The Belt of Gold (31 page)

“Stop milling at me—I don't take that from anyone!”

Hagen's breath was stuck fast in his throat. Michael's strength amazed him; for a long moment, staring into the other man's eyes, he worked over in his mind a way to beat him, but then, sighing out his lungs, he relaxed, leaning back, his arm loose in the other man's hold.

“Let go of me.”

Through the torn, stained sleeve of his shirt, the fresh blood suddenly bloomed. Michael saw it, and his eyes widened. Letting go of Hagen, he slid away into his seat again.

“I'm sorry. I didn't know you were hurt.”

Hagen pulled his sleeve down. “You're strong, for a Greek.”

“Therefore you want to fight me? God, you barbarians.”

Hagen laughed, seeing this a new way, and shook his head. “I don't have anything to prove to you.”

“Nor I to you,” Michael said swiftly.

Hagen reached for his wine cup. “Whatever you say.” Ishmael had told him that he was wrong about Prince Michael, and perhaps he was. It would be hard to be a man in Constantinople, with every breath prescribed by law.

“How did she die?” Michael asked.

“I told you, John Cerulis had her killed.”

“And you are letting it go at that?”

Hagen raised his eyebrows at him. “Your cousin will not let me take him.”

He raised his cup in a salute. “To Theophano.”

“To Theophano.” Michael lifted his cup in answer. They drank deep.

“She would never have gone home with me anyway,” Hagen said. “She would have never liked Braasefeldt.”

“‘Braasefeldt.' What a name. That's where you come from? What is it like?”

“Not like here.”

In his mind, he summoned up the place, the dark swift-flowing many-fingered river, rushing through the fields and marshes, in among the wet knees of trees, and on the high ground, the hall, its doorposts made of the trunks of trees still rooted in the earth. He smelled the reeds and the river and the sea and heard the wind, and felt the icy cold of the winter mornings when the first sun brought the mist like wraiths up from the flat water.

“No, in truth,” Michael said, “I doubt Theophano would have done well in your Brazen Field.” He propped his elbows on the table. “Do you want to go back there? Why?”

“It's my home. I have things to do there—” His mill, his dike, his reclaimed fields, his ripening oats and hay, the wealth of which money was the counterfeit. “Besides, when John Cerulis is emperor—”

“John Cerulis will never become emperor.”

“He is becoming so even now. All over the City, he is killing off the Empress's supporters, and she will do nothing. I talked to her of it and she gave me some drivel about God and faith—”

“She will overcome him,” Michael said. He gestured, and a wench brought them another jug.

“She is a woman. What can she do against a man as determined as John Cerulis?”

Michael leaned toward him over the table. “Don't be a fool, Hagen. Don't think your balls are made of gold. My cousin may be a woman, but mark this: she was born the daughter of a poor provincial nobleman; she had no treasure, no friends, no education, not even a place in the City, but today she is Basileus. John Cerulis is rich, but he came into it with his christening, and although he has been plotting all his life, he has no more power now than he was born to.”

Hagen reached for his cup. “As Ishmael says, the ways of God are inscrutable.”

Michael shrugged. “Water always runs downhill. I see no need to find the hand of God in every river.”

“You're a very reasonable man. I thought that was against the law here.”

“I'm allowed to be, since I confine my use of it to horse-races.”

Hagen was getting drunk. He reached for the cup again, wanting to be drunker. He had made a mistake about Michael; his passions had fooled his judgment. Now, finding the Prince's eyes on him, he lifted his cup in a little salute.

“Pax.”

They drank.

27

In the morning, with the rest of the Imperial Service, Nicephoros heard mass in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, and saw once again the Crowned Christ before him in the person of the Basileus. Together with his fellows, he knelt down and put his face to the floor and worshipped her. Overhead, the great dome seemed to float upon the radiance of light that streamed through the windows, as if, when Justinian built this place, he made a union here between Heaven and earth.

In his prayers Nicephoros begged God for peace, for guidance, and for answers to his questions. His mind was in possession of a devil. Over and over the vision of the City Prefect, with the rope around his neck, presented itself to his inner eye; since the massacre had begun of John Cerulis's victims, the strangled man had come to mean the Empire, dying in the grip of a malevolent ambition.

I will become a monk, he repeated, a verbal drug to stupefy the action of his mind; yet this expedient served nothing; with clarity undimmed, intensity undiluted, the vision forced itself upon him, not as something complete and finished but as a riddle which he had to answer.

He had no answer.
I will become a monk,
he told himself, and shut his eyes, and longed for sleep, or drink, or opium to quell this dream.

After the mass he went into the vestibule of the church, where behind several painted screens of wood, the Empress's women were removing her diadem and robes of gold. Kneeling down, Nicephoros pressed his lips to the floor, and taking from his clothes a letter he offered it to the Basileus.

“What is this?” Irene looked at the oblong of paper in her hand.

“It was written by the City Prefect,” Nicephoros said, in a steady voice. “It was conveyed to me by his executors, who found it among his other effects, addressed to me.”

She gave him a sharp glance, opened the paper, and began to read.

“My dear Nicephoros,” the letter began; Nicephoros had read it over and over, his friend's voice sounding in his ears. “When you come to read this, I shall be dead. You will blame yourself, but you are blameless—it was I who condemned myself to everlasting torment, when I corrupted my office.

“Now, at the extremity of my pitiful ruined life, I have yet one more crime to confess to you. Because, dear Nicephoros, you were wrong about me. It was not my misuses of the money from my office that made it impossible for me to face the Basileus. It was something far worse—the knowledge that I had joined in a conspiracy against her, and the fear that she, who reads men's souls as easily as men read books, would see what I was doing. Yes. I lent my support to the cause of John Cerulis.

“Why? I don't know. Boredom, I suppose. False pride, that a man should have to bow down before a woman. Love of intrigue. The inability to do well at my proper work. Who knows? I did it. So be it.”

At that, the Basileus paused, and her eyes stabbed at Nicephoros before her; her face was harsh as a mask of the Gorgon. Nicephoros looked away.

“Now,” she read on, “I will do whatever can be done to redeem my disgrace.”

What followed was a betrayal of John Cerulis. The Prefect in three or four quick paragraphs described the inner workings of the entire conspiracy: the passwords, the payoffs, who had what power, and at what signal would use it. Where the treasure was; who his spies were. Everything was there.

“Too late, perhaps,” said Nicephoros. “Yet he did the honorable thing, at the end.”

“Too late,” she said, in a meditative voice. She folded the letter. With a gesture, she sent away her waiting women, and nodding to Nicephoros drew him after her into the back of the vestibule, where a little window opened on the garden; outside, a mulberry tree was bearing fruit, littering the ground beneath.

“Had we known all this a week sooner,” Nicephoros said, “we might have saved many lives.”

“Perhaps.” Her voice was still thin, restrained, concealing her anger, he thought. “Tomorrow is Saint Febronia's Day. Tomorrow John will enter Constantinople with his holy man. But every soul in the City will be at the Hippodrome, waiting for the race for the Golden Belt.”

Nicephoros bowed in response. He kept silent, thinking that John surely knew this as well as they did, and when all attention was focussed on the horse-race, the moment would be perfect to seize control of the government, now decimated and half-paralyzed by the assassinations of the past days.

“He will strike then,” she said, in her cool, tight voice, looking down at the letter in her hand.

“Indeed,” said Nicephoros.

“Yet perhaps this last pitiable gesture—this effort at atonement— will not be in vain. Here, Nicephoros.” She put the letter into his hand. “On the day of the race, you will take what this letter gives you. Seize John's treasure and his fortresses, confiscate all his belongings, in the name of the Basileus.”

“Yes, Augustus.”

“Then if John Cerulis and the Basileus should come to be the same, on the day after Saint Febronia's—”

She shrugged. Her face was hard, sucked dry, and older than he ever remembered seeing her. He stared at her a moment, shocked. He had not seen before how thin she was becoming. Her eyes were sunken in hollows of bone and failing flesh, camouflaged with make-up. The Parakoimomenos had said that she was sick. Nicephoros held his breath, fighting against the quivering panic in his belly: he saw death in her face.

She said, “Perhaps he would enjoy watching the race from the Imperial balcony.”

“What?” Nicephoros said, startled.

“Issue him the invitation. This time, maybe, he will not decline it, if the messenger be clean.” She laughed, a sound that raised the hackles at the back of his neck; her eyes were too bright, too intense, like a flame fighting against the wind. “He may watch the race from beneath the purple.”

“Yes, Basileus.” Had she gone mad, at the last? With the whole of her power falling to pieces around her, why would she invite the author of her misfortunes to a place of honor at her side? Now her gaze fell on him, and her lips smoothed into a gentle smile.

“Nicephoros, you old fool. Do you blame yourself for the Prefect's death? Yes, I see you do. What an old fool you are.” She put out her hand and touched his cheek. Confused and miserable, he sank to his knees, the letter in his hand. When he looked up, she was going.

Ishmael waited until dusk fell, and stole up to the edge of John Cerulis's camp, spread out over the low crown of a hillock north of the City walls. A ring of bonfires, for which the soldiers had stripped the whole area of wood, lit up the border of the camp, and the guards were supposed to march with sword and axe along the spaces between each blaze. Of late, however, they had grown easy and confident, and now sat in groups around the largest fire, talking and drinking. Ishmael drifted around the outside of the ring until he found a place unguarded and walked into the camp.

Three large silky tents stood on the flat ground, and many smaller shelters filled up the sloping spaces. As he walked through the little city of cloth, a noise warned him, and he stood in the shadow to watch John Cerulis, the center of a cavalcade, march by on his way to his dinner. Tumblers preceded him, and flutes and drums, and John himself wore a tunic of cloth of gold that shimmered in the torchlight of the procession. Ishmael realized that this man believed himself already emperor.

He had given little thought to John Cerulis in this. If the world ended, of course, it did not matter who was emperor. But it was so hard to keep faith. The world was here, insistent, forcing itself in on his senses, filling up his mind with trivial things, like eating, and wanting his wife now, and, above all, the race, the Golden Belt, the challenge that he ached so much to meet. It had been days since he saw the Heavenly City, days since he heard Daniel, and he needed to hear him again, now, face to face.

He walked back and forth through the camp, stopping at each of the tents, and watching who came and left; if none, then he went in and looked, and satisfying himself that the holy man was not there, moved on. Most of the people in the camp were involved in feeding John Cerulis his dinner; nobody stopped him or even looked his way.

In the end, he found him, not under a roof at all, but in the back of the camp, near the latrines and the picketed horses, sitting with his back against a dead tree. Ishmael almost walked past him without seeing him. He stopped and stared at the old man for a long while, unsure, and afraid to speak.

“Who are you?” Daniel said, at last.

“I am—” Ishmael knelt down, his hands together. “Master, I am one who needs you desperately.”

“Come closer.”

Ishmael crept closer on his knees, and the holy man peered at him, frowning.

“Well? What do you want?”

“I want—”

He fell down on his face beside the holy man, and sobbed.

“I want the Heavenly City. I saw it, when you called it down—but now, I cannot—I have lost my faith. I need you to tell me again that the City will come, and that I can enter into it, and be safe and sure forever.”

For a moment, silent, on his face on the ground, he waited for the reassuring fatherly words. Then something struck him sharply over the head.

He yelped, startled, and put his hand to his head. The old man glared at him. He brandished the stick at Ishmael again.

“You wretch. You want it made easy for you, do you? Do you want the City of God? Then come with me, boy, back to the desert, to the barren mountains. Eat thorns, and drink the alkali, let the sun burn you, the night wind freeze you—for there is the City of God! Not ease and luxury, boy, but suffering and death are the City of God! Pain and suffering and struggle and death!”

He struck Ishmael over the head again, and the charioteer crouched and flung up his hand to ward off the blows. The holy man lowered his staff. With a look of contempt he turned his face deliberately away from Ishmael and composed himself again in his inward thoughts, blocking out the world.

Ishmael straightened slowly. As if the blows had broken open the shell of illusion, he saw in a new way, fresh and clear. He saw how he had been gulled, or how he had gulled himself.

As the Heavenly City faded away from his mind, there rose up strong and irresistible another place, the Hippodrome, the crunch of the sand, the smell of the excited horses, the roar of the crowd, the passion of the race. He backed away from the old man, suddenly in a haste; with every second the lure of the Hippodrome grew stronger. What was he doing here, with the race only days away? At the edge of the camp, he whirled and ran.

Daniel escaped once, and ran away toward the wilderness, but John Cerulis's men caught him and brought him back to the camp. That he took for a sign that God had work for him yet in the affairs of the new emperor.

On Saint Febronia's Day he would enter Constantinople, and preach again to the multitude, and he decided to denounce John Cerulis then, and cause his downfall. But then John Cerulis summoned him before him and said that there would be no great entry into the City after all.

“The usurping female has proclaimed a challenge race in the Hippodrome for that day,” John said, sitting in his ivory chair, smiling. “No one would come to watch you or hear you preach, and therefore it is a waste of time. I suspect, anyway, that your purpose in my elevation has been fulfilled. We shall keep you by us for the while, and when we have been crowned and enthroned, shall find you a quiet monastery to retire to.”

“Why can I not go back to my mountain?” Daniel asked.

The Emperor's lean pale face elongated with his smile. “We feel perhaps it were better you did not have so much freedom. The temptations of the world might overwhelm your tender spirit. We shall see that your saintliness is properly maintained.”

Daniel backed away, repulsed, as if the man lounging in the chair before him had been transformed into a giant reptilian slug. Another man came up to the new emperor and knelt beside his chair and whispered in his ear, and John laughed.

“She has played into my hands this time. The garrotte is closing around her neck, and now she has given me the last necessary fitting for it—on the day of the Challenge Race, she shall wear my crown no more!”

Daniel crept away out of the tent. No one bothered him, so long as he made no effort to leave. He went into the back of the camp, near the horse lines, and sat down under a poor wretched tree that had been hacked up by the soldiers, and thought deeply on his sins.

He had made this possible. He had proclaimed John Cerulis the emperor. Now God was reminding him, over and over, that it was his duty to rectify that evil.

While he was sitting there, God sent a messenger to him. In the shape of a townsman from Constantinople, an angel appeared before him, and reminded him rudely of the sermon he had preached, and of the delusion he had brought on the people of Constantinople. He sent the angel off with assurances of his own understanding and settled himself again to his plan for the destruction of John Cerulis.

On Saint Febronia's Day, not too early, because John Cerulis did not rise early in the morning, they set off to enter Constantinople. They went in by the gate at the foot of the Mesê. Daniel rode on a white donkey with a guard on either side to lead it. Behind him came the train of the new Emperor.

They went in through the gate, and a little crowd gathered to greet them sent up a thin piping cheer. Little children with garlands of flowers on their heads ran out to scatter a few rose petals on the street before Daniel and the Emperor, and music played.

Slowly they made their way up the Mesê. Daniel had never been to the City before and he gawked around him, amazed, at the broad white street, the rows of columns, the fora spreading out around him in great luxurious spaces of pavement and shops, fountains and statues. They passed a church with a roof of gold, and another from which music sounded. Steadily the road led them upward, toward the Palace, now visible on the highland, against the sky, a clutter of white horizontal lines, with the great dome of the Church of the Holy Wisdom a soft breast among the rigid angles.