The Sheen of the Silk

chapter 89-91

Eighty-nine

CONSTANTINE STOOD ALONE IN THE COURTYARD STARING at the fountain, and in his mind everything shrank into a tiny, crystal-clear picture, sharp-edged as a polar wind and just as simple. He could see the whole pattern as clearly as a great mosaic, every piece in its place. His whole life, every experience good and bad, had been leading up to this time when his understanding was like a shaft of light and at last undeniable. Even betrayed, he had not abandoned the cause. From that surely he must conclude that God would never abandon him?

His task now was the one above all others. Zoe Chrysaphes must be stopped. He had struck her down once, with the power of God in his hand, and Anastasius the vain, the shallow, and fickle as water, had healed her.

He must go to Zoe late in the evening, when he was certain to find her alone. His resolve was absolute. He could not leave the destiny of God's people on earth in the slippery hands of Zoe Chrysaphes.

It was a dark night, cloud-covered and windy, with pieces of debris blown rattling along the street. He would not have chosen to be out, but this must be done. And perhaps such a night was created for decisions that could never be reversed.

He was admitted warily by her servants and shown into the entrance room with its old mosaic floors and arched doorways leading to her private apartments; but he had to insist, even imply the threat of excommunication to them, in order to see her alone. After his last visit, Zoe's servants mistrusted him.

Finally, only Anastasius stood in his way.

"I will see her alone," Constantine said firmly. "That is her right. Would you deny her the final sacrament of extreme unction? Can you face God yourself, if you do such a thing?"

Anastasius reluctantly stepped away, and Constantine went in, closing the door behind him.

The great room was as magnificent as always. The torches were burning in their ornate stands, yellow flames giving it a warm, peaceful feeling, like a fine painting framed and dusted with gold. The great crucifix was hanging in its usual place. It was beautiful, but Constantine did not like it. There was something almost barbaric about it. It made him uncomfortable, like a sort of indecency.

Zoe sat in a huge chair with her back to one of the tapestries, all wines and scarlets and purples, with threads of bronze. She was wearing red again, a brazen color. It lit her face, which was not as gaunt as it should be after her illness, and showed off those golden eyes.

"I know what you have done, Zoe Chrysaphes," he said quietly. "And what you plan to do."

"Really?" She seemed barely interested.

He leaned closer. "There are plans in heaven that earth knows nothing of," he said harshly. "That is the meaning of faith. Trust God that He will provide for us whatever is necessary."

Her fine eyebrows rose. "Do you believe that, Bishop Constantine?"

"I more than believe it," he said with ringing certainty. "I know it."

"You mean I cannot change you?" she persisted.

"Not at all." He smiled.

"You have such faith!" Her voice was slow, almost a caress.

"I have," he declared.

"Then why are you here?"

He felt the heat in his skin. Zoe had nearly tricked him.

"To save your soul, woman!" he retorted.

"You told me I had already lost it," she reminded him. "Are you going to forgive me after all?"

"I can do," he told her. "If you repent, and come back as an obedient daughter of the Church. Recant all that you have said in support of union with Rome, forgive your enemies, return the money to the Church you have taken, and submit yourself to discipline. Continue the rest of your days in prayer to the Holy Virgin, and you may at the last be washed clean."

"All that before Charles of Anjou burns us to the ground again?" she said with mocking incredulity.

"God can do anything!" he said forcefully. "If you repent, and obey."

"I don't believe you," she said softly. "We must help ourselves."

"You blaspheme!" His voice rose in amazement and fury. "God will strike you dead!" He lifted his hand and pointed at her, jabbing his finger in the air as if it were a weapon.

She sat staring at him, smiling slightly lopsidedly, the right side of her face a little stiff. "Then my physician will heal me... again," she replied. "You have the power to destroy, and he to make whole. Think of that, Bishop! Which of you does that make the greater?"

He lunged forward and seized a cushion from the nearest chair. He flung himself on top of her, pressing the soft, stifling fabric over her face. She struggled, arms and legs thrashing, but he was more than twice her weight and he held her down, crushing her lungs, suffocating her. It was only a few hideous moments before she stopped moving, and his rage went cold, his body covered in icy sweat. He stood up slowly and looked at Zoe where she lay sprawled on the floor, hair tangled, tunic up around her thighs. He should remember her like this: broken, without dignity, at once both exciting and disgusting in her suggestion of sensuality.

Feeling a revulsion he could barely control, he touched her hair with his hand to straighten it around her face. It was soft, so soft that he could barely feel it. The backs of his fingers brushed against her cheek. Her skin was still warm.

He shuddered convulsively. This was obscene! He wanted to strike her, tear down one of the huge tapestries and cover her with it.

But of course he must not do that. He was a bishop, tending a penitent sinner on her deathbed.

He pulled her tunic down as far as it would go. It was not far enough. It still looked as if she had had it lifted, as if... He refused to follow that thought. His mutilation burned in his soul. He lifted her thighs; she was heavy and warm. Then he pulled her tunic straight.

He stood up, his whole body trembling.

He waited several more minutes, then walked to the door and opened it. He stopped abruptly or he would have bumped into Anastasius standing just beyond it.

He looked Anastasius straight in the eye. "She repented of all her errors and saved her soul. It is a time for great rejoicing. Zoe Chrysaphes died a loyal daughter of the true Church." He took a deep, steadying breath. "She will be buried in the Hagia Sophia. I shall offer the funeral Mass myself." He forced himself to smile. It was like the rictus of the dead on his face.

Anastasius stared in total disbelief, his eyes wide and, unbelievably, filled with grief.

Constantine crossed himself and walked past him, his huge hands clenched, his heart pounding with victory.

Ninety

ANNA WALKED INTO THE ROOM AND STARED DOWN AT the body of Zoe. She saw the blue face, the bitten lip, and the blood on it. She bent down beside her, pushing back a stray lock of hair off her brow. Gently she lifted one eyelid. She saw the tiny pinpricks of red and knew what had happened. She stood up slowly and faced Thomais.

"Lay her out," she said. "Make her look beautiful." Her voice strangled in her throat. It was not only Zoe who was dead, it was Constantine also, and in an infinitely more terrible way.

Anna went outside into the rising wind and the first spots of rain. She walked alone to Helena's house to give her the news. She did not want to do it, so it was best done quickly. Now the weight of what Constantine had said lay increasingly heavily on her. He would claim that Zoe had taken back all her support for union with Rome and died in the bosom of the Church. He would make pomp and display of it.

Helena took a long time to appear. The servants had admitted Anna only with great reluctance, but she had told them why she had come, and not one of them wished to tell Helena of Zoe's death themselves. Anna waited, grateful for the wine and bread she was offered. She was cold through to the bone now, and her eyes stung with tiredness and with sorrow.

Helena came across the room, and Anna rose to her feet.

"What on earth have you to say that cannot wait until morning?" Helena said irritably.

"I am very sorry indeed to tell you that your mother is dead," Anna replied.

Helena's dark eyes widened in momentary disbelief. "Dead?"

"Yes."

"Really? At last." Helena straightened her back and held her head a little higher. A slight smile touched the corner of her mouth, and one might have thought it was superb courage and dignity in the face of loss. Anna had the ugly thought that in fact it was an attempt to contain her victory.

She felt the tears for Zoe welling behind her own eyelids. Something of Byzantium was gone. It was more than an age that was past, it was a passion, a fury, a love of life, and its leaving took something irreplaceable from the world.

Ninety-one

PALOMBARA LANDED IN CONSTANTINOPLE WEIGHED DOWN by the bitter news he carried. The fleet of Charles of Anjou had sailed for Sicily, and from there it would leave for Constantinople. They could count the time until invasion in weeks.

Back again at the house he shared with Vicenze, Palombara found him busy in his study, writing a pile of dispatches. Vicenze, secretive as always, turned them upside down the moment he saw him in the doorway.

"Good voyage?" Vicenze asked politely.

"Good enough," Palombara replied. He held out the letters the pope had sent Vicenze, still sealed.

Vicenze took them. "Thank you." He looked at Palombara. "I don't suppose you've heard yet, but Zoe Chrysaphes is dead. Had an apoplexy or something. Bishop Constantine said a requiem Mass for her in the Hagia Sophia, the hypocrite. Said she died reconciled to the Orthodox Church. Damn liar!" He smiled.

Palombara was stunned. It had seemed as if nothing could destroy Zoe. He stood still in the middle of the floor and was overwhelmed with loss, as if Byzantium itself had begun to die.

Vicenze was still staring at him, still smiling. Palombara had an almost overwhelming desire to strike him so hard that it would break his teeth.

"Perhaps it's just as well," he said as calmly as he could. "Charles of Anjou has set sail for Messina. At least she will be spared knowing that."

He went to see Helena Comnena to offer his condolences. She had moved into Zoe's house, and she received him in the room that had once been her mother's. The view was the one Palombara remembered, but the colors were already different. The new tapestries were pale, intricately detailed. There were blues and greens, no warmth of the earth tones.

Helena's perfectly balanced face, with its winged eyebrows, almost like her mother's, was lovely. But he had no sense of the steel within. There seemed to be in her a hunger without joy.

"I am grieved to hear of your mother's death," he said formally. "Please accept my condolences."

"Personally?" she asked. "Or do you speak for Rome?"

He smiled. "Personally."

"Really?" She regarded him with dry, rather sour amusement. "I had not realized that you were fond of her. I rather assumed the opposite."

He met her dark eyes. "I admired your mother. I enjoyed her intelligence and her infinite capacity to care about everything."

"Admired her..." Helena repeated the words curiously, as if she found them inappropriate. "But surely she was nothing that Rome approves of? She had no humility, she was never obedient to anything but her own desires, and she was certainly very far from chaste!"

He was angry with her for not defending her mother. "She was more alive than anyone else I know."

"You sound like the eunuch physician Anastasius," she observed sourly. "He mourns her, which is stupid. She would have destroyed him without a thought, if it had been worth her trouble." There was contempt in her voice and a sharp edge that Palombara recognized with surprise as resentment.

"You are mistaken," he said icily. "Zoe admired Anastasius greatly. Quite apart from his medical skill, she liked his wit and his courage, his imagination, and the fact that he was not afraid of her, or of life."

Helena laughed. "How quaint you are, Your Grace. And how terribly innocent. You know nothing."

He forced himself to smile. "If you have your mother's papers, I daresay you are aware of a great deal that others are not. Some of it will be very dangerous. But you must already know that?"

"Oh yes, very dangerous indeed," she said in little more than a whisper. "But you are foolish to pretend that you know of what you speak, Your Grace." Her smile was bright and hard. "You don't."

What was it that obviously pleased her so much? She was looking at him and gloating. Why?

"It seems not," he agreed, lowering his eyes as if he were crestfallen.

Helena laughed, a shrill, cruel sound. "I see my mother did not share it with you," she observed. "But she discovered that your precious eunuch, whom you admire so much, is actually the most superb liar! His entire life and everything about him is a lie."

Palombara stiffened, anger swirling up inside him.

Helena looked at him with derision. "Or to be accurate, I should say 'her whole life.'" She went on, "Anna Zarides is as much a woman as I am. Or at least legally she is. There must be something repulsively wrong with her that she would masquerade as a man all these years, don't you think? Wouldn't you say it was a sin? What do you think I should do, Bishop Palombara? Should I assist in her deceit? Is that morally right?"

He was so stunned he could hardly find his voice. Yet as Helena said the words, he believed them. He looked at her face, shining with malice, and he hated her.

Then he smiled. Her envy was so highly visible. Zoe was gone, and now Helena could not taste her victory completely. Without Zoe to see, there was no flavor in it. But she could at least destroy Anastasius, the daughter Zoe had preferred.

Palombara met Helena's eyes and saw the fury in them. "My condolences," he repeated, then excused himself and walked away.

Outside in the street, the sense of triumph wore off within moments, replaced by fear. If Anastasius was actually a woman and Helena knew it, then she was in the most intense danger. If Helena chose to expose her, he did not know what punishment Anastasius would face, but it would be savage.

Zoe had known and had not betrayed Anastasius's secret. That too was a mystery. She must, in her own way, have had a great respect, even a kind of affection, for her.

He walked along the busy street with the crowd jostling around him. News of the fleet having left for Messina had reached Constantinople with the ship on which Palombara arrived. Fear spread like fire on the wind, sharp and dangerous, edged with panic, quick to violence as the threat became suddenly no longer a nightmare, but a reality.

He walked more rapidly, facing into the wind. The more he considered what Helena had said, the more it frightened him. Should he find Anna Zarides and warn her? But what use would that be? There was nothing she could do, except perhaps flee, like so many others. But would she do that? It led him to the question of why she had ever begun such a desperate course in the first place.

Dressed as a woman, she would be beautiful. Why did Anna Zarides not use that? What could have compelled her to such an act, and over the space of years? Who or what did she care about to this cost?

To find out, he began with a man he knew quite well who had been a patient of Anastasius's for some time. From him, Palombara learned of people she had treated without charge in her work with Bishop Constantine.

The picture emerged of a woman dedicated to medicine, absorbed in its practice but also fascinated by its details, its art, its curiosities, and the endless learning it inspired. Yet she was not without fault. She made errors of judgment, and she had a temper. Palombara became increasingly aware of a sense of guilt within her, although he had no idea what caused it. The more he learned, the more he was fascinated by her, the more intense became his need to protect her.

Over and over again, Anna Zarides appeared to have asked about the murder of Bessarion Comnenos.

Had she had some relationship with him? But she had not been to Constantinople before, and he had never left it since the return now nearly twenty years ago. It must be someone else. The obvious candidate was Justinian Lascaris, the man exiled for Bessarion's murder.

Justinian Lascaris was in exile near Jerusalem; this much he also learned. Her husband? Then she was a Lascaris as well, at least by marriage, a member of one of the imperial families with a passionate vengeance to wreak against the Palaeologi.

It was imperative Palombara see Anna Zarides where Vicenze would not know of it. His curiosity was cruel, endless, and still fueled by his need for revenge over the substitution of the nude painting for the icon of the Virgin.

So Palombara made his inquiries obliquely, as if they were of interest rather than importance, and it was three days before he finally presented himself at her house.

He noticed that she looked tired. There were fine lines around her eyes and a pallor to her skin. She had to be even more aware than he of the fear in the city and how short a time they had left before the end.

"How can I help you, Bishop Palombara?" she asked, looking at his eyes, his face, then at the way he stood. She could have seen no signs of illness in him, because there were none.

"I was grieved to hear of the death of Zoe Chrysaphes," he replied. He saw the answering emotion in her, a sharper sadness than he would have expected, and he liked her for it. "I went to convey my sympathies to Helena Comnena."

"That was gracious of you," she responded. "How does that reflect on your health?"

"It doesn't." He did not alter his steady gaze. "She told me that in her mother's papers she discovered something... startling. It is a piece of information which I fear Helena will use to her advantage, unless she can be prevented."

Anna clearly had no idea what he was referring to. He hated what he had to do, but her ignorance compelled him to act.

"Is Justinian Lascaris your husband or your brother?" he asked bluntly.

She stood completely motionless, the remnants of color draining from her skin. At first there was nothing in her eyes, as if she were too stunned to react at all; then the fear came, violent, all but consuming her. She breathed slowly, her chest heaving.

"My brother," she said at last. "My twin brother."

"I came to warn you, not to threaten you," he said gently. "You might prefer to leave the city."

The ghost of a smile crossed her face. "But there will certainly be work enough for a physician when the city falls." Her voice was thick with emotion, as if she found the words hard to say at all.

"Helena hates you," he said urgently. "She's changed since Zoe's death. It's almost as if it has freed her. I'm sure she's planning something. If she has access to Zoe's papers, then she may have taken up funding the rebellion against Charles in the West." Had he said too much?

Anna smiled. "I'm sure she has something planned," she agreed bitterly.

"Then go!" he argued. "While you can."

"I'm Byzantine, and I should run while you, a Roman priest, will stay?" she asked.

He did not answer. Perhaps in the end there was nothing else to say.