The Belt of Gold (26 page)

They withdrew a few steps, the guards, their eyes glassy. He bounded up onto the table, sweeping away the meats in their sauce, the wine opened up to breathe, and a tremendous sound came from him—if words, then surely not in Greek—as if he were a great brass vessel that the wind boomed through. Theophano thought, amazed, that he was laughing.

“Come on, tree-killers!” He whirled the sword over his head and slashed the air before him. “There's not a Frank alive who can match swords with me; do you think twenty of you Greeks dare even try?”

The guards launched themselves forward again, and again their blows cut and slashed at him. From the back of the pack, three or four suddenly whirled and raced out the door of the tent. Theophano held her breath until her lungs throbbed. Only a few feet behind Hagen's back was the wall of the tent; they would kill him through the cloth. He battered at the swords before him; she saw him cleave down through the skull of the man directly before him, and the brains blurted out, grey and white.

They swung at his feet and he leapt in the air and the blades whipped harmlessly by, and landing light on his toes he struck behind the blades and another of the Romans fell. Then, without a pause, he swung around. His sword hacked into the tent wall, and made it bulge around some form behind it, and through the rending silk and canvas came a horrible scream.

The guards retreated again. There were bodies all over the carpet now, bleeding into the Persian roses. On the tables, Hagen leapt up and down like an acrobat; he swiped at the air, three or four mighty blows that whistled and hissed.

“You see, Basileus,” he shouted, “your soft and malleable men are no use to you! Now, hear me, Basileus—”

He wheeled and swiped at the tent wall again; Theophano could not see that he struck anything. The guards hovered nervously in a semicircle halfway across the tent from him, and at every move he made they flinched.

He faced John Cerulis. His face was bright as a flag. “I have a certain piece of paper, Basileus, that these women will do anything to possess—”

“No!” Theophano screamed.

“And if you kill me, Basileus, you shall not have it either!”

“No—”

She wheeled toward John Cerulis; she flung herself on her knees beside his chair, clinging to his arm. “You don't need it now. You are Emperor already—”

His face was sharp as a knife blade. He said, “You have the list? Yes, of course, I see now that you must have had it, all along.”

“Hagen!” Theophano got up from the ground. She clambered up onto the table, going for the bread knife, and at a sharp word from their master, the bread cook and the assistant saucier jumped on her and dragged her back. She hung on their arms, gasping. Throughout the tent, now, people burst into excited talk.

John Cerulis said, “Silence!”

He stood up, lifting the corner of his mantle over his arm, and arranged the folds properly before he spoke. The tent quieted.

“You have the list?”

“Yes,” Hagen said. “Not here. I will give it to you in exchange for my freedom and that girl.”

“Your freedom only. The girl does not concern you. She was not responsible for your brother's death.”

“I'll decide that,” Hagen said. “She was there, and she brought your men down on us.”

John stood a moment in thought, his eyes distant. Theophano imagined that the arms around her relaxed a moment, and she lunged forward, but they seized her again. John looked down at her.

“I regret this, Theophano. Really I do.”

She began to weep. He would kill her; he would give up the list. In the grip of many hands, she went out of the tent.

Hagen had the list hidden away in the desert. He took Theophano and one of John Cerulis's trusted men away to retrieve it. They left the camp at once. Hagen had no interest in remaining very long in John Cerulis's range, now that they were enemies.

He put Theophano on his horse and swung up behind her. She had said nothing to him since she broke down weeping over the list he was trading for their lives. With his arm around her waist, he held her tight against him and galloped away into the desert, John Cerulis's knight beside him.

To keep anyone from following, he moved fast, staying on the road. The moon rose, a sickle among the stars. No one spoke. The night was full of a wild rushing wind, and when he stopped to let his horses breathe, he thought he heard hoofbeats down the road behind them, but it might have been the wind.

He raced on, although Cerulis's knight protested at the pace, and left the road to cut off a loop of it that went around a hill. Hagen led the other man up the steep slope and down the far side at a dead run.

Now the horses were blowing hard and hot and worn, their hides steaming. He reached the road again and dropped their pace to a walk, and a mile on came to the place where he had hidden the list. Dismounting, he fished it out from under a rock and gave it to the Greek knight, who took it without a word to him and rode away.

Hagen gathered up his reins. From the saddle, Theophano looked down at him, the moonlight faint on her face.

“You have just condemned those people to death,” she said. “They were friends of the Empress among John's supporters, and they will all die now for your deed.”

“Come down here,” he said, raising his arms to her.

She slid down from the horse and stood before him; her fragrance made him light-headed. When she put her hands on his arms he nearly cried out at the luxury of her touch. She lifted her face to his.

“Go back,” she said. “You could overtake that man, without me to weigh you down, and have the list again.”

“I made a bargain,” he said. He closed his arms gently around her, her warmth against him now.

“A bargain with the Devil!”

“I don't betray my word, girl. Not even to men who betray theirs as a matter of course.”

“Hagen—” She clutched his arms, her face tipped up, and now tears streamed down her cheeks. “He will kill those people!”

“I don't care about them,” he said. “I only care about you.” He tightened his embrace around her and kissed each tear and then at last he kissed her mouth.

Her arms went around his neck. For an endless moment the world fell away from them; there was nothing left but her, sweet and pliant in his arms, her kiss as fierce and full of passion as his own.

“I love you. I love you.”

“Oh, my man,” she whispered. “What a man you are—”

The wind rose, harping through the thorny brush, and whirled around them, buffeting them like a great hand that urged them on. Reluctantly he stepped back, his hands sliding down her arms. “We have to get out of here.”

“If we get back to Constantinople before he does,” she said, “we can warn them. Some of them. I have some of their names.”

He lifted her up onto the saddle, the wind blowing her cloak flat against her back, and taking the reins in one fist he vaulted up behind her. She turned, her hands out to him, and he leaned toward her and they kissed again.

He heard the whistle in the air an instant before the blow struck. It knocked him out of the saddle; he hit the ground so hard his senses left him for an instant. He struggled up, fighting for his consciousness. He was unhurt. He reached his feet, shaky still, and looked around.

His horse still stood in the road, too tired to run away, but there on the ground beyond it lay Theophano.

“Oh, God—”

She was trying to rise. The arrow pierced her back like a bolt that bound her to the earth. When he lifted her up in his arms she sobbed with pain.

“No—save yourself—”

The sibilant hiss of another arrow sounded behind him, and he heard the thunk as it hit the ground. Another came, and another. He leapt onto the horse and kicked it into a gallop down the road.

In his arms, she cried out with pain. The arrow was still lodged in her back. He knew every stride of the horse was an agony. Ahead the road curved, and he forced the weary horse on past the bend and turned it sharp off the road and up the steep rocky slope.

Halfway to the peak, he reined in. From here he could see a long way, and he dismounted and laid her down among the rocks and bent over her, shielding her with his body.

He knew she was dying. He knew by the bubbling in her throat.

She said, “Take this.”

She fumbled at her slipper, and he took it from her foot. Inside it was a thin piece of silk, which she pushed at him. “Take it—to the Basileus. Tell her—”

He cast a quick look around them; down there on the road, a line of horsemen was coming into sight around the curve.

“Tell her—that here, obedient to her law—”

“Theophano!”

“I fell.”

And she was dead, gone, slipped away like a sigh, leaving behind nothing he could cherish. The slip of silk crushed in his fist, he bent over her and let his tears fall like burning coals onto the shell she left behind.

More arrows thudded around him. He tore the shaft from her back, slung her over his shoulder, mounted the horse and went on over the hill.

Tired as it was, the horse kept on, and Cerulis's soft and malleable men did not. Dawn came as Hagen crossed a ridge and rode down on to the sandy slope before the sea, and there he buried Theophano.

He sat down on the ground beside her grave and looked out across the sea. The rising sun brushed gold over the tops of the waves, but the darkness still lay in the folds, so that the sea rolled toward him in curls of light. Hagen sat there, his sword in his hands, and wept like a child.

He wept for himself, who had lost his love, his wife, his dearest heart, but he wept also for Theophano, who deserved life so much. He cursed God, for arranging the world in such a way that good people died at the hands of evil people who then went on and on, enjoying life. He beat at the ground with his sword; he scrubbed his wet face dry and rubbed the salt tears from his eyes and a moment later gave himself up to fresh torrents of grief.

At last, his passions dead from overwork, he sat there limply staring at the sea. The sun was risen now, and its heat blasted him; the brilliant light lay on the water's restless surface like a sheen of oil. There was no wind. As he sat there silent, the small birds and flies and creeping things that lived in the brush began to move around again and sing and eat and dig, the ants around his feet, the hawk in the air.

He understood his own courage; he relied on his strength and skill, and if he lost anyway, he knew God was against him. Her courage mystified him. Alone, a mere girl, friendless, weaponless, in the grip of a cruel enemy, she had fought on, using whatever weapons she could find—a needle, the knife she had tried to reach in the last moments before he led her away. She had never cringed.

He laid on his knee the scrap of silk she had given him and stroked it smooth with his fingers. She had written on it in some faint ink, letters barely recognizable. Suddenly he found himself kissing it, a wrinkled dirty bit of cloth, and fresh floods of tears erupted from him; he howled and rolled on the hillside. He lay on her grave and willed himself to die.

He did not die. Gradually the intensity of his passion subsided into the dull ordinary apprehensions of the moment. The shadow of the hawk glided over him; he realized he was hungry. The dust made him sneeze.

It was the list that sent him on, to do what she had bidden him. He found his horse, eating wild lilies in a crevice near the sea waves, the sweat dried on its sides in long white lines like a map. He mounted and turned its head toward Constantinople.

22

The silk was crumpled, and the names on it barely readable. Irene rolled it around her finger.

“Why did you send her? Why did you send her back to him?”

She glanced at him, where he knelt in the middle of the room, his voice pleading, as if Irene could call her back from the dead. She had never thought to see him again.

She said, “I thought it was necessary.”

His head swayed from side to side. He had come straight here, and his clothes were dusty and his white hair rough and uncombed. He said, “She told me to tell you something. It sounded like something from a story. That here, according to your law, she fell.”

“Yes,” she said, and her throat filled, painfully tight. “From a story. And very fitting.”

Her hand fell to his shoulder. “I'm sorry, Hagen. I loved her too. Remember this: she chose this course. She understood the importance of success and accepted the risk of failure. She gave herself for the Empire. We must be proud and honor her even in mourning.”

His hands covered his face. In spite of his filthy condition, she gathered him up into her arms, and bending she pressed a soft maternal kiss on the top of his head.

“Be patient,” she said softly. “We shall have our revenge. I promise you, we shall see John Cerulis suffer for what he did to her and to us.”

Under her hands he shuddered. She stroked his hair, wondering at his depth of grief. It infected her; tears came to her eyes and spilled in rivulets down her cheeks. She pressed his heavy head against her, thinking with hate of John Cerulis.

In the afternoon, bathed, dressed in fresh clothes, Hagen went by ferry across the narrow water to Chalcedon, and found his brother Rogerius's grave and knelt down before it. He crossed himself and said some prayers and told Rogerius that Karros who had murdered him was dead, and spoke in his mind to Reynard the Black, his father.

Revenge, his father's spirit replied. Revenge, revenge.

That no longer satisfied Hagen. The old, tried way now seemed to him too simple. When he thought of Theophano he did not want to stain her memory with blood.

Revenge, he heard his father say. Blow struck for blow taken. It is the only way.

But there was more to it than that. What had caught Theophano up in its coils and crushed the life out of her would not be destroyed by a course as narrow as that. Something was at work here that went beyond his understanding, and it touched close to his notion of the very nature of evil. He could not see it, but he smelled a monster here.

Under this dirt his brother lay, and he put his hand to the mound, now softly sprung with new grass. “Sleep,” he said. “Sleep, brother.” He laid a stone down beside the head of the mound, a token of his visit there, and walked away across the churchyard to the gate where he had left his horse and sword.

It was a hot day. The Caliph's ambassador was sweating in his heavy ceremonial clothes, in spite of the two servants busy with their fans around him. Irene was sitting down; she had long experience of the Imperial harbor below the Bucoleon Palace, and had made them place her chair at the corner of the L-shaped wharf, where the breeze from the sea flowed in through the break in the protecting breakwaters. She smiled at the ambassador.

“You will convey my deepest respects to your dear master, whom I love as a mother does her son.”

The ambassador had caught sight of his barge rowing briskly up to the wharf through the moored vessels of the Imperial home fleet. “I shall tell him so, Basileus.” He bowed, his eyes turned to watch the barge. He was in some haste to go, she knew, because he had lost all his ready money betting on the Caesarea driver in the Hippodrome. She beckoned, and a page-boy hurried forward with a little velvet-covered box.

“My dear lord.” She gestured toward the box. “A little present from us, in token of a happy visit.”

He took the box, straightening; under the folds of his turban his face was damp and pink. When he opened the box a wordless exclamation slipped from his tongue.

“Permit me.” Irene leaned forward and touched the key in the base of the mechanical bird, and dutifully it flapped its enameled wings and sang.

“Basileus,” he said. “Your generosity far exceeds any of your predecessors; let your name be written in jewels and gold forever.” He bent and kissed her hand.

He would have to give the bird to Harun, the Caliph, and the sight of it would inspire others of the court of Baghdad to want such marvels, which could be made only in the factories of Constantinople. She sat back, smiling. The cool breeze from the sea crossed her face.

“Make haste, sir, your barge awaits.”

The Caliph's man paused only a moment longer, and his eyes met hers; he formed a wicked little smile under the edges of his moustache. “Most excellent of women, let me offer you my sympathies in your trials. I hope when I come back it is to fall once more at your feet, and not those of John Cerulis.”

His eyes sparkled. He was showing off. She lifted her hand to cover her mouth, hiding her own smile.

“Be certain of it, my lord.”

With a crash the gangplank fell across the gunwales of the barge and the edge of the wharf. In the stern of the wide flat craft, a little group of musicians burst into a skirling wild tune, and all the sailors stood up straight in respect. The Caliph's man walked up the plank and on to his barge, the plank was hauled in and stowed, and to the boom-boom of a skin-drum the oars stroked up and out and down, bearing the barge off across the quiet water. Its course divided the square shape of the Imperial harbor almost in half. Nosing out the opening in the breakwaters, it met the open water of the Golden Horn and the drumbeat picked up.

The Empress sat where she was. The breeze here was cool from the water and this place was quiet and when she went back into the palace, high on the cliff behind her, she would face worried people and treacherous ones as well.

John Cerulis was marching on the City, not with an army, but worse, a fiery-eyed prophet from the wilds who had proclaimed him emperor. Every eye in Constantinople was turned on her now, speculating: had she lost her call to the throne of Christ? Any false step now, any mistake, any sign of weakness, and they would turn on her, as they had turned on so many before her, and tear her to pieces.

They, less one. Now, from the next wharf of the Imperial harbor, another barge was sliding out toward the opening in the long grey lines of the breakwater.

This barge was bigger than ibn-Ziad's. Bright with scarves and gold-embroidered silks, crowded with servants, it passed by the Empress as she sat there alone on the wharf watching. She did not raise her hand in greeting. Nor did the Parakoimomenos, seated—enthroned —on a canopied chair in the front of the barge, facing the stern. Perhaps until the very last he wanted to keep his eyes on Constantinople. Perhaps he was merely loath to look upon Lesbos, the place of his exile, before he had to. Like the whistling Memnon he sat there with his hands on his knees, staring away into the empty air, as he glided by her. The Empress waited until he was gone before she laughed.