The Belt of Gold (4 page)

“The girl,” he said. “The Greek girl who was with us when we got here. Where is she?”

“Now, listen to me, you're full of questions—”

“I want a graveyard. And a priest.”

“I want some answers!”

Hagen's temper slipped and he cocked up his fist, ready to knock the innkeeper to the ground; the Greek backed away a few steps. His palms rose between them. “Now, listen, don't get yourself in more trouble.”

The Frank lowered his hand. It did no good to strike at this man, anyway, who was innocent. Like a fluttering in his brain his brother's soul cried to him for revenge. He gathered himself, aware of being alone in a strange and treacherous place.

“I need a priest. A graveyard. I will dig the grave.” He turned toward the bed where Rogerius lay, and gathering up his brother's scattered clothing began to make him ready for his burial.

There had been times in the past he had expected to do this for Rogerius, other times when he had thought Rogerius would do this for him. Even so he was unready. He wished that he had died with his brother, rather than do this.

He touched the body's cooling flesh with hands that trembled. Memories overwhelmed him. As boys, two years apart in age, they had fought all the time; he remembered chasing his brother with an adze around the courtyard, remembered Rogerius, still in a long shirt, hitting him in the face with a rock. Gradually they became friends and set to fighting everyone else. Their mother had died in childbed when Rogerius was born; their father, merciless in all his other doings, doted on his sons and let them do as they would. After Reynard died, they came to depend on each other even more, and as Reynard had taught them, side by side they stood against the whole world, and asked for nothing more than a chance to win.

Now he was alone. He had never expected to be alone, even in the worst of times.

While he was pulling Rogerius's shirt on over his head, a folded piece of paper fell out of the sleeve. He opened up the paper and stared at the lines of ink marks on it. He could not read, but he recognized Greek letters. Theophano must have given this to Rogerius.

Theophano. She had brought this on him and his brother.

He steadied himself, feeling dangerously light and thin, as if he were stretched out around a great swollen boil of grief. He knew he would have to be careful. He was not afraid. He understood fighting; he had always taken a deal of comfort from the simple discipline of feud and counterfeud, blow struck for blow taken. But this was not his own country and these Greeks, he had marked before, were of a different order from Franks. He would avenge Rogerius, but he would have to walk like a cat to do it, keep watch like an owl in the night, and be ever mindful of his own ignorance, if he wanted to survive.

When his brother was dressed and laid out straight, his hair brushed, his hands folded on his breast, his eyes decently shut, Hagen knelt down again, but this time he did not pray to God. This time he spoke to his father, Reynard the Black.

He apologized for letting Rogerius be killed, since as the elder brother he had been responsible for him, and he swore, by an oath so old that the words were strange and his tongue went slowly over them, that he would pay the blood debt. He did not cross himself afterward. There were things best kept without Christ. Getting up, he went out to find shovel and pick and dig the grave in the dark.

In the morning, he buried his brother in a churchyard near the Sea of Marmora, among the dead of an alien people. This hurt him with an absurd sharp hurt, that Rogerius should lie until Doomsday with a crowd of Greeks, and for long moments he could not bear to walk away from the grave and leave his brother alone there.

At last he went away up the road through the dark pine trees, along the foot of the hill, and went to Chrysopolis. There he found the ferry boat and bought passage for himself and his horses over the straits to Constantinople.

With the wind so high, the crossing took the whole afternoon and most of the night. The darkness and fog hid the great city from view. At last, as the dawn spread its white veil across the sky, the sea quieted, and the mist began to rise.

Hagen stood in the bow of the great ungainly barge with his horses. The other passengers crowded on the deck around braziers of coals and shared their cloaks for warmth. The storm had subsided and the air was as still as water in a jar. Hagen's face was clammy from the dawn mist, his fingers numb on the bridles of the two horses.

At first, in the feeble early light, the great towering promontory on which the city of Constantinople stood was only a vague sensation of mass to his left. The billowing flame of the lighthouse on the very tip of the cliff faded like the stars into the pallor of the day. The barge on its groaning sweeps crept along the shore and slowly turned north, butting into the harbor.

They called this harbor the Golden Horn. A finger of water, it lay protected in the lee of the cliff, the narrow way into it made narrower yet by breakwaters and heaps of rock linked together by chains. When the barge finally turned inside this mouth, the men at the sweeps gave out a cheer and crossed themselves and thanked Christ for their deliverance.

It was a wonderful harbor. Hagen had marked that when he came through here on his way to Jerusalem. In the long, shallow inlet ahead of him, now beginning to glow with the first true daylight, ships lay by the hundred. He saw the fat-bellied bottoms of the Venetians side by side with the narrow wedge-prowed ships of eastern sailors, the tilted sails of dhows, red and orange and striped, and the swollen-waisted river-going longships of the north. Little harbor boats danced between them and the shore, unloading, reloading, carrying supplies back and forth. Hagen narrowed his eyes, looking among this city of ships for one he might take to Italy.

The sun was warming his face and hands. He straightened, his cold-stiffened muscles soaking up the heat of the day, like a tree that wakened from the grip of winter. Now his gaze turned to the city itself.

It shocked him. It had shocked him when he first saw it and he should have been ready this time, but even so his first clear look at it made him draw a deep breath, fascinated, his eyes caught, his mouth falling open.

The mist still hugged the shoreline and veiled the lower slope. From this indefinite lightless mass of grey rose up layer on layer of buildings, climbing the steep cliffside in ranks, up into the sun, until at the top of the cliff, in a blaze of sunlight, the white marble buildings of the Palace stood up against the blue vault of the sky, and the golden domes of the churches there glittered like holy flame. They seemed closer to Heaven than to the earth, those great white and gold buildings on the clifftop, as if they had been placed there by the hand of God, and from them the rest of the City seemed to depend like the broad and graceful sweep of a cloak. Along the spine of the promontory, leading back to the mainland, were more churches, domed in gold and silver; a row of white columns fletched the spaces between them. That was their central street, which the Greeks called the Mesê. Here and there among the rounds of the domes, sweet to the eye as the curve of a breast, a spire stuck up boldly into the blue of the sky, so that the horizon was a jagged march down the ridge toward the undistinguished hills below.

The rest of the City fell away in patches of garden and trees, masses of buildings one on top of the other, the streets plunging among them like goat tracks, or spreading wider and gentler into marketplaces on the flats, down to the crowded shoreline.

Even at the edge of the sea they had not stopped building. The whole long beach was cut with causeways and breakwaters of stone, forming little shelters for the boats, and out along these moles were more buildings, shacks and warehouses and even churches, lapped by the mild waves of the Golden Horn. Now, with the full day upon them, these walkways teemed. Men with handcarts hurried down to the water's edge, and rows of half-naked slaves carried bundles from the ships standing at the wharves back into the City. He saw covered cushioned chairs on rails, supported by brawny men, swaying along the harbor-side street, and now, for the first time, the sounds of the place reached them, the cries and yells, the songs of the workmen, the scream of the sea gulls, the tramp of feet and the patter of donkey's hoofs, blended into a featureless roar that—he knew, from his past experience here—would never cease, not even when night fell, like the life-sounds of the City itself.

The barge was nosing into its berth in the harbor. The other passengers, as one man, lifted themselves and their goods and their babies and rushed forward into the bow, crowding together, their voices raised in excitement. Hagen's horses laid their ears back and swung their broad haunches threateningly toward the crowd, and the other passengers shrank away, avoiding them. The barge rocked under their weight. The prow touched the wharf, padded with plumped sacks hanging in nets of rope from the pilings, and a cable hissed uncoiling through the air to the boatman waiting on the deck.

The crowd screamed and pressed forward. Hagen did not move; he had seen before what happened now, and knew there was no reason to try to get off. Scream and struggle as they might, none of the others left either; two shouting officials forced them all back on to the barge and came on board, carrying tablets of wax and sharpened reeds to write with, and made everybody form lines, and began to ask questions.

Hagen had already mastered this part of it. When the first of the two officials came quickly along the line, making a preliminary order in the swarm of people, Hagen gave him a bribe. At once they passed him through, ahead of all the others, let him off the barge with his horses, and took him to their chief, who had a room at the head of the dock.

“You are a barbarian?” this man asked, writing down the answers on a piece of paper.

Hagen had kept his papers from the last time. He pulled them out of his purse and laid them on the work-scarred table before the official.

“My king is Charles. My bishop is Adelhardt, and my overlord is the Count of Frisia. I am going home from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and my first purpose is to find a ship here to take me to Italy.”

“You are alone?” the officer said, surprised. “Well, well. You speak fair Greek, for a barbarian. You have no goods you mean to sell here?”

“No,” Hagen said brusquely. They had asked him and Rogerius that before, and it still insulted him.

“How much money are you carrying with you?”

Hagen had counted it on board the ferry. “I have eighteen bezants, about sixty dinars, and twenty-five silver pence.” He spread it out on the counter and let the officer look for himself. Carefully the man wrote this all down. Hagen watched with distaste. It was beneath his birth to pay so much heed to money.

He said, “I have a message for someone at court. How would I go about delivering it?”

“You won't be able to do anything about that until the day after tomorrow,” said the Greek. “Tomorrow is a race for the Golden Belt. Every soul in Constantinople will be in the Hippodrome. Name?”

Hagen told him his name, and the Greek made reference to a tattered list on the wall. “What horse-races?” Hagen asked.

“In the Hippodrome. You should go, if you can still get in—no visit to Rome complete without the games.”

“Why do you people insist on calling this place Rome? I've been to Rome, it's on the far side of the world.”

“It's not a matter for the barbarian mind. I am giving you twenty days.” The officer wrote on a piece of paper and heated wax over a candle and put a seal on the corner. “If you haven't found a ship by then, come back and I'll see about giving you another twenty. No buying or selling of goods without licenses, please.” The Greek held out the sealed paper. “Good day.”

“Good day.” Hagen took the paper, which they would expect to have back when he left, and went out.

3

The city Byzantian, which Constantine the Great had called New Rome, and which everybody else called Constantinople, had mothered forty generations of men. The towering wedge-shaped cliff above the Bosporos commanded the sea route between the steppes of Asia, source of gold and silk, jewels and spices, and the Mediterranean; as well, it dominated the connections between the valley of the Danube and the highlands of Anatolia, from the dawn of time centers of metal-working and trade. Long before Byzas the Greek built a permanent settlement there, in the seventh century before Christ was born, the site of Constantinople had been a place of power.

Thus Byzantium was already old when the Emperor Constantine, his choice confirmed by oracles, walked around the site with a pack of architects and masons, and laid out his new capital. After years of civil war and rival claimants to the throne, he had at last reunited the great Empire of Augustus Caesar, which enclosed the entire Mediterranean world—which, as if to emphasize its utter dependence on the Middle Sea, stubbornly resisted all efforts to extend it east or north beyond that drainage: an empire taking name from the city of Rome, but no longer confined to the character of Rome, or to its traditions. It was to get away from those troublesome traditions, most annoying being the expectation of republican rule, that Constantine was removing the center of government east, to his new city, where with a free hand he could shape the Imperial destiny to his own notions.

The East offered positive help in this regard. In the East, the king was a god, whose will had the authority of godhead. No senate, no raucous mob, no irritating pre-existent body of law could defy him. In Constantinople, laying out his palace, his state buildings, his gardens and his places of worship, Constantine meant to make himself omnipotent.

To this purpose also he chose a new religion. After generations of ridicule and oppression, the Church of Christ would become the sole faith of the Empire. Everybody would worship one God, in one way, according to the word of the thirteenth apostle, the companion of Christ, the voice of God on earth, the Emperor in Constantinople.

In the terrible generations to follow, Constantine's foresight was vindicated. The western provinces of the Empire crumbled into decay and were overrun by Visigoth and Vandal, Hun and Lombard; Rome itself fell time and again until only the shell of her glory was left, but Constantinople endured. The barbarians sent armies against her so great they covered the plains like swarms of locusts, but they could not penetrate her defenses. Attila lived and died, and Alaric, whose sword weighed out the ransom of the weeping Romans, and lame Gaiseric, in whom Carthage at last had her revenge, and Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who wanted only to be Roman himself, and their trumpery ambitions died with them and turned to dust, while Constantinople endured and grew mighty. Even when disaster struck, as when the Emperor Valens died under the hoofs of the Visigoths' horses at Adrianople, the City was invincible.

She was an idea, the City, an idea like Justinian's, a perfect world order, a universal Christian empire; for a little while at least Justinian even recovered the old western provinces of Africa and Italy, and the Empire reached around the Middle Sea again. Then, because a eunuch took insult at a woman's slight, the Lombards took back most of Italy. And the Arabs came.

The desert bred them, as if the grains of sand turned into warriors, and the hot blast of the wind drove them in a wild irresistible whirl across Africa and up through the Holy Lands, where an unfortunate dispute over a subtle matter of doctrine made the people ready for a new master, who possessed a clearer statement of what God had in mind. The Empire shrank like a puddle in the sun. Africa was lost again, and Egypt and Syria, the Arabs coming on and on, driven by their simple credo and their seemingly limitless numbers; they reached the shore and built ships, took Cyprus and Sicily, and then one day there they were, before Constantinople itself, expecting to have it all.

Some said the Virgin walked on the walls of the City during that siege, and by her motherly smile and the touch of her hand gave heart to the defenders; others, more practical, attributed the success of the defense to the new weapon, Greek fire, blown through hollow tubes onto the Arab ships, which then blazed on the water like the hecatombs of old. The Arabs failed. Came back again, fools, not knowing the will of God when they saw it (although they mouthed great speeches about the will of God), and were beaten again, and again and again, and each time as the baffled minions of catastrophe withdrew, the Empire grew a little stronger.

There was no peace. There was a balance—the Arabs struck, the Empire struck back, and where their strengths were equal, a boundary appeared, but as ever, with one enemy subdued, another appeared. From the north came the Bulgars, a great grunting people without even a true king, pushing down into Thrace and Illyria and Greece. Then the Emperor made a terrible mistake.

The Emperor—Basileus, he was called, in Greek, the Latin tongue having ceased to serve the Empire around the time of Justinian—was equal to the apostles, but even Peter made mistakes; and in the face of the Arabs with their sublimely simple faith, the Emperor Leo the Isaurian was tempted irresistibly. He would simplify Christendom as well. He decreed that all idols and images of God and the saints were blasphemous and were to be destroyed.

Like a whirling maelstrom, the iconoclasm nearly pulled the whole Empire in after it. Perhaps there had been abuses of the images of saints —in the eastern provinces especially, where icons had often stood godparents at christenings—but the people loved them, and cleaved to them. Within a few years of the decrees of the iconoclasm, Constantinople had lost most of Greece and all that was left to it of Italy, and the rebelling populations of the Empire were making government impossible.

Yet the Emperor would not relent. Nor did his son Constantine yield to reason, but closed up the monasteries that were the champions of the icons, and seized their wealth, and the icons were broken or covered over with whitewash, so that the Church of the Holy Wisdom itself looked like a poorhouse. The monks fought back with the fervor of those for whom death meant salvation, and the Arabs and the Bulgars took the opportunity so advanced to attack the Empire again, and it seemed that all would fall into chaos.

One among the Imperial court kept faith. One saw the true way. At eighteen years of age, the Athenian noblewoman Irene, named for the goddess of peace, was chosen from eighty others to marry the Emperor Leo IV. While her husband lived she could do nothing but wait and watch and suffer with the rest of right-thinking humanity. But in her thirtieth year Leo died, leaving their son Constantine a mere baby, and Irene became regent and took the government into her own hands.

She bought off the Arabs with a great tribute, and sent her generals into Macedonia to hold back the Bulgars, and she struck down the decrees of the iconoclasm, and all over the Empire people rejoiced. The women brought forth from their dower chests and cupboards the precious images they had been hiding; the whitewash was scrubbed off the walls and domes of the churches, and once again people could look up and see the face of God.

The boy Constantine, growing older, grew impatient as well, and would have ruled. He sent his mother away, and ruled very badly. Still Irene kept faith with those that mattered. She spoke soothing maternal words to her son, and he allowed her back from her exile, and she saw what ruin he worked and knew what must be done. With the help of monks and officers of the court, she convinced Constantine to divorce his wife and marry another woman, and when he did, she used the unpopularity of that marriage to dethrone him. His eyes were put out with hot irons, and Irene ascended the throne, not as regent, not as empress, but as Basileus Autocrator, Equal of the Apostles, Ruler of the World.

In the year 802 after the birth of Christ, Irene was fifty. Her magnificent blonde hair was thick and lustrous as ever; the brilliant grey-green eyes for which the Emperor's son had chosen her from among eighty of the most beautiful women in the Empire still made men dream and quote poetry and search the lexicons for adjectives that always seemed too tame. In the Palace of the Daphne, where Constantine the Great had tread, she walked with a sure step, and the diadem with its pendants of pearls fit her as well as it had Justinian and Heraclius.

Now she said, “What does this Pope of Rome? Does he presume to tell me what to think in matters of religion? Pagh.” Opening her fingers, she let the letter drop from her hand onto the tufted Shiraz carpet.

“Basileus, Chosen of God,” said the scribe, bowing so that his nose touched the floor.

Along the wall, gorgeous in their court clothes, stood a row of her officers, who whenever she glanced their way bent like blades of grass before the wind in elegant submission. Irene walked the length of the room, her step firm, and her head high. She had been sick all the night through, but she could master that. She mastered everything else, and she would master the crushing pain in her chest as well. It was gone now anyway, leaving only the memory, which was almost as bad.

“Tell him,” she said, “that since he is so benighted that he would crown some barbarian as emperor of the West, he clearly has no insight into truth of any sort, not even in the most earthy and unpretentious matters, much less doctrines of the most high. Tell him to read the Credo of Constantine, and he will see there, most clearly, that the Son sitteth at the right hand of God, which means to any with sense that the Son is subordinate to the Father, as it is even in the most primitive households.”

They all murmured, in one voice, “Yes, Basileus, Chosen of God,” and among them the Parakoimomenos, the Grand Domestic, lifted his hands and said in his sonorous voice, “Glory to God on the Highest! Glory to the Basileus whose mind is suffused with the glory of God!”

Irene stared at him a moment, her face expressionless. The office of the Parakoimomenos was reserved for eunuchs, the earthly angels; he was splendid to look upon, taller than any other, with a brow like a marble statue.

“With the letter to Rome send someone who is capable of good judgment in such matters. I would know more about this collusion between the Bishop of Rome and the Franks.”

“Yes, Basileus, Chosen of God.”

They dipped and swayed, their brocaded coats glittering. Irene paced back up the room.

“You may go.”

One by one they came and knelt down and kissed the floor at her feet—Nicephoros was the last, her treasurer—and went out. As the door shut behind them, the chief lady-in-waiting got up from her chair in the corner and came forward.

“You must sit down.”

“Helena,” said the Empress, “I will see Theophano now.”

“That stupid child,” Helena said, between her teeth. “Sit down, I beg you, mistress, I beg you.”

“Do I look ill?” Irene said swiftly.

“No, no—but—”

“Then send me Theophano.”

Helena sighed. She had been in Irene's company for thirty years, since the day they sat together in the Hall of Chimes, with the other beauties of the bride-show, and waited for the Emperor's son to make his choice among them who should be his wife. Helena's black hair was striped with grey and her face was formed in the soft folds and wrinkles of age; looking into her face, Irene knew herself still young by contrast. The lady bowed and backed away, and at a nod from her head a page leapt to a little door in the back of the room and opened it.

Through it came Theophano. She had arrived at the Palace late the night before, considerably disheveled, but now she came forward suitably dressed to face her Basileus, her hair wound in sleek black coils on her head, her mouth painted to a delicious curve, her cheeks highlighted with Egyptian rouge. She knelt down at the feet of the Empress and pressed her forehead to the floor.

“Augustus, Protected One of God, I have failed you.”

“So I am told,” Irene said. Helena, who disliked Theophano, had brought her the whole sordid story, along with a potion, at three in the morning.

“I have no excuses,” Theophano said, into the carpet. Probably she was crying; she had a lamentable tendency to excess emotion. “I am foolish and weak and I erred.”

“You should never have involved barbarians in this, Theophano.”

“Augustus, I had no choice—John Cerulis's men were about to take me prisoner, and I had the list. The Franks saved me and the list from them.”

“Yes,” Irene said, between her teeth. Helena was hovering nearby, solicitious as a nurse, and she waved her away. “But now you don't even have the list, do you.”

“Augustus, have me put to death. I cannot bear the agony of failure.”

“Where is the list?”

“I gave it to one of the knights for safe-keeping, and when John Cerulis's men burst in on us, I could not recover it. I had to run for my life. Oh, I should have died.” Theophano moaned. “I have failed you. Oh, Augustus, have me blinded for my crimes, cast me out entirely—”

“Foolish you certainly are.” The Empress went closer to the window. In the garden below, laid out in a series of concentric squares of roses and gravel paths, the exact center was a sundial. Several hours remained before she had to appear in the Hippodrome and declare the race for the Golden Belt. “But you meant well, and I forgive you, Theophano. You may rise.”

Theophano stood up, her hands on her thighs. “Augustus, Beloved of God, your kindness is a blessing from Heaven. I swear to you, I shall be worthy of your generosity—”

“Yes, yes, my girl. You will always do your best.” It would have been best if she had died with Shimon, especially since she had mishandled the list. If John Cerulis's soldiers had overcome the barbarians, they certainly had the list by now. She waved away Theophano, still brimming over with promises, and with a gesture dismissed her. The girl's voice ceased abruptly and she hurried out of the room.