Two for Joy

Chapter Seventeen

Lucretia awoke in darkness to the sound of muffled thunder.

Someone was pounding at the front door of Nonna’s apartment building. Balbinus? Her heart leapt, an animal trying to escape from a trap. It’s only a nightmare, Lucretia told herself. How many times had she had that same awful dream since fleeing her husband?

A sleepy tenant shouted from a window below, castigating the nocturnal caller for waking everyone in the house. The visitor replied with a yet more inventive string of curses. Familiar curses, bellowed in a familiar voice.

As Nonna stirred sleepily nearby, Lucretia dressed in frantic haste, grabbing the first clothing her hand encountered in the dark. She ran out on to the landing, her mind still dazed with sleep.

There was a door at the back of the building’s first floor. If she reached it quickly enough she could escape before the argument going on at the front of the house was finished. Running downstairs in a panic, she caught the toe of her sandal on a loose board and fell heavily to the floor on the landing.

From below came the rattle of a bolt drawn, the bang of the front door flung open. More shouting. More foul language. For an instant she was paralyzed, huddled on the floor by the door to the communal lavatory. Terrible words she had hoped never to hear again came booming up the stair well.

Heavy footsteps pounded upwards.

Lucretia pushed herself to her feet. No time to escape now. She jerked open the lavatory door and crouched down in the cramped, malodorous cubicle. Insults continued to be shouted upstairs after Balbinus. His footsteps crossed the landing, past her temporary sanctuary.

As soon as she heard him rapping at the door of Nonna’s room on the floor above, Lucretia flung herself downstairs and escaped out the front door. Her heart pounded faster than her feet on the slippery cobbles as she dashed into the alley across the street, heedless of danger, seeking any concealment she could find.

With laboring breath, she traversed the dark length of the narrow way and ran across the open space beyond. Torches guttered here and there at shuttered shop fronts. Down another street she went, pulling away in fright from the grasping hand of a woman sitting in a doorway, and finally stumbled into a marketplace.

Boisterous stallholders were already setting out wares for their expected customers, comparing competitors’ offerings in the light of torches, loudly finding them the worst rubbish they had ever had the misfortune to observe and having little better to say about each other’s ancestors and sexual practices.

She glanced back down the shadowed street from which she just emerged. Was that someone running after her? She whirled and fled, straight into the side of an ox cart.

The next thing she knew she was being dragged to her feet. She tried to pull away, lashing out toward her captor’s face at the same time. A strong hand gripped her wrist.

“Stop it! I’m not going to hurt you!”

It was a ruddy faced carter, about her age or perhaps a year or two younger.

“Where are you running to, lady?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” Lucretia stammered. “I was just careless…”

“A lady wouldn’t be roaming the streets at this hour without good reason. You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

Lucretia protested feebly that it was not so, but the carter would not be convinced. It struck her that he was young enough to grasp eagerly at the adventurous prospect of assisting a pretty woman in obvious distress without giving much thought to the possible consequences. Certain that her husband would burst into the marketplace at any moment she blurted out her destination.

The carter grinned. “Well, there’s a miracle for you! I’m just on my way to that very shrine!”

As he quickly cleared a space for her amid the sacks of onions and amphorae of olive oil piled in his cart, he pointed out that those encamped out there needed to eat and have light just like everyone else. “I do well enough from their trade,” he went on, “even though I charge a bit less than some, what with them being pilgrims and all.”

Lucretia thanked the young man. She did not reveal that although she had contemplated joining Michael’s followers she also feared what that would entail-cutting herself off forever from her former life, from her friends and family. Her mind had finally been made up only when Balbinus arrived bellowing at the house door.

As soon as she was safely aboard, the carter urged his ox forward.

“It could be good for future business too,” he shouted back to her loudly enough to be heard over the rattling of wheels, “since they’ll remember their friends if they should take over the city. And it might help me in the afterlife as well, you never know. Yes, it’s certainly been excellent for trade, although not so good for public order. There’s an uneasy feeling in the air, fermenting like demon’s wine as you might say, but isn’t that usually the case? Always somebody stirring up trouble, always somebody else suffering for it.” He was quite the philosopher, it seemed.

“But,” he went on, “although personally I don’t know what to make of it all, there’s a lot of talk when the wine jug’s been emptied a few times about how things will be different when Michael’s in charge. I’ll believe that when I see it, though.”

Before long they had passed out of the city gates. The guards scarcely glanced at the heavily loaded cart. They were obviously concerned not with who might be openly leaving the city but rather with those trying to enter it by stealth.

Lucretia suppressed a startled cry as she was jolted awake by the sudden, lurching halt of the cart. She had been dozing uneasily, and peering warily over its side was relieved to see neither her husband nor a pursuing Prefect. There was, however, a white-haired man lying a short distance away beside the unruly line of brush running along the edge of a field.

Her benefactor was already investigating. Lucretia leaned forward, staring. Surely the man on the ground had not been set about by robbers? Even from a distance, she could see from his rough clothes and malnourished look he had nothing worth stealing. Dark patches of blood stained his tunic. Perhaps he had been beaten for the sport of it?

Helped into a sitting position, the old man spoke for a time but Lucretia could not hear what was being said.

When he returned to her side, the young carter looked grim. “Nothing to be afraid of here, lady. But there’s been an attack at the shrine. He says he barely escaped with his life.”

Lucretia asked who could have been responsible for such a terrible act.

Her companion spat into the dust. “Our beloved emperor sent a company of excubitors. Apparently they showed up before dawn. Their captain ordered the pilgrims to get out while they still could. Most of them did, scattered like leaves in the wind, it seems. Not much faith there, you may say, but what is faith against the sword? Still, it seems there were plenty who wouldn’t, who wanted to defend their precious Michael so that poor old fellow told me.”

Lucretia paled. “What happened?” she asked, knowing what the answer would be.

The answer was as stark and simple as she had expected. “A massacre. He doesn’t know what happened to Michael but thinks he probably escaped disguised as one of his own followers.” He spat again. “Not but what apparently some of them pilgrims gave good accounts of themselves. There’s more than one of Justinian’s men who isn’t going to be marching back to Constantinople to get drunk or go wenching tonight-or any other night.”

“Is that old man badly hurt?” Lucretia asked, noting that he had remained seated on the ground.

“It’s only a scalp wound, looks worse than it is,” was the dismissive reply. “He probably got a quick cut just to remind him unorthodoxy is severely frowned upon. He was lucky.”

From her uncomfortable position Lucretia looked along the narrow road pointing back toward the city.

“So,” the carter was saying, “do you want to ride back with me? There’s no use going there now. The only people left at the shrine are either dead or wounded or excubitors, and what with all them soldiers being there, to be blunt, well, it could be dangerous for you, you know how it is…” He trailed off.

“If everyone else has run away help will be needed with the wounded,” Lucretia said firmly. “I will go on.”

“It’s a mistake, it really is,” he replied with a frown, “and I hope you don’t live to regret it.”

Lucretia watched the cart rattle out of sight towards the city. The Bosporos was hidden from this stretch of road but the fog rising from its hidden waters sent white, wispy fingers inland to clutch damply at her.

She had no choice, she told herself, wiping away her tears. She must continue onward, despite the fact that her only refuge had now been destroyed.

Trudging down the narrow road, she wondered briefly if Nonna had sent someone from the building to notify Balbinus of where his wife could be found. Doubtless coins changed hands. Would her old nursemaid have betrayed her? It seemed the only explanation, for there were thousands of doors in Constantinople, too many to bring Balbinus knocking at that particular one by chance.

And, of course, Nonna always knew best, she thought with a grim smile, just as she had always known what was best for Lucretia all through her childhood. And Nonna thought that Lucretia was dishonoring her family by fleeing and, yes, it was possible that the strict old woman had taken steps to ensure that Lucretia took the right, the honorable course. Unless, perhaps, Balbinus had finally gone to her father and discovered her possible whereabouts. She could imagine the sort of statements her father would have made when he was informed of her flight. Duty would doubtless have been the first thing mentioned.

“A dutiful daughter,” she chanted softly to herself, as she plodded along the road, through the mist. “A dutiful wife. A dutiful daughter. A dutiful wife…”

The sun had burnt off the fog by the time she neared the shrine. During her journey, several groups of pilgrims had rushed by her, going in the opposite direction. There were also groups of men who did not appear to belong to the military, being unarmored and dressed in plain tunics, and yet they carried swords or spears. They seemed to take no notice of her but when, looking back over her shoulder from the crest of a rise along the way, she glimpsed a large band of such men moving toward her destination, she was grateful that they quickly outpaced her and vanished around a bend in the road. Perhaps they were arriving to reinforce the excubitors already holding the shrine, or, she thought, her stomach churning, perhaps they had been sent out to hunt down such acolytes as had escaped from their clutches.

Limping as she crested the final hill before the shrine, she gasped in shock and horror.

Where during Michael’s sermons there had been a pool of humanity filling the space in front of the building, there was now only a scene of desolation. Bodies lay strewn across the trampled grass. A few excubitors paced around, poking at the fallen with their swords. Some of their colleagues assisted wounded comrades. The small group of acolytes clustered at the foot of the steps leading up to the shrine’s columned portico were under heavy guard. Lucretia fervently thanked the Lord that she could not see Michael among the captives.

Surely they were not going to murder the survivors, she thought, looking again at the excubitors prodding swords at the figures on the ground.

From here and there on what must have lately resembled a slaughtering pen rather than a battlefield, an occasional hoarse shout rose to hang on the morning air. At each shout, one of the fallen was quickly picked up by a pair of brawny excubitors and carried, none too tenderly, into the shrine. So they were finding and tending to the living, she thought. She could be of assistance after all. That had been her first impulse. What she would do afterwards, where she would go, she couldn’t say.

“Guard me, Lord, and keep me safe,” she prayed softly, not certain if she feared detection by her pursuing husband more than the possibility of assault. She quickly walked down the hill.

Soon she was stooping, checking those lying in her path. The first person she found alive was a woman holding her gashed arm, lying on her back staring blank-eyed into the morning sky.

“Tear a strip off your tunic and bind your wound,” Lucretia urged her. “Then come and help with the others.”

The woman smiled benignly, patting Lucretia’s arm with a bloody hand. “But of course I will, my dear. Just as soon as Michael heals me.”

Lucretia looked around in desperation. “I don’t see him here. He could be dead. He may have run away.”

The woman’s smile broadened. “Oh, no, not him,” she contradicted, looking at Lucretia with obvious pity for such lack of faith. “No, he would never abandon us, my dear. Why, we followed him all the way from Sinope. Yes, me and my husband left what little we had. My husband. Where…” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Where is my husband? Is he dead?”

The woman scrambled to her feet and began a frantic search, rolling bodies over to look at their faces. Lucretia trudged after her. One or two other women appeared, also obviously seeking loved ones, stony-faced shuttles weaving back and forth across a tapestry of agony.

Flies were already buzzing at the feast. From here and there came soft whimperings of pain, a muttered curse, fragments of prayers. One woman discovered her lover, another her child, the one still living, the other dead.

Lucretia arrived at the shrine. The acolytes had been herded into the building, from which the sound of low chanting now emerged. Several excubitors sat on the steps. Silent, heads hanging, they stared at the marble beneath their feet with that blank gaze of the physically and emotionally exhausted.

Lucretia looked up at them. They had murdered her only chance of escape. It was suddenly too much for her to bear.

“You call yourself brave men, you call yourself heroes!” she screamed. “You miserable excuses for men, you filthy bastards! Creeping about in the night to do Justinian’s foul work!”

She could not stop her tirade. All the bitterness and anger and fear of the past few days fueled it as she berated the group of excubitors staring down at her as if she had been suddenly struck insane.

“You’ve murdered women! Children, babies even!” she shrieked, wild-eyed. “Pilgrims, people who had done you no harm! May the fire from heaven strike you down! May it roast your eyes out while you live to endure its agonies! May you die of the pox! And may Justinian suffer every agony he and that whore of a wife of his have brought down upon these innocent people, suffer them ten times over!” Her voice had risen to screaming so shrill that, fortunately for her, her words could hardly be understood.

One of the men leapt down the steps and grabbed her tightly by her elbows, fingers digging painfully into her flesh. “Be quiet, you fool!” He shook her roughly. “You’ll cause yourself trouble.”

Lucretia spat in his face. “Ah, so the murderer fears trouble, does he? From an unarmed woman! You coward! What would your mother think, to see her son carrying out the devil’s work?”

The man dealt her a hard slap. His companions started to laugh, calling out obscene suggestions.

Her stinging face brought Lucretia to her senses as the man began dragging her away toward the edge of the grassy space, where bushes clustered along the banks of a small stream. The coarse laughter of his companions followed them, growing louder as Lucretia struggled to escape his grip. He stopped and struck her again, a harder slap. She jerked away and darted around him. His companions’ bawdy shouts changed into jeering. Two of them stood to follow with obvious purpose.

But the man was fast on his feet. He caught Lucretia easily and turned triumphantly back toward his companions. “Stay where you are,” he shouted at the two men approaching. “Find your own prize. This one’s mine and I don’t need your help with it.” He then proceeded to describe in particularly foul detail exactly what he didn’t need their help with.

Lucretia screamed again, provoking another burst of laughter from the two excubitors, who nonetheless went back to their perch on the shrine’s steps.

The man threw Lucretia roughly down behind the bushes.

Before she could think, he was bending over her, his breath hot on her face. “Leave, woman! Go before you get hurt!”

She gazed up at him, dumbfounded. He knelt down beside her. “Don’t you understand? We didn’t kill any women or children. Our captain ordered the pilgrims to go. They were permitted to leave unharmed. The ones who stayed…”

“But I saw children dead on the grass, there were children…”

“In panicked flight people get hurt, children most of all. Most of the pilgrims fled, fortunately for them since our captain’s wounded and has lost a lot of blood. I doubt he can keep order now and not all of my comrades were pleased to see the women escape. A couple weren’t too happy to see the children get away either.” Deep disgust was displayed on his face and in his voice.

Lucretia sat up. The bushes shielded them from sight of the shrine. As the man had dragged her boastfully away she thought she had understood his intent perfectly, but this odd behavior confused her.

“But what you shouted you were going to do just now…why would you want to help me?” she asked suspiciously.

“It is not a Mithran’s way to force a woman. Now, leave.”

“But what about Michael? Is he dead?”

“He wasn’t with those we cornered inside the shrine,” was the reply. “But if he’s dead, at least he chose to stand and fight.”

“You’re lying! He escaped and you know it. I saw your men on the road. They were looking for him, weren’t they?”

The excubitor denied her accusation.

Lucretia grabbed his arm. “But I saw armed men coming in this direction,” she insisted.

Shouts came from the road as she spoke. Alarm washed over her companion’s face. He peered through the concealment of the thick bushes toward the road.

Lucretia looked over his shoulder.

An angry crowd was pouring down the hill. Among them she saw some of the simply dressed but well-armed men she had seen along the road.

The excubitor cursed. His companions at arms were already jumping up, reaching for their weapons. Even Lucretia, totally unskilled in military matters, immediately realized her rescuer’s concerns. This was a different situation altogether.

Before Lucretia could gather her thoughts she heard a familiar voice drifting across the open space.

Michael was standing on the brow of the hill. From where they crouched, she could not hear exactly what he was shouting.

It didn’t matter. He was alive!

More excubitors emerged from the shrine, moving quickly to take up their positions, shaking off their weariness. The scattered group of exhausted soldiers was again transforming itself into a fighting unit.

Several acolytes appeared in the portico of the shrine.

“I must rejoin my comrades immediately,” her companion said, unsheathing his sword.

Lucretia pointed out that they were outnumbered at least ten to one.

“But we are Justinian’s men and they are just a rabble,” he replied.

It was then that Michael raised his hands to the heavens.

A lightning bolt seemed to strike the foot of the shrine’s stairs, sending gouts of flame toward the cloudless sky. Two excubitors broke formation, slapping at the flames crackling along their arms.

A second bolt exploded against the side of the shrine.

Now the mob of pilgrims was running, surging across the open space, shrieking and waving weapons with most unholy intent as they trampled over dead and wounded alike in their haste to attack the excubitors.

Lucretia saw nothing more. After the man who had rescued her raced off to carry out his duty, she covered her ears and cowered down behind the sheltering bushes, trying to blot out the sound of hoarse oaths and screams and all the obscene sounds of a battle that was soon over.

When a terrible silence fell, she raised her head, weeping. She had come here seeking refuge and had found only hell instead.