The Belt of Gold (28 page)

He said, “Put his name on the list.”

“The Basileus commands,” said the scribe, and his pen scratched.

Nicephoros reached the Palace in the black of midnight. He went quietly through the courtyard of the Daphne and across a garden to his apartments in the back of the Magnaura Palace and went in the little rear door. His chambers were dark and empty, the three servants having long since gone to their beds, and he passed by memory's guide through the lightless outer rooms to the room where he slept.

There, shedding his coat in the dark, he groped along the table by the window for a lamp and a firebox to light it. The tabletop was cluttered with books and papers; he swore, not finding what he was looking for, and as if his words had kindled it, a flame burst into life in a corner of the room.

He whirled, cold all over. The fire grew and steadied, a pale nimbus, shining on the side of the bed, the marble table there, the pillows stitched with gold thread, and sitting among them, perched up comfortably on Nicephoros's own bed, the Empress Irene.

Seeing her he froze, sick; he knew he was caught now. He blinked at her. She stared calmly back at him through the shivering white light, and finally, for want of something better to do, he prostrated himself.

“Very good,” she said, and put down the lamp she had lit.

“Chosen of God—I am most honored—I cannot tell you the glory, the delight I experience at the sight of you—”

“Be quiet, Nicephoros. I don't want to hear it. I want to know your impressions of the holy man.”

“I—I—”

“You did go out to see the holy man?”

“Augustus, I would never think of—”

“Oh, but you should have, Nicephoros—your career and your very life perhaps depend on it. If you have not gone out to see for yourself, you have disappointed me, Nicephoros.”

He raised himself up on to his knees, her voice calming his rabbity heart. She trusted him, surely; had he ever betrayed her trust? Relieved, he realized he had not, and he faced her, more assured.

He said, “Augustus, I lay open my heart to you, and you see therein both my deep and fleeting thoughts.”

“Perhaps.” She smiled; there was something humorless and awkward in the smile, but he shunted that out of his mind. “As a method of retrieving your invaluable opinions, however, this reading of hearts is less efficient than direct speech, Nicephoros.”

“I saw an old man, much abused in John Cerulis's company, who gave me a blessing.”

“Oh? No more than that? No aura, no miracles? He has not elevated John Cerulis several feet above the ground?”

Again, he detected something brittle and unhappy in her tone. Carefully he chose words.

“Augustus, Equal of the Apostles, I cannot tell anything with an absolute degree of certainty, but I know that he and John are not friends. John uses force to control him. If, perhaps, John somehow manufactured him—”

“He does control him, though.”

“Oh, yes. He is very confident, he let me go with no trouble about it.”

Her smile widened, suddenly genuine, intimate, and kind. “Although you defied him, my heart?”

Nicephoros bowed down, grateful that she had drawn this conclusion for herself.

“Well,” she said, “excellent. Yet I foresee some danger in the coming days. Already John's men are doing his filthy work in the City. His enemies will die, and many innocent people as well. I advise you to find a bodyguard, Nicephoros, someone who can defend you at close quarters. My Frank has come back. He is well suited to the task, a man of great strength and courage, who has proven himself surprisingly dependable. I suggest you hire him to protect you.”

“Basileus, I accept your wisdom.” Or was she giving him to the Frank to be quietly assassinated?

“You have done well, Nicephoros.” She slipped off the far side of the bed; the darkness enveloped her, and he waited, his ears straining, while she stole away.

Just as he was preparing to rise, convinced that she was gone, her voice came from the darkness. “Nicephoros.”

“Basileus,” he said, surprised.

“I will confess, my heart, that I did not come here expecting to find you off at the holy man's court, but to convey some very unpleasant news to you.”

“Ah?”

“Your friend Peter Karrosoulos, the Prefect of the City, is dead.”

Nicephoros's mouth opened; his breath exploded from him in a grunt, as if he had been struck in the stomach. He said stupidly, “Dead? Truly?”

“Oh, yes. He hanged himself.”

“Oh, God. Oh, God.”

“He had lost heavily at the races, using money that was not his. I am sorry, Nicephoros.”

Nicephoros sagged forward onto the side of the bed, struggling with this. He said, “But the month is not yet over.”

There was no answer. She was certainly gone now. Heavily he raised himself up off the floor and sat on the side of the bed. Suicide. He hanged himself! His hands rose to his throat; he imagined the condition of mind in which the Prefect had taken rope and wound it round and round his throat.

He deserved it. Corrupting his office like that. His own weakness destroyed Peter Karrosoulos, Prefect of the City.

Oh, but who did not have weaknesses? Nicephoros's head tipped back, his guts churning. Was he not also handsome, and charming, and kind? Why was it so common that a man's weaknesses destroyed him, and so rare that a man's virtues lifted him to greatness?

It was the Empire, he thought, the Empire, waiting like a basilisk for the missteps of men, waiting to devour them all.

His mind flinched from that, but his soul leapt like a flame. The Empire to which he had devoted his adult life now seemed to him like a horror. The Devil made it, to seduce men from God. The Devil built here a promise of order that was fulfilled in a chaos of disorder—an illusion of peace in a history of warfare. Men came and laid themselves upon the rack of Empire and were broken. Like the Prefect, like Nicephoros himself, they pursued the vain dream of a sane and liveable world, when they should be giving themselves up wholly to God.

Then into his mind sprang the memory of the Irish monk, whom he had met in the Chapel of the Virgin. Especially he remembered the monk's gaze, clear, aloof, and invulnerable. He longed for that detachment, proof against pain. He thought, I will become a monk.

At once the idea crystallized into a certainty. When this crisis was past, when the Empire was safe again, for the moment, and the Empress safe, for the moment, Nicephoros would retire into a monastery.

He let out his breath. Sitting heavily on the bed, he gathered his tumultuous feelings and stuffed them back inside his tormented heart. There, ahead of him, now, the promise he had made himself shone in the distance, beyond the work and fear and struggle, a goal to be waited for, to be striven toward, a refuge and a reward.

That decision, somehow, brought all else into line with it; the time between now and then became suddenly manageable. He sighed. The bed beside him was creased and wrinkled where she had lain upon it, waiting for him. He bent suddenly and pressed his lips to the seamed cloth.

“Sir.”

His housekeeper, a Circassian slave, stood in the doorway with a lamp.

“Sir, is there anything I might do?”

“I would like a cup of wine,” Nicephoros said. “Before I go to bed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And ask the Ethiopian woman to wait on me here.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Circassian went out. Nicephoros sat still, his hands between his knees, and thought again of the City Prefect. What a fool, what a poor fool, Peter, oh. His eyes swam with tears. His shoulders hunched. The Ethiopian woman would ease away some of this pain. Some of it would never leave him. Like an old man, slumped there on the side of his bed, Nicephoros waited, fighting against tears.

24

Wretched and despairing, Daniel knew that he was beaten. The task had overcome him. He had lost the sense that God was with him—that God was in him, working through him. He had failed.

He had not supposed that his burden would be easy, but he had assumed it would be possible. Maybe that was his first mistake.

In the desert it had seemed so real. In the desert under an open sky, God had spoken to him in a clear voice. As men built houses to keep out the wind and the sun, so men made images and performed rituals that divided them from God. If people would simply tear down all forms and structures, they would rejoin God; and the universe, rent with the first sin when Eve took the apple, would be whole again.

It had not occurred to him, until too late, that there was more to it than that. That people filled the space around them with images and forms to protect themselves against other people. That when he went among them, they would build their defenses around him, too.

He prayed all day long, begging God to take him back again. When he was too tired to pray, he cried, lonely and heartsick.

In the desert he had run over the rocks, shouting the praises of God. He had felt God all around him there, surrounding him like the air, an active and boisterous presence. He had moved through God, breathed God, touched Him in every rock, seen Him in the flash of the lizard diving under cover of a ledge, in the high soar of the vulture in its endless wheeling search. He had eaten God, shit God, exhaled God, and every day had been the first day of Creation, when the earth rejoiced and there was no sin.

Then he had decided that he had a mission to the rest of men, and now it was all gone.

This John Cerulis came to him and wanted him to preach, to say thus and so, words that meant nothing to Daniel. These alien words, like blocks of stone, made a wall around him, like mirrors they turned his own face back to him, putting himself where he had been used to finding God. Out of false faces the people around him spoke to him, and there was no truth in them, no honesty.

It had all begun with the appearance of John Cerulis—with that mistake on the road, when he had thought he saw the Emperor coming.

“You must denounce Irene,” John Cerulis told him. “She pretends to be Basileus, and she deserves the worst. A mere female! Yet she has dared to lift her eyes to the supreme power, and surely it is blasphemy to claim to represent the divine Son of God in the body of a woman.”

Daniel rubbed his face with his hand; he did that a lot, touching himself, reassuring himself that there was a boundary between himself and this world around him. He did not understand what John wanted, although it had repulsed him to learn that the Basileus was a woman, and he agreed with the notion that such a thing was blasphemy. Sometimes he suspected that he had walked down that mountain road into a devilish world made up from the jealous wicked mind of the Fiend to seduce him, a world in which everything was the exact opposite of the divine plan.

John Cerulis, cruel and frivolous, ruled this world. Daniel hated John, as the owner of a precious vessel of gold might hate an ugly noisy child with dirty hands that smeared everything it touched with sticky fingerprints.

He made no protest anymore. Too unhappy even to complain, he blamed himself for his arrogance and his failure, and knew he deserved whatever came on him. When they gave him a new robe and took away the mantle he had worn for years, he accepted this as penance for his sins. He ate the rich food they brought, although he knew it was gradually replacing his spiritual essence with a perishable and rotting dross that corrupted his flesh and withered the strength of his soul. He did everything they told him, because he had lost God, and nothing else mattered.

He went out one day before a multitude of people and spoke the words John Cerulis had given him to speak, although they were rough and ugly. He called the anathema down on the pretender Irene, who had sullied the throne with her unclean female presence, and released everyone from their oaths of allegiance to her, and he called on all good true Christians to rebel against her, and put the rightful emperor on the throne, John Cerulis.

The people spread out before him in a great mass, filling the whole meadow, all the way to the road and past the road, in among the olive groves. In the distance stood the tremendous wall of the City, its towers and golden domes shining in the sun. Daniel spoke from a high wooden platform, with Cerulis's soldiers standing all around the edge. The crowd before him covered the field from side to side with the flutter of their clothing, the pale dots of their faces, a great murmurous mass. His words evoked no more excitement from them than from a great wind-rumpled field of daisies. But as he looked, he began to discern individual faces among them: here a woman with great dark eyes below the severe line of her headcloth; there an old man leaning on the shoulder of a boy; here a little child in a colorful coat, a doll clutched in its arms; every life another gift from God.

He began to talk to them. His voice came faster and higher in pitch and he paced back and forth before them, pointing and waving his arms at them, calling to them, pleading with them to answer him.

He told them of the wonder of God, the ecstasy of union with Him, the necessity of giving up everything that got between them and Him—their homes, their work, their families—all must be thrown away, he told them; nothing mattered save the delight of finding God.

Here and there they began to respond to him. Grunted monosyllables erupted from them, yells of assent.

“Walk out of this false life,” he cried. “Your deliverance is within reach. All you must do is recognize it. Come to God. Come to God, Who loves you.”

Now they were shouting, their arms raised toward the sky and toward Daniel, calling to him. He reached out toward them, loving them, and they shouted his name. He began to weep. He wanted them; he wanted God's love for them. The tears in his eyes blended out distinctions between them and he saw them as a single creature, that begged him to lead them on to Heaven.

“See,” he cried, “how God calls to us! See—”

Now, suddenly, through eyes washed clean with tears, he saw in the sky a vision, a white city, a mass of towers and walls and domes that floated in the blue of Heaven above the earthly City of Constantinople, and he flung out his arm toward it.

“See the City of God, descending from Heaven! God is coming to earth—God will lead us into His heavenly City—”

Now they saw it too, and screamed. They wheeled around toward it, floating in the sky among the clouds, and many bounded to their feet and ran toward it. The sun struck the glistening heights into a dazzling white, the domed rooftops mounting toward Heaven; and if some were shouting now that it was only a cloud, they saw without the eyes of faith. Most of the crowd saw it. They howled and wept and prayed to be led away to it, to the City of God, and Daniel went to the edge of the platform and started to climb down toward them, to lead them there.

From all sides, the soldiers rushed at him, pulled him back onto the platform, and flung him down on his back. One of them stood on his hands to hold him. John Cerulis's spokesman hurried forward to tell the crowd that Daniel would enter the City on Saint Febronia's Day, a week away, to preach again, and they wrapped Daniel up in a cloak and bundled him off like a roll of carpet, to put in storage until they needed him again.

Ishmael's wife was still on her knees, swaying back and forth, praying and crying. Ishmael touched her shoulder. She unnerved him, when she was like this, outside herself like this; he could not reach her. He bent down to put away the wine flasks and the remnants of their lunch and to collect his small son and daughter, playing on the trodden earth near their mother.

He understood his wife's passion, because he had felt it too, and it still shook him. This holy man knew God. At first Ishmael had doubted him, when he spoke against the Basileus, in the beginning; he had been disappointing to one used to the great preachers of the City. But when Daniel began to speak about God, then Ishmael had heard the truth ringing through his words. He had felt that Daniel was speaking to him alone, out of all the hundreds gathered there, and every word had fallen like a drop of acid on Ishmael's corrupted soul, burning through the dead layers of lies and sin, down to the stinging quick.

“He knows God,” he said, to those people around him, who were also getting ready to leave. Like his wife, many throughout the crowd were still deep in their prayers. Those who heard Ishmael nodded in agreement.

“He knows God. He has God's words in his heart and on his lips. What a wonderful sermon! He drew down the City of God from Heaven with his sermon.”

“But—the Basileus—”

At the mention of the Emperor, everyone turned away and fell diligently to the work of packing their belongings and urging their loved ones home.

Ishmael hooked his hand under his wife's arm and elevated her to her feet. His son and daughter were dashing around merrily getting underfoot and calling down disapproving looks from the people around them. Ishmael thumped and shouted them into obedience and they started back toward their City.

Walking, Ishmael turned his eyes to the sky. All day long, great white masses of clouds had been rushing up over the horizon, and still they came, floating past the sun, brilliant in the sun's light. The Heavenly City that had appeared for a moment among them was gone.

His heart was breaking. What the holy man had said rang over and over again in his mind. Go to God—give up everything but God—a wave of guilt washed over him. Since his victory in the Hippodrome, he had been stuffed fat with pride, as if he grew enormous with it; he had been to church only once, and then had not kept his mind on his prayers; he had come here today for his wife's sake, not his own. The victory had seemed enough, a perfection needing no other.

It was not enough. Even now he ached for the next race, to prove himself again, this time against the champion, against Michael, his rival. To win again. To overcome other men again.

His head hammered. Thinking of the Heavenly City, he walked on, going at top speed, pushing his family before him, hating himself. Daniel was right. He had turned from God—he had made a false God of victory. The snow-white City in the sky was not for him. But oh! how he wanted to go there, to walk out of this life with its toil and hardship and constant care. He was close to weeping now; careless of his wife and children, he strode forward through the gates into Constantinople.

Hagen had seen Nicephoros before, once in the company of the Empress, other times around the Sacred Palace; he had no idea what honors were proper to such an officer, and so he did nothing, neither bowing nor saluting him with his hand. Nicephoros also did nothing and said nothing to greet him, and they stared at each other a long moment, as if the Treasurer had not sent for Hagen to attend him. Finally the Treasurer sighed, sat down, and laying his hands on his thighs nodded to a chair opposite him.

“I understand in your own country you are a prince, and therefore I am somewhat reluctant to appear insensible to your honor, sir, yet circumstances constrain me to seek the use of your superior abilities in certain spheres of action.”

Hagen did not sit. He saw in Nicephoros a nervous wind, like a horse that blew and jittered all over before the start of a race. Patiently he waited for the dark man to tell him what he meant.

“There are dead men all over the City today,” Nicephoros said, and now rose, his nerves driving him into action, his hands rubbing together, his eyes restless. “Men of high birth, men of great station in life—men I would have thought invulnerable to such a savage purge as this. And I—I fear I may be intended to become one of them.”

“Who is killing them?” Hagen asked.

“John Cerulis.”

“Ah.”

“He means to become emperor. He believes this holy man will make him emperor, and he is cleaning out all the—the—”

Nicephoros put his hands to his face. Hagen said, “Someone should go to the Basileus.”

“Ah—what can she do? His men strike in packs, they say, like hyenas.”

“Kill John Cerulis.”

“Kill him!”

“If she gave me leave, I would do it for her—though it meant my life, I would kill him with my bare hands.”

“Could you do it?”

Hagen shrugged one shoulder, smiling at this city man, this man of such power and such fear. “If you wish to badly enough, you can kill anyone at all.”

“Ah, don't say that.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Will you protect me? I am told you are the greatest of warriors among your own fierce people. I need—I want—” Nicephoros sat down again, hunched forward, his face seamed with strain. “I am terrified. Yet I must go all over the City, every day, on the business of the Empire—I must have protection.”

Hagen straightened up, surprised. “I shall have to ask the Basileus. She considers herself my overlord while I am here.”

“She suggested I ask you to do it.”

“Oh.”

Now Hagen turned away, and prowled around the room, thinking about Irene with some irritation; she was managing him like a slave, which annoyed him, but more annoying yet was her inability in this crisis to do the right thing: to murder John Cerulis. He stood staring out a window, onto a deserted brick courtyard below, where stood some jars and bottles in rows, thinking that he might go now, out to the great camp on the meadow beyond the City, and find John Cerulis and put a knife in him, and reminded himself that this was not his City. He had forsworn vengeance for Theophano's sake, and there was no other good reason he could see why he should involve himself in this.

He swung around, facing Nicephoros, ready to refuse him, and saw in the Treasurer's face such a haunted look that his hatred leapt alive again. If the Empress could not or would not stand against this evil, someone should show her how.