β
Krysaphios had been keen for me to begin by
questioning the imperial household, the men most likely to profit
from the Emperor’s death, but I insisted on first visiting the site
of the act. Thus, next morning, a chill dawn found me outside the
house of Simeon the carver, overlooking the arcades of the Mesi
near the forum of Saint Constantine. Many of the ivory carvers had
their shops here, with the emblem of the crossed horn and knife
hanging from their arches; the house of Simeon, I guessed, was the
one with the shuttered windows, the locked gate, and the two
Varangians standing at the door, helmed and armed. The neighbours
setting out their wares, I noticed, were careful to ignore
them.
I crossed to the far side of the road and crouched
low over the marble paving, scanning its grey-veined surface for
signs of the murder. I had heard rain in the night as I lay
sleepless in my bed, but I held out hope that blood would not wash
away so easily. The stone was cold against my bare knee, and there
were plenty of feet to tread heedlessly on my fingers as the
morning crowds flowed around me, but I kept my eyes close to the
ground until I found what I was looking for, a faded patch of pink
stained into the white marble. Was this where a loyal guard had
unwittingly given his life for his Emperor, I wondered, or merely
the residue a hasty dyer had dripped onto the street?
‘This is where he fell. I was standing behind him
when he was hit.’
I looked up, to see the creased, blue eyes of a
Varangian peering down on me. The axe on his shoulder gleamed like
a halo beside his face, though the skin was too coarse and lined to
be that of a saint. His straw-coloured hair was streaked with grey,
and although he stood as tall as any of his race, he seemed old for
a guardsman.
I scrambled to my feet. ‘Demetrios Askiates,’ I
introduced myself.
‘Aelric,’ he answered, holding out his spear-hand
in greeting. I took it gingerly, and felt thick fingers clasp
tightly around my wrist. ‘The captain’s waiting for you in the
house.’
‘But this is where the soldier fell?’ A nod. ‘Was
it sudden?’
‘Like lightning. All I saw was him on the ground,
stuck in the side like a boar and bleeding his life out. In no more
time than you’d need to blink. And straight through his armour,
too,’ he added in wonder. ‘Like it was made of silk.’
‘His right side or his left?’
The guard turned to face up the street, clearly
mimicking the last steps of his dead companion, and thoughtfully
lifted a hand to his right breast. ‘This one,’ he said slowly. ‘The
side where the Emperor rode.’
‘So the arrow must have been fired from high up, or
it would never have passed over the Emperor on his horse, and from
across the street – from the carver’s house.’
‘Where the captain’s waiting for you,’ prodded the
guard, the merest hint of impatience edging his voice.
‘Stand here, then. I want to see what the assassin
saw.’ I walked slowly back across the road and up the steps between
the columns, to the barred gate on the carver’s door. Little light
fell within, but I could see the scaly gleam of ringed armour not
far back.
‘Demetrios Askiates,’ I called, putting my face up
to the bars. The carver would have mounted them to protect his home
and his goods; now, I suspected, they were become his prison.
‘I know who you are, Demetrios Askiates,’ said a
gruff voice from inside. He stepped into the slatted light by the
door, the red-headed Varangian captain of the previous night, and I
saw his vast fist turning a key in the lock. The door swung
inwards, opening onto a dim room filled with every manner of
trinkets, reliquaries, mirrors, and caskets. Rich men and women
would pay handsomely to own one of them, but in the present
circumstances they put me more in mind of a tomb, a crypt, than of
conspicuous luxury.
‘The bone scratcher’s upstairs,’ said the captain.
‘Lives over his workshop.’ He jerked a thumb up at the ceiling.
‘We’ve got two apprentices up there too. And his family.’
Had they been kept captive all night, I wondered,
as I climbed the steep steps in the corner. I came onto the first
floor, another large room covered in white shavings as fine and
deep as snow. Long tables stood in the centre, still strewn with
abandoned tools and half-finished artefacts, while tall windows
looked out over the sloping tiles of the arcade’s roof. Beyond it,
I could just see the top of a helmet: Aelric the Varangian,
standing where I had left him.
‘The arrow wasn’t fired from here,’ I said, to
myself as much as to the captain who had thudded up behind
me.
We mounted to the next level. Here woollen curtains
hung from the ceiling, dividing the room into private spaces; I
brushed through them, to the front of the building where more
windows – shorter, now – again looked down onto the street. We were
at some height, but still there was only a narrow gap between the
edge of the arcade and the dome of Aelric’s helmet. I beckoned the
captain to come and stand beside me.
‘Were you there when he was killed?’ I asked,
naturally slowing my speech for the benefit of his foreign
ears.
‘I was.’
‘And could you see – was he standing directly
beside the Emperor’s horse?’
‘He was.’
‘And do you think,’ I persisted, ‘that an arrow
could be fired from here and pass over something the height of a
horse – and maybe its rider too – yet still strike a man standing
in the horse’s shadow?’
The captain frowned as he stared out of the window.
‘Maybe not,’ he grunted. ‘But then I don’t know any arrow that
would go through a coat of mail, whether a horse was in its path or
otherwise. Ask the carver.’
‘I will,’ I said, more abruptly than was wise to
this axe-bearing giant. ‘But first I want to examine the
roof.’
‘The carver and his apprentices were on the steps
outside when we found them,’ countered the captain. ‘None of them
would have had time to get down from the roof so soon.’
‘Then maybe they weren’t responsible.’ I pushed
through another curtain, into a back room where there stood a table
and some stools, with a ladder leading to a trap door in the
ceiling. Climbing swiftly, I shot back the bolt which held it fast
and emerged, shivering, onto the roof. Broken only by low
balustrades, it stretched to my left and right, joining together
all the houses on this side of the Mesi in one elegant line. It
would have been easy, I thought, for the assassin to escape down
any of their stairs. Before me I could see Constantine the Great
atop his column in the forum, only a little higher than I, and
behind him the domes of Ayia Sophia, the church of holy wisdom.
Wisdom, I thought, that I could well use.
Turning my eyes downwards, onto the street, I could
see Aelric again, still standing impassive amid the thronging
traffic. Though he seemed even smaller from this height, I could
yet see much more of him than from below, even when others passed
beside him. And likewise he me – he waved a salute as he noticed me
peering down on him.
‘Yes,’ I murmured to myself. This was where you
could have shot an arrow at the Emperor, and hit the ribs of a
guardsman beyond by mistake. I knelt by the parapet which lined the
edge of the roof. There were scratches in the stone, I saw with
rising excitement – and there, just at the base of the wall where
moss grew in the shaded cracks . . .
‘Date stones?’ The Varangian captain had followed
my eyes and caught what I had seen, a small scattering of date-palm
seeds; now he tipped back his head and gave a great, bellowing
laugh. It was not a comfortable sound.
‘Congratulations, Demetrios Askiates,’ he said,
picking up one of the pips and tossing it in his free hand. ‘You’ve
found a murderer who shoots like Ullr the huntsman, and has a taste
for dried fruits. Miraculous!’
The captain stayed with me while I interviewed the
carver and his family; I doubt it put them at their ease. The
carver, a thin man with fine hands, trembled and stammered his way
through a simple enough story: that he had been in his shop all
morning, while the apprentices worked upstairs; that they had all
three of them gone out to the arcade to watch the Emperor pass; and
that they had been dumbfounded to be seized by the Varangians
moments later – they had not even seen the soldier die, though they
had noticed a commotion on the far side of the street. The carver
chewed on his nails, twisting and tearing at them as he swore that
he had locked the gate behind him, that nobody could have crept in
while he was outside. His wife had been upstairs, he explained, and
he had had thieves before, even on holy saints’ days curse them.
Now, he said mournfully, he was forced to be ever vigilant. At that
the Varangian captain snorted, which did nothing to soothe the
carver.
The apprentices had little to add, though it took
me the better half of an hour to establish so. They sat back
sullenly on their stools and said nothing that was not prompted,
regarding me for the most part with the inscrutable gaze of
adolescence. Yes, they had been hard at work in the workshop before
their master called them down to watch the procession – he was a
fair man, they said, though demanding in his craft. He might have
locked the door – they did not know, but he often did: he had a
terror of thieves.
‘Was the door locked when you came in?’ I asked the
captain, after I had dismissed the boys.
‘I wasn’t the first in. Aelric was.’
‘Can you ask him?’
The captain’s face, never reserved at the best of
times, said plainly that he thought this a worthless task for an
officer of the Emperor’s bodyguard, and I fancied he made even more
noise than usual stamping down the stairs. I let it pass as the
carver’s wife came into the room. She was younger than her husband,
with a darker complexion and a fuller figure, though she dressed
modestly and wore a scarf low over her face, casting her eyes in
shadow. Her children were with her – two girls, very young, and a
boy of about ten, none of whom would look at me. Behind them, I saw
the dividing curtain twitch, and the carver’s two dusty feet
protruding below the hem. Was he simply a jealous husband, I
wondered, or were there secrets he did not want told?
I opened with an innocent enough question. ‘Are
these all your children?’
‘Three of them,’ she said, so quietly that I
strained to hear. ‘I have a son, apprenticed to another carver, a
friend of my husband’s, and two married daughters.’
‘And you and your children were watching the parade
from the window yesterday?’
She nodded silently.
‘Did you hear anyone else in the house at the time
– someone mounting the stairs perhaps?’
She shook her head, then saw fit to add almost in a
whisper, ‘No-one is allowed up here but the family. My husband is
very strict on it.’
Between the ever-vigilant carver, the locked gate,
and the family on the uppermost floor, Odysseus himself would have
struggled to creep through this house.
‘And did you see – or hear – something that could
have been an arrow loosed from near here?’ I pressed.
‘The procession caused much noise, much cheering
and shouting.’ She frowned. ‘But perhaps there was a crack from
above, just before the soldier fell across the road. As the Emperor
was passing our window.’
‘A crack from above,’ I repeated. ‘Were you up on
the roof at all yesterday morning? Hanging laundry or taking some
air or . . .’ I paused, hearing the distant sound of
boots on the stairs. ‘Eating fruit?’
Another shake of the head. ‘We do not go onto the
roof.’ It was as though Moses had commanded it thus on the stone
tablets. ‘Urchins and vagabonds play there. Some of the other
shopkeepers and craftsmen allow them up when they should not. We
keep the roof-door bolted.’
The noise on the stairs reached a crescendo, and
the Varangian captain came striding into the room, almost tearing
the curtain from its hooks as he did so.
‘The gate was locked,’ he said abruptly; then,
turning to face the cowering children and their mother: ‘Do you
like dates?’
‘Whoever fired the arrow must have come up through
one of the other buildings and along the roof,’ I told the captain.
We were in the workshop, and I kicked up great clouds of bone
shavings striding around the room in thought, while the Varangian
leaned on the table and played with a small chisel that was like a
toy in his hands.
‘And will you spend your day asking every
shopkeeper on the street whether he saw a fearsome assassin wander
up his stairs, with a mythical weapon and a bunch of dates?’
I thought on this. ‘No,’ I decided. For three gold
coins a day, I reasoned, such errands should be beneath me:
Krysaphios would not want his treasure squandered. ‘You can do
it.’
The captain’s red face flushed darker, and with a
sudden movement he drove the chisel hard into the table. The fine
point snapped at the impact. ‘Take care, Master Askiates,’ he
bellowed, hurling the broken tool into a corner. ‘The Varangians
serve to protect the Emperor’s life and to destroy his enemies. I
have fought at his side in a dozen desperate battles, where the
blood ran like rivers in the wilderness and the carrion-birds
feasted for weeks. I will not be found begging gossip off
merchants.’
Sunlight shone through the windows, and myriad
fragments of dust and ivory swirled in the light as the Varangian
and I stared at each other in silence. He glared at me with fury,
one hand on the mace at his belt, while I levelled my eyes and
tensed my shoulders. And in the brittle hush between us, there came
the slight sound of an unguarded sneeze.
We both spun to the stairs from where it had come.
There, just beyond a shaft of light and dust, was one of the
carver’s young daughters, sitting on the bottom step and chewing a
length of her dark hair. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her
dress, and twisted her hands in her skirt as she looked shyly
across at me.
‘I was on the roof yesterday,’ she said quietly.
‘Mamma doesn’t let me, but I was.’
At these simple words I almost jumped across the
room, but I controlled myself enough to walk slowly over to her, a
broad smile fixed intently on my face. I knelt down in front of her
so that our heads were almost level, stroked her arm, and pushed
some of the hair out of her face.
‘You were on the roof yesterday,’ I repeated.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Miriam,’ she said, looking down at her
hands.
‘And what did you see on the roof yesterday,
Miriam?’ Although I had assumed an easy, carefree tone, my face
must have shown that every sinew in my body was tensed with
expectation.
And doomed to frustration; she shook her head, and
giggled softly to herself. ‘My friends,’ she said. ‘We play.’
‘Your friends,’ I echoed. ‘Other children? How
about a man, a man carrying a big bow and arrow, like a soldier.
Like him, perhaps,’ I added, gesturing to the Varangian behind
me.
But again she shook her head, more vigorously this
time. ‘Not like him. We played. Then Mamma found me and was cross.
She hit me. I got a bruise.’ She began to lift her skirts to show
me, but I hastily tugged them down over her legs: there were
certain things I did not need evidenced.
‘And was this long before you watched the big
procession?’
She considered this seriously for a moment. ‘No.
She hit me and then we looked at the purple man on the
horse.’
She seemed as though she might say more, but at
that moment we heard her name being called from above, her mother
sounding far less demure than when she’d spoken with me. Miriam
hopped up off her seat, opened her eyes very wide and put a finger
to her lips, then turned and ran up the stairs. Her bare feet made
no sound on the smooth stone.
‘Well,’ said the captain, folding his arms over his
barrel of a chest. ‘He shoots like lightning, he eats dates – and
he’s invisible. How do you unveil an invisible man,
Askiates?’
‘I’m leaving,’ I said shortly, ignoring his taunts.
‘There are men I must see.’
‘Not invisible men, then?’ Clearly he found this
infinitely amusing.
‘Not invisible men.’
‘Aelric and Sweyn will go with you. The eunuch
commands that you be guarded at all times.’
‘That’s impossible.’ I wondered how much Krysaphios
wanted me guarded, and how much watched. ‘The men I am seeing are
not those who would speak freely in front of palace guards.’ Nor
indeed welcome their company at all.
I expected the captain to protest, to offer the
argument that those who would avoid the guards were those who ought
most encounter them, but he did not; instead he merely shrugged his
shoulders.
‘As you choose,’ he grunted. ‘But if you want to
give the eunuch his report, you will be back at the palace by
nightfall. Otherwise the Watch will have you – and have you flogged
for breaking the curfew.’
The thought did not appear to trouble him.