forefinger pointing straight out.
“I draw my dagger. A two-edged dagger. A wicked thing. Death to the tyrant! Blood’s spewing from the stumps of his severed fingers. He can hardly see because that gory scrap of loose scalp is flopping in his face. I don’t hesitate. I lunge with the dagger. Plunge it into the beast’s side. Up to the hilt.”
He took a tottering step and shot his hand forward, poking John’s side painfully with his stiff fingers.
“The tyrant falls!” Artabanes sounded jubilant.
John took a step away but did not fall.
Artabanes face was a fiery red, sweat beaded on his smooth, broad forehead. He smelled like a tavern. “Then we take care of the guards.”
He started lashing his invisible dagger at the shrubbery. Leaves flew like green flesh. Artabanes reeled forward, banged his knee on the bench, and tumbled across it and into the foliage, where he thrashed around in panic before finally ending up on his back.
He lay there in the embrace of the branches and looked up at John. “It was wonderful. I was a warrior then, Lord Chamberlain, and look what I’ve become.”
John helped him to his feet, grimacing at the wine fumes which seemed to be seeping from the man’s every pore.
“So is it any wonder Praejecta fell in love with me as soon as I unlocked the door to her room?” Artabanes raved on. “I was still soaked in blood. Her rescuer, the avenger of her cowardly husband. She was mine. She is mine, by right! She gave herself to me willingly. Eagerly. A toast to Fortuna for arranging the Great Whore’s long agony!” Artabanes raised his hand and realized he was holding neither cup nor jug. “Ah, well. I just wish her torment had lasted as long as my miserable marriage.”
A breeze wandered into the garden and was strangled by the stifling heat. Snatches of song passed them, carried on a tantalizing smell of frying onion.
“I suppose your kitchen is cut in half too?”
“Oh yes. Yes, it is. But, you know, onions cut in one side still make eyes on the other side water. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? Just how it always goes.”
Artabanes wandered away abruptly.
John decided it was his opportunity to escape. Perhaps his thoughts would march in better order if he was somewhere cooler.
Somewhere along the coast perhaps.
He could go to Zeno’s estate and surprise Cornelia and the others.
If it weren’t for this hopeless investigation. He could not leave the city with Justinian likely to summon him at any time.
Since he had to stay, a long walk round the city would be helpful in ordering his thoughts, as it had been on numerous occasions.
John left quietly, while Artabanes urinated across the border.
Chapter Twenty-one
A flash of white hurtled from the open doorway straight at John’s face. He put his hand up just in time and the object smacked against his palm. His fingers curled over a smooth surface. When he opened his hand he saw he was holding an unbroken egg.
He went into the inn wedged between the towering walls of the Hippodrome and the looming fortresslike Baths of Zeuxippos. The scale of the world changed as he stepped out of the darkness into a brightly lit room where smoke hung against a low ceiling.
Laughter greeted him.
It was Felix and Gaius, sitting at a table near the entrance.
“You’ve still got a fighter’s reflexes, John,” Felix called out.
John made himself smile in greeting and sat on a stool next to the two. He seldom stopped for a cup of wine so near to the palace. He preferred places where he was less likely to run into, or be observed by, members of the imperial court. That usually didn’t apply to friends, but John would have preferred this evening to have a quick, solitary drink before hurrying home to find out what news there was, if any. The more troubled he was, the less John wanted company.
The place was unpleasantly noisy. At the counter the bald proprietor was arguing with a short man dressed in the mud-spattered garments of a laborer.
“You fool!” the proprietor yelled, waving a ladle. “I shall outlive the lot of you put together!”
The man he addressed ignored this prophecy, leaned forward, plucked another egg from a basin on the counter, and sent it winging out the door.
John looked at the egg he had caught.
“Hard-boiled,” Felix explained with a grin.
Gaius leaned forward to be heard more easily against the background noise and breathed into John’s face. The physician smelled as if his insides were fermenting, almost as nauseating as Artabanes. Obviously he had not stopped drinking since John had visited his surgery in the early afternoon. “You see,” Gaius said, “the fellow who owns this excellent inn is known as Alba. He has strange humors at times and will only eat white food. Hence his nickname. His real name is…is…do you know what is it, Felix?”
“Nobody knows,” Felix replied. “But his name is white and so is his diet.”
“Not healthy,” Gaius lamented. He shook his head sorrowfully. His words were thick.
“And tedious,” Felix agreed. “A man can’t exist by eating only white food. The very thought of carrots and parsnips and eggs and fish must choke the throat after a few years. Look at what’s it done to Alba. Every last hair on his scalp has fled in disgust.”
Another egg flew out the doorway.
The proprietor stepped around his counter, grasped the egg-thrower by the neck, and propelled him into the street, helped along with a boot in the laborer’s ample rear. Patrons raucously praised the entertainment. Wiping his hands on his grubby tunic, the proprietor came over to the trio. “Wine for you, sirs?” he addressed John and Felix. “Gaius, I know you’ll have more.”
John nodded. After spending dawn to dusk listening to aristocrats describe their enemies as potential murderers, he needed a drink. He presented the egg to the proprietor, who took it and began polishing the shell on his tunic as he walked back to the counter for wine.
“Alba’s a patient of mine,” Gaius told John. “We trade services. I get free wine, he gets free treatment. Now there’s a good deal for me, wouldn’t you say? I’ve been trying to persuade him to eat other foods, but he insists that good health and balanced humors are only obtainable by dining on white dishes.”
“With white food on them,” Felix put in.
“You see that bowl of black olives on the counter?” Gaius said. “I brought them myself this morning. I’m hoping he’ll be tempted to try one. If Felix leaves any for him, that is.”
“Dangerous to tamper with a man’s favorites,” Felix observed. “Especially food. So I thought I’d remove temptation.” Suddenly Felix’s voice sounded much too loud.
It was because the room had grown quiet.
An excubitor, clad in a leather cuirass and carrying a lance, filled the doorway. A curl of fiery red hair stuck out beneath his helmet.
Felix jumped to his feet, strode over to the excubitor, and exchanged a few words before returning to the table.
“I have to go. Justinian wants to see me. Immediately.”
John gave him a questioning look.
“No idea what it’s about. Except it’s urgent.”
“Maybe he’s had a sudden whim to have somebody executed,” Gaius mumbled.
As soon as Felix vanished with the messenger the room exploded into an uproar as every drinker offered his conjecture about what new disaster the red-haired excubitor’s visit might foretell. A couple of customers got up and
