Emperor's Winding Sheet (28 page)

But why, he wondered now, had he wanted to? What was he doing here? His head swam. There was something he had to do, something … He laid his fingers on his master's eyelids, and weighed them down to shut them over the dark empty eyes. Something else … He hesitated. Then he remembered. The Emperor had cast off all his purple, had wanted to be unrecognized. But he had for gotten his undershoes, his silken slippers. Vrethiki tried to take a grip on himself, to think clearly, to stop trembling. Then he pulled off the under-shoes. There was something unbearable to him in the sight of the Emperor's naked feet, soft and helpless in the sunlight, projecting from under Don Francisco's shoulders, where he lay across his cousin, face down. Vrethiki looked away, hastily. Then he went and put one of the undershoes on Theophilus. “This is the last thing you must do for him,” he told the body. But he couldn't get the second one on. Theophilus' leg seemed to be broken; it wouldn't stay stiff while he pulled the silken legging up it. Vrethiki gave up, feeling sick, and looped the second slipper through his own belt.

Then he went back to the Emperor's body. “You are quite safe, now, affendi,” he told him. “No further indignity awaits you.” “Nobody will find him, ever again,” he thought. “There is no one but me to say goodbye to him. But how ought an Emperor be bidden farewell?”

There came to him a jumbled memory of the ceremonies of the Empire: of the Emperor sitting enthroned with the Gospels beside him, while the great men of many nations
pressed forward to kiss his hand and cheek; of the words Stephanos translated from the Empress Helena's requiem … Kneeling, he kissed the Emperor's right foot, his right hand, his blood-streaked right cheek. Then he stood up and cried out loudly in the silent street, “Depart Emperor; the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords bids thee go forth!”

A
fter that it seemed to him there was nothing more to be done. He simply stood where he was.

He might have stayed there, dazed and weary, for a long time if another small group of Turks had not clattered through the gate. His hand flew to the slipper looped through his belt, and he fled from them into the shadows, running swiftly, dodging from wall to wall, and then from bush to bush in the open, making for the maze of streets that might offer some cover. If they found him with the purple slipper, they would make him tell where it had come from. He had to hide it; he had to hide. Where could he go? All he knew of the City was palaces and churches; the Turks would go straight to them for plunder. He knew a few ordinary streets, but they would be ransacked for slaves. In the whole of this City nowhere would be safe, nowhere! Then he remembered … a well shaft with iron footholds going down it … a well shaft that was dry … with something bright lying in the bottom. Where was that? Where had he remembered that? Yes—it was the ruined palace, the old Imperial palace by the sea.

And though he had to cross the whole City to do it, Vrethiki set himself to get there.

He kept away from noise. When he heard screaming and
clamor he turned aside at once, and took another way. Still he saw horrors. He went down streets in which every house had a little white flag at the door, to show it had been pillaged. The old lay dead on the thresholds, the babies and the sick lay smashed on the roadway, while the shutters of the windows from which they had been thrown swung and creaked on their hinges overhead. In one place a river of blood ran thickly in the gutter. Once he crossed the path of a single puny-looking Turk leading away ten citizens, four of them only girls, so white they could never before have walked out in the sun, but the rest were able-bodied men. They were tied together in their own girdles, and made no resistance. Vrethiki lurked in a doorway till they had passed. He crossed behind a church from which screams of captured women pierced and rent the air, and another from which the sound of singing and prayer still hopelessly seeped. Somehow he had got ahead of the progress of the looting, for just outside the Hippodrome he met a great crowd of citizens, fleeing toward the Great Church. He mingled with them, and then extricated himself, and ran across the floor of the Hippodrome.

The ruins of the old Imperial palace seemed utterly deserted. With a faint unreasonable surprise he saw the poppies growing up through the cracked marble floors, the roses in the overgrown gardens. He had come the other way the day he had found the well, and this place was vast and labyrinthine, but he thought he remembered amore or less unruined church beside the court it was in, and so he found it. He flung himself over the rim, and let himself hastily down the iron ladder. He had been right: it was dry. The bottom was full of dusty rubble and broken things. He lay in the bottom, panting for breath. He felt safe down here, deep down, buried out of sight, and out of seeing. No more blood
and suffering to look upon, only a disk of blue sky, far above him, for a lid. Exhausted beyond endurance, he fell asleep there almost at once.

 

THE SUN WAS HIGHER WHEN HE WOKE; IT WAS FINGERING
down the well. The sound of the sack had come nearer. In the world above, perhaps from the nearby church, he could hear running feet, and gleeful shouting, and the sound of smashing and shattering. It went on and on. He lay quite safe and still. “Why am I here?” he wondered. “I should never have left his side. I should have died with him. I wish I were dead.”

But after a time it occurred to him to wonder what it was he had seen shining down here, and he shifted around on the rubble floor, looking for it. As soon as he moved, the sun struck it, and flashed daggers of light in his eyes. He reached out his hand.

It was a little bird made of gold. All its feathers were delicately engraved, and it had a round bead of jasper for an eye, and coral claws. It had been crushed, dented and flattened, but it was still charming. “Poor bird,” murmured Vrethiki, turning it in his hands. What was that tale Stephanos had told him once? Everything has an object with which its fate is bound up—its stoicheion. The stoicheion of someone or other was a pillar—cut off the top and he fell dead. “And this poor thing might be the stoicheion of the City, so crushed and battered as it is,” he thought. “Is it the Turks who broke your wings, my bird? Some Crusader, more likely, sacking and looting here long ago, who took you so roughly from your golden tree he broke you, and then cast you down here.”

He fingered the delicate chased feathering. Then, thoughtfully, he placed his fingers along the creases that
crushing the bird had made along its back and belly, and squeezing gently he tried to press it back into shape again. Its sides bulged outward as he squeezed. Then, suddenly, the little thing began to tremble and vibrate in his hands. A buzzing and whirring noise came from it, and a golden weight began to descend between his fingers on a golden wire, coming from its belly. He had released some curled-up mechanism, some long-jammed wheels and cogs within it. It ground, and creaked, and buzzed. Its beak flicked open and shut, and its wings juddered as though it should have flapped them, and was struggling in vain to do so. Vrethiki held it, fascinated. He hardly noticed the sounds of the sack receding again above him, dying away into the distance. The bird was slowing down now. Its pulsing energy was running out. And then, above the grinding and whir ring, it sang three notes pure and true, on a dying fall.

He shook it, but it sang no more. He tried to find how to wind it, but he could find no cog or key to turn. “Nothing in you but an ending,” he said to it at last. “Perhaps you are my stoicheion, for I wish I were dead!”

At that he suddenly heard Stephanos' voice, the Emperor's words: “Let him take care what he wishes in case it is given to him.”

 

“
I MUST THINK ABOUT IT,
”
HE TOLD THE BIRD. IT FIXED HIM
with its pinpoint beady eye. “You know, stoicheion,” he told it, “I'm sure, sure, I want to be dead. I have only to think of my friends, of my dear Lord … but, you know, I always seem to be wrong when I'm sure. I was sure I didn't want to come here … sure Stephanos was un manly, sure Justiniani was brave, and the Emperor was not … how could I have? But I did, for certain sure.” The bird still looked at him.

“My mother would like you, stoicheion,” he said to it, remembering her almost childish pleasure in ingenious things, how she loved his father's loadstone, suspended on its little brass astrolabe.

His mother once having come to his mind, he thought how she would be grieving over him, saying nothing, like as not, to anyone, but hugging her loss to herself, day by day. And he knew that he did not belong in the bottom of a well in Byzantium, but must somehow, if he could, save himself. He put the little bird down, to have both hands free. Then he began to climb the iron rungs, hand over hand, hauling himself up into the light.

 

THE FIRST THING HE NEEDED WAS A HIGH POINT TO SEE
from. He clambered up onto a ruined wall. To his amazement he saw a company of soldiers on the sea wall below him, still fighting, though they were assailed from within and with out. But beside him, on his right, it was all over. He could see a gate standing open, and the blue sea beyond. It was Turkish sailors coming up from there, doubtless, who had sacked the churches in the palace ruins while he had been hiding down the well. He could still hear clamor and shouting, afar off, from somewhere in the hapless City behind him. But Vrethiki fixed his eyes on something else—a flotilla of ships in the Bosporus. They were flying the Imperial flag, or the Genoese, or Venetian colors. They had come through the boom, and were standing off, waiting, perhaps, to see if others would join them. Vrethiki leaped off his wall, and ran down the slope, dodging from one courtyard to another, leaping down ruined stairways, making for that gate that stood open in the sea wall.

The shore was littered with Turkish ships. Their crews had
left them, and gone to join the rape and plunder. That must be how the Christian ships had got through the boom unhindered, and were free now to wait offshore. But the shore was also crowded with a pitiful throng of women, holding out their hands to the ships, beating their breasts, weeping and entreating the sailors to rescue them. Vrethiki wasted no time beating his breast. He took off his boots, scrambled out onto a wave-washed rock, and plunged into the water. He swam steadily toward the nearest ship.

It was farther off than it seemed. He saw as he swam that they had all set sails now, and were beginning to move on the wind. And the current swept him so far out into the Marmara that it was the leading vessel, and not the nearest, that threw a rope to him, and drew him from the water.

“It's the Emperor's English boy,” someone said. He looked around, standing on the deck dripping and shivering in the smart north wind that was taking them to safety. They were all Genoese. He had been rescued by Jus tiniani's ship.

“I hate him,” said Vrethiki to them in English. “It is because of his cowardice the Lord Emperor is dead.” They did not understand him, but he relished saying it. Behind them the dusky blue outline of the City dimmed and faded as it fell away astern.

The doctor on board the ship spoke Latin. He came and conferred with Vrethiki. “He is dying,” he said. “He is raving. He asks and asks what happened to the Emperor. Come and tell him.”

Vrethiki's heart had screwed up within him to a tight hard knot of hatred and contempt. But Justiniani lay panting and sweating in his cabin, covered by a bloodstained sheet. His eyes had sunk deep in their sockets, his hair was stuck down to his scalp.

“L'Inglese,” he said, when he saw Vrethiki. “Tell me what happened?”

“The Emperor lost everything,” said Vrethiki. “He was butchered in the gate.”

“He lost nothing,” said Justiniani. “I am the one who lost …”

“You see,” murmured the doctor. “The pain makes his mind wander.” But he made sense enough to Vrethiki.

“There was little enough he had to lose, it's true,” he said. “Hardly an Empire, really. Only a ruin, a memory and a dream. But all are lost, now he is dead.”

“Nobody conquers a dream,” said Justiniani, and his limp hand twitched on the sheet. “He has not lost it. Whenever men think of the City, he will be there; the last … Emperor dying bravely in the gate … but I lost my part in it …”

 

“
OH, IF IT
'
S DEATH YOU WANTED
!”
CRIED VRETHIKI, HIS HATRED
melting away, “never fear, it is on its way!”

“Ah,” said Justiniani. “Thank God.”

The boy turned to creep away, for the great captain said no more and had closed his staring eyes. But as he reached the door the painful voice stopped him. “You threw away the dagger I gave you …”

“Yes.”

“If I gave you my own, now, would you keep that?”

“Yes,” said Vrethiki.

 

THE GENOESE CAPTAIN GAVE VRETHIKI A WARM MEAL.
someone found him dry clothes. He felt odd wearing doublet and hose again, like a plain Western gentleman. His memory twitched and jerked at the creaking movement of the ship. It struck him that very likely, now, he would get home again. What he would have to tell them! And suddenly, with amazement
he knew that his mother would think of the Emperor as a tricky Eastern heretic, and he would have much ado to convince her that he was a truly valiant Christian gentleman. He smiled a little at the thought. And his aunt would be very disapproving. He could almost hear her sharp clipped voice complaining that other than such wild talk he had brought home no merchandise. “Cousin Alys will like to see the purple slipper,” he thought, and realized he would have to tell her it was purple once, for the cold salt Bosporus waters had rinsed it a pale rose-pink.

Before he slept, he went up on deck to look at the night. He leaned on the stern rail, watching the curling wake trail out behind the ship. He knew he would never be able to explain to his family at home. How could such a distance be bridged with a handful of words? Why, he would probably stumble speaking English, just at first. “I shall be like that bird Stephanos gave me,” he thought, “that fluttered in its wicker cage. But when I let it go free it beat from without on the bars, as though it would fain enter in again. In the very house I was born in, I shall carry an exile's heart, thinking of that immortal City, and how it passed away. And nothing will be simple for me, ever again.”