The Sheen of the Silk

chapter 33-34
Thirty-three

ANNA ARRIVED HOME AFTER HER ENCOUNTER WITH Helena with her mind racing and her body still trembling as if she had been physically assaulted. She strode past Simonis with barely a word and went to her own room. She took off her clothes and bandages and stood naked, then washed herself over and over again, as though she could cleanse herself with harsh, astringent lotion, smelling the bite of it with pleasure. It stung, even hurt, but the pain pleased her.

She dressed again in her plain golden brown tunic and dalmatica and left the house without eating or drinking. She was fortunate that Constantine was at home.

He rose from his seat, his broad face filled with anxiety the moment after she entered. "What is it?" he demanded. "What's happened? Is it another monk tortured? Dead?"

It was preposterous! Her obsession with her own, so desperately trivial hurt, when people were dying terribly. She started to laugh, hearing it run out of control and end in sobbing. "No," she gasped, fumbling her way forward to sit in her accustomed chair. "No, it's nothing at all, nothing that matters." She put her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands. "I saw Helena. I've been treating her-nothing serious, just painful. She..."

"What?" he demanded, sitting opposite her. His voice was gentle, but there was an edge of alarm in it.

She looked up at him, steadying herself. "Really nothing," she repeated. "You told me that she made an advance to Justinian, which he found acutely embarrassing." She did not add her own experience, but he understood it. She saw his face darken and then pity and revulsion leap to his eyes, as if he had been touched by it himself.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "Be careful. She is a dangerous woman."

"I know. I think I made a reasonably graceful refusal, but I know she won't forget it. I hope I don't have to treat her again. Perhaps she won't want me to..."

"Don't rely on that, Anastasius. It entertains her to humiliate."

Anna pictured Helena's face. "I think she knows humiliation. She told me Justinian was in love with her. She showed me a beautiful box that she said he gave her." She saw it in her mind as she said it. It was the sort of thing Justinian would have chosen, but surely not for Helena?

Constantine's mouth curled with distaste and perhaps a vestige of pity. "Lies," he said without hesitation. "He disliked her, but he believed that Bessarion could lead the people against the union with Rome, so he hid his feelings."

"She said he quarreled with Bessarion badly, shortly before he was killed. Was that a lie, too?"

Constantine stared at her. "No," he said quietly. "That was the truth. He told me of it himself."

"Why?" she demanded. "Was it about Helena? Did Justinian tell him that Helena had... How could he tell him such a thing?"

"He didn't." Constantine shook his head minutely. "It was not to do with Helena."

"Then what?"

"I can't tell you," he replied. "I'm sorry."

The protest welled up inside her. She saw in his face that he knew the answer and that he would not tell her.

"Was it a confession?" she said shakily. "Justinian?" Now the fear gripped inside her like an iron hand closing.

"I cannot tell you," Constantine repeated. "To do so would betray others. Some things I know, some I guess. Would you have me speak that aloud, were it your heart and your secret?"

"No," she said hoarsely. "No, of course I wouldn't. I'm sorry."

"Anastasius..." He swallowed hard. His skin was very pale. "Be very careful of Helena, of all of them. There is such a lot that you don't understand, life and death, cruelty, hatred, old debts and dreams, things that people never let go of." He leaned farther toward her. "Two men are dead already, and a third exiled, and that is only a tiny part of it. Serve God in your own way, heal their ills, but leave the rest of it alone."

To argue with him would be pointless and unfair. She had not told him the truth, so how could he understand? They were each trying to reach the other, he failing because he was bound by the sanctity of confession, she because she could not trust him with the truth of why she could not let go of any of it.

"Thank you," she said quietly. "Thank you for listening."

"We shall pray together," he replied. "Come."

She was at the Blachernae Palace, having treated one of the eunuchs for a bad chest infection and been up with him all night until the crisis broke. Then she had been sent for by the emperor over a minor skin irritation. She was still with him when the two papal legates from Rome, Palombara and Vicenze, were granted an audience and were shown in, as was customary, by the Varangian Guard. They were always there, strong men with lean, hard bodies, dressed in full armor. The emperor was never without them, no matter the time of day or night, how formal or trivial the occasion.

Anna stood a little apart, not included, yet neither had she been given leave to go. She recalled her unpleasant journey to Bithynia with Vicenze, during which Cyril Choniates was nearly killed.

All the ritual greetings were exchanged, well-wishes that no one meant. Beside Anna, Nicephoras was watching every inflection while outwardly seeming merely to wait. Only once did he glance at her with a momentary smile. She realized that he would remain here, judging both words and silences, and afterward give Michael his counsel. She was glad of that.

"There is still some dissension among certain factions who do not see the need for Christendom to stand together," Vicenze said with barely concealed impatience. "We must do something decisive to prevent them from causing trouble among the people."

"I'm sure His Majesty is aware of that." Palombara glanced at Vicenze, then away again, both humor and dislike in his eyes.

"He cannot be," Vicenze argued impatiently. "Or he would have addressed it. I seek only to inform, and ask advice." The look of contempt he shot his fellow legate was sharp and cold.

Palombara smiled, and that too was a gesture without warmth. "His Majesty will not tell us everything he knows, Your Grace. He would hardly have led his people back again to their city, and kept them safe, were he ignorant of their nature and their passions, or lacking in either the skill or the courage to govern them."

Anna hid her smile with difficulty. This was becoming interesting. Rome certainly did not speak with a single voice, although it might be only ambition or personal enmity that divided them.

Palombara looked at Michael again. "Time is short, Your Majesty. Is there some way in which we might assist? Are there leaders with whom we might speak, and resolve some of their fears?"

"I have already spoken with the patriarch," Vicenze told him. "He is an excellent man, of great vision and understanding."

For half a second, it was clear in Palombara's face that he had not known that. Then he concealed it and smiled. "I don't think the patriarch is where we need to concentrate our efforts, Your Grace. Actually I believe it is the monks in different abbeys who harbor the greatest reservations about trusting Rome. But perhaps your information is different from mine?"

Two spots of color stained Vicenze's pale cheeks, but he was too furious to trust himself to speak.

Palombara looked at Michael. "Perhaps if we were to discuss the situation, Your Majesty, we might learn of a way in which, in Christian brotherhood, we could find an accord with these holy men, and persuade them of our common cause against the tide of Islam, which I fear is lapping ever closer around us."

This time it was Michael whose face lit with amusement. The conversation continued for a further twenty minutes, and then the two legates withdrew, and shortly afterward Anna went after them, having finally been noticed and given permission to leave.

She was on the way through the last hall before the great doors when she encountered Palombara, apparently alone. He looked at her with interest, and she was unpleasantly aware of a certain curiosity in him because he was clearly unfamiliar with eunuchs. She became self-conscious, aware of her woman's body under the clothes, as if he could see some kind of guilt in her eyes. Perhaps to a man unused to even the concept of a third gender, her masquerade was more apparent. Did she look feminine to him? Or was he simply considering how mutilated she was that her hands were so slender, and her neck, her jaw, lighter than a man's? She must say something to him quickly, engage his intellect away from her physical presence.

"You will find it a difficult task persuading the monks of the truth of your doctrine, Your Grace." Normally she was not conscious of her voice, but now to her it sounded so much that of a woman, without the mellower, more throaty quality of a eunuch. "They have given their lives to Orthodoxy," she added. "Some in most terrible martyrdom."

"Is that what you advise the emperor?" he asked, taking a step closer to her. In spite of his bishop's robes and emblems of office, there was a virility about him that was unpriestly. She wanted to make some uniquely eunuch gesture, to remind both of them that she was not a woman, but she could think of nothing that would not be absurd.

"The last advice I gave him was to drink infusion of camomile," she answered, and was delighted to see Palombara's puzzlement.

"For what purpose?" he asked, knowing she was taking some advantage of him to amuse herself.

"It relaxes the mind and assists digestion," she replied. Then, in case he should think the emperor was ill: "I came to attend one of the eunuchs who had a fever." Now she was aware of her crumpled dalmatica after a long night of nursing and the pallor of her face from weariness. "I have been with him for many hours, but fortunately he is past the crisis. Now I am free to leave, and attend my other patients." She moved forward to pass him.

"The emperor's physician," Palombara observed. "You look young to have attained such responsibility."

"I am young," she responded. "Fortunately the emperor has excellent health."

"So you practice on the palace eunuchs?"

"I make no distinction between one sick person and another." She raised her eyebrows. "I don't care whether they are Roman, Greek, Muslim, or Jew, except as their beliefs affect their treatment. I imagine you are the same. Or have you ceased to minister to ordinary people? That would explain your perception of the monks who do not wish to be driven into union with Rome."

"You are against the union," he observed with faint irony, as if he had known she would be. "Tell me why. Is the issue of whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father only, or the Father and the Son, worth sacrificing your city for-again?"

She did not wish to concede his point. "Let me be equally direct. It is you who will sack us, not we who will come to Rome and burn and pillage it. Why does the issue mean so much to you? Is it enough to justify the murder and rape of a nation for your aggrandizement?"

"You are too harsh," he said softly. "We cannot sail from Rome to Acre without stopping somewhere on the way, for water and provisions. Constantinople is the obvious place."

"And you cannot visit a place without destroying it? Is that what you have in mind for Jerusalem also, if you beat the Saracens? Very holy," she added sarcastically. "All in the name of Christ, of course. Your Christ, not mine-mine was the one the Romans crucified. It seems to be becoming a habit. Was once not enough for you?"

He winced, his gray eyes widening. "I had no idea eunuchs were so savage in argument."

"From the look on your face, you have no idea about them... us... at all." That was a bad slip. Did he anger her because he was a Roman or because he could not take the gender for granted and made her so aware of her lie and the loss of herself as a woman?

"I am beginning to realize how little I know about Byzantium," he said softly, laughter and curiosity at the back of his eyes. "May I call on you if I need a physician?"

"If you fall ill, you should call one of your own," she responded. "You are more likely to need a priest than someone skilled in herbs, and I cannot minister to a Roman's sins."

"Are not all sins much the same?" he asked, amusement now quite open in his face.

"Exactly the same. But some of us do not see them as sins, and it is the healing I am responsible for, not the shriving-or the judgment."

"Not the judgment?" His eyes widened.

She winced as the barb struck home.

"Are the sins different?" he asked.

"If they are not, then what have Rome and Byzantium been fighting for over the centuries?"

He smiled. "Power. Is that not what we always fight for?"

"And money," she added. "And pride, I suppose."

"Not much is hidden from a good physician." He shook his head a little.

"Or a good priest," she added. "Although the damage you do is harder to attribute. Good day, Your Grace." She moved past him and walked down the steps toward the street.

Thirty-four

ZOE HAD SEEN THE NECKLACE WHEN IT WAS ALMOST finished. She had stood in the goldsmith's shop and watched him working the metal, heating it slowly, bending it, and smoothing it into exactly the shape he wanted. She had seen the stones because he had had them out in order to make the shapes to hold them: golden topaz, pale topaz almost like spring sunlight, dark, smoky citrines, and quartz almost bronze. Only a woman with hair like autumn leaves and fire in her eyes could wear this without being dominated by it and made to look eclipsed rather than enhanced.

The goldsmith would be flattered that she wore it. It would advertise his art and earn him more customers. Then everyone would want his work.

She arrived at his shop at midmorning, gold coins ready in a small leather pouch. She would not send Sabas for this because she wanted to make sure the piece was perfect before she passed over her money.

She was irritated to see someone already there, a gaunt-faced middle-aged man, his graying hair prematurely thin. He was holding coins in his hand. He closed his fingers over them, smiling, and passed them to the smith. The smith thanked him and picked up Zoe's necklace. He laid it on a piece of ivory silk, wrapped it gently, and passed it to the man, who took it and folded it away until it was concealed by his dalmatica. He thanked the smith, then turned and walked away toward Zoe, his face alight with satisfaction.

Zoe's fury overtook her. The man had taken her necklace, and the smith had allowed it.

It was only as the man passed her that she recognized him, even after all these years-Arsenios Vatatzes, Eirene's cousin by marriage, the head of the house whose crest was carved on the back of her crucifix.

It was his family who had robbed Zoe's father in 1204, promising to help in that terrible escape, then betraying them by keeping the relics, the icons, the documents of history that were uniquely Byzantine. They had fled to Egypt and sold them to the Alexandrians to finance a fat, comfortable exile, while Zoe's father, hideously bereaved, a widower with one small daughter, had had to labor with his hands in order to survive.

Now Arsenios was rich and back again in Constantinople. The time was right. She turned away, in case he might recognize her also.

She arrived home with her mind racing. There were a dozen ways of achieving someone's ruin, but it depended upon circumstance, the person's friends and enemies, their family or lovers, their hungers, their strengths, the weaknesses through which they were vulnerable. Arsenios was clever, and it seemed he had wealth, which these days meant power. The Vatatzes had ruled Byzantium in exile from 1221 to 1254. Arsenios's brother Gregory was married to Eirene, who was also of aristocratic descent from the Doukas dynasty. Only a disgrace so clear, so blatant as to be unarguable, would work.

What kind of disgrace? She paced the floor of her room, walked over to the great cross, and stared at it, seeing in her mind's eye the other side with one goal achieved, one of its fourfold emblems meaningless at last. The Vatatzes must be next.

Whom was the necklace for? Someone Arsenios loved, but whom?

It did not take long to find out that he was a widower and had one daughter, Maria, who was soon to make a fortunate marriage into a family with not only wealth, but immense power and ambition. Her beauty and her lineage were her strengths, and therefore Arsenios's strength also. That was where to strike.

The plan took shape in her mind. It would avenge the humiliation she had suffered in Syracuse all those years ago. Arsenios would pay for that, as he would pay for betraying Byzantium.

Anastasius Zarides was the perfect vehicle. But with a peculiar mixture of emotions, she remembered their last encounter. At first she had thought his saving the monk Cyril was just one of those random pieces of good fortune that happen from time to time to anyone. But then she had seen something in the healer's eyes that made her believe he knew she had tried to poison Cyril and had himself worked out exactly how.

She could see him in her mind's eye, and it was almost as if she had caught half an image on some polished surface: herself and yet not herself. The clothes were different, the shape of the body, no lush curves of bosom and hip. Yet the turn of the neck, the refinement of the jaw, just for half a second, the blink of an eye, were the same.

It was a delusion, of course. It was the fire in the mind that was the resemblance, the steel inside.

Of course, Anastasius had serious flaws. He forgave, and that was a weakness that sooner or later would prove fatal. He overlooked faults. Such a defect infuriated Zoe. It was like a chip on the face of an otherwise perfect statue. The mutilation of his manhood was a shame, but he was too young to be of any interest to her, although it was difficult to be accurate about the age of a man who was not a man. A human being without the spirit or the fire to hate was only half-alive. That was a waste. She liked him-apart from that.

She shook herself impatiently. The only thing of importance was that he was the perfect tool for this task and perhaps for others in the future. She realized with surprise just how sorry she would be if it did destroy him.

The sun was making bright patterns on the floor, its warmth soothing her shoulders. What was the cause of this new hate of Anastasius in Helena? Had he bested her too in something, and was she stupid enough to resent it instead of tasting the amusement of it? Zoe's daughter gave in to emotion instead of using it.

The idea that was forming in her mind had far greater possibilities than merely destroying Arsenios. By using Anastasius, she might also learn the answer to several questions that had become more and more insistent lately. Anastasius was always interested in the murder of Bessarion. Zoe had assumed that the law was correct and Antoninus had killed him, and then Justinian had helped him conceal it. She had thought that she knew why, but possibly she had been mistaken. It could be dangerous to be wrong.

Also dangerous was the possibility of Michael learning that she had deliberately ruined Arsenios. If he discovered this, he might deduce that she had also killed Cosmas. He might feel inclined to stop her.

That must be prevented. Michael was clever, inventive, a true Byzantine. Above all, he would save his country, his people, against their will if necessary, but he would live or die to prevent the crusaders from burning Constantinople again.

If Zoe were indispensable to him in any part of foiling Charles of Anjou, then he would protect her from the devil himself, let alone some mere question of the law.

Even as she stood in the sun, the sounds of the street echoing below her, the far light gleaming on the sea, she began to see how she would do it.

It took over two weeks for Scalini, the Sicilian, to visit her, alone and at night, as she had insisted. He was a weasel of a man, but clever and not without a sense of humor, and that quality alone redeemed him in her eyes.

"I have a job for you, Scalini," she told him as soon as he sat in the chair opposite her and she had poured wine. It was long after midnight, and she had only one torch lit.

"Of course." He nodded and reached for the glass. He put it to his long, sharp nose and sniffed. "Ascalon wine, with honey and something else?"

"Wild camomile seeds," she told him.

He smiled. "Where is the job? Sicily, Naples... Rome?"

"Wherever the king of the Two Sicilies might be," she replied. "As long as he is not here. By then it would be too late."

He grinned. His teeth were sharp and white, well cared for. "He will not be here yet," he said with relish, licking his lips as if tasting something sweet. "The pope has forgiven the emperor of Byzantium. When he heard this piece of news, His Majesty of the Two Sicilies was so beside himself with rage that he snatched up his own scepter and bit off the top of it!"

Zoe laughed until the tears were wet on her face. Scalini joined in, and they finished the wine. She opened a new bottle, and they finished that as well.

It was coming toward three in the morning when at last she leaned forward, her face suddenly grave. "Scalini, for reasons which are not your concern, I need to have something of great worth to offer the emperor. A year from now may be sufficient, but I need to be certain of it."

He pursed his lips. "The only thing Michael Palaeologus wants is his throne secure and Constantinople safe. He'll trade anything else on earth for the city's security-even the Church."

"And who threatens him?" she whispered.

"Charles of Anjou. The world knows that."

"I want to know everything I can about him. Everything! Do you understand me, Scalini?"

His small brown eyes searched her face, studying inch by inch. "Yes, I understand."