Four for a Boy

Chapter Three

“Careful where you’re treading with those filthy boots!”

John glanced down at the puddle of icy water forming on the kitchen floor. When he looked up, the servant who’d scolded him gaped in alarm and hurried off.

The cold blast of air that had swirled in through the servants’ entrance of Senator Opimius’ house clung to the folds of John’s cloak. A pair of cook’s assistants, laboring over a long table standing under the kitchen’s steam-fogged window, peeked around at him, exchanged excited whispers, and then went back to expertly jointing a pile of freshly plucked chicken carcasses.

John noticed their surreptitious stares as he made his way to the kitchen brazier. No one offered a greeting. He found himself shivering. The heat rising from the glowing charcoal seemed to hold no warmth.

A pair of girls strolled into the room, carrying baskets filled with olives and cheese. They giggled as they chatted.

“So I went and got myself a love charm. Cost me a lot, too. But has it worked? Ha!” one complained.

“I keep telling you it’s all nonsense!” her companion replied. “The only people who get any satisfaction out of them are the ones making a fortune selling the wretched things!”

“I have an idea,” offered the other, evidently inspired by the activity going on at the table. “We could sell some of the master’s spare chickens to folk needing them for magick rites and make our own fortunes!”

Then they belatedly spotted John, set their baskets down quickly and fled.

John frowned.

“Why do you look so puzzled? Wouldn’t you be frightened if a shade suddenly appeared in your kitchen?”

Opimius’ ancient house steward, who had been looking over a pile of vegetables spread out on the other end of the table, came up to John and patted his shoulder. It was a gesture John disliked intensely.

“You feel solid enough,” Dorotheus continued with a wide smile. “Nonetheless, everyone in the household heard you’d been dragged off to the imperial cells. Usually that means you’re as good as dead.”

John nodded. He should have realized how startling his reappearance must be. His death had seemed a foregone conclusion to them, just as it had to him. He did not offer Dorotheus an explanation for his salvation and the old man did not ask.

John moved his hands closer to the fire. They were almost colorless and numb with cold. The hands of a shade. “I was instructed to resume my duties here, Dorotheus, although occasionally I shall be required elsewhere. I thought I’d warm up a little before seeking Lady Anna.”

“You won’t find her at home, John. She and the master are both out.” The steward’s face was the same brown as the leaves that clung to trees all winter in the northern climes where John had fought long ago. “You look barely alive. What did they do to you?”

John said he had not been mistreated. Dorotheus looked unconvinced. He puffed his cheeks out in a manner that, coupled with his brown face and small beak of a nose, gave him a distinct resemblance to a plump pheasant.

“You were extremely fortunate. The trouble with you is you don’t know when you’re well off. Just back from the dead, and there you stand, looking as sour as spoiled milk.”

“Alive or dead, my fate has nothing to do with my own efforts. It was Fortuna spared me and nothing more than that.”

“I should say it was the Lord that spared you,” Dorotheus replied with a quick scowl. “If you want to call Him Fortuna, I doubt He cares. But having Him on your side is better than having all the emperor’s armies at your back.”

John said nothing and gloomily continued to warm his hands.

Dorotheus sighed. Cheerful by nature, he was a man who could have consulted the oracle of Trophonius and still emerged with a smile on his face, but John’s mood was almost bleak enough to chill even his perpetually sunny demeanor.

He requested John to step out of the kitchen so that they could have a few private words.

There was a sudden exclamation as one of the kitchen workers sliced into her thumb. Perhaps she had been more intent on her eavesdropping than her work.

John murmured agreement. Could he properly refuse a request from Dorotheus, who was a slave like himself, but as steward ruled in his master’s absence? John had been at the palace for several years and every change in his work still brought new uncertainties. He had only recently grown accustomed to laboring in the office of the Keeper of the Plate and had just begun to enjoy it when he was thrust into new duties tutoring Lady Anna.

Now his situation was different again, although for the present he preferred not to think of the mysterious new assignment set before him.

Given his years of military employment, the prospect of taking orders from the Prefect Theodotus was not unappealing in itself, although, for all he knew, he might only be handling written work for him. Justinian had said something about an investigation into the death of Hypatius the philanthropist, the murder the whole city had been talking about. Perhaps he expected John to organize reports and evidence as he would marshal the Keeper of the Plate’s valuable dinnerware for a banquet.

Dorotheus led John from the kitchen and along a hallway whose windows looked out into an inner courtyard. Its fountain was coated with rivulets of ice resembling meandering streams of wax from a melting candle. A few brown leaves drifted down from the branches of a skeletal tree. The sky was leaden.

“I am expecting more snow. It’s most unnatural, if you ask me,” the steward observed. “In all my years I can’t remember such winter weather. Thank the Lord we have warm beds to sleep in and good food to eat. Many are not as fortunate.”

“That’s true enough.” Troubled as he was, John couldn’t help thinking of the shivering beggar he and Anna had seen huddled in a doorway not that far from this well-appointed household. He mentioned the incident to Dorotheus and wondered aloud if the unfortunate man had managed to find better shelter for what would certainly turn into a bitterly cold night. Dorotheus observed confidently that the Lord looked after His flock and made the sign of his religion.

John did not like cold weather and never had. He was thin. Any chill in the air found its way into his bones too easily. One of the few things he liked about living in the empire’s capital was that it was not often as frigid as it had been the past few days.

“Yes,” Dorotheus took up his previous observation, “there’s plenty who would envy us. We may not be free men, John, yet we have a better life than many who are proud to so call themselves. Free to freeze or starve, more like it!”

They climbed the staircase at the end of the hallway and entered Dorotheus’ room, a cramped space cluttered with a pallet, a pair of stools and two chests. A bronze brazier warmed the air with a few smoldering embers.

“Sit down, John.” Dorotheus stirred up the fire, pushed a stool toward its warmth, and seated himself on the edge of his pallet.

“I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to talk with you ever since you began tutoring Lady Anna.

She’s very fond of you and so we all are. There’s nothing more important here than her happiness. Apart from the master’s, of course, but as his depends on hers, it amounts to the same thing.”

John did not reply. Glancing out of the room’s tiny window, he saw that snow flurries had begun to lazily bedaub the sky.

Taking his silence for attentiveness, his companion plunged ahead enthusiastically. “You see, I realized immediately that you’re one of those headstrong young men who are dissatisfied with the place assigned him. Don’t deny it! You are more discreet in your speech than most, but I can see it in your eyes.”

Dorotheus hesitated, collecting his thoughts. “Now, I’ve been with the senator’s household since I was purchased as a mere boy. Never in all that time have I wanted for anything. A kinder master than Opimius you could scarcely find. On the whole ours is not a bad life, wouldn’t you say?”

“Do you think so?”

“You have a quick temper, John,” Dorotheus said sorrowfully. “But what man is not a slave in some way or another? We are all slaves to time and age. And we all must serve the Lord, even the emperor. Eunuchs like us are less enchained than many a free man, since we’re not slaves to our passions.”

Was rage then not a passion? John said nothing. He did not want to hurt Dorotheus’ feelings. He would never have chosen the life Dorotheus found so natural. He could only hope he would not have to endure it for as long as the old steward already had.

“Nor do any of us need question what befalls us, for it is all the will of heaven,” Dorotheus said, as if reading what John was thinking. “Now, you know the tale of John Chrysostom and the eunuch Eutropius?”

John nodded. Who had not heard the story of how the paths of the Christian Chrysostom, he of the golden tongue, and of Eutropius had crossed more than a century earlier in this very city?

“Then consider this,” Dorotheus said. “Eutropius originally worked in a minor position in the palace administration. It’s said he came to imperial attention through his wit and piety, but whatever the reason in due course he was elevated to chamberlain and consul.”

“You’re saying I should not despair, that I might shed my chains one day?”

Dorotheus smiled. “John, you’re being deliberately obstinate, I fear. Surely you recall that Eutropius grew greedy and corrupt and was eventually executed? Obviously what we should learn from his sorry tale is we ought not to seek to rise beyond the position in which we are placed. Especially when ours is such a comfortable one.”

John made no reply. He could scarcely reveal that his position had suddenly become much less comfortable than Dorotheus innocently supposed.

“Now, John, your life isn’t really such a nightmare, is it? You have not flung yourself over the seawall in despair.”

John paused before replying. After his capture and castration, he no longer suffered nightmares.

When he could not avoid thinking about it, this seemed to him a natural result of his maiming. By that unthinkable act in the Persian camp, the night exhausted its forces. The formless terror that lurked just out of sight around sleep’s darkest corners had presented itself all too clearly. The heart-stopping fall had ended, not in waking but with crippling impact. As for death, the bottomless dread upon which all other fears play like ripples, John would gladly have plunged into its depths if he had not felt even more strongly that his duty, as a soldier of Mithra, was to endure.

When he replied to Dorotheus, John chose his words carefully. “It’s true I have not thrown myself over the seawall. That is because heaven has ordered that I exist in this world. It’s an order renewed each time I awake. I cannot imagine the purpose of it, but one should not question heaven.”

Dorotheus gazed at him sorrowfully. John remained silent. How could he explain to this cheerful old man, a man who had never known anything but slavery, how it was to be free, to chart one’s course in the world, to make one’s own way?

And having done so how then to convey the stark horror of being captured and offered for sale to anyone with enough coins to buy a man, a woman, or a child and with that purchase the right of absolute power over their bodies and their fates?

It was not possible to even begin to describe it, he thought, nor did he wish to attempt it. His past life was gone. The man he had been had died under a bloodstained blade.

***

“What’s he up to? That’s what I’d like to know! He’s burdened me with an excubitor and a slave. It’s a certain wager they’ve been told to keep an eye on what I’m doing. I won’t have it!”

Theodotus had stamped into Proclus’ office without announcement. Not that he needed any. There were few in Constantinople who would not have recognized the rough-hewn City Prefect. Though he dressed like a peasant in leather breeches and a rough wool shirt, no one could have mistaken the broad-chested figure, shambling along as if weighed down by the enormous and asymmetrical head set between wide shoulders without apparent benefit of a neck.

Some whispered he’d been kicked in the head by a horse as a youngster. Others said the misshapen head was a result of his mother easing her pregnancy with demonic potions. No one, however, said anything at all about the matter when within earshot of the man nicknamed the Gourd.

“You’re speaking of your two new assistants?” Proclus was seated behind a cluttered desk beside Emperor Justin. He had been helping the emperor sign new legislation when Proclus barged in. Justin didn’t bother to look up from the papers he labored over. “I’d heard about them. By direct order of Justinian, wasn’t it? And the emperor, of course.”

Theodotus ran stubby fingers through hair consisting of a few frazzled strands. “How can I possibly fail to keep order in the city with so much help thrust upon me?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

“The murder of Hypatius has dangerous political overtones. There are plenty who might use it for their own ends.” Proclus spoke so quietly he might have been sharing a confidence with the Prefect rather than pointing out something so obvious.

“What he means is my nephew’s let his precious Blues run amuck and now they’ve killed someone important. Not just common beggars and shop keepers. Interesting, isn’t it? With the public outrage it’s caused, he might not get his wish to push me aside before my carcass is cold. Ah! Look. I’ve blotched this one too.” Justin yanked the wooden stencil he’d been tracing off the parchment.

Proclus plucked the sheet up and examined it.

“It is perfectly acceptable, Caesar.”

“So you say, but no one ever tells the emperor he’s got a boil on the end of his nose,” Justin growled.

“Why should they? Boil or not, he is the emperor.”

“Few would dare to talk to their ruler like that,” Justin observed. “That’s why I value your advice so much. And Theodotus’ also. He doesn’t care how he speaks in my presence either. What is this document about anyway? My eyes seem particularly blurred today.”

“It’s a list of regulations regarding warehouse fees.”

“Then it’s all right. Business owners have better things to worry about than blotched signatures.”

Theodotus emitted a loud grunt. “But what about all this additional help I suddenly have, Caesar? Do you suppose I’m not already on the trail of the villain who killed Hypatius? Why would I need a fuzzy-cheeked excubitor and a slave to assist me with my investigations?”

“I agree with Justinian. It’s in everyone’s interest that Hypatius’ murder is solved quickly,” Justin replied. “This business of a murder in the church. And Hypatius being a church patron. It’s got everyone’s attention. We have to be sure it’s solved in a manner that we can all be certain is, let us say, impartial.”

“Impartial? What does solved impartially mean? Solved is solved,” Theodotus said impatiently.

Proclus looked thoughtful. “Sometimes, however-”

The emperor slammed his kalamos down on the desk. “We all need eyes everywhere. You have plenty of spies around the city, Theodotus. They don’t seem to have helped you catch the culprits.”

“I see your point,” Theodotus admitted. “I will have a letter of introduction drawn up for these men, to facilitate their investigations, allow them to interview people. I just hope they don’t interfere with the real investigation. I am holding a dinner party tonight. I’ll set them to guard my guests. Theodora will be there so doubtless that will please her. She can report to Justinian that his slave is already keeping an eye on me.”

The emperor slumped back in his chair, as if tracing a signature on a few documents had exhausted him. “I had high ambitions for my nephew once, until that little whore got hold of him,” he said. “Euphemia hates her. Theodora wants me out of the way so Justinian can rule, and what Theodora wants, my nephew wants. He never paid attention to these street brawlers until she came along. Just because the Blues aided the woman’s family when the Greens wouldn’t, is that a reason to put the whole empire into turmoil? Is this what it’s come to, that Roman citizens should be ruled by the daughter of a bearkeeper for one of the factions? Well, I’m not dead yet. And I don’t intend to die for some time.”

Proclus removed the wooden stencil. Justin had obviously finished his labors although a stack of documents remained unsigned.

“Don’t let this matter of Hypatius keep you from your work restoring order in the streets, Theodotus,” Justin went on. “Street riots threaten the empire as much as any conspiracy.”

“I’ll skin everyone in the city alive if that’s what it takes to make the streets safe.”

“It’s not the beatings and robberies and assaults that scare people, it’s all the counting and scribbling it down,” Justin observed. “If a clerk with a kalamos hadn’t recorded it, you wouldn’t have someone like Senator Balbinus railing about how there were two murders near the Strategion and fifteen assaults on the Mese overnight. Not to mention a grocer had three bunches of leeks snatched. Citizens wouldn’t be so fearful if we didn’t keep count.” Justin’s teeth clenched as he came to an abrupt halt and reached a trembling hand down to his leg.

Theodotus reached into the pouch at his belt, took a few awkward steps forward and set a terracotta pot down on the desk in front of Justin. “Your medication for that old wound, excellency. A fresh batch. I made it only this morning.”

The emperor drew the tiny container toward him. “You have served me well, Theodotus, and I trust you will continue to do so. Now off you go to prepare for your banquet. What entertainments do you plan? It’s a pity you can’t ask Theodora to perform some of her specialties for your guests! However, I’m sure you will think of something almost as diverting.”