been an attack at the shrine. He says he barely escaped with his life.”
Lucretia asked who could have been responsible for such a terrible act.
Her companion spat into the dust. “Our beloved emperor sent a company of excubitors. Apparently they showed up before dawn. Their captain ordered the pilgrims to get out while they still could. Most of them did, scattered like leaves in the wind, it seems. Not much faith there, you may say, but what is faith against the sword? Still, it seems there were plenty who wouldn’t, who wanted to defend their precious Michael so that poor old fellow told me.”
Lucretia paled. “What happened?” she asked, knowing what the answer would be.
The answer was as stark and simple as she had expected. “A massacre. He doesn’t know what happened to Michael but thinks he probably escaped disguised as one of his own followers.” He spat again. “Not but what apparently some of them pilgrims gave good accounts of themselves. There’s more than one of Justinian’s men who isn’t going to be marching back to Constantinople to get drunk or go wenching tonight-or any other night.”
“Is that old man badly hurt?” Lucretia asked, noting that he had remained seated on the ground.
“It’s only a scalp wound, looks worse than it is,” was the dismissive reply. “He probably got a quick cut just to remind him unorthodoxy is severely frowned upon. He was lucky.”
From her uncomfortable position Lucretia looked along the narrow road pointing back toward the city.
“So,” the carter was saying, “do you want to ride back with me? There’s no use going there now. The only people left at the shrine are either dead or wounded or excubitors, and what with all them soldiers being there, to be blunt, well, it could be dangerous for you, you know how it is…” He trailed off.
“If everyone else has run away help will be needed with the wounded,” Lucretia said firmly. “I will go on.”
“It’s a mistake, it really is,” he replied with a frown, “and I hope you don’t live to regret it.”
Lucretia watched the cart rattle out of sight towards the city. The Bosporos was hidden from this stretch of road but the fog rising from its hidden waters sent white, wispy fingers inland to clutch damply at her.
She had no choice, she told herself, wiping away her tears. She must continue onward, despite the fact that her only refuge had now been destroyed.
Trudging down the narrow road, she wondered briefly if Nonna had sent someone from the building to notify Balbinus of where his wife could be found. Doubtless coins changed hands. Would her old nursemaid have betrayed her? It seemed the only explanation, for there were thousands of doors in Constantinople, too many to bring Balbinus knocking at that particular one by chance.
And, of course, Nonna always knew best, she thought with a grim smile, just as she had always known what was best for Lucretia all through her childhood. And Nonna thought that Lucretia was dishonoring her family by fleeing and, yes, it was possible that the strict old woman had taken steps to ensure that Lucretia took the right, the honorable course. Unless, perhaps, Balbinus had finally gone to her father and discovered her possible whereabouts. She could imagine the sort of statements her father would have made when he was informed of her flight. Duty would doubtless have been the first thing mentioned.
“A dutiful daughter,” she chanted softly to herself, as she plodded along the road, through the mist. “A dutiful wife. A dutiful daughter. A dutiful wife…”
The sun had burnt off the fog by the time she neared the shrine. During her journey, several groups of pilgrims had rushed by her, going in the opposite direction. There were also groups of men who did not appear to belong to the military, being unarmored and dressed in plain tunics, and yet they carried swords or spears. They seemed to take no notice of her but when, looking back over her shoulder from the crest of a rise along the way, she glimpsed a large band of such men moving toward her destination, she was grateful that they quickly outpaced her and vanished around a bend in the road. Perhaps they were arriving to reinforce the excubitors already holding the shrine, or, she thought, her stomach churning, perhaps they had been sent out to hunt down such acolytes as had escaped from their clutches.
Limping as she crested the final hill before the shrine, she gasped in shock and horror.
Where during Michael’s sermons there had been a pool of humanity filling the space in front of the building, there was now only a scene of desolation. Bodies lay strewn across the trampled grass. A few excubitors paced around, poking at the fallen with their swords. Some of their colleagues assisted wounded comrades. The small group of acolytes clustered at the foot of the steps leading up to the shrine’s columned portico were under heavy guard. Lucretia fervently thanked the Lord that she could not see Michael among the captives.
Surely they were not going to murder the survivors, she thought, looking again at the excubitors prodding swords at the figures on the ground.
From here and there on what must have lately resembled a slaughtering pen rather than a battlefield, an occasional hoarse shout rose to hang on the morning air. At each shout, one of the fallen was quickly picked up by a pair of brawny excubitors and carried, none too tenderly, into the shrine. So they were finding and tending to the living, she thought. She could be of assistance after all. That had been her first impulse. What she would do afterwards, where she would go, she couldn’t say.
“Guard me, Lord, and keep me safe,” she prayed softly, not certain if she feared detection by her pursuing husband more than the possibility of assault. She quickly walked down the hill.
Soon she was stooping, checking those lying in her path. The first person she found alive was a woman holding her gashed arm, lying on her back staring blank-eyed into the morning sky.
“Tear a strip off your tunic and bind your wound,” Lucretia urged her. “Then come and help with the others.”
The woman smiled benignly, patting Lucretia’s arm with a bloody hand. “But of course I will, my dear. Just as soon as Michael heals me.”
Lucretia looked around in desperation. “I don’t see him here. He could be dead. He may have run away.”
The woman’s smile broadened. “Oh, no, not him,” she contradicted, looking at Lucretia with obvious pity for such lack of faith. “No, he would never abandon us, my dear. Why, we followed him all the way from Sinope. Yes, me and my husband left what little we had. My husband. Where…” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Where is my husband? Is he dead?”
The woman scrambled to her feet and began a frantic search, rolling bodies over to look at their faces. Lucretia trudged after her. One or two other women appeared, also obviously seeking loved ones, stony-faced shuttles weaving back and forth across a tapestry of agony.
Flies were already buzzing at the feast. From here and there came soft whimperings of pain, a muttered curse, fragments of prayers. One woman discovered her lover, another her child, the one still living, the other dead.
Lucretia arrived at the shrine. The acolytes had been herded into the building, from which the sound of low chanting now emerged. Several excubitors sat on the steps. Silent, heads hanging, they stared at the marble beneath their feet with that blank gaze of the physically and emotionally exhausted.
Lucretia looked up at them. They had murdered her only chance of escape. It was suddenly too much for her to bear.
“You call yourself brave men, you call yourself heroes!” she screamed. “You miserable excuses for men, you filthy bastards! Creeping about in the night to do Justinian’s foul work!”
She could not stop her tirade. All the bitterness and anger and fear of the past few days fueled it as she berated the group of excubitors staring down at her as if she had been suddenly struck insane.
“You’ve murdered women! Children, babies even!” she shrieked, wild-eyed. “Pilgrims, people who had done you no harm! May the fire from heaven strike you down! May it roast your eyes out while you live to endure its agonies! May you die of the pox! And may Justinian suffer every agony he and that whore of a wife of his have brought down upon these innocent people, suffer them ten times over!” Her voice had risen to screaming so shrill that, fortunately for her, her words could hardly be understood.
One of the men leapt down the steps and grabbed her tightly by her elbows, fingers digging painfully into her flesh. “Be quiet, you fool!” He shook her roughly. “You’ll cause yourself trouble.”
Lucretia spat in his face. “Ah, so the murderer fears trouble, does he? From an unarmed woman! You coward! What would your mother think, to see her son carrying out the devil’s work?”
The man dealt her a hard slap. His companions started to laugh, calling out obscene suggestions.
Her stinging face brought Lucretia to her senses as the man began dragging her away toward the edge of the
