Emperor's Winding Sheet (2 page)

There was a silence. The agonized silence made by many men holding their breath. A hundred eyes were bent upon the Despot Constantine; they watched, they commanded. The boy shivered. He could feel the tension in the sunlit afternoon air, something fateful happening, some terrible bond being forged. Then the Despot reached out his hand, and lightly touched the crown. Voices rang out.

“By the wish of the Lady Empress, and of the people of the City, and all their governors and demarchs,” intoned the Lord Alexios Lascaris, “we bring you this.”

“God give me strength to wear it!” said the Lord Constantine.

The boy did not understand. But he knew that he had tumbled into something far out of his scope. Out of his depth altogether. “As soon as they all remove from this garden,” he promised himself, “it's up over that wall again, and out of it for me. I'd be better begging in the streets, or trying my luck in that other little town.” He remembered as clear as daylight his Uncle Norton saying grimly, “It's always dangerous to deal with kings.”

But they weren't all going yet. Someone else came through the arch from the courtyard, an old man dressed in black, with a grizzled beard, who leaned upon a stick to walk. The boy sighed. “Yet more of these fantastical for eigners,” he groaned to himself. For certainly the new comer was a strange and striking figure. His face was wrinkled and creased as an old man's should be, but yet all lit up and shining from within, like the face of a child at a market sideshow.

He came forward, and spoke. “I have been sleeping over
my books these very minutes past,” he declared. “Till trumpets roused me. I never drowsed thus when I was a young man … ah well, time brings us all to such shifts in the end … what was I saying? Ah yes! My dream. I was visited, my Lord, by an unusual dream. Hear it, good Constantine.”

“You dreaming, Plethon?” said the Lord Constantine. “We will hear it indeed.”

“I have dreamed, my Lord, that I saw an eagle, flying in the zenith of the heavens, with many lesser birds flocking around him. And he flew through a dark cloud, whereupon many of the lesser birds fell back, and left him. Still he flew, till only one small bird remained beside him; and they two flew through the dark cloud to the light beyond. Who can interpret this?”

“Who indeed!” said the Lord Constantine. He spoke gravely, but there was a tremor of something in his voice—fondness? amusement?—that the listening boy heard, and strained to understand. “What is going on? What are they talking about?” he wondered, baffled, longing for them to go away. “Dear friend,” the Lord Constantine was saying, “what did your great Plato think of dreams and auguries? Since when did you dabble in such foolishness?”

Then another spoke—a churchman, for on his shoulders black crosses were embroidered on white bands. “Not foolishness, my Lord. God speaks to us in dreams. Did not Pharaoh dream, and Joseph auger it? Did not the blessed saint …”

“Let the saints rest in peace, and auger my dream for me, good Father,” said Plethon.

“The black cloud is the power of the infidel Turk,” said the priest confidently. “And the dream means this. That as long as any, even one, is at the Lord Constantine's side, who is at his side at this moment, no harm will befall, and the City will not perish.”

“My Lord, who could stay always at your side—which man now present could remain day and night beside you?” Plethon asked eagerly.

“Come, Plethon,” said the Lord Constantine. “Can I spare my soldiers and diplomats, that I should make them into slaves of the bedchamber?”

“But I, my Lord, could be spared to go with you …” the old man said.

“Ah,” murmured the Lord Constantine, “now I understand. Dear friend, I thank you,” he said gently to Plethon. “But I would not uproot you from your peaceful life, and your dear books of Plato, to share what lies in store for me.”

At that the Lord Iagrus spoke. He was the second of the two who had brought the crown. “Have a care, my Lord. As to the truth of dreams …” He shrugged his shoulders. “But it is true indeed that the people believe in them. They are swayed by every idle prophecy. Should it be known you have defied one, it will do little to your standing with the mob.”

“Then I must heed it,” said the Lord Constantine. “But still I will not trouble Plethon's calm old age. For it happens, by great good fortune, by the providence of God perhaps, that a person of no consequence at all has been hidden here all the while, not a yard from me, and him I shall take with me, and keep with me night and day.” And smiling wryly, the Lord Constantine reached down behind the marble bench he had been sitting on so peacefully not an hour since, and with astonishing strength lifted the boy by a handful of his rags, and stood him upon the bench, flinching at his sudden exposure to so many staring eyes.

“This is my lucky find,” said the Lord Constantine. “My Vrethiki. And I swear that Plethon's dream shall bind him to me.”

Angry and bewildered, the boy stood looking at them all. They all looked well pleased at something, except the strange old man. He was looking straight at the Lord Constantine, and weeping openly, with love and grief writ ten clearly on his face.

“Be satisfied,” said the Lord Constantine to him, very softly. Thus the boy's fate was settled, and he had not understood a word of it.

W
hen the despot left the monastery garden, handing his gorgeous volume to the curator of books, speaking graciously to him but like a man who speaks while thinking of other things, mounting a white horse with splendid harnessings, riding away up the hill, the boy sidled along among the throng of his followers, hoping to get through the gate and make a dash for it down the street. But before he reached the street gate, the beardless man took him firmly by the hand and led him away, at a brisk trot to keep up with the Despot's horse, among the at tendants and servants. The party gradually mounted the hill along a winding narrow road broken every few yards by flights of shallow steps. The Despot's horse picked his way gingerly, side-stepping a little, up these stairwayed streets, and the donkeys on which some of his party were mounted barged straight up them, heads down, but the boy, feeble and sickly as he was, stumbled and dragged the hand that was leading him.

No doubt that was partly through weariness; but he missed his footing most often through snatching sideways glances at his keeper, and not looking where he went. His captor had a man's stature, but the smooth and beardless visage of a boy. The unnaturally womanish look of his face reminded the boy of poor Jack Half-Wit, who begged through the streets
of Bristow, chewing his words up and slobbering pitifully, but this man's face was neither coarse nor stupid, but handsome enough, and shrewd. Besides, it was he who had Latin enough to converse with the boy. Rather short of breath from scrambling up the steep slope so briskly, and distracted by the sight of the tall narrow houses, and the great many-arched façade of a huge building hanging, it seemed, in mid-air above them, the boy could not manage to inquire where he was being taken, let alone why. He did manage, “Who are you?” to his companion, who answered, “I am Stephanos Bulgaricos, Eunuch of the bedchamber, and many other things besides, to the Despot Constantine.”

Then they turned off the street, through a wide tall archway cut and carved in honey-colored stone, into a wide courtyard, where the Despot dismounted, and a boy came running to lead away his horse. The Despot moved gravely and with even steps up a stairway to an inner room, but Stephanos drew the boy out through a side door, into an inner courtyard. There were people of all sorts thronging in it, soldiers, servants, boys and men, and kitchen girls, and, hurried though they looked, they all had time to stare at the boy, and chatter, and point at him.

Stephanos led the boy toward a certain door, but an indignant outburst from the slave who sat before it, and the voices of others chiming in, mocking and angry, dissuaded him. He looked at the boy and led him back toward the well which stood in the middle of the courtyard. A monkey-faced derisive serving lad ran to turn the wheel and raise the bucket. Stephanos took hold of the boy's rags by the scruff of his scruffy neck, and ripped them from him, letting them fall in a dirty heap, and leaving him standing mother-naked in the bitter winter sun, in front of all those staring eyes, and
buffeted by gales of unfriendly laughter! Head held high, lips bitten hard together, his two hands held before him like a fig leaf, the boy smarted helplessly. The rope wheezed and creaked on the rumbling well wheel.

Suddenly a thunderous shout broke through all the other voices. A black-robed figure—the churchman who had spoken in the garden—had appeared in one of the upper windows overlooking the courtyard. “Silence, impudent blasphemers!” he cried. Looking up, the boy saw a fierce visage contorted into a terrible frown above a flowing grizzled beard. “Has it not been said of this child that the very Empire shall not fall while he is with us? Wretch though he is, the Lord God has chosen him for a sign of His abiding mercy, and who shall dare to mock?”

“Oh, what have I done?” thought the boy, cringing. It never entered his head that the man's anger was not for him, and whatever it was he had done, being naked made him feel five times worse about it. “Is it not the poor and humble who are most pleasing to the Lord?” the voice ranted on. “Mysterious are the ways of the Lord our God, and beyond our understanding. Even with such a broken reed as this wretched child He can strike down our enemies, and save us from the jaws of the infidel, His will be done,
Ameen
!”

During this outburst the bucket had been drawn, creaking and groaning, to the rim of the well, and as the speaker cried “
Ameen
!” and turned from the window arch above them, Stephanos unhooked the bucket, and tossed the water over the boy.

Gray shining snakes and slopping gobbets of water struck him, and glazed his goosy skin. The cold seized and bit him, and cut off his breath in gasps; on the dusty slabs of the courtyard a pinkish dark starfish stain spread out from his feet all
round him. His teeth chattered violently in his head. But nobody laughed; shamed into silence they looked at him, and looked away. Stephanos led him once again toward the bathhouse door, and this time the doorkeeper let them in.

Within was a tall round room, lined with marble under a domed roof, with a pool of deep warm water set into the marble floor. A wraith-like twist of steam curled upward from the surface of the bath to the air vents of the dome. How gratefully the boy slid into the warm water! How he tingled and glowed as his blue pincushion skin smoothed flat and pink again. Pink, that is, except for the brown weathering on the back of his hands and over his face and neck, where the Mediterranean sun had marked him, and for certain darker, fading bruises and marks … Bobbing up and down in the bath, flopping and splashing round in the water like a seal, he warmed up enough to scrape some more Latin together, and came to the edge of the bath to look up at Stephanos, impassively sitting there, on a marble bench.

“What was that crown they brought him?”

“The crown of the Empire,” said Stephanos, somberly.

“What Empire?” asked the boy.

“The Roman Empire,” Stephanos replied.

“
But,
” the boy exclaimed, “the Roman Empire passed away these thousand years ago!”

“The Western Provinces,” Stephanos replied, “have been occupied by the barbarians for some considerable time, it is true. But in the East the Empire still stands. Against all onslaughts it has survived till now. Till now,” he repeated. “God knows how much longer.” And at that the somber note sounded so clearly in his voice that a little chill tremor reached the boy through his bewilderment.

He climbed out of the bath, and Stephanos clapped his
hands. Two slaves came, bringing towels to rub him down.

“But if he's a
Roman
Emperor,” the boy persisted, from the midst of the enveloping clouds of linen, and the hands of the slaves patting him dry, “why does he not speak Latin?”

“Greek is the language of the Romans, and has been since the time of the Emperor Heraclius,” Stephanos told him.

“And this land is Greece?”

“It is the Morea; a province of the Empire.”

“Of the
Roman
Empire?” The boy strove to find his feet among these mind-boggling answers.

“Yes. The Lord Constantine has governed it under Christ, and most valiantly striven to keep out the infidel, and with some success. He has governed this province well, though he must leave it now.” Again came the chilling tone of sadness in the man's voice.

“But why must he leave it now?” the boy asked. “Where is he going?”

“To the City. Where else? Come, we must go to the wardrobe master to find you a garment.” And wrapping the towel round the boy and taking his hand again, Stephanos led the boy away, through arches and arcades and little courts sunk deep in the high-storied palace walls, and up a narrow flight of stairs.

 

“THIS ONE?” SAID THE WARDROBE MASTER, HOLDING A PURPLE
tunic up against the boy. “No, that's too long. Shame to cut it, it's the only silk one left. This one? No, all those are too small. It'll have to be this one. Can't be choosy.”

He offered for Stephanos' approval a worn tunic of purple linen faded to a rusty red in stripes which marked the folds it had lain in on some other wearer.

“Can't I have this one?” asked the boy, finding a dark-green
one about the right size, and made of coarse woolen cloth. The heat of the bath was wearing off rapidly.

“You have to have purple, for the Emperor's household,” said the wardrobe master, in guttural Latin.

“But surely, I won't be … I mean I'm not,” said the boy, “I'm not his man, nor he my master. I was hoping he would send me home … in Christian charity … he will, won't he? Why not?” His voice grew increasingly desperate as he saw the expression with which the two men exchanged glances.