2

“God, I hate churches,” Hagen said. “When we get home again, I’m never going inside another church. I’ve earned so much absolution, anyway, these two years, that when we get home, I’ll sin for free the rest of my life.”

“Be quiet,” Rogerius said.

They had left their horses in a grove of trees at the gate, and now, approaching the little stone church, they unbuckled their sword belts and laid their weapons down on the uncovered porch at the door. Hagen went first into the church. He pushed back the hood of his cloak; inside the church, the jingle of his pilgrim’s bells sounded noisy and irreverent.

The church was very small, six steps from door to altar. Fresh whitewash covered the walls and the dome. Disappointed, he saw that there were none of the magnificent pictures here that he had gotten used to finding in such places in the Holy Land. On the curved wall behind the altar was a plain cross of wood. With his brother beside him, Hagen knelt down to pray.

Rogerius crossed himself, pressed his palms together, lowered his head, closed his eyes, and gave himself up to devotions. Hagen shifted his weight from knee to knee, already restless. It was part of their penance that they could not pass by any church on their road without stopping to pray, and he was heartily sick of it. It irritated him that his brother, who had done the deeds for which they were now repenting with as much initial enthusiasm as Hagen, had become so passionately godly as a result. In as few words as possible Hagen asked for God’s protection on their journey—they were still half the world away from home—and began to look curiously around him.

This church was little different from dozens of others they had seen in the twenty months they had been on pilgrimage. The ceiling was domed, and two little windows cut the side walls. A few stubs of candles were stuck onto the altar rail a few feet from him. This close to Constantinople, many palmers probably came by this way, going to and from Jerusalem. He wished there were some pictures to look at. His knees already hurt.

Then the door behind them opened and a single figure hurried into the church, and Hagen glanced keenly around.

He did not want either his horse or his sword stolen while he was reconciling himself to Heaven. But the hooded figure kneeling down at the altar was a woman.

A pretty woman. She tipped up her face toward the cross; her skin was smooth and pale, her cheeks brushed with color that had not come from God; her black hair swept back under her hood from a deep peak above her brow. She crossed herself in the Greek fashion and, turning, cast a look back over her shoulder at the door.

As she did so, she saw Hagen staring at her, and swiftly she lowered her eyes, and the color on her cheeks took on more the hue of nature. But she did not pray. Instead, crouched forward, she twisted to look behind her again, back toward the way she had come in.

Hagen looked where she was looking, and Rogerius nudged him hard in the side with his elbow. “This is a church,” his brother said. “Pray.”

Hagen ignored him. The door stood halfway open, and through the gap he could see several men on the porch and hear their muttered voices. He shifted his attention to the girl again; she was biting her lip, staring straight ahead of her, her hands tightly gripped together, and once again, while he watched, she threw a look of fear behind her at the door.

“What are you doing?” Rogerius asked.

With a nod of his head, Hagen indicated the girl; he got up and walked back through the church to the door.

He was a tall man, Hagen, even for a Frank, and when he went out the door, the several men standing there on the porch backed up quickly to let him through. They were Greeks, by their beards and leather armor. There were four of them. Hagen kept his eyes on them, reaching behind him for his sword belt on the porch, and standing there to buckle it on. The weight of his sword made him smile. He put his hands on his hips and smiling faced the four Greeks, who edged together into a tighter pack and pretended not to notice him.

“Here to talk to the Lord?” he said; he had learned a lot of Greek, in the course of the pilgrimage.

The four men shuffled their feet. One of them, a fat man who wore rosettes of red-dyed leather on his shoulders, turned his head and without meeting Hagen’s eyes said, “On your way, barbarian.”

“Oh, no,” Hagan said. “You go on yours.”

The Greeks moved, their feet crunching on the stone porch and the single step, their leather armor creaking. The man with the red rosettes turned to one of his fellows and said, “Go in and get her.”

That man started toward the door. Hagen took a step after him, and the other Greeks swung to face the big Frank, and the door flew wide open and Rogerius stood there.

Shorter than Hagen, stockier, he filled up the doorway, and seeing his brother involved in this dispute, he put his shoulder to the door frame and looked the Greeks before him up and down.

“What’s this?”

Hagen reached behind him for his brother’s sword, the belt wrapped around the scabbard, and held it out to him. “These city people are after that girl in there.” He spoke Frankish.

“Oh,” Rogerius said, and glanced over his shoulder into the church. He slung the heavy brass-studded belt around his waist. “Well, that’s too bad.”

“Look,” said the man with the red rosettes on his shoulders. “You two don’t know what you are doing. Don’t get yourselves into trouble here. That woman is no concern of yours.”

“Walk,” Hagen said, and put his hand to the hilt of his sword.

“I’m warning you—”

“I’m warning you, fellow. I’ve been all the way to Golgotha and I have a lot of currency with God, and I don’t mind spending a little of it to rid the world of a few of you backwards-signing Greeks.”

Rogerius was looking at him, his forehead creased; he did not speak the language as well as Hagen. Behind him, suddenly, the girl appeared.

The Greeks saw her just as Hagen did, and as one man they lunged toward her. She was behind Rogerius, and when the Greeks jumped toward him, he stepped sideways, blocking their way. His sword leapt out of its scabbard with a clash of iron. Hagen swung around, putting the four Greeks between him and his brother. He whipped his long sword free, and as ever when he felt its power in his hands a heady passion filled him and he roared with exultation.

The Greeks scattered, two to the left, two to the right. The man with the red rosettes cried, “Away! Stand off—” None of them drew a weapon. Still backing away from the two Franks, they circled off the porch and banded together again in the churchyard.

“We’ll get her later,” the fat man with the red rosettes said to the others, and herded them swiftly away. Looking back over his shoulder, he shouted, “And you, too, barbarians! Don’t think you’ve gotten away with anything.”

Rogerius laughed. “What cowards.” His sword slithered back into its scabbard.

Hagen watched the Greeks, who were leaving the churchyard; there were several horses tied to the trees a hundred yards away, in the opposite direction from the two Franks’ horses, and the Greeks mounted up and rode off at a brisk trot. Slowly Hagen put his sword up. He disliked drawing it without bloodying it; he imagined the sword to go hungry. Turning, he looked beyond his brother at the girl.

She was gone. “God’s bones,” he said, and pushed past Rogerius into the church.

At the side of the church, the girl was struggling to climb out the narrow window. Her cloak hindered her and she flung it down, and Hagen bounded across the church and caught her around the waist.

“Let me go!” She twisted violently in his grasp and tried to hit him. He held her arms down against her sides; she was light as a child, and he held her without effort. She smelled wonderfully of roses. Rogerius picked up her cloak from the floor.

“What is happening here? Hagen, put her down. She won’t go anywhere.”

“You think so?”

“Put her down,” Rogerius said.

Reluctantly Hagen lowered the girl down onto her feet, and Rogerius hung the cloak around her shoulders again. She looked from one to the other of them. In spite of the thick paint on her eyes and lips and cheeks, she was very pretty, and rich, too, by the weight of metal in her ears and around her neck. Her clothes were torn and filthy but her skin was white as cream, and her hair black as ebony.

She said, “I suppose I should thank you for saving my life.”

“I suppose you might want to,” Hagen said. “Were they trying to kill you? Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You’re lying,” Hagen said.

Swiftly he translated what she had said into Frankish, and Rogerius shook his head, exasperated. “She’s lying.”

“See? He agrees with me,” Hagen told the girl, “and he’s nowise as clever as I am. Come along with us. A church is no place to talk about things like this, and we are armed men now.”

The girl looked from him to his brother, and under her silk bodice her breast rose and fell in a deep noisy sigh. She walked toward the door with an air of being taken prisoner, and the two Franks followed her out.

They crossed the open yard toward their horses. The girl looked keenly down the road in both directions, obviously searching for the four Greek soldiers; she held her cloak tight over her breast with both little fists. Hagen wondered how she had come here. Her thin embroidered shoes, battered now, were worthless for walking. Probably the four Greeks had made off with her mount.

He said, “My name is Hagen, and this is my brother Rogerius. Our father was Reynard the Black. We are from the Braasefeldt, in Frankland, and we have been on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher.”

“Tell her we mean her no harm,” Rogerius said, “and that God must have sent us to help her, because clearly those other people did mean her harm, and so she should be forthcoming with us.”

Hagen repeated this in Greek. The girl listened with no warmth in her expression, but when he was done, she put up her hand and brushed back a stray tress of her hair from her forehead and nodded to them both.

“Very well. I owe you my life—perhaps a good deal more than my life. My name is Theophano. I am a handmaiden of the Basileus Autocrator, whom God protects.”

Hagen looked at his brother. “She says she’s a servant of the Empress.”

“Well, she’s rich enough, look at the jewels around her neck.”

Hagen had already assessed her jewelry; he had killed people, during his bad days, for less than she was wearing, although of course he killed no women. He said, “What are you doing out here by yourself, Theophano? Why were those men after you?”

“I can’t tell you,” said Theophano. “But I will pay you to take me to Constantinople. I’ll pay you splendidly.”

“We are going to Constantinople anyway,” Hagen said.

“I’ll pay you,” she said again.

Rogerius swung up into his saddle. Hagen said, “You would pay us best by telling us why you are in trouble.” His hands on her waist, he lifted her up behind his brother.

“You must believe me. I have done nothing wrong. Those men are enemies of the Basileus, whom God protects.”

Rogerius was looking impatiently at Hagen, and obedient to the look on his face Hagen told him what the girl was saying. Turning to his own horse, he stepped up into the saddle and gathered his reins, and side by side they started along the road.

“Don’t harass her,” Rogerius said. “She’s been through enough difficulties, can’t you see that?”

The girl sat behind him, her arms around his waist, her breast against his back. Hagen saw that his brother’s sympathies were engaged—Rogerius was quick to defend small, weak creatures. Hagen licked his smile maliciously wide.

“Do you want me to carry her?”

“No, no,” Rogerius said.

“Then you could look at her all you will. As it is, only I can see her.”

“I will carry her,” Rogerius said firmly.

“She’s very pretty. Much prettier than the one in Bethlehem.”

“What do you think her trouble is?”

“Us, now.”

“Do you think she’s really one of the Empress’s women?”

Hagen shrugged. They had come through Constantinople on their way into the Holy Land, and he had learned there of the Empress Irene, who ruled in the Greek lands, alone, with no husband, although she kept the man’s title of Basileus Autocrator. She had the reputation of being a she-wolf. She had taken the throne by force from her own son, whose eyes had been put out.

He turned to Theophano again. “Whose men were those who were after you?”

She looked gravely at him, her arms around his brother’s waist, her wide blue eyes candid as a baby’s. “I cannot tell you. Please, trust me.”

“We saved you, didn’t we? Now the master of those men will bear us a grudge. We have to protect ourselves.”

“Such heroes as you must have no fear of anything,” she said.

Hagen put back his head and laughed a loud laugh. He told Rogerius what she had said, and Rogerius smiled wide and glanced over his shoulder at her, chuckling.

“Why are you laughing at me?” she asked, her pride clearly touched.

“Heroes we are not, my lady,” said Hagen. “We came on this pilgrimage because otherwise we would have been hanged, in Frankland.”

Her eyes grew wider. She shrank back away from Rogerius. “But you are men of gentle birth.”

“Our blood is as noble as any family’s in Christendom—the King is our kinsman. That was why we had the choice between hanging and pilgrimage.”

“Then you have chosen wisely. God will save you. God will help you cleanse your souls.”

Hagen shrugged; he was keeping watch around them, as they travelled, for the four Greeks. He decided he liked her. In spite of the paint and the lies and her being Greek to begin with, he saw something honest and solid in her. He told Rogerius the trend of their conversation and his brother looked over his shoulder at her with a protecting and tender expression that made Hagen snort.

“You are probably right, about Rogerius,” he said to the girl. “Since we saw the places where Christ walked and died, he has been steadily becoming more and more holy. It’s getting hard for me to keep company with him.”

“He speaks no Greek?” She peered at Rogerius over his shoulder.

“Very little.”

“Yet he has a kindly face.”

Rogerius looked down over his shoulder at her again, and she smiled at him.

Hagen turned forward again. Rogerius’s new saintliness had not extended to a life of chastity. He had always done well with women; he would do well with this one too. Shut out of their company, Hagen cleared his throat, reproved himself for envy, and pointed up ahead of them, where the road wound over the barren hillside.

“That looks like a good place for an ambush. I’ll go make sure her friends aren’t waiting for us.” With a nudge of his heels, he lifted his horse into a gallop down the road, toward the curve in the distance, where great stones crowded up against the way.

The barbarian knight’s cloak was of some coarse stuff that smelled of horses, but his face was noble, almost gentle, although of course not Greek. Theophano trusted him. She liked him better than his brother, perhaps because of his brother’s insistence on asking questions. And she remembered how Hagen had caught her and held her against her will.

Now Hagen was going on ahead of them. Theophano slipped her hand inside her cloak, down under the silk of her tunic, and fingered out the list of names.

If John Cerulis’s men came back in force, two knights would not stop them, even these two, with their great swords and their air of joy in fighting. She would have to give herself up to save lives. What was important was the list. If Cerulis’s men found it, many more would die than Theophano. She leaned forward toward this knight who spoke little Greek and therefore certainly did not read Greek and held out the paper to him.

“Please,” she said. “Hide this.”

His brother had said he was of a holy bent. She had to trust him; she did trust him. He looked down at her, unsmiling, and took the paper.

“Hide it.” She pronounced the words slowly and exactly, nodding to him, and he understood. He understood better than she had hoped; he looked ahead of them toward his brother, now only a speck on the road between the great grey high-piled boulders, and without even unfolding the paper to look at it, he slipped it away inside his tunic.

Theophano sighed, relaxing. She smiled at him, and with the worry eased from her mind she saw that he was a handsome man, in his way, rough and without graces, but full of vigor. His body was pleasantly large and solid under the rough cloak. She leaned her cheek against his back, her arms around his waist.

“Theophano,” he said, caressing her name with his voice, and his hand clasped hers above his belt buckle. She smiled, her face against his back. Love knew all languages. The brother was coming back. She moved her fingers against her new friend’s palm, a little promise in the touch.

She had heard that the hair of the western barbarians was blond, and Rogerius’s hair was the gold of wheat, Hagen’s almost white. As they rode on, they talked back and forth. She learned that they had been on pilgrimage for the better part of two years, going to the holy shrines of Syria and Palestine, and rather timidly she asked what sins they had committed to require so great a penance. That got from Hagen another roaring laugh, but no answer. She remembered the yell with which he had drawn his sword, and shivered. Men like this were best avoided, used only when necessary, paid promptly, dismissed at once. She would have to get rid of them, once she was safe in Constantinople, before they could embarrass her before the Basileus.

As soon as the thought formed, she was ashamed. They had saved her from the despicable Karros—more important than herself, they had saved her mission, however inadvertently. She should not be thinking of getting rid of them, but of rewarding them somehow, for their service to her and to the Basileus.

The road wound down the hillside before them, switching back and forth across the steep slope; the brother on his bay horse was far ahead now, galloping easily along before a plume of dust. She pressed her cheek against the harsh cloak of the man before her. That same rude power and lack of refinement that would have made them into fools at court would save her again if Karros tried to seize her from them. She saw the deeper lesson in that. God measured the value of men; she accepted what God sent to her, gladly and without judgment.

The knight before her murmured something to her. His hand pressed warm over hers. She smiled against his back. God would not mind if she gave this handsome and courageous knight the only reward she had to bestow. He spoke little Greek, but that was no hindrance, once they got past talking. She tightened her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek to the warmth of his back.

“Theophono,” he said, crooning out the syllables. She smiled and shut her eyes, feeling very safe, at least for a while.

They stopped for the night at an inn beside the dark sea. The wind out of the west was blowing a storm down on them, and the waves were breaking on the rocks of the shore with a crash and hiss like a great boiling cauldron. The inn stood outside the little white town of Chrysopolis, where the ferry took on passengers for Constantinople, across the narrows that separated Asia from Europe.

Besides the common room, there were several smaller rooms on the second floor, which the innkeeper let out to overnight guests, and this night there were few travellers. Hagen and his brother and the girl Theophano hired a room all to themselves.

It would have mattered little to Rogerius and Theophano if they had been surrounded by strangers. They saw only each other. Somehow over the afternoon’s ride their wordless companionship had ripened to a precipitous lust. From the moment he lifted her down from his horse, Rogerius touched her, his arm protectively around her shoulders, his head inclined toward her. Hand in hand, the two stood smiling like idiots while Hagen paid for their room, and, in the room, they leaned together, their gazes locked, almost breathless, until Hagen said something only half-worded and went out and left them alone.

It made him angry. He liked women; he loved his brother; but he had been riding all day long and wanted to get his weight off his feet and rest. Now he had to wander off through the inn looking for something to do, while his brother and this Greek slut bounced the bed around. In a sour mood, he went down to the common room and bought a jug of wine.

The common room was filling up with people—travellers and local folk—drinking, calling for food and for their friends. Alone, lonely, Hagen took the jug and went out behind the inn, off through the sharp-smelling pine trees, down through rocks and beds of fallen needles to the shore.

The wind was blasting in over the water. The sun was going down. Out across the black water, whitecaps danced and leapt as thick as stars in the sky of a clear night. Hagen sat down on a rock and pulled out the cork from his wine and took a long full drink of the wine.

Tomorrow they would take the ferry to Constantinople. That meant they were halfway home, because from Constantinople they could take a boat to Italy, and Italy was in the hands of the Franks. By Christmas they would be back at the Braasefeldt.

He drank more of the wine, remembering the great hall that his grandfather had built, with the skulls of bear and deer nailed to the rafters, the hearth of massive stones, the smell of meat roasting. The sound of Frankish voices. To hear his own tongue again! To taste beer again, real beer and not the thin insipid stuff these Easterners brewed. To eat the bread of home again—

He had plans, for when he reached home again. In alien lands, among strangers night after night, he had talked to Rogerius about Braasefeldt. They would build dikes all along the river, raise a mill, drain the marshes for farmland. No more robbery, no more feuds, no more going around looking for trouble and looking out for it, too, hands ever at their sword hilts, drawing at shadows. If he had not learned to pray as well as Rogerius, he had at least learned not to sin.

The wine tasted bitter but it relaxed him. It fed his lonely melancholy. Looking back, he saw now that he had wasted his youth in drunken brawls and getting revenge on his enemies. Avenging his father’s murder had been necessary, although Reynard had been so bad a man it was inevitable that somebody would slay him; but most of the other feuds and quarrels Hagen had pursued with such single-minded devotion had been only excuses for frivolous crimes. Now he was ready for a quiet, honest life, ordering his serfs, protecting his borders, fighting the wars of his king. Marrying. Raising a brood of little boys with white hair and hot tempers, and little girls, too, to marry off into other families, to make alliances against his enemies. He was tired of being an outlaw. He wanted respect, connections, and honor.

The sun was gone. The light was bleeding from the sky. Already the sea was dark as the waters of Hell. He got up and walked unsteadily along the rocky shore, kicking stones into the water. The waves surged up and broke over the teeth of the rocks and spread their sloppy suds out and drew back, rattling and banging the cobbles of the beach. There in the west, pure and bright, the evening star shone like a drop of heavenly fire. The jug was empty. Turning his back to the wind, he trudged onward toward the inn.

He went in through the back of the yard, where cats fought over a mountain of garbage, and circling upwind of the stench, he headed for the side door into the inn. Halfway there, he stopped dead in his tracks. Off in the front of the inn, barely in sight around the corner, stood a man in leather armor, holding the reins of a group of horses.

Hagen recognized him at once: it was one of the Greeks from the little stone church. He broke into a run toward the front of the inn. His room was on the far side, in the second story. Just as he reached the corner of the inn, the other three Greeks from the church burst running out the front door.

The leader, the fat man with the red rosettes on his shoulders, saw Hagen and yelled. He leapt up into his saddle, whipped his reins out of his friend’s hands, and charged straight at Hagen. The two men behind him were slower; one was dragging his leg.

The horse bolted down on Hagen, who dodged to one side, coming up against the wall of the inn. Wrenching his mount’s head around, the Greek with the rosettes spurred it at a gallop toward the gate, and without waiting around for his men fled away down the road. The others were scrambling into their saddles and turning to follow. Hagen ran into the inn.

The common room was packed with people. He had to fight through the press of bodies to the stairs. There, the crowd eased; he went up the stairs two steps at a time and raced down the narrow corridor. The door to his room stood halfway open. Hagen shouted his brother’s name and rushed into the room.

The bed was all pulled apart, the covers strewn halfway across the room, and the window shutters were thrown wide open. The only occupant was Rogerius, who lay naked in the middle of the room on his back, a great puddle of blood spreading across the floor. Hagen knelt down by his brother and lifted him, and from the first touch he knew that Rogerius was dead.

Still, he lifted him up carefully, to keep from hurting him, and held him in his arms, his mind stuck, waiting for his brother to come alive again.

A shadow across the door brought his attention that way. The innkeeper, spitting out an oath, strode into the room.

“Who did this? Who are you people?”

Hagen was struggling with himself; he loved his brother more than any other creature alive. Slowly he got himself to carry Rogerius across the room to the bed and lay him down there. A great wound in Rogerius’s chest smeared blood all over Hagen’s clothes, and there was a wound in the side of his neck also, a wound given from behind.

The innkeeper was pressing after him, shouting, “Who did this? Who did it?” With a sharp twist of his head Hagen faced him.

“Get out of here.”

“This is my inn!”

“I don’t care; get out of here before I kill you.”

The innkeeper’s jowls sagged. Slowly he backed up, away from Hagen, into the crowd of curious gawkers that now packed the doorway and the corridor outside. Whirling, the innkeeper drove them all out of the room again. The door shut.

Hagen took the patched and ragged sheet from the floor and laid it over his brother’s body, and knelt down and said some prayers for Rogerius’s soul, still fresh from life. He imagined the soul a white moth that fluttered up and up toward Heaven, burdened down by the weight of sin, and he sent his prayers to it like helping wings. Slowly, as he ran out of holy words, a red tide of rage drowned the white vision. He began to weep. Clutching his brother’s hand, he cried and swore and thought about the four Greeks who had done this.

He thought about Theophano. She had not been with them when they ran out of the inn, and on the evidence, he guessed she had gone out the window.

He mastered himself; he opened the door, and finding the innkeeper outside in the hall he beckoned him into the room.

“What is this?” the innkeeper said. “I keep a decent establishment here. Things like this are very hard to explain to the authorities.”

“You didn’t see those soldiers come up here?”

“Of course I did! You can’t miss four heavily armed men, tramping into your establishment and—”

“You didn’t stop them?”

“I didn’t know what they wanted! Obviously they serve someone important, with uniforms like that—”

“Did you recognize their uniforms?”

“I didn’t see them for very long—they just walked in and made straight for this room. They must have spied on you, somehow—they came in right after you left, in fact.”

Hagen was breathing heavily. He felt as if a great chunk of his body had been torn out. If he had not left—if he had been here when they came—he could not bring himself to look on his brother on the bed.

“The girl,” he said. “The Greek girl who was with us when we got here. Where is she?”

“Now, listen to me, you’re full of questions—”

“I want a graveyard. And a priest.”

“I want some answers!”

Hagen’s temper slipped and he cocked up his fist, ready to knock the innkeeper to the ground; the Greek backed away a few steps. His palms rose between them. “Now, listen, don’t get yourself in more trouble.”

The Frank lowered his hand. It did no good to strike at this man, anyway, who was innocent. Like a fluttering in his brain his brother’s soul cried to him for revenge. He gathered himself, aware of being alone in a strange and treacherous place.

“I need a priest. A graveyard. I will dig the grave.” He turned toward the bed where Rogerius lay, and gathering up his brother’s scattered clothing began to make him ready for his burial.

There had been times in the past he had expected to do this for Rogerius, other times when he had thought Rogerius would do this for him. Even so he was unready. He wished that he had died with his brother, rather than do this.

He touched the body’s cooling flesh with hands that trembled. Memories overwhelmed him. As boys, two years apart in age, they had fought all the time; he remembered chasing his brother with an adze around the courtyard, remembered Rogerius, still in a long shirt, hitting him in the face with a rock. Gradually they became friends and set to fighting everyone else. Their mother had died in childbed when Rogerius was born; their father, merciless in all his other doings, doted on his sons and let them do as they would. After Reynard died, they came to depend on each other even more, and as Reynard had taught them, side by side they stood against the whole world, and asked for nothing more than a chance to win.

Now he was alone. He had never expected to be alone, even in the worst of times.

While he was pulling Rogerius’s shirt on over his head, a folded piece of paper fell out of the sleeve. He opened up the paper and stared at the lines of ink marks on it. He could not read, but he recognized Greek letters. Theophano must have given this to Rogerius.

Theophano. She had brought this on him and his brother.

He steadied himself, feeling dangerously light and thin, as if he were stretched out around a great swollen boil of grief. He knew he would have to be careful. He was not afraid. He understood fighting; he had always taken a deal of comfort from the simple discipline of feud and counterfeud, blow struck for blow taken. But this was not his own country and these Greeks, he had marked before, were of a different order from Franks. He would avenge Rogerius, but he would have to walk like a cat to do it, keep watch like an owl in the night, and be ever mindful of his own ignorance, if he wanted to survive.

When his brother was dressed and laid out straight, his hair brushed, his hands folded on his breast, his eyes decently shut, Hagen knelt down again, but this time he did not pray to God. This time he spoke to his father, Reynard the Black.

He apologized for letting Rogerius be killed, since as the elder brother he had been responsible for him, and he swore, by an oath so old that the words were strange and his tongue went slowly over them, that he would pay the blood debt. He did not cross himself afterward. There were things best kept without Christ. Getting up, he went out to find shovel and pick and dig the grave in the dark.

In the morning, he buried his brother in a churchyard near the Sea of Marmora, among the dead of an alien people. This hurt him with an absurd sharp hurt, that Rogerius should lie until Doomsday with a crowd of Greeks, and for long moments he could not bear to walk away from the grave and leave his brother alone there.

At last he went away up the road through the dark pine trees, along the foot of the hill, and went to Chrysopolis. There he found the ferry boat and bought passage for himself and his horses over the straits to Constantinople.

With the wind so high, the crossing took the whole afternoon and most of the night. The darkness and fog hid the great city from view. At last, as the dawn spread its white veil across the sky, the sea quieted, and the mist began to rise.

Hagen stood in the bow of the great ungainly barge with his horses. The other passengers crowded on the deck around braziers of coals and shared their cloaks for warmth. The storm had subsided and the air was as still as water in a jar. Hagen’s face was clammy from the dawn mist, his fingers numb on the bridles of the two horses.

At first, in the feeble early light, the great towering promontory on which the city of Constantinople stood was only a vague sensation of mass to his left. The billowing flame of the lighthouse on the very tip of the cliff faded like the stars into the pallor of the day. The barge on its groaning sweeps crept along the shore and slowly turned north, butting into the harbor.

They called this harbor the Golden Horn. A finger of water, it lay protected in the lee of the cliff, the narrow way into it made narrower yet by breakwaters and heaps of rock linked together by chains. When the barge finally turned inside this mouth, the men at the sweeps gave out a cheer and crossed themselves and thanked Christ for their deliverance.

It was a wonderful harbor. Hagen had marked that when he came through here on his way to Jerusalem. In the long, shallow inlet ahead of him, now beginning to glow with the first true daylight, ships lay by the hundred. He saw the fat-bellied bottoms of the Venetians side by side with the narrow wedge-prowed ships of eastern sailors, the tilted sails of dhows, red and orange and striped, and the swollen-waisted river-going longships of the north. Little harbor boats danced between them and the shore, unloading, reloading, carrying supplies back and forth. Hagen narrowed his eyes, looking among this city of ships for one he might take to Italy.

The sun was warming his face and hands. He straightened, his cold-stiffened muscles soaking up the heat of the day, like a tree that wakened from the grip of winter. Now his gaze turned to the city itself.

It shocked him. It had shocked him when he first saw it and he should have been ready this time, but even so his first clear look at it made him draw a deep breath, fascinated, his eyes caught, his mouth falling open.

The mist still hugged the shoreline and veiled the lower slope. From this indefinite lightless mass of grey rose up layer on layer of buildings, climbing the steep cliffside in ranks, up into the sun, until at the top of the cliff, in a blaze of sunlight, the white marble buildings of the Palace stood up against the blue vault of the sky, and the golden domes of the churches there glittered like holy flame. They seemed closer to Heaven than to the earth, those great white and gold buildings on the clifftop, as if they had been placed there by the hand of God, and from them the rest of the City seemed to depend like the broad and graceful sweep of a cloak. Along the spine of the promontory, leading back to the mainland, were more churches, domed in gold and silver; a row of white columns fletched the spaces between them. That was their central street, which the Greeks called the Mesê. Here and there among the rounds of the domes, sweet to the eye as the curve of a breast, a spire stuck up boldly into the blue of the sky, so that the horizon was a jagged march down the ridge toward the undistinguished hills below.

The rest of the City fell away in patches of garden and trees, masses of buildings one on top of the other, the streets plunging among them like goat tracks, or spreading wider and gentler into marketplaces on the flats, down to the crowded shoreline.

Even at the edge of the sea they had not stopped building. The whole long beach was cut with causeways and breakwaters of stone, forming little shelters for the boats, and out along these moles were more buildings, shacks and warehouses and even churches, lapped by the mild waves of the Golden Horn. Now, with the full day upon them, these walkways teemed. Men with handcarts hurried down to the water’s edge, and rows of half-naked slaves carried bundles from the ships standing at the wharves back into the City. He saw covered cushioned chairs on rails, supported by brawny men, swaying along the harbor-side street, and now, for the first time, the sounds of the place reached them, the cries and yells, the songs of the workmen, the scream of the sea gulls, the tramp of feet and the patter of donkey’s hoofs, blended into a featureless roar that—he knew, from his past experience here—would never cease, not even when night fell, like the life-sounds of the City itself.

The barge was nosing into its berth in the harbor. The other passengers, as one man, lifted themselves and their goods and their babies and rushed forward into the bow, crowding together, their voices raised in excitement. Hagen’s horses laid their ears back and swung their broad haunches threateningly toward the crowd, and the other passengers shrank away, avoiding them. The barge rocked under their weight. The prow touched the wharf, padded with plumped sacks hanging in nets of rope from the pilings, and a cable hissed uncoiling through the air to the boatman waiting on the deck.

The crowd screamed and pressed forward. Hagen did not move; he had seen before what happened now, and knew there was no reason to try to get off. Scream and struggle as they might, none of the others left either; two shouting officials forced them all back on to the barge and came on board, carrying tablets of wax and sharpened reeds to write with, and made everybody form lines, and began to ask questions.

Hagen had already mastered this part of it. When the first of the two officials came quickly along the line, making a preliminary order in the swarm of people, Hagen gave him a bribe. At once they passed him through, ahead of all the others, let him off the barge with his horses, and took him to their chief, who had a room at the head of the dock.

“You are a barbarian?” this man asked, writing down the answers on a piece of paper.

Hagen had kept his papers from the last time. He pulled them out of his purse and laid them on the work-scarred table before the official.

“My king is Charles. My bishop is Adelhardt, and my overlord is the Count of Frisia. I am going home from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and my first purpose is to find a ship here to take me to Italy.”

“You are alone?” the officer said, surprised. “Well, well. You speak fair Greek, for a barbarian. You have no goods you mean to sell here?”

“No,” Hagen said brusquely. They had asked him and Rogerius that before, and it still insulted him.

“How much money are you carrying with you?”

Hagen had counted it on board the ferry. “I have eighteen bezants, about sixty dinars, and twenty-five silver pence.” He spread it out on the counter and let the officer look for himself. Carefully the man wrote this all down. Hagen watched with distaste. It was beneath his birth to pay so much heed to money.

He said, “I have a message for someone at court. How would I go about delivering it?”

“You won’t be able to do anything about that until the day after tomorrow,” said the Greek. “Tomorrow is a race for the Golden Belt. Every soul in Constantinople will be in the Hippodrome. Name?”

Hagen told him his name, and the Greek made reference to a tattered list on the wall. “What horse-races?” Hagen asked.

“In the Hippodrome. You should go, if you can still get in—no visit to Rome complete without the games.”

“Why do you people insist on calling this place Rome? I’ve been to Rome, it’s on the far side of the world.”

“It’s not a matter for the barbarian mind. I am giving you twenty days.” The officer wrote on a piece of paper and heated wax over a candle and put a seal on the corner. “If you haven’t found a ship by then, come back and I’ll see about giving you another twenty. No buying or selling of goods without licenses, please.” The Greek held out the sealed paper. “Good day.”

“Good day.” Hagen took the paper, which they would expect to have back when he left, and went out.