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.
3
I crossed the road, turned onto a side-street and plunged down the hill, heading for the merchant quarters and the Golden Horn. The path was steep and winding, frequently breaking into short flights of stairs where the slope was too treacherous, and I was grateful that the ashen skies had not yet delivered up their rain or I would have been upended many a time. The walls around me were sheer and tall, broken seldom by doors and never by windows: they were the fortified courtyards of Venetian traders, who kept their wares, like their lives, locked away from sight. Occasionally a slave or a servant slipped through one of the stout bronze gates, but more often the street was deserted.
Gradually, though, my surroundings became less imposing, the buildings first unassuming, then modest, and finally humble. Shops appeared, crowding the alley with wares and smoke and the shouts of their owners, boasts of quality and promises of bargains unimaginable. Now I had to push my way through, resisting every manner of blandishment and enticement, while the upper storeys of the buildings reached closer and closer together, until I could imagine myself in the high basilica of an enormous church. So, at last, I came to the house of the fletcher.
‘Demetrios!’ As I stooped under his lintel, he put down the fistful of feathers he held and rose, limping out from behind his table to embrace me like a brother.
‘Lukas.’ I clapped my arms around his back, then retreated a step to let him take the weight off his twisted leg. ‘How does the trade go?’
Lukas laughed, pulling a bottle and two cracked mugs from under his table and splashing out generous measures of wine. ‘Well enough to give you a drink. As long as Turks and Normans keep their women mothering sons, there’ll be targets enough for my arrows.’ He leaned forward. ‘And there are rumours, Demetrios — rumours of a new war, of a great barbarian army coming to drive the Turks back to Persia.’
‘I’ve heard those rumours too,’ I acknowledged. ‘But I’ve heard them every month since you and I fought by the Lake of Forty Martyrs, and all I’ve ever seen come were adventurers who turned on us as soon as they had our gold, or visionary peasants.’
Lukas shrugged, and poured more wine. ‘Barbarians or no, I’ll still have a living. My masters at the palace have never reduced their order in a dozen years.’
We talked on for some minutes, swapping memories old and new, some shared but mostly separate, until — in a silence — I pulled Krysaphios’ mysterious missile from the folds of my cloak.
‘What do you make of this?’ I passed it to Lukas. ‘Could you make me a bow that could fire it, and with enough venom to pierce a steel hauberk?’
Lukas took the arrow in his hands and examined it closely, squinting in the dull light. ‘A bowyer could build you a bow that would fire it,’ he said, carefully. ‘If you wanted a toy, a plaything for your daughter. Perhaps she needs to fend off importunate suitors?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘But this arrow would make a dangerous toy — someone could injure themselves on it.’ He stroked a finger over the encrusted blood. ‘Indeed, it seems someone has.’
‘Someone has,’ I agreed.
‘Someone, perhaps, who was wearing a steel hauberk?’ Lukas watched me shrewdly.
‘Perhaps.’
Lukas handed back the arrow. ‘No. If you fired that from a bow, you would be lucky to see it stick in a tree. There’s no weapon I know that could make it so lethal.’
I put the arrow back in my cloak, glad at least that the Varangian captain was not there to scorn this latest failure.
Lukas asked me to stay, but the day was drawing on and I did not want the first day of Krysaphios’ gold to have yielded nothing. For three hours I tramped the streets of the Platea, hunting out every mercenary and informer I could remember in all the holes they frequented. None could conceive of such a weapon as I sought, though all expressed interest in owning one should I find it. Some tried to guess my true purpose; others blustered, and swore they could cut down a man, hauberk or no, for a fair price. One was mad, and tried — without conviction, thankfully — to stab me. At length, sitting on my own in a grim little tavern chewing some pork, I decided that if the collective memory of the brigands and hired swordsmen I’d seen could not solve this riddle, the answer must lie further afield, beyond the realm of our Byzantine knowledge.
I was right: it did. But not so very far beyond our realm. It resided, I discovered, in a small tavern behind the quay of the Hebrews, in the person of a very short, very round man, with oily skin and a miserable vocabulary.
It was pure chance that I found him. I had gone to the tavern to find a soldier named Xerxes, a Saracen I had half-known in worse times. If the weapon came from the east, I hoped he might know it. He did not, but before I could make excuses he had brought me to his table and forced me to join him in the rough wine he was drinking. It tasted like stewed pine-bark, and I held the cup well in front of my mouth to hide my grimace as he introduced the companion he drank with, a fat Genoese named Cabo who shook my hand vigorously and blew spittle in my face.
‘Demetrios used to sell his sword-arm,’ explained Xerxes, resurrecting a past I preferred to forget. ‘Now he sells his brain. I don’t know which earns him less.’
‘Never as much as it’s worth,’ I assured him, though three gold pieces were already coming to seem overgenerous.
‘Cabo’s much cleverer,’ Xerxes told me. ‘He was in the business too. Now he’s a respectable merchant.’
‘What do you trade?’ I asked. I hardly cared, but talking kept me from having to drink.
Cabo gave a knowing leer from under thick eyebrows. ‘Silks. Gems. Gold. Weapons. Whatever men will buy.’
‘Cabo doesn’t like the imperial monopolies,’ added Xerxes with a wink. ‘He thinks they’re an abomination
