Byzantium (3 page)

“I prefer to stay,” I said.

“You are a devil,” he said. “I shall cast you out.”

“I am a guest, and you are sworn to hospitality. Or have you already forgotten the lesson in the Miracle of the Cisterns, Most Holy Father?” In the Miracle of the Cisterns, one of the more widely repeated wonders of Theodosios, the monks had been punished for putting their own needs above those of their guests.

At my mention of the miracle, the higoumen’s face reddened. He raised his stick and held it before him as if he were going to strike me, but a moment later he put it down and burst out with a chain of prayers. Then he turned and left without a further word.

That afternoon, Brother Sergios visited me. He bowed and reported that Theodosios had agreed to receive me, and that he, Brother Sergios, would take me to him at nightfall. I sent away the magician who had just arrived and for the rest of the day hid in my quarters.

I HAD PRACTICED ON THE SHIP, and thoughts of the gelding had weighed ever in the back of my mind, but only now was I confronted with the imminence of my task. Very soon, I would have to cut the flesh of another man, a man I’d not yet even seen. When my father was my age, he led a sortie across the Danube and captured an Avar prince. I wondered what he had thought in the hours before setting out. I tried to prepare myself, to ready my mind, to imagine the emperor’s wrath, the silver thorns in the Chamber of the Golden Meadow that awaited me if I failed. But nothing worked. I could only wait and hope I acted well when the moment came.

Brother Sergios entered my quarters in the first minutes of dusk. All day he had been absent from his watching post—attending, I imagined, to the offices of repentance. He refused to meet my eye, and as he led me up the ravine’s side he kept his silence, so I kept mine. I felt for him, but I had my own concerns.

The moon was still down, but the last streak of red remained glowing in the west. We soon passed into a part of the monastery that Brother Sergios was unfamiliar with. At each fork in the trail he had to stop and consult his memory before choosing the way. Pitch-dark caves echoed with the mumble of prayers, and desert creatures, invisible in the blackness, skittered from our path. After a stiff climb we suddenly topped the ravine, the night sky leaping into place all around us. We only stayed a moment, long enough for Brother Sergios to find a new path, marked by a small stack of pebbles, and lead me back down. A few yards in, we crossed a fissure in the rock by a bridge of dried sticks. The bridge squeaked and shifted beneath our weight, and once we were over, Brother Sergios halted and pointed to a far boulder. Its surface flickered with reflected lamplight, the source deep in an unseen hollow. We had arrived.

I stood for a moment, paralyzed. I was here at last, and had to master several flutters of panic. When I finally turned to Brother Sergios, to ask if it was time, I saw he had gone.

“Come,” a voice said, from the same direction as the light. I stepped forward, toward the boulder and into the hollow, which opened into the wide mouth of a grotto. Inside, a monk my age stood with his hands clasped before him. Beside him sat a man weaving a basket, his body made of lumps, his jaw too large for his face. Next to this man was the lamp, and before him lay a reed mat.

“The mat is for you,” the monk said.

I couldn’t understand. What game was Theodosios playing, having me sit before this unfortunate while he watched? Just as I wondered this, the unfortunate moaned, like a man with an over-thick tongue, and the monk said to me, “I ask your indulgence. I wish to finish the basket. Two of the brothers are taking another load to Jerusalem tomorrow.”

It took a moment, but, with a prickle of surprise somewhere beneath my gut, I understood. The monstrous imbecile was Theodosios. The other monk was translating for him. Briefly, the thought crossed my mind: was my task necessary? But Heraclius had given his command. Besides, they’d made emperors from worse. I sat and watched as Theodosios wove the basket’s rim, twisting and tucking the reed at an expert pace.

He finished the basket, set it aside, then began to moan at me. “I apologize,” the monk translated. “I should have received you the moment you came. It was vanity that made me think I could hide myself from the world while others cannot. For this vanity, for this pride, I allowed one of our brothers, whose soul should be my greatest care, to be corrupted.”

Theodosios looked at me. I wasn’t sure what he wanted, so I said, “For my part, I forgive you.”

This seemed to offer him some solace. He smiled crookedly and nodded. He was about to speak again when he stopped and fixed me with a stare. His left eye was not level in his head—it was as if it had been pushed into the raw dough of his face—and it was with this eye that he studied me. He let out a low moan.

“Something troubles you,” the monk translated. “Speak.”

“There’s nothing,” I said.

Another low moan. “I know what it is,” the monk translated. “I can see it in you.”

“I tell you there’s nothing,” I said, but I rose. I had sent a message to my goatherd to have a horse waiting up the ravine. I could be in the crowds of Jerusalem, disappeared, by noon.

Before I could take a step, Theodosios leaned forward and grabbed my ankle and held me fast. He uttered a long chain of hurried moans. “I see your father in the garden. He’s throwing his glass. I see you hiding and weeping and pitying yourself. I see the black knot within you. It was not tied by the devil and it was not tied by God—”

I twisted free. “That is not why I came,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from shaking.

Theodosios let out another string of moans. “You may hold on to your pains if you wish,” the monk translated. “I have been told your mission. They speak of me in the imperial court and have asked you to investigate my works.”

I said nothing, only waited.

“Listen,” the monk translated. “I have a message for you to take back. The people and the priests devote themselves to quibbles. They are old women arguing in the market as a flood rises to overtake the city. The emperor is a blind beast, thinking every trembling leaf the tread of a hunter, and he feels not the world shifting beneath him. We are at the gate of perdition. Our sins will be judged, and in these times we must all be brother to one another.”

“Proof,” I interrupted. “I have come for proof.”

And for a moment I believed this was my true mission. Theodosios remained quiet for some time. Then he closed his eyes and mumbled something the monk did not translate. When he finished, the monk—I never learned his name—went to the back of the grotto and fetched a small jar.

“Give me your broken hand,” the monk translated as Theodosios held out his own hand, palm open.

I hesitated. I had not expected this.

“Give me your hand,” the monk repeated.

I had no choice. I pulled my hand from my tunic and put it in Theodosios’s. With a solemn nod he sent the translator away, then peeled off the glove and poured ointment from the jar and began rubbing it into my skin. For ten minutes, he kissed the crook of my wrist, the knobs of my fingers. He scrubbed my hand with his hair, and the whole time moaned prayers. I watched his face and I watched my hand. When he ceased his efforts it remained as withered as ever.

Theodosios studied my hand, his already misshapen face contorted in bafflement. He looked up to the grotto’s ceiling, moaned something, then rubbed more ointment into my fingers and wrist. He signed for me to wait and tried to communicate, with moans and shaking head, that he didn’t understand. But I did. I saw again the holy men who had humiliated me in my youth: their hollow smiles, their empty promises, their mocking eyes. Here was another with his finely honed act, playing me for a fool. It seemed Heraclius knew well what he was doing when he chose me. I burned with shame—for a moment Theodosios had gotten to me—and I felt no hesitation now.

Before he could take my hand again, I leapt onto Theodosios and pinned him with my knees. He moaned; I covered his mouth with my good hand. He struggled, pulling himself up; I shoved him back to the grotto’s floor. With a jerk, I forced up his habit, then felt in my tunic for the knife, squeezing its handle between my stunted fingers. He was screaming and struggling. I had no time. Taking my other hand from his mouth, I gave him a cuff to quiet him and grabbed his testicles, lifting them from his body, and made the cut. With a single tug the knife sliced cleanly through the boneless flesh and it was done. Theodosios twisted beneath me, his bellowing mouth bent in a terrible grimace, but I felt a quiver of calm relief. It hadn’t been nearly as hard as I’d feared.

The other monk had reappeared in the grotto’s entrance, panting and silent, in shock, and I was recalled to my senses. I stuffed Theodosios’s testicles in the leather purse and pushed my way out. Once across the footbridge, I fled blindly, but fleeing was easy. The monastery was only a labyrinth when you were looking for someone, not when you were running away. I slipped and slid on the paths, shoved my way through the monks who’d come from their caves at the sound of Theodosios’s howls. By the time I made it to the bottom of the ravine, they were sounding the monastery’s wooden bell. Its furious
tock
filled the valley. I skirted the guesthouse—the lodgers had emptied out onto the ledge—and ran to where the goatherd was waiting with the horse.

“Sir,” he said as he helped me up. “What’s happened, why are they ringing the bell?”

“Don’t worry yourself about that,” I said.

He was still holding the reins when he pulled back and pointed. “Sir,” he said. “Your hand.”

I looked down. It was ribboned with blood. I gave the goatherd a kick, took the reins, and spurred the horse. But I soon lost track of where I was going. Too startled to think, I kept looking in disbelief at my hand. The goatherd had not seen what I had seen. He had seen only the blood. I saw something more. Where the blood had run over my hand, it had made the withered flesh whole.

I PASSED THE NEXT DAY in a wandering stupor. I am still uncertain how I made it out of the desert. As I sat upon my horse, a lightness coursed through my veins. My mind reeled: each explanation I could fathom crumbled in the face of another. He knew what I’d come to do; he didn’t know. He was a true holy man; it was some sort of new charlatan’s trick. The hand was a blessing from God; it was a curse of the devil. I felt a sickness for what I had done, but then I would look at my hand. I had washed it and wiped it clean, and as my horse ambled and nibbled at dry grass, I gazed at its new perfection. I flexed its fingers, traced the straightened, flat pan of its palm. I held both hands side by side. They were mirrors of each other, though the healed hand was smoother, pinker.

Just before sunset, I reached the orchards outside Jerusalem. I rode around the city, headed straight to the coast as I imagined the new life that awaited me: a place in court, prominent seats in the Hippodrome, our family restored to its rightful place. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too late for me to take a command, some squadron on the Dalmatian frontier. If any asked about my hand, I would say I had visited a sulfur spring in Greece and was treated by a physician. But surely few would ask. I was unknown. Only the emperor’s long-memoried informants had any idea who I was. That, I decided, would soon be changed.

BY THE TIME I RETURNED TO CONSTANTINOPLE, I had regained enough of my reason to be fearful. I didn’t know what news had reached the city, or what the reaction might be: perhaps mobs filled the fora, clamoring for my death. Once off the boat, I hid in the crowds and gleaned the conversations of passersby. I trailed parties of beggars through the markets, sat with the mad outside church doors. Only among these did I feel safe, unseen. Within hours of my arrival, while huddling outside the Church of the Holy Wisdom with a pair of moaners, I heard the first rumors of the gelding. Some passing monks were discussing it, and I was relieved: they had the story wrong. “The assassin was a Monophysite,” one declared, setting the others off. “No, I heard he was a Jew.” “No, a devil.” “It was a punishment, for pride.” The monks all frowned, though on one I detected a stifled smile. By evening, a troupe of clowns had spread through the city, portraying the surprised Theodosios and his veiled attacker.

After another day of listening, satisfied I wasn’t hunted, I made my way to the Chalke Gate, where I whispered my presence to one of the guards. I was expected. Within a minute, the eunuch from before came and showed me directly to the Chamber of the Golden Meadow. There I knelt and waited, nervous, every organ beneath my chest grown cold, my palms and my scalp beading with sweat. I returned triumphant, but what if Heraclius had lied to me? What if my reward awaited me here, among the silver thorns? I glanced at them now, wishing I knew which were poison-tipped.

I had just begun counting the drops of sweat falling from my forehead when the emperor burst through the door and strode toward me, roaring gleefully. “I have heard the reports!” he said. “There’ll be no more talk of a monk on the throne, that’s for certain.”

I kept my head bowed. Warm relief flooded through me. My fears now seemed groundless.

“Your father would be pleased,” Heraclius went on as he stood over me. “You have done your duty.” Then he chuckled and seemed to play out the gelding in his mind, for I saw him make a flick of the wrist like a man slicing grapes from a vine. After two more of these flicks, he asked, “Do you have them?”

I bowed lower and offered up the leather purse, which I had kept tied to my tunic since fleeing the monastery. Before leading me to the Chamber, the eunuch had made sure I remembered to bring Theodosios’s testicles. It seemed Heraclius possessed a cabinet near his bed in which he stored, preserved in vinegar, similar artifacts taken from vanquished pretenders and Persian generals.

“Tell me,” the emperor said when he finished prodding the purse, “did he squeal?”

“He screamed in pain, Emperor,” I answered, speaking as evenly as I could.

“Very good,” the emperor said, then, after losing himself in thought and chuckling once more, “you may go.”