The Sheen on the Silk

by Anne Perry

  Ben Ehud was studying her. “You wish for this one?”

  “I do.”

  He wrapped it again carefully and then took another, larger piece of linen and wrapped that around it also. He ignored the first painting as if it were not worth consideration. It had served its purpose.

  “I do not know if it is what you hope,” he said quietly.

  “We will choose to believe that it is,” she replied. “That will be as good.”

  After settling with ben Ehud, she carried the painting back to the hostelry, clutching it inside her robe.

  She was not far from the hotel when she was aware of someone behind her. She touched the knife at her belt, but it was little comfort. She had only ever used it for food or a few brief moments of first aid.

  She forced herself to walk, rapidly but quelling the panic inside her. She reached the entrance of the hostelry just as Giuliano approached from the opposite direction. He saw the fear in her face, perhaps in the haste of her movement as well.

  He grasped her by the arms and pulled her up the steps and then into an archway. Three men, heavily robed in gray, their faces hidden, hurried past them and up into an open square. One had a curved knife still in his hand.

  “I’ve got it!” she gasped as soon as they were in his room and the door latched. “It’s beautiful. I think it’s real, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the face of a woman who has seen something of God that the rest of us only hope for.”

  “And the questions about Sinai?” Giuliano asked. “Was that to do with the painting?”

  Anna was startled. She thought she had been discreet, but somehow he had heard.

  “That’s my own search.” She knew as she said it that she was opening a door she would not ever be able to close again. “It has nothing to do with Zoe.”

  “But she knows about it,” he insisted. “That’s how she was able to make you come.” He was guessing; she could see the puzzlement and the hurt in his face that she had not trusted him.

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation. She must tell him now; there was no alternative. “There is a relative of mine who has been accused of a crime, and exiled somewhere near here.”

  “What is he accused of?”

  “Collusion in murder,” she replied. “But his reasons were noble ones. I think I could prove that if I could speak to him, learn from him the details, not just the pieces I already have.”

  “Who is he supposed to have killed?”

  “Bessarion Comnenos.”

  His eyes widened, and he breathed out slowly. “You’re fishing in deep waters. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “I’m not at all sure,” she said bitterly. “But I have no choice.”

  He did not argue. “I’ll help you. First we’d better put the picture somewhere where it will be safe.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. How big is it?”

  She took it out, unwrapped it carefully, and held it up for him to see. She watched his face, seeing the disbelief in his eyes melt away and wonder take its place.

  “We must put it on the ship,” he said simply. “It’s the only place where it’ll be safe.”

  “Do you think those men were after it?” she asked.

  “Don’t you? And whether they were or not, others will be. If Zoe knew of it, so do they.”

  “The monastery I want is at Mount Sinai.” She forced out the words.

  He studied her face, trying to understand. “A relative?” he said softly.

  How much dared she tell him? The longer she hesitated, the more anything she said would seem to be false. “My brother,” she said in a whisper. “I’m sorry.” Now she would have to lie again or tell him that her name before she married was Lascaris. Men did not change their names at marriage, and eunuchs did not marry at all. He would have to think she simply lied about her name, to hide it. This masquerade had once seemed so obvious that she had even become accustomed to thinking of it as easy. Even the freedom to move about the streets she now took for granted.

  He was still puzzled. He said nothing, but it was in his eyes.

  “Justinian Lascaris,” she said, wading in more deeply.

  At last, understanding filled his eyes. “Are you related to John Lascaris, whose eyes the emperor put out?”

  “Yes.” She mustn’t elaborate. “Please don’t …”

  He put up his hand to silence her. “You must go to Mount Sinai. I’ll take the picture to the ship. I’ll look after it, I promise.” He smiled with a hard, biting pain of shame. “I’ll not steal it for Venice, I give you my word.”

  “I wasn’t afraid you would,” she replied.

  “We’ll go very carefully,” he said. “I think we’ll be safer outside the city. How long will it take you to get to Mount Sinai?”

  “A month, to go there and back,” she answered.

  He hesitated.

  “I’ll be back here by the time the ship returns,” she promised. “Just keep the picture safe.”

  “I must see Jaffa, and Caesarea on the coast,” he said. “I’ll be back in thirty-five days.” He looked anxious, on the brink of speaking, and then changed his mind.

  There was a sound of footsteps outside in the hostelry corridor and hushed voices arguing.

  “We can’t stay here,” he told her quietly. “You must change your appearance and get out of the city. How are you getting to Sinai? A caravan?”

  “Yes. They go every two or three days.”

  “Then you must get out of the pilgrim gray. That’s what they’re looking for. I’ll go and get you something right now. You could dress as a boy….”

  She saw the embarrassment in his face, in case he had insulted her, but there was no time or safety to spare for such things.

  She took the initiative. “Better still as a woman,” she told him.

  He looked startled. “They won’t let women into the monastery.”

  “I know. I’ll find another hostelry, on the road outside the walls. Then I’ll change back again.”

  He left and she barred the door behind him. She spent a miserable hour waiting for his return, afraid in case he was attacked. She was too tense to sit or even to stand still. She paced the floor back and forth, only a few steps each way. Five times she heard footsteps outside and thought it was Giuliano, then stood with pounding heart and ears straining as they passed and the silence closed in again.

  Once someone knocked, and she was about to undo the bolt when she realized it could be anyone. She froze. She could hear someone breathing heavily just on the other side of the wood.

  There was a thump against the door, as if someone had tested it with his weight. She stepped back silently. There was another thump, this one harder. The door shook on its hinges.

  There were voices, then quick footsteps. Someone stopped outside the door.

  “Anastasius!” It was Giuliano’s voice, urgent and sharp with fear.

  Relief washed over her like a sudden heat. She tried to loosen the bar and found it jammed by the previous pressure from outside. She jerked her own weight against it, heard it give.

  Giuliano stepped in and replaced the bar instantly. He had a bundle of clothes in his arms, some for her and some for himself. “We’ll go tonight,” he said quietly. “Change into these. I’ve got merchants’ clothes for myself. I’ll try to look like an Armenian.” He shrugged. “At least I can speak Greek.” He began slipping off his gray pilgrim cloak.

  Was he coming with her? How far? She picked up the women’s clothes and turned her back to put them on. If she made any kind of an issue of modesty now, it would draw his suspicion. If she was quick enough, he might be too occupied with his own clothing to notice anything else.

  The dress was wool, dark wine red, roughly shaped, and tied with a girdle. She slipped into it with an ease that tore away the years of pretense as if they had been paper, and once again she was the widow who had returned from Eustathius’s house to that of her parents. She bound h
er hair like a woman’s, wrapped the outer robe of darker wool around her, and without thinking adjusted it with the grace she had struggled so hard to abandon.

  He looked at her. For an instant his face was blank, then it filled with sharp, painful surprise. He picked up the painting and handed it to her. He turned to the door, opened it carefully with his hand on the hilt of his knife. Having looked to right and left, he nodded at her to follow him.

  Outside in the street there were several groups of people standing around, apparently arguing or haggling over the prices of goods.

  Giuliano went immediately north, keeping a steady pace she could match without appearing to stride like a man. She kept her eyes down and her steps shorter. In spite of the fear tightening her muscles, she enjoyed the brief freedom of being a woman, as if it were a wild, dangerous escape that would have to end too soon.

  Jerusalem was a small city. They walked quickly, keeping to the wider streets where possible.

  They were climbing steadily, the great site of the Temple Mount to their right. She thought Giuliano was making for the Damascus Gate to the northwest and the Nablus Road.

  They were accosted once, and Giuliano stopped and turned, smiling, hand on his belt. It was a peddler selling holy relics. He thought Giuliano was reaching for his purse. Anna knew he had a hand on the knife hilt.

  “No, thank you,” he said briefly. Catching Anna by the arm, he hurried onward.

  His grip was warm and harder than it would have been had he touched a woman. She struggled to keep up with him, never daring to draw attention to herself by looking backward.

  The Damascus Gate was crowded with merchants, peddlers, camel drivers, and several pilgrims dressed in gray. Suddenly they appeared sinister, and without realizing it, she slowed her step. Giuliano’s hand tightened again, pulling her forward.

  Did he feel her fear, or the slenderness of her bones, and wonder? They knew so much of each other—of dreams and beliefs—and yet so little. It was all shot through with assumptions and lies. Probably the lies were all hers.

  They pushed through the crowds at the gate, and then they were out on the open road. After they had gone swiftly for about two hundred yards and strayed off the path downward, Giuliano stopped. “Are you all right?” he said anxiously.

  “Yes,” she said. “Do you want to go south now?” She pointed back to the road. “The Jaffa Gate’s that way. That’s Herod’s Gate ahead of us. I could go in there. There’s a pilgrim lodging near St. Stephen’s. I’ll stay there overnight, and go down to the Sion Gate before morning.”

  “I’ll come with you,” he said quickly.

  “No. Take the painting and go back to Acre and the sea. I’ll stay in this until morning, then I’ll put on the gray again.” She looked at him briefly, then turned away. Beyond his shoulder she saw the scarred hillside with holes in it that seemed at a glance like the eyes and nostrils of a great skull. She shivered.

  “What is it?” he asked, swiveling around to follow her line of sight. “There’s no one.”

  “I know. It wasn’t that….” Her voice tailed off.

  He stood closer to her, his hand on her arm. “Do you know where we are?” he said softly.

  “No….” But even as she denied it, she understood. “Yes. Golgotha. The place of the crucifixion.”

  “Perhaps. I know some people think it’s inside the city, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. I’d rather it were here, desolate with the earth and the sky. It shouldn’t have a pretty church built over it. That is to efface all it means. It had to be terrible, and alone, like this.”

  “Do you think we’ll all come to such a place one day?” she asked. “Or be brought here?”

  “Maybe, one day or another,” he answered.

  She stood still for several moments longer. Then she turned to him. “But I must go to Sinai, and you must go to Acre. I’ll see you again in thirty-five days, or as close as I can to that.” She found it difficult to keep her voice level, the emotion in control. She wanted to leave before it broke. She glanced down to where he held his sack with the clothes and the picture. “Thank you.” She smiled briefly and turned away, climbing back up the steep incline to the road. At the top, she looked at him once and saw he was still on the same spot, still watching her, the skull of Golgotha behind him. She took a deep breath, swallowed, and started walking again.

  Sixty-one

  GIULIANO WATCHED UNTIL THE SLENDER, LONELY FIGURE of Anastasius disappeared into the distance, then he walked over the rough ground and climbed back up to the road, joining it farther to the south and west. Was that the true Golgotha on which they had stood? The desolation of it seeped into his bones, drowning his mind. Why hast Thou forsaken me? The cry of every human soul who looks upon despair.

  Was the sad, powerful face on the wooden painting he carried really that of Mary? It didn’t matter. The passion was real. Who cared if it was this place or that place? This woman or another?

  Why did the sight of Anastasius dressed as a woman trouble Giuliano so much? He not only looked so natural in the clothes, he even changed his walk and the angle of his head. The way he looked at the passing men was feminine, different. His character had changed. He was no longer the friend Giuliano had come to know so well. At least he thought he had. There were days at a time when he forgot that Anastasius was a eunuch. His sexuality, or lack of it, was of no importance. It was his courage, his gentleness, his intelligence, his quick wit and soaring imagination that mattered and made him who he was.

  Now suddenly the whole issue was forced into the open. Anastasius truly was a third gender, neither male nor female. He could slip from one to the other as silk changed in the light, almost as if there were nothing innate that defined him.

  But it was worse than that. It was something deeper, something within himself, that troubled him. He had found Anastasius dressed as a woman to be beautiful. He knew perfectly well that he was, if not a man, then definitely male, yet momentarily he had responded to him as if he had been female. He had felt protective and then been aware of the sharp stirrings of sexual attraction.

  Giuliano was relieved that he had to go to Jaffa and there was no real question of his traveling to Sinai as well.

  Yet the moment Anastasius, such a vulnerable figure, was gone, he felt strangely alone. He would soon be surrounded by people, but there was no one to whom he could speak of the burdens inside him, the guilt at having fallen so far short of being the kind of friend Anastasius needed and deserved.

  Perhaps worse than that, cutting more deeply into the fabric of himself, he was not the man he himself needed to be. He had realized that perhaps he could not love, passionately or with lifelong honor and completeness, as his mother could not and his father did so unrequitedly. Perhaps the depth of that was not in him. But he had believed that friendship was another kind of love just as profound and just as precious. And he was wrong in that, too.

  Had Anastasius the gentleness to forgive that? Out of the great well of his loneliness, the compassion Giuliano had seen in him so often, could he? And should he?

  Sixty-two

  DRESSED AS A PILGRIM ONCE MORE AND HAVING TO FORCE herself to adopt the habits and gestures of a eunuch again, Anna asked the caravan master at the Sion Gate for passage across the Negev Desert to St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai. She still had a great deal of Zoe’s money, more than was necessary to pay for her passage. He haggled a few minutes, but time was short and the money she offered was good, even generous.

  Anna was unused to riding a donkey, but since there was no alternative, she accepted the assistance of one of the guides. He was a dark, mild-faced man of whose language she understood only a few words, but his tone of voice was sufficiently explicit that even the camels were obedient to him.

  The caravan that left the shelter of Jerusalem numbered as near as she could tell about fifteen camels, twenty donkeys, and about forty pilgrims, plus a number of camel and donkey drivers and two guides. It was apparently a small n
umber compared with what was usual.

  It was a journey that began easily as they followed the road south. The first place of any note they passed was desolate, unremarkable, until the man on the donkey beside her crossed himself and began to pray over and over again, as if warding off some evil fate. She was startled by the fear in his voice.

  “Are you ill?” she asked in concern.

  He made the sign of the cross in the air. “Aceldama,” he said hoarsely. “Pray, brother. Pray!”

  Aceldama. Of course. The Field of Blood, where Judas slew himself. Surprisingly, it was not fear that took hold of her but a savage and overwhelming pity. Was that really a road from which there was no returning?

  When they moved past Aceldama and into the ever-shifting, ever-changing desert, there was nothing left behind but an old grief.

  The first night she was stiff and cold, too tired to sleep at first, and very aware of the miserable accommodations: three dirty, leaking sheds where they huddled together, trying to find enough rest to gain strength for the next day.

  It was a relief to eat and drink a little and begin the day’s journey. At least it was warmer to move, even in the wind, than to lie still.

  The scenery changed from black and white to faded colors, bleached by heat and cold, almost devoid of life except for miserable little tamarisk trees thick with thorns. Pale sand gave way to almost black, flat and hard, covered with little flints. Black mountains were dense and jagged in the distance. The wind roared and stung with hard little edges of sand, like myriad insects stinging. They were told quite cheerfully by the guides that at other seasons it was worse.

  They were warned not to leave the caravan for any reason whatever. To stray was to invite death. One could become lost in minutes, disoriented, and perish of thirst. The wastes beyond the known path were littered with the white bones of the foolish.

  At night, the sky was ink black and burned with stars so low as to seem barely out of reach. Beautiful and alien, they exerted such a profound fascination that Anna found it hard to tear her gaze away from them and remember that she must sleep if she was to survive.