Six for Gold (19 page)

Chapter Thirty-seven

From the flat roof of the guest house the oasis appeared as a choppy sea of palm fronds, interrupted by fields outlined by irrigation ditches and the few dusty streets of Mehenopolis. Beyond, dun-colored desert sands shimmered in the heat.

“I was happy we slept up here last night,” Cornelia said to John. “The stars were magnificent. We'll have to continue sleeping on the roof. It'll be like old times, lying together beneath the heavens.”

“Not exactly like old times.” John had turned on his stool to face the upthrust cliff of the Rock of the Snake.

“We can only be what we are. If we spent our time regretting the endless things we're not, we'd never do anything else. I found this philosophy most helpful when Europa was difficult to manage.”

John stared fixedly toward the ruined temple. “Our daughter is the best reason we have to return to Constantinople as soon as possible.”

“Thomas can take care of her.”

John turned his gaze away from the rock outcropping. He had erred in not explaining the situation to Cornelia immediately, when he spoke to her on the ship. His first thought had been to protect her peace of mind. It had been a misjudgment he had not been able to bring himself to correct. Now it was time.

She listened in silence while he told her how he had followed Thomas, discovered him in the Hippodrome next to the senator's body, instructed him to flee, and then drawn the excubitors away.

“I'm sorry I didn't tell you everything,” John concluded. “I thought it would be simpler, for all of us, if I kept it to myself.”

Knowing Cornelia, John feared she might be angry.

“Why would Thomas kill a senator?” was all she said.

“He didn't. The matter was deliberately arranged to make him appear guilty.”

John explained how he had seized the opportunity to create a pretext for the emperor to exile him without raising undue suspicion.

She leaned over and kissed him.

He looked at her in surprise.

Cornelia laughed. “Now, John, admit it. Your first thought in the Hippodrome was to save Europa's husband, wasn't it?”

“Thomas is a reckless fool!” John paused and then smiled faintly. “Then again I was a reckless fool once myself. If I'd not insisted on seeking out silks for you and thereby strayed into Persian territory, if I hadn't been captured and taken away…”

“We would have long since quarreled bitterly and gone our separate ways, young hotheads that we were,” Cornelia said firmly.

John was silent. Again his gaze went toward the ruins atop the outcropping thrusting up into the brilliant blue sky. “Melios is frantic over this latest death. He's now talking about using the banquet he planned to officially announce that he's entering a monastery.”

Before Cornelia could reply, Peter climbed up through the trapdoor to the roof, bearing a platter of fruit.

“I apologize for the meager fare, master. I fear tonight I'll only be able to serve the remains of yesterday's evening meal, as it's difficult for me to cook right now.”

As Peter put his burden down on the rooftop beside them, they saw his hands were covered with huge blisters.

“Did you burn yourself?” Cornelia asked with quick concern.

Peter reddened. “I was careless while preparing a meal, mistress. I've obtained a healing salve from Hapymen. He also kindly provided this fruit for you. Hypatia often claimed melons are plumper and grapes more succulent here than anywhere else, and going by these examples, I believe she's correct.”

Cornelia sampled a few grapes and said she agreed.

“Though I must say, mistress, I have not been impressed with some of the vegetables. The lettuce, for example…and the onions too,” the elderly servant rushed on. “The larger ones have a tendency to develop too strong a flavor. Hapymen cautioned me before I cooked them and just as well. Otherwise the entire dish would have been ruined. As you see, their juice irritated my skin very badly.”

“You'll be back to your pots and spoons before your fire gets cool,” Cornelia said.

Peter hesitated. “Master, could it be—”

“No, it's nothing to do with magick,” John reassured him quickly.

A subdued rumbling caught their attention. From their elevated position they could see a cart bearing the body of a sheep trundling toward the gate of the estate.

“Is it the poor beast that died last night?” Cornelia wondered.

“It must be,” John confirmed. “Melios said he intended to send it to the pilgrim camp.”

“Nothing is allowed to go to waste in an oasis,” Cornelia observed. “Not even a sheep done to death by magick. All those amulets and the protective garland you described didn't do it much good, did it?”

Without replying, John leapt to his feet and vanished through the trapdoor.

He sprinted outside, ran past two naked children playing in the dirt, and hailed the driver of the cart.

The driver halted at John's command, and watched him as, without a word, he began to examine the garland of wilted flower and greenery still encircling the dead sheep's neck.

As he suspected, several squill bulbs had been halved and were tightly attached to the underside of the collar, arranged so that their cut sides pressed against the sheep's throat.

Chapter Thirty-eight

On his way to the Hormisdas Palace to seek out Bishop Crispin, Anatolius was forced to dodge out of the way of a cart full of plague victims.

He was startled by the laboring donkey as he approached a bend in the wide path, where overgrown shrubbery blocked his view. He stepped back into a bed of herbs. The fragrance rose around him but failed to mask the odor of death as the cart creaked past, drawing with it the usual cloud of glistening flies.

The dead were not stacked in a jumble of limbs but neatly laid out, each granted the relative dignity of its own space.

Perhaps it was because they had all died on the palace grounds.

Deaths had become fewer, but whether that was because the plague was ebbing or due to the much reduced population, no one could say. Many who had survived this long had become used to its presence and thought of the plague as they did of death itself, a visitor who would call on them eventually—but probably not today.

The driver offered no greeting. A sunken-eyed, expressionless man with waxen skin, he was distinguishable from the corpses in his cart mostly because he was upright.

As the cart jolted away, a scrap of jewelry fell off the back, glittering momentarily in the sunlight. It landed not far from where Anatolius stood. He stepped back onto the path and picked it up.

It was a silver earring, rimmed with chips of red glass and inset with a delicate, enameled rose.

Anatolius contemplated it as he walked on. What would be the use in returning the earring to its dead owner? Whatever beauty it might have graced had been withered by death. Why had she worn it the day she died? Was it a favorite piece? A gift from someone she had loved? Was he dead too? What about the silversmith who had created the jewelry? Or had it been an heirloom?

Was there anyone left alive to whom the scrap of silver, glass, and enamel meant something, Anatolius wondered, or had its story been swept away by the plague, like so many others?

“Salutations, sir.”

The greeting startled him.

“Hypatia!”

John's former gardener stood beside an unruly cluster of shrubbery, a pair of shears in her hand, staring at him with bemusement.

“My lack of hair and peacock-infested garment is a long story, Hypatia,” Anatolius said with a smile. “They've served me well today, however, because I thought it prudent to take a back way through the grounds and thereby have found you.”

The Egyptian servant's tawny skin looked browner than he remembered. She must have been spending her days in the sun.

“I see you were able to get your old job back,” he went on.

“It wasn't difficult, sir. Look at the overgrown state the gardens are in! Today I'm supposed to cut back the Golden Gate here, before it closes completely.”

Only now that she mentioned it did Anatolius realize the shrubbery had been pruned to resemble the great gate of Constantinople. The shortage of gardeners, not a besieging army, had reduced it to ruin.

Anatolius took a last look at the earring in his hand and gently tossed it into the shrubbery forming the gate.

Hypatia gave him a quizzical look.

“Something I noticed in the path. I didn't want anyone stepping on it.”

“How is mistress Europa, sir?”

“She's managing well enough,” Anatolius replied after a slight hesitation. “Thomas is away. Europa and I are living elsewhere right now. I ought to warn you, Hypatia, Hektor's succeeded in taking John's house.”

Hypatia's hand tightened around the handle of her shears. “I'm extremely sorry to hear that.”

“Believe me, Hypatia, it will be only a temporary situation. I hope you'll come back when everything's been straightened out. We all hope you'll return.”

Hypatia began to clip the shrubbery energetically, even violently, or so it seemed to Anatolius. “I have heard the Lord Chamberlain is dead, sir. Is it true?”

“Just loose tongues idly wagging. How can anyone know what is happening so far away?”

Leaves and twigs flew, but the servant made no reply.

***

Bishop Crispin met Anatolius in a corridor near the front of the Hormisdas.

“Back again, my garishly garbed friend? Apparently you are in a great hurry to join whatever god it is you worship.”

The corridor was made nearly impassable by boards leaning against its walls and further obstructed by bundles of belongings where Theodora's assorted heretics had constructed shelters or simply laid claim to space, like street beggars. The stench was nearly as bad as that rising from the cart Anatolius had seen not long before.

“It would be as well I don't take that journey until you've heard what I have to say, or I can guarantee you'll be following me shortly.” Anatolius had to raise his voice to be heard over the unintelligible chanting of a hirsute fellow in a bright yellow loincloth sitting nearby.

“You are clearly deranged, young man. Your threats are but empty words. Still, I am bound to listen to those who seek an audience.”

He grabbed Anatolius' elbow and directed him through an archway to an atrium whose walls were lined with classical statues, and beyond that into what had once been a series of private baths. The walls which had separated baths from changing rooms and exercise areas had been torn down, leaving an empty marble box illuminated by light from the apertures in several domes. Former rooms were marked by the marble benches, tables and statuary which had been left sprouting incongruously from the floor. Many of these traces of former glory formed the basis for the same sort of crude dwellings to be seen in the corridor. Some enterprising lodgers had made homes out of the dry bath basins by laying boards over them.

“Renovation work here is unfortunately not one of Justinian's priorities,” Crispin remarked. “He'd much rather build something new and magnificent. Now, why have you returned? More pilgrim flasks, is it? You strike me as an aristocrat, but no one here recalls a bald-headed fop dressed in peacocks. At least you're a more convincing fraud than that big red-headed oaf with whom you say you're working.”

“Then you've met my friend?”

“Not necessarily. Might it not be that he's been described to me? Your blundering acquaintance pretended to knowledge he did not have, as I told you at our last interview. I repeat I have no business which involves you, nor am I in need of whatever services either of you propose to offer.”

“Did it not occur to you that I might not be a friend of orthodoxy? You suppose my associate and I are selling you our sealed lips. You think we know nothing, but there are certain matters of which we are aware, which we may be persuaded to reveal at the appropriate time. The question is to whom?”

This appeared to give Crispin pause. “So now you pretend to offer…what?”

Anatolius decided to test the conclusions he'd made.

Mithra, let the words be right, he prayed, and then began.

“I understand your suspicions. After all, Senator Symacchus' servant Achilles died because his careless mouth alerted my friend to a certain matter. Then the senator was murdered because he was thought to have become untrustworthy in that his servant should never have known anything about the affair in the first place.”

“You and your associate have some strange notions.” Crispin delivered his retort in even tones, but Anatolius thought he detected a slight movement in the narrow face, as if the bishop's jaw tightened. “I am a guest of our beloved empress, who shares my religious views, as everyone knows. I would not seek to offend her in any way, let alone engage in any sort of matter. What is it you're talking about? You have been vague about the details, I notice.”

“Let me be plain. You were able to convert Symacchus to your religious views. Justinian sent him to you to argue theology, but the senator was a well-read man, open to new ideas. I believe his late wife, being Egyptian, was herself a monophysite, so naturally he would already have some sympathy for that point of view.” Anatolius could see from the expression in Crispin's eyes that his deductions were correct. He pressed on. “More importantly, like you, I move among those who share the same beliefs.”

“Then I congratulate you on your courage in remaining in the city, young man. However, you have yet to state this business of yours.”

“Symacchus was seeking a relic in which you had an interest,” Anatolius went on. “The man I know was to assist in this quest, but before he received his instructions, the senator was murdered. When we met recently, I showed you an artifact similar to that which my colleague was to use to establish his identity to the senator's intermediary.”

He paused. “Although you tried to conceal the fact, it was obvious the token was familiar to you. I realized you would wish to appear ignorant to see if despite your assumed indifference and advice to depart the city I returned to offer our assistance. And here I am.”