Two for Joy jte-2

by Mary Reed

  Himation flapping, Philo ran after the man now walking briskly away.

  “Diomedes!” he called out. “Wait! Wait, old friend!”

  Peter fretted. It was late and John hadn’t returned. His concern was not borne of self-interest, for as a freed man and an excellent cook, he could be certain of obtaining a good post should he ever find himself unemployed. Cooks, after all, were everywhere more in demand than philosophers. Occasionally he had wondered what it would be like to work for a less ascetic employer, especially when John regaled him with tales of the exotic dishes he had sampled at the tables of some of the wealthier inhabitants of the city. It was true that his master’s simple tastes rarely presented a challenge to culinary skills but inevitably loyalty, and perhaps more than a pinch of distaste for such ostentatious fare, kept Peter in John’s employ.

  And John, he admitted to himself, was kind enough even if his theology was both mistaken and dangerous. Sooner or later it would bring grief upon his master, as if he had not already suffered enough. Unless, of course, he eventually saw the error of his beliefs, as Peter fervently prayed he would. The possibility that his master’s beliefs would also visit fury upon his own head he dismissed. He was elderly now, but John still had many years left in him. And yet…and yet it sometimes seemed to Peter that John almost willfully sought out situations where he would have to place himself in danger.

  However, Peter thought, with these Michaelites stirring the city into a turmoil as fiery as his kitchen brazier, there was no telling what might happen. And whereas John habitually carried a blade about his person, as did all sensible men including himself, there had definitely been an increase in violence in Constantinople over the past few days. Not to mention the undeniable fact that two or three thugs working together could out-stab even the nimblest person, especially if they thought it would gain them a few nomismata. Since there was anonymity in a multitude, it was unlikely ruffians like that would ever be caught. Yes, it was a dangerous time to be abroad alone.

  What concerned him most was that John invariably sent a messenger if he expected to be delayed an hour or two beyond the time of the evening meal. Now it was nearly dusk and no word had arrived. This unusual event, coupled with occasional bursts of that angry, distant growling that told of the rising appetite of a mob working themselves up to committing who knows what crimes, suggested to Peter that it was quite likely that John had fallen afoul of some anonymous cut throat.

  Shuffling about his duties while straining his ears for the sound of John’s familiar rap on the door, Peter offered a quiet prayer for his master’s safe arrival home. Having thus left the matter in heavenly hands, he began chopping onions. Their pungent odor made tears flow down his walnut-brown and similarly wrinkled face.

  The beggar knew it was time to seek shelter for the night. Already the tide of darkness had filled the byways with shadows.

  During the warmer months he preferred to claim a sheltered corner where he could doze in solitude without fear of being robbed or assaulted. But the increasing chill in the night air reminded him that he would soon be needing better protection from the elements. Unfortunately, in such refuges as were available to him others would also be gathering, many of them untrustworthy, violent or even deranged, and all of them filthy and vermin infested.

  He intended to avoid such accommodations for as long as the weather and his fraying garments would allow. In the life snatched away from him, now all but forgotten, the beggar had been a private and fastidious man.

  He set off for his night quarters, a cozy niche under-neath a huge yew tree that grew near the aqueduct through the burial grounds between the city’s walls. The decently buried dead were quiet companions and since few ventured into their settlement after dark, it was one of the safest places in Constantinople.

  Yes, he thought, as he stepped out smartly for his destination, after the tumult of the day he would appreciate the serenity waiting there. Having observed the enormous crowd flooding the Mese that afternoon he had sensed the city was ready to explode into rioting. It had happened before. The prospect filled him with a mixture of eagerness and dread. Once bricks and fire opened the houses and shops of the wealthy to such as himself, he might again taste a peach he had not found half eaten in a gutter. Perhaps he could find sandals whose soles were unbroken or a warm tunic for the winter. Those were excellent possibilities to consider. But there would also be human packs roaming uncontrolled, more vicious than starving dogs. That was something he did not like to contemplate. He had lost his workshop and his former life to just such a riot. Fortunately, he had not been married nor had a daughter or he might well have lost even more.

  He shuddered and turned his thoughts firmly to the refuge he had chosen. It was some distance away, at least by the route he was planning to take. He intended to avoid certain streets likely to be frequented by Blues or Greens and give a wide berth to particular alleys he knew to be deadly.

  As he passed swiftly along his way, he stayed close to the shuttered shops edging the streets, wary as a cat of open spaces where he was away from a wall to have at his back if the need arose.

  He came to a wide avenue lit by the wall-mounted torches that merchants kept burning outside their places of business at night. A dark shape on the cobbles ahead caught his attention. Was it some unconscious intoxicated person? A corpse? If it were, it was too small to be human, he decided. A dead animal perhaps? There were enough of those to be found in the streets.

  He crept forward slowly, ready to flee if necessary. It was not human, he realized with a sudden rush of relief. It was discarded clothing, a cloak.

  The beggar snatched it off the ground, clutching its heavy folds to his thin chest. He could almost hear his heart pounding against his rib cage. The cloak was made of finely woven wool. Even in his former life he had never owned anything of such richness and value.

  Belatedly, a terrible suspicion occurred to him. He looked around in panic. Was this the trick of some cruel Blue or Green who would materialize out of the shadows, blade in hand, to reclaim his possession from a thief? But neither faction needed an excuse to kill a beggar. Perhaps it belonged to a courtier? Certain tales concerning them were commonly bandied about the streets. If only half of them were true, would it not please such a person to have a beggar like him handed over to the imperial torturers?

  Other horrible possibilities, each worse than the last, raced in a mad riot through his head. Should he even have picked the cloak up, thus placing himself in danger? He shivered, looking around, waiting for the hand on the shoulder that heralded…who knew what? Yet, as time passed he still stood unmolested, clutching his newly found treasure to his chest with shaking hands.

  Examining the cloak in the light of the nearest torch, he realized that, however it had come to be there, it was certainly of great value.

  His thoughts were swirling as wildly, the debris blown around by the chilly wind now guttering the lonely flares of the torches. How much food would the cloak be worth if he sold it? And if he kept it, how many cold nights would it allow him to remain safely in his hidden corner, well away from the communal refuges he so dreaded?

  He pulled the cloak over his shoulders, noting with satisfaction how warm he felt. Its hem dragged behind him a little as he set off down the deserted avenue with much springier steps than those that had brought him there. The cloak had been made for a taller man. What fate had befallen him?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lucretia awoke in darkness to the sound of muffled thunder.

  Someone was pounding at the front door of Nonna’s apartment building. Balbinus? Her heart leapt, an animal trying to escape from a trap. It’s only a nightmare, Lucretia told herself. How many times had she had that same awful dream since fleeing her husband?

  A sleepy tenant shouted from a window below, castigating the nocturnal caller for waking everyone in the house. The visitor replied with a yet more inventive string of curses. Familiar curses, bellowed in a familiar voice.r />
  As Nonna stirred sleepily nearby, Lucretia dressed in frantic haste, grabbing the first clothing her hand encountered in the dark. She ran out on to the landing, her mind still dazed with sleep.

  There was a door at the back of the building’s first floor. If she reached it quickly enough she could escape before the argument going on at the front of the house was finished. Running downstairs in a panic, she caught the toe of her sandal on a loose board and fell heavily to the floor on the landing.

  From below came the rattle of a bolt drawn, the bang of the front door flung open. More shouting. More foul language. For an instant she was paralyzed, huddled on the floor by the door to the communal lavatory. Terrible words she had hoped never to hear again came booming up the stair well.

  Heavy footsteps pounded upwards.

  Lucretia pushed herself to her feet. No time to escape now. She jerked open the lavatory door and crouched down in the cramped, malodorous cubicle. Insults continued to be shouted upstairs after Balbinus. His footsteps crossed the landing, past her temporary sanctuary.

  As soon as she heard him rapping at the door of Nonna’s room on the floor above, Lucretia flung herself downstairs and escaped out the front door. Her heart pounded faster than her feet on the slippery cobbles as she dashed into the alley across the street, heedless of danger, seeking any concealment she could find.

  With laboring breath, she traversed the dark length of the narrow way and ran across the open space beyond. Torches guttered here and there at shuttered shop fronts. Down another street she went, pulling away in fright from the grasping hand of a woman sitting in a doorway, and finally stumbled into a marketplace.

  Boisterous stallholders were already setting out wares for their expected customers, comparing competitors’ offerings in the light of torches, loudly finding them the worst rubbish they had ever had the misfortune to observe and having little better to say about each other’s ancestors and sexual practices.

  She glanced back down the shadowed street from which she just emerged. Was that someone running after her? She whirled and fled, straight into the side of an ox cart.

  The next thing she knew she was being dragged to her feet. She tried to pull away, lashing out toward her captor’s face at the same time. A strong hand gripped her wrist.

  “Stop it! I’m not going to hurt you!”

  It was a ruddy faced carter, about her age or perhaps a year or two younger.

  “Where are you running to, lady?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucretia stammered. “I was just careless…”

  “A lady wouldn’t be roaming the streets at this hour without good reason. You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

  Lucretia protested feebly that it was not so, but the carter would not be convinced. It struck her that he was young enough to grasp eagerly at the adventurous prospect of assisting a pretty woman in obvious distress without giving much thought to the possible consequences. Certain that her husband would burst into the marketplace at any moment she blurted out her destination.

  The carter grinned. “Well, there’s a miracle for you! I’m just on my way to that very shrine!”

  As he quickly cleared a space for her amid the sacks of onions and amphorae of olive oil piled in his cart, he pointed out that those encamped out there needed to eat and have light just like everyone else. “I do well enough from their trade,” he went on, “even though I charge a bit less than some, what with them being pilgrims and all.”

  Lucretia thanked the young man. She did not reveal that although she had contemplated joining Michael’s followers she also feared what that would entail-cutting herself off forever from her former life, from her friends and family. Her mind had finally been made up only when Balbinus arrived bellowing at the house door.

  As soon as she was safely aboard, the carter urged his ox forward.

  “It could be good for future business too,” he shouted back to her loudly enough to be heard over the rattling of wheels, “since they’ll remember their friends if they should take over the city. And it might help me in the afterlife as well, you never know. Yes, it’s certainly been excellent for trade, although not so good for public order. There’s an uneasy feeling in the air, fermenting like demon’s wine as you might say, but isn’t that usually the case? Always somebody stirring up trouble, always somebody else suffering for it.” He was quite the philosopher, it seemed.

  “But,” he went on, “although personally I don’t know what to make of it all, there’s a lot of talk when the wine jug’s been emptied a few times about how things will be different when Michael’s in charge. I’ll believe that when I see it, though.”

  Before long they had passed out of the city gates. The guards scarcely glanced at the heavily loaded cart. They were obviously concerned not with who might be openly leaving the city but rather with those trying to enter it by stealth.

  Lucretia suppressed a startled cry as she was jolted awake by the sudden, lurching halt of the cart. She had been dozing uneasily, and peering warily over its side was relieved to see neither her husband nor a pursuing Prefect. There was, however, a white-haired man lying a short distance away beside the unruly line of brush running along the edge of a field.

  Her benefactor was already investigating. Lucretia leaned forward, staring. Surely the man on the ground had not been set about by robbers? Even from a distance, she could see from his rough clothes and malnourished look he had nothing worth stealing. Dark patches of blood stained his tunic. Perhaps he had been beaten for the sport of it?

  Helped into a sitting position, the old man spoke for a time but Lucretia could not hear what was being said.

  When he returned to her side, the young carter looked grim. “Nothing to be afraid of here, lady. But there’s been an attack at the shrine. He says he barely escaped with his life.”

  Lucretia asked who could have been responsible for such a terrible act.

  Her companion spat into the dust. “Our beloved emperor sent a company of excubitors. Apparently they showed up before dawn. Their captain ordered the pilgrims to get out while they still could. Most of them did, scattered like leaves in the wind, it seems. Not much faith there, you may say, but what is faith against the sword? Still, it seems there were plenty who wouldn’t, who wanted to defend their precious Michael so that poor old fellow told me.”

  Lucretia paled. “What happened?” she asked, knowing what the answer would be.

  The answer was as stark and simple as she had expected. “A massacre. He doesn’t know what happened to Michael but thinks he probably escaped disguised as one of his own followers.” He spat again. “Not but what apparently some of them pilgrims gave good accounts of themselves. There’s more than one of Justinian’s men who isn’t going to be marching back to Constantinople to get drunk or go wenching tonight-or any other night.”

  “Is that old man badly hurt?” Lucretia asked, noting that he had remained seated on the ground.

  “It’s only a scalp wound, looks worse than it is,” was the dismissive reply. “He probably got a quick cut just to remind him unorthodoxy is severely frowned upon. He was lucky.”

  From her uncomfortable position Lucretia looked along the narrow road pointing back toward the city.

  “So,” the carter was saying, “do you want to ride back with me? There’s no use going there now. The only people left at the shrine are either dead or wounded or excubitors, and what with all them soldiers being there, to be blunt, well, it could be dangerous for you, you know how it is…” He trailed off.

  “If everyone else has run away help will be needed with the wounded,” Lucretia said firmly. “I will go on.”

  “It’s a mistake, it really is,” he replied with a frown, “and I hope you don’t live to regret it.”

  Lucretia watched the cart rattle out of sight towards the city. The Bosporos was hidden from this stretch of road but the fog rising from its hidden waters sent white, wispy fingers inland to clutch damply at her.

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nbsp; She had no choice, she told herself, wiping away her tears. She must continue onward, despite the fact that her only refuge had now been destroyed.

  Trudging down the narrow road, she wondered briefly if Nonna had sent someone from the building to notify Balbinus of where his wife could be found. Doubtless coins changed hands. Would her old nursemaid have betrayed her? It seemed the only explanation, for there were thousands of doors in Constantinople, too many to bring Balbinus knocking at that particular one by chance.

  And, of course, Nonna always knew best, she thought with a grim smile, just as she had always known what was best for Lucretia all through her childhood. And Nonna thought that Lucretia was dishonoring her family by fleeing and, yes, it was possible that the strict old woman had taken steps to ensure that Lucretia took the right, the honorable course. Unless, perhaps, Balbinus had finally gone to her father and discovered her possible whereabouts. She could imagine the sort of statements her father would have made when he was informed of her flight. Duty would doubtless have been the first thing mentioned.

  “A dutiful daughter,” she chanted softly to herself, as she plodded along the road, through the mist. “A dutiful wife. A dutiful daughter. A dutiful wife…”

  The sun had burnt off the fog by the time she neared the shrine. During her journey, several groups of pilgrims had rushed by her, going in the opposite direction. There were also groups of men who did not appear to belong to the military, being unarmored and dressed in plain tunics, and yet they carried swords or spears. They seemed to take no notice of her but when, looking back over her shoulder from the crest of a rise along the way, she glimpsed a large band of such men moving toward her destination, she was grateful that they quickly outpaced her and vanished around a bend in the road. Perhaps they were arriving to reinforce the excubitors already holding the shrine, or, she thought, her stomach churning, perhaps they had been sent out to hunt down such acolytes as had escaped from their clutches.