The Golden Horn

by Judith Tarr

  They let him in readily, with proper respect for his priesthood. Wonder of wonders, he thought, they were both sober and sane. Nor had they plundered within. Part of the hospital was a barracks, but a well-disciplined barracks; the rest kept to its old function. And there, bending over a wounded soldier, was Master Dionysios, as brusque and grim-faced as ever, tyrannizing over the conquerors as he always had over his own people. Even the Frankish surgeons seemed content to bow to his rule.

  As Jehan approached him, a shrill cry echoed through the room. Anna ran down an aisle among the beds, her braids flying, to fling herself into Jehan’s arms. She was babbling like a mad thing, too swift and incoherent for him to follow.

  He held her for a long while. They were all staring at him. Latins, he noticed, lay beside Greeks, all mingled and apparently amicable.

  Anna had fallen silent, weeping; her whole body shook, although she made no sound. He sat with her on the side of an empty bed.

  She stiffened in his arms. He loosed his hold; she sat on his lap, looking into his face, letting the tears fall where they would. “Mother is dead,” she said very calmly. “So is Irene. So is Corinna. The Latins killed them. Alf made our house a pyre for them.”

  Jehan had known how it must be. But it was the worst of all the past days’ horrors to hear it from her in that quiet, child’s voice ancient with suffering, all her world destroyed in a handful of days.

  And no hate; before God, no hate. She had gone past it.

  She regarded him with grave concern. Her tears had stopped; his had only begun. She wiped his face with a small warm hand. “Don’t cry, Father Jehan. You’ve won. You should be glad.”

  “I haven’t won. No one has, except maybe the Devil. We found the greatest city in the world; we’ve made it an outpost of Hell.”

  Anna shook her head. “Hell isn’t here. It’s underneath us. You know that, Father Jehan.”

  “And belike I’m going there.” He mastered himself with an effort. “You’re safe, God be thanked. Is—is—Anna, is Nikki here?”

  Her face twisted. “No. N—no.”

  ‘“Dead?”

  “No.” She was crying again.

  “For God’s sake, you great lout, stop tormenting the child.”

  Jehan met Master Dionysios’ cold eye. “I’m tormenting myself,” he said levelly. And at last: “Where is Alfred?”

  The Master glared. “What is that to you?”

  Suddenly Jehan could not bear it. “Everything!” he shouted. “Everything, damn you!”

  “We are not deaf.” Dionysios’ expression had not softened, but his eyes had, a very little. “Nor do we know where he is.”

  “They took him,” Anna said. “He fought. Thea—Thea was somebody else, and then they shot her, and she was herself. He tried to kill everybody. They tied him up and took him away. Thea, too. Nikki and his cat went after. Nobody could stop him. They were too busy holding me down.”

  Dionysios nodded shortly. “That in essence is the truth. The woman had a bolt in her lung below the heart. She could not have survived the hour under such handling as they gave her. But mercy is not a virtue you barbarians are guilty of. Your friend was taken with her; where, no one seems able to tell. Some vile prison, no doubt, reserved for those who had the temerity to defend their city.”

  If Jehan had not been sitting, he would have fallen. “Alf—wasn’t—hurt?”

  “Not that any of` us could see, though he fought like a madman once the woman had Fallen.”

  “It didn’t matter,” Anna said, “if he wasn’t hurt, if Thea was.”

  No. It did not. And if Thea was dead—

  Jehan rose unsteadily, setting Anna on her feet. She held to the cincture of his habit. “Take me with you,” she said.

  “Child, I can’t. You’re safe here. There’s the Master, and Thomas, and—”

  “Take me!”

  “What would l do with you?”

  “Take me,” she persisted.

  He hardened his will. She tightened her grip on his belt.

  “It’s death out there!” he cried in desperation.

  “Not any more,” she said. “The riots are over. Everyone says so. All the Latins are sick and sorry and very, very rich. Besides,” she added, “you’re big enough to take care of six of me.”

  But not to withstand the pleadings of even one of her. He tarried, hoping that she would weary of waiting and abandon him. Vain hope. He questioned every Latin in Saint Basil’s, of every rank, and she never took her eyes from him.

  No one knew where Alf had been taken. Lord Bertrand had commanded it; Lord Bertrand was gone, and his men with him. He could be anywhere in the City.

  When Jehan left Saint Basil’s, he had a small companion. A boy, it might have been, dressed as a healer’s apprentice, with a cap on his head and a small, satisfied smile on his face.

  o0o

  Nikki huddled miserably in a corner with his kitten in his lap. It was dark where they were, and damp, and cold. Things scuttled in the darkness, fleeing when the cat sprang at them, creeping back boldly when it paused to make a meal of one of their kin. Once, when men brought food and water, the light of their torches caught the brown-furred bodies and the pink naked tails and the redly gleaming eyes.

  Alf did not notice. Alf noticed nothing except Thea. His robe lay under her body, shielding her from the crawling dampness; for himself he had only his thin undertunic.

  The men had had things to say of that; Nikki had felt their minds when they came, and seen their faces. Not good faces, but not bad ones, either. One had tried to touch Alf where a person was not supposed to touch, but the other had stopped him, angry and a little disgusted, thinking words Nikki was not sure he understood.

  Alf had not even known they were there. Thea lay very still on his robe. He had eased the bolt out of her side with hands and power, and stopped the bleeding.

  Strange bleeding, bubbling like water out of a fountain. It frightened Alf, a fear that made Nikki cower in his corner. She was dying the way Father had died. She would die, and there would be no world left for Alf.

  Hour after hour she lay there in the darkness and the cold and the pale glimmer of Alf’s power. Close to death, hovering, on the very edge of it, yet she held firm against his healing.

  Her will and her consciousness had no part in it; those were long gone. But her body clung grimly to life, and her power kept doggedly to its resistance: two instincts, each powerful, each implacable, each striving blindly to thwart the other.

  Alf drove his power to the farthest limits of its strength and even beyond. His body, abandoned, sprawled beside hers; his mind cupped like a hand about the wound that drained her life away, but could not move to mend it. Her shield was like adamant.

  He spun back into his body. For a long while he lay motionless.

  Her face was white and still and achingly beautiful. Already it had the marble pallor of death. Drop by drop, blood trickled into her lungs, crowding out the precious air. Her heart strained; her limbs grew cold as all her forces gathered at her center.

  Slowly Nikki crept from his corner. Alf seemed as close to death as she, willing it, longing for it.

  There was a small space between them. Nikki wriggled into it. Thea was hard and cold in her armor, Alf cold and rigid, no warmer or softer than the stones on which he lay. They were gone; they would never come back. They had left him alone. He began to cry, deep racking sobs without help or hope.

  Alf’s power, all but spent, sent forth a last, feeble tendril. Thea’s barrier wavered and melted.

  Nikki, between them, wept as if his heart would break. Through the perfection of his grief, Alf’s healing flowed.

  It was very little. He had no more left to give. Yet Thea’s life, balancing on the edge of dissolution, seized the thread and clung. Inch by tortured inch he drew her back. Cell by cell her body began to mend.

  At last, exhausted by his weeping, Nikki slept.

  o0o

  Alf woke
by degrees. His mind ached at least as much as his body. There was a grinding pain in his stomach; only after a long while did he recognize it as hunger.

  His nose twitched. There was food somewhere within range. Blindly he groped for it. Something warm and furred moved against his hand; he started, half sitting up, to meet the bright eyes of Nikki’s kitten.

  Thea lay on her side, pale and ill to look on but sleeping peacefully. Nikki coiled in the hollow of her body. All around them was a room of stone, bare of furnishings, with a steep ladder of a stair leading up to a heavy door.

  Not a prison, Alf thought as his mind began to clear. It had not that aura which prisons have, of hate and fear and pain. This place spoke rather of ancient wine and of long-gone cheeses.

  Close by him lay a plate and a bowl and a lidded jar. The plate held bread, dry and rather hard but of decent quality; a stew filled the bowl, now cold and congealed, and in the jar was thin sour wine.

  He raised the jar with trembling hands. He was as weak as if he had roused from a fever. He drank a sip, two. The wine burned his parched throat, but it warmed his belly. Carefully he set the jar down and reached for the bread. A little only; a spoonful from the bowl. His stomach growled for more; his mind, trained to fasting, refrained.

  With his body’s needs attended, he sat clasping his knees, chin upon them, gazing at the two who continued to sleep. Perhaps he prayed. Perhaps he dozed. His mind was empty of thought, utterly serene.

  He started awake. The kitten crouched at his feet, every hair erect.

  Iron grated on iron. Bolts thudded back; the door swung open. Light stabbed Alf’s dark-accustomed eyes. He threw up a hand to shield them.

  The stair groaned under the weight of several men. They were armed, he saw from the shape of their shadows; mailed though not helmed, and cloaked over it. One carried the torch that still made Alf’s eyes flinch. Two others stood with drawn swords.

  The fourth stood over him. The little cat struck fiercely with distended claws; met mail; spat and yowled, defying the intruder to advance.

  Alf rose unsteadily with the furious cat in his arms, and bowed as best he might. “My lord,” he said, neither surprised nor afraid.

  Count Baudouin looked him up and down; folded his arms and cocked his head a little to one side. “So, Master Alfred,” he said, “even your familiar will fight for you. Have you anything to say for yourself ?”

  “You judged me when first you saw me,” Alf responded coolly. “What could I say that would change it?”

  Baudouin’s jaw tensed. “My judgment has proved correct.”

  “In your eyes, perhaps.”

  “Four of my men died at your hands.”

  “How many innocent women and children died at theirs?”

  “Greek women and children,” said Baudouin. “You, sir, are not a Greek.”

  “No. I am merely a man who saw half his family cruelly murdered and his lady wounded unto death by men gone mad with wine and plundering.”

  “You took arms against your own people.”

  Alf’s eyes glittered; his voice was deadly soft. “My people, my lord? The only one of my people in this city lies yonder with the wound of a Flemish quarrel in her side. She lives, and will live, but she owes her life to no act of your army.”

  Baudouin looked from him to Thea. She was little more than a shadow and a gleam, her slender body lost in the Varangian armor, her face hidden by the fall of her hair.

  He approached her slowly. Alf, with no appearance of haste, moved to stand in his path.

  There was a pause. Baudouin glared; Alf met him with a cold quiet stare. His eyes dropped.

  “My lord,” All said very gently, “with me you may do as you like. But I advise you not to touch my lady.”

  Baudouin laughed, high and strained. “That? Your lady? A fine lusty wench she must be, from the tales I’ve heard. But then,” he added with a flash of malice, “you seem to be a man after all, now I see you without your silken skirts. Do you keep her satisfied?”

  “What can it matter to you, my lord, whether I do or not?”

  Baudouin’s hand flashed up. Alf seemed hardly to move; but the heavy gauntlet never touched his skin, only ruffled his hair slightly with the wind of its passing.

  The Count clenched his fists and spoke through gritted teeth. “Lord Bertrand would like to make an example of you.”

  “What sort of example, my lord?”

  Baudouin bared his teeth. It was meant to be a smile. “We’ve hanged a number of our own for keeping back more than their fair share of the plunder. It’s quieted the men down, to be sure. But it’s time we gave them a genuine criminal or two. What could be better than a Latin witch who has thrown in his lot with the Greeks?”

  “What indeed?” Alf asked as quietly as ever. “I ask only one concession.”

  “I grant you none,” said Baudouin. “I gave you enough in coming here at all and in letting you fray my temper with your insolence. Lord Bertrand may let you live; you can pray for that, if either God or your black master will listen to you. Or he may rid the world of you.”

  “That is his right. But let him set my lady free. She is a Greek, and fought loyally for her Emperor; she does not deserve a traitor’s fate.”

  “That’s for Lord Bertrand to decide. I wash my hands of you.”

  “And Pilate spoke, and having spoken, turned away.”

  Thea’s voice spun them both about. She lay as she had lain for this long while, but open-eyed, weak yet alert; Nikki’s great eyes stared up from the curve of her side.

  Carefully, shakily, she raised herself on her elbow. She regarded Baudouin with a bright mocking stare, for he was gaping like a fool. He had not thought to find her beautiful.

  “Yes, Count,” she said, “you’re wise to let someone else do your dirty work. You can’t have brother Henry guess what you’ve done, now can you? He might even begin to suspect the truth, that most of your hatred of Alf is simple, sea-green jealousy.”

  “Jealousy?” cried Baudouin. “Of that?”

  “Of a man for whom, on a few moments’ acquaintance, your much beloved brother conceived a great and lasting friendship. A friendship which he was rash enough to declare in your presence, with considerable and glowing praise of its object.”

  “Henry is a trusting fool. He saw a handsome face, heard handsome words, and let himself believe in them.”

  “And you were like to die of envy. He never praises you, except on rare occasions when he thinks you might deserve it. If you want to be Emperor, lordling, you’re going to have to learn to be more like your brother.”

  Baudouin had begun to recover from the shock of her beauty in the bitterness of her words. He opened his mouth to denounce her.

  She laughed, sweet and maddening, with a catch at the end of it. “Oh, certainly! I’m at least as bad as my paramour. You’ll have to hang us both, your lordship, or you’ll never have peace.”

  “Thea,” Alf began, setting the cat on the floor, sinking to one knee beside her.

  She kissed the finger he laid to her lips, and shook it away. “Go on, my brave lord, my Emperor-to-be. Condemn us both to death. Then you’ll have no rival for your brother’s affections, and no one to take vengeance on you for murdering her lover.”

  Baudouin’s sword hissed from its sheath. She laughed at it.

  He gritted out a curse and whirled away, half running up the steep stair. His men scrambled after him.

  32.

  Jehan prowled the room Henry had given him in Blachernae. It was a chaplain’s cell, with a chapel close by it; in comparison with the rest of the palace it was very small and sternly ascetic. But by the standards of a priest from Anglia, it was almost sinfully opulent.

  Anna sat on the large and comfortable bed and watched him. Here in seclusion, she had taken off her cap; her braids hung down, very black and thick on either side of her narrow pointed face.

  She tugged at one. “Won’t you let me cut them off?” she begged.<
br />
  “No!” he snapped. He stopped in front of the saint painted with jewelled tiles upon the wall, and glared into her huge soulful eyes. “‘Holy Saint Helena,’” he read, “‘finder of the True Cross, pray for us.’ If you could find a Cross buried for three hundred years, why in God’s name can’t you find a handful of prisoners lost for a day?”

  “Maybe because you haven’t asked her before,” Anna said reasonably.

  He growled and began to pace again.

  Someone knocked softly at the door. Anna stuffed her braids into her cap. Jehan muttered something in Norman; and louder, in Greek: “Who is it?”

  “You ordered food, my lord,” said a light sexless voice.

  Jehan shivered a little. These eunuchs made his skin creep, silent gliding creatures, neither male nor female, serving their new masters with obsequiousness that masked deep and utter contempt.

  He found his voice. “Come in, then.”

  The servant entered with bowed head and laid his burden on a table. Anna, with the perfect ease of the Greek aristocrat, stepped around him as if he had not been there and began to investigate the various plates and bowls.

  The eunuch made no move to go. He was a young one, overdressed as they all seemed to be, painted and perfumed like a woman; there were jewels in his ears and on his fingers and everywhere between. As he lifted his face, with a shock Jehan knew him. Either the chief steward of the palace had suffered a great reduction in rank, or there was something afoot.

  Without conscious thought, Jehan reached for his sword and drew it and set himself between the eunuch and the child.

  Michael Doukas looked from the bright blade to the cold eyes behind it and smiled slightly. “I take it, holy Father, that we know one another.”

  “I think,” said Jehan, “that we do. Are you in the habit of running errands for minor clerics when there’s nothing of greater import for you to do?”

  “On occasion,” replied Michael Doukas, “I will stoop to it.”

  He laid a delicate finger on the flat of Jehan’s blade, just below the point, and moved it fastidiously aside. “Do you mind, my lord? It’s quite vulgar to greet one’s guests with steel.”