The Belt of Gold (6 page)

None of this discontent showed on his face. He was a spare, tall, hollow-chested man in later middle age, his clothes elegant, his grey hair polished to a silver sheen, his every mannerism evidence of his excellent breeding and perfect education. He was Basileus in every particular but one: he could not wear the purple. It was an oversight on the part of the Creator that he had been working hard to amend for the last twenty years of his life.

“Well,” said Karros, clasping his hands behind his back, “she can't have that list of names, anyway. The last I saw of her she was going out the window, and she didn't have enough clothes on to hide a pimple. She must have hidden it somewhere on the road.”

He was still staring at Theophano, in the Empress's entourage. Abruptly Karros's face stiffened, his gaze sharpening, and quickly he jerked his whole body around to put his back to the pavilion.

Intrigued by this indication of alarm, John Cerulis adjusted his seat slightly, to look around him again at the pavilion. Nothing in the scene there seemed enough to provoke such a response. Beyond the Imperial box, up on the highest level of the Hippodrome, a slight movement caught his eye: there was someone up among the antique statuary stored on the upper level. Cerulis glanced at Karros again, but the fat man was relaxed now, his hands clasped behind his back, rocking up and down on his heels and toes. Whatever had bothered him had not apparently bothered him very much.

Perhaps Theophano had seen him. The slut. John Cerulis raised his handkerchief again to his lips, smiling.

“Here comes the second heat,” Karros said, eager.

The four teams were rolling out on to the track. Prince Michael led the way, since he had won the first heat. John Cerulis noticed again the bright scarf fluttering on his arm.

“There, you see? He's involved in some sneaky business.”

Karros said, “I don't understand that.”

“Someone does, you fool. Didn't I tell you to find out what he's up to? Why must you fail me in everything?”

“Most Noble, I've talked to Michael himself at great length sometimes—I swear to you, nothing concerns him but horse-races.”

“Then why does he send secret signals to his followers? No! You've been duped again, Karros, you fool.” John kept his voice mild. This was why he was not emperor, because he had the use only of silly and ignorant men who could not understand what they were seeing. “I'm telling you, go make friends with him, and find out what he intends.”

“Yes, Most Noble.”

Cerulis placed himself more comfortably in his chair, smiling. He tried to smile always, since people were always watching him, and it would not do to betray any mood less than perfect serenity. The chariots were lining up for the start of the next heat. He leaned on his elbow, smiling, to watch.

One of the horses on the team from Trebizond was refusing the start. Rearing and pitching, it backed away from the ribbon in spite of the whip and the shouts of the driver. The groom assigned to lead the Trebizonders into place was approaching warily, his hands out.

Because the Trebizond team had finished last in the first heat, they had the inside position for this one, and so the race could not begin until the horses were settled. Mauros-Ishmael calmed his raging heart.

Kept his eyes forward, his hands firm on the reins. He felt, as he always felt before a race, that he was made of fire.

Now the crowd began to scream and chant, stamping their feet. The colors of the teams fluttered in the air. Ishmael's wheelhorse tossed its black head, impatient; Ishmael felt the action through the reins and his fingers opened and closed, giving and taking rein, the man and the horse perfectly tuned together.

Before them lay the track, the sand gleaming, furrowed by the rakes. The shadow of the Hippodrome wall cut across the straightaway halfway down its length; the whole far end was deep in the shade. In the sun, the crowd rose up like a mountain, howling and cheering and all moving at once, all watching him.

Hot all over, his blood burning in his veins, his eyes boiling, he longed for the explosion of the start.

Now the inside team's flanker was calming down. For an instant it stopped plunging, its head thrust up high, its nostrils pumping the air in and out, and the grooms bolted to the side walls. The starter raised his flag. The crowd hushed, gathering its breath.

The flag dropped, and the ribbon fell away. The bronze horns blared forth two notes, and the crowd's thundering cheers drowned the rest. Needing no cue from Ishmael, the horses flung themselves forward down the stretch of sand.

The inside team's flanker had chosen exactly that moment to rear again, and so the Trebizonders lost the start. Ishmael with his greys and blacks bolted out into the lead, half a stride ahead of Michael on the right, a horse's length ahead of the team on the left. Before the surging horses had even steadied their stride Ishmael was urging them sideways, toward the inside track, left open by the faltering of the Trebizonders.

The roar of the crowd, the rattle of wheels and the pounding of the horses' hoofs blended into an indefinite thunder that was like hearing nothing at all. The four heads of his horses bobbed in unison, their braided manes laid back on the wind of their passage, spume flying from their necks and mouths. He tightened his inside hand and the big black wheeler responded, edging closer to the spina, pinching off the team between them and the inside, charging toward the open sand ahead.

“On! On!”

That was the driver of the team on Ishmael's left; he went to the whip, lashing his horses, trying to keep them up and hold Ishmael out. Ishmael's horses needed no whip. They knew racing as well as their driver. With the black wheeler guiding them all into the open track inside, they slackened stride just a little, just enough to keep team, and forced the horses in their way to shorten up or crash.

Losing ground with every stride, the inside team faltered still more, and Ishmael swept on ahead of them. Now Michael was racing up fast on the outside, urging his team out ahead of Ishmael's, now leading by a neck, now by half a length. Ishmael gripped his reins tight, giving his horses the strength of his arms and shoulders to steady them. Michael was straining for the lead, but the turn was on them, and Ishmael had the inside track. Gripping the wheeler as short as he could, he sent on the flankers in a burst of speed, whirled around the turn in perfect rhythm, and came out of the curve ahead of Michael by a clear length.

They charged down the straight and Michael went for the lead again. His horses surged up alongside Ishmael's car, their long lean heads flat as blades. Ishmael leaned into his outside reins and his flankers moved out sideways a little, forcing Michael wide, holding him off. The horses raced together, two teams side by side, buckle to buckle. For long strides they raced even. The crowd was screaming their names, some calling the drivers by name, some calling the horses, its passion like a whip. Ishmael himself screamed. Through the reins he knew the splendid unfaltering strength of his team, and there beside him Michael's horses and the Prince himself were racing with the same power, the other half of this little world, locked into an eternal contest at the peak of life.

The turn swept at them. Ishmael leaned his horses into it, asking the flankers for more speed, drawing the wheeler in a little, but he asked for too much, or did it wrong. Their rhythm broke. They lost something, a failure of concentration, trembling back through the reins into his hands, so that for precious instants he drove not a single pulsing power but a collection of separate and contending wills. Faltering, they went wide, forcing Michael also wide.

Under Ishmael now the car rocked up onto the inside wheel. He leaned out hard toward the outside, trying to bring it down. The car lost its track entirely and skidded, swinging hard toward the wall. The horses had to slow; Prince Michael surged out ahead of them, while Ishmael, sobbing with desperate fury, worked his horses down and got his chariot firmly under him and turned them straight again.

The other three teams were already entering the next turn. The race was lost. Ishmael flung his whole heart and mind forward and sent the horses hurtling after, down the passage of the sand.

They responded. Impossibly far behind, the four horses leaned into the harness and stretched their legs into the rushing wind. Flying down the straight into the turn, they gathered themselves like an arrow drawn to the full might of the bow. Hopeless. Yet they raced on.

This time, without other teams there, they executed the turn perfectly. Coming into the straight beyond it, they were eight, no, ten lengths back. Ishmael's hands gripped the reins so tight the blood striped his palms. He wept and called to his horses, his voice lost in the wind and the roar of the crowd, and straining for every inch, for every instant of speed, the team crept into the gap between them and the others, narrowed it, and at the far turn, closed it.

This was the last turn. Ishmael held them close against the spina, to save everything he could for the straightaway. As they wheeled into the turn, he prayed for help, and help came.

Swinging around the turn, the Thessalonian team, on the inside just ahead of Ishmael, began to drift wide. On the outside the Trebizonder driver screamed at the errant racers and lashed at his own horses, but to no purpose. The Thessalonian horses veered out across the track, leaving the inside open, giving Ishmael just enough space to fit through.

The horses saw the opening and needed no command from him. Flattened to the task, their haunches bunching and thrusting in powerful coils, they forced their way through the opening. For a moment the heads of the Thessalonian team bounced even with the wheel of Ishmael's car, but then, drained by the effort, they stopped. Falling back, they took the Trebizonders with them, and now Ishmael stretched out his team alone in pursuit of Michael.

It was too far. The champion was already halfway to the finish line, the yellow scarf on his arm flapping, the crowd standing to welcome him, their darling, into his place of victory. Ishmael bent over his horses' rumps, begging them for more, weeping for their useless courage, and they raced up closer and closer, now fifteen yards behind, now ten, now five. Then they swept over the finish line, Michael first, Ishmael nowhere.

The crowd loved it. They stood on the benches and cheered until the whole Hippodrome reverberated, and clouds of flowers and bits of food and paper and even small coins rained down on the track and on Michael, his horses, Ishmael, and his horses. Ishmael let his team slow as it would. They were tired and came back quickly to him, snorting and sighing. They knew they had lost. With heads drooping, their flanks streaked with salty drying sweat, they walked back toward the stable gates.

Michael was touring the Hippodrome. Having won two heats he had won the day's race, and he carried his golden belt at arm's length over his head, showing it off to the crowd. Ishmael passed him going the other way, and for an instant they looked at each other. Ishmael raised his hand in tribute, and Michael nodded, distant, aloof, took his gaze away, and went on.

Ishmael felt all eyes on him—all jeering, contemptuous eyes, all laughter, all the world's scorn falling on him and his horses. Another cheer for Michael sounded, a blow struck on his heart. He bowed his head. The grooms were waiting at the stable door, and he gave up the horses into their care.

He slipped down from the car, tired, his knees quaking, his wrists and shoulders stiff and sore. He had sand in his eyes and in his mouth and hair and nose. Blind in the darkness of the stable, he stumbled down the corridor into the Apron, banging into gear and people. Once inside the shelter of his team's equipment room, he shut the door on the rest of mankind, and sitting down on a trunk began to cry like a child.

6

“Now he is leaving,” Theophano said; she stood by the rail of the Imperial box, looking down at the enclosure where John Cerulis had been sitting.

“Pull the curtains,” said Helena, the chief lady-in-waiting.

As if she gave the order to herself, she went forward to draw the great silk curtains closed. Theophano stepped back, her hands at her sides. John Cerulis frightened her; he was like a serpent, impossible to predict or placate, and now he was her enemy.

The Empress would protect her. She thanked God for giving her into the protection of the Basileus, whom Christ Himself had chosen.

Irene was gone now, with the others of her party, since the race was over. Helena had fastened the curtains into place, and stooping gathered up the Empress's cloak and a stray earring and went into the back of the box, to the door that opened on to the stairwell to the Daphne.

“Bring your lute. She'll want music after dinner. And don't forget those sweets here or they will draw the ants.” Helena bustled out of the box and disappeared down the dark stairwell of the Kathismus.

Theophano loitered in the pavilion, fixing the back of her hair, which had come loose. She was thinking about the horse-race. Michael had won again, which delighted her, although they were no longer lovers. Maybe she would talk to him after dinner, and if he showed interest, go down later to the Bucoleon for the drinking and celebration. She stuck a hairpin into the coiled mass of her hair and fingered a heavy curl into place.

Behind her the silk curtain ripped with a long hissing sound that sent a shiver of horror through her. She whirled.

In through the long rent in the curtain a man was coming, and she snatched up her lute and leapt into the doorway, to block it with her body. An instant later she dropped the lute.

It was the big white-haired Frank. He climbed in across the chair of the Empress herself and faced Theophano, his eyebrows cocked up.

“Well, well, pretty, remember me?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I want to talk to you, pretty.”

He was coming toward her; she reached behind her for the door into the Kathismus and pulled it closed and set herself firmly before it, a barrier between this savage and the Empress. “I warn you, there are guards at the foot of this stair!”

“Are there really!” He came up beside her and took hold of her arm. “Then you tell me right now and here what it is I want to know.”

“What do you want?”

“Who killed my brother?”

She licked her lips; he was hurting her arm, and by the look on his face he intended to hurt her more if she did not cooperate with him.

“I can't tell you—it is business of the Empress.” The brother was dead, then. She had hoped he had somehow fought off the attack. Then abruptly a pain daggered through her arm, wiping out all thought of Rogerius.

“Tell me!” He twisted her wrist around behind her.

“I can't—I can't—” She sobbed, her upper arm and shoulder a fiery agony. “Please—”

“I don't believe you. Why should my brother's murder be any business of the Basileus? Tell me, damn you, Theophano, I will break off your arm if you don't.”

She was sinking down onto her knees, limp and helpless. He let her go, and she cried out with relief; he gripped her by the front of her dress and yanked her up again onto her feet to face him.

“You won't tell me unless she allows it? Then take me to her.”

“No! Heavens—”

“Why not? Are you afraid of what she'll tell me?”

Her arm dangled, numb and useless. She pressed her back against the door. “She is the Basileus! You—you can't—” She surveyed him, his battered boots, his rustic leggings of rough knitted cloth, his coat like the hide of a wild animal; she imagined him in the presence of the Basileus, and almost laughed. “No. You are not worthy.”

“Yet my brother was worthy enough to die?”

Theophano dragged in a deep breath. She saw a certain sense in that.

“I'm sorry about your brother, truly.”

“Then help me get revenge for his murder.”

She had involved him in this. Rubbing her arm, now tingling painfully alive again, she faced the unpleasant truth; she was responsible for this, and an uncouth barbarian had the right of her.

“Very well,” she said. “I'll take you to her.”

This would cost her much, perhaps even her place with the Empress, but grimly she forced herself to admit that it was all her own doing. “Come along.” She opened the door and led him into the Palace.

Helena said, “I would feel safer, mistress, if we had an army to call upon.”

“Would you,” said the Basileus. Helena had attended her for thirty years, and had earned this freedom of opinion by her loyalty and selflessness. “I would not. There is no safety in relying on force, my love.”

“John Cerulis has an army.”

“Fortunately it is scattered over Thrace and Macedonia.”

“But he will summon it here, mistress, and hold us up to ransom, and the price of our lives will be your power.”

Irene laughed. She reached out and caressed her maidservant's forearm. They were sitting in the evening room, at the rear of the Daphne Palace. Through the great window at the end of the room, she could see out on to the torch-lit terrace, where the fountains showered streams of diamonds into the jasmine-scented air. Night had come. The long day's labor was done. Irene sprawled across silken cushions, her women fussing around her, and looked forward to hours and hours of leisure and self-indulgence.

“It is better to rely on Christ,” she said, “since it was Christ who gave me my throne, and only Christ can take it from me. If I raised an army it would surely lead to war; fighting always brings on more fighting; an army often runs off ahead of its purpose, dragging in its wake those very people who ought to be leading it.”

The little girl Philomela, sitting beside her, lifted her round young face in an adoring smile at these words. The Empress fondled the child's cheek with her free hand. The other hand lay on Philomela's knee, where the little girl could massage creams into the skin and paint the nails with gold.

“Nonetheless,” Helena said, “I think you ought to rid us once and for all of John Cerulis.”

“You panic easily, Helena.”

Two of the other women were setting up the table for supper; the jet-black man whom the Caliph had sent her as a birthday gift waited beside the door with a tray of food. Where was Theophano? The Empress's intuition bothered her and she never lost time trying to verify the judgments of her sixth sense by the laborious exercise of reason. Something was wrong.

“Theophano must be in difficulty. Someone go find her.”

“Mistress, Nicephoros is here, outside—”

“Oh, Nicephoros.” Irene waved her hand in the air, wafting away the mention of her treasurer, who always wanted to complain to her about money. “I'll see him in the morning.”

“In the morning is the procession from the Well, and then after that the Saint Matthew's Day Mass in Holy Apostles'—”

“Well, I'll see him in the afternoon, then. Find me Theophano.” She leaned forward a little, to let another woman comb out a vagrant tendril of her hair and pat it into place. A subtle aroma reached her nose and she sniffed. “Ah, delicious. Octopus in cream.” She beckoned to the black man to bring the food to the table.

He stepped forward, leaving the door, and an instant later the door flew open.

All the women screamed. As if they moved on wheels and springs, they rushed together into the center of the room, to make a wall of their bodies between their mistress and whatever danger threatened. The black man leapt away, his mouth an O of alarm.

But it was only Theophano who came in, looking rumpled. “Mistress,” she said, and went to her knees. “Mistress, this is all my fault—”

Into the doorway behind her a stranger stepped.

Irene stood up. With a gesture she dispersed her women to the sides of the room. “Who are you?”

The strange man walked calmly into the center of the room, looking around him. “Very beautiful,” he said. “This is very nice.”

Theophano, still on her knees, reached up and gripped his hand and tried to pull him down beside her. “Down on your face, you lout—that is the Basileus!”

He did not kneel. He braced himself easily against the tug of her hand on his arm and faced Irene, a big, square man in foreign clothes, his hair white and thick and curly as sheep's wool.

He said, “I am Hagen, lady, the son of Reynard the Black, of Frankland. Men call me Hagen the White. My king is Charles. I mean you no harm, lady, but I have urgent questions of your serving girl here, and she will not talk to me without your permission.”

“Oh,” Irene said, understanding everything at once. She walked leisurely across the room toward him, taking in every detail of his appearance. She liked men, and this one pleased her by his size and evident strength. His straightforwardness she also enjoyed. It was the salient characteristic of men, refreshingly uncomplicated, unlike the subtle and oblique minds of women, and was, she thought, the chief reason for marriage, each finding its perfect equal in the other.

She was past needing marriage, or even sex. Nonetheless she intended to enjoy this encounter. She walked once all the way around the big Frank, looking him up and down, and went to sit before him again; one of her women rushed up with a little spindle-legged stool for her.

“Well: ask,” she said, with a gesture toward Theophano.

“I want her to tell me who killed my brother,” Hagen said.

“Does she know? Theophano?”

“Not precisely, mistress,” said the girl, still crouched on the rug. “I ran away—I could see that even so mighty a man as his brother would not hold off four of John Cerulis's men for long.”

“Who is that? John Cerulis?” asked the Frank quickly.

“An enemy of mine,” said Irene, and smiled, because suddenly she saw possibilities in this Hagen the White, uses for him multiplying steadily through her imagination, like a series of doors opening. She fixed her eyes on him.

“Tell me, my dear, are all Franks as handsome and well formed as you?”

He put his head to one side, his blue eyes pensive. He said, “My lady,” in a voice quivering with suspicion.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be forward. Clearly your ways are more sober than ours. But the proposition has been advanced that your king and I should marry, and bring the western provinces into the Empire again.”

“My lady, I only want to know who killed my brother.”

“Well, that's easy: John Cerulis. Or his men did it, anyway, obeying what they took to be his will. I would even venture to guess that their leader was a certain Karros. Theophano?” She glanced at the girl, who nodded. “Yes. Does that satisfy you?”

“Karros,” said the Frank, with purpose in his voice. “Yes. Thank you.”

“And tell me now what you intend to do.”

“Nothing that will trouble you, lady, if these men are your enemies.”

“Enemies, yes, but they are also my subjects, and I will not suffer them to come to harm at the whim of a barbarian.”

“They killed my brother,” he said.

“And you seek revenge. That's certainly simple enough. Do you plan simply to kill them, or have you more complicated measures in mind?”

He stood there a moment, his gaze on her, his brow furrowed in thought, which, being a barbarian, he could not have much practice in. Or perhaps he was having trouble understanding her Greek; he spoke the street language, and she spoke court Greek. She lifted one hand. “I will dine now, before the food is cold.” Swiftly, their silk clothes rustling, her servants hurried to bring her a plate.

The Frank said, “I am sworn to avenge my brother. That means the death of those who killed him. That is our way, in Frankland.”

“You have made that clear.”

“I realize that here you do things differently.”

One of the women knelt down, holding the plate so that Irene could survey the food upon it; everything was laid out in the shape of a fish, because it was of the sea's larder, and because the only true nourishment was the Body of Christ. The rings of the octopus in their sauce formed the scales of the fish; strips of marinated eggplant were the fins, and colored fruit the eye and gills and the sea around it all. It was a shame to disturb it, but she was hungry, and she reached for the spoon.

“Here we trust in the judgment of Christ our Lord, and strive for mercy in our dealings with others.” Gently she removed one of the scales and began to eat.

“Yes,” he said, malice in his voice like a rock in the grass. “Here you put out the eyes of your own children.”

The women gasped. Theophano reached out and struck him, which he ignored. Irene ate the mouthful of the white octopus and laid the spoon down.

“Ah,” she said, the food swallowed. “Don't try to duel with me, my dear, you will fall victim to the simplicity of your sex and race and also to your shortcomings in the language. Yet I will answer your remark, because I see you do not understand the ways of Rome.”

“Make me understand.”

“When I had my son blinded, I committed an act of mercy, because otherwise I would have had to kill him. Alive and whole, he would always have been a threat to me, the center of plots against me, and therefore a threat to the Empire itself. But a blind man cannot rule, and so I have put him out of danger.”

“Surely you had another choice, which was to leave him the Emperor, as he was.”

“No,” she said swiftly, and put down the spoon, and waved the dish away. Intense, fierce, she leaned forward toward this barbarian whose physical excellence was so in contrast to his shallow understanding. “No, I did not have that choice. He was weakening the Empire. He was destroying the City of Christ. That cannot be allowed to happen. Constantinople must not fall. Troy—Athens—Rome itself—the tide of barbarism has swallowed them all. Only Constantinople remains. But the barbarians are ever at the gates. We must defend and protect with every guile, every craft, every dedicated power in us, with no thought for ourselves, because when Constantinople falls—”