Four for a Boy (3 page)

She paused, as if to give John and Felix time to grasp what she was saying. “Ironic, isn’t it? A man enters a holy place to view the beautiful work of art he has arranged to have placed there and he is rewarded in such an unthinkable fashion. More than ironic, I would say. This was a murder designed to catch the citizens’ attention. Justinian naturally shares the public outrage. Yet it has already been whispered abroad that certain of the Blues were responsible and worse yet, that Justinian, well known as one of their supporters, condones their act. Those who spread this filthy rumor would not dare to do so were their future emperor not confined to his bed.”

Theodora’s embroidered robes rustled as she turned away. For the first time, released from the rabbit snare of her gaze and voice, John became aware of the wide bed set in an alcove framed by draperies. Mary Reed & Eric Mayer

“Justinian wishes to address you,” Theodora said. “Step forward.”

The men did as she ordered.

The unprepossessing figure propped up in bed, a purple coverlet pulled up to his neck, did not resemble the usual notion of a future emperor. His face was bland and round with a strong familial resemblance to Justin’s, especially the small eyes. Justinian smiled weakly.

“Felix. It’s Felix, isn’t it? One of my uncle Justin’s favorite bodyguards. ‘Reminds me of myself in my excubitor days,’ he told me. In fact, he insisted on volunteering your services when he heard I planned to have the matter of Hypatius’ murder investigated.”

Felix opened his mouth to reply, but shut it without saying anything. He looked shocked.

“And you are John,” Justinian went on. “A highly intelligent man, or so I am reliably informed. The palace is a small place. Those with quick wits are soon noticed and rewarded. Are you surprised I should call upon a slave? I was not born to the palace and neither was our emperor. Both of us might have been farmers. I would as soon be served by those of similar humble origins. Adversity is a better teacher than luxury.”

John glanced at Felix. The excubitor’s expression remained one of stunned amazement.

“Now as to why you’re both here,” Justinian continued. “I’m enlisting you in the defense of the empire. You will report to Theodotus, the City Prefect, and assist him for the time being. He’ll have orders for you. When he has none, you will continue with your usual duties. The fact that you are working for him can hardly be kept secret, but you will say nothing about this meeting and who assigned you to the Prefect’s office. I do not have to tell you the consequences of disobedience.” Justinian’s voice faded abruptly and his head fell back against his pillow.

Just that quickly, their audience was ended.

“You have tired him out,” snapped Theodora. “Leave.”

The men began to back toward the door.

Fortuna had arranged for something momentous to take place soon, John thought. She must have, for he and the excubitor Felix had just been addressed by the man who would almost certainly be the next emperor. Indeed, many said he had been the de facto ruler for years.

Where was the drama, he wondered. Where the magnificence? The sickly and unimpressive man lying in bed had sounded like a petty bureaucrat instructing his clerks to undertake some minor task or other.

John suddenly felt dizzy. Was it caused by the room’s smoke or its cloying heat? Or was it relief?

He had expected to be dead and his feet set firmly on the seven-runged ladder to Mithra by now.

Chapter Three

“Careful where you’re treading with those filthy boots!”

John glanced down at the puddle of icy water forming on the kitchen floor. When he looked up, the servant who’d scolded him gaped in alarm and hurried off.

The cold blast of air that had swirled in through the servants’ entrance of Senator Opimius’ house clung to the folds of John’s cloak. A pair of cook’s assistants, laboring over a long table standing under the kitchen’s steam-fogged window, peeked around at him, exchanged excited whispers, and then went back to expertly jointing a pile of freshly plucked chicken carcasses.

John noticed their surreptitious stares as he made his way to the kitchen brazier. No one offered a greeting. He found himself shivering. The heat rising from the glowing charcoal seemed to hold no warmth.

A pair of girls strolled into the room, carrying baskets filled with olives and cheese. They giggled as they chatted.

“So I went and got myself a love charm. Cost me a lot, too. But has it worked? Ha!” one complained.

“I keep telling you it’s all nonsense!” her companion replied. “The only people who get any satisfaction out of them are the ones making a fortune selling the wretched things!”

“I have an idea,” offered the other, evidently inspired by the activity going on at the table. “We could sell some of the master’s spare chickens to folk needing them for magick rites and make our own fortunes!”

Then they belatedly spotted John, set their baskets down quickly and fled.

John frowned.

“Why do you look so puzzled? Wouldn’t you be frightened if a shade suddenly appeared in your kitchen?”

Opimius’ ancient house steward, who had been looking over a pile of vegetables spread out on the other end of the table, came up to John and patted his shoulder. It was a gesture John disliked intensely.

“You feel solid enough,” Dorotheus continued with a wide smile. “Nonetheless, everyone in the household heard you’d been dragged off to the imperial cells. Usually that means you’re as good as dead.”

John nodded. He should have realized how startling his reappearance must be. His death had seemed a foregone conclusion to them, just as it had to him. He did not offer Dorotheus an explanation for his salvation and the old man did not ask.

John moved his hands closer to the fire. They were almost colorless and numb with cold. The hands of a shade. “I was instructed to resume my duties here, Dorotheus, although occasionally I shall be required elsewhere. I thought I’d warm up a little before seeking Lady Anna.”

“You won’t find her at home, John. She and the master are both out.” The steward’s face was the same brown as the leaves that clung to trees all winter in the northern climes where John had fought long ago. “You look barely alive. What did they do to you?”

John said he had not been mistreated. Dorotheus looked unconvinced. He puffed his cheeks out in a manner that, coupled with his brown face and small beak of a nose, gave him a distinct resemblance to a plump pheasant.

“You were extremely fortunate. The trouble with you is you don’t know when you’re well off. Just back from the dead, and there you stand, looking as sour as spoiled milk.”

“Alive or dead, my fate has nothing to do with my own efforts. It was Fortuna spared me and nothing more than that.”

“I should say it was the Lord that spared you,” Dorotheus replied with a quick scowl. “If you want to call Him Fortuna, I doubt He cares. But having Him on your side is better than having all the emperor’s armies at your back.”

John said nothing and gloomily continued to warm his hands.

Dorotheus sighed. Cheerful by nature, he was a man who could have consulted the oracle of Trophonius and still emerged with a smile on his face, but John’s mood was almost bleak enough to chill even his perpetually sunny demeanor.

He requested John to step out of the kitchen so that they could have a few private words.

There was a sudden exclamation as one of the kitchen workers sliced into her thumb. Perhaps she had been more intent on her eavesdropping than her work.

John murmured agreement. Could he properly refuse a request from Dorotheus, who was a slave like himself, but as steward ruled in his master’s absence? John had been at the palace for several years and every change in his work still brought new uncertainties. He had only recently grown accustomed to laboring in the office of the Keeper of the Plate and had just begun to enjoy it when he was thrust into new duties tutoring Lady Anna.

Now his situation was different again, although for the present he preferred not to think of the mysterious new assignment set before him.

Given his years of military employment, the prospect of taking orders from the Prefect Theodotus was not unappealing in itself, although, for all he knew, he might only be handling written work for him. Justinian had said something about an investigation into the death of Hypatius the philanthropist, the murder the whole city had been talking about. Perhaps he expected John to organize reports and evidence as he would marshal the Keeper of the Plate’s valuable dinnerware for a banquet.

Dorotheus led John from the kitchen and along a hallway whose windows looked out into an inner courtyard. Its fountain was coated with rivulets of ice resembling meandering streams of wax from a melting candle. A few brown leaves drifted down from the branches of a skeletal tree. The sky was leaden.

“I am expecting more snow. It’s most unnatural, if you ask me,” the steward observed. “In all my years I can’t remember such winter weather. Thank the Lord we have warm beds to sleep in and good food to eat. Many are not as fortunate.”

“That’s true enough.” Troubled as he was, John couldn’t help thinking of the shivering beggar he and Anna had seen huddled in a doorway not that far from this well-appointed household. He mentioned the incident to Dorotheus and wondered aloud if the unfortunate man had managed to find better shelter for what would certainly turn into a bitterly cold night. Dorotheus observed confidently that the Lord looked after His flock and made the sign of his religion.

John did not like cold weather and never had. He was thin. Any chill in the air found its way into his bones too easily. One of the few things he liked about living in the empire’s capital was that it was not often as frigid as it had been the past few days.

“Yes,” Dorotheus took up his previous observation, “there’s plenty who would envy us. We may not be free men, John, yet we have a better life than many who are proud to so call themselves. Free to freeze or starve, more like it!”

They climbed the staircase at the end of the hallway and entered Dorotheus’ room, a cramped space cluttered with a pallet, a pair of stools and two chests. A bronze brazier warmed the air with a few smoldering embers.

“Sit down, John.” Dorotheus stirred up the fire, pushed a stool toward its warmth, and seated himself on the edge of his pallet.

“I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to talk with you ever since you began tutoring Lady Anna.

She’s very fond of you and so we all are. There’s nothing more important here than her happiness. Apart from the master’s, of course, but as his depends on hers, it amounts to the same thing.”

John did not reply. Glancing out of the room’s tiny window, he saw that snow flurries had begun to lazily bedaub the sky.

Taking his silence for attentiveness, his companion plunged ahead enthusiastically. “You see, I realized immediately that you’re one of those headstrong young men who are dissatisfied with the place assigned him. Don’t deny it! You are more discreet in your speech than most, but I can see it in your eyes.”

Dorotheus hesitated, collecting his thoughts. “Now, I’ve been with the senator’s household since I was purchased as a mere boy. Never in all that time have I wanted for anything. A kinder master than Opimius you could scarcely find. On the whole ours is not a bad life, wouldn’t you say?”

“Do you think so?”

“You have a quick temper, John,” Dorotheus said sorrowfully. “But what man is not a slave in some way or another? We are all slaves to time and age. And we all must serve the Lord, even the emperor. Eunuchs like us are less enchained than many a free man, since we’re not slaves to our passions.”

Was rage then not a passion? John said nothing. He did not want to hurt Dorotheus’ feelings. He would never have chosen the life Dorotheus found so natural. He could only hope he would not have to endure it for as long as the old steward already had.

“Nor do any of us need question what befalls us, for it is all the will of heaven,” Dorotheus said, as if reading what John was thinking. “Now, you know the tale of John Chrysostom and the eunuch Eutropius?”

John nodded. Who had not heard the story of how the paths of the Christian Chrysostom, he of the golden tongue, and of Eutropius had crossed more than a century earlier in this very city?

“Then consider this,” Dorotheus said. “Eutropius originally worked in a minor position in the palace administration. It’s said he came to imperial attention through his wit and piety, but whatever the reason in due course he was elevated to chamberlain and consul.”

“You’re saying I should not despair, that I might shed my chains one day?”

Dorotheus smiled. “John, you’re being deliberately obstinate, I fear. Surely you recall that Eutropius grew greedy and corrupt and was eventually executed? Obviously what we should learn from his sorry tale is we ought not to seek to rise beyond the position in which we are placed. Especially when ours is such a comfortable one.”

John made no reply. He could scarcely reveal that his position had suddenly become much less comfortable than Dorotheus innocently supposed.

“Now, John, your life isn’t really such a nightmare, is it? You have not flung yourself over the seawall in despair.”

John paused before replying. After his capture and castration, he no longer suffered nightmares.

When he could not avoid thinking about it, this seemed to him a natural result of his maiming. By that unthinkable act in the Persian camp, the night exhausted its forces. The formless terror that lurked just out of sight around sleep’s darkest corners had presented itself all too clearly. The heart-stopping fall had ended, not in waking but with crippling impact. As for death, the bottomless dread upon which all other fears play like ripples, John would gladly have plunged into its depths if he had not felt even more strongly that his duty, as a soldier of Mithra, was to endure.

When he replied to Dorotheus, John chose his words carefully. “It’s true I have not thrown myself over the seawall. That is because heaven has ordered that I exist in this world. It’s an order renewed each time I awake. I cannot imagine the purpose of it, but one should not question heaven.”

Dorotheus gazed at him sorrowfully. John remained silent. How could he explain to this cheerful old man, a man who had never known anything but slavery, how it was to be free, to chart one’s course in the world, to make one’s own way?

And having done so how then to convey the stark horror of being captured and offered for sale to anyone with enough coins to buy a man, a woman, or a child and with that purchase the right of absolute power over their bodies and their fates?

It was not possible to even begin to describe it, he thought, nor did he wish to attempt it. His past life was gone. The man he had been had died under a bloodstained blade.

***

“What’s he up to? That’s what I’d like to know! He’s burdened me with an excubitor and a slave. It’s a certain wager they’ve been told to keep an eye on what I’m doing. I won’t have it!”

Theodotus had stamped into Proclus’ office without announcement. Not that he needed any. There were few in Constantinople who would not have recognized the rough-hewn City Prefect. Though he dressed like a peasant in leather breeches and a rough wool shirt, no one could have mistaken the broad-chested figure, shambling along as if weighed down by the enormous and asymmetrical head set between wide shoulders without apparent benefit of a neck.

Some whispered he’d been kicked in the head by a horse as a youngster. Others said the misshapen head was a result of his mother easing her pregnancy with demonic potions. No one, however, said anything at all about the matter when within earshot of the man nicknamed the Gourd.

“You’re speaking of your two new assistants?” Proclus was seated behind a cluttered desk beside Emperor Justin. He had been helping the emperor sign new legislation when Proclus barged in. Justin didn’t bother to look up from the papers he labored over. “I’d heard about them. By direct order of Justinian, wasn’t it? And the emperor, of course.”

Theodotus ran stubby fingers through hair consisting of a few frazzled strands. “How can I possibly fail to keep order in the city with so much help thrust upon me?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

“The murder of Hypatius has dangerous political overtones. There are plenty who might use it for their own ends.” Proclus spoke so quietly he might have been sharing a confidence with the Prefect rather than pointing out something so obvious.

“What he means is my nephew’s let his precious Blues run amuck and now they’ve killed someone important. Not just common beggars and shop keepers. Interesting, isn’t it? With the public outrage it’s caused, he might not get his wish to push me aside before my carcass is cold. Ah! Look. I’ve blotched this one too.” Justin yanked the wooden stencil he’d been tracing off the parchment.

Proclus plucked the sheet up and examined it.

“It is perfectly acceptable, Caesar.”

“So you say, but no one ever tells the emperor he’s got a boil on the end of his nose,” Justin growled.

“Why should they? Boil or not, he is the emperor.”

“Few would dare to talk to their ruler like that,” Justin observed. “That’s why I value your advice so much. And Theodotus’ also. He doesn’t care how he speaks in my presence either. What is this document about anyway? My eyes seem particularly blurred today.”

“It’s a list of regulations regarding warehouse fees.”

“Then it’s all right. Business owners have better things to worry about than blotched signatures.”