The Belt of Gold (12 page)

“Hail, O Basileus, Beloved of God, Augustus, Equal of the Apostles, from whom comes all, in whose name all is done, Hail, Hail, Hail.”

She answered, as Constantine had, in a voice made louder by the hollow of the great room around them.

“Welcome, Romans, and give tongue to your thoughts, advise me and request of me, in the name of Christ our Lord, amen.”

Their orator crept forward a little on his hands and knees.

“O Basileus, Augustus, Chosen of God, we beg of you that you give us the grace of a hearing.”

There began the long summary of their tribulations. Too many people, not enough money, no place for them all; the Arabs, the Jews, the Italians competed unfairly—

The litany of complaints went on and on. The orator had a gift for rhetoric, and couched his speech in terms as fanciful and elegant as poetry, but even so the matter began to beat on her like a rain of stones. Why could they not be content with what they had? They never once mentioned salvation, the priceless treasure they received by virtue of their birth, which the Arabs, for all their gold and myrrh and zealous overwork, could not aspire to.

That reminded her of the holy man, whose name she knew now: Daniel. He was coming toward Constantinople, and he was preaching very disagreeable ideas, such as the perfect union of the soul with God, and the superfluity of the Church and the City and the law, when the soul belonged utterly to God.

She knew that John Cerulis had sent men to observe this dangerous ecstatic. If John Cerulis could manage to find an interpreter of God's will who would proclaim him emperor, then his lies could cloud the minds of men and lead them into a terrible crisis.

She was true emperor. She knew that. More than for herself, she trembled to think of the consequences for her people and the Empire, should they desert God and Irene, and follow John Cerulis. Therefore she had sent Hagen the Frank to spy on John Cerulis, and she meant to plant Theophano there as well.

In the meantime, the presidents of the Guilds were huddled before her waiting for her answer. The orator had done. Silence filled up the Magnaura Palace. The Basileus sat absolutely still for a long while, letting them all wait for her.

They knew what she would say. Had she not said it before, over and over—did they not come here to be told again what the truth was? And the truth did not change with the price of gold and silk and wax and wood. The sinner did not go to mass to hear that for his sake sin would now be virtue.

She said, “My people have come before me, and I have heard them. My heart is moved to pity by their lamentations. Yet I must deny them the swift and easy ameliorations that they seek.”

Crouched before her, they kept their faces to the floor, but from some of them, rising above their bowed backs, came a tremulous sigh.

“We belong to the Empire,” she said, and saw again, as if in the air some vision formed, the wonderful image of salvation that was Constantinople. “We belong to our Empire, whose order was set down by God, and made manifest by the laws of Constantine and Theodosius and Justinian. They gave us the perfect City. If now God chooses to test our hearts, we must prove our hearts worthy, and not change the order of God. To change is to fail. To keep faith is to survive. So be it. I have spoken, Basileus, Irene, Augustus, Equal of the Apostles.”

For a moment, in the cold echoing chamber, there was silence. She trembled with the intensity of her vision. It was true, and unfaltering she would serve that truth, though she be the last, the only one to do so. Now from the people crouching at her feet came their own assent to the truth.

“We hear, and we shall obey, O Basileus.”

The Chamberlain came forward with his staff and rapped the butt hard on the floor. “Blessed be the name of the Lord our God!”

“Blessed be the name of God, and long life and salvation to our Basileus.” And one by one they inched forward on their knees to kiss her shoe and the hem of her robe.

The Guild presidents, in their antique coats, walked in formal steps from the throne room, their heads bowed, their hands together; as soon as they crossed the threshold their sedate and orderly lines broke and they rushed in a yammering mob on the Prefect of the City, standing in the antechamber.

“She denied us!”

“We can't go on like this—you must do something—”

They swarmed around him—he was at the end of the anteroom opposite the guards—and drove him backwards to the wall; and there, shouting and furious, they held him fast and screamed their problems in his ears.

“Please—please—”

His voice was drowned in theirs. “We need help! There is no work —no money—” “I have not paid my workmen in more than six months—” “I have not taken a nomisma of profit in over a year!”

“Please,” he cried, and smiled, trying to look each furious red face in the eyes. This placid kindly look and his smile usually won people over to him, but the Guild presidents, old men all of them, were caught up in the full fury of their own little crisis. They were actually leaning on him, and his back, pushing to the marble wall, was beginning to throb. Then, to his incalculable relief, he saw Nicephoros coming across the antechamber.

“There,” he cried, and thrust his arm out in a gesture as noble as any statue's. “Here comes the Treasurer of the Empire to deal with your questions.”

They all turned, their voices falling silent for an instant, to see the angular figure of the Treasurer marching into their midst. Three of his secretakoi accompanied him. The Prefect used this lull to abandon the wall and make for the refuge of Nicephoros's side, where he caught his friend's hand in a hard grateful grip.

“My God,” he murmured, “you've been my own redeemer, Nicephoros. I hope you have something to say to these people.”

The Treasurer shrugged, a gesture he had from his Syrian ancestors. His dark face showed no light or easy humor. In the Prefect's grasp his hand was cold and limp as a day-old fish. His eyes swept the mob of the presidents, now facing him with the hostility and expectation by which they had pinned the Prefect to the wall.

“Now, hear me,” Nicephoros said. “The Basileus has spoken, and has made clear what our duties are to the Empire and to God.”

The mass of old men cast up a single groan.

“However,” Nicephoros said, in a ringing voice, and paused. Beside him, the Prefect looked swiftly down the antechamber. The Imperial Guard was filing out of the throne room, their axes shining in their hands; one or two looked curiously in this direction. A servant with an iron lamp standard came quietly up the long room and put the lamp down and swiftly lit it. “The Empress,” Nicephoros said, “cannot hear the pleas of her people without ears of pity. Therefore she has commanded that your burdens be eased somewhat by the following.”

The Prefect relaxed, smiling. He took a moment to admire Nicephoros's statecraft. It was the Basileus who had insisted on duty to the state; it was the Empress whose heart went out to them. A nice touch; the Prefect knew he would use that sometime in his own work. Nicephoros turned to take a slip of paper from one of his underlings. The lace collar of his coat had etched a line of red across the back of his neck.

He said, “We shall allow the complete remission of your taxes, those owed from previous years and those owed for this year. In addition the Prefect shall issue you licenses to buy bread at a special rate. And finally the Empress will guarantee that you receive the materials for your crafts and industries whether or not you can sell the finished product.”

The presidents murmured, their faces raised toward Nicephoros's; was it relief that made them pale, or merely the light from the lamp standard?

“In return,” Nicephoros said, “we shall expect that you will distribute your available resources even-handedly, care for those among you who are suffering the most, and keep all your workmen at their benches and looms and in their shops, busy.”

A necessary corollary: busy people did not collect in mobs in the streets and riot against the state.

“If we all give whatever we can to one another,” Nicephoros said, “and take only what we must to live, then we shall survive this trial. When God sees how we uphold His Word, He shall be moved in our favor, and surely will bestow on us again those favors by which He has distinguished us above any other men. Go, now, and keep the Word of God and the commands of your Basileus.”

“Amen,” they cried, in one voice, their faces softened with relief. Not much relief, to be sure; not what they had wanted; but the method of its presentation had satisfied them. The Prefect admired this very much, and when the crowd had dispersed a little, and he and Nicephoros were alone together beside the lamp standard, he said so.

“Really,” Nicephoros said, and gave him a cold look, “you respect appearances too much, Peter, and perhaps care too little for that under-structure of performance that maintains the surface. I shall have to see you sometime soon, and speak with you in depth.”

“Ah,” said the Prefect, alarmed.

“Not now. I have many pressing engagements. I shall send a page to you to arrange a meeting time. Good day.”

“Nicephoros,” said the Prefect. But the Treasurer was going. Alone beside the lamp standard, in the glow of the light, he wound his hands together and tried not to think about what Nicephoros wanted to say to him.

It wasn't fair. He had never really wanted to enter the Imperial service; his father had insisted on it.

That would not salve Nicephoros's sore temper, should the Treasurer discover what the Prefect had been doing with some of the Imperial money at his disposal.

The light surrounded him like a protective shell. Everyone had gone away now, and the Magnaura seemed empty. He too had important meetings to attend, great work to do—after all, he was one of the officers of the Basileus, and in the City itself none was higher than he. He struggled to find comfort in these facts, but the nagging alarm remained, a worm in his guts. If Nicephoros knew—or guessed—then she knew too. Or guessed.

It wasn't fair. They leapt to the rescue of a few starving artisans, sweepers and bakers, goldsmiths and workers in ivory, but they would not take pity on him, who was one of their own.

It had always been easy for him to feel sorry for himself, which may have been why nobody else ever bothered. In a rush of courage, he left the shell of the light, and hurried toward the door.

12

Obeying the Empress's orders, Hagen went out into the City to find the palace of John Cerulis. He took one of his horses and rode out along the Mesê, the great street that ran from the Chalke gate into the Palace down the backbone of the promontory that supported Constantinople, away to the north to the mainland.

The Mesê was relatively flat, following the gentle descent of the ridge; the rest of the City fell away from this spine on either side—on the right, down to the sun-gilded bustle of the Golden Horn; on the left, through gardens and orchards, clumps of buildings, and a series of walls, down to the shores of the Sea of Marmora. On the side facing the harbor, the slopes seemed gentler, but he thought it was only because there were more houses there. Their flat roofs and whitewashed stone walls covered the earth like a crust, and even their gardens grew in pots and hanging baskets; the streets swarmed through this tangle in twists and turns, up and down, the buildings sometimes pressing so close to the street that they overhung the walkways and made passage impossible for more than one person at a time.

On the other side, where there were fewer houses, the streets were straighter and wider. He rode down along between palm trees like clumps of feathers on sticks, looking around him for some sign of John Cerulis.

He was hoping to find some district in this place where all the mighty lived, a cluster of palaces, or even a place fenced off from the common herd, but in Constantinople there was no such tidy order. Down each street he rode he found some great building that might have been a palace, side by side with the smaller houses of smaller people, and sometimes even hard by the decrepit many-storied buildings that housed the poor in swarms, like a hillside full of caves.

He turned a corner and came on a street that plunged away from him down a slope so sheer the houses were built out from it on stilts of stone; at the bottom, at the land's end, the sea laid down its hem of surf. Hagen drew rein. He would never find what he was looking for this way.

He hooked his leg around the pommel of his saddle and looked around him, no longer trying to force some order on this place, but letting it present itself to him as it would. No use trying to see it as a larger version of Aachen. He could walk around Aachen in half an hour and see everything. Even Rome was small and simple compared with this.

The buildings around him gave him very few clues. In the half-collapsing tenements down to his right there were no windows on the street; all the houses offered nothing for the passerby but a blank wall to look at. Like a woman who veiled her face, this mystery made him angry and unbearably curious. They came out, these people, they seemed to live in the streets, clusters of them on every corner, around every fountain, their voices drowning the cries of pigeons. He rode up to the nearest of these groups and asked for directions to John Cerulis's palace.

To his surprise, the old man he spoke to knew at once, and gave him detailed instructions, pointing, making turns with his hands. Hagen went off obediently down the next street, turned right, turned left, and stopped again, puzzled. He was lost again. The old man had told him to go straight here but there was no street to take him straight. He asked another man on the corner.

Once again, this fellow knew exactly where John Cerulis's palace was, and gave him directions, this way, that way, go up here, pass by the church—when he mentioned the church, he crossed himself—down the slope, past the garden, turn left at the fountain. It all seemed clear enough. Hagen rode off again, got about half a mile on, and lost his way again.

He felt like a fool. The City around him seemed to be laughing at him. Were they sending him wrong? The blank walls of the houses around him infuriated him. Pass the church! On every street corner was a church. He sat on his horse's back watching the streams of people that came down the hill by him; as they went past the old domed church across the way from him, they all crossed themselves, and some genuflected, without breaking stride. A donkey jogged along the street, tiny under a mountain of hay, a paper hung around its neck like an amulet. He went on to the fountain just beyond the church and asked again.

Like this, up and down, he went patiently through Constantinople. The City was all contradiction. The people were friendly to him, unceasingly helpful, smiling, cheerful; but the winding streets, the blank walls, threw him back like a magic kingdom to which he did not know the charm. Yet by degrees he fought his way closer and closer to where he wished to be, until at last, when he asked a little child in the street, the child ran ahead of him around a corner and pointed.

There, across a triangular courtyard, was a long wall with a gate in it, and by the gate a myrtle tree. Beyond the wall he saw the roofs of other buildings. The child was looking up at him expectantly. Hagen fingered up a coin from his wallet and dropped it to him, and the little boy leapt into the air, nimble as a juggler, and ran off.

Nothing distinguished the outside of this particular place from any of a hundred others he had seen in the course of the morning. Hagen rode slowly around it, looking in over the wall when he could. The wall contained a number of buildings, their roofs tiled in red clay tiles; he could hear people inside working and talking, and, coming on the front gate, which stood open, he watched as a group of elegantly dressed Greeks arrived in curtained chairs carried by poles on the shoulders of half-naked men. Through this gate he could see a courtyard, where many people worked. He itched to go inside, but on either side of the front gate stood soldiers, and so he went back around the palace to the gate by the myrtle tree.

A wagon loaded with firewood was rolling slowly in through the opening in the wall. Hagen dismounted and tied up his horse to a branch of the myrtle and went in after the wagon as if he were one of the workmen.

The wagon lumbered into a little kitchen yard, and there men sprang to unload it. Hagen went past them, into the great courtyard at the center of the palace complex.

On all sides were buildings, one or two of them having several stories, connected by covered walkways. The courtyard itself was full of servants, women at their looms, scullery wenches cleaning the pots and spreading out the linen to dry in the sun. Hagen went through an open doorway into the largest of the buildings and found himself in a lavishly decorated room like a great hall.

This place was as magnificent as the Palace of the Daphne, although much smaller. The walls were covered with panels of gold worked in relief with religious scenes, and the furniture was inlaid with shell-pearl and jewels. Sumptuously dressed men stood in lines before a door to the right, and all around loitered John Cerulis's guardsmen, wearing the short leather-skirted armor that the men had worn who had killed Rogerius.

Obviously they expected no danger. They drank from leather jugs, talked and gambled and paid no heed to what went on around them. Hagen walked right by them and no one even hailed him.

He went into the kitchen and helped himself to one of a heap of loaves on the table, took a wedge of cheese from a rack against the wall, and went out again to the courtyard to eat. One or two of the women at work around him gave him curious looks but no one asked him what he was doing there.

It was very clear to him that John Cerulis was going nowhere in a hurry. With all these people waiting to see him, and all this household bustle around him, it would take the effort of days to uproot him. Hagen finished his lunch, admiring the orderly business of the courtyard around him, the women at work, gossiping, and the men waiting for work. A little naked baby wobbled up to him on wide-spread feet and leaned against his knee and begged for food, and Hagen put a bit of cheese on his knee and the little boy took it gravely and went away. Hagen got up and left.

He saw no purpose in returning to the Palace, where the Empress would have some other errand for him. He rode his horse up through the narrow streets toward the crest of the ridge, and there turned down along the Mesê and rode off through the City.

On this main thoroughfare most of the trade of Constantinople was done, either in shops in the colonnades on either side, or in the great squares strung along the Mesê like jewels on a necklace. There were three of these squares, each one lined with little shops and stalls, and crowded full of traders and merchants and people buying goods. Hagen steered wide of these crowds. Unused to large groups of people, he preferred to watch everything from a distance.

He could not buy anything here anyway; he had not the money for it. The prices wanted for these goods astounded him. He saw that the buyers all were haggling over their purchases, leaning across counters piled up with cloth or pots or glassware, but even so they paid more for a piece of wax, here, or for a clay pot, pretty as it was, than he was used to giving for a night's lodging and a good meal, on the road. He saw a woman in a chair borne by patient, stupid-looking men, who carried her from one stall to another, where she was buying up silks, spending more for each roll of fabric than Hagen had ever paid for anything in his life. At another stall she stopped and bought each of her bearers an orange.

Hagen went on, curious in spite of himself. He drew rein to let a string of camels pass by him through a narrow archway. The City beguiled him. He did not want to like it; it was too different from his home. Yet it trapped his interest, as women did, by glimpses and suspicions and hints. Each little street that wound away down the hillside or around a corner seemed a promise. The blank walls of the houses made him ache to know what went on inside.

He stopped in the square where they sold beasts, to watch a drover of oxen bargain with a customer; the great dun-brown dewlapped brutes lay on the straw behind the two men, chewing their cuds, their widespread horns tipped in brass. The two men were using a language he had never heard before, but their gestures were perfectly meaningful to him, and when one man turned and saw him watching, he gave Hagen a broad wink.

In a narrow street just off the Mesê he found a row of cobblers' shops, and went from one to the next hoping to get his boots mended cheaply. They all charged exactly the same price, and each one tried to sell him a pair of new boots first, although his own were still good enough to mend. He settled on one at random. The cobbler examined his boots closely, eyebrows raised, picking at the long Frankish stitches, and smelling the leather.

“Not deer,” he said, “or cattle leather, either, by my nose.”

“Bear's hide,” Hagen said. “Off the bear's belly.”

The cobbler's eyebrows waggled up and down. “Interesting.” He fit the right boot down over his lathe and peeled off the sole with a short stubby knife. “I suppose a man who walks in bearskin concerns himself just as much with the True Nature of Christ?”

“Hunh,” Hagen said, startled.

The cobbler bent to look through a bin of leather pieces. His voice rose past him like smoke. “Because I can promise you, barbarian, that unless you understand that the Son partakes of exactly the same attributes and nature as the Father, you shall never see the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“Amen,” Hagen said, which seemed safest.

“Yes, indeed.” The cobbler fit a piece of leather over the foot of the boot and scooped up a handful of little nails, which he popped like a handful of grapes into his mouth. “Because the Son existed in the Father always, since God is perfect—” He spat nails into his palm as fast as he spoke, a word, a nail, the word flying to Hagen's ears, the nail to Hagen's bootsole, the hammer tap-tapping without a pause in rhythm. “Yet God could not diminish Himself, and therefore when He yielded up the Son from His own substance He did not give up anything of Himself—”

Tap tap tap. Hagen watched the nails disappear into the leather. “Amen,” he said, wondering how tight these boots would be.

“And since the Son also is perfect, of the substance of God, He could not have been partial in any way, but must partake of all those attributes that are undeniably the attributes of God, that is—”

“Amen.” Tap tap tap. Without a break in his discourse the cobbler lifted the boot up off the lathe and twisted and flexed it in his hands, found it good, and with his knife trimmed away the extra leather, working with a master's fleet deft gestures.

“Eternity, truth, justice, goodness—these are the attributes of God.”

“Amen,” Hagen said.

The other boot went down over the lathe, and the cobbler continued his discourse; Hagen had lost track of his line of argument, if he had one at all, and merely said “Amen” whenever some comment was wanted of him. When the boots were done, he put them on his feet. “Ah.”

“Good?” the cobbler asked, smiling.

“Very good.”

“If a man's feet are comfortable, the rest of him is comfortable,” said the cobbler, and took the money, gave him change, made the Sign of the Cross at him, and blessed him in God's name. Hagen went back to his horse, at the side of the street.

God dominated every life in Constantinople, not just the cobbler's. There were churches in every street, some magnificently domed in gold, with doors of brass, and some mere huts with crosses on their roofs, and still the preachers overflowed into the streets, took up posts on walls and corners and on the tops of columns, declaiming passionately on matters of Faith. At the fountains, where the women gathered to draw water and exchange gossip, old men sat on stone benches tossing crumbs to the pigeons and damned one another to Hell for confusing the coterminous and the coeval. Even the little children, chasing their hoops and balls through the side-streets, teased one another in the name of God.

He stopped to let his horse drink at a fountain, and sat in his saddle laughing at a little band of boys who fought and swaggered in the square. Through them came a little troop of women, in the black shawls all the married women wore, with jars for the water, and he drew back to let them reach the fountain. Among them was a girl with unbound hair. She caught his appraising look on her and her cheeks flushed and she lowered her head, and then flashed him a sidelong look as sweet and merry as any harlot's. Hagen coughed, amused.