Two for Joy (23 page)

He crept forward slowly, ready to flee if necessary. It was not human, he realized with a sudden rush of relief. It was discarded clothing, a cloak.

The beggar snatched it off the ground, clutching its heavy folds to his thin chest. He could almost hear his heart pounding against his rib cage. The cloak was made of finely woven wool. Even in his former life he had never owned anything of such richness and value.

Belatedly, a terrible suspicion occurred to him. He looked around in panic. Was this the trick of some cruel Blue or Green who would materialize out of the shadows, blade in hand, to reclaim his possession from a thief? But neither faction needed an excuse to kill a beggar. Perhaps it belonged to a courtier? Certain tales concerning them were commonly bandied about the streets. If only half of them were true, would it not please such a person to have a beggar like him handed over to the imperial torturers?

Other horrible possibilities, each worse than the last, raced in a mad riot through his head. Should he even have picked the cloak up, thus placing himself in danger? He shivered, looking around, waiting for the hand on the shoulder that heralded…who knew what? Yet, as time passed he still stood unmolested, clutching his newly found treasure to his chest with shaking hands.

Examining the cloak in the light of the nearest torch, he realized that, however it had come to be there, it was certainly of great value.

His thoughts were swirling as wildly, the debris blown around by the chilly wind now guttering the lonely flares of the torches. How much food would the cloak be worth if he sold it? And if he kept it, how many cold nights would it allow him to remain safely in his hidden corner, well away from the communal refuges he so dreaded?

He pulled the cloak over his shoulders, noting with satisfaction how warm he felt. Its hem dragged behind him a little as he set off down the deserted avenue with much springier steps than those that had brought him there. The cloak had been made for a taller man. What fate had befallen him?

Chapter Seventeen

Lucretia awoke in darkness to the sound of muffled
thunder.

Someone was pounding at the front door of Nonna’s apartment building. Balbinus? Her heart leapt, an animal trying to escape from a trap. It’s only a nightmare, Lucretia told herself. How many times had she had that same awful dream since fleeing her husband?

A sleepy tenant shouted from a window below, castigating the nocturnal caller for waking everyone in the house. The visitor replied with a yet more inventive string of curses. Familiar curses, bellowed in a familiar voice.

As Nonna stirred sleepily nearby, Lucretia dressed in frantic haste, grabbing the first clothing her hand encountered in the dark. She ran out on to the landing, her mind still dazed with sleep.

There was a door at the back of the building’s first floor. If she reached it quickly enough she could escape before the argument going on at the front of the house was finished. Running downstairs in a panic, she caught the toe of her sandal on a loose board and fell heavily to the floor on the landing.

From below came the rattle of a bolt drawn, the bang of the front door flung open. More shouting. More foul language. For an instant she was paralyzed, huddled on the floor by the door to the communal lavatory. Terrible words she had hoped never to hear again came booming up the stair well.

Heavy footsteps pounded upwards.

Lucretia pushed herself to her feet. No time to escape now. She jerked open the lavatory door and crouched down in the cramped, malodorous cubicle. Insults continued to be shouted upstairs after Balbinus. His footsteps crossed the landing, past her temporary sanctuary.

As soon as she heard him rapping at the door of Nonna’s room on the floor above, Lucretia flung herself downstairs and escaped out the front door. Her heart pounded faster than her feet on the slippery cobbles as she dashed into the alley across the street, heedless of danger, seeking any concealment she could find.

With laboring breath, she traversed the dark length of the narrow way and ran across the open space beyond. Torches guttered here and there at shuttered shop fronts. Down another street she went, pulling away in fright from the grasping hand of a woman sitting in a doorway, and finally stumbled into a marketplace.

Boisterous stallholders were already setting out wares for their expected customers, comparing competitors’ offerings in the light of torches, loudly finding them the worst rubbish they had ever had the misfortune to observe and having little better to say about each other’s ancestors and sexual practices.

She glanced back down the shadowed street from which she just emerged. Was that someone running after her? She whirled and fled, straight into the side of an ox cart.

The next thing she knew she was being dragged to her feet. She tried to pull away, lashing out toward her captor’s face at the same time. A strong hand gripped her wrist.

“Stop it! I’m not going to hurt you!”

It was a ruddy faced carter, about her age or perhaps a year or two younger.

“Where are you running to, lady?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” Lucretia stammered. “I was just careless….”

“A lady wouldn’t be roaming the streets at this hour without good reason. You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

Lucretia protested feebly that it was not so, but the carter would not be convinced. It struck her that he was young enough to grasp eagerly at the adventurous prospect of assisting a pretty woman in obvious distress without giving much thought to the possible consequences. Certain that her husband would burst into the marketplace at any moment she blurted out her destination.

The carter grinned. “Well, there’s a miracle for you! I’m just on my way to that very shrine!”

As he quickly cleared a space for her amid the sacks of onions and amphorae of olive oil piled in his cart, he pointed out that those encamped out there needed to eat and have light just like everyone else. “I do well enough from their trade,” he went on, “even though I charge a bit less than some, what with them being pilgrims and all.”

Lucretia thanked the young man. She did not reveal that although she had contemplated joining Michael’s followers she also feared what that would entail—cutting herself off forever from her former life, from her friends and family. Her mind had finally been made up only when Balbinus arrived bellowing at the house door.

As soon as she was safely aboard, the carter urged his ox forward.

“It could be good for future business too,” he shouted back to her loudly enough to be heard over the rattling of wheels, “since they’ll remember their friends if they should take over the city. And it might help me in the afterlife as well, you never know. Yes, it’s certainly been excellent for trade, although not so good for public order. There’s an uneasy feeling in the air, fermenting like demon’s wine as you might say, but isn’t that usually the case? Always somebody stirring up trouble, always somebody else suffering for it.” He was quite the philosopher, it seemed.

“But,” he went on, “although personally I don’t know what to make of it all, there’s a lot of talk when the wine jug’s been emptied a few times about how things will be different when Michael’s in charge. I’ll believe that when I see it, though.”

Before long they had passed out of the city gates. The guards scarcely glanced at the heavily loaded cart. They were obviously concerned not with who might be openly leaving the city but rather with those trying to enter it by stealth.

***

Lucretia suppressed a startled cry as she was jolted awake by the sudden, lurching halt of the cart. She had been dozing uneasily, and peering warily over its side was relieved to see neither her husband nor a pursuing Prefect. There was, however, a white-haired man lying a short distance away beside the unruly line of brush running along the edge of a field.

Her benefactor was already investigating. Lucretia leaned forward, staring. Surely the man on the ground had not been set about by robbers? Even from a distance, she could see from his rough clothes and malnourished look he had nothing worth stealing. Dark patches of blood stained his tunic. Perhaps he had been beaten for the sport of it?

Helped into a sitting position, the old man spoke for a time but Lucretia could not hear what was being said.

When he returned to her side, the young carter looked grim. “Nothing to be afraid of here, lady. But there’s been an attack at the shrine. He says he barely escaped with his life.”

Lucretia asked who could have been responsible for such a terrible act.

Her companion spat into the dust. “Our beloved emperor sent a company of excubitors. Apparently they showed up before dawn. Their captain ordered the pilgrims to get out while they still could. Most of them did, scattered like leaves in the wind, it seems. Not much faith there, you may say, but what is faith against the sword? Still, it seems there were plenty who wouldn’t, who wanted to defend their precious Michael so that poor old fellow told me.”

Lucretia paled. “What happened?” she asked, knowing what the answer would be.

The answer was as stark and simple as she had expected. “A massacre. He doesn’t know what happened to Michael but thinks he probably escaped disguised as one of his own followers.” He spat again. “Not but what apparently some of them pilgrims gave good accounts of themselves. There’s more than one of Justinian’s men who isn’t going to be marching back to Constantinople to get drunk or go wenching tonight—or any other night.”

“Is that old man badly hurt?” Lucretia asked, noting that he had remained seated on the ground.

“It’s only a scalp wound, looks worse than it is,” was the dismissive reply. “He probably got a quick cut just to remind him unorthodoxy is severely frowned upon. He was lucky.”

From her uncomfortable position Lucretia looked along the narrow road pointing back toward the city.

“So,” the carter was saying, “do you want to ride back with me? There’s no use going there now. The only people left at the shrine are either dead or wounded or excubitors, and what with all them soldiers being there, to be blunt, well, it could be dangerous for you, you know how it is…” He trailed off.

“If everyone else has run away help will be needed with the wounded,” Lucretia said firmly. “I will go on.”

“It’s a mistake, it really is,” he replied with a frown, “and I hope you don’t live to regret it.”

Lucretia watched the cart rattle out of sight towards the city. The Bosporos was hidden from this stretch of road but the fog rising from its hidden waters sent white, wispy fingers inland to clutch damply at her.

She had no choice, she told herself, wiping away her tears. She must continue onward, despite the fact that her only refuge had now been destroyed.

Trudging down the narrow road, she wondered briefly if Nonna had sent someone from the building to notify Balbinus of where his wife could be found. Doubtless coins changed hands. Would her old nursemaid have betrayed her? It seemed the only explanation, for there were thousands of doors in Constantinople, too many to bring Balbinus knocking at that particular one by chance.

And, of course, Nonna always knew best, she thought with a grim smile, just as she had always known what was best for Lucretia all through her childhood. And Nonna thought that Lucretia was dishonoring her family by fleeing and, yes, it was possible that the strict old woman had taken steps to ensure that Lucretia took the right, the honorable course. Unless, perhaps, Balbinus had finally gone to her father and discovered her possible whereabouts. She could imagine the sort of statements her father would have made when he was informed of her flight. Duty would doubtless have been the first thing mentioned.

“A dutiful daughter,” she chanted softly to herself, as she plodded along the road, through the mist. “A dutiful wife. A dutiful daughter. A dutiful wife…”

***

The sun had burnt off the fog by the time she neared the shrine. During her journey, several groups of pilgrims had rushed by her, going in the opposite direction. There were also groups of men who did not appear to belong to the military, being unarmored and dressed in plain tunics, and yet they carried swords or spears. They seemed to take no notice of her but when, looking back over her shoulder from the crest of a rise along the way, she glimpsed a large band of such men moving toward her destination, she was grateful that they quickly outpaced her and vanished around a bend in the road. Perhaps they were arriving to reinforce the excubitors already holding the shrine, or, she thought, her stomach churning, perhaps they had been sent out to hunt down such acolytes as had escaped from their clutches.

Limping as she crested the final hill before the shrine, she gasped in shock and horror.

Where during Michael’s sermons there had been a pool of humanity filling the space in front of the building, there was now only a scene of desolation. Bodies lay strewn across the trampled grass. A few excubitors paced around, poking at the fallen with their swords. Some of their colleagues assisted wounded comrades. The small group of acolytes clustered at the foot of the steps leading up to the shrine’s columned portico were under heavy guard. Lucretia fervently thanked the Lord that she could not see Michael among the captives.

Surely they were not going to murder the survivors, she thought, looking again at the excubitors prodding swords at the figures on the ground.

From here and there on what must have lately resembled a slaughtering pen rather than a battlefield, an occasional hoarse shout rose to hang on the morning air. At each shout, one of the fallen was quickly picked up by a pair of brawny excubitors and carried, none too tenderly, into the shrine. So they were finding and tending to the living, she thought. She could be of assistance after all. That had been her first impulse. What she would do afterwards, where she would go, she couldn’t say.

“Guard me, Lord, and keep me safe,” she prayed softly, not certain if she feared detection by her pursuing husband more than the possibility of assault. She quickly walked down the hill.

Soon she was stooping, checking those lying in her path. The first person she found alive was a woman holding her gashed arm, lying on her back staring blank-eyed into the morning sky.