Two for Joy (39 page)

John caught the slight widening of Theodora’s eyes and the flare of her nostrils. He thought her near to combustion with no need of inflammable concoctions. Perhaps she had hoped that Anatolius at least would not escape.

“That may be,” the empress said, her smooth voice revealing no hint of her rage, “but there is still the matter of the Lord Chamberlain’s treason in defying you, his emperor, by returning from exile. Not to mention Anatolius’ complicity in all his machinations. Perhaps the young poet here was not man enough to wield a blade against one he suspected of killing his father, but he was observed copying an important and secret state document—the first message from Michael. Such an offense is punishable by death.”

Justinian turned a questioning look on Anatolius.

John knew there was no use denying the allegation. “A misunderstanding, as you will doubtless have realized, Caesar,” he put in quickly. “Anatolius was unable to speak with you although he knew how urgently I needed the information. He assumed you would have given your permission.” As he spoke, John hoped that Justinian had forgotten his refusal to allow him to examine the document in question. “As I have explained, it was the content of that message that set me on the right track. I acknowledge that the action was rash, but it enabled the plot to be defeated.”

“A knotty question to be resolved indeed,” mused Justinian. “Should the emperor behead the general who wins a battle by disobeying orders or commend him for achieving the victory?”

“I am not convinced that the battle is won,” declared Theodora. “Although the philosophers are under arrest, this Michael person has escaped. And while the excubitor captain whose detachment escorted the Lord Chamberlain to the shrine has been executed for his carelessness in allowing the holy fraud to get away—not to mention his assisting the Lord Chamberlain to defy your orders—yet consider. What is to prevent Michael from returning to incite the mob again?”

Justinian looked thoughtful. “Surely he would not be so insane as to come back, having escaped our wrath once? And yet it is an intriguing possibility.”

His hand made an almost imperceptible gesture and the two excubitors flanking Anatolius grabbed the young man’s arms roughly. Others stepped toward Balbinus and John.

“What is your answer to this most important question, Lord Chamberlain?” Justinian demanded.

“Caesar, what I shall reveal may be hard to believe,” John began, willing his voice to remain steady. “It is well known that people see what they expect to see. How many of Aurelius’ guests realize they observed Darius commit murder? While their attention was on the girl playing Calliope, it took but the wink of an eye to push Adula into the fountain, immediately setting her robe afire. But since everyone expects water to quench fire, what appeared to be happening when they looked around was Darius attempting to douse the flames and save the girl.”

“You have already described that scene, Lord Chamberlain,” Theodora pointed out.

“But I remind you of it, highness, because Michael was practicing just such a deception and also in full view. Because of that, his followers will not be pleased or inclined to remain when they learn the truth of it.”

An almost child-like eagerness suffused Justinian’s features. “Fascinating! And what is this deception you imagine will render the heretic powerless, should he return?”

“Michael is not a holy man, excellency,” replied John, “but rather a woman.”

Epilogue

“So Michael’s past betrayed her, like a new wife’s
old love letters?” mused Anatolius as he and
John strolled around the Lord Chamberlain’s garden not long before sunset.

John had explained that the dark lines mistaken for the onset of mortification had been what remained of a djed tattoo, the mark of an Egyptian prostitute, which Michael failed to erase.

Justinian had not been much interested in Michael’s past, beyond the fact that she had left her profession to marry. The emperor was well versed in the legal rights accorded to husbands and realized she could not risk anyone revealing her whereabouts if the husband seeking her should arrive in Constantinople. She would not, he was satisfied, dare to come back. He had therefore ordered Anatolius freed and dismissed them all from his presence.

Anatolius, being more interested than the emperor in matters of the heart, prompted John to relate what he had learned.

In the darkening garden, John thought back to the words that had passed in private between himself and Michael after Darius’ charred body had been retrieved from the Bosporos.

The story he had pieced together from Michael’s soft, rambling words, directed as much to herself it seemed as to John, had been unremarkable, save for its strange ending. A husband who grew cold and became unfaithful. A wife who left and was pursued.

Studying Michael’s delicate, pale features, so clearly those of a woman, now that he knew the truth—now that he was no longer blinded by seeing her as a despised eunuch—John chided himself for having been deceived.

“There are many stories of women who for various reasons disguised themselves as men, and of men who did the opposite,” he said. “Afraid of being apprehended, she shaved her head and dressed as a man.”

Anatolius frowned and abruptly stopped walking. “Had it been Lucretia I would not have wanted to see her shear off all her beautiful hair. Do you suppose Lucretia and Balbinus will be reconciled now?” His voice was wistful.

John shrugged silently. It was the only tactful answer, particularly since it did not seem to have occurred to Anatolius that in effect Lucretia had sacrificed her freedom in exchange for his.

“Did she tell you how it was she came by her religious beliefs?”

“Why should she? It was a revelation from God, as she’d told her followers, and the rest of the world, often enough.”

“You believe that?”

“How do any of us come by our beliefs?”

“But what did Michael want, John? Did she truly aspire to be Patriarch? Was she merely an unwitting instrument of destruction?”

He admitted, he had not been able to fathom her motivation. “She professed ignorance of the extent of the philosophers’ plot. Yet she had suffered at mens’ hands and I don’t think she was completely averse to the possibility of revenge, even if it could not be directed at one person in particular. Then again, it’s quite possible that she also found herself swept along by events.”

A chilly breeze was beginning to rustle through the bushes crowding the pathway. They resumed walking.

“What exactly did she suffer?” wondered Anatolius.

John sighed at the question. Despite recent events, the younger man still had not learned to exercise tact. “Given her old life,” he replied, “much of what she underwent is easily imagined. But she did tell me that as she spoke to her followers on the night of your father’s banquet, she looked out into the crowd and saw a family. A family with a young child and a woman who was close to her time. And that reminded her of the child she had lost, a loss that was the beginning of the bitter estrangement between she and her husband.”

“Strange indeed,” mused Anatolius, “for it is sadly true that infants die every day without their deaths threatening to bring down an empire. But it seems stranger still that she would tell you all this, John.”

“Perhaps she felt the need for some human sympathy, for a holy man cannot receive very much of that.” John did not add that those who had suffered greatly often sensed it, unspoken, in others. Perhaps that had been the real reason for the confidences Michael had made to him.

Their walk around the garden had led them to the pool graced by the eroded stone creature. Anatolius looked thoughtfully into the water. A few dead brown leaves floated there, heralding the approaching winter.

“And what of Michael now?” he asked.

“I hear the gossips in the marketplace have it that Michael ascended to heaven from the shores of the Bosporos. In a fiery chariot, no less!” John gave his thin-lipped smile. “That fiery chariot, of course, was Darius. But if you are a follower, it is a much more satisfactory explanation for her disappearance than the truth, which is that she fled by a more ordinary method of transport, in the back of a cart or on foot perhaps.”

“But why did you allow her to escape?” Anatolius persisted.

“Everything considered, I realized if Michael sincerely believed in this matter of the body as holy vessel, to destroy such vessels was not something she would knowingly assist.”

Anatolius continued to look doubtful but said nothing.

“And there again although she’s free, she is not free,” John went on. “So long as she’s hunted, there will never be rest. She can never stop looking over her shoulder. Every day might be the day that her husband finds her. It will be the first thing she thinks of when she awakes, the last thing before she sleeps. But it is growing cold. We should go indoors.”

***

Their conversation continued in John’s study.

Anatolius again expressed amazement at their escape from death. “Perhaps Justinian was in a merciful mood,” he offered thoughtfully, lounging on the chair lately occupied by Philo.

“Perhaps. But if you ask me, it’s much more likely that I was exiled rather than executed so as to remove me from Theodora’s long reach and allow me time to complete my task,” John replied. “Of course, he could still have me executed on the spot.”

“Well, that applies to everyone,” Anatolius cheerily pointed out, “especially if he disagrees with them. Or even if he doesn’t.”

“True enough. And one thing with which Justinian most certainly would not agree is my opinion that the empire does not need ungodly fire weapons,” John said as he poured two cups of wine. Handing one to Anatolius, he went on, “Incendiary devices are one thing but setting water ablaze for stadia, killing everyone trapped in or on it, is another. War is a cruel enough undertaking as it is but more than that, there’s no honor in such a weapon.”

“But if the enemy has the secret…?”

John smiled grimly. “If they did, do you not think they would have used it long since? It would have been deployed immediately and doubtless they would have taken Constantinople by now. So, all in all, perhaps it’s as well those learned academicians were found dead in their cells just an hour or so after their capture at the villa Peter and I visited. It was poisoned wine, apparently.”

Anatolius had been about to put his cup to his lips. He paused abruptly. “What is this? Justinian orders wine served to those who sought to overthrow him?”

“Their guards are Mithrans.”

Anatolius understood. “And Hypatia is an excellent herbalist, isn’t she?”

“They knew what was in the wine and made their choice. I expected it to be mentioned during our audience, for Justinian certainly knew about it even if Theodora did not. She certainly knows by now. Hopefully she will assume that it was done on the emperor’s orders and inquire no further. So let us say no more about it, my friend.”

Anatolius set down his cup, wine untouched. “Your house seems very quiet, John.”

“Yes, Peter is resting and Hypatia went to visit friends. Felix went back to his own home this morning, even though he still needs to recuperate a while longer. But he also wanted to mourn his fellow captain in private.”

Anatolius said in a husky voice that he quite understood.

“And Isis,” John went on, “well, she is distraught over Darius, of course. It’s difficult to overcome affection for a person who has served you faithfully for many years, even when he betrays you. And of course Darius betrayed more than one of us. However, she went off an hour or two ago to visit the ruins of her house now that the streets are quiet again.”

Anatolius wondered how Isis would manage to earn a living with her house in ruins and her girls scattered about the city.

John laughed. “If she did not have more than a few jugs of nomismata buried under her cellar floor I would be very surprised. They’re safe enough for now, under the rubble. But what of yourself? You have doubtless already been informed your appointment to the quaestor’s office has been withdrawn?”

Anatolius couldn’t help smiling. “To be relieved of that is almost worth the time I spent imprisoned.” His expression grew more somber. “Although I would burden myself with the law in the wink of an eye if it would bring my father back.” There was longing in his voice. He wiped tears away.

“I am sure whatever you do, Anatolius, you will conduct your life in a manner that would have made him proud,” John said.

Anatolius finally took a sip of the raw wine. “Do you think my parents could be watching us even now? I myself believe that the dead can observe and even speak to us.” His haggard face lit up with a sweet smile as he continued. “Do you recall that I dreamt my mother’s shade appeared in my dreams and warned me to be vigilant, to guard my back against the blade?”

John replied that he did, adding that it was certainly good advice.

“But was it more than that, John? Because what was at my back and all around me as I dozed in my father’s study?”

John considered for a moment, remembering the room whose decoration had been overseen by Anatolius’ mother. “The walls were painted with cupids!”

“And Darius was at the banquet in the guise of Eros,” Anatolius pointed out. “Do you think…?”

John silently reached for the wine jug.

They sat for a long time, passing it back and forth to refill their cups.

A smile seemed to flicker on the face of the mosaic girl Zoe when the lamps were lit. As darkness advanced over the city, rain began to beat on the window panes.

Glossary

ACTAEON

Hunter who accidentally saw Artemis, goddess of the chase, while she was bathing. He was transformed into a stag and subsequently torn to pieces by his own dogs.

ATROPOS

One of the three Fates, daughters of Zeus and Themis (loosely, “order” or “law”). CLOTHO, the spinner, formed the thread of a life; LACHESIS, the allotter or dispenser of time, measured its length and ATROPOS, the inexorable or inflexible, cut it with her shears at the moment of death.

BLUES

See FACTIONS