Emperor's Winding Sheet (3 page)

The wardrobe master put the purple tunic over his head, and Stephanos found a belt and put it round him. The belt was of heavy leather, embossed with a pattern of leaves, and it was far too long—by the time it was comfortably drawn through to fit the boy's slender girth, half its length was surplus, hanging free. Stephanos took a little dagger from his belt, and scratched a light mark where the buckle lay. Then, removing the belt, he went over to sit where the light of the window fell squarely on the floor, and began to trim it to size. The wardrobe master busied himself finding hose and boots, and neither of them looked at the boy while Stephanos, carefully wielding his little knife, said, “You could not go yet, child. You are in too starved a state for journeying. For the present you are taken into the Imperial household. You will be well cared for.” And Stephanos put the belt round the boy's waist, and drew it tight, and buckled it.

 

YET THE BOY COULD SEE THAT THE LORD CONSTANTINE HAD
no material need of another page. He lived simply enough in his grand palace, though to the boy's eyes he was surrounded by unbelievable luxury. The palace walls were plastered smoothly, and painted with splendid pictures, over which, to ease his boredom, the boy's eyes traveled through forests and
hunts and in among row upon row of sacred and royal personages. The palace was furnished with couches, and cupboards, and tables, all of outlandish design to honest English eyes. Every day the Lord Constantine put on clean linen next to his skin, and every day washed himself in warm water, or descended to the bath house. But although he had these almost sinfully extravagant personal luxuries, he did not seem to enjoy them. Watching his body slave put his shirt over his head, and straighten or twitch the fine cambric smooth over his body before bringing the stiff silk tunic that went over it, it seemed to the boy that the Lord Constantine suffered these ministrations patiently, rather than wanting them. Far from needing more help about his dressing than he already had, he often, while they were fussing over some detail of the garments laid out ready on the bed, dressed himself without waiting for them. There was nothing for the boy to do. But he studied the Lord Constantine, watching for the moment when he might kneel to him, and beg for his release.

There was a restlessness about that great lord, a sense of impermanence. He lived like a soldier who had taken the palace as a billet for a short season—as though nothing in it belonged to him, or was of his ordaining, and all would continue when he was gone. He enjoyed the hunt, though most of his time at Mistra was taken up with receiving people and signing documents for them. The boy managed to dislodge the secretary's slave from the office of bringing pen and ink and wax seals for all these grants of land and confirmations of privileges, required, it seemed, in large numbers to set the province in order before the Lord Constantine departed from it, and so got himself one small thing to do; but the palace was full of servants, built into it like the furniture, as well as those who were the Lord Constantine's own—Stephanos, and Cup and
chain man, who was called Manuel, and who poured out every drop of wine or water that passed the Lord Constantine's lips, and now the boy himself—so the larger part of the boy's time was spent standing around, idly staring, and when the pictures on the wall-plaster lost their charm, gazing sullenly at the Lord Constantine, his jailer.

He was a man of middle age, fairly tall, very slender. His hair was dark, his skin sallow. He wore a short beard very neatly and closely trimmed to a point, but his hair was long, hanging over his collar in ringlets, which, somewhat to the watching boy's disgust, required the attentions of a barber with hot curling tongs every few days. His lean face wore a somber expression as soon as it was at rest. Al though every day much time was spent going in procession with crowds of attendants to hear Mass said in this church or in that—at least the boy thought it was Mass, though most of it was hidden from sight behind gorgeous and complex screens—although they had always heard at least one, and sometimes as many as three services in three different churches in the course of the day, yet the Lord Constantine prayed again at bedtime, kneeling before an icon of the Virgin, in his nightshirt, with his black eyes shrouded by his drooping lids, murmuring, head bowed, for long minutes before he slept.

And the only thing expected of the boy, he soon discovered, was simply to walk behind the Despot every where he went, three or four paces behind him, and be seen to be there. He might as well have been a dog.

 

THE PLENTIFUL WHOLESOME FOOD OF THE PALACE BEGAN TO
smooth over the grooves between his ribs, though at first he could eat only mouthfuls at a time. Stephanos made broth for him and Manuel brought him watered wine. He soon recovered
enough to eat normally, and was full of curiosity, and rebellion. “Why do you carry that cup round on a chain?” he asked Manuel.

“To foil attempts of poisoners,” said Manuel, in his limping, scanty Latin, rolling his eyes dramatically. “Cup bearer goes everywhere with Emperor; the Emperor drink no other cup. Cup chained to me; if Emperor poisoned they kill me at once. Only for ceremony, now, and all I'm for is taste and pour the wine.”

“But might someone poison him?” asked the boy.

“He crowned Emperor soon,” said Manuel. “More Emperors have died out of their beds than in them, I can tell you that.”

“Why must I go to church with the Lord Constantine?” the boy demanded of Stephanos. “We've been to church three times already, and I'm sick of going. Why can't I just stay here?”

“He has sworn a great oath that all the people know about to keep you by his side,” Stephanos said. “Now stop arguing and get down there, this very moment.”

 

SO WHEN THEY RETURNED THE BOY CHALLENGED STEPHANOS.
he had time to think, walking to the church and back, and he was furiously angry. Stephanos and Manuel were together, sitting in a window arch looking out over the town, when he found them.

“What do you mean he swore an oath to keep me with him?” the boy demanded. “You said he would send me home when I was well enough.”

“I said only that you were too weak to go at once. I did not say what was to happen later …” said Stephanos quietly.

“Why, you treacherous liar!” cried the boy.

“It was true you were too weak,” said Stephanos. “Lower your voice, you will disturb the Lord Constantine.

“That's devilish!” the boy hissed, between clenched teeth. He was rigid from top to toe with rage. “You made a lie out of the truth! Do you think I would have stayed here so meekly if I'd known? I'd have run away long since!”

“Where would you have fled to?” asked Stephanos, his voice still steady and low. “Back through the mountains to the sea? Or northward to the lands held by the Turks? Or to a seaport perhaps? They belong to Venice or to Genoa; how would you fare among them?”

“I could hardly fare worse than here, if here I am a prisoner cruelly held!” the boy replied.

“
Cruelly
held?” said Stephanos. “
Cruelly
? And yet what I would call cruel is the sending of a child as young as you on perilous journeys over distant seas.”

At that the boy's rigid posture gave place to trembling. Misery rose in his throat. “They couldn't help it!” he said. “My father was sick. Trade was bad. The Baltic was closed to us, and the Iceland run. My Uncle Norton found a venture for me on Richard Sturmy, his friend's, ship … he was not to know she would be shipwrecked.” But he remembered his mother's alarm. Uncle Norton had come to see them, and stood before the fire in the hall, and rocked to and fro on his toes—a way he had, with his hands clasped behind his back, under his fur-trimmed cloak. “A fair opportunity for the boy,” he had been saying. “… As you know, I have no ship of mine own in harbor at this time, but my right good friend Richard Sturmy hath an enterprise making ready. He is to take pilgrims to Jaffa in the Levant …”

“The Holy Land!” his mother had cried. “But there will be infidels, and surely, Brother, a risk of foul play from the
men of Genoa, or Venice, for is not that trade all theirs?”

The boy had thought no more of his mother's alarm than if she had been fussing over him riding a dozen miles on some errand. But it all looked different to him now; his eyes brimmed with tears, and he turned his head away that Stephanos might not see them.

“… For the homeward journey,” Uncle Norton had continued, “he hath cloth and wool and tin to take to Pisa, hard by Florence. Piers may take goods to trade on his own account, without charge or fee. This is a good offer, madam, made to you out of friendship. Others who embark with Master Sturmy must pay him a full tithe.”

“Piers hath done well learning Latin,” the boy's mother had said, “I wondered if we might put him to Oxford, or the Church.”

“I have no money for it, Sister, if I would,” said Uncle Norton. “God witness what I do now is by my reckoning the best I can devise for him, and I could no better were he my own son.”

“Don't fret, Mother,” the boy had said. “I'd rather far set sail than be a clerk at Oxford. I'll be all right.”

But he had not been all right. And Uncle Norton's own son, his cousin Tom, was safe at home in England, while he was here; caught in some mysterious trap.

“Oh, help me!” he cried suddenly to Stephanos. “Talk to him! Make him send me home!”

“He cannot, child,” said Stephanos. He took the boy's hand, and drew him down to sit between them in the high window, and he told the boy what had happened in the garden.

“It seems to me an idle, foolish fancy to put trust in dreams and prophecies,” the boy said at last, when he had heard it.
“But if he does, why does he not take the old gentleman who dreamed the dream? Why did he lay this burden upon me?”

“Take Plethon with him?” said Stephanos, throwing up his hands. “God knows he has troubles enough without that! There are already in the City ten thousand shades of opinion upon every topic in theology; but a man who puts Plato before Christ, and praises all day and every day none but the ancient heathens—why, he would infuriate them all! The Emperor Manuel did well to persuade Plethon to leave the City, and study here in peace. My Lord Constantine must have thanked God for you, when he slipped out of the trap Plethon had laid for him, and got out of taking Plethon home!”

“It would be the death of the old man, anyway,” said Manuel.

“But if it's just a trap … just a bit of scheming,” pro tested the boy, “why does anyone heed it? Why does it matter? Why must I lose my freedom for it?”

“It is like this, my son,” said Stephanos. “The Lord Constantine dare not offend Plethon because he is a famous scholar, known and well loved in the West, from whence is our only hope of help against our enemies … and he dare not take him to the City for fear of offending the Church, against which he already struggles in vain to make them submit to the Pope in Rome, and so get help from him … and he dare not ignore the dream and the prophecy because whatever he thinks of it himself, the people are deeply moved by such things, and will blame him if he flouts them, and he must somehow make one people out of them, and make them fight.”

The boy said nothing. “No wonder he calls you Vrethiki,” said Stephanos.

“Why does he so?” demanded the boy angrily. “I am Piers Barber, an English apprentice merchant out of Bristow …”

“‘
Vrisko
,' you kept saying. ‘Find.' Our word for a lucky find is Vrethiki.”

“So what, then, is to become of me?” asked the boy.

“You will stay with the Emperor. When he is crowned and goes to the Imperial City, you will go too, to keep the people's courage up, and be a talisman of hope to them.”

“Well,” said the boy. “Since you say I must, I must. But not willingly. I could wish my uncle had sent me on the Iceland run, or anywhere in the world but here, where I am no more Piers Barber, a free-born Englishman, but Vrethiki, the Emperor's most unwilling and resentful slave. I shall run away if I can, as a slave is like to do!”

“Few men are free,” said Stephanos. “Try to resign yourself.”

H
ow could he resign himself, when he was racked with homesickness? When he thought of England—and there was nothing to take his mind off it in all those long hours standing uselessly around, witnessing everything, understanding nothing—when he thought of England it was its greenness he remembered. Not that the land of the Morea was not green, but it was the wrong kind of green. The olive trees that carpeted the valley floor were a silver-gray aspen color, with a lovely shimmer like silken garments when the wind caressed them; but pale and cold. And the tall cypresses, elegant and lovely tapered towers, were green, but heavy green, with a bitter touch of blackness in them, and they, too, of a cold dark hue. The leaves of the orange trees were green, with that dusty dark greenness that overtakes English leaves in summer, but the boy was yearning for the bright yellow-green, fresh juicy green of an English meadow, the amazing tender emerald green of the young leaf sprouting and unwinding in the cool northern spring.

Flowers came; the Greek spring dawns early, and soon the land was extravagantly coverleted in flowers. Every dry stony crack put forth blooms, every blade of grass was divided from the next by flowery stems. Strange and beautiful, and quite
unknown to him as many of them were, they gave him joy, but his heartache grew worse from them even so. Improvident and wildly spendthrift, this foreign spring wantonly used up the flowers for every season at once; fruit and blossom in the orchards side by side, daisies and violets to remind the boy of spring at home, and at the same time poppies and the wild rose to tug at his heart with thoughts of English summer. When the land began to put forth flowers, he thought he would never bear it.