“I am expected in His Majesty’s chamber this evening,” said Basina.
Chira knew from DORC-prep that the Emperor—Alexios III Angelos—was married to Euphrosyne Doukaina Kamatera, a first-class Alpha Bitch who, despite being famously adulterous herself, would eviscerate anyone found fiddling with her wussy husband’s tackle-box, especially since she’d only given him daughters. That is not what surprised Chira about the news of this dalliance. Rather it was this: “Aren’t you . . . a kinswoman . . . of his?”
“Honey-bee,” said Basina, “it’s the imperial court, we’re all each other’s blood-cousins. Why do you think everyone fights so dirty? I would prefer to be in someone else’s bed tonight, that’s all, so I need somebody to distract His Majesty, and I need it to be a stranger so she can vanish before Euphrosyne hunts her down and gouges her eyes out.”
“Is the Emperor expecting you?”
“I was summoned by his cupbearer, so somebody is expecting me,” she said. “But it might be his wife trying to entrap me.”
“Ah,” said Chira.
“Yes,” said Basina. “If you open that wooden cabinet over there, you’ll find my summer gowns. Help yourself to any but the purple one. I’ll have the maids oil and dress your hair to resemble mine, but I will not trust you with my jewelry.”
“Very well,” said Chira, wishing DORC’s curriculum included a mandatory anti-assassin workshop.
“Spend the day in here. You’d be underfoot anywhere else.”
Chira dressed herself in the most modest of the several gowns—all garish by modern standards, with tremendous amounts of small garnets and turquoise sewn onto the fronts, as well as decorative stitching in silver and gold thread. She then received (grudging and ungentle) ministrations from Basina’s attendants, who attempted to goad her into revealing her identity until Basina told them to shut it. Chira was left alone in the chamber for approximately five hours, until Basina and her entourage returned, the entourage tittering, Basina looking pleased with herself. In her hand Basina held a black silk drawstring bag, half the size of a human fist.
“That was painless. Here are your kalonji seeds,” she said, and tossed them onto Chira’s lap. “Keep them tied to your belt, or better yet, your wrist.”
“When am I to go to the Emperor’s chambers?” Chira asked.
“After nightfall,” said Basina. “One of his eunuchs will come with a summons. Have you eaten today?”
When Chira said that she had not, Basina sent two of her retinue down to the kitchens to bring up fruit and nuts and cheese, further cementing the attendants’ resentment. A mediocre lute-playing eunuch came in to entertain them, until Basina got tired of him and sent him away, and finally after the sun had set, Basina excused herself to go to her other lover’s bed.
“Do not abuse her,” she ordered her sulking retinue. “If I hear of any bad behavior on your part, I’ll have you flayed by that Genoan His Majesty keeps in the cellars.”
She departed, leaving Chira alone with the seething attendants. All efforts on her part to gather intelligence from them met with complete failure as they were barely able to contain themselves from tearing her garments off her à la Cinderella’s stepsisters.
Finally the Emperor’s eunuch came in search of Basina. When the attendants presented Chira in her stead, he blinked a moment, then sighed, then rolled his eyes, shook his head, and lugubriously gestured her to follow him. The attendants were pleased by this response, and one of them whispered, “Surely he is leading you straight to what should have been Basina’s death. Ha!” Followed by a Greek term with no perfect translation but meant in essence, “Sucker!”
The eunuch led her through such a maze of torch-and-lamp-lit stairwells, corridors, halls, and yards that she became disoriented and is not able to reconstruct the route for us (shown as, literally, a gray area on the DORCCAD rendering). But eventually, she was brought to a grand set of copper-faced double doors with intricate gold chase-work as decoration. The eunuch rapped on one of these with a particular staccato rhythm, and in response the doors swung outward toward them. Ahead of them was a very small vestibule, candlelit, with one door to the right and one to the left. (We know from old maps—digitized and cleaned up in DORCCAD—that these led to the Emperor’s and Empress’s respective bedchambers.) The eunuch, giving her a mournful look, literally shoved her into the vestibule and turned his back. As the door began to swing shut, a smooth, strong hand grabbed Chira’s arm and she felt a slender blade press against her carotid artery. As her self-defense skill set is of the flight-not-fight variety, she froze.
“Finally, Basina,” said a woman’s voice, harshly happy. “Finally I have caught you in the act.”
“I am not Basina, Your Majesty,” said Chira. “I am simply an entertainer obeying a command from my Emperor.”
There was some cursing, the knife blade was removed, the hand loosened its grip, and she turned so that her back was to the wall and she could face her assailant in the candlelight. The Empress Euphrosyne was considerably older than her but still, in a ravaged, cougar-esque sort of way, definitely pretty hot.
“Who are you? You can’t go in there,” said Euphrosyne. “I know what happens when a whore gives an emperor a son. If he doesn’t get one from me, he doesn’t get one from anyone. Nobody is going to rob my daughters of the throne.”
“I’m Jewish,” Chira said. “No son of mine would ever be allowed on the throne, no matter who his father is.”
Euphrosyne looked surprised. “He would never bed a Jewess,” she said.
“He saw me dance at a feast a fortnight back and made inquiries. We’ve never spoken in person, but he has already paid a great deal and I am tardy. Given I am no threat to Your Majesty, may I attend to my Emperor’s wishes?”
Everything about Euphrosyne’s demeanor changed as this sank in. She gestured to the door that led to the imperial bedchamber. “Go on, then,” she said. “I don’t care if you fuck him. In fact, fuck him thoroughly so I don’t have to worry about his fucking anyone else tonight.”
With these words of encouragement she opened the door herself. It was a very large room, marble floors, and panels of marble for walls, ceiling of glassed gold-leaf tile looking burnished in the flickering light from a dozen beeswax candles. One entire wall opened on to a balcony that overlooked a garden.
In the middle of the room was the single piece of furniture: a large bed that appeared to be carved out of solid turquoise, and on this sat a sickly pale, dark-haired man who did not look at all what Chira expected of an emperor. He was wearing a nightshirt, which was thick white silk with gold thread sewn into the collar, cuffs, and hems. He looked up expectantly when he saw her, and then pulled his head back like a surprised turtle.
“Where’s Basina?” he demanded, standing nervously.