One for Sorrow

Chapter Thirteen

John stood uneasily at the edge of the dock, dark eyes narrowed against the harsh light, looking down into the debris of the city sloshing at his feet. He felt his stomach tighten.

Anatolius, shading his eyes with his hand, was staring at the horizon where dark clouds lay in a sullen stripe across the sea. “There will be a bad storm soon.”

They made their way through the oppressive heat that lay over the raucous harbor, the lines of sweat-streaked slaves burdened with crates and sacks, the dark-sailed merchant ships sweetly redolent of old cargoes of spices rising and falling on the same sparkling swells as many-oared warships.

John should never have come here. He had only seen the woman from a distance, for an instant. In the dim solitude of his study it had seemed possible that he had found his old love again. In the brassy sunlight, it was obvious it had been nothing more than self delusion.

They identified the Anubis, the ship named by the soothsayer, by the protective Eye of Horus painted on its prow. It was as silent as the dead its eponymous jackal-headed god conducted to the underworld. A man dozed at the foot of its mast. The gangplank was not in place. Waves sloshed loudly at the bottom of the gap between dock and ship.

“Hey! Watchman! Visitors!” yelled Anatolius. The man continued dozing.

Leaning down, John picked a shard of pottery from the litter strewn about the dock and lobbed it at the boat. Its clatter did not awaken the sleeper, but brought forth from the ship’s bowels an angry boy. The Lord Chamberlain had seldom been announced in so undignified a manner.

He soon found himself standing in front of a low-lintelled door. If there were any sounds to be heard from inside, they were masked by the regular fretting of waves against the ship. He raised his hand to knock. His fist was shaking, and not from the proximity of the water.

He paused. Although he had done his best to concentrate on his search for Leukos’ murderer, the performer at the Hippodrome had been constantly at the back of his thoughts, drawing him into a past he could never regain. Now there lay between him and the reality of the present only this plank doorway.

“Go on,” urged Anatolius.

“Mithra, it’s worse than waiting for the cornu to sound the attack,” John muttered. He rapped briskly. Light footsteps sounded within. A woman opened the door.

There was a hint of gray in her dark hair. Close up she looked less slender than she had seemed at the Hippodrome, although she was apparently still agile enough to vault and leap over razor-sharp horns.

“Cornelia!”

She stepped forward, pulled him into the cabin, and dealt a stinging slap to his face.

“And they say Cretans are liars! By the goddess, you took long enough! And what do you want after all these years?”

John reached for her hand, half-expecting his fingers to pass through hers as through a mirage, and it was a shock when they were stopped short by the warm solidarity of her flesh.

“How did you know where we were, John? And what do you think you’re doing, coming here? And, now I think of it, what are you doing for a living these days?” Her features were white with fury except for an angry spot of red on each cheekbone.

“Still the same Cornelia, all questions and never a pause for breath so I can answer!” John wiped tears from his eyes with a quick swipe of his knuckles.

“The John I knew wouldn’t have cried.” Her voice cracked.

“The Cornelia I knew was gentler.”

She looked him over appraisingly. “You look strange in those fancy clothes. You must have done well for yourself.”

“I am not the John that you knew, Cornelia.”

There was pain beneath the anger in her eyes. “How I prayed to the goddess for word from you! But it never came. Why didn’t you at least tell me you were leaving?”

“I never intended to leave you. I accidentally crossed the border and ran into a band of Persians. I ended up…well, eventually I ended up in Constantinople.”

“And I stayed with the troupe. I keep expecting you might show up in every new place we visited.”

“When I saw you in the Hippodrome I thought how kind the years had been to you. You looked just as young as when we first met.”

Cornelia laughed quietly. “Your tongue is still as smooth as ever, I see. But in fact-”

Anatolius managed to squeeze into the cramped, dim cabin. “I owe you an apology, John. I could have sworn the bull-leaper was little more than a girl.”

John introduced him. “My friend Anatolius, secretary to Emperor Justinian.”

“Secretary to the emperor? That sounds like a high position.” Cornelia looked John up and down again. “And so, what is it you do, John?”

Anatolius broke the ensuing silence. “He is Lord Chamberlain to the emperor.”

Before Cornelia could say anything there appeared in the doorway a slim dark-haired girl. “Mother, who are the visitors?”

Shock washed over John in a cold tide. “You have a daughter?” As soon as the words were spoken he regretted them. There was no reason why Cornelia should not have taken a lover in the years since he had been forced to abandon her.

“She’s the one you saw bull-leaping. Her name is Europa. She looks a lot like me, doesn’t she? Though there are those who say she looks more like her father. Like you.”

The ship lurched as an unusually large swell pushed it toward the dock. Anguish washed over John. He closed his eyes, feeling lightheaded, as if he were about to topple into a chasm suddenly opening at his feet. It was not the vertigo which had so recently seized him at the dock, but rather an instinctive reaction to the sudden yawning of unfathomable depths as terrifying as those revealed when the split earth disgorged Hades, intent on abducting Persephone.

Struggling with his emotions, John realized he was not what he thought he was. Half of his being, his identity as a man, had been wrenched away from him and twisted around and then thrust back into his dazed grasp, all in the space of time it took for Cornelia to say two words. “Like you.”

Europa was his daughter.

Yet the thought which made him so lightheaded had also loosed a gray miasma of apprehension.

How would his child-he tasted the word-his child react to meeting the father she had never known?