by Tom Harper
A cold breeze played over our faces, and we were turning to go indoors when Thomas surprised us all by speaking unprompted, and at such length that Father Gregorias was pressed to remember it all.
‘He says the monk often came here,’ he said. ‘He would stare out at the queen of cities, and beseech God to annihilate her, as He did Sodom and Jericho.’
‘He said all this in Frankish?’ It seemed strange that a monk would address his God in a foreign tongue.
Gregorias conferred with Thomas. ‘In the language of Old Rome, Latin. Thomas knew the words because the Franks and Normans use it in their worship.’
This was more curious still, and I shook my head in defeat. At every turn I found a dozen new questions, but never a single answer.
Sigurd looked up at the sky. ‘We’ll spend the night in the stables,’ he announced. ‘With the beasts. I don’t want to find myself stranded here by some poacher turning his hand to horseflesh. And there’s only one door to guard.’
A peal of thunder rippled through the valley.
‘And,’ he added moodily, ‘the roof’s intact.’
I spent another half hour exploring that mournful house, but found no answers among the crumbling fabric and mouldering furniture. The thunder was moving slowly nearer, and every time it sounded I would snap my head around, unsettled by the surroundings. I was glad at last to escape the building, to return to the company of the Varangians, who had tethered our horses in the stable and made a small fire in a ring of stones outside. On it they roasted salt fish and vegetables which we gulped down in haste: there was little of the usual banter of soldiers on a march that night.
We settled down on the hard floor, cursing whoever had swept out all the straw before abandoning it. As I closed my eyes, I heard the first drops of rain beginning to strike on the lead tiles above us.
It was still raining when I awoke, and still dark. A horse was snuffling somewhere on my right, but otherwise nothing moved. I lay there a second reminding myself where I was, allaying the natural fears of night with the knowledge that I was surrounded by a dozen of the stoutest warriors in the empire. That was comforting. I put my hand under the balled-up cloak I used as a pillow and felt the haft of my knife still there; then, almost from superstition, I reached out to touch Thomas on the shoulder.
My hand felt cold air, then cold stone. I stretched further, my heart whipping itself into a panic, but again felt only the slap of my hand on the hard floor. Where was he? I threw off my blanket and stood, picking my way between the sleeping Varangians to the doorway. Warriors they might have been, but none of them, I noticed, stirred as I stole like a thief between them.
None, at least, save Aelric: but he could not help it. He was sitting in the doorway, his back against the frame, and as I reached it to look outside I fell sprawling over him. He cursed, and staggered to his feet, his hand fastening around the axe at his side.
‘It’s me, Demetrios,’ I hissed. Old though he was for his calling, I suspected I would not survive more than a single blow of his axe. ‘The boy’s missing.’
‘Christ.’ Aelric rubbed his eyes. ‘Oh Christ.’
A clap of thunder exploded over our heads, and almost simultaneously a shaft of lightning cracked through the clouds.
‘There!’ I had been peering out into the rain, searching in vain desperation for any sign of the boy; by the white glare of the lightning, I thought I had seen something. ‘Someone moving, over by the house.’
‘And what’s to say it’s the boy?’ demanded Aelric. ‘Are you armed?’
‘I have my knife.’ His words struck a fresh wave of dread into me, as all my fears of brigands and bandits and the monk’s adepts in this desolate place came flooding back, but there was no time. I launched myself out into the rain, flinching under the barrage of the water, and began running across the open ground to the house, with Aelric’s footsteps close behind me. My feet dragged in the mud and puddles, and my clinging tunic hobbled me. Rain ran off my sodden hair into my eyes, which I had to keep squeezed close together, but another flash of lightning guided me on towards the house. The door, I saw, was open.
‘Follow me in,’ I shouted, looking back over my shoulder. Aelric was invisible, and any sound he made was now drowned out by the torrent of winds around us.
The gale stopped as I pushed through the door, and for a second my squelching tread seemed terribly loud in the small hallway. Then there was rain pelting my face again, and I realised I had come into the peristyle. The water rattled on the stone tiles, but I thought that somewhere in the surrounding darkness I could hear a more animate sound, as of someone scraping at something.
I stepped forward, trying to gain a sense of where the noise was strongest. My effort was thwarted, though, as thunder boomed out over me, resounding off the walls and galleries in a dizzying, deafening roll. I tried to steady myself against a pillar but found none; then, for an instant, lightning burst across the square of sky overhead. The entire courtyard was held in its cold brilliance, and by the light I saw the boy, Thomas, crouched in the far corner by the bush which grew through the mosaics.
The light vanished; I stepped towards him, but in that moment something blunt and heavy cannoned into my back between the shoulder blades. Instinct took over; the months of training I had endured in the legions flooded into my blood, and as my shoulder hit the ground I rolled away across the floor. If my assailant aimed a second blow at where I had fallen, he would meet only stone.
‘Aelric?’ I yelled, wondering if he had blundered into me in the dark.
There was no answer, and I sprang away again just as I heard something crash into the space where I had been. Someone else is here, I thought in disbelief. Some murderer intent on killing me. Did Thomas purpose to lead me here as a trap?
My knife was still in my hand, for instinct and discipline had tightened my grip when another man might have dropped it. I raised it before my face, straining every sense for a sign of my enemy. Someone was moving in the blackness before me, but where I could not tell. He did not seem to be so very near, but with the uproar of the weather that could yet be near enough.
And what of Thomas? He had been in front of me when I was struck from behind: where was he now? Perhaps my invisible assailant was not hunting me at all. Perhaps he had come to slaughter the child.
Another sheet of light from the sky broke off my frenzied speculation. Thunder and lightning seemed now to have joined themselves immediately overhead, and by the spark of their union the courtyard was again illuminated. And there, standing in the shadowy doorway directly opposite me, a huge figure with a weapon raised in his arms.
The light vanished and I launched myself forward, charging across those slippery tiles heedless of the rain and the chance of other, unseen enemies. As I came near I lowered my shoulder – as the dekarch had demonstrated on so many parade grounds – drew back my knife, and tensed my neck for the impact.
He had not moved in those few seconds; I struck him in the belly and drove my knife hard into him. He grunted and fell backwards, bringing me tumbling down over him, but it was I who shouted the louder, for his stomach seemed to be lined with steel, and my knife had bounced harmlessly off him. He was in armour, I realised with horror, while I lay there defenceless. I tried to pull away but he had wrapped an arm about me and was holding me down, scrabbling on the floor for the weapon he had dropped.
‘Shit,’ he swore.
My heart stopped. ‘Aelric?’ I gasped. ‘Aelric? It’s Demetrios.’
A sharp blade hovered against the hair on my neck.
‘Demetrios?’ he growled. ‘Then why in Satan’s hell did you try to rip my guts out?’
He loosened his grip, and I drew myself up. ‘There was a man in here, attacking me.’ I shook my sodden head. ‘Was that you too?’
‘What do you think?’ Aelric’s voice was surly – perhaps I had hurt him through the armour. ‘I followed you in. I was only just here when you rammed me.’
‘But I’ve been here . . .’
A flickering light by the entrance silenced us both; we drew apart, tensing our weapons in our arms as it drew nearer.
‘Aelric? Demetrios?’
‘Sigurd?’
The Varangian captain stepped into the room, his axe in one hand and a torch in the other. God alone knew how he managed to get it lit in the midst of that pelting storm. He held it under the colonnade, but its burning glow pierced the night to reveal the entire courtyard, frozen into a tableau where even the rain seemed to stand still.
Aelric and I were standing in the door to Sigurd’s left, by the passage which led into the western arm of the house. Sigurd, flanked by two of his men, was at the main entrance, staring angrily at Thomas, who cowered in the corner where the lightning had last revealed him, his hands still loosely bound. Of whomever else I might have battled in the darkness, there was no sign.
‘I suppose,’ said Sigurd, ‘that there is a reason for this.’
Aelric answered first. ‘The boy managed to escape the stables. Demetrios and I chased after him, but in the storm I lost my bearings. By the lightning I saw him entering by the west door and I followed. As I came in here, he rammed me like a trireme and we both went down. Fortunately I recognised his voice before I took his head off.’
‘But I didn’t come in the west door,’ I objected. ‘I came by the main entrance, which was open. Where Sigurd is. And I was here several minutes before I attacked you. Mistakenly,’ I added. ‘But I grappled with someone well before that.’
‘Perhaps it was the boy.’ Sigurd had no patience for this; I guessed he would be furious that the boy had come so close to escaping. ‘We’ll get his explanation in the morning. Until then we double the guard and tether the boy in the stables.’
‘What about the other man? He may still be in the house – or at least in the grounds. Supposing he is an assassin sent by the monk – or indeed the monk himself?’
Sigurd snorted. ‘Even if this man exists, and if he is not some phantom of your dreams, I will not waste my night chasing over rubble and through mud to find him. If you want to stay in this house and seek him alone, then do it. I will not risk a sprained ankle or a knife in the dark.’
Nor, on reflection, would I.
ι α
Nothing more came to disturb my sleep, though it would have found little sleep to trouble. I lay awake, tensed by every creaking beam or rustle of blankets, until the air outside the door lightened, and the few birds which had not fled before the winter began their morning song. Glad of any excuse to be away from my restless bed I rose, passed the sentries on the door, and made once more for the house.
My head already ached from its broken sleep, and the stiff chill in the air did nothing to help it, but at least the rain had passed. I looked around, nervously scanning every yard of ground between me and the encircling woods. Nothing moved.
My pulse quickened as I reached the house, and even the sight of the empty courtyard did nothing to soothe it. I glanced up at the surrounding galleries, unable to shake the apprehension that someone might be watching me; I even walked all around the colonnade to be sure that no-one lurked behind a pillar. No-one did.
I turned my attention to the corner where we had found the boy in the night. His behaviour was a mystery, for if he had wanted to escape he would surely not have come in here. And he would be desperate indeed to try to run in a storm, in the midst of a forest with his legs bandaged and his arms tied before him. He would not have survived a day. So why had he risked so much coming here, when an overzealous Varangian might easily have cut him down in the dark?
I looked to the floor. The mosaic tiles were loose, cracked open by the bush which had pushed through them. I squeezed my thumb under one and tugged, watching as it came away in my hand. Mortar trickled off it in a fine powder, turning to a grey paste again on the wet floor.
I prised away half a dozen more tiles, looking particularly for those which were already loose. They would be the ones nearest the stem of the plant, I guessed, and I scratched my arms several times reaching under its branches to grasp them. Perhaps it was a futile exercise in eliminating an unlikely possibility, but this whole expedition had been just such a task: what were a few more wasted minutes?
And then I saw why the boy had risked so much to come here. A black tile – the stripe in the side of a tiger – came free, and as I poked my finger in the cavity beneath I felt the cold surface of polished metal. It was a ring, the gold barely tarnished by its underground sojourn, set with a red stone which was probably a garnet. A sinuous black crack was cleft through the gem, almost like a snake, and written around the shank in clumsy, Latin lettering was an inscription.
‘The captain says breakfast is cooked, if you want any.’
I looked around to see Aelric. ‘Tell Sigurd I’ve found something,’ I ordered. ‘Tell him to send the boy here with the interpreter.’
I rinsed the dirt from my hands in a puddle while I waited, and rubbed the ring on the hem of my tunic before folding it into my fist as Thomas stumbled in. His face was set firm in a hard scowl, and his bandages were caked with mud.
‘Ask him what he was doing here last night,’ I instructed Father Gregorias. ‘Did he really think he could escape us?’
‘He says he was called by nature.’
‘And his modesty was such that rather than relieve himself against a wall, he walked two hundred yards through a driving storm to piss in here?’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Ask him if he was looking for this?’
As I spoke, I opened my hand to reveal the ring, keeping my eyes always fixed on Thomas’s face. He may have learned his craft in the slums of the city, but he could not hide the surprise of recognition which flashed across his features.
‘Where did you find that?’ asked the priest, irrelevantly.
‘Under a stone. What does the inscription say?’
The little priest took it in his hands and squinted at it. ‘Saint Remigius, lead me in the way of truth,’ he read.
I had never in all the feasts and liturgies heard of this Saint Remigius, but I recognised the trinket clearly enough. It was a pilgrim’s ring, the sort sold by hawkers and peddlers near the shrines of the sanctified. Had the boy left it here? His parents had been pilgrims, I remembered: was it theirs?
‘Ask him if it was his mother’s.’
The boy’s cheeks coloured, and he spoke angrily at some length. I twisted the ring in my hands while I waited, until the priest was ready to translate.
‘He says it is his. The monk who brought him here wore it on a cord about his neck. One night the boy managed to cut the cord and hide it. The monk was furious and searched everywhere, but eventually he accepted that it must have worked loose and fallen somewhere in the grounds. The boy never had the chance to retrieve it from its hiding place.’ The priest cleared his throat. ‘According to the boy, he remembered this in the middle of the night and came to fetch it for you.’
What devotion. ‘Tell him I do not believe him.’
The boy muttered a few short words, which Father Gregorias seemed challenged to translate.
‘He says you . . . He insists it is the truth.’
‘Am I to think he would simply have presented me with this ring in the morning?’ I rolled my eyes. ‘If he stole it once, he would not lightly surrender it.’
The priest was translating my words as I spoke, but they wrought no change in the boy’s hardened face. I began to doubt I would achieve much by continuing this bout of contradiction and denial.
‘Whatever his purposes,’ I shrugged, ‘you may tell him that by running away in the night he has done nothing to help his fate with us. Nor has he helped his wounds to heal by splashing them through mud.’ I looked at his shabby clothing and the soiled bandages. ‘I saw a spring in the gardens; we had best use it to clean him.’
We walked around the house – Aelric, the priest, Thomas and I – and down some stairs into a sunken, walled orchard. In its centre was a
low plinth, from which a stone channel ran between the trees back to the cistern under the house. The channel was broken, feeding only into a boggy patch of ground, but the spring still rose, and fed enough water over the moss-grown lip of the trough that I could splash it over Thomas’s leg.
I had just dried him with my cloak, and was wrapping on the fresh bandages which Anna had given me, when he spoke unexpectedly.
‘What was that?’ I asked, pulling the linen tight.
Gregorias translated. ‘He said this was where the monk brought him to practise with the arbalest. They would spend much of the day shooting at targets against the far wall over there.’
I tied a knot, then paced down the garden to the wall which the boy had indicated. Like all this estate, weeds and lichens had made it their own, but there were many places where the stone showed through, clean and sharp, and pitted with white gouges. Many arrows must have struck here, each drawing the boy’s eye closer to the true aim which would see his bolt strike home on the Emperor. It was as well he had not practised any more.
A shout from above interrupted my thoughts; I raised my head over the parapet and looked out across the broad enclosure. One of our sentries had issued a challenge to a man now riding between the gateposts on a handsome white mare. I saw Sigurd emerge from the stables and move quickly to meet him, with the rest of his company spread in a purposeful line behind. I ran to join them.
The man on the horse seemed untroubled by the cordon of Varangians, every one of them with an axe in their hands. In fact, there seemed to be an arrogant amusement on his face as he looked down from his mount.
