Four for a Boy

Chapter Two

The imperial crown sitting on John’s pallet was beautifully constructed, the product of painstaking labor.That was John’s immediate reaction as he entered the dormitory of the slaves’ quarters in the Great Palace.

His second was blinding anger. On examination, the parchment circlet and its pendulia turned out not to be a model to be delivered to a jeweler for fashioning in gold as he had first supposed. Rather it had been constructed from the missing list of the palace’s silver plate John had been searching for only the day before.

All thought of a quiet hour or two following his unexpectedly harrowing excursion to the Great Church vanished. He snatched up the fragile creation and stormed out along the corridor to the dining room where his fellow slaves had already gathered to eat.

The thick gruel of wheat meal, poured out to congeal over a large board set in the center of the table and garnished with meats boiled in inexpensive wine, had already largely been consumed. Several of the eunuchs suppressed sniggers as John strode into the room, the crown in his clenched fist.

Andrew, a large, round-faced man, leaned across the table, trespassing on his neighbor’s culinary territory in order to grab a sausage. “John! What’s that you’ve got there? A little gift for Lady Anna perhaps? Oh, but she’ll be very cross with you. You’ve squeezed it too hard and ruined it!”

His fellow conspirator, distinguished by his glossy black hair and pock-marked skin, nudged him in the ribs. “It’s tragic,” he grinned. “How can a slave compete with that handsome Trenico? Everyone knows he’s got designs on Anna. Not for her physical charms, of course…”

“Oh, absolutely not, Sisinnius,” Andrew agreed, “but certainly her fortune is very charming, isn’t it?”

“While poor John here can offer neither companionship nor wealth.”

Andrew shook his head in mock sympathy. “So sad, really, isn’t it? You’d think he’d know by now that love is not for him!” He waggled the little sausage he held in his pudgy hand before popping it into his mouth.

John took a pace or two further into the room. His lips were drawn into a taut line of anger.

“But now we get to the truth of the matter,” Andrew continued. “It’s obvious our John has been spending far too much time daydreaming. No wonder he couldn’t find that list he lost. He didn’t realize it had turned into an imperial crown. It was all done by magick, you know!”

Laughter crept around the table as John’s cheekbones reddened.

“And see,” Sisinnius replied in a casual but too loud tone, “there’s the proof of it. The man blushes!”

“As well he should,” Andrew said. “You’d think he’d have long since given up lusting after women. Even one as plain as-”

John’s fist tightened, crushing the crown into a shapeless mass. He was across the room before Andrew had finished his sentence. John grabbed his neck, yanked him up from the bench and begun to stuff the crumpled parchment into his mouth.

His tormentor’s face turned scarlet.

Several slaves leapt up and ran out into the corridor, shouting hysterically. In his rage, John saw nothing except the man flopping fishlike around in his grasp as the creature’s hot spittle dribbled on his knuckles.

The physical contact was repellent and he loosened his grip. Andrew jerked away. He spit out the soggy wad of parchment and shrieked, “You miserable Greek bastard!”

Then he sank his teeth into John’s wrist.

“That’s right,” shouted Sisinnius gleefully, “give him what he deserves!”

The words had hardly left his mouth before John had slapped one hand onto the table, sending the remains of the meal flying, and vaulted over it, kicking Sisinnius off the bench. Before the man could gather his scrambled wits, John had knelt on him. He banged Sisinnius’ head on the floor and screamed lurid curses, mostly concerning the other’s ancestry and tastes in intimate companionship. A red stain began to creep across the tiles.

Sisinnius squirmed and squealed. He finally managed to knee John in the stomach. Andrew ran around the end of the table, grabbed John’s arms, and pulled him back. Sisinnius punched and clawed at his attacker’s face. John leapt to his feet. Blood streamed down his cheek.

Andrew and Sisinnius were joined in battle by two of the remaining eunuchs, who danced around, kicking clumsily at John’s legs.

“So at the Great Palace bullies fight four to one,” John sneered, swiping blood from his face with the sleeve of his tunic. “Good odds for weaklings! Or eunuchs!”

With a roar of rage, Andrew started pummeling him with fists resembling slabs of meat. And almost as soft, John thought. Nevertheless, he stepped back out of reach.

He had overlooked Sisinnius, who remained prone on the floor. The dark-haired slave immediately grasped John’s boot and jerked his foot out from under him. John fell sideways. His head cracked painfully against the corner of the table.

Then the familiar black mist descended and again he was a young mercenary, striking out left and right, seeking the best place to land a killing blow.

The pounding of boots in the corridor announced the arrival of an excubitor. A couple of the eunuchs who had fled for help cowered outside the room, peering around the doorpost.

“I order this ended!” the guard shouted.

His command was hardly necessary, for silence had suddenly fallen.

***

His back against a rough stone wall, John sat on a cold flagstone floor and contemplated the rapid change in his fortunes.

In the space of less than an hour he had gone from escorting a senator’s daughter to wearing shackles in a cold, underground room that reeked of mold and fear.

“Fortuna, you do not smile on me today!” he muttered, shifting his lean flanks uncomfortably.

“Shut up!” came his answer, not from that fickle goddess Fortuna but rather from Andrew, chained to the opposite wall. “Do you want to bring even more trouble down on our heads?” The big eunuch’s voice trembled and tears welled in his eyes.

“You mean it’s illegal to invoke pagan deities in a Christian emperor’s dungeon?” John asked with a sarcastic grin.

“What I meant was that we’re all going to be punished extremely severely for damaging imperial property and you don’t need to make it any worse!”

John pointed out that apart from a few broken plates and slight damage to the plaster wall little damage had been done to the slave’s dining room.

“No, you fool! The imperial property we’ve damaged is ourselves! And we’ll pay for it dearly!”

“I see.” John lapsed into silence.

“Why couldn’t you just laugh at our little joke?” Andrew mourned. “Why do you hate us so much when you’re the same?” He began to weep, snuffling and wiping his nose on his blood-spattered tunic.

John examined the ragged bite mark on his thin wrist. “Your weapon needs sharpening,” he grumbled.

Andrew didn’t reply. He was now sitting hunched over, staring at the steady flame of a small lamp burning on the floor by the door. “Do you think it will last long?” he finally asked.

“I suppose it depends on what punishment is meted out to property-destroying slaves.” John spit out the final word.

The other shook his head. “No, I meant the oil in the lamp. Do you think it will last long?”

John stared at him. The big man’s frame seemed suddenly shrunken, his bruised face pitiful. “You’re afraid of the dark!”

Andrew looked at the floor and said nothing.

As the silence stretched out, John contemplated what might soon transpire. That severe punishment that was about to be meted out to all five brawlers was in itself not of much concern. He was familiar with the usual form of justice administered to slaves. Compared to what he had already suffered, a flogging would amount to little. However, he would not like to lose his eyesight and fervently hoped his services were valuable enough to the Keeper of the Plate to forestall anything so drastic. But, then too, he reminded himself, slaves had been summarily put to death for lesser misdemeanors than fighting amongst themselves.

If he lived, he would endure, as he had somehow endured the terrible events that eventually brought him to Constantinople. As to whether he would live, that was in the hands of Fortuna. And she had been filled with black humors for much too long.

The regular tread of military men approached slowly along the corridor. A bolt rattled, and the heavy door of the room swung open and admitted an excubitor who looked down with obvious distaste at the sorry spectacle of two crouching, bloodspattered prisoners.

“You! Eunuch!” He glared at John and bared his teeth in an unpleasant grin. “You’ve been summoned to an audience with Justinian.”

John’s shackles were unlocked and he was thrust out into the corridor where two armed guards waited.

The imperial jailer blew out the lamp inside the room John had just left before yanking its door shut. John was not sure if the faint sound he heard was the creak of the closing door or a horrified groan from Andrew inside the suddenly darkened cell.

He had no time to contemplate the question.

The excubitor prodded John’s back with a sword tip. “What are you waiting for? I’d think you’d be eager to get to a meeting with Justinian.” The man at John’s right shoulder only partly suppressed a laugh as both guards grabbed John’s arms and forced him forward.

John’s feet felt heavy as blocks of stone. He knew little of court life. He did know, however, that prisoners were not usually dragged off to meetings with the second most powerful man in the empire.

At the end of the corridor they were met by a thin, stooped man who carried a lantern suspended on a leather cord. Its need was soon apparent, since instead of emerging into daylight as John had expected, they instead clattered down a flight of narrow stone steps and emerged into another dark hallway.

The lantern’s cap had been painstakingly decorated with a swirling pattern of punched holes. The circles of light it cast flowed over the hallway’s uneven ceiling, occasionally vanishing up into musty darkness when the men passed through cavernous, seemingly empty rooms whose purpose John could not begin to guess.

John sniffed at the cool air flowing in his face. It smelled of loam.

Since his capture he had wished daily for the earth’s final embrace. Although he longed for the destination, something within him feared the journey, however short it might turn out to be. It was easy enough to face death in battle when the mind was fogged by warfare’s powerful, black potion of fury and terror. Such a death was honorable. But extermination in some dark corner like a rat in a cellar was not.

Yet if this was the manner in which Mithra had chosen to answer his oft prayed wish, how could he protest?

The procession passed across an unused cistern, where stagnant puddles lay amidst a forest of pillars and small creatures scrabbled in the shadows. Here and there arches in the hallway’s sweating walls revealed nothing but utter darkness. Soon they moved along the edge of another cistern where the black mirror of water which had never known wind faintly reflected the lantern’s light.

“Almost there,” announced the big excubitor, his voice wakening echoes around them.

John wondered what method would be used to extinguish him. He hoped it would be a mercifully speedy thrust of the blade.

Mithra, let it not be strangulation or drowning, he prayed fervently as he stumbled against the first step of a stairway leading upward.

He should lash out at his captors, he thought rapidly. Attempt to escape. Yes, that would ensure a clean death.

But the obstinate creature inside him, the thing that so feared death, refused, greedy for the last few heartbeats of life.

At the top of the stairs, their lantern bearer pulled a narrow door open to admit a blinding flood of light. John blinked as he crossed the threshold into a corridor whose wall depicted the progress of a tiger hunt.

There was no time for comprehension. He was dragged around a corner, another door opened, and he was shoved forward to fall onto a thick rug. Incredulous, he saw the big excubitor immediately prostrate himself beside him. The other three men had disappeared. Turning his head forward, John found himself staring at a pair of dainty, amethyst-encrusted shoes.

“Get up!”

The voice was a woman’s. The tone of the command was a man’s.

John stood, half expecting the bite of a blade in his back or the hideous embrace of a garrote.

He faced a woman who would have been mistaken for nothing more than a pretty girl except for the fortune in silk robes and jewels which covered her short frame and the gem-studded crown she wore, a real crown, not a parchment imitation.

“It is a sad thing indeed when Justinian is forced to deal with such sorry specimens as you two,” said the woman.

John realized that as impossible as it seemed he must indeed have been summoned to meet with Justinian. The woman could only be the powerful man’s notorious concubine, the former actress Theodora.

John was engulfed in Theodora’s musky scent. It held a suggestion of a spice-seller’s shop and a spring meadow as well. Nothing, not the perfume, the incense smoldering in gold pots, not even the oily smoke curling from glass lamps set atop silver tripods, could quite mask the foetor of disease.

“Justinian is very ill,” Theodora continued. “It is no secret. He has obviously been poisoned by some stealthy enemy. Yet deception must be met by deception. Those who would fight like slaves, slipping potions into the master’s food, must be opposed by slaves.”

“Yes, highness,” the excubitor beside John muttered, unable to stop himself from replying to her tirade.

Theodora glared venomously at him, her eyes as fathomless as polished jet. “You need not speak. Emulate the silence of your friend here. He understands his place.” She glanced at John as her lips formed a red sickle of a smile.

“Justinian has the interest of all citizens at heart,” she went on, “and naturally the citizens are outraged by the murder of Hypatius, a pious and generous man. A murder in broad daylight in the Great Church itself! And what’s more, Hypatius was one of those who contributed toward the Christ figure!”

She paused, as if to give John and Felix time to grasp what she was saying. “Ironic, isn’t it? A man enters a holy place to view the beautiful work of art he has arranged to have placed there and he is rewarded in such an unthinkable fashion. More than ironic, I would say. This was a murder designed to catch the citizens’ attention. Justinian naturally shares the public outrage. Yet it has already been whispered abroad that certain of the Blues were responsible and worse yet, that Justinian, well known as one of their supporters, condones their act. Those who spread this filthy rumor would not dare to do so were their future emperor not confined to his bed.”

Theodora’s embroidered robes rustled as she turned away. For the first time, released from the rabbit snare of her gaze and voice, John became aware of the wide bed set in an alcove framed by draperies. Mary Reed amp; Eric Mayer

“Justinian wishes to address you,” Theodora said. “Step forward.”

The men did as she ordered.

The unprepossessing figure propped up in bed, a purple coverlet pulled up to his neck, did not resemble the usual notion of a future emperor. His face was bland and round with a strong familial resemblance to Justin’s, especially the small eyes. Justinian smiled weakly.

“Felix. It’s Felix, isn’t it? One of my uncle Justin’s favorite bodyguards. ‘Reminds me of myself in my excubitor days,’ he told me. In fact, he insisted on volunteering your services when he heard I planned to have the matter of Hypatius’ murder investigated.”

Felix opened his mouth to reply, but shut it without saying anything. He looked shocked.

“And you are John,” Justinian went on. “A highly intelligent man, or so I am reliably informed. The palace is a small place. Those with quick wits are soon noticed and rewarded. Are you surprised I should call upon a slave? I was not born to the palace and neither was our emperor. Both of us might have been farmers. I would as soon be served by those of similar humble origins. Adversity is a better teacher than luxury.”

John glanced at Felix. The excubitor’s expression remained one of stunned amazement.

“Now as to why you’re both here,” Justinian continued. “I’m enlisting you in the defense of the empire. You will report to Theodotus, the City Prefect, and assist him for the time being. He’ll have orders for you. When he has none, you will continue with your usual duties. The fact that you are working for him can hardly be kept secret, but you will say nothing about this meeting and who assigned you to the Prefect’s office. I do not have to tell you the consequences of disobedience.” Justinian’s voice faded abruptly and his head fell back against his pillow.

Just that quickly, their audience was ended.

“You have tired him out,” snapped Theodora. “Leave.”

The men began to back toward the door.

Fortuna had arranged for something momentous to take place soon, John thought. She must have, for he and the excubitor Felix had just been addressed by the man who would almost certainly be the next emperor. Indeed, many said he had been the de facto ruler for years.

Where was the drama, he wondered. Where the magnificence? The sickly and unimpressive man lying in bed had sounded like a petty bureaucrat instructing his clerks to undertake some minor task or other.

John suddenly felt dizzy. Was it caused by the room’s smoke or its cloying heat? Or was it relief?

He had expected to be dead and his feet set firmly on the seven-runged ladder to Mithra by now.