Raptor (70 page)

I also, in the brief time we were there, got my first taste of many of the superb foods of the sea: locustae, oysters, crayfish, scallops, cuttlefish cooked in their own sepia. I did my omnivorous eating at Amalamena’s pandokheíon, because it had a terrace overlooking the harbor. While I ate, I could watch the slow but graceful movements of the war galleys called Liburnians, with their two or three banks of oars, some of them with high castles fore and aft—and watch the low, slim, speedy “raven” and “dolphin” patrol boats gliding about.

I saw also merchant craft more immense than I had ever seen on a river: two-masted and square-sailed ships, called “apple-bowed” because of their blunt prows; and the smaller, faster coastal traders, propelled by oars only. There was a constant coming and going of those merchant vessels, because their masters were eager to complete all their year’s voyages before the coming of winter, when all but the coast-hugging cruising has to cease.

I so enjoyed our short stay in Perinthus that I might have been reluctant to leave there, except that we were only three or four days’ travel from what I knew to be a considerably richer and livelier seaport, and what I had been told was the most magnificent city in the entire Roman Empire: the one that had for long been named Byzantium, then for a time Augusta Antonina, but was now and forevermore the Great City of Great Constantine.

In a manner of speaking, we saw Constantinople long before we could see it. Our column was still some two days distant from the city, and we were making camp for the night in a goat pasture beside the road, when several of our company exclaimed aloud on espying a yellow light in the night sky to the east.

I said, “The vast herds of goats on these shores have not left enough trees or shrubbery to feed a forest fire. What can be making that light? The Gemini fires of a storm? The draco volans of a swamp?”

“Ne, Saio Thorn,” said one of our soldiers. “It is the pháros of Constantinople. I have been here before, and seen it. The pháros is a wood fire atop a very high tower, mainly intended to guide ships to safe harbor there. A light by night and a smoke by day, as you will see tomorrow.”

Amalamena said, “We must be still at least thirty Roman miles from that city. A column of smoke, ja, we could see. But how can a mere wood fire’s light be visible at such a distance?”

“It is magnified, Princess,” the soldier explained, “by an ingenious contrivance, rather like a curved speculum. The fire is laid in an immense metal bowl that is lined with plaster. And in that concavity of plaster are embedded innumerable shards of glass, each backed with a silver foil, as gems are set in jewelry to make them glow the brighter. So glows the pháros fire.”

“Ingenious, indeed,” Amalamena murmured.

The soldier went on, “In time of war or other emergency, the fire-tenders can flicker that light by covering and uncovering the reflective bowl with a leather blanket, and thereby spell out a message. It can be read by sentries on distant hills. They in turn light beacons and likewise flicker them, to repeat that message over and over, and farther and farther, thereby to summon an army or divert it or whatever is required. Similarly, the sentries can relay to the city a warning of an approaching enemy, or any other urgent news from abroad.”

The next novelty we encountered was not visible at all, because it was a smell—but such an
awful,
almost smiting smell that it fairly made me reel in my saddle. I coughed and retched, and my eyes watered, but through my tears I could see that the other wayfarers on the road seemed to consider it no very terrible occurrence. Everybody whose two hands were not totally occupied or burdened was either simultaneously or alternately pinching his nose and sketching the sign of the cross on his forehead.

“Gudisks Himins,” I gasped to Daila. “This miasma would make even a normal man as gloomy-natured as a Slovene. Summon that soldier who has been here before. Let us ask him if Constantinople always stinks so putridly.”

“Ja, Saio Thorn,” said the soldier, cheerfully enough, though he too was holding his nose. “What you smell is the odor of sanctity, and Constantinople is quite proud to have it greet all comers. Indeed, the aroma actually attracts many pilgrims hither.”

“In the name of whatever god they worship,
why?”

“They come here to adore Daniel the Stylite. Look yonder.”

He pointed across the fields on the left of the road. In the distance, I could descry what looked like a tall pole with an extremely untidy stork’s nest built on top. It was surrounded by a number of people on the ground at its base, some of them moving about, but most of them kneeling.

The soldier said, “This man Daniel does it in emulation of the famous Simeon of Syria, who became St. Simeon by living atop a lofty column for thirty years. Daniel has been a pillar-hermit now for only some fifteen years, but I am told that his example of self-inflicted misery has converted many pagans.”

“Converted them to what?” growled Daila. “Not even Circe’s men-turned-swine would loiter in such nauseous surroundings.”

“Devout Christians,” said the soldier with a shrug. “Those who find pleasure in abasement and mortification, I suppose. They seem to find bliss in the smell of fifteen years’ accumulation of Daniel’s droppings.”

“Then we shall leave him to them,” I said. “And them to him. They appear to deserve each other.”

We did eventually leave the stench behind us, and in just a few hours more we saw the walls of Constantinople begin to loom above the horizon ahead. I turned and told one of my bowmen:

“The princess was most eager for her first look at the city. Ride back to her carruca and advise her that it is imminent. Ask if she would like her mule saddled and readied for her to mount.”

He came back, smiling a little, to report, “The princess thanks the marshal for his thoughtfulness, but she has decided to admire the city from her carruca, of which she has opened the curtains. She believes it would be unseemly for the sister and daughter of a king to enter Constantinople riding astride, like a barbarian woman.”

That sounded unlike the free-spirited Amalamena who had heretofore laughingly dismissed “womanly” inhibitions and “seemly” behavior. Clearly she was inventing that excuse, so as not to have to admit that she did not feel well enough to sit a saddle. I reminded myself to seek out a physician for her at the first opportunity.

The walls that we were nearing were, of course, the walls built by the Emperor Theodosius II. The earlier wall, laid out by the city’s founder, encompassed only five hills of the Byzantium promontory. Even at that, Constantine was thought overweening for having far exceeded the measure of the most spacious city. But he was proved right, because in his own lifetime the New Rome had grown beyond the wall, and now, like the Old Rome, it occupied fully seven hills.

Theodosius’s later wall, fencing Constantinople off from all the rest of the continent of Europe, must be the most formidable protection ever built for any city. Stretching nearly three Roman miles between the waters on either side of the promontory, it is actually two walls, twenty paces apart, with a broad moat before them, and that moat is fronted with masonry breastworks. The dual walls are five times as high as a man, and are studded with ninety-six towers, higher yet. Those towers are alternately round and square, and the walls between them are zigged and zagged to permit concerted action by the warriors manning the fortifications.

Now I saw all the other travelers ahead of us on the Via Egnatia—the pedestrians, riders, teamsters, carters, drovers with their flocks, even the chairs and carriages of apparently important persons—moving to one or the other side of the road to make way for some procession coming from the city. Daila looked to me inquiringly, and I shook my head.

“Ne, Optio. We are Ostrogoths and royal deputies, not the local Greeks and mongrels. We march as we are, at least until we see what approaches.”

I was right to hold our ground, but there was no danger threatening, because it turned out that what approached was an imperial delegation coming to greet us. They were a splendidly mounted and caparisoned body of men. The elderly leader of them, the best dressed of all, raised his hand in salute—and his first words, though cordial, were an astonishment to me.

“Khaîre, Presbeutés Akantha!” That meant only “Hail, Ambassador Thorn!” in Greek, and it was puzzling enough that he should have known my name. But then he said, “Basileús Zeno éthe par ámmi philéseai!” and that meant “The Emperor Zeno bids you welcome!”

Once again in my life I had sense enough not to exclaim something witless like “Who is
Zeno?
I came here to meet the Emperor Leo,” but my face must have gone blank, nevertheless. While I sat speechless, the elderly man went on, “The Emperor Zeno sends these gifts in the name of friendship,” and he waved forward two heavily laden servants who rode behind him. I motioned for my two bowmen to receive the things, and composed myself enough to say, “Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, salutes his cousin Zeno, and we also bring gifts of friendship.”

“You bring the king’s royal sister, too, I believe,” the man said, nodding down the column toward the carruca. “I am Myros, the emperor’s oikonómos, his palace chamberlain. If I may escort you, then? There is a house prepared for you and the princess Amalamena and your attendants, and adequate quarters for your warriors.” I gestured for the chamberlain to ride beside me, and the rest of the delegation fell in among my men, and thus we proceeded toward the city.

As we rode, I remarked to my new companion—pretending to make idle conversation, but really probing for information—“I have not yet lived a very long life, Oikonómos Myros, but, if I wished to enumerate all the emperors of east and west that have come and gone in my time, I should have to count on my fingers.”

“Naí,” he agreed, then astonished me again. “And now two of them displaced in the span of mere months.”

“Two of them?” I blurted involuntarily.

“Naí. The younger Leo dead here, Julius Nepos deposed at Rome. Had you not heard?”

I was thinking: not only was I not going to meet the emperor I had been sent to see; neither was the Saio Soas. I mumbled, “I have been away. At war. Out of communication with current events.”

Myros gave me the look that I suppose Romanized Greeks frequently bestow on barbarians. “And on your way hither, Marshal, you could not read the pháros fires and smokes? They have told of little else these past months. Except, of course, to advise us of your imminent arrival.”

With some vexation, I admitted that I was illiterate in skywriting, and added, “I should have hoped that I would at the very least recognize my own name written in the heavens. How were you apprised of that?”

He smiled slyly, as if to imply that “we Greeks are omniscient,” but then told me frankly, “Our katáskopoi are everywhere. Soldiers who wear no uniform while they do their patrolling and scouting Doubtless one of them heard you identified as the Saio Thorn when you and the princess stopped at Beroea or some other place.”

“Indeed,” I said coldly, not at all pleased that my company had been spied upon without my having realized it.

The oikonómos and I were now leading the column through the grandest of Constantinople’s ten gates, the triple-arched Golden Gate. Set in handsomely black-streaked white marble, the massive bronze doors were hospitably wide open and polished so that they really looked like gold. Two of the sequential arches that compose the gate are, of course, passages through the two thick walls of the city. The third and innermost arch is different; it actually takes the arriving wayfarer through the foundations of the Church of St. Diomed. That church is built just within the walls, above and astride the road. The Via Egnatia ends there under the church—or simply changes its name—and becomes the Mése, the equally broad and well-paved central avenue of Constantinople.

I deliberately did not turn in my saddle to admire the high-built Church of St. Diomed when we emerged from under it. Instead, to indicate to the oikonómos Myros that I was not the least bit awed by the grandeur of the imperial city, I conversationally went on:

“Well, chamberlain, tell me of all these shifting and varying emperors of whom you spoke. I swear, I have seen children playing the game of all-fall-down, and do it without prostrating so many players as the empire has lately been doing.”

“Dépou, dépou, papaí,” Myros dolefully agreed. “True, true, alas. Now, what to say of the late Leo? During all his six years, Leo was ever a sickly boy. His namesake grandfather should not have appointed the lad to succeed him. Poor little Leo, even with the aid of his own father as his regent, had scarce the strength or heart or will for such responsibility. Anyway, both of the Leos being now dead, the regent-father has himself assumed the purple.”

“That regent and father being Zeno?”

“Of course. Did you not know that he was affinal son of the first Leo? He is wedded to that emperor’s daughter, Ariadne. The late Leo the Second was the son of Ariadne and her husband, now called Zeno.”