THE STENCH AND NOISE told Taylor they hadn’t made it home. She clung to Brody with desperate strength, for they were standing now and the solid strength of Veris was no longer at her back.
“What happened? Where are we?” she asked Brody, now noticing the humid heat around them. It was dim, too, with the drip of water that made her think of caverns. But there were walls in the dimness that looked man-made, even though they curved downwards and gleamed dirty white.
“Is it safe to let you go?” she asked.
Brody was holding her as tightly as she held him. His hair, she realized, was as long, if not longer, than he wore it at home. But it seemed tangled where her hands touched it.
“Not yet,” he growled into her neck. Then, with a deep exhalation, he said, “Dia orainn.”
“Why must god help us?”
He pulled away from her, just enough to look her in the eye. His hair hung matted on either side of his face and, shockingly, his cheeks wore a day’s growth of dark beard. “Because no one else will.” He held up one hand. A three inch thick metal band circled his wrist. “We’re in Constantinople.” He licked his lips and swallowed. “I’m human, Taylor.”
She stumbled backwards a step, almost tripping over something. She turned to look behind her to see what it was and realized it was her own garments. She picked up the hem, as Brody steadied her.
Taylor laid a hand on his chest and felt the heat and quick, steady beat of his heart. It was true, then. Acid fear rushed through her. “But, if you’re human…” She looked around, feeling like the walls were closing in on her. “…then you’re also a slave,” she finished.
There was a sound of steps behind them, echoing on the walls. The flare of light reared against the sloping walls. Brody glanced at the leaping light and back at her. “I am,” he agreed. “And from your clothes, you are most definitely not a slave.”
She glanced down at herself. The garments were softly folded and pleated, sweeping in elegant curves over her arms and pinned at her shoulders. What she could see of her hair was curled and felt like it was pinned up at the back of her head to dangle at her neck. There was a heavy necklace at her neck and equally elaborate earrings in her ears that swung with hefty arcs each time she moved her head. A thick bracelet coiled around her wrist, enameled and glittering in the little light showing in the cavern.
Her dress was white, clean and glowing, but the garment over the top was rich with embroidery and dazzling colors. The name for it came to her. It was her stola.
Brody, in contrast, wore a simple tunic, belted at the waist with twisted cloth, and it was far from clean. His only adornment was the metal slave bands on each wrist.
“You have to go,” Brody insisted.
“Go where?” Taylor asked. She looked over her shoulder. The cavern ended in a blank wall.
Brody pointed toward a narrow passage she had not noticed, hidden in the shadows, with even darker shadows showing at its mouth. “That way. I’ll stay here and distract them.”
“Distract who?” Taylor demanded.
“That is the guards who come now,” Brody told her. “They have found me missing from my usual spot and seek to find me.”
“But where is Veris?” Taylor whispered anxiously.
Brody began to shepherd her toward the tiny passageway. “In this time and age? He would be in Britain.”
“Britain?” The word squeaked out of her and she turned to Brody, horrified.
“He will come straight here as soon as he realizes what has happened. He will put it together.”
“But it took you…you said it took ages to get here when they took you as a slave. Months and months, you thought!”
Brody’s lips thinned. “They were transporting hundreds of us,” he said softly. “Veris will be travelling alone and he will let nothing get in his way. Our job will be to survive until he gets here and that is all.” He tried to smile but it was a weak expression. “Once he is here, all we have to do is be within reaching distance of each other and we can jump out of here. There are no other complications, this time. We just have to wait for Veris to get here.”
“But that could take weeks!” she cried softly.
“You! Celt!”
Brody stiffened. “Damn,” he muttered.
The torches, actual hand-held flaming balls of rags soaked in oil, illuminated a handful of men striding toward them. They wore longer tunics – chitons, her contemporary language mind supplied – with dalmatics over the top in various shades and colors and patterns. Most of them were dirty and ragged. None of them wore cloaks – chlamys – and every single one of them had filthy feet inside their sandals.
All of them were heavily armed, with at least a sword and knife apiece. Most carried spears, extra knives and several carried bows over their shoulders.
The leader was a big man with wide shoulders, a heavy gut and narrow eyes that glittered with anger.
“Oh, ho! What’s this? You’ve got yourself a split tail, now, have you?” he said as he planted his feet wide in front of Brody.
Brody remained silent. Taylor realized there was nothing he could say to defend himself. He was a runaway slave, apparently caught dallying with a woman.
She was from the higher classes, if her dress was anything to go by. That might work in her favor. Taking a deep breath, Taylor stepped out from behind Brody, squaring her shoulders. “You dare interrupt me,” she said, mustering all the imperiousness she had heard Tira use and injecting it into her voice and posture.
“By all the holy gods….” one of them breathed.
“My lady Ariadne,” the big man in front said. He gave a stiff nod of the head. “Well, this puts a different light on the matter, doesn’t it?”
Taylor felt her hauteur slip a little. Who the hell was Ariadne?
The big man gave an oily smile. “We wondered who slipped Braenden here out of his chains. It never occurred to me a pretty smile and a piece of gold did the trick.” He grabbed Brody’s wrist. “But we need him back in his cage, rested up for tomorrow’s race if you’ll be excusing us, my lady.”
He yanked hard. Taylor heard Brody’s grunt of pain as he staggered forward and remembered from when she had travelled with Veris back to when he had been human, in old Norway, that Veris had felt pain and all sensations at almost twice the intensity he had felt them as a vampire.
Brody would be experiencing that phenomenon, too.
One of the other guards, the one that had prayed to the gods when he had seen her, stepped forward. He was young, with shaggy blond hair that reminded Taylor sharply of Veris. “I’ll escort you home, my lady,” he said.
Taylor almost laughed. The lad barely came to her shoulder. But he had a flat Roman sword on his hip, a dagger in his belt and another knife hilt peeped from his sleeve, where he held the single torch up to light the way.
And he knew where she lived.
She watched Brody being pulled and yanked along, the guards all holding swords on him.
Survive until Veris gets here. Her heart squeezed hard.
“I am ready,” she told the boy guard, who swept her into the dank passage Brody had been insisting she take in the first place.
* * * * *
Basilides. A dour, Greek version of Robbie Coltrane having a permanently bad day. Brody had no trouble remembering the head guard’s name. It was emblazoned in his mind and came to him almost at once, despite the novel sensations shooting through his body. Pain seemed to be amplified. So did sound. The air brushed over his skin, making every hair stand upright on high alert.
His heart was a runaway steam train trying to cope with it all.
Basilides was having a whale of a good time tugging on the chains they’d threaded back through his bracelets as soon as Taylor’s back was turned. He seemed to salivate as he described all the punishments they could hand out for a runaway.
Brody listened with half an ear. He was too busy dealing with the changes in his body, even though trying to run away was one of the direst crimes a slave could commit.
They were back into the populated areas of the slave quarters. Caging was interspersed with rough wooden bunks. Fire pits with cook pots were added punctuation. Everywhere, guards kept watchful eye upon the slaves in their short, dirty tunics as they went about the meager business of their daily lives.
His memories were fitting back together now he was forcing himself to dredge them up. This was the lowest level of one of the furthest wings of the training facilities associated with the Hippodrome and it was linked to the Hippodrome by an underground passage. For races, the slave chariot drivers that Genesios the Money Lender owned and kept in this basement cavern could simply be herded along the passage to the Hippodrome. They didn’t need to see daylight until they were pushed into their chariot for their race.
A particularly hard wrench on his wrist brought Brody to a halt and a half spin around to face Basilides. “I do believe you were not listening to me, boy,” Basilides said, his face mere inches from Brody’s.
Brody stared at the man. In his memory, in the numerous times over the years when he had dared to probe the memories, Basilides had always seemed to loom over him like a giant. Yet now Brody realized with a start that Basilides was shorter than him by at least an inch, if not more. He could look over Basilides’ shoulder.
He saw a slave sitting up on one of the higher bunks, a concerned look on his worn face.
Evaristus. The unacknowledged leader of the slaves. The man – the vampire – who would turn Brody sometime in the future. Evaristus watched him now and Brody knew he was silently coaxing Brody to back down. To submit. To give them what they wanted so that Brody would live to fight another day. It was an old song Evaristus had long sung. Brody had listened to it for at least fifteen years.
Brody returned his gaze to Basilides’ face. “I was listening,” he replied.
Basilides pushed him to the ground and spat on him. “If we didn’t have a race tomorrow, I’d do more. You might have been sprung by a lady with coin and a taste for bartered flesh, but you still look me in the eye too squarely for a slave. You need humbling.” He pushed his dirty sleeves up his arm. “Bring me the lash!”
Something locked in Brody’s chest, making his heart hurt and his breath wheeze out of him. He looked past Basilides again. Evaristus was clutching the sides of the bunk. Pity etched his features. Fear stabbed into Brody as memories of other times similar to this one returned to him in a rush.
Hands were scrabbling at his back, pulling at his hair. His tunic ripped, then was torn from him.
More hands pulled on the chains at his wrists, pulling him down flat onto the cold, hard, sandy floor. Hands wrenched on his ankles, holding him still and flat.
Memory told him what was coming, but the shock of the first blow drove all thought from his mind except for the agony of pain. A small voice whispered in his mind. Why did Veris not warn me of these feelings?
Then the second blow landed and even the small voice vanished. The pain overrode everything, became everything.
* * * * *
After seventeen lashes, Basilides lowered the lash reluctantly, his chest heaving with effort. “Throw him in the cage for the night. Water rations only. Maybe that will cool his temper and make him biddable for the morrow. If he doesn’t win his race he can have another twelve lashes just for losing the purse.”
The guards holding Brody down loosened their hold on his wrists and ankles, but Brody didn’t move. Blood trickled from his bruised and torn back.
“Throw some water on that mess, too,” Basilides said, pointing to his back. He dropped the lash, stepped over Brody’s still body and walked away.
* * * * *
“Gilmárdal! Quickly! Staunch it!”
Veris blinked, refocusing. He looked down into the open wound in front of him and the ancient instruments inserted into it, then up at the man opposite him.
“Hurry!” the man insisted.
Greek, Veris realized. He lifted his hands to clamp the pulsing vein and realized they were bare. Ancient Greek, he amended and realized where he was. He adjusted mentally. “Right,” he said. “Let’s get this finished.” He looked for something that would work as a clamp and sighed when nothing presented itself. “As quickly as possible, anyway,” he added, delicately clamping the bleeding vein with his finger and thumb.
Two hours later, he stepped out of the treatment center and plunged into the spring. It was supposed to be sacred, but all he cared about was washing the blood from his arms, for it reached as high as his shoulders. There was no one else in the spring, for it was night and all the visitors to the Sanctuary of Asclepius had gone for the day. Besides, Pergamum had been steadily losing it majesty and popularity for nearly two hundred years. The Christians had seen to that. Statues of saints that wept blood and created miracles had stronger appeal than Greek temples filled with doctors that used science and practical medicine.
Veris floated in the water for a few minutes, gathering his thoughts, then climbed the steps back to the stone seat where he had left his tunic. Cydones was sitting next to it.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you, Northman?” Cydones said.
Veris picked up the tunic. “Yes.”
“You pleaded with us, when you came here. You begged us to teach you all we knew. You said you’d had a bellyful of war.”
“All of that is true. I will be back, Cydones. But I must go to Constantinople for a while. I have friends in trouble.” He slid the tunic on and pulled his hair out of it. It slapped wetly against his back, almost to his waist.
“How could you know that?”
He bent to slide on his sandals. “I just know. I can’t explain it.”
“The same way you just knew how to perform an operation we have never seen done before?” Cydones asked.
Veris stood up, keeping his face neutral. For a long moment, he couldn’t think of anything to say to cover this major gaff. Then he settled for a partial truth. He looked Cydones in the eye. “I couldn’t let the patient die, could I?” he said simply.
Cydones considered him for a moment. Then he smiled. “I wouldn’t have, either,” he agreed. He got to his feet. “I hope you are wrong about your friends.”
Veris shook his head. “I’m not.”
“How will you get there?”
“As fast as possible.”
“When will you leave?”
Veris stood up from fastening his other sandal. “Now,” he said simply. He held out his hand. “I will be back, Cydones. I have to be.”
“Pergamum will still be here when you do, Northman.” Cydones gripped his upper forearm. “Perhaps you can teach us something, instead.”
* * * * *
There had been hostels and inns operating in Pergamum time out of mind, catering to the tourists and sick that sought help or rest in the famed city. There weren’t as many operating now as there might have been when Pergamum was at the peak of its power and fame as a city of healing, but Veris had found one that didn’t fleece as badly as the others and was willing to charge a long term rental for a room where he could come and go with minimal interference.
He changed into a longer tunic and dalmatic, added a cloak pinned at the shoulder and a sword about his waist. He left a month’s rent in his room and cleared it of valuables, including all the coins, which he put in his wallet on his hip. There were half a dozen hidden weapons on his body, but he still felt naked stepping out onto the road without a shield against his side.
He wasn’t travelling as a mercenary this time. It wouldn’t serve his purposes to walk through the double rampart walls of Constantinople as a for-hire dogsbody. He needed to look like someone with influence and power…at least until he had sniffed out what had gone wrong and found Taylor and Brody.
Then he travelled through the rest of the night, walking silently along the deserted road, heading for the tiny mining town north of Pergamum. Soma had the virtue of being small and having caves and pits of coal dug from the hillsides. The people of this time called coal ‘black stone’ and found it useful for their fires. Veris had found the porous countryside useful for another reason.
He arrived in the tiny town as the day was beginning to start and found someone who was keener to acquire coin than keep horseflesh. He bought their horse for less than the going rate and was trotting into the rising sun before breakfast, already heading out of town again.
He had taken the night of walking from Pergamum to recall the original path he had taken. Now he retraced those steps and found the cave just north of Soma with no trouble. It lay untouched since he had left it covered with grasses and overhanging branches and landfill over the mouth of it. It was far from human paths, too far for even the curious to accidentally find.
He lit a torch and went inside while the horse munched contentedly on wild grass.
Inside was a virtual Aladdin’s cave. Decades of pillaging and raiding, while never settling down in one spot meant Veris had acquired a small fortune he had not been able to drink and dribble away on dice and women. He had stored it away, instead. Occasionally, he had sold pieces off to eager collectors, always at very good prices and always for gold or gold coin and no other, for other currency tended to lose its value over the long term.
He had relocated his hoard to Soma when he had decided to study at Pergamum, because he wasn’t certain where his life would take him after that. The row of chests sitting beside the cart he’d used to bring them here contained a collection of coins, precious gems, objets d’art and other prizes of war. Most of them made Veris sick to look at them.
All or some of them would help him win through to Brody and Taylor now.
He shrugged off his cloak, then the dalmatic and threw them both over the low sides of the cart. In the flaring and flickering firelight of the torch, he picked up a pair of gem-encrusted sheers from one of the chests and grabbed a hunk of his hair and started to cut.
* * * * *
Taylor stood in the middle of the opulent room, afraid to move. The young guard had walked her through the streets of Constantinople and it had been more than eye-opening—it had been nearly overwhelming.
There were thousands of people on the streets. It had been shocking. There were so many people squeezed behind the high rampart walls of the city it made New York look placid.
These were not just people of Greco-Roman ancestry, which she might have expected, but people of every possible race and color, all dressed similarly, or in variations of the same sort of vaguely Roman style, with the excessively colorful layers on top. Her mind reeled.
There were definitely the haves and the have-nots. Thanks to her time spent in Jerusalem during the first crusade, this fact wasn’t the shock it might have been. Brody’s situation already had her braced for the ugly truth. Taylor – or Ariadne – was one of those who were well off. Brody was a slave, who had nothing. Then there were poor classes, who scraped by and working classes, who did okay.
When the guard stopped in front of a grandly ornate columned and statue-filled white marbled palace-sized building and bowed and backed away from her, Taylor realized with horror that Ariadne wasn’t just well off. She was far beyond that.
There was a shout from inside the building and guards and women in the same flowing white elegant robes as herself, but not nearly as elaborate or elegant, came tumbling and running down the long flight of stairs at the front, calling her – Ariadne’s – name with voices filled with panic and delight. They surrounded her and began shepherding her up the stairs. Questions battered at her.
“Where have you been?”
“What have you been doing?”
“Where did you go? Two days we’ve been looking for you!”
“Mercy, the master will be relieved!”
Slowly, as Taylor was shuffled through elegant room after stunning room after more breathtaking room into yet another one, she realized that she was being taken directly to see “the master,” and that the flood of questions weren’t designed to let her answer, but for everyone to vent their relief and dismay at her disappearance and sudden reappearance.
She was deposited in the middle of the floor she now stood upon and the servants, as she finally surmised them to be, departed to get the master.
Taylor swallowed her growing fear as she looked around the sumptuous decorations and paintings. Finally, she was beginning to understand what was meant by Byzantine elaboration. Nothing was left plain and unadorned. Filigree and gilt covered everything. Brocade and marble was everywhere. It was rich, ornate and stunning.
There was a murmur of voices. A pad of footsteps on marble. Then a flash of movement from the far corner of the room. He was coming.
She straightened up, adjusting the veil on her head as she had seen the women wearing them in the streets.
The man that came toward her was short. Only about five ten, very nearly her own height. He was richly dressed, of course—as well dressed as any of the men she had seen so far. He wore boots rather than sandals. The boots had soft soles and would be warm on all this marble. He had pale brown eyes, but they were looking at her sharply.
He took her chin in hand, looking at her.
Then he glanced over his shoulder at the servants who had followed him in. “Everyone leave,” he said curtly. “Leave me alone with my wife.”
My wife.
Taylor shuddered.
The servants all vacated the room again, leaving them alone.
He was staring at her hard. His hand dropped away from her.
“You are not Ariadne,” he said softly. “You look so very much like her, but you are not her.”
Taylor considered for a second whether to bluff, or not, but the certainty in his voice told her a bluff would fail. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Your servants hurried me in here before I could explain. They didn’t give me a chance to speak. Even the guard that brought me here was convinced. I’ve been trying for an hour now to find a way to tell people I am not Ariadne, but everyone is so convinced I am her, they don’t even question it.”
“Have you?” he said sharply.
“Have I what?” Taylor said.
“Found a way to tell anyone?”
“I don’t know how!” Taylor said. “No one even questions whether I’m anyone else. They just assume I am your wife. It’s very strange!”
He seemed to relax. “Good,” he said.
“Good?” Taylor replied, astonished.
He whirled away, troubled, then back to face her. His expression was that of a man skewered by a dilemma. “Do you even know who I am?”
“I arrived in Constantinople this evening,” Taylor confessed. “I know nothing of this city.”
He wrung his hands together. “I see I must beggar myself then. Do you have a name, dear lady?”
“Tyra…” She hesitated, then added with a smile, “Gallagher-Gerhardsson.”
Matthew frowned. “A most unusual name. Celtic and…Nordic?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
He bowed slightly. “I am Matthew. They call me Matthew of Antioch, although it has been years since I left that city.”
“Ariadne is your wife,” Taylor concluded. “And from what your servants were saying, I have guessed that she is missing.”
Matthew pursed his lips, his expression growing darker. “They believe she is merely missing. I know that she has been taken and why.”
“Taken? Why would they take her? For money?”
Matthew looked affronted at the idea. “For the races,” he said, as if it were perfectly obvious.
“What races?” Taylor asked blankly.
Matthew looked at her as if she were stupid. “The chariot races, of course.”
“They would take your wife hostage over racing?” Taylor tried to keep any incredulity out of her voice. She was in a different time and culture and she knew she was missing a big chunk of information. Byzantium wasn’t a subject she had studied in her trips through the history books and she was feeling that lack now.
Matthew narrowed his eyes, studying her. “Now I really do believe you arrived here this evening, if you would question such a thing. Yes, they would do this. I am the owner of a string of chariots and drivers. They wear the green and we’re winning so far this year. The blues would do anything—anything—to ensure we lose.”
“They…would kill your wife, if you let your teams win?”
Matthew sat on a nearby divan with a heavy exhalation. “One of my colleagues, two years ago, also a businessman with a string of highly successful chariots, had a beautiful wife he doted on. I don’t know what happened to her, but she was found floating in the Golden Horn one day, half her body eaten away by fish. My friend sold off his chariots. He lives in Sicily now.” Matthew looked at her. “I could speculate, Tyra. I don’t think it would be a difficult exercise.”
“But this is outrageous!” Taylor protested. “Surely there is a governing body, some sort of regulating agency that controls the races? Someone you can appeal to?”
“You mean the emperor, perhaps?” Matthew asked.
Taylor caught her breath. “Do you have access to the emperor? Can you appeal to him?”
Matthew smiled dryly. “I could. But he favors the blue and spends pots of gold on making sure they win each week. I wouldn’t expect any appeal to him to be received with sympathy at all.”
Taylor hissed out her frustration.
Matthew’s smile broadened and he stood up again. “I prefer to approach this with more finesse than the bull-at-the-gate strategy you have in mind. Now I have met you, there is an alternative.”
“And that is?”
“With your agreement, you continue to pretend to be my wife Ariadne in public, especially at the races tomorrow. That will confuse whoever is holding Ariadne and give them less power over me. If they think they have no leverage, the threat is lifted.”
“But what of Ariadne? What will they do to her?”
“I will do what I have been doing all along,” Matthew said firmly. “Use all my resources to find her. If you appear in her place tomorrow, it might cause enough of a stir amongst the blues that her location is revealed to me.”
Taylor considered. “And when I am not parading as your wife?”
“You will need to stay close to the house as my wife would, but you are free to take advantage of the amenities here and enjoy the benefits as she would.”
“I may need to move around the city on errands of my own,” Taylor pointed out.
Matthew considered this. “As long as you travel as my wife would travel, with a full complement of servants and escorts and bring no shame on this household or my reputation, then you are free to do what you will.” His eyes narrowed. “No late night sallies to the slave quarters.”
Her heart quickened. He had been informed where they had found her, then. The servants of this household were, of course, loyal to Matthew and not her.
Should she agree to this charade? Where else would she find protection, shelter and an instant identity as a rich, landed woman with means to help Brody? She just had to learn the ropes in this culture so she could figure out how to move outside them. “I supposed, then, yes, it is an arrangement I can work within,” Taylor said hesitantly. Brody, hang on, she mentally begged. I’m coming for you.
Matthew nodded. “Good,” he said, sounding pleased.
Then he backhanded her across the face with a blow so powerful it knocked her to her knees and blinded her with the pain.