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.