Nine for the Devil jte-9

by Mary Reed

  Not that Theodora had exerted any force, despite what gossips claimed. Except for forcing the two into common living arrangements.

  Once Joannina had made a blushing and stammering Vesta tell her exactly what the ladies-in-waiting and other attendants were gossiping.

  “Oh, your ladyship…I’d rather not say…but…oh…they claim Theodora came here herself and instructed you both to go into…into…the bedroom and…and disrobe. And then…oh…must I? Then she told you both exactly what to do and even helped…”

  Joannina had laughed. “What nonsense! Theodora has hardly been well enough to move around on her own since Anastasius and I have been living here. She has never visited. It was nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.”

  She did not tell Vesta what it had been like. That the haughty and handsome Anastasius had been absolutely terrified to do what his grandmother had made clear he must do.

  That had done more than anything to endear him to Joannina.

  Thinking about it, Joannina began to grow impatient. Where was he?

  Despite her annoyance, she started drifting off to sleep on the couch. When he stamped into the sitting room he startled her.

  She saw he was empty-handed, hadn’t brought anything for her. “What’s the matter, dearest? Where have you been so late?”

  Joannina felt she had a wifely duty to assuage his anger, but when in the past she had tried soothing words or put her arms around him, it had just stoked his fury.

  “I’ve been out and about asking questions.” He flopped down on the couch next to her, yanked off his malodorous boots, and threw them across the room. “I don’t like it! I don’t like it at all! Someone’s going to pay. I’ll have my revenge, you wait and see. Vengeance will be mine!”

  He sounded more petulant than vengeful.

  Joannina pulled herself into a sitting position and leaned over Anastasius who was slouched on his spine with his long legs stretched out on the floor. “What are you talking about? Vengeance for what?”

  “For the murder of my grandmother. It’s not just a rumor. It’s true. She was murdered. Justinian has ordered that eunuch of his to find the culprit. I didn’t believe it, but now I have it on good authority. He spent the whole day visiting people who are under suspicion.”

  “Vesta and ourselves are under suspicion?”

  “And Germanus, not to mention your mother.”

  “That’s silly. Mother was Theodora’s friend.”

  “Maybe. But it’s very convenient for your mother that the empress died before our marriage, isn’t it?”

  Joannina drew away from him. “You don’t think my mother killed your grandmother, do you?”

  Anastasius said nothing but frowned furiously.

  Joannina frowned back. “You can’t be thinking of taking vengeance on mother!”

  “Well, no. The eunuch visited Artabanes. That’s who I suspect.”

  “Why Artabanes?”

  “Because Theodora arranged for his…uh…marital relations, just like she did ours, but the opposite, don’t you see?”

  Joannina tentatively put her hand on his narrow shoulder. “What do you mean?”

  “She arranged for us to stay together. She also arranged for Artabanes to stay with his wife. See. Artabanes wanted to marry Praejecta, just like we want to marry each other. But in Artabanes’ case, she stopped the marriage and forced him to live with his wife, while in our case, though we aren’t married, she made us live together so we can be married. It’s almost exactly the same except different.”

  Joannina ventured to let her hand run down Anastasius’ arm. “I see, now that you explain it so clearly.”

  “So Artabanes wanted revenge on Theodora for spoiling his marriage plans. That would make anyone want revenge.”

  “But it isn’t your job to take revenge on anyone, Anastasius. And certainly not on Artabanes. We barely know the man.”

  “It it weren’t for him there would be no way your parents could stop our being married!”

  “Your grandmother was very ill,” Joannina pointed out.

  Anastasius slid lower on the couch. “But she wouldn’t have died before she saw to it we were married if not for-”

  “You sound as if you care more about our marriage than your grandmother!”

  Anastasius turned toward Joannina and put his hand out. She moved slightly and the hand brushed her shoulder. “You know I care about you more than anything in the world, Joannina, my little sparrow.”

  “Now that’s the Anastasius I love.” She kissed his forehead and her hand went to his belt. “Let the Lord Chamberlain worry about vengeance.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The carriage was utterly dark. The windows had been covered.

  John had caught only a glimpse of the conveyance as he was thrown roughly inside it. It was an imperial carriage in poor repair, nothing the emperor would ride in, and had been relegated to other uses.

  He tried the door. Not surprisingly, it was locked. He couldn’t see his hand or anything else. Except that he could feel his breath going in and out he might already have been a disembodied phantom.

  The carriage had an unpleasant sour smell. The smell of fear, perhaps, from previous passengers.

  At least half a dozen excubitors had come to the house. They hammered on the door loudly enough to wake him in the study where he had dozed off in his chair. Once he confronted them they had become taciturn about their mission and John’s destination.

  “Emperor’s orders! That’s all you need to know!” their apparent leader barked when John tried to question him.

  John recognized the man by the unruly red hair spilling from underneath his helmet.

  He was the excubitor who had summoned Felix from the tavern for an urgent meeting with Justinian.

  A meeting to order John’s arrest?

  There had been no use resisting. John had not tucked the blade he usually carried into the tunic he had intended to wear to bed. It didn’t matter. A single man, even properly armed, would have no chance against so many trained soldiers.

  He fought the only worthwhile battle left, the battle to maintain his dignity.

  After so many years of imperial service, was his life going to end like so many others-like the guards outside Theodora’s sickroom, like the imperial cook-unexpectedly, at the whim of the emperor?

  Everyone at court heard stories of people spirited away to be summarily executed on Justinian’s orders. Sometimes acquaintances or family members. And then they wondered what would it feel like? How would they react when they were roused from sleep and told they had less than a hour to live, if they were lucky? If they were lucky enough, that is, to be killed simply and cleanly and not taken down to the torturers first.

  But however close the victim had been to a particular person, it was like hearing about someone killed by lightning or a run-away cart. An acknowledged possibility, but never something you really imagined would happen to yourself.

  John stared into the blackness that pressed in on him like dark water. He feared deep water. Now he fought off the feeling he was drowning. He kept his lips tightly pressed together as if the darkness might get in and choke off his breath.

  He didn’t know what time it was. How long had he dozed before waking? It might be the middle of the night or nearly dawn.

  One wouldn’t have expected the emperor to schedule a meeting for either time.

  He wished he had heard from Cornelia.

  The carriage wheels creaked. John was jolted continually. He couldn’t tell where he was being taken. At least the carriage had not been moving downhill, which would indicate that the destination was the docks or some lonely stretch of sea wall beyond which the hungry waters waited for the emperor’s offerings.

  Instead, the carriage was going uphill. It slowed, turned, came to a halt.

  “Mithra!” John muttered.

  The door swung open. Powerful arms pulled him into the night and dragged him along before he had
a chance to get his bearings.

  Abruptly he was released.

  He stood amidst massive sarcophagi illuminated by torches in curving walls.

  Was this some kind of horrible jest on Justinian’s part?

  John realized he had been brought to Constantine’s mausoleum behind the Church of the Holy Apostles. Around him lay emperors, who having lived in the purple slept for eternity enclosed in the imperial color. Purple porphyry folded angular arms about Constantine, Theodosius, and other departed rulers. Although Zeno lay under dark green Thessalonian stone, veined in white.

  Thinking of the emperor reminded John of Anatolius’ uncle Zeno, on whose estate John’s family was currently living.

  A hand shoved him forward.

  He moved through a haze of incense, its sweet perfume foretelling the gardens of heaven.

  He might have been dreaming.

  An excubitor stood on each side of him. He could see the steel of their drawn swords glinting.

  Light flashed from the mausoleum’s gem-studded gold fittings, icons glittered in lamplight glowing from silver dove-shaped lamps suspended on long chains from the frescoed roof, reflected in marble walls.

  They passed out of Constantine’s burial place and into the mausoleum Justinian had only recently had completed.

  The excubitor with the red hair stopped and clamped a hand on John’s shoulder. “Far enough!”

  The guards at John’s side moved away.

  A prickling sensation ran from the nape of John’s neck down his back.

  Where would the steel penetrate?

  He remembered well the feel of a blade cutting through flesh.

  He had endured the pain before and he would endure it one last time.

  ***

  Hypatia stood in the dark kitchen, trying to overcome her fear. The clatter of the carriage moving away across the square still seemed to reverberate through the house,

  The Lord Chamberlain may have been called away on business, she told herself. Though it was before dawn, it would not have been impossible. Affairs of the empire did not keep regular hours.

  But he would never have left the door open or gone without leaving word with her.

  Would he?

  Then again, he had been working too hard. He was exhausted. It was plain in his gaunt features.

  What about the raised voices? Had they only sounded overly loud and angry because they had startled her in the middle of the night?

  She told herself not to leap to conclusions. The Lord Chamberlain did not explain his comings and goings to her.

  Perhaps he would return soon.

  She preferred not to think the worst.

  She pulled a chair up to the table, sat down, and waited.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  John waited to die in Justinian’s mausoleum.

  But the sudden pressure he felt against the middle of his back was not sharp steel but flesh. One of his guards gave him a shove.

  John took three stumbling steps forward before he saw the emperor kneeling by Theodora’s sarcophagus.

  How horrified the empress would be if she could see the emperor kneeling in the presence of one of his subjects.

  Justinian got to his feet. At those times John had seen him since Theodora’s death his demeanor had been so stolid John had wondered if he really was a demon exhibiting a false face to the world as many believed. Now, however, very human tears glistened on his gaunt cheeks. Justinian’s face had grown so thin it resembled the skulls of Timothy, Luke, and Andrew, three of the most sacred treasures held in the Church of the Holy Apostles. The impression had scarcely formed in John’s thoughts when Justinian smiled wanly in his direction.

  “I shall be laid to rest next to the empress in due course,” the emperor remarked in an even tone. “But I feel as if I were already entombed. I feel like Emperor Zeno. The story goes that he was locked in his tomb while still alive and called from his darkness for three days before his voice fell silent forever.”

  Justinian patted Theodora’s sarcophagus fondly, as one might caress the head of a child.

  John fought to reorient himself. Mention of the former emperor inevitably reminded John of Cornelia and his daughter Europa at the estate of Anatolius’ uncle Zeno.

  “It is a beautiful creation, excellency,” he replied automatically. The color was strangely appropriate. For Theodora was enclosed not in the purple of imperial majesty but by reddish-brown, as if the stone had taken on the hue of her murderous nature.

  “Sardian stone,” Justinian said. “I commissioned it three years ago, never expecting…she was only forty-five at the time and…” He stopped and for an instant John thought the emperor’s voice would break and he would begin to sob. If he had been about to do so, he controlled himself. Instead he traced a finger along the top of one of the the fluted columns carved on each corner of the sarcophagus. John saw the finger trembled.

  John, himself, was trembling, the effects of his stressful journey. He hoped it didn’t show.

  “Look here, Lord Chamberlain,” Justinian said. “See how the doves circle the heads of lambs, indicating her nature. And there at the end, and on the lid, the olive wreathes enclosing crosses.”

  John said nothing. He found it impossible to imagine that even the man who had been married to her could have believed Theodora’s nature to be reminiscent of doves and lambs and olive wreaths.

  Perhaps least of all the man who had been married to her.

  And the emperor knew how Theodora had hated John. Did he expect to convince John now of his wife’s saintliness? Or did he have something else in mind?

  “I did everything in my power to help her,” Justinian went on. “But what did it come to in the end? It is commonly said I have the power of life and death over every person in the empire, but in truth I have only the power of death. It’s not a great matter, since death is certain anyway. And what can I do now, to serve the empress in death? I promised to allow those heretics she sheltered in the Hormisdas Palace to remain there. I will do so, but would it not be better if there were no heretics?”

  His gaze fastened on John. Did Justinian know his Lord Chamberlain was a Mithran, a heretic? Did he care?

  “You have always done your best to mediate between the opposing factions, excellency,” John said.

  Justinian looked at the sarcophagus. “Yes. Without success. It is even more urgent now that this wretched matter of the Three Chapters be resolved. What do you think of the Three Chapters, John?”

  The Three Chapters was the name by which the current religious controversy had come to be called, due to the fact it revolved around three writings by long dead churchmen which some deemed to be heretical. John couldn’t believe Justinian had had him abducted from his home and driven to this mausoleum in the middle of the night to discuss religion. “I lack your expertise in theology, excellency,” John replied.

  “It is a knotty problem,” Justinian acknowledged. “Countless tomes written debating the nature of Christ. Over years of study I have come to the conclusion that it is all exceedingly simple. Nestorianism, you see, is the opposite of Monophysitism. Nestorius claimed that Christ had two natures, human and divine, both distinct, while the monophysites believe that Christ had only a single nature, his human nature being absorbed into his divinity.”

  John felt dazed. During the long carriage ride he had steeled himself for death, but instead he found himself listening to an arcane lecture. He struggled to recall what he knew of church councils. “Did not the Council of Chalcedon condemn both as heretical?”

  “Yes. The fathers ruled that Christ has two indivisible natures in one person. He was both fully human and fully divine. Having given the matter much thought, and as God’s representative on earth, I came to the conclusion that two indivisible natures are not necessarily different from a single nature in which a second nature has been subsumed.”

  “A matter of words.”

  “Nothing more. When I summoned Pope Vigilius t
o Constantinople I discovered he had never read the passages he was defending, for he does not read Greek. He knew only what he had been told. After I had them translated for him, he saw they were heresy and agreed with me that they should be condemned. If more churchmen spoke both Greek and Latin, as you do, Lord Chamberlain, perhaps this misunderstanding would never have arisen.”

  It was true that John spoke several languages. It was a useful skill. Justinian and those closest to him were Latin speakers, while the rest of Constantinople spoke Greek or the various languages from the far flung parts of the empire from which they had come. Over the years John had become so used to alternating between languages according to whom he was speaking that he hardly noticed changing back and forth.

  “I recall that Vigilius issued his pronouncement condemning the Three Chapters at Easter,” John said. “So you have all but brought about a reconciliation between the monophysites and the Orthodox church.”

  Justinian nodded, then looking to where his wife lay, frowned. “Theodora was pleased. But now Vigilius is wavering. Cursed man! The churchmen in the west, in Italy, are horrified. They say a repudiation of the Three Chapters amounts to heresy.”

  John had managed to control the fear he had felt while locked in the carriage, on his way to his execution as he had imagined. Now, however, he felt a new chill. What sort of man would choose the side of his wife’s tomb as the place to ramble on about the current religious dispute? Perhaps the tears on his cheeks were as false as the human face he wore.

  Or perhaps Justinian was not a demon, but simply insane.

  Justinian continued talking. Was this the sort of thing that ran through his mind when he sat up at night, poring over holy books?

  John allowed his attention to wander. However the disputants wished to slice up Christ’s nature it made no difference to the world, except insofar as it affected the empire.

  “This is a Christian empire,” Justinian was saying. “If the church is not united, the empire is not united.”

  “I can see that, excellency.”

  “Why are you looking so grim?” the emperor asked. “Do you suppose I intend to have you dispatched to the next world, with my praises of Theodora the last earthly sounds you hear?”