One for Sorrow

Chapter Fifty-two

John sat in his quiet study with a jug of wine, trying to make sense of what he had learned. The trace of blood he had found on the door of Isis’ establishment had come to nothing. According to Isis the bloody corpse of the bear trainer mauled to death in front of her house had been carried in that way to avoid soiling the entrance.

The lack of blood beneath Leukos’ body where it lay in the alley was not so easily explained. Nor was it clear why Leukos would have visited the patriarch, if in fact the bald man observed by Sabas had been Leukos. Could John trust what the injured, feverish laborer claimed to have seen?

John’s gaze fell upon Zoe. He began to ask her opinion but stopped himself. What sort of man was it who could talk to a mosaic girl more easily than to his own daughter? Who understood glass but not flesh and blood? But then glass could not grow and change and a mosaic girl could not speak, although it sometimes seemed she did. John averted his eyes.

Wasn’t the Inn of the Centaurs the cynosure of it all? When he confronted Gregorius at the home of the deceased bear trainer’s family he immediately recalled how he had first seen the young man, soaking wet after an immersion in the fountain. The charioteer was staying at the inn, as was Thomas. The soothsayer had been living there. Leukos had visited the soothsayer at the inn.

Gregorius’ mission to the bear trainer’s family had been innocent enough, which was not say that he did not supplement his racing earnings with a little smuggling as he traveled around.

Xiphias may have been involved in some sort of illicit trade as well. Was he so terrified by John’s investigations that he had killed himself?

Or was it apparently killed himself?

And had Thomas and Xiphias spoken or not? Thomas admitted he was pursuing Ahasuerus for a relic he believed was in the soothsayer’s possession. Why then had he spoken with the Keeper of the Plate? Did he suspect Ahasuerus had already disposed of the Grail to Leukos, that it was in the palace, and Xiphias might be bribed to help it disappear?

And what about Berta? She had entertained Thomas and the soothsayer in different ways. Had those chance meetings entangled her in the same web in which Leukos had become entangled?

What web was that?

The sky looked threatening. It seemed that the spring rains would never stop. Dark clouds loomed low, and there was that eerie hush that signaled yet another storm would be upon the city within the hour. Gusts of heralding winds swirled about the house. Several large seabirds strutted on the cobbles below, shrilly squawking. Their ghastly cries suggested the screeching of the Harpies tormenting their prey. John shuddered.

Zoe stared at him with eyes blacker than night.

John examined the facts he had gathered, each one akin to a glistening bit of glass. He shuffled them around. He could almost see the pattern. Place this piece next to that and then this other over here and soon they would form a lifelike picture. As lifelike as Zoe and then, like Zoe, they would speak to him and whisper the name of Leukos’ murderer.

John poured wine and pondered. Without realizing it, he dozed.

A figure in a dripping hooded cloak stood before him. An emaciated hand pushed back the hood to reveal the time-worn face of Ahasuerus.

“I thought you had embarked on your journey across the Styx,” John heard himself say.

The old man chuckled hoarsely. “That is a journey that I will not take for a long time. However, I am off on another sort of journey. Did you ever hear that the mantis warns travelers of danger, pointing the way to go to avoid it? Well, I’ve been hiding. For a while I was over there in the stables debating whether to stay.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the barracks. “When I awoke today what did I see but a mantis. It was pointing toward the sea. Even a soothsayer need not cast pebbles to know that it was urging me to depart.”

“You look exhausted. Should I ask Peter to bring something?”

“Thank you, but I am not hungry. Tell me, Lord Chamberlain, where do you think I have been?”

“As I told you, I feared you were dead.”

A gust of wind rattled at the window, underlining the old man’s words. “I will tell you where I have been. I was summoned from the inn to see Patriarch Epiphanios. I cast the pebbles for him. Later, as I stood on the docks intending to take ship, something struck me squarely in the shoulder blades and I fell into the water. And, Lord Chamberlain, I cannot swim.”

In the grip of nightmare John felt as if it were he who had plunged into the water.

“But as I told you, it is not time for me to take that journey into darkness. I survived. I hid. Now I have come on this rainy night to cast the pebbles for you.”

***

John awoke in the gray light before dawn. The memory of his dream returned slowly. On the floor of the study several glistening patches of moisture marked where the wind had blown rain through cracks around the window frame.