelric shook his grizzled head. ‘You can’t go alone. It’s getting dark, and the Watch will have you locked up for a horse thief if they see you. And I can’t come with you: you don’t want to leave Sweyn alone with your daughters.’

I smiled wearily. ‘My daughters are with their aunt, my sister-in-law.’ I would have to leave them there another night, though they would return primed with even more disdain for my disreputable profession, and for my paternal failing to find them suitable families of their own.

‘Then you and I can guard the boy, and Sweyn can return our mounts.’ Aelric swung himself down from the beast and strode over, lifting Thomas onto the ground. I dismounted, and handed both sets of reins to the taciturn Sweyn.

‘Get back quickly,’ Aelric told him. ‘You don’t want to rely on my old eyes all night.’

‘Not if last night is any guide,’ I said, as the horses vanished around the corner. I had not yet raised his failure to stop Thomas escaping the stable, for fear of provoking Sigurd to still greater wrath, but I had not forgotten. Nor forgiven it.

Aelric looked me in the eye. ‘We all have lapses, Demetrios. You were kind to hide mine from the captain. But the boy is safe, and no harm was done. If I’ve learned one thing from my life, it’s that when I escape the worst consequences of my mistakes, I should thank my God and forget it.’ He clapped me on the arm. ‘Now let’s get the boy out of the street, before some arbalest-wielding monk gallops past and puts an arrow in him.’

We climbed the stairs to my home, keeping Thomas always between us.

‘Is this the only entrance?’ Aelric asked, as I unlocked my heavy door.

‘There is a way out onto the roof inside.’ I crossed my threshold, bending to pick up a scrap of paper which someone had pushed under the door. ‘Unfortunately, it only bolts from the inside. This house wasn’t built to be a prison.’

‘But are we here to keep the boy in, or others out?’ Aelric crossed the room and rattled the shutters. ‘At least you’ve got bars on the windows.’

‘A sensible precaution for a man with young daughters.’ My skills as a bounty-hunter and a searcher had allowed me to move my home away from the more dangerous corners of the city, but not always their inhabitants.

Aelric continued prowling around the house while I unfolded the paper. ‘The merchant Domenico wishes to see me at his house in Galata.’

‘Do you know him?’