Five for Silver

by Mary Reed

  “What is it?” She firmly clutched the edge of her door, obviously prepared to slam it shut if necessary.

  “Are you the owner of this building?”

  “Yes. My name’s Glykeria. How can I assist you?” She inclined her head to one side to look up at John. Her eyes had a glassy, vacant look.

  John realized she was actually turning an ear toward him.

  The woman was blind.

  He told her he sought a man named Triton.

  “Do I know where he is? Indeed I do,” Glykeria replied. “Burning in the eternal fires, that’s where. That young villain will be roasting long after the empire is dust and that’s just for the rent he never paid. So whatever he owes you, I’m afraid you’ll just have to be content with considering that he’ll burn for that as well.”

  The sightless eyes gleamed as if reflecting the flames she contemplated.

  John sighed. He’d never undertaken an investigation where death seemed to be not only the crime, but also the murderer’s accomplice. Nonetheless he forged ahead, explaining he wasn’t a bill collector but rather a palace official.

  The woman glowered at him. “Of course not. You’re a good friend and just want a word. He had so many good friends wanting a word. Never met anyone so popular, I must say. I could tell by my nose just who he’d robbed. The perfumer visited more than once. for a start. At the end he couldn’t even pay the cheesemaker’s bill. All good friends, so they said, although none of them claimed to be from the palace before now.”

  John assured her he was, in fact, from the palace. She gave no indication that she had heard him, or believed him if she had.

  “When did Triton die?” he asked.

  “Only yesterday. Or possibly it was the day before. Not long ago.” She flapped a claw-like hand vaguely.

  “Do you know anything about his family or friends? Perhaps some of these visitors you mentioned—”

  “His father won’t be settling Triton’s debts, so you’re out of luck there. I can assure you, the rogue had long since cut himself off from whatever family he had, or they cut themselves off from him. Little wonder, really. If he hadn’t died, I would’ve evicted him at the end of the week.”

  “Triton was a troublesome tenant?”

  “Named for a pagan god and had the morals of one.”

  Something in the woman’s tone told John he would have to tread around the subject of Triton carefully. He asked to see Triton’s room.

  Glykeria’s head inclined further to the side. “I see I misunderstood your intentions.”

  Suddenly she grabbed a fold of John’s robe.

  A toothless smile added another crease to the woman’s face. “I can feel from this fine cloth you can afford my rooms. For an instant I thought I’d have to direct you to a tenement. If you would wait…”

  She banged the door shut and emerged not long afterwards grasping a bundle of keys.

  “This way,” she said as she scuttled out. Despite her lack of sight, Glykeria crossed the paved courtyard without hesitation and vanished into an entranceway. John followed her to the top of a gloomy flight of stairs.

  “I’m not proposing to become a tenant,” he said, wondering how she had formed the misconception. “I only wish to see where Triton lived. I’m curious, though. How did you initially suppose I couldn’t afford one of your rooms?”

  “Excuse me, sir, but it was because you carry the smell of the most vulgar of wines.”

  Glykeria led him to the second floor. If any lamps were provided in the windowless stairwell, they weren’t lit. The hallway was nearly as dark. Glykeria’s key grated in a lock, a battered plank door swung open, and they stepped into a room whose furnishings consisted entirely of dust.

  “Spacious, as I’m sure you’ll agree. If you’d care to look out the window and direct your gaze between the building over the way and the warehouse next to it and then over the top of the distant granary, there’s a fine view of the sea, or so I’m told.”

  John walked over to the window. Whoever had described the view to Glykeria possessed either eyes or a tongue that couldn’t be trusted.

  “A most pleasant view,” she went on. “But then to me any view would be pleasant.” She emitted a brief cackle.

  Ignoring his recent statement that he did not wish to take a room, she continued. “I must caution you, sir, there’s already been some interest in this fine place. Several well-spoken young men came by just yesterday. Come to think of it, that proves Triton must have been dead then. Unless it was this morning when I showed them the room. They looked around for the longest time. They wanted to meditate on the decision by themselves, so I left them. I suspect they were praying for advice. In the end, they did not take it. Perhaps it was heaven’s plan the room should still be here for you, sir. They gave me a nummus for my trouble. Very pious young men, they were.”

  Not to mention strong, since the courteous thieves had apparently stolen everything in the room. Not that there had been much furniture to begin with, judging from the dust-free markings on the floorboards.

  Glykeria secured Triton’s former lodgings behind them. Having taken several uncannily sure steps down the hallway, motioning John to follow, she rapped a staccato summons on a door at the far end.

  After some time a muffled screech came from within. “I told you, my husband’s sick, you old crow. We’ll pay the rent as soon as he’s up and around and can get back to work.”

  “I’ll have what’s due, or you’ll answer to the City Prefect!”

  “Why not bring the Patriarch along with the Prefect while you’re at it?” came the shouted reply. “Or how about Justinian? I am sure the emperor is as anxious about your rent as you are! Go away and stop bothering a sick man!”

  “I’ve got someone here prepared to take you away now,” Glykeria claimed. “If you don’t believe me, look out and see.”

  The door opened briefly and shut again with a loud click. Not long afterwards the door opened a second time and several coins clattered onto the floor near Glykeria’s shoes. She bent nimbly, her fingers explored the boards, found the money, and scooped it up in an instant. “Thank you for your assistance, sir. I’ll be happy to give you a discount on that room.”

  “Perhaps you might have waited until your tenant resumed working?” John suggested as they clattered back downstairs.

  Glykeria snorted in derision. “The fellow won’t see sunrise tomorrow.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  They were halfway across the courtyard. Glykeria stopped and turning toward John tapped her nose. “I can smell it, sir. Take the clerk on the second floor. He’s afraid it’s the plague, but he’ll be back to his accounts next week. He just ate something that had spoilt, that’s all. However, the potter next door to him will be clay before he touches his wheel again.”

  “How do you know this, Glykeria?” He almost expected to hear that she kept an oracle in her kitchen.

  “I smell it on them.”

  “Ah, I understand.” It was becoming obvious that Glykeria’s blindness was less an impediment to her than her mental faculties. Which perhaps explained how she had transformed John so quickly from one of Tritons’ creditors to prospective tenant.

  She must have sensed the doubt in his tone. ”Let me prove it, sir.” She wrinkled her nose and sniffed. “What a strange thing. You have been to a farm recently. A gentleman like you in the midst of the capital, I agree it seems unlikely and yet it is unmistakable. Let me advise you, bulls can be dangerous beasts.”

  John remarked that she had an amazing gift.

  “Gift? You call this a gift? Can you imagine what it is like to live by one’s nose since the plague arrived? Be glad you don’t possess my sensitivities, sir. Now, about the matter of Triton’s old room…”

  John explained yet again that he did not intend to rent anything. He pressed a coin into her hand, stifling her vague murmurs of disappointment. “For your help, Glykeria.
Is there anything else you can tell me about Triton before I go?”

  “I didn’t know him as well as some, I admit. However, I make my daily rounds, to collect rents, to clean, to make certain all is in order. I noticed things from time to time. He imbibed heavily, for a start. He was often sick from too much wine.”

  Her face crinkled with displeasure at the recollection. “His father visited once. They argued. Such blasphemous language. I’ve rarely heard the like! It’s no wonder Triton died horribly. Many of my tenants have left this life since the plague arrived and it’s always a dreadful death, but his was the most terrible of all. I could hear him at the end, bellowing with pain, even down here in the courtyard. Heaven is just, sir, if not always kind.”

  She tilted her head toward the courtyard which they had just left, as if the paving stones still vibrated with echoes of Triton’s last agonies.

  John asked what Triton and Nereus had argued about.

  “A woman, of course. What else? She insisted on calling herself Sappho. She thought I didn’t notice, but I always knew when she sneaked in and out of the building. She smelled of cheap wine, expensive perfume, and garlic. A very stupid and low girl.”

  Glykeria leaned forward confidentially. “One day she brought in a piece of fox-fur one of the furriers over the way had discarded. I had a tenant who sewed, and I allowed her to conduct business in her room for a small weekly consideration. Apparently Sappho imagined she would look quite the aristocrat, with this nasty scrap of fur sewn along the bottom of her tunic. Still, the job provided my tenant a extra nummus or two, so she could pay her rent on time for a change, until the plague claimed her.”

  She pursed her lips. “My tenant described the woman to me in great detail. Sappho always wore saffron-colored garments, of a most indecent style I may add, and boasted endlessly about how she would one day wear golden silk. Well, to cut a long story short, she eventually moved in, but when she left him she took the nasty thing with her. I mean the fox-trimmed tunic, not Triton.”

  John asked, without harboring much hope, if Glykeria could remember the date of the woman’s departure. Unfortunately, she could not. Nor could she say where this particular girl had come from. She’d really been no different from the others who stayed with Triton occasionally, except she’d stayed longer than the rest.

  “But then what do you expect? She was an actress, sir, and very flighty in her ways. Decent folk use other words for them that follow that particular profession.” She compressed her lips. “Have you talked to the bear trainers by the Hippodrome? But no, it’s a bull you recently visited, not a bear. She claimed to work with them. Bears, I mean.”

  “And Triton, what profession did he follow?”

  “He was like her. Had all sorts of notions, but rarely worked. Fancied himself first an actor, then a bear trainer. The girl knew some of the trainers, as I said, and got him a job with them. It didn’t last long and no wonder, if he mistreated the bears as badly as he did her.”

  She hugged herself suddenly. “If you don’t mind, sir, there’s bit of a chill in the air. I need to warm up inside and then I’m off to the Great Church. I spend as much time there as I can.”

  John remarked that one’s faith could be a great comfort in such trying times.

  Glykeria gave another cackle. “It’s the incense that draws me there these days, sir. Yes, the blessed incense. It’s the only thing that banishes the stink of death from my nostrils.”

  Chapter Nine

  Anatolius loped through the high-ceilinged halls of the Baths of Zeuxippos, exchanging hurried greetings with one or two of the scanty number of bathers availing themselves of the facilities. It was remarkable, his poetic nature noted, how even as the shadow of Thanatos lay across the city, some residents still clung to their everyday routines.

  What was even more remarkable, his practical side immediately asserted, was that there was still enough manpower and fuel to provide enough hot water for the baths to continue to operate.

  The corridors were eerily deserted as he made his way toward the private baths. His footsteps, slapping against an uncharacteristically dry marble floor, sounded far too loud.

  He remembered a dream he’d had more than once. In the dream he arrived at the baths only to find himself alone. The water was cold, the corridors all empty. As he wandered the lifeless labyrinth panic began to swell in his chest. Suddenly he knew, without question, he was the last person left alive and that when he emerged from the impossibly deserted baths, Constantinople would be just as empty, and all the towns beyond its walls, and all the lands beyond the seas—all would be empty. He could feel the emptiness inside him as well as all around him.

  Had that recurring dream been an omen?

  He had begun to form the uneasy feeling that perhaps he was dreaming again when he arrived at a semicircular area graced by a platform facing a number of empty benches.

  At least this lecture room was occupied, if only by a single person, the glum-faced Crinagoras.

  Seeing Anatolius, his expression brightened and he leapt up with an eager grin. “How kind of you to attend my recitation! I feared my genius had frightened off my fellow devotees of Calliope. Until you arrived, as someone once said, my audience was made up of three benches and four walls. Well, if you want to be entirely accurate, not even four walls, just a single curved one.”

  Not certain whether his friend was jesting or not, Anatolius mumbled apologies for arriving late. “I visited the Lord Chamberlain on the way here, and we talked about Gregory’s murder. Remember, I was telling you about that after you mentioned you’d witnessed—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. What matters is that you’ve managed to finally get here!”

  “Yes. That’s the important thing, naturally.”

  Crinagoras ignored the ironic comment and chattered on.

  Anatolius occasionally wondered why he tolerated Crinagoras. They’d been tutored together as boys. Their shared horror of the hypotenuse was the foundation of their friendship. The two aspiring poets had always preferred Homer to Pythagoras.

  Crinagoras had grown up to be slightly taller than Anatolius, bigger of frame, and with a tendency to plumpness. Although the same age as his fellow, his ruddy face, framed in sandy curls, retained the pudgy, unformed look of a child, a face that might be characterized as a not quite completed marble likeness still awaiting time’s final, telling cuts.

  “We may as well begin, I suppose.” Crinagorus fussed with the voluminous folds of the old-fashioned toga he’d donned for the event. A disappointed scowl displaced his welcoming grin as he ruffled through several parchments. “It’s just as well I didn’t bring my lyre.”

  “Perhaps notice of your recitation has not yet reached your patrons?” The prospect of maintaining a semblance of enthusiasm as an audience of one in the face of his friend’s lugubrious verses made Anatolius squirm as much as the sight of a equilateral triangle on a wax tablet had upset him in his youth. “Might I therefore suggest you delay it until they have received the news? Doubtless they’d all be sorry to miss such an opportunity! Instead, perhaps we could…” He cast about for inspiration. “…go off into the country for a little fresh air?”

  “What? But we’d have to go to the stables. I’d need to change my clothing. What about our midday meal?”

  “Oh, you don’t need to change,” Anatolius replied hastily. “It will be an adventure. John was telling me just now that he hadn’t learned anything when he visited Nereus’ residence except that the household has moved out to his estate. It’s up by the northern end of the Golden Horn. Perhaps we could find out something useful for him.”

  “I’m not certain if I want to go, Anatolius. Riding always upsets my humors.”

  “We could stop at the cemetery on the way and inspect your latest inscriptions.”

  “Well, there’s that, certainly! It may be that some of my dear patrons no longer draw the breath that sang my praises. What a c
old mistress is the grave, yet none can resist her blandishments. Alas, that men would desert my verses for death.”

  “Aptly put, my friend. You must write it down for posterity as soon as possible.”

  “Anyway, it would be best to reveal my newest inspiration to several of my patrons simultaneously, wouldn’t you say? Then no charge of favoritism could be leveled at me if one should hear before the rest.”

  “A circumstance that would certainly create difficulties in the way of obtaining new commissions, if someone thought another had heard your most recent creations first.”

  “Exactly so. I hope you don’t mind, Anatolius, but I shall not let you read my new poems either, even though you are a close friend!”

  “Of course.” Anatolius attempted to look disappointed. “Even friends cannot always ask for special dispensations.”

  “I can tell you, however, that one of them is a most personal poem about my beloved Eudoxia and the agonies of longing I have suffered ever since her death. I am quite painfully honest about my anguish. Courageously honest, if you will. It is my duty to keep her dear memory alive.”

  “You don’t have to explain. Your patrons expect nothing less of you. Alas, I know how difficult it can be, pleasing one’s patrons.”

  Crinagoras looked thoughtful. “I said I would not reveal my latest poems to you, but I will tell you I have composed several more of my epigrams on architecture. You see, my thought is they might eventually be chiseled on the architecture in question for a reasonable price. You might describe them as little bricks of poems. Businessmen are not always interested in the finer feelings. Ordinary subjects are what they prefer. For instance—” he glanced through the parchments in his chubby hand— “you’ve already heard my Ode to a Granary. Another one proclaims the Mese. I call it Forked Like The Serpent’s Tongue. There’s pathos in stone, you know, if you can just find it.”

  Anatolius stated he was absolutely certain if pathos could be found, Crinagoras would be the one to find it.