Seven for a Secret

Chapter Four

John stepped away from the stylite’s column to make room for a group of pilgrims.

The middle-aged men with peeling, sunburnt faces, their homely garments stiff with the dirt of a journey from the countryside, stared up toward the motionless holy man and put their fingertips to his granite pillar.

The sunlight felt hot. The finger-like shadow of the column fell across the square as if marking the hour. More passersby were in evidence. One or two beggars had stationed themselves near the pillar in order to take advantage of pious charity. The smell of fresh bread mingled with the acrid smoke that had begun to burn the back of John’s throat, evidence of a bakery hidden amidst the forges and furnaces whose increasing clamor announced the beginning of a new day of labor.

The enticing odor reminded John that he had not eaten that morning. It was simply a fact to be noted. He was not a man who was driven by appetites.

Again he surveyed the square.

Perhaps Anatolius was right and Zoe was not going to appear.

The long watch was not difficult for John. During his years as a mercenary he had passed countless nights in Bretania, on guard in the chilly darkness at what had once been the edge of the empire. The nights had seemed countless at the time, but they were not, for now they were gone.

John’s muscles remembered how to remain still but ready to respond immediately if attacked. He retained the trick of letting his mind doze while his eyes and ears remained alert.

He saw a woman, dressed in brocaded robes, step out of the canopied chair which her four Nubian slaves had set down in front of a goldsmith’s workshop. A small army of retainers and guards accompanied her.

Not far off he heard an elderly man, who might have passed for Peter, haggling with a tired merchant over a bundle of limp greens.

“They weren’t wilted when you started arguing about the price!” the merchant declared.

A hollow-eyed, dirty boy lingered nearby. Was he waiting for his opportunity to snatch one of the apples the disgruntled customer had already dismissed as worm-eaten?

No.

In fact, he was staring at John.

Steadily. Brazenly.

When he noticed John looking back, he turned and bolted.

John went after him.

Metal flashed in the sunlight as the guards posted at the door of the goldsmith’s establishment drew their weapons. John was already past them, running out of the square and down a straight street without colonnades.

After an initial burst of speed, the boy slowed. As a young man John had been a runner. He knew how to pace himself and he made a point of regularly visiting the gymnasium at the Baths of Zeuxippos. Nevertheless, the boy was younger. As soon as John began to make up ground, his prey managed to pull away. John thought he could wear the boy down if they ran long enough and he kept his quarry in sight.

Laborers on their way to work and shoppers carrying baskets stepped aside in alarm. Later they would regale their friends and families with the incongruous spectacle of a tall man in fine robes in pursuit of a grubby street urchin, and not a few of the theories advanced to explain the spectacle would be of a lewd, not to say obscene, nature.

The boy veered sideways into an alley.

John followed.

It was possible he was being led into an ambush. He did not think so. There was no doubt the pursuit had attracted attention, which assassins would wish to avoid.

The alley turned at sharp angles, threading its narrow path first one way and then another, its course defined by the surrounding buildings.

John leapt over a pile of rotting cabbages, his boots sinking into a semi-liquescent puddle surrounding the remains of some farmer’s unsold wares, not yet found by the hungry. He slipped, righted himself. His shoulder slammed into a brick wall an arm’s length to his right.

For a heartbeat he had taken his gaze from the boy, who had vanished.

Impossibly, because John was at the entrance of a cul-de-sac.

A perfect spot to be waylaid, if attackers closed off its one entrance.

Except there was no place for potential assassins to hide-or for the boy to have gone. The buildings closing in the airless space were devoid of doors or windows. The wall John had briefly touched was hot. He guessed there was a furnace of some sort on the other side. Later in the day, the narrow passage would be stifling.

Ahead, three long steps led up to what must have once been a portico. Pale circles on the platform at the top of the flight revealed where columns had stood. The wide door to the building it originally graced had been partly boarded over and secured with a heavy rusted chain. It had obviously not been opened for some time.

However, a corner of the board had been cut out and the metal strapping bent aside, creating a gap large enough for a boy, or a man as lean as John, to crawl through.

He ran up the steps and knelt by the opening. It appeared to have been gnawed by giant rats but was, no doubt, the work of beggars seeking shelter. Constantinople was too small for its populace. No space was allowed to go unused. Any place where rent was free attracted the homeless who scratched out a living, and often died, in dark corners and on the city streets.

A cool draught emanated from the building. John thought he could hear the fading sound of footsteps.

Then the boy was not lying in wait for him.

Others might be.

It would be folly for him to go in there.

He stilled his breathing and listened.

There was no sound.

He was certain no one was on the other side of the door. He had no sense of any other presence.

He took a handful of nummi from his coin pouch and flung them through the gap. The copper coins rang noisily against stone.

From within, there was no reaction. No intake of breath, no muffled sound of a weapon shifted, automatically, defensively. No scuffling for the coins.

John pulled his short blade from his belt, took a breath, and squeezed through the hole. A protruding nail ripped his robe from shoulder to waist, tearing a scrap of flesh with it.

He scrambled to his feet.

It was not entirely dark. Shafts of light, filtering through fissures in the derelict building above, criss-crossed a cavernous space interspersed with soaring columns. He was at the top of a flight of steps, matching in width those outside, but descending more steeply into darkness.

John’s foot touched something heavy and unyielding.

As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he realized it was one of several pieces of broken statuary-legs, a wing, and a horn such as the fabulous beasts described by Aristotle and Pliny might have displayed.

He started down the steps.

There was a movement in the darkness below.

Something pale. A mist. A phantom. It floated up toward him as he descended until it had resolved itself into a human form.

It was John’s reflection in water.

He stopped abruptly at the edge of the gleaming surface. The water stretched back past the rows of columns, smooth as a black basalt floor in the Great Palace.

His heart had begun to race harder than when he had been pursuing the boy.

He was not surprised to find himself in a cistern. It was a common enough use for the basements of abandoned buildings.

However, he would have preferred to confront an armed man, or even more than one wielding weapons. He could never look upon deep water without remembering a freezing stream in Bretania and a familiar face staring up at him from beneath its surface, eyes fixed and unseeing.

John fought the urge to flee back up the stairway.

A sword in the back, a knife slashing one’s throat-those were deaths he could face, but to drown was a horror past imagination.

Was that why he had been led here? To be overpowered and held under the water?

He would not go down to death without a struggle.

He looked around, gripping his blade tighter.

Little more than an arm’s length away a figure rose from the water.

This time John recognized it as statuary immediately. It was a stern Greek goddess, sculpted from green porphyry.

A few steps and John could see another statue, this one of reddish stone, lying face down, barely submerged, at the feet of the goddess.

John shuddered.

He felt an urge to turn the statue over, to remove its face from the terrible water.

It was a remarkably life-like work. Even in the dim light, the subtlety of the musculature in the naked form was apparent. And the sculptor had chiseled every strand of hair.

Long, red hair which spread out and floated on the water’s surface.

John bent and put his hand on the supine figure’s shoulder.

He felt cool flesh.

Carefully, he turned the woman over.

The water was so shallow at the cistern’s edge she might have escaped drowning, but she was dead nevertheless.

A welt circled her neck. John hoped she had in fact been strangled first, before her face was battered into an unrecognizable mask. The cheekbones had been smashed inwards, the nose crushed. The mouth was a gaping, twisted, toothless hole in the red stained ruin.

Yet she was not covered in blood.

Even had the woman been washed clean by immersion in the cistern, John knew, only too well, the color and smell of blood.

The woman had been dyed red from head to foot.

Why?

To conceal her identity?

The beating she had been given would have been more than sufficient to accomplish that.

John took hold of a delicate wrist and lifted it out of the water.

He saw what he had feared.

If he had not been looking for it, he would never have noticed because the dye had almost entirely concealed the tattoo. Only a faint shadow remained visible. Enough for John to recognize the scarab, overlain by a crude cross.

The same strange tattoo he had glimpsed the morning before, when she had raised her arm to push aside her veil.

The dead woman was Zoe.