The Belt of Gold (22 page)

“Very well, Ishmael. Good night.” He walked stiffly away across the Apron.

In the morning, the Caesarea team entered Constantinople, and half the City came to see them. They were high-steppers, four matched chestnuts, with manes the color of spun gold. Ribbons and banners festooned their car. The driver and his supporters had paid boys to run ahead of them and cheer, and so all the way up the Mesê the wild clamor of a crowd greeted them.

In the Hippodrome stables, they took over an entire aisle, between the one where Michael's horses were kept and the palace side. The driver was a big, round-bodied man with a full black beard, who walked up and down through the Apron, swearing at his grooms as each horse was led by, and complaining about the size of the stalls, the quality of the straw, the ill light, the stink of the torches. With new horses in the barn, every beast was neighing, stamping, kicking the partitions and the doors, and Hagen's black horse got loose somehow and rampaged up and down the aisles, snorting and whinnying until the walls echoed.

With his grooms' help, Ishmael cornered the black horse and got a bridle on it, and he was leading it back to its stall when the Caesarea driver crossed his path.

“One of yours, there?” The Caesarea driver leered through his curly black whiskers. “I thought your team was supposed to be good.”

The black stallion danced sideways, pinning its ears back, and Ishmael hooked his arm around its head, his hand on the bone of its nose, holding it down. He said, “Get out of my way.”

“No,” the Caesarea driver said, in a booming voice; everybody in the barn turned to hear him. “You get out of
my
way, little man, on the racetrack, come race day. You mark me there!”

He strutted off, into the circle of his team-mates, who surrounded him with cheers and backslaps and adoring gazes. Ishmael led the black horse swiftly away. Prince Constantine's bribe turned to a handful of ashes. He didn't care now if his landlord kicked him into the street, he was going to run the Caesarea team off its wheels.

The lute was out of tune. Nothing of this daily horror of the music lesson was as tedious as tuning the lute. Philomela hunched her shoulders. She sat on a marble bench under one of the mulberry trees, awaiting Helena, and the lute lay beside her, pearwood and silver symbol of the sublime, and of woman, and source of so much misery for Philomela.

She had, however, a piece of currency, with which she could buy a day's freedom from this torture; she made up her mind that this would be the day. She loved the Basileus, but the lute was impossible.

She raised her head. Already in the midst of her childish roundness a longer, more slender shape was forming, and sometimes, tentatively, like putting on a mask, she tried out the expressions and attitudes of a woman; she was
turning
, the Empress told her, as if it were some private female rite, like the antique mysteries. Turning into what? she wondered. Now she saw, coming through the mulberry trees, the tall sedate figure of the chief lady-in-waiting, and a voice in her mind said: Not that.

Picking up the lute, she played triplets across the strings, as if for the first time she noticed that it was out of tune, and bent studiously over the instrument, her brows knit.

“Well,” Helena said, arriving. “No need to ask what we'll do with this half hour.”

She sat down on the next bench, under the next mulberry tree, and dropped her hands into her lap like something she could now forget about.

Philomela played with the silver screws. “I'm afraid I'll break a string, Helena.”

“Tosh. Watch your manners, my girl.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Viciously she twisted the screw tighter and tighter, but the string would not break. Her courage wound up as well; she began to play the coin that would buy her escape.

“My lady, what does
fix
mean?”

“You silly girl. You know that. To mend something that has broken.”

“Well,” said Philomela, over the lute, “it must mean something else, because a race can't be broken, can it?”

She kept her head down; she did not see the older woman's reaction to this, but Helena said nothing for a long while, in itself a telling clue. Finally there was a rustle of silk, and a vanguard of perfume, and Helena sat down beside her. “Where did you hear this?”

“I heard some men talking. It was just gossip.”

“What men?”

“I'm sure I don't know who they are, Helena. Just some men.”

“Oh, the villains,” said Helena.

She took hold of Philomela's wrist and led her up onto her feet. “Come along.”

“But what about my music lesson?”

“I think today, you imp, you will be excused the music lesson.”

Irene heard Philomela's story with her back to the child and the lady-in-waiting; she was glad of it, because her hands began to tremble with the violence of her feeling. They had bought the race; they had put forward a challenge to her, and she had accepted it honorably, and then they had cheated her.

“Perhaps,” she said, and was surprised to hear her own voice saying it aloud.

“The child may be making it all up,” said Helena. “You know how her imagination breeds when she is idle.”

“No,” Irene said. “She would not lie to me. Would you, Philomela? No.”

The girl faced her, chin up. “I'm not lying, mama.”

Irene waved at them. “You may go. Thank you for bringing me this news.”

When they had gone she let go of her passion in a single furious oath, and struck at a hanging. How dare they! Men, who trumpeted of honor and glory and the nobility of risk; men, who strutted their superiority over women. It was all a sham. She had always known it. They feared her, they pranced and paraded and talked Homerically but when she came face to face with them, they went craven and had to buy a victory.

Well, what could one expect of an Arab.

She paced up and down, rubbing her hands together; in less than an hour she had a meeting of her council, to hear news from the campaign against the Bulgars. To buy the race, ibn-Ziad would have to buy Ishmael, the champion of the Greens. The whole fix then turned on whether Ishmael could be bribed, crippled, or otherwise destroyed.

She did not know if this were possible, but Michael would know. She went out of the Daphne and, alone, walked down through the great descending sweep of the Palace grounds toward the Bucoleon.

It was early afternoon, and most of the people of the household were inside, resting after dinner, and getting out of the sun. It was another ferocious summer day, hot and windless as a furnace room. Irene had always disdained to let the weather affect her; she walked at a quick pace down the gravel walks and the shallow steps of the lower gardens. Now directly before her stood the lighthouse, a great cracked column, raising its bronze tray of coals forty feet above the very tip of the headland. Below, the sea lay like wrinkled silk. To her left was the Bucoleon Palace.

Michael himself sprawled in the sun before the fountain, on his stomach; one of his slaves was massaging oil into his back. Irene stood a moment watching him. He was a sort of talisman for her; he had won the Golden Belt for the first time in the same month that she arranged the overthrow of her son Constantine and raised herself to the ultimate power, and in all the Empire his power over the crowd was rival only to hers. Yet they fit together well. He wanted nothing save great horses and opponents who would push him to his best, and the multitude needed a hero, to fix their hopes on.

She said, in the dialect of Athens, which she had not spoken in years, “Well, well, sister-son, why spendest thou the hours of the sun in idleness? Up: thy days are short, the night cometh.”

Michael lifted his head, twisting to look toward her, and the slave bounded backward a yard and dropped to all fours. The Prince lolled on his elbow, drawing his sheet across his nakedness.

Irene went forward half the distance between them, and stood looking down at him. She said, “I need your opinion, my darling, but what I must tell you to derive it will ruin your supper, I think.”

“Ah?”

“Would it be possible to bribe Ishmael?”

“Ishmael!” He sat up, his face vivid with bad temper. “Who has tried to bribe Ishmael?” Now suddenly he breathed deep, and across his face walked a look of sudden understanding. He lowered his hands to his knees. “Oh—yes.”

“He can be bribed?” she said, in a steady voice.

Michael flung her a dark look. “God, it was a fine day, before you brought your games of power into it.”

She snorted at him. Her hands hung at her sides; unlike him, she needed no physical agency to express her power; she stood before him shining, shining in her golden coat. “You made yourself a false world when you cut the games of power out of it. Answer me.”

“No. God! God! The amount of gold has not been dug up, Basileus, that would compensate Mauros-Ishmael for the loss of a single race. But it's been tried—I see it now, I understand it, now, how he's been acting.”

She smiled at him, radiant. “Then you believe him proof against corruption.”

“As I know myself.”

“Thank you.” She turned and walked away.

The sun was blazing in the western sky. She had her council meeting, and the hour was slipping by; she hurried her steps, climbing back up the mount of the clifftop. Under her heavy clothes her skin had melted into a sticky slime of sweat. She went up through the palm garden and had to stop at the next level, at a fountain, to catch her breath.

Her legs were quivering. She had felt this before, and remembering she gathered herself, willing herself to continue, and made for the Daphne like a hare going to den.

At the edge of the paved court just outside her private entrance, a number of women had gathered. She went in among them blindly, burrowing toward the door, and they scattered. Their voices clanged in her ears. She could not catch her breath, and the booming of her heart was like the tramp of oncoming footsteps. She reached the door and slipped inside.

The pain hit her. It came down like a hawk from the center of the sun, dug its claws deep into her breastbone, and crushed its weight in on her. She reached her morning room and fell onto the sofa there.

Helena came. Dear Helena.

“Oh, my God, my God—”

She shut her eyes. When she lay still it went away. It always did. It would go away now, if she could lie still long enough.

It clutched her still, a weight like an anvil on her chest. She felt the women around her, murmuring, and Helena bustled them all away. Helena had the hands of an angel. The medical instincts of Asclepius. Around Irene there fell a healing silence, and a sense of safety. She shut her eyes, lost in the pain.

The Parakoimomenos said, “But it's been over an hour.”

The others turned their white faces toward him, and no one spoke. In the corner, Nicephoros bent over the chess game, dreamily moving the knight methodically over the squares.

“Where are the women?” The Grand Drungarius marched back and forth in the center of the room. “The Lady Helena surely will know—”

“Helena will say nothing.” The Parakoimomenos strode forward. Taller than any of the other men, stretched and thinned by his deformity, he seemed like a wax figure, supple with the heat. Nicephoros looked quickly away, his stomach turning over.

“We must demand to see her.” In the center of the others, the Parakoimomenos wheeled around, his heavy Hunnish coat flaring at the hem. “If she is—God have mercy on us—if she should—pass on—”

“No.”

Nicephoros got up and went forward, unwilling to hear any of this. “She is the Basileus. We must have faith in her as we have faith in the Empire itself. She will tell us what she wishes us to know.”

Even to himself, these words were a feeble wail against the storm. He put his hands to his face. Could she be dying? He had seen her at breakfast, when they talked of applying pressure to the monasteries to give up some of their treasure. She had seemed well, even hearty. He had seen people die of cholera in less time than had elapsed since he had last seen her healthy; in the depth of summer, when the plague raged, strong young men went from full bloom to blackened corpses in twelve hours.

But not Irene. Not Irene.

She walked through their midst, through a silence that her footsteps, cushioned on the carpet, only accented. She touched none of them. Nicephoros thought, Did she hear?

“Parakoimomenos.” At the end of the room, she wheeled, her clothes swirling around her, glittering in the sunlight coming through the window behind her.

“Yes, Augustus,” said the eunuch.

“Tell me, my angel—have you still an Empress?”

She had heard, then. Nicephoros hunched his shoulders closer to the carpet.

The voice of the Parakoimomenos was half an octave higher than usual. “Augustus, Chosen One of God, you alone are the Glory of the Empire—”

“Silence!”

There was silence.

“I am the Basileus,” she shouted, and behind Nicephoros someone whined.

The Parakoimomenos babbled, “Augustus, Chosen One of God, we meant only to—”

“Silence!”

Nicephoros's cheek pressed against the carpet. He thought, She would not be so enraged if she were not also frightened, and his heart sank. Was she losing her call? Cautiously he lifted his head to look at her.

She stood there in the blaze of sunlight, her golden clothes so brilliant his eyes were dazzled. Towering over him she might have stepped down from Heaven. She lifted one arm and he quaked at the threat.

“I am Basileus,” she cried, again, and they all answered her.

“Hail, Augustus, Chosen of God, Equal of the Apostles, hail!”

She lowered her arm, mollified. Now, blinking, Nicephoros could discern her features, behind the veil of golden light; he saw her magnificent eyes, wide and bright with life, and was angry with himself for doubting her.