Nine for the Devil

Chapter Three

Theodora’s funeral procession made its slow way down Constantinople’s main thoroughfare. The colonnades along both sides of the Mese were packed with watchers five and six deep. Most had glimpsed Emperor Justinian, if at all, only from a distance, when he attended events at the Hippodrome or appeared in public for church celebrations.

This afternoon they could almost touch him, if they had dared.

Clad in plain garments without decorative borders or gems, the mourning emperor walked immediately in front of the bier bearing Theodora’s coffin. Scarlet boots were his only touch of color. He scuffled through dust and windblown debris as if he hardly had sufficient strength to lift his feet. His head, bereft of crown and bare, was held high but his expression remained blank.

As he passed the crowds a whispering followed him, a snakelike hiss John heard as he marched a few rows in front of the emperor in a line of court officials. He found himself between Justinian’s treasurer, the bald, dwarfish eunuch Narses whom John despised, and the obese Master of Offices, who puffed and wheezed ever more alarmingly as the procession climbed the hill atop which sat the Church of the Holy Apostles.

John felt hot and uncomfortable, burdened by the heavily embroidered robes he wore only when ceremony demanded. It was just as well a sullen sky pressed dark clouds down on the city as if to smother the five domes of the church. A rising wind flapped tunics and cloaks, with gusts carrying away the sound of the hymns sung by the choir trailing the coffin. The wind and lack of sunlight ameliorated the heat and humidity to a small extent.

He would have preferred to be back in bed with Cornelia. He had been forced to abandon that refuge long before dawn. Court officials and ecclesiastics had paid homage to Theodora during the early morning hours. The empress’ perfumed and anointed body had lain in the Triclinium, popularly known as the Hall of the Nineteen Couches, on the palace grounds. Any possible echoes of the imperial banquets usually held in the long, many-windowed building were muffled by deep purple drapery covering its walls and the bier on which her coffin rested, covered by a linen cloth of the same color, embroidered with scenes of the Resurrection. Despite Justinian’s suspicions of foul play, her death was not unexpected. Preparations for the funeral had been completed for weeks.

Justinian had also prepared for trouble. In case anyone might seek to use the disruption of life to his own advantage, the palace grounds were thick with armed men. When John arrived, his friend Felix, captain of the excubitors, a burly, bearded man, had been patrolling inside the Triclinium, moving from one guard post to another, conferring with those on duty.

Felix growled a greeting.

“I am sorry to hear about the deaths of your excubitors,” John said.

“Justinian had no reason to have those boys killed. It was all I could do to keep the rest from revolting.” Felix’s angry glare moved around the long room filled with elegantly dressed mourners and settled on the dead empress. “They’d rather throw her corpse on the street for the dogs than stand guard over it. The imperial whore reached up out of hell and murdered their colleagues, as far as they’re concerned. I can’t blame them. You can’t stop a disease with swords and spears. Or stop fate either.”

John wondered whether Felix blamed the emperor or the empress or both. Usually it amounted to the same thing, or had until now. “Nor can you bring fate to justice, which is what Justinian expects of me,” John replied.

“Yes, I’ve heard. May Mithra stand at your shoulder.”

“Have there been any disturbances?”

“None. Not here. I’ve spent half the night watching over an endless parade of Theodora’s pet monophysites. Those heretics are a wild eyed foreign crew and not all of them properly washed.” Felix sniffed disdainfully. “They seemed to be genuinely grieving. When Justinian comes to his senses he’ll turn them out of that den of theirs in the Hormisdas Palace. Then they’ll have something to grieve over.”

John noticed an attractive, fair-haired woman surrounded by attendants moving toward the bier. “I see Antonina is here.”

“She’ll be angry she didn’t get what she wanted,” Felix said. “Coming all the way from Italy in hopes that Theodora could convince Justinian to give Belisarius the reinforcements he needs to fight the Goths. She arrived too late.”

John saw that Felix’s gaze lingered on the woman. In the dim light, at a distance and dressed in robes glittering with jewels, she looked the same as she had over fifteen years ago. Back then, Felix was a lowly young excubitor and had confessed to John he had been lured to an unwise tryst with Antonina in this very hall. Did he recall that now? How could he not? Did he ever wonder if fate had smiled, whether it might be him instead of Belisarius leading Justinian’s troops in Italy?

John said, “Cornelia tells me that Antonina will be pleased since she can call off that marriage Theodora arranged between her daughter and Theodora’s grandson.”

“That’s a harsh judgment.” Felix spoke with surprising brusqueness. “Antonina was Theodora’s friend.”

There was a stir behind them as the choir took its place and the final detachment of excubitors stepped into line.

Felix glanced back. “A choir of former whores from her refuge singing hymns!”

“Some believe that the dead pay demons at the toll stations on the way to heaven with good works done here,” John observed in an undertone. “That refuge of hers will get her through at least one gate.”

“Perhaps,” Felix admitted in a begrudging tone. “But how will she get through the rest of the gates unless she knows the demons manning them personally?”

John took his leave. He had to be seen going through the motions of paying his respects to the woman who had hated him. Then the funeral procession to the Church of the Holy Apostles would not be long in leaving. Internment needed to be carried out quickly, particularly in summer heat. Although the rich and powerful could afford more perfumes and scented unguents than the poor, once their souls had departed their flesh decayed just as quickly.

Now the long line of mourners was approaching the church. Justinian, pale, stumbled along as if he were an automaton fast running down. The murmur of the crowd along the street mingled with the tramp of excubitors’ boots and the monotonous rise and fall of hymns. Clergy brandished censers whose fragrant incense evaporated ineffectively into the pervasive stench of the city. Servants of the imperial household, including several of Theodora’s female attendants, all weeping, followed the bier, as did more clergy carrying bright icons whose gold looked dull in the heavy light struggling from the dark heavens. Then came gaudily uniformed silentiaries and mounted scholarae in plumed helmets, minor officials, representatives from palace offices and the charitable endeavors in which Theodora had interested herself. It was a microcosm of both the dead woman’s life and imperial power and majesty.

Overhead glowering clouds sank lower and a greenish light began to spill down from breaks in the gray sky. Patriarch Menas waited at the church entrance. His long beard pulling his narrow face down into a sorrowful expression.

“Lord Chamberlain,” the patriarch murmured, nodding a greeting.

Was there a hint of irony in the look Menas gave to him?

Probably it was only John’s imagination. Menas, like John, had been no friend of Theodora’s. A dozen years earlier the new pope, Agapetus, had removed Theodora’s heretical ally Anthimus from the patriarchate and replaced him with the orthodox Menas.

Like John, Menas had survived despite Theodora’s enmity.

Even if Menas had not intended to convey to John the irony of them both paying their respects to an enemy, it was ironic that a woman who had ordered floggings and torture with less concern than she took over choosing jewelry would rest under the same roof sheltering relics of the apostles, martyrs, and saints, not to mention a portion of what was believed to be the column to which the Christian’s gentle god had been tied for a flogging before his slow, tortured death.

John would not have relished tracking down her murderer even if he believed she had truly been murdered. However, a follower of Mithra did his duty. For more than twenty years he had served Justinian. The emperor wanted him to find a murderer and John would do his best.

Was it possible that his duty to Justinian conflicted with his duty to Mithra? John did not think so. Yet there were those who claimed that both the emperor and empress were demons in human disguise. There was no doubt there was evil abroad in the world. A Mithran’s life was dedicated to battling evil. Had John been serving the wrong side?

Yes, said the scarred and twisted visage of the demon peering at him from the fringe of the crowd.

No. Not a demon. Not a sign, he realized. It was his friend and informant, the beggar Pulcheria, she of the half-ruined face. Even the poorest of the poor had come to pay their respects to a woman who had lived in splendor.

Or had the beggars come to gloat that though they lived on the streets, they yet lived?