Seven for a Secret (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

John and Anatolius waited in Figulus’ workshop for a long time before the mosaic maker appeared. Light glittered off tesserae in the barrels against the wall, and struck sparks here and there on the dark floor where stray bits of glass had fallen.

“Lord Chamberlain! Is there anything wrong? Have my workmen caused some damage?”

The mosaic maker ran a hand over his eyes. Had he been asleep? He wore only a thin, unbelted tunic. The servant who had stayed with the unexpected callers stepped away into the shadows but did not leave.

John peered around. From the little he could make out, nothing looked different from his previous visit. He hadn’t expected to barge in on a band of conspirators. He would not have been shocked, however, to have found the mosaic maker dead.

“I was able to clean a considerable portion of the mosaic today, excellency. In particular I brought out some of the details in the depiction of the Olympian palace of Zeus. If that it is not to your taste—”

“How well do you know Menander?” John cut in.

“Menander? I can’t—”

“Don’t lie, Figulus. It is not advisable. You sold him one of your special pieces.”

“Special pieces?”

“Whatever it is you call those particularly lewd mosaics. I’m aware of that part of your business. My colleague tells me you sold one to Madam Isis.” John nodded toward Anatolius. “I wouldn’t have expected a religious man and a good family man to be dealing in such wares, and certainly not selling them to brothels.”

Figulus glanced around. “Please, excellency. If you could not speak so loudly. My boys…”

“What can you tell me about Menander?”

“He’s a customer. A big, white-haired fellow, isn’t he?”

“He used to hold a position at the palace.”

“Yes, I suppose so. There are a lot of people like that living in the area.”

“Do you do business with such people on a regular basis?”

“Lord Chamberlain, I cannot answer since I don’t question my customers about their background. I suppose some may have been at the palace at one time. Many still are.”

“Including one of your customers who was found dead in my bath after you and your workmen left today. Menander.”

Figulus blinked in bewilderment. The hand holding the lamp shook, and the flame guttered and hissed as oil splashed on it. “Dead?”

“Indeed. I believe the body was taken into my house concealed in one of the sacks or barrels in which you move your plaster and tesserae.”

Figulus protested, asking surely the Lord Chamberlain did not think him guilty of murder.

“I wouldn’t have imagined you were a purveyor of lewd pictures.”

“You don’t understand…I only sell them because…well…”

“To finance a worthy undertaking.”

“Yes…but how did you know?”

“You are in the habit of making apologies for yourself, Figulus. But what exactly is this worthy undertaking? Something a disenfranchised official, like Menander, might approve? An attack on the emperor, for instance?”

A look of terror crossed the mosaic maker’s face. “Nothing like that, Lord Chamberlain.”

“What then?”

“I’ll show you.” Figulus walked hurriedly to the barrels of tesserae against the wall. Setting his lamp down on one, he pushed two others aside without any sign of exertion. They must have been empty, the pieces of cut glass piled on a false top to give the impression they were full.

The action revealed an opening half the height of a man in the wall.

“Please, excellency, follow me.” Figulus ducked through the aperture.

“Be careful, John,” whispered Anatolius.

But the Lord Chamberlain was already following the mosaic maker.

He found himself in a cramped vault sided with crumbling concrete. Underfoot were broken bricks of the sort used to fill up the interiors of walls.

A ladder extended from an uneven hole in one corner. Figulus scrambled on to the ladder and vanished downward, obviously used to the procedure. John followed, cautiously, and Anatolius came after him.

Below, a gloomy chamber led to another, similarly bare.

Then they emerged at their destination.

John was not certain of the original use of the space, which was too narrow for a cistern or warehouse but too wide to be a corridor, with a curved roof perhaps three times a man’s height. It bore a resemblance to the huge corridors leading down into the storage areas beneath the Hippodrome. The far end of the place was lost in darkness.

Here and there scaffolds hid the walls. Nearby, where there was no scaffolding, John could see mosaics.

Even in the poor light of Figulus’ lamp, it was obvious that they were as finely wrought as those in the Great Church, and they would not have been out of place there. So far as he could tell they depicted scenes from the Christian’s holy book.

A garden which looked remarkably like parts of the grounds of the Great Palace, but even lusher—the foliage so thick as to practically conceal the two figures entirely, let alone expose any of their nudity—represented the paradise from which mankind had been expelled. There was a ship, not unlike the merchant vessels to be seen in city harbors any day, but far larger, to judge from the tiny size of the animals shown on board. A weird tower, reaching up into cut glass clouds, might have been the lighthouse visible from one window in John’s house, but as seen in a nightmare. The stars scattered across the curved vault overhead would have made it resemble the ceiling of a mithraeum, except for the hovering angels.

“You see, excellency,” explained Figulus, “tesserae are expensive. I could not afford this except for those evil pictures. It is a torment to me to make them. But I am not responsible for the lusts and sinfulness of other men and here their vices are transmuted into a tribute to God’s glory.”

“This is magnificent,” exclaimed Anatolius. “But no one can see it down here.”

“The Lord sees it,” Figulus replied. “That is enough, isn’t it?”

“You should be working in one of Justinian’s new churches or at the palace,” Anatolius told him.

“Alas, I do not have the proper connections to obtain imperial contracts even though many from the palace are well satisfied with the lesser projects I have undertaken for them personally.”

“Do you know the original purpose of this room?” John asked.

Figulus shook his head. “I discovered it shortly after I bought the workshop, which was badly in need of repairs. I explored the area carefully. This room appears to be completely sealed off on its own. I took it to be a gift from the Lord. It extends for a long distance. Before I leave this world I hope to have shown the whole of the events related in our sacred writings.”

It occurred to John that given the scope of his ambition, Figulus must be hoping for a very long life indeed.

Anatolius meantime had walked up and down, inspecting the walls. He paused for a time in front of a large space where there seemed to be nothing on the wall but shadows.

Figulus bought his lamp to where Anatolius was standing. “I see you are admiring my best work, sir. This was the most difficult scene yet. I labored over it for years longer than the Lord labored over the real thing.”

“But there’s nothing here,” Anatolius replied.

John, moving closer, saw that the apparently blank wall was in fact covered with tesserae, but they appeared uniformly black.

“This is the beginning,” Figulus explained. “The darkness out of which was formed light and the world.” He began to move the lamp. As the light shifted the wall became alive.

It seemed to John that black shapes coalesced and evaporated. Vague, shadowy possibilities of men and animals and vegetation swirled and flowed across the glass. Dark smoke in a starless night.

Or perhaps it was nothing but shadows and John’s imagination.

“Mithra!” The admiring oath escaped before he realized it. He looked away from the wall, toward Figulus. If the mosaic maker had heard, he gave no indication.

Chapter Thirty-Three

When John returned home he could not sleep. Every time he began to nod off he dreamed about the strange, living darkness in Figulus’ wall and came fully awake with his heart pounding.

Words came back to him that he had heard once, during an official ceremony he could not recall, in a church he could not immediately place. Something moving upon the face of the deep. What did that mean? Had it been Figulus’ intent to capture that?

The face of the deep.

The very phrase made him shudder.

He needed to walk, to think.

He left the house without waking either Cornelia or Peter. He had learned to move in quiet fashion as a mercenary patrolling the empire’s border and had maintained the skill. He was naturally quiet in his movements. He startled people without meaning to do so by appearing at their elbow as if springing up from the underworld. However, he reminded himself, if palace residents feared the Lord Chamberlain might be with them before they knew it, that was to his advantage.

It was earlier than the time he usually took long morning walks. He followed his accustomed route and had almost reached the square where he had met Agnes before the roofs of the city began to emerge from the night, a mountain range of massive blocks and escarpments, surmounted by countless crosses.

He heard a scuffle, and turning quickly, caught a glimpse of movement. He had the impression something had vanished into a doorway on the opposite side of the street. A feral dog or a cat?

Then it occurred to John that he was near the spot where he had been attacked.

He stepped back against the wall of a closed shop. His side of the street was still sunk in impenetrable shadow.

He waited.

A figure burst out from the doorway and raced across the street at an angle, this time disappearing under an archway. The echoing footsteps seemed to linger in the narrow space between the buildings.

John’s hand went to his blade. Had he been followed? Was the figure he had glimpsed attempting, not very artfully, to outflank and then creep up on him?

He moved toward the archway.

The figure rushed out.

John raised his blade and stepped into the man’s path.

The other came to a sudden halt.

It was the maker of sundials.

“Helias!”

“Lord Chamberlain.” The voice had the same pitch as the squeak of a terrified rat.

“Have you been following me?” John demanded.

Helias threw panicked glances this way and that. “No! I’m just on my way home.”

“You have a stranger manner of it.”

The diminutive sundial maker shifted from foot to foot. “Please, do you mind if we continue while we talk?” Without waiting for a reply, he headed off a trot.

John caught up easily with his long stride. “Why were you darting back and forth like that? Were you trying to elude someone?”

“No, excellency. It’s because of the shadows. Can’t you see them? They’ll trip you up. Nasty things, they are. They move fast.”

To John the street appeared uniformly dark, aside from the deeper shadow along the side they were walking on. He said as much.

“But you don’t work with shadows every day as I do, Lord Chamberlain. My sundials are specially made to display them. You might call my creations shadow traps. Or perhaps time traps. It’s the same thing, you see. It’s all to do with the sun crossing the sky, pulling shadows along with it. It’s enough to make you giddy if you can’t help noticing, as I do.”

During their first meeting Helias had confessed he didn’t like being out in the sun because he couldn’t help calculating the time from the shadows, but it struck John now there was something more to the matter than that.

Or else Helias was lying.

Helias turned and went through the archway leading to the courtyard and his subterranean shop. He stopped abruptly at the edge of the open space and jerked his head around, averting his gaze. “I’m too late!” His squeaky voice rose to an even higher pitch. “I had business to attend to and I lost track of the time.”

The irony of the statement was not lost on John. However, he contented himself with questioning Helias why he conducted business in the middle of the night.

“My clients value my services. They are willing to make arrangements to suit my needs.” Helias replied. “Time is important. They depend on me to supply them with time of the best quality.” The sundial maker kept his gaze pointed toward John’s feet, or perhaps at some indeterminate point on the pavement behind John because the Lord Chamberlain would certainly cast a shadow.

“Time is the same for all of us,” John observed.

“I fear it is not so, Lord Chamberlain. For example, consider the senator who decided to install an antique sundial in his garden. Suddenly he was missing important meetings. The sundial was set for hours in Rome. It wouldn’t work in Constantinople…I don’t know how I’ll get to my emporium now. The courtyard is swarming with shadows. They’re creeping everywhere.”

In fact, John could make out poorly defined shadows, including that of the exedra used by the troupe. “Helias, do you claim you can see these shadows moving?”

“But I can! I can’t help it! Anyone’d see how they move too if they spent all day incising the lines of the hours, each perfectly in their place so shadow fingers would cross them exactly when they should.”

John remained unconvinced on the matter of whether or not Helias had been following him and advised him in a curt voice to admit it if it had been so.

“No, Lord Chamberlain, it is just as I say. And now, I must…try…If I fall, would you pick me up?”

It was evident the little man’s fear had made him forget he was talking to one of the most powerful officials at court.

The sundial maker backed hesitantly into the courtyard. John watched in amazement as Helias crept backward, eyes squeezed shut. He began to veer off course.

“Move the other way,” John instructed.

Helias finally blundered into the wall some distance from the doorway leading to the underground shops. He scuttled crab-like along the wall with his shoulder blades pressed firmly to it, managed to open the door without turning, fell backward into the dark maw revealed, and was gone.

John pondered the strange events. This was the second extremely odd explanation he had encountered for someone’s suspicious actions. Figulus, at least, had obviously been working on his enormous mosaic for years, but Helias might have manufactured his excuse on the spot. Still, John felt Helias was telling him the truth.

Who would make up such a ridiculous ruse to disguise his actions?