Emperor's Winding Sheet (8 page)

Now Vrethiki looked round him with different eyes. How many of the jewels were also glass? They looked suspiciously regular, the colors clear and harsh … on many of the golden dishes could he not now see a dark band on the rim, where the gold was wearing thin, showing the glass beneath? And there were carefully stitched and mended patches on the tablecloth … and cracks on the panels of the purple walls, filled in with plaster and care fully painted over, but not quite matching. And now he noticed a green patch on a corner of the ceiling, where the roof had let in rainwater, and green mold grew on the golden surface … Even on the Emperor's crown, couldn't he see faint lines and creases, as though it were made of leather, gilded leather, instead of solid gold?

“This is all false!” cried Vrethiki to himself. “This is all faked and painted, all for show, like what the mummers wear, or the maypole dancers! And the Emperor sits there, enthroned, dolled up in frippery frumpery like a player king! To think I was taken in by it!” Tears of rage and disappointment ran down his cheeks, and Stephanos, thinking to
comfort him, whispered that the cup he had broken was of no consequence, no value at all.

 

AND IF THE MAGNIFICENCE OF THE EMPEROR'S COURT HAD
faded all at once, like fairy gold, so too, Vrethiki found, had the glory of the City. Riding at first light through the streets, escorting the Emperor to pray in the Church of the Holy Apostles, through a City bereft of colored hangings and of surging crowds, how different it all seemed! Grass thrust up between the paving slabs of the streets; ruined houses lay in tumbledown heaps. The marble and the porphyry, the tall columns, the bronze statues, all were there, but the columns leaned a little, the houses were shabby, there was ruin everywhere, on every side. A boy was pasturing sheep on the grassy mantle worn by the bones of a fallen house; up every side street Vrethiki could see plowed fields, with the spring corn tenderly fingering through the fur rows, or orchards, just now with their swelling buds pale-tipped with the promise of blossom, and there were even little copses and straggling clumps of wild rosebush growing along the way. They passed a fallen cistern, some of its arches still standing at ground level, bare of vaulting; the great square, sunken deep, that had once held water was dry now, and the rich silt in the bottom of it was carefully hoed and planted with lettuces. They passed a princely house still lived in, but in a different manner from before. The great bronze gates to the courtyard of this house stood hanging askew on broken hinges, jammed open, dark with tarnish, and through them Vrethiki caught sight of a goat tethered to a marble angel standing in the basin of a cracked fountain, and hens pecking in the dust.

The City had shrunk to a number of little settlements, with almost empty countryside between them, except along
the main streets. As though conscious of their isolation, some districts even had walls and fences of their own around them. And yet, across a valley in the spine of the City, a vast ancient aqueduct went marching in gray grandeur, its huge two-storied arches still carrying water to still unbroken cisterns; from almost anywhere in the City the encircling sparkling blue water of the sea, to the south, or the Golden Horn, to the north, shone at the end of every prospect. The Church of the Holy Apostles when they reached it, though its windows were cracked, and though the roof let rainwater in, and though pigeons flew in the dome and fouled the floor with droppings, was yet the most splendid church Vrethiki had ever seen, adorned with pictures made all of fragments of gleaming glass, so that it shone with a dazzling golden light …

The boy's feelings were churned up intolerably by all this glory and dereliction. “Oh!” he cried inwardly, “what splendor there once was here! And yet there's nothing left—nearly nothing—it's all ruined and cracked. It could no more withstand attack than an empty husk can with stand a wind … the Turks will storm it … they will get in …” And fear choked off his thoughts, and left him sullen and afraid again. For surely, he knew, his own fate and the fate of this impossible City were now the same.

 

SEEING HIM DOWNHEARTED, HIS BLUE EYES STARING LISTLESSLY,
Stephanos, riding homeward beside him, began to talk to him.

“You see that column there? The one with its top knocked off? There's a story about that one. It was said to be the stoicheion of the Tsar Symeon, King of the Bulgars. Some people believe that everyone has a stoicheion—some material object
bound up with his destiny … there was an Emperor once who thought his stoicheion was a bronze lion that stood in the Hippodrome … he had it polished and burnished every day, and set a guard on it day and night, so that nobody could so much as scratch it … well, as I was saying, Tsar Symeon was a danger to the City in his time, and a wise old monk told the citizens that Symeon's stoicheion was that very column, within the City, so then the people broke the capital off the column, and the Tsar Symeon fell dead!”

But Vrethiki could scarcely raise a smile for this absurdity. He was thinking that the people they had seen in the streets that morning were in as wretched a condition as the fabric of the City: poorly clad, and plying humble trades. There were hawkers with jars of water or lettuces on handcarts, shouting their wares; there was a group of boys with baskets on their backs, standing idly on a street corner, waiting for employment as porters; there was a gypsy boy with a tambourine, and a young bear wearing ribbons led on a chain behind him, ready to dance for a coin. Among these poorer folk Vrethiki saw one or two with ears or noses cropped, or lacking a right hand. Only once had they seen a prosperous sight—a curtained litter, carried by well-dressed slaves, taking a princely lady to her morning prayers.

Then as they rode, suddenly a cracked voice from a window cried to them, “Woe to the City for Constantine!”

The Emperor reined in his horse below the window, and his party clattered to a halt behind him. “Come now, old mother,” said the Emperor, looking up at the latticed shutter. “You have said those words to me once already. Say what you will, and have done”

“I say you should have been Demetrios, you should have been Thomas!” came the screeching answer. “Was it not
prophesied, long ago, that the last Emperor would bear the same name as the first?”

The Emperor was silent a moment. Then, “God's will be done,” he said, and moved on.

When Stephanos translated this exchange to Vrethiki, it plunged him into yet deeper gloom. Not even a wet nurse would give credit to such a farrago of superstition, he thought. And Stephanos, glancing at the boy's face, turned aside for a moment as they passed a little street market. When he caught up with them again, he had brought a present for the boy—a little songbird in a wicker cage.

“Here, perhaps his songs will gladden you,” he said, giving the cage to Vrethiki, as they dismounted at the palace gate.

But Vrethiki's face grew darker still. “I'm not an Emperor,” he said, “I don't need creatures caged!” And opening the basketwork door, he shook the bird out into the open air. It fell to the ground, and fluttered in the dust. And then it flew, but not into the trees of the palace gardens—instead it flapped desperately round the cage in Vrethiki's hands, pressing against the wicker bars with beating wings, trying to get back in. Bewildered, Vrethiki covered the cage with his cloak, and then, lost, the bird flew upward, wheeling and circling overhead, till at last it winged away toward the green country outside the City.

Watching all this with a wry little smile, Stephanos said, “You see, it is not simple, my little Crusader. Nothing is simple.”

A
nd yet for many months there was a simple pattern to the days. At dawn Stephanos rose, and went to wake the Emperor, knocking three times on his door. The Emperor dressed, and came to the throne room, where he prayed before an icon of the Virgin, half covered with silver and studded with gems, that hung on the wall. Then he sat on the left of his wide throne, with the Gospel book beside him, and Stephanos and Manuel brought his breakfast to him, and stood by while he ate, and Vrethiki ran to fetch more bread, or more figs if they were needed. When the Emperor had eaten, the three of them bore away table and dishes, and moved the Gospels to a lectern standing near, and the Emperor moved to the right side of his throne, for in council he was to act as Christ on earth. Vrethiki shifted the footstool for him. Then Stephanos ushered in the notable men who wished to see the Emperor, and handed him a list of the day's affairs. While the morning's work began, the servants retired and hastily ate their own breakfast.

All morning the Emperor received his ministers, and his officials. They prostrated themselves before him, and then rose, and stood, and discussed affairs of state. Vrethiki opened and shut the chamber door as the great men came and went.
Watching their faces and gestures, and catching now and then a word or two in their latinate Greek, he tried hard to discern any business that had to do with the defense of the City; he could never forget that his life depended on such frail hope as these grave and somber men might be able to provide. Fear still haunted him. He did not remember what it was the Turkish sailors had done to him; still his mind refused to let him remember. But sometimes nightmarish fragments came back to him, and for a fleeting moment he recalled their hawkish noses, their dark brows, and full cruel crimson lips; or the marks on private parts of his body he had carried when he fled from them … he was more afraid of them than death. A thread of anxiety ran constantly through his bored and drifting mind as he listened to the great men talking.

When they had finished, the Emperor would sign the documents they laid before him, while Vrethiki held the tray of pens and ink. Then he would lay aside crown and stiff ceremonial robe, and the Patriarch, who often stayed when the other princes had left, did likewise, and the two men sat down together for lunch. The Emperor embraced the Patriarch like an equal when he left. But Vrethiki didn't like him. He had shifty eyes. He seldom looked the Emperor straight in the face. Then at three o'clock the palace gates were shut, and the Emperor went to visit his mother's bedside, for she had fallen sick, and so Vrethiki was free till the evening. That rule about being at the Emperor's side seemed to be only for public Occasions; within the palace he was free.

Sometimes Stephanos would tell him what had happened in the morning's discussions … that the wiry gray-headed newcomer, for instance, whom the Emperor had been so glad to see, was Phrantzes, his dear friend and Chief Secretary, who had been away in Trebizond, trying for a Comnene
princess for his master to marry. He had come straight home as fast as he could when the news reached Trebizond that the Sultan was dead. “He says,” Stephanos related, “that the Emperor of Trebizond was fool enough to rejoice that his old enemy was dead.”

“Isn't it good news then?” the boy asked.

“Hardly. The old Sultan was a wise man, and weary of fighting. His untried son is a different kettle of fish.”

Or, the boy would learn, the Emperor was at his wits' end about the man called Scholarios. The citizens all hated the Union of their Church with Rome, and Scholarios preached against it every Sunday, whipping the people's feelings to a frenzy. The Emperor kept asking the Patriarch to deal with him, but nothing had been done.

“It's my belief,” said Manuel darkly, “that the Patriarch is afraid to face him.” So the Emperor had appealed to Rome, both for help against the Turks, and for learned clerics who could preach and explain the Union of the Churches, and make it acceptable to his people. “We don't have a homegrown Holiness capable of dealing with Scholarios,” added Manuel. “He would make circles round the Archangel Michael in debate.”

“Yet he signed for union in Florence,” said Stephanos.

But though Stephanos was willing enough to translate, Vrethiki learned still more from another source—from the Englishmen in the Varangian guard. He found his way to their courtyard, below his window, the very first chance he had, looking for the English voice he had heard in the throne room. There was John Inglis, the captain, and four others, among a band of Danes and Russians, and Bulgars, and Serbs and Swedes and Germans, and even one Icelander, and four Spaniards, and a Turk. The Englishmen didn't mind Vrethiki
sitting talking to them, especially if he was helping to clean harness and polish weapons, or mixing bran for the horses at the same time. And their talk was not all solemnized by being in Latin, as Stephanos' was. Besides, since those last days in Mistra, he had not been quite at ease with Stephanos.

It was from John Inglis that Vrethiki learned that the shifty-eyed Patriarch had fled to Rome, and was there complaining bitterly to the Pope that the Emperor would do nothing to enforce the Union of the Churches … that the whole City thought the Emperor would do nothing while his mother was alive, because she opposed it and Scholarios was her dear friend, but luckily she was dying fast … that the soldiers all took it for granted that the City was sunk without Western aid, and the West would help only if the City accepted the Union of the Churches … nothing to cheer him in any of it.

But, he thought, lying in bed at night, such fine bold men as his new friends were would surely not be “resigning themselves” like Stephanos. He nursed a wild hope, thinking about them.

It came crashing the moment he ment ioned it. “John,” he said, in a low voice, urgently. “When you escape from here …”

“Escape?” said John. “What from? We are not prisoners here. We could go whenever we wished.”

“Oh,” said the boy, astonished. “I thought you must be prisoners.”

“No, lad,” said John. “We came here freely, and could just as freely go.”

“When you go, then—oh, please take me!”

“We won't be going; not for a long while yet.”