4
As I left the apartment building a figure leapt up from the doorway and lurched off out of sight.
Only a beggar, I told myself, to judge from the man’s rags. I could feel my heart leaping against my ribs. Why should I be startled at a beggar who’d taken shelter? If I was going to start being alarmed by beggars, I’d be jumping out of my skin every time I turned a corner.
I was gutless was what it amounted to. If I had any courage I would have acted by now. Then again, if I had any courage, would I be making my living by lurking in my room painting saints on boards?
I had always thought of myself as a Christian. I even went to church sometimes. And where had it got me – or any of the thousands of other good Christians trapped in the rotted carcass of the empire?
It started to rain. Black clouds rubbed their bellies against the countless crosses bristling from Constantinople’s rooftops – a view of Calvary multiplied a thousand times.
And here I am imagining I’m being crucified, I chided myself. Macedonia was right. Icons wouldn’t put a roof over my head or food on my plate, or even supply me with a plate.
Not the icons I painted, at any rate.
Now that I didn’t even have a room to shelter in, maybe the time had come to take the chance I’d been holding in reserve for weeks. What choice did I have?
I cut through a square I crossed almost every day – a deserted place surrounded by boarded-up shops – and went towards a sculpture that stood under one corner of the square’s colonnade.
For once, the stylite who lived atop the granite column rising above the two-storey brick buildings was silent. Probably he was too cold to cry out to humanity or heaven, or both. If it got much colder, with the rain coming down, he’d be covered in a glimmering sheen of ice, like the gold leaf I put on my images.
Living in the city, you learn to ignore holy men the same way you ignore stray dogs, gulls, and beggars. Not to mention I was busy looking over my shoulder in case those clerks – or whoever they were – had followed me from the tavern.
Which is why as I ducked under the colonnade I ran smack into the girl. She would’ve ended up on her backside but she grabbed two handfuls of my cloak and clung to me, radiating warmth and exotic perfume.
“Sorry,” I said, disconcerted. “I was thinking.” As if I couldn’t watch where I was going and think at the same time.
The girl smiled faintly. There was just a touch of red on her slightly parted lips. Beneath a sodden blue wool cloak she wore a stola of faded green silk. Not a whore. A servant wearing household hand-me-downs who’d stolen a couple of dabs of her mistress’s make-up and perfume.
Her triangular little face was nothing special except for the enormous brown eyes. They were outsized, their gaze piercing.
An icon’s eyes.
I’d seen her before. How could I forget a face like that? But where? It came back to me. At Florentius’s house. Yes, the last time I’d futilely tried to sell him one of my icons.
I kept the knowledge to myself.
The wind picked up, blowing rain under the colonnade.
The girl glanced around. Her gaze slid over the metal sculpture in front of the spot where we had collided.
“What is that thing?” she asked. “It’s horrible.”
“It’s a hound. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.” The larger-than-life image, made of iron and covered with rusty mange, didn’t look like much of anything. Its shoulder was roughly the height of my shoulder. It wasn’t doing anything, just standing there looking out into the square towards the stylite’s column.
The girl frowned. “Was it stuck in this out of the way spot to keep anyone from having to look at it?”
“Not very handsome, is it? They say it was once part of a group with a hare and a statue – said to be of Pan – but the last person who knew why it’s here or what it represents probably died decades ago.”
The girl wrinkled her nose. “What an eyesore. Someone ought to remove it.”
“Might not be a good idea. You can never tell how these old statues are going to react.” I didn’t mention Macedonia’s tale about Athena and the earthquake.
It was making me nervous, the way she kept examining the hound. Was it that interesting? “Look,” I said, “Let’s find somewhere dry. I know a place.”
I started to walk away, expecting her to follow. Instead I heard a clatter. When I whirled around the girl wasn’t in sight. I saw a board lying underneath the hound. The board I’d used to cover a gap in the wall.
I scrambled under the statue and through the gap, ripping the sleeve of my tunic on a sharp-edged broken brick.
She was already at the bottom of the rubble incline leading down from the gap, on the floor of what had been a shop that had collapsed, so that watery light and rain poured in.
She pointed to an archway in the far wall. “We can stay dry in there,” she called up to me.
“No, wait!” I yelled. I slid frantically down the rubble, hoping to stop her.
Too late. By the time I’d reached the archway she had vanished through it.
After hundreds of years of fires and earthquakes, not to mention emperors intent on remaking the city in their own images, Constantinople sits atop a labyrinth of abandoned foundations, sub-basements, tunnels, and cisterns, many linked together over the centuries as a result of incessant construction and reconstruction. There are entrances to this vast underworld hidden all over the city – some man-made, but mostly being the result of accidents, fires, earthquakes, decay.
You never know where one of those entrances might lead. Until you’ve been through it.
I’d been through this one.
Which is why I sprinted across the dusty sub-basement trying to catch the girl. I knew she would spot the place where the bricks had fallen out of a wall, leaving a cave-like entrance above a waist-high pile of debris. As I reached her side she was stepping up on to the pile of shattered bricks and craning her neck to see into the cave.
She shrieked.
We were looking into an alcove or possibly the gap between the inner and outer walls of an ancient, buried building. The monstrous thing that had made her scream loomed over us, twice my height. There was no doubt it saw us. It was staring straight at us.
A gigantic face of Christ.
5
“This is the image from over the Chalke Gate!” I said.
“But Leo had it taken down! They burned it in front of the Golden Milestone, by the Augustaion!”
The vast open square of the Augustaion – from the Milestone all the way back to the Great Church – had been packed with gawkers. I’d gone there after hearing rumours about Leo’s planned desecration, but hadn’t been able to get near enough to see anything of the icon’s destruction.
“This is only the icon’s face,” I pointed out. “Maybe what they burned for the crowd was the body.”
The girl shivered and pulled her wet cloak tighter. I couldn’t blame her. A black, pointed beard framed the icon’s gaunt visage. The lips were not merely closed, as tradition required, but drawn in a taut, angry line. The eyes were merciless. This was clearly the Christ who, like an emperor, had come with a sword.
Which was why Christ and the emperor had succeeded while most of us fail.
Could I be merciless?
I’d protected my treasure once.
That had been different. I’d simply reacted in anger and fear. I hadn’t had time to ponder what I was doing.
“You can’t be sure it’s the real icon,” the girl was saying.
“No, this is definitely the Chalke Christ. I’ve seen it hundreds of times, whenever I passed the palace gate. Look at the way the shadows round the eyes are formed, and the highlights in the irises. Very distinctive. See how the pupils aren’t quite as close to the upper eyelids as would usually be the case? That was to give the impression he was looking down from above the gate, meeting the gaze of anyone approaching.”
“How would you notice all that?” She asked, gazing at me with her huge brown eyes.
“I paint icons for a living. At least I used to. Now most of my patrons are afraid to do business with me. My name’s Victor, by the way.”
“Arabia,” she said absently, her mind obviously not on introductions. “It’s very strange. My employer, Florentius, collects icons.”
“Florentius! You mean the wine merchant with the house near the Great Church?”
“That’s right.”
“Why, I’ve done work for him! You must have seen my painting of Saint Laurentius?”
“Oh, hardly. I’ve only been there a short time. I mostly scrub floors. He keeps the icons locked out of sight. Thinks nobody knows about them, but servants gossip. That’s how I know about his collection. This one must be worth a fortune!”
“All it’s worth right now is the head of anyone unfortunate enough to be caught with it. Possessing any image is a crime, let alone the most famous one in the empire. In fact, we probably shouldn’t stay here.”
I turned as if I intended to go back the way we had come but Arabia remained planted in front of the icon. “We can’t leave it here, Victor. Can’t you see, it isn’t just chance that we found it. It’s a miracle. We can’t turn our backs on a miracle.”
It sounded funny for her to say that. But why not? I knew nothing about Arabia. Just because a woman steals a dab of her mistress’s lip colour doesn’t mean she has no religious beliefs.
“There’s nothing either of us can do with it. At least nothing I can think of,” I lied.
“Florentius is already hiding icons. Why not one more?”
“He would probably turn us over to the authorities as soon as we approached him. Even if he didn’t, we’d be putting ourselves in danger for the rest of our lives. The emperor would be bound to hear about the icon sooner or later and—”
Arabia screwed her face up in thought. “Of course we couldn’t stay in the city. Florentius would give us enough to leave, to buy a farm, maybe. Just enough for us to get going again. It wouldn’t be much for a man of his wealth.”
It was the sort of plan I’d been thinking about, in a general way, for some time. Maybe Arabia could be of some assistance; the partner I needed. If I dared to trust a partner.
“Have you ever held a solidus?” she asked me. Her eyes glittered.
“Not often.” My transactions rarely involved silver, let alone gold.
“I did, once. Florentius dropped it. He let me hold it. It was heavy. There was a picture of Emperor Leo on the front. He has the same narrow face and the same pointed beard as that icon. There was a cross behind his shoulder. It was such a lovely coin. Do you know what I did? I couldn’t help myself. I kissed the emperor.”
The icon’s gaze bored into me. I felt a gnawing pain in my stomach. I’d almost forgotten I had eaten nothing that morning, except the egg. Land was cheap in the countryside. A few solidi would buy a farm. There would be plenty of eggs on a farm.
If I could force myself to go through with it.
6
“We’ll need to wait for a few days,” I said. “Florentius will have to make some preparations. He’ll have to be careful. He can’t just send a couple of servants to drag the icon along the street.”
I didn’t mention my fear that I was being followed. If I was, when I failed to return to my rooms tonight, they’d start looking for me.
I’d need to deal with Florentius at some point. A servant girl couldn’t approach her wealthy employer and ask him to buy an illicit icon, let alone vouch for its authenticity. I could do both. Florentius knew and trusted me, to the extent any aristocrat knows and trusts the artisans he hires. But I’d need to be patient, give my pursuers time to shift their search to another part of the city.
Who was I fooling? I needed time to get my courage up.
At any rate, I told myself, it would be safer for Arabia to be out and about than me. She might prove very useful in that way. And, if anything went wrong and I had to stay in hiding for an extended period, she’d be able to keep me supplied with food.
I explained some of what I had in mind and sent her off. She returned with a wine skin and a sack.
“Praise be to God for what he provides,” she said. I’m not sure whether she was being ironic, or where exactly the Lord had left the provisions. It appeared to be the army barracks in what used to be the Baths of Zeuxippos, judging from the hard biscuits underneath the clay lamp, the iron striker and flint, and the jar of lamp oil.
I had a biscuit halfway to my mouth when Arabia leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the lips. Then she was gone, leaving behind a wraith of her perfume.
And a thought that persisted in thrusting itself forward.
Something that really needed attention.
I lit the lamp. The rats scrabbling nearby quietened down and the painted icon opposite where I sat resumed staring at me. I returned its gaze. Had I been a more religious person I would have taken some comfort in the holy presence. The Lord was here with me. Even though he was everywhere at once, yet, like the saints, he was even more strongly where his icons or relics were – or so they said.
But on the other hand how forgiving was he?
He didn’t look very forgiving at all. The flickering lamplight animated the giant features. At times the taut lips appeared ready to snarl, and at other times about to quirk into a sardonic smile.
The face was so large that, had the mouth opened, it could have snapped my head off with one bite. A rat peeped out from around the corner of the panel. I found a bit of brick and flicked it at the rodent, which scuttled away. The movement had made barely a sound but immediately I heard a noise coming from outside my little niche.
No. It had to be my imagination.
I sat and listened, feeling my muscles tighten until my legs began to cramp. I had to know. I crawled out of my hole, lamp in hand, took several steps forward, and listened.
Nothing.
I went a few paces further, then quickly on into the cavernous space beyond, a dry and abandoned cistern. Darkness swallowed the feeble lamplight. Several toppled columns, piled together, partly blocked the way in.
From a distance came the loud sound of cascading water. It was raining again and getting in somewhere. That must have been the sound I thought I had heard.
All the same, I checked behind the columns.
Philokalas was still there.
Or rather the tunic full of bones and scraps of rotted flesh that had once been Philokalas. The rats and whatever else lived down here had devoured most of him, which made the stench less than it might otherwise have been.
Still, I knew I should move him. It would be better if Arabia didn’t stumble across the body. I bent down but my stomach lurched at the thought of touching the thing. I hadn’t eaten much for days, and the biscuits weren’t sitting well.
I returned to my hiding place. Now I could almost swear the icon was smiling benignly at me, as if to say, “Don’t worry about Philokalas. You acted without thinking. You’re only human.” Or maybe it was just smiling to itself. Finding the whole thing funny.
I dozed.
After being awakened countless times by phantom footsteps, I finally woke to Arabia gently nuzzling my neck.
She had whiskers.
I came fully awake, flailing at a rat.
By the time I had my wits about me, my assailant was gone. In the dim lamplight I noticed the biscuit sack had moved. I started to pull it back towards me and rats boiled out and streamed behind the holy image.
The rest of the night I stayed alert.
So far, things had gone reasonably well. But I brooded over all the things that might go wrong.
Then I thought about the gnawed bones that used to be a labourer named Philokalas.
After which I thought about Arabia who had showed quick intelligence and a certain amount of cunning.
More to the point, if things went wrong I could deny everything. After all, she was only a servant and I was an artist, a craftsman well-known to Florentius. That was another good reason for me to work with her.
When Arabia arrived the next morning she wore a blue embroidered cloak and a yellow stola. She’d pinched a deeper shade of lip colouring and had pulled her glossy hair into neat coils at the sides of her head. She looked more like a lady than a servant.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, as if she didn’t know. Her eyes shone. The eyes are where life shines out. In my icons I tried to capture that in paint with bright lines and detailing. That was part of what I had left unfinished on the eyeless Christ back in my room. Yet I’d never managed to hint at eyes like Arabia’s.
“I’m glad to see you,” I told her. “It’s a relief, after having that thing glowering at me all night.” I nodded towards the icon.
She had brought a basket with her. This time the Lord had provided bread and cheese. I ate and described my restless night and some of the conclusions I’d drawn before the unseen dawn arrived overhead. Farming was fine, but the empire stretched a long way and so did the grasp of the emperor. Besides, what were the chances Florentius would agree to buy the icon rather than report us immediately to the authorities?
I just wanted to plan for all eventualities but she took it the wrong way. Her face darkened. “Don’t lose courage before we’ve even started. It’s lack of sleep, that’s all.”
“The rats never stop running,” I complained, around a mouthful of bread. “They come out from behind that thing.”
She went over and stood beside the giant image. “We’re not going to be stopped by rats.” She put a finger to her lips and then dropped a piece of cheese near the icon. “They love cheese even better than biscuits,” she whispered.
She didn’t move for a long time. She had all the patience in the world.
Finally a beady-eyed head poked out from behind the panel. The neck extended slightly, the nose twitched towards the cheese. Arabia brought the heel of a yellow shoe down sharply. I heard the rodent’s skull pop.
“There,” she said. “See how easily that’s dealt with? Now we’ll deal with something else.”
She shrugged off her heavy cloak, tossed it on to the floor, and began to loosen her stola.