by Tom Harper
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.
11
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 banda
ges 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.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. Although his green cloak and high boots seemed expensive, his accent was rustic.
‘We heard rumours that the Emperor’s enemies could be found here,’ said Sigurd evenly. ‘We came to find them.’
The man on the horse squinted. ‘Did you find them?’
‘None. Yet.’
I think Sigurd meant it as a threat, but it drew a laugh from our visitor. ‘I am Kosmas, and no enemy of this or any other Emperor. I am the forester, and I manage this estate for my mistress, the owner.’
Sigurd moved his head in a broad are, deliberately studying the ramshackle landscape. ‘Does she pay you well for it?’
‘Enough that I do not tolerate uninvited guests. If you have found all there is to find, which is nothing, you should go.’
I could see Sigurd boiling up to resist the man’s demand, and did not want a confrontation here. ‘Tell me, forester,’ I broke in, ‘who is this inhospitable mistress?’
‘My mistress, who is most hospitable to those she invites, is the noble lady Theodora Trichas. Wife of the Sebastokrator Isaak, and sister-in-law to the Emperor Alexios Komnenos.’ He smiled. ‘Hardly a family to be harbouring traitors and treachery.’
That was so optimistic as to be laughable. But we left anyway.
The long ride back was silent, and the arrival stormy. The road grew ever busier as we neared the city, and though we chose one of the lesser gates so as to arrive inconspicuously, we still found a mass of people jostling to get in. The watchmen were ill at ease, barking questions at the entrants and searching their belongings with brusque contempt; most of those around us seemed to have come in from the country, and many must have carried the greater part of their belongings on their backs. We might have been there until nightfall if Sigurd had not managed to push and kick a path through for us, and fortunately the guards recognised him. When the last of our company was within the walls, he called a halt.
‘We’ll take the boy to the palace and keep him in the gaol,’ he declared. ‘If he’s well enough to escape once, he’s well enough to get out of that monastery.’
‘If you put him in there, he’ll die in a week.’
‘And that will be no loss to me.’ Sigurd snapped his reins angrily. ‘Let disease take him, if God wills it.’
‘Disease is my least concern. Have you forgotten what happened to the Bulgar? The monk, or his agents, can enter the gaols at will it would appear.’ Although few seemed to care about the Bulgar’s death, it troubled me every time I thought on it. How had an assassin crept into the depths of the palace, through a locked gate and past a legion of Varangians? None of the enquiries that Krysaphios, Sigurd or I had made could answer it.
‘We’ll be more careful this time,’ said Sigurd. ‘For all it matters.’
‘Do you want me to go to the chamberlain over this? He has given me the prerogative. I say the boy does not go into the gaol.’
Sigurd glowered. ‘And where will you take him then, Demetrios? Into the monastery, to the care of monks and women? Will God protect him there?’
That thrust me onto the defensive. I had had all day to ponder it, but my thoughts had been ever distracted by other questions. Now I floundered for a solution, while Sigurd watched with a sneer on his lip.
I spoke the first thought I had. ‘He will come to my house.’
‘To your house?’ Sigurd looked delighted with my folly. ‘Your castle? Your tower, surrounded by water and guarded by a thousand archers? Or your
tenement, where the boy could slit your family’s throats and escape over the rooftops in a second?’
They were all sound objections, but I would not give him the victory of acknowledging so. ‘If the boy wants to escape, he will succeed eventually. Unless we put him in the prison, in which case he will die. You will lend me two of your soldiers to watch my door. As for my family. .’ I hesitated. ‘I will see they are safe.’
Sigurd stared at me in angry silence.
‘The boy is no more the monk’s ally than was the whore he used. Perhaps a little affection and charity will coax more information from him.’ I raised my hands. ‘Or, I can talk to Krysaphios.’
‘Take care,’ Sigurd warned. ‘You might get your way with him for now, but who will you turn to when he loses patience? Take the boy; I will leave you Aelric and Sweyn — for the moment.’
He kicked his horse and cantered off, followed closely by all but a pair of his men.
‘I must go too,’ said Father Gregorias. He looked desperate to be parted from his mount. ‘I am needed at my church.’
‘You are needed with me,’ I answered. ‘How else am I to talk to the boy?’
‘Call in the doctor. She speaks his tongue.’
And meek though he was, he left me. With two reluctant Varangians, and a boy none of us could comprehend.
I led my companions back to my house, and realised I had nowhere to stable the horses.
‘We should take them back to the palace,’ said Aelric. ‘The hipparch will want them immediately.’
‘I can go,’ I offered. ‘I ought to report to Krysaphios.’
Aelric shook his grizzled head. ‘You can’t go alone. It’s getting dark, and the Watch will have you locked up for a horse thief if they see you. And I can’t come with you: you don’t want to leave Sweyn alone with your daughters.’
