inquisitively. ‘Did you expect others to join us?’
‘None that I invited.’ The sudden noise had jolted me with shock, spilling my soup across the table, but now I steadied myself. ‘I will see.’
I crossed to my bedroom and pulled out my knife from the chest where I kept it. Then I descended the stairs.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Sigurd. The eunuch commands you to the palace.’
I groaned — it seemed there was no hour of day or night when Krysaphios could not summon me. ‘Can he wait until dawn, at least, when I will return there anyway?’
He could not.
I ran back up the stairs to the three expectant faces. ‘I am called to the palace,’ I said briefly. ‘I cannot say when I will be back. Will you stay with the girls, Anna? You can sleep in my bed. I. . I will take the floor when I return.’
Helena seemed about to complain that she could watch herself and Zoe well enough, but stilled her protest at a glance from Anna.
‘Of course,’ Anna said. ‘Though I must be back in the monastery in the morning.’
‘I hope even the chamberlain cannot keep me that long.’
The night was cold outside, though during the day I had begun to think that winter was relenting its grasp and making way for spring. Sigurd was waiting for me in the arch under the house opposite; he crossed the street and joined me as I closed my door.
‘What is this?’ I asked quietly as we strode up the hill. ‘Have the barbarians moved?’
Sigurd shrugged. ‘I doubt it — I saw nothing from the walls. A messenger arrived at the gate two hours ago and demanded I take him to the palace. I’d barely introduced him to the guard when some flummeried noble appeared and took him away. I was ordered to wait. Then one of the eunuch’s slaves appeared and told me to fetch you there. Which I’m doing.’ He paused, letting the stamp of his boots fill the silence. ‘Even standing sentry duty on the walls was more honourable than being a eunuch’s go-between.’
‘You were doing much the same thing on the first night we met,’ I reminded him.
‘That was different.’
The moon was waning, but with still more than half its face showing it lit our way adequately enough through the pale shadows. We passed by the severe statues of the great squares, through the looming triumphal arches, down empty streets, and so to the palace.
Sigurd conferred briefly with the guards at the gate, and then at greater length with a clerk who sat at a table just within, scribbling away by the light of an oil lamp.
The clerk looked up at me. ‘He will take you to the throne room,’ he said, indicating a slave who had appeared noiselessly from behind a pillar.
‘And you, Siguard?’
‘I will wait here.’
Without a word, the slave turned and receded into one of the main corridors. I had walked it many times in the past months, and always it had been thriving with all the ranks of palace life, from distant relatives of the imperial family down to the slaves and errand boys. Now it was empty, and the gaps between the pools of light on the floor seemed unnaturally dark. Soon we turned off the thoroughfare, and down a succession of dimly lit passages where the smells of oil and roses were replaced by dust and damp. Some of these areas were familiar, and others seemed so, but without my silent guide I would have been as lost as Theseus in the maze.
He brought me to an open peristyle and vanished. The arcades around it glowed with the warm light of many lamps, suspended from the roof on thick, golden chains, while in its centre a floor polished like silver reflected back the shaved disc of the moon.
I drew a sharp breath. It was not a silver floor, I realised, but a lake, a pool spread over the entire square, yet impossibly smooth, unrippled. A marble causeway was built out across it to an island in its centre, where I could see the silhouette of some dark structure rising from the water.
‘Demetrios.’
I turned back to the arcade and looked about. The voice had come from my left, and from some distance, but I could see nothing. The thick columns which obscured my view drew my eyes up, and I gaped again as I saw their vast height, four times higher than a man at least, and far wider. I had seen larger, of course, not least in the great hall of Ayia Sophia, but the stark beauty of these stone trunks towering above the pool held an awe all its own.
I walked around the arcade to my left, looking down at the speckled images passing under my feet. They seemed to be cameos of bucolic life, or what some urban artist had imagined bucolic life to be: children playing or riding on donkeys, goats grazing, huntsmen chasing a tiger. But amid these idylls were flashes of brutality: a dog being ripped open by a bear, an eagle with a serpent writhing about its body, a griffin feasting on slaughtered hind. Protean faces in blues and greens stared out of the borders, wrapped with fronds and leaves, and from the gentle swaying of the oil lamps high above, one could almost imagine their features twisting and contorting as I passed.
I turned a corner and saw the origin of the voice which had called me: Krysaphios. He was perhaps half-way along the passage, but I was an uncomfortably long time under his gaze before I reached him.
‘The Sebastokrator Isaak has sent me news,’ he said. ‘He has spies in the barbarian camp. They have found the monk there.’
‘The monk?’ He had faded in my thoughts over the past weeks. Though there had been every chance that he had not left the city, that he still sought a moment to strike at the Emperor, every day which passed without news of him had lessened that likelihood. He had become a phantom, a ghost who could slip into my thoughts — and sometimes also my dreams — but never assume substance. ‘Where in the barbarian camp?’
‘Near the wharves of Galata, in a lodging house by the walls. It is behind the warehouses, apparently, now abandoned by merchants who fear to transact their business in a barbarian camp.’
‘Why was I not told that the Sebastokrator had spies there?’ I demanded. ‘How can you ask me to perform my tasks when there are vital factors I am ignorant of?’
‘There are many things of which you are ignorant. I would have thought you might have guessed that the Sebastokrator keeps his own spies, as does every member of the imperial household. Did he not once ask you to serve him so?’
‘Perhaps. But how will we entice the monk out of Galata? We may be invincible within our walls, but Galata has become almost a Frankish kingdom. Ten thousand of their warriors make a commanding bodyguard.’
‘We cannot entice him out. It has taken us weeks to find him, and if he sensed a single whisper of a trap he would disappear again. We must enter Galata and capture him. Or rather,
I stared at him. ‘I must enter Galata? How? Will a loyal widow hoist me through her window in a basket?’
‘You will go with two hundred Patzinaks — they will protect you. You will be welcomed, because you will be escorting a grain convoy on behalf of the Emperor. While the barbarians are distracted, burying their faces in the trough, you and the guards will slip away and seize the monk before they realise what has happened.’
I shook my head. ‘If we invade their camp, and forcibly abduct one of their acolytes, there will be war. No- one desires more than I that the monk should be captured, but in Galata his danger is caged. Surely that cannot merit risking all the Emperor’s diplomacy?’
Krysaphios folded his fingers together and stared at me with the full displeasure of an imperial eunuch. ‘The Emperor desires what I command. The Sebastokrator has agreed that it should be thus, and you will be the instrument of their will. Already the monk has proven that he can penetrate and corrupt our inmost halls and trusted servants: if he were to do so again, as the quarrel with the Franks comes to its crisis, there would be devastation in the empire. And there is not much time — two weeks, at most. Bohemond of Sicily, whom the Emperor defeated at Larissa, is hurrying here with his Norman army to reinforce the Franks. If they join their forces we will be helpless before them.’
I swallowed. This was news I had not heard in the markets — nor even in the outer wards of the palace. I remembered Sigurd’s tales of the ruin the Normans had wrought on his homeland, and — far nearer my home — the
