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.’
I smiled wearily. ‘My daughters are with their aunt, my sister-in-law.’ I would have to leave them there another night, though they would return primed with even more disdain for my disreputable profession, and for my paternal failing to find them suitable families of their own.
‘Then you and I can guard the boy, and Sweyn can return our mounts.’ Aelric swung himself down from the beast and strode over, lifting Thomas onto the ground. I dismounted, and handed both sets of reins to the taciturn Sweyn.
‘Get back quickly,’ Aelric told him. ‘You don’t want to rely on my old eyes all night.’
‘Not if last night is any guide,’ I said, as the horses vanished around the corner. I had not yet raised his failure to stop Thomas escaping the stable, for fear of provoking Sigurd to still greater wrath, but I had not forgotten. Nor forgiven it.
Aelric looked me in the eye. ‘We all have lapses, Demetrios. You were kind to hide mine from the captain. But the boy is safe, and no harm was done. If I’ve learned one thing from my life, it’s that when I escape the worst consequences of my mistakes, I should thank my God and forget it.’ He clapped me on the arm. ‘Now let’s get the boy out of the street, before some arbalest-wielding monk gallops past and puts an arrow in him.’
We climbed the stairs to my home, keeping Thomas always between us.
‘Is this the only entrance?’ Aelric asked, as I unlocked my heavy door.
‘There is a way out onto the roof inside.’ I crossed my threshold, bending to pick up a scrap of paper which someone had pushed under the door. ‘Unfortunately, it only bolts from the inside. This house wasn’t built to be a prison.’
‘But are we here to keep the boy in, or others out?’ Aelric crossed the room and rattled the shutters. ‘At least you’ve got bars on the windows.’
‘A sensible precaution for a man with young daughters.’ My skills as a bounty-hunter and a searcher had allowed me to move my home away from the more dangerous corners of the city, but not always their inhabitants.
Aelric continued prowling around the house while I unfolded the paper. ‘The merchant Domenico wishes to see me at his house in Galata.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’ I put the paper on a table. ‘Perhaps he wants to sell me an arbalest.’
‘If that’s so, you’d better see the eunuch first to collect your pay,’ Aelric chuckled. He poked his head around one of the dividing curtains. ‘Who sleeps in here?’
‘My daughters.’ Although they were away, I did not want Aelric or Thomas staying in that room. But I had yet to consider how I would manage that combination in my household. ‘The boy and I can sleep in my room; you can sleep on the bench in here.’
‘I’ll get a palliasse from the barracks tomorrow.’ Aelric was clearly unimpressed at the prospect of another night of hardship.
In the absence of my children, I chopped up some leeks and onions, and mixed in some Euxine sauce which a former client had sent me. Sweyn returned with bread he had had from the palace kitchens, and the four of us shared a coarse meal by the light of my candle. Then Aelric took the bench and pushed it against the bolted roof door, while Sweyn descended to the street.
‘Better to guard at a distance,’ he explained solemnly. ‘Otherwise, if you miss them, it’s too late.’
I retired to my bed chamber with the boy and lay down on the bed, gesturing that he could share it. Instead of gratitude, though, he recoiled, cowering by the wall like a cornered hare, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. He stared at me with bitter eyes, and his legs, I saw, were trembling.
‘Do you take me for some sort of pederast?’ I was angry and embarrassed. At the tone of my voice he cringed still further; a tear ran down his cheek.
With a sigh which might have been exasperation or pity, I rolled off the bed and stood on the far side, pointing first to him, then to it, then to myself and then to the floor.
Still he did not move.
‘Very well.’ If words and signs would not suffice, he would have to judge me by my actions — or stay cramped in his corner all night. Very deliberately, I laid out a blanket on the floor, reclined myself on it, and blew out the candle. Then I listened in the darkness.
It must have been a full half an hour before I finally heard the boy creep into the bed above me. And it was long after that that I at last fell asleep.
12
Early the next morning I went straight to the palace, thinking Krysaphios would demand to know my progress immediately. He did not. Instead, a clerk directed me into a long arcade lined with benches, where scores of petitioners had already gathered, some so settled they seemed scarcely different from the marble statues around them, as if a gorgon had come and gazed on them. I tried to explain my importance to the clerk but he would not hear me: promising that my name would be noted, he vanished.
I leaned against a cold pillar — the benches were all occupied — and waited. The pale sun moved above the fountain behind me; clerks and secretaries, men and eunuchs, bustled about, talking in urgent voices and ignoring the supplicants who lined their way. In over an hour, I did not see one of them granted an entrance. And an entrance to what? I wondered. I doubted the Emperor Alexios, or even his chamberlain Krysaphios, awaited me on the other side of the doors at the end of the passage. They would admit to another secretary, who might direct me to yet another vestibule or atrium, where another clerk would take my name and ask me to wait. In these heavenly surroundings men moved like the stars, their path prescribed by a higher law and destined never to deviate, nor to touch another body.
I would go, I decided. The thought of the boy and the two Varangians in my house made me anxious, and the eunuch’s gold made me only less tolerant of time wasted. I pushed myself away from my column, and for a moment thought that I had committed some grave offence: there was an almighty clash of cymbals from the far end of the corridor and a great commotion all about me. Men who had not twitched a muscle all morning were suddenly off their seats and on their knees, touching their foreheads to the ground and trying to mumble the words of an adoring hymn. I could hear the tramp of many footsteps, stamping out a rhythm over which rose the plangent cadences of flutes and harps. I knelt; but did not make my bow so low that I could not see who was coming.
First there was a company of Varangians, though none that I recognised. Their burnished axes were held over their shoulders, the hafts capped with the plumed feathers of great birds, and even in the wan light their
