‘Why don’t they just go away?’ Zoe demanded. ‘Our walls are too high for them, and our armies are too strong – why do they stay here making us miserable?’
I put my hand over her small clenched fist. ‘Because they and the Emperor both desire the same thing, the lost lands of Asia, and neither will forfeit it. They cannot reach those lands without the Emperor’s permission, and he will not give it unless they surrender their claim. He cannot dislodge them save by force, but if he uses force he will break the alliance and lose all chance of invading Asia. We are like two serpents, so tightly coiled together that neither can bite the other.’
‘They’re both barbarous.’ Helena, as ever, saw the problem with the clarity of conviction. ‘Why should great men squabble and sulk, like Achilles before the walls of Troy? The true purpose should be to liberate the Romans – the
Christians
– who live under the Turkish yoke. What does it matter which army frees them?’
‘It matters greatly.’ I looked at her firmly. ‘Ask Sigurd what the Normans did to his country when they conquered it. Every man became a slave, and the kingdom was booty for their lords to plunder. They are murderous and cruel, these barbarians; their rule would be just as bad as the Turks’. Perhaps worse. That is why the Emperor resists them.’
‘Then why . . .’ Anna broke off as a furious thumping erupted from the bottom of the stairs. She eyed me inquisitively. ‘Did you expect others to join us?’
‘None that I invited.’ The sudden noise had jolted me with shock, spilling my soup across the table, but now I steadied myself. ‘I will see.’
I crossed to my bedroom and pulled out my knife from the chest where I kept it. Then I descended the stairs.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Sigurd. The eunuch commands you to the palace.’
I groaned – it seemed there was no hour of day or night when Krysaphios could not summon me. ‘Can he wait until dawn, at least, when I will return there anyway?’
He could not.
I ran back up the stairs to the three expectant faces. ‘I am called to the palace,’ I said briefly. ‘I cannot say when I will be back. Will you stay with the girls, Anna? You can sleep in my bed. I . . . I will take the floor when I return.’
Helena seemed about to complain that she could watch herself and Zoe well enough, but stilled her protest at a glance from Anna.
‘Of course,’ Anna said. ‘Though I must be back in the monastery in the morning.’
‘I hope even the chamberlain cannot keep me that long.’
The night was cold outside, though during the day I had begun to think that winter was relenting its grasp and making way for spring. Sigurd was waiting for me in the arch under the house opposite; he crossed the street and joined me as I closed my door.
‘What is this?’ I asked quietly as we strode up the hill. ‘Have the barbarians moved?’
Sigurd shrugged. ‘I doubt it – I saw nothing from the walls. A messenger arrived at the gate two hours ago and demanded I take him to the palace. I’d barely introduced him to the guard when some flummeried noble appeared and took him away. I was ordered to wait. Then one of the eunuch’s slaves appeared and told me to fetch you there. Which I’m doing.’ He paused, letting the stamp of his boots fill the silence. ‘Even standing sentry duty on the walls was more honourable than being a eunuch’s go-between.’
‘You were doing much the same thing on the first night we met,’ I reminded him.
‘That was different.’
The moon was waning, but with still more than half its face showing it lit our way adequately enough through the pale shadows. We passed by the severe statues of the great squares, through the looming triumphal arches, down empty streets, and so to the palace.
Sigurd conferred briefly with the guards at the gate, and then at greater length with a clerk who sat at a table just within, scribbling away by the light of an oil lamp.
The clerk looked up at me. ‘He will take you to the throne room,’ he said, indicating a slave who had appeared noiselessly from behind a pillar.
‘And you, Siguard?’
‘I will wait here.’
Without a word, the slave turned and receded into one of the main corridors. I had walked it many times in the past months, and always it had been thriving with all the ranks of palace life, from distant relatives of the imperial family down to the slaves and errand boys. Now it was empty, and the gaps between the pools of light on the floor seemed unnaturally dark. Soon we turned off the thoroughfare, and down a succession of dimly lit passages where the smells of oil and roses were replaced by dust and damp. Some of these areas were familiar, and others seemed so, but without my silent guide I would have been as lost as Theseus in the maze.
He brought me to an open peristyle and vanished. The arcades around it glowed with the warm light of many lamps, suspended from the roof on thick, golden chains, while in its centre a floor polished like silver reflected back the shaved disc of the moon.
I drew a sharp breath. It was not a silver floor, I realised, but a lake, a pool spread over the entire square, yet impossibly smooth, unrippled. A marble causeway was built out across it to an island in its centre, where I could see the silhouette of some dark structure rising from the water.
‘Demetrios.’
I turned back to the arcade and looked about. The voice had come from my left, and from some distance, but I could see nothing. The thick columns which obscured my view drew my eyes up, and I gaped again as I saw their vast height, four times higher than a man at least, and far wider. I had seen larger, of course, not least in the great hall of Ayia Sophia, but the stark beauty of these stone trunks towering above the pool held an awe all its own.
I walked around the arcade to my left, looking down at the speckled images passing under my feet. They seemed to be cameos of bucolic life, or what some urban artist had imagined bucolic life to be: children playing or riding on donkeys, goats grazing, huntsmen chasing a tiger. But amid these idylls were flashes of brutality: a dog being ripped open by a bear, an eagle with a serpent writhing about its body, a griffin feasting on slaughtered hind. Protean faces in blues and greens stared out of the borders, wrapped with fronds and leaves, and from the gentle swaying of the oil lamps high above, one could almost imagine their features twisting and contorting as I passed.
I turned a corner and saw the origin of the voice which had called me: Krysaphios. He was perhaps half-way along the passage, but I was an uncomfortably long time under his gaze before I reached him.
‘The Sebastokrator Isaak has sent me news,’ he said. ‘He has spies in the barbarian camp. They have found the monk there.’
‘The monk?’ He had faded in my thoughts over the past weeks. Though there had been every chance that he had not left the city, that he still sought a moment to strike at the Emperor, every day which passed without news of him had lessened that likelihood. He had become a phantom, a ghost who could slip into my thoughts – and sometimes also my dreams – but never assume substance. ‘Where in the barbarian camp?’
‘Near the wharves of Galata, in a lodging house by the walls. It is behind the warehouses, apparently, now abandoned by merchants who fear to transact their business in a barbarian camp.’
‘Why was I not told that the Sebastokrator had spies there?’ I demanded. ‘How can you ask me to perform my tasks when there are vital factors I am ignorant of?’
‘There are many things of which you are ignorant. I would have thought you might have guessed that the Sebastokrator keeps his own spies, as does every member of the imperial household. Did he not once ask you to serve him so?’
‘Perhaps. But how will we entice the monk out of Galata? We may be invincible within our walls, but Galata has become almost a Frankish kingdom. Ten thousand of their warriors make a commanding bodyguard.’
‘We cannot entice him out. It has taken us weeks to find him, and if he sensed a single whisper of a trap he would disappear again. We must enter Galata and capture him. Or rather,
you
must enter Galata and capture him.’
I stared at him. ‘I must enter Galata? How? Will a loyal widow hoist me through her window in a basket?’
‘You will go with two hundred Patzinaks – they will protect you. You will be welcomed, because you will be escorting a grain convoy on behalf of the Emperor. While the barbarians are distracted, burying their faces in the trough, you and the guards will slip away and seize the monk before they realise what has happened.’
I shook my head. ‘If we invade their camp, and forcibly abduct one of their acolytes, there will be war. No-one desires more than I that the monk should be captured, but in Galata his danger is caged. Surely that cannot merit risking all the Emperor’s diplomacy?’
Krysaphios folded his fingers together and stared at me with the full displeasure of an imperial eunuch. ‘The Emperor desires what I command. The Sebastokrator has agreed that it should be thus, and you will be the instrument of their will. Already the monk has proven that he can penetrate and corrupt our inmost halls and trusted servants: if he were to do so again, as the quarrel with the Franks comes to its crisis, there would be devastation in the empire. And there is not much time – two weeks, at most. Bohemond of Sicily, whom the Emperor defeated at Larissa, is hurrying here with his Norman army to reinforce the Franks. If they join their forces we will be helpless before them.’
I swallowed. This was news I had not heard in the markets – nor even in the outer wards of the palace. I remembered Sigurd’s tales of the ruin the Normans had wrought on his homeland, and – far nearer my home – the barbarity when the Normans captured Dyrrachium and Avlona ten years earlier.
‘When do we go?’
‘So that you reach the walls of Galata at dawn, when they are least prepared. You will leave by the Blacherna gate and take the road around the Golden Horn.’
‘Boats would be faster – and would make our escape easier if we met resistance,’ I objected.
‘But you could not cross the Horn until daylight. Then they would see your approach and prepare for it. By road, you will be hidden from them until you arrive. And I have already ordered the grain carts to meet you by the Blacherna gate.’
‘Then it’s as well we have two hundred men and a cloak of darkness,’ I told him. ‘The mob will slaughter us if they see wagons of food being taken from the city granaries to the barbarians.’
Krysaphios ignored my words. ‘You will sleep in the palace tonight; I have ordered the slaves to prepare you a bed in the guard quarters. There are few enough hours already before you must leave.’
‘I will sleep at home tonight.’ I bridled against his dictating my least movement. ‘I would rather half a night’s sleep in my own bed than a full night in another’s. I can meet the Patzinaks by the gate.’
Krysaphios flashed a look of petulance, but waved his hand carelessly. ‘As you will. I had thought you would abhor distractions now that the monk is so near your grasp.’
‘There will be no distractions.’ Nor would there be any satisfaction, not until the monk was in chains in the dungeon. Even with two hundred Patzinaks to guard me, entering the barbarian camp would be walking into the jaws of a lion. I could scarcely believe that after this long chase, these many months’ hunting, I might finally trap the monk. But even if I did, would it justify bringing the two great armies of East and West into open war?
I left Krysaphios under the shadows of those great pillars, beside the moon pool, and hurried out of the palace. The slave who had led me there appeared as soundlessly as before, and took me quickly to the outer courtyard. The scribe was still there, writing in the lamplight, and Sigurd with him, dozing on a bench.
‘Is your axe still sharp?’ I asked quietly, nudging his shoulder.
His eyes opened slowly, and I repeated my question. ‘Or have long days on the rainswept walls rusted it?’
He growled. ‘The only thing which blunts my blade is bone, and it has felt none of that these last two months. Why?’
‘I am going on a dangerous errand tomorrow, and I would welcome a stout axe beside me.’
‘What errand?’ Sigurd watched me suspiciously.
‘A dangerous one. It would be more dangerous for you to know more, though you can probably guess where the greatest dangers are to be found at the moment. Will you come?’
‘I should be on the walls.’
‘As you told me once before, the walls have stood seven hundred years without you. They might survive one more morning.’ I spoke light-heartedly, but with Krysaphios’ warning of the Normans ringing in my mind, the jest no longer held so much of its wit.
Sigurd rubbed his shoulder, then stood up. ‘Very well, Demetrios. You make a habit of needing my help in dangerous places, and my conscience has too much to trouble it already. When do we go?’
I arranged to meet him at the Blacherna gate at the end of the midnight watch, then slipped out of the palace and hastened home. The night was already old, and I began to doubt my wisdom in refusing Krysaphios’ offer of a bed. I could not afford a tired mistake in the barbarian camp in the morning, for I might pay for it with my life.
I was now well known to the Watch, after so many weeks walking home from the palace after dark, and I passed through the streets undisturbed. The thought of the Normans still worried me, and the darkness of the shadows preyed on my fears all the way to my own door, so much that I felt a flood of relief when I had locked it behind me, mounted the stairs, and gained the safety of my own bedroom.
My frugal daughters had not left a light burning, but I knew my home well enough to navigate it blind. I stood there in the dark and pulled off my tunic and cloak, letting them drop unheeded to the floor. The air was cold about me, and I felt my skin pinch at the chill. Thinking I would have to rely on my soldier’s habit of waking when I was needed, I felt for the edge of the bed and pulled myself under the covers.