sellers.
The marbled arcades of the Augusteion were ahead of us now, with the palace gate beyond it and the vast dome of the great church on our left. The questions which clawed at my mind had reached a ringing intensity, yet were suddenly thrown into still greater confusion as the captain turned abruptly to his right, away from the palace and down a long street whose wall, I could see, was formed by the vast rim of the hippodrome. A greaved forearm against my shoulder steered me helplessly down into the darkness after him.
‘The palace is that way,’ I called, extending my already harried strides.
‘The palace,’ retorted the captain over his shoulder, ‘has many gates, and not all of them serve for everyone. The fishmongers, for example — they keep to their own gate. To keep out the stink,’ he added pointedly.
The walls now above us were pocked with arches and embellished with all manner of pagan and holy statues, extending far out of sight in every direction. We came under them and passed through an iron gate, a lesser entrance left curiously unlocked. For a moment we were in darkness, giddied by the echoing slap of our feet on the stone; then the purple sky opened above us and I felt warm sand trickling through the straps of my sandals. We were in the arena, on the racetrack still chewed and furrowed from the day’s activity. It was empty, but the silence of a hundred thousand absent spectators only served to press the vastness upon me further, while before us a host of shafts and columns bristled from the central spine like a sheaf of spears.
‘Come,’ said the captain, his words muted in the oppressive expanse. He led me across the track, our feet crunching in the yielding sand, and up a narrow staircase cut through the spine. Now we were directly below the thrusting monuments, as if between the fingers of a giant hand, and for a single ludicrous second I imagined the hand closing around us in a stone fist. It was a ridiculous vision, but I could not keep from shivering.
My escorts, stout though they were, showed no more inclination than I to delay there. More steps brought us back down onto the arena floor, now on the far side of the stadium; we walked some way along the track, across to the opposite wall, and up another flight of stairs between the ranks of empty benches. These stairs led onto a terrace; the terrace, in turn onto more stairs which doubled back on themselves so often I felt dizzied. The sky was all but invisible now, only a shade removed from complete darkness, and already one horn of the crescent moon was pricking up behind the walls, but the soldiers’ pace was unflagging. It was with much tripping and stumbling that I mounted the last few steps to emerge, breathless and disoriented, onto a broad balcony high above the race track.
‘Welcome to the Kathisma,’ said the Varangian captain, and though my lungs faltered from the climb I somehow found the air for a heartfelt gasp. True, I had been told I was going to the palace, but I had expected a side-door and a clerk’s desk in one of the public courtyards; not this, not the Kathisma. This was the imperial loge itself, the dais where the Emperor paraded his untouchable majesty to the world — his world — and received its acclamation. I myself had seen him here a hundred times, though only from great distances.
One of the guards drew flame from an alcove and touched it to the lamps which hung from the ceiling. Fire sparked in the glass, and was in an instant echoed back a thousand-fold: off the golden chains which held the lamps; off the golden mosaics set between every archway; and off the golden throne which stood, empty, in the middle of the room. Suddenly I was surrounded by a great host: the flickering silhouettes of a hundred kings and heroes leaped out of their gilded background, while from above the great charioteers of old seemed to be driving their horses hard down upon me, as if coming for Elijah.
‘You are Demetrios, the unveiler of mysteries? The illuminator of shadows? The master of the apocalypse?’
The voice which called me was mellow, like honey, but at its first words I cowered like a kitten, for it seemed it came from the walls themselves. There was neither menace nor malice in its tone, but it was with a trembling heart that I turned my gaze upon its source — and for a moment feared that indeed the wall had come alive, for I saw instantly a figure moving forward out of the golden shadows. Only as he came into the light could I see the substance of him: the sumptuous robes stitched with the gems and insignia of high office, the round head, the beardless face as smooth as a girl’s. His eyes were very bright, glistening in the lamplight like the oil in his dark hair as he stared intently upon me.
‘I am Demetrios,’ I stammered at last.
‘I am Krysaphios,’ he replied elegantly. ‘Chamberlain to his serene majesty the Emperor Alexios.’
I nodded slowly, saying nothing. The ritual with which I usually greet my clients would have seemed pathetic in this august place, and there was something in the eunuch’s eye which proclaimed that he already had the measure of me.
‘You unravel the riddles which perplex other men, I am told,’ he said. ‘You reveal what was hidden, and give light to the truth.’
‘The Lord has blessed some of my efforts.’ I answered with more humility than I might normally have felt in those efforts.
‘You found the Eparch’s daughter, when her family had already arranged her funeral,’ prompted the eunuch. ‘That was well done. I have need of such talents.’
He had been holding his hands clasped behind his back; now he extended a fat palm towards me. The skin was fleshy and soft, but there was no softness in what it held, in what he offered me. At last I began to see why he might have brought me here, why my unorthodox skills might be necessary to him. There was much of which I remained wholly ignorant, I knew, but if the matter involved the palace, and commanded so urgent a secrecy, then it must touch on the highest possible authorities. And possibly, I thought absently, the richest possible fees.
The item which Krysaphios held was about as long as the span of a man’s hand, as thick as his finger, and formed from a wooden shaft with an iron tip, which had first been hammered into a crude block and then filed into a fearsomely sharp triangular point. This point, and a good half of the protruding shaft, were encrusted with a wine- coloured stain that should, sadly, have been far less familiar to me than in fact it was. The frayed remnants of what might have been feathers were set around the blunt end.
‘An arrow?’ I guessed, holding it cautiously between my fingers. Despite its size it was unexpectedly heavy. ‘But it seems too short for such a purpose — it would have fallen off the bow well before it was tensed.’ I thought furiously, aware of the eunuch watching me. ‘From a siege engine, a ballista, you could fire it, perhaps, but that would be like harnessing a plough to a dog.’ I became aware that I was speculating too much aloud, and too much from ignorance, neither good professional practice. ‘However — it is a weapon, I deduce, or at least a tool which has been used as such.’ The dried blood told me that much — and more. ‘Recently, I should say.’
Krysaphios sighed, and for the first time I saw lines of tension beneath his marble skin.
‘It was shot,’ he said, ‘like an arrow but with immense power — how we do not know — at a guardsman today. Such was its force that it passed through his armour and deep into his ribs. He died almost immediately.’
‘Extraordinary.’ For a moment I grappled dumbly with his words — they seemed nonsensical. Or perhaps it was my exposition of the weapon which had been nonsense. In the interim, while I struggled, I reached for the well-worn safety of aphorism.
‘What a tragedy for the soldier,’ I mumbled. ‘And for his desolated family. My prayers. .’
‘Your prayers can wait for the church,’ snapped the eunuch. ‘The soldier is an irrelevance. What is significant,’ he added, pressing his plump fingers together, ‘is that when he died he was standing, in a public street, as close as I am now to you, beside his master. The Emperor.’
I had been wrong again, I chided myself. The fees for this commission would not be rich — they would be truly beyond all imagining. If, of course, I could earn them.
I began tentatively. ‘You want me to find out who attempted the assassination of the Emperor?’ The words sounded no less ridiculous in my mouth than they had in my head, but I saw the eunuch nodding nonetheless. ‘Someone has tried to kill him, and I am to catch that man?’
‘Do you think yourself equal to the task?’ asked Krysaphios dryly. ‘Or have I called the wrong man from his drinking? The Eparch assured me I had not — though I naturally did not tell him the entire truth of your commission.’
‘I can meet the challenge,’ I said, with a confidence that I would regret the next morning. ‘But at what cost?’
‘Your fee, Askiates? I believe we can meet it.’ The eunuch wore the graceless smirk of one who can be deliberately careless of money. ‘Double, even. Two gold pieces a day should afford your time.’
‘It was not the cost to
