The Sheen of the Silk

chapter 49-50
Forty-nine

ZOE KNEW BEYOND ANY DOUBT THAT SHE WOULD HAVE only one chance to kill Gregory. If she lost it, she lost everything. He would not fail.

She was thinking of this on her way home from the baths, her servant Sabas a few feet behind her, when she was bumped unexpectedly hard by a messenger running around a group of women talking in the street. Zoe lost her balance, and in trying to regain it without falling over, she stepped out into the path of the traffic. She was struck by a cart that had just started moving forward. She fell heavily and felt a sharp pain in her lower leg.

There were shouts of alarm and sympathy around her. People rushed forward, Sabas among them, and a tangle of arms thrust out to help her, pushing and shoving to get the cart backward without startling the horse into bolting. Arms pulled her up, tearing her robe, and she was unceremoniously put down on the ground with her back to the wall of the nearest shop while an old woman wagged her head and looked with alarm at the blood staining the fabric.

Then Sabas was there, bending over her. Without asking permission, he tore the hem off Zoe's tunic and used it to bind the wound.

"Look where you're going in future," an old man said waspishly.

Zoe was too shaken to retaliate, but she looked at his face so she would remember it, and one day she would repay his insolence. He saw something in her gaze and hurried away.

Sabas found a carriage and helped her in, and she was carried home, angry and for the moment consumed with pain.

As soon as she arrived, she sent Sabas off again at a run to fetch Anastasius. He was obliged to ask Simonis where Anastasius was and then follow her to another patient who was not seriously ill. Anastasius left almost immediately and accompanied him back.

Zoe was in too much distress to complain about waiting. Blood had soaked through the makeshift bandage, and the wound was throbbing so she could feel it all the way up to the groin. She told Anastasius what had happened and watched while he unbound the bloody edge of her tunic and exposed the wound. It looked horrible, and it turned her stomach and sent a chill of fear through her, but she would not let him see her avert her eyes.

He worked quickly. She noticed that he had beautiful hands, like a woman's-slender, long-fingered-and he moved with both delicacy and strength. She wondered what he would have been like had he been allowed to grow into a man. There was something in the turn of his head, an inflection of the voice, that reminded her of Justinian. It came suddenly as he frowned and bent to look more closely at an herb, then the likeness was gone again.

"I need to stitch the sides together," Anastasius told her. "Otherwise it will take a long time to heal, and it will leave a worse scar. I'm sorry, but it will feel unpleasant."

"Then do it quickly," Zoe ordered him. "I want it healed. And I don't care for blood all over the place."

Anastasius threaded one of his curved needles with silk. "Now please keep perfectly still. I don't wish to cause you any more pain than I have to. Would you like Thomais to hold you steady?"

Zoe looked at Anastasius and met the unflinching gray eyes. It was the first time she had looked at him so intently. He had long eyelashes and his eyes were beautiful, but it was the intelligence in them that excited her, even alarmed her. It was as if his mind touched hers and read it much more intimately than she would have expected.

He had started to stitch, and she had not noticed it. She watched him work quickly, admiring his skill.

"It seems you are busy now, Anastasius," she remarked. "Your reputation has spread. I hear many people speaking of your abilities."

He smiled without taking his eyes from his work. "I am grateful to you for that. I owe my first recommendations to you. I believe it was you who gave my name to Eirene Vatatzes. I have attended her since then."

Zoe froze, her body suddenly rigid.

"I'm sorry," Anastasius apologized. "I am nearly finished."

Zoe swallowed. "Tell me about Eirene. It will take my mind off what you are doing. How is she, now that her husband has returned from Alexandria?"

"Recovering." Anastasius put in the last stitch and, very gently, so as not to pull the flesh, cut the silk with a blade. "It may take her a little while."

"Thank you. Did you meet her husband?"

Anastasius looked up. "Yes. An interesting man. He mentioned that he knew you."

"A long time ago. What did he say?"

Anastasius smiled, as if he knew exactly what was in her mind and in Eirene's. "He said you were the most beautiful woman in Byzantium, not for your face, or even your body, but for the passion in you."

Zoe looked away. She could not face Anastasius's eyes. "Really? No doubt he said it to annoy Eirene. She has a temper, and that amuses him. And what did you say?" she demanded, facing him again, the high color in her cheeks masked as anger.

Anastasius smiled. "My answer was unimportant."

"Oh? What was it?"

"I told him that I was not in a position to appreciate it, but I quite believed him that it was so," Anastasius replied.

She gasped at his nerve, felt the remembered heat scorch up her face again, then burst into laughter, a rich peal of pure delight.

Anastasius poured some fine powder into a small silk sachet and then placed a jar of ointment on the table beside it. "Take a spoonful of this in hot water once a day." He handed her a ceramic spoon, wide but shallow. "Level, do not heap it. Draw a knife over the top to make certain of that. It will keep the infection from getting worse. And put the ointment on if it starts to itch. It probably will do, as it heals. I shall call again in a week to remove some of the stitches, and then take out the rest a week or so after that. But if it gives you cause for anxiety because it is inflamed or it suppurates, send for me immediately. Or if you become feverish."

After Anastasius was gone and Thomais had assisted her to bathe and put on clean clothes, Zoe became aware of the steadily increasing pain in her leg. By nightfall, it was throbbing so powerfully that she could think of little else. She sent for hot water and measured out the powder Anastasius had left and dropped it into the cup. She was about to drink it, and suddenly a hideous thought came to her. What if Gregory was using Anastasius, perhaps the only person outside her own household whom she would trust?

Carefully, in case any of it spilled on her, she threw out the medicine. At first she thought to destroy it with fire and then realized just in time that it might be just as lethal if it was burned and its fumes inhaled. She ended up tipping all the powder into the hot water and pouring it down the drain.

Three days later, she was in even greater pain. In spite of having treated it herself and taken one of her own powders to get rid of fever, the wound was red and angry, and it felt as if it were on fire. Every now and then she was dizzy. She drank glass after glass of water; it tasted even more brackish than usual, and she was always thirsty.

Now she was certain that Gregory was behind the attack and that somehow he had managed to introduce poison into the wound.

"Look for poison!" she told Anastasius when he came. "The wound is infected. Someone is trying to kill me."

Anastasius looked at her, studying her hot, golden eyes, her flushed skin, and then last the raw wound in her leg, which was beginning to suppurate. He touched it gently with one cool finger, then turned to her. "Did you use the medicine I gave you? And don't lie, unless you want to lose your leg."

"No," she said quietly. "I was afraid that whoever poisoned me might have reached you, too."

Anastasius nodded. "I see. Then we had better start again, from the beginning. The infection is serious now. I shall stay here and watch you. I have every interest in your recovery. It would be bad for my reputation if you died, so do as I tell you." He smiled very slightly, a deep, inward humor.

He stayed, nursing her all day and to begin with all night as well. He sat beside her, talking to her through the increasing pain. At first it irritated her. Then gradually she realized that as she answered his questions, she became less aware of how badly she hurt. Obliquely, it was kind of him.

"Demetrios?" she answered his last question, smiling in spite of herself. "Not like his father. Weaker. In love with Helena? Probably not. In love with power, certainly. Thinks he hides it, but he doesn't. Eirene's son, but without her intelligence. Brilliant with money, like her." She laughed, but so deep inside herself that he did not hear it. "Helena thinks he loves her, but then she thinks all sorts of things. Fool."

"Did Justinian love her?" Anastasius asked, sounding only mildly interested, as if he were still trying to take her mind from the pain.

"Loathed her," Zoe answered frankly. Damn it, her leg hurt! She was getting a little dizzy. Was she going to die after all?

He made her drink something more that tasted foul. Had Gregory got to him? She searched his eyes, his face, and could read something in it beyond curiosity, but what?

"Anastasius," Zoe whispered.

"Yes?"

"If I am alive in the morning, I shall tell you why Justinian Lascaris killed Bessarion. Bloody fool! He didn't come to me, and I was the one person who would have believed him. I can see it for myself now. Only mistake he made, but it cost him everything. Idiot!"

Anastasius looked as if she had struck him, his face an odd mixture of ashen pale and red spots on his cheeks, like weals.

The room was beginning to swim around Zoe. She was growing delirious with fever. He forced her to drink something that was even more vile than the last time, but when she awoke at midday she was much improved.

Anastasius was smiling at her. "Better?" he inquired with some satisfaction.

"Much better." She sat up slowly, and he offered her something to drink that was pleasant. "Thank you."

He eased her back down again. He was stronger than she had expected. Or perhaps she was weaker.

"It's morning," Anastasius observed.

"I can see that!" Zoe snapped.

A smile flickered in Anastasius's eyes. "Then you will tell me why Justinian was a fool not to trust you?" he said with an edge to his voice. "Or was I the fool to believe it?"

Memory rushed back. "What was that you just gave me?"

Anastasius smiled. "You haven't answered my question."

"Justinian knew Bessarion was useless," Zoe said quietly. "He would have been a disaster on the throne. But the others wouldn't believe Justinian. They'd put everything into it and the plans had gone too far. The only way to stop it was to kill Bessarion. Antoninus believed Justinian. He helped." She almost laughed when she thought of it, except that it was so futile. "Fool. I would have stopped it. They could have done nothing without me. But Justinian didn't trust me. What was it I just drank?"

Anastasius stared at her as if mesmerized.

"What was it I just drank?" Zoe repeated, her voice more angry and frightened than she had wanted to betray.

"Infusion of camomile," Anastasius answered. "It's good for the digestion. Just camomile leaves in hot water, nothing else. It's bitter because you've been ill. That alters your taste."

She did not want to admire Anastasius, and it was a curious feeling to trust him. Yet at least as far as medicine was concerned, she did. She lay back at last, for the time being content.

After three days, she began to regain strength and the wound was less red and the swelling subsided. After a week, he pronounced it satisfactory and said he would leave and return at the end of another three days.

She thanked him, paid him generously, and also gave him the gift of a small enameled box made of silver and inlaid with aquamarine. He touched it gently, looking first at its beauty, then up at her. His appreciation of it was clear in his face, and she was satisfied. She told him to leave.

Zoe was glad Anastasius had liked it. He had ministered to her not only with skill, but with gentleness. It had given her a serious fright to be so vulnerable. It could not go on like this.

An idea was beginning to take shape in her mind. She would make Gregory's death count. She would contrive a means to have Giuliano Dandolo blamed for it. That way, she could bear to kill Gregory. She could even do it herself.

Fifty

WITH GREGORY, ZOE WOULD HAVE NO SECOND CHANCE.

In a perverse way, this last battle between them was another kind of bond. She thought of him during the day. She lay awake at night and remembered how it was to be with him.

Another piece of the plan fell into her hands. It was the street attacks upon Bessarion and then upon herself that gave her the idea.

The first thing was to plant the seeds in people's minds that there was a quarrel between Gregory and Giuliano Dandolo. It must be just a superficial word, so slight that the meaning was recalled only afterward and understood then.

The second thing was to go to Bardas, a maker of daggers whom she knew and had trusted in the past. She put on her heaviest dalmatica and went out into the windy street and the light rain. Walking quickly, she left Sabas far behind her as he was used to being, discreet, seeing and hearing nothing. The pain in her leg was barely there anymore.

"Yes, mistress," the swordsmith said immediately, pleased to see her again. Only a fool forgot a benefactress or broke his word to a woman who never forgot or forgave. "What can I make for you this time?"

"I want a good dagger," she replied. "It doesn't have to be the best, but I want a family crest on the hilt, and I want you to be discreet about it. It is a gift, and it will be spoiled if anyone else hears of it."

"Your business is no one else's, lady. Whose crest would that be?"

"Dandolo," she answered.

As soon as she had the dagger, which was beautiful-Bardas was even better than his word-she sent a letter to Giuliano Dandolo, who was still lodging in the Venetian Quarter. The message was simple: She had learned more about his dead mother.

Giuliano came, as she had known he would. She looked at him standing in her magnificent room. Although he was ill at ease, trying to hide the eagerness to learn what she had to say burning inside him, he still moved with grace, and grudgingly she admitted to herself he was better than handsome: He had a vitality of mind that she could not ignore. If she had been younger, she would have wanted to lie with him. But he was a Dandolo, and the dream in the eyes, the shape of a cheekbone, the width of his shoulders, or the way he walked could not pardon that.

He made all the usual polite remarks, not rushing into asking for the new information, and she played the game, uncertain whether she enjoyed it or not.

"I have heard more of your mother," she said as soon as the greetings were over and the casual remarks that courtesy required. "She was beautiful, but perhaps you knew that already." She saw the flicker of emotion in his face, the sharp hurt too deep to camouflage. "Perhaps you did not know that Maddalena had a sister, Eudoxia, also beautiful, but regrettably there is considerable scandal about her name." Again she saw the emotion raw in him. A pity she could not be young again. "What I did not know before is that Eudoxia is said by some to have repented deeply in her old age, and to have joined some holy order. I do not know which, but I may be able to learn. It is possible that she is still alive."

"Alive?" His eyes opened wide.

"Please, leave it to me. I have ways which are not open to you, and I can do it discreetly. I will let you know as soon as I have something that is certain."

"Thank you." He smiled at her, a handsome, self-assured man with a charm that came without effort.

"I was three when my mother died," she said to Giuliano, aware that her voice was shaking but unable to control it.

"I'm sorry," he responded with sudden shock, his eyes tender.

She did not wish his sympathy. "She was raped and murdered." Then she wished she had not told him. It was a weakness and a tactical error. He might work out the year, and the circumstances, and then know he could never trust her. "I have something for you," she said hastily, trying to cover it. "I came by it almost by chance, so please feel no obligation." She moved away from him over to the table on which lay the dagger with the Dandolo crest. She unwrapped the blue silk cloth around it and held it out, hilt toward him, crest upward. Bardas had done a perfect job: It looked old and well used, yet every detail of it was clear.

Giuliano stared at it, then looked up at her.

"Take it," she urged. "It should be yours. Anyway, what on earth would I do with a dagger that carried a Venetian crest on it?"

He was not clumsy enough to offer to pay for it. He would give her a gift of appropriate value, a little more than he judged the dagger to be worth.

He weighed it in his hands. "The balance is perfect," he observed. "Where did it come from?"

"I don't know," she answered. "But if I find out, I shall tell you."

"Thank you." He was not effusive, but the depth of his feeling filled his voice, his eyes, even the way he stood and the touch of his hands on the knife.

"Wear it," she said quite casually. "It will become you." She would pray that he did, kneel before the Virgin Mary and beseech her that he did. Unless the dagger was known to be Giuliano's, Zoe's plan would not work.

"I will." He seemed about to add something further, then changed his mind and took his leave.

She watched him go with an odd little pain biting in her side, as if something were slipping out of her hands. Now there was nothing to do but wait, two or three weeks, at least. She had to be sure others had seen Giuliano with the knife and knew it was his.

She waited a month. Time seemed to crawl by like a crippled thing, dragging days behind it. The heat of noon paralyzed, the afternoons were heavy and silent, darkness was a mask that could hide anything, every creak and footstep a possible assassin.

As she had expected, Giuliano sent her a gift: a brooch for her dalmatica. She liked it more than she wished to. It was black onyx and topaz, in a bed of gold. She did not want to wear it, yet she could not resist doing so, her fingers straying to it because it was also beautiful to the touch. Damn him!

Finally she could wait no longer, and she sent for a thief she had used in the past, when necessity dictated. She told him the knife was hers and had been taken in a robbery, then sold to Giuliano Dandolo. She had seen him with it and realized he had no idea of its origin. She had offered to buy it back, and because of the family crest, he had, not surprisingly, refused. She had no recourse but to have it stolen, as it had been stolen from her.

The thief asked no questions and promised to do as she wished, for a price.

Next she wrote a letter to Gregory, disguising her hand to look like that of Dandolo, copying from the letter he had sent her accepting her earlier invitation. She said she had accidentally stumbled on a revealing secret about Zoe Chrysaphes and would be willing to inform Gregory, if Gregory would assist him in a certain diplomatic matter, of no detriment to Byzantium. She signed it with his name, also copied.

Finally she sent a similar letter to Giuliano from Gregory saying he had heard that Giuliano was interested in learning about Maddalena Agallon. He had known and admired her and would be happy to tell Giuliano all he was able to. She signed it "Gregory Vatatzes." She knew his hand well enough to forge it without effort.

Then she sat in the large red chair under the torches and stared at the ceiling, relishing the moment, feeling her heart beat so hard and so high in her chest that she could scarcely breathe.

The night of the assignation between Gregory and Giuliano, Zoe was filled with a torrent of doubts. She stood at the window and looked out at the hazy darkness and the faintly moving gleam of lanterns like crawling fireflies in the streets below. Was she being absurd? Poor Zoe Chrysaphes, once the greatest beauty in exiled Byzantium, the mistress of emperors, soon to be a crazy old woman in the streets, dressed in rags, trying to kill people!

She strode over to the great cross on the wall and stared at it, willing herself to regain the passion of vengeance that would overcome her weakness. The Kantakouzenos were destroyed in Cosmas, and the Vatatzes with Arsenios, the Doukas in Euphrosane; the rest did not matter. Only Dandolo was left, and that would soon be over, too.

She moved to the icon of the Virgin Mary and knelt. "Blessed Mother of God, fill me with strength to complete my mission!" she pleaded.

She looked up at the somber face with its aureole of gold, and it seemed to smile at her. As if some hidden floodgates inside Zoe had opened, the blood throbbed in her veins and her muscles had the vitality of a young woman.

She rose, crossed herself, and hurried out alone in the night, as light and easy in her stride as a deer. It was mild, the wind off the sea smelling of salt. Only when she was half a mile from her home did she realize that the old beggar woman she was dressed to seem would never have walked as she was doing. As she rounded a corner, she bent a little and slowed her pace. She went another mile slowly, painfully.

Gregory had to pass this way to keep his appointment with Giuliano. Here was the place to catch him, in the Venetian Quarter. She had calculated the time he would pass, and before Giuliano could arrive, but only just. It had to be exact. She touched the dagger at her belt, hidden by her cloak, then crossed herself again. Now she must wait.

There was someone coming along the street now. Two young men, arm in arm, drunk, their bodies swaying, making the shadows move. She heard their voices and their laughter and shrank back into the lee of a doorway.

Should she attack Gregory from behind? No, that was a coward's way. He would suspect anyone following him, but not an old woman face-to-face. She bent farther forward, as if age crippled her.

There was laughter down the street, lights going the other way. The wind was saltier here, close to the waterfront.

There was someone else coming, a tall man carrying a lantern. She recognized his step. She hobbled, barely glancing at his face, her voice whining, high-pitched, and servile. "Spare an old woman a few pence? May God bless you..."

He stopped, his hand going toward his side. Money or a weapon? There was no time to wait and see. Zoe drew out the knife from beneath her cloak and clawed upward with it, at the same time kicking him as hard as she could on the shin. He jerked forward with surprise, and she swept the blade hard across his throat, using all her strength, helped by the weight of his body as he lurched off balance from the kick. The lantern crashed and went out, but her eyes were accustomed to the night. There was blood jetting out of his throat, warm and sticky on her hand. She could smell it. He did not even cry out, making only a terrible gurgle as he choked, wrenching around, grabbing at her as his life gushed out of him. He tore at her shoulder, pulling the muscles, hurting as if he had stabbed her, but he was already losing his balance, carrying her down with him. She felt herself falling, and the ground hit her hard with a pain in her elbow that took her breath away.

But his grasp had loosened. She did not want him to go without knowing it was she who had done it.

"Gregory!" she said clearly. "Gregory!"

For a moment, his eyes focused on her and his lips formed something that might have been her name; then the light in him went out, and his tar black eyes were empty.

Slowly, her bones aching, her muscles stiff, she rose and turned to walk away. Her vision was blurred; hot tears streamed down her face. It puzzled her why she felt as if the void were not at her feet but inside her, and she knew with certainty that it would never again be filled.