Raptor (72 page)

Although it was Constantine who decreed that Christianity would be the Roman Empire’s state religion, his own capital and namesake city does not acknowledge a patron saint, but a tutelary deity, and that one the pagan goddess Tykhe, as Fortune is called in Greek. So there are statues of her all about the city, and there were several in our xenodokheíon. They were “Christianized” to the extent of each Fortune’s having a cross affixed to her forehead, but there was something else about the statues that pleased me more. The Greeks had formerly represented Tykhe as an ugly, fat and raddled old woman. But, by Constantine’s order, ever since his time she has been personified as a beauteous and blooming young maid.

I was looking over the gifts Zeno had sent for Theodoric—mostly gems, bolts of fine silk and other easily portable goods—when I was joined by Amalamena, her face flushed with an unaccustomed pink. She was a trifle angry, and she let me know it.

“Why did you presume to send a lekeis to me?” she demanded. “I asked for no such attention.”

“I hold myself responsible for your safety, Princess, and that includes your good health.” I added, “I am happy that the attention would seem to have been unnecessary. The iatrós just now departed, and without a word to me.” I was able to say that truthfully, because I had instructed him to do just that.

“I could have told you myself that I feel well.” She looked relieved, and I was sure that she, too, had commanded the iatrós to say nothing. She went on lightly, “Right now, I feel healthily hungry.”

“Good. You will be well fed,” I said, just as lightly. “I went to tell the cooks to be sure to feed also our men in the courtyard. And I am pleased to report that every cook in the kitchen is exceedingly obese. That is always an augury of tasty and ample victuals. The dining chamber is yonder, Princess. Let me go and see that our men are encamped, and I shall join you there for nahtamats.”

The iatrós was, as instructed, waiting for me in concealment in the courtyard, and he said immediately—but not happily:

“If the princess desires to die at home, wherever her home is, you had best waste no time in taking her there.”

I winced. “She will perish so soon?”

“The scirrhus has eaten outward from the mesenteries, through the flesh and the skin. It is now an open, ugly aposteme, and there is no longer any doubt of its being a killing karkínos.”

“Is she in pain, then?”

“She says no. She is lying. If it is not already excruciating, it very soon will be. You said you brought mandragoras. If you like, I can tell the cooks here how to serve it in her food without her knowledge.”

I nodded bleakly, and commanded a nearby soldier to go and fetch my packet of the drug. “Is there nothing else that can be done?”

Old Alektor looked off into the distance and scratched in his beard for a while before replying, and then he did not reply directly.

“There was a time,” he mused, “when we recognized the existence of goddesses, the equal of any gods. And in those days even mortal women were accounted equal to mortal males. Then along came Christianity, preaching that women are inferior to men, commanding women to be subservient to men, making of women mere cattle, as lowly as slave-owned slaves.”

“True enough,” I said, puzzled by this turn of the conversation. “But what of it?”

“Even a beautiful and intelligent princess is nowadays only an adornment, a bauble, at best fated to be the meek and self-effacing wife of some prince. She never
does
anything. Your Princess Amalamena, now—if she had a long life to live, what would she do with it?”

I still did not know why we were discussing abstractions, but I decided I could philosophize as well as he.

“A
flame
does nothing whatever,” I said, “except burn itself to extinction, perhaps all the time in agonizing pain. Yet, in the process, it gives a blessed light and warmth.”

He grunted sourly. “Not much for that flame to remember, when it is snuffed out.”

“Excuse me, venerable Alektor,” I said at last. “Why are we talking in enigmas?”

“I do not know what mission brings you here, young Akantha, but the princess seems most eager to have you succeed in it. I suggest—it is the only prescription I
can
suggest—that you invite her to
help
you achieve your mission. Unlike most women, she will have done one thing in this world—one thing in her very brief life—to remember and cherish during all her eternal afterlife. I have no more to say. I shall take this mandragoras to the kitchen and give instructions there. May Tykhe smile on you and your princess.”

I fixed on my face what I hoped was a cheerful expression, and went to join Amalamena in the triclinium. She was already gracefully stretched out on a couch and eating heartily—whether or not that was mere pretense for my benefit—and a well-dressed young male servant stood behind her, evidently identifying for her the various unfamiliar dishes on the table. When I reclined on the couch at right angles to hers, Amalamena said, as gleefully as a girl-child dining away from home for the first time:

“Here, Thorn. Do try this. It is called marsh mutton—the meat of a sheep that has grazed all its life on sea grass. Uniquely delicious. And the sauce on it is of boiled laver fronds. Akh, and look here. Every single manchet of bread bears the embossed zeta initial of Zeno.”

“So that we do not forget whom to thank for the meal?”

“Considering that bread is usually the plainest food on a table, I thought it a most elegant embellishment. I asked Seuthes how it is done.” She indicated the young man standing behind her couch. “He says the kitchen’s baker simply stamps the bread dough with an engraved wooden block before it goes into the oven. Akh, and did you notice the wondrous pictures on the draperies all through this house? Seuthes says those are done the same way—stamped with wooden blocks that are ever so intricately incised, dipped in different-colored dyes and ever so carefully pressed onto the cloth, one after another…”

I smiled tolerantly as she went on effervescing, and, when she finally ran out of praise for the meal and the house, I said idly to Seuthes:

“Are you slave or servant? Has your office a title?”

“I am neither, Presbeutés,” he said, a little stiffly. “But I do have a title. I am the diermeneutés, the palace interpreter. I speak all the languages of Europe, and several of Asia. I shall interpret for you, Presbeutés, when you have your audience with the Basileús Zeno.”

I thanked him. “Eúkharistô, Seuthes, but that will not be necessary. I excuse you from the duty.”

He looked shocked and affronted. “But you must have me present. You are a bárbaros.”

“I am aware of that. But why would your attendance make my being so any less barbaric?”

“Why… why… a bárbaros, by definition, is one who does not speak Greek.”

“I am aware of that as well. But tell me, interpreter, in what language are you and I conversing at this moment?”

He did not answer that, but said stubbornly, “It is a known fact. No bárbaros can speak Greek.”

“All received wisdom is not necessarily wise, or even true. Facts to the contrary, you are somehow understanding my speech, and I yours. Do you expect that Zeno and I will not?”

Still stiffly, he said, “I have always been needed—and present—whenever the basileús has granted audience to a bárbaros.”

I assured him, “Naí, you will be present. Because the princess will also be there, and she is of course a barbará. She will be pleased to have you translate the words she speaks to Zeno, and he to her.”

Now the man literally staggered where he stood. “The words
she
speaks?!”

Amalamena was looking more and more interested as this exchange got louder and louder, so I said, “Interpreter, you can commence by translating for her what you and I have just been saying.”

He did so, speaking the Old Language quite well. And Amalamena, when she heard what I had proposed, looked almost as dazed as he. However, Seuthes had repeated all of that to her very hurriedly, because he was in such haste to turn to me again and tell me in Greek:

“She cannot be present! In all its history, the Eastern Empire has never been visited by a presbeutés of other than the male sex! The basileús would be insulted, outraged,
furious
if a woman pretended to be such a thing, and presented herself before him in that guise. It is unheard of!”

“You are now hearing of it.” In Gothic, I added, “And you are now excused, until we convene in Zeno’s purple presence-chamber. Go away and smooth your ruffled sensibilities.”

As he departed, shaking his head, Amalamena looked at me with a mixture of amusement and gratitude. Her eyes of late had been clouded, but now they shone again like the Gemini fires.

“I thank you,” she said, “for the delightful surprise gift—including me in your ambassadorial retinue. And I shall be overjoyed to go with you to the Purple Palace. But why did you decide on that? And insist on it?”

In reply, I told her not the whole truth, but a truth:

“You suggested it yourself, Princess, when you quoted Aristotle. Your beauty ought to help us accomplish great things together.”

It happened as I had demanded: the eunuch chamberlain came to the house early the next day to inform me that the Basileús Zeno would see me that very morning. Clearly, the oikonómos would have liked to see me express gratified pleasure at that announcement. However, he found me waiting for him already dressed in my finest—newly polished corselet, my green-embroidered chlamys and my bearskin cloak, with my freshly burnished helmet under my arm—and his face rather fell. Pretending that my patience had been about to wear thin, I said tartly:

“Very well, Myros. We are ready. Are there any formalities we ought to be observing on the way to the palace?”

“We? Who are
we?”

“Myself and the princess Amalamena, of course.”

He cried, “Ouá, papaí!” and began to fizz and sputter and reel about, much as the interpreter had done the night before. I put a quick stop to that, declaring firmly that Amalamena
would
be accompanying me. He waved his arms and wailed, “But I brought mounts only for you and me!”

I looked out into the courtyard. There was a considerable body of men waiting to escort us—splendidly robed attendants, armed and armored guardsmen, even a band of musicians. One of the men was holding the reins of two horses, and the saddles of them were so ornate, high-backed and canopied that they looked like thrones.

“Khristós,” I growled. “The palace gates are not three hundred paces from here. The notion of parading thither is ridiculous. But if we must, we must. The princess and I will ride. You can walk, Oikonómos, with the other escorts.”

He gasped in horror, but that is how we went—Amalamena and I astride and aloft, Myros in his heavy long robes waddling and stumbling along behind us, and nearly getting overtrodden by the guardsmen stamping vigorously to the band’s brisk Lydian marching music.

The Great Palace of Constantinople is not a single edifice; it is a city within the city. Inside the impressive bronze gates and the walls of Prokonéssos marble are fully
five
different palaces, big and small, but none really small; and two entire, separate living residences, the Oktágonos for the emperor and the Pantheon for the empress; and numerous churches and chapels, besides the massive Hagía Sophía just outside the walls; and quarters for the palace guardsmen, a building much too grand to be called a barrack; and one building used for nothing but a banquet hall; and numerous other edifices for the meetings of this and that council or tribunal; and an armory, and a depository for the imperial archives; and servants’ quarters, slaves’ quarters, stables, kennels, massed aviary cages…

The immaculately gardened grounds sweep all the way down to the city’s seawall at the edge of the Propontís, and anywhere on the grounds one is standing in Europe but can gaze northeastward across the Bósporos strait and see the continent of Asia on the farther side. Down at the water’s edge—although Constantinople has seven other artificial harbors, the finest in the world—there is a private harbor, the Boukóleon, for the use of ships and boats belonging to the palace or coming to it. And alongside the Boukóleon looms the cross-beamed, laddered tower that holds high the immense metal bowl of the pháros fire.

Most of the palace’s building exteriors are faced with the black-streaked white marble from the little island of Prokonéssos. But the interior walls and columns and braziers and even sarkophágoi are mostly of Egyptian porphyry—and the draperies and hangings and upholsteries are colored to match that stone. That is why the entire site is popularly referred to as the Purple Palace. And, because the children born to the imperial and noble families residing there are known as “porphúro-genetós,” many other languages have adopted a translation of that term to describe persons of high pedigree: “born to the purple.”

Considering all the splendor that surrounded us there, it may seem odd that I was so taken with one rather trifling detail of the decorations. But it was this. The emperor’s throne room, closed against the day by heavy purple silk hangings, was lighted only by a scattering of lamps and small braziers, so the very high ceiling of it was invisible in darkness—or almost invisible. When I looked upward, I realized why the big room was kept dim. It was to make shine—up there, where a dome or roof or rafters should have been—what looked to be the night sky spangled with multitudes of twinkling stars.

All the constellations were in the exact places they would occupy in the real sky on a clear summer midnight, and every star was of just the proper color and degree of brilliancy. What was most marvelous was the ingenious simplicity with which this had been done. As I later found out by inquiry, all the countless stars up there on the black-painted dome were nothing but humble, commonplace fish scales of varying tints and sizes, precisely glued in place to reflect the flickering light of the lamps below.

I had earlier seen Amalamena’s face tighten with pain when one of our attendants had helped her onto her horse’s elaborate saddle, and she had grimaced again when she was helped to dismount. But she walked proudly and serenely as we entered the one of the palaces to which our escorts had led us, and as we and Myros paced through the many halls and corridors. In one of those, the gifts we had brought to Zeno were displayed on purple-covered tables—or most of our gifts; one of them I had not handed over to the chamberlain and was now carrying myself, in a fancily carved ebony box. Because that was bulky and heavy, Amalamena was carrying Theodoric’s folded, wax-sealed vellum.