The Sheen of the Silk Read online

  “It is a stone in your bladder,” she told him. “If it passes it will hurt, but then it will be over.”

  “Thank you for your honesty,” he said quietly. “I will take the tincture and come back every day.”

  She gave him a tiny portion of her precious Theban opium. Sometimes she mixed it with other herbs such as henbane, hellebore, aconite, mandragora, or even lettuce seed, but she did not wish him to fall into unconsciousness, so she kept it pure.

  Basil returned regularly, and if she had no other patients, he often remained for a little while and they talked. He was an intelligent man of obvious education, and she found him interesting and likable. But beyond that, Anna hoped to learn something from him.

  She broached the subject at the beginning of the second week of his treatment.

  “Oh yes, I knew Bessarion Comnenos,” he said with a slight shrug. “He cared very much about this proposed union with the Church of Rome. Like everyone else, he hated the thought of the pope taking precedence over the patriarch here in Constantinople. Apart from the insult and our loss of self-governance, it is so impractical. Any appeal for permission, advice, or relief would take six weeks to get to the Vatican, however long it required for the matter to reach the pope’s attention, and then another six weeks to get back. By that time it could be too late.”

  “Of course,” she agreed. “And there is the question of money. We can ill afford to send our tithes and offerings to Rome.”

  He groaned so sharply that for a moment she was afraid his pain was physical.

  He smiled with apology. “We are in our own city again, but we balance on the brink of economic ruin. We need to rebuild, but we cannot afford to. Half our trade has gone to the Arabs, and now that Venice has robbed us blind of our holy relics, the pilgrims scarcely bother with us anymore.”

  They sat in the kitchen. She had made an herbal infusion of mint and camomile, and they were sipping it because it was still hot.

  “Added to which,” he went on, “there is the major issue of the filioque clause, which is the real sticking point. Rome teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, making them both equally God. We believe passionately that there is only one God, the Father, and to say otherwise is blasphemy. We cannot condone that!”

  “And Bessarion was against it?” she asked, although it was barely a question. Why would anyone think Justinian had killed him? It made no sense. He had always been Orthodox.

  “Profoundly,” Basil agreed. “Bessarion was a great man. He loved the city and its life. He knew that union with Rome would pollute the true faith and eventually destroy everything we care about.”

  “What was he going to do about it?” she said tentatively. “If he had lived…”

  Basil shrugged slightly. “I’m not sure that I know. He spoke well, but he did little enough. It was always ‘tomorrow.’ And as you know, tomorrow did not come for him.”

  “I heard he was murdered.” She found it difficult to say the words.

  Basil looked down at the table and his bony hands holding the cup of mint infusion. “Yes. By Antoninus Kyriakis. He was executed for it.”

  “And Justinian Lascaris, too?” she prompted. “Was there a trial?”

  He looked up. “Of course. Justinian was sent into exile. The emperor himself presided. It appears Justinian helped Antoninus dispose of the body so it might look like an accident. Actually I imagine they thought it would never be found.”

  She swallowed. “How did he do that? How can a body not be found?”

  “At sea. Bessarion’s body was discovered tangled in the ropes and nets of Justinian’s boat.”

  “But that could have been without his knowledge!” she protested. “Perhaps Antoninus didn’t have a boat, and simply took one!”

  “They were close friends,” Basil replied quietly. “Antoninus would not have implicated a man he knew so well when there were any number of other boats he could have taken.”

  It made no sense to Anna. “Was Justinian a man to leave evidence like that, condemning himself?” She knew the answer. She would never have made such a mistake, and neither would he. “Are they even sure Antoninus was guilty? Why would he kill Bessarion?”

  Basil shook his head. “I have no idea. Perhaps they quarreled; he fell overboard and panicked. It can be difficult trying to help someone who is thrashing around; they become as much a danger to others as they are to themselves.”

  Anna had a vision of Justinian losing his temper, striking more forcefully than he had intended. He was strong. Bessarion could have overbalanced. He would flail around in the water and be pulled down, gasping, crying out, drowning. Had Justinian panicked? Not unless he had changed beyond all recognition from the man she had known. He had never been a coward. And if he had intended to kill Bessarion, then he would not have cut the ropes, he would have stayed all night and found the body, then tied weights to it and rowed far out in the Bosphorus and let it sink forever.

  She felt a sudden sense of release. It was the first tangible evidence to grasp. She had facts, and even if she could not use them yet, they showed her brother’s innocence irrefutably to her. “It sounds like an accident,” she pointed out.

  “It’s possible,” Basil conceded. “Perhaps if it had been anyone else, they would have taken it as such.”

  “Why not for Bessarion?”

  Basil made a slight gesture of distaste. “Bessarion’s wife, Helena, is very beautiful. Justinian was a handsome man, and while he was religious, he was also imaginative, articulate, and had a dry and sharp sense of humor. He was a widower, and therefore free to follow his inclinations where they led him.”

  “I see…” Anna was a widow and held a hollow pain of loss inside her, too, but it was different. Eustathius’s death had been both a guilt and a release. He had been of good family, wealthy, a soldier of courage and skill. His lack of imagination bored her and eventually made her find him repugnant. And he had been brutal. She still felt nausea rise inside her at the memory. The emptiness within seemed as if it would fill her until it burst through her skin. She was incomplete, maybe as much as the eunuch she pretended to be.

  “You think that Justinian cared for Helena?” she asked incredulously. “Is that what people are saying?”

  “No.” Basil shook his head. “Not really. I should think a quarrel that got out of hand is more likely.”

  After he had gone, she examined her herb and general medicine store. She needed more opium. Theban was the best, but it was imported from Egypt and not easily obtained. She might have to settle for second quality. She also needed more black hyoscyamus, mandragora, juice of climbing ivy. She was low in such ordinary herbs as nutmeg, camphor, attar of roses, and a few other of the common remedies.

  The following morning, she set out to find a Jewish herbalist whose name she had heard recommended. Like all Jews, he lived across the Golden Horn in district thirteen, Galata. She took as much money as she could afford to spend and set out for the shore. Since having Basil as a patient, she was much better off than previously.

  It was hot already, even this early in the day. It was not a long walk, and she enjoyed the sound and bustle as people unloaded donkeys from the day’s trade. There was a pleasant smell of baking in the air and the salt breath up from the water.

  At the harbor, she waited until there was a taxi going across to Galata that she could share, and fifteen minutes later she was on the northern shore. Here it was even more run-down than the main city. Houses were in need of repair, windows were paned haphazardly with whatever was to hand. The shabbiness of poverty touched every street corner, and she saw people in unembroidered cloaks and tunics, and of course few horses. Jews were not allowed to ride them.

  After a few inquiries, she found the small, discreet shop of Avram Shachar, on the Street of the Apothecaries. She knocked on the door. It was opened by a boy of about thirteen, slender and dark, his features Semitic rather than Greek.

  “Yes?” he sai
d politely, caution edging his voice. Her fair skin, chestnut hair, and gray eyes would tell him she was unlikely to be of his own people; her robes and beardless face could belong only to a eunuch.

  “I am a physician,” she replied. “My name is Anastasius Zarides. I came from Nicea, and I need a supplier of herbs of wider origin than usual. Avram Shachar’s name was given me.”

  The boy opened the door wider and called out for his father.

  A man appeared from the back of the shop. He was perhaps fifty, his hair streaked with gray, his face dominated by dark, heavy-lidded eyes and a powerful nose. “I am Avram Shachar. How can I help you?”

  Anna mentioned the herbs she was short of, adding also ambergris and myrrh.

  Shachar’s eyes lit with interest. “Unusual needs for a Christian doctor,” he observed with humor. He did not say that Christians were not allowed to seek treatment from Jewish physicians, except with the special dispensation that was frequently granted to the rich and the princes of the Church, but his eyes said that he knew it.

  She smiled back. She liked his face. And the sharp yet delicate odors of the herbs brought back memories of her father’s rooms. Suddenly she was achingly lonely for the past.

  “Come in,” Shachar invited, mistaking her silence as reluctance.

  She followed him as he led the way to the back of the house and into a small room opening onto a garden. Cupboards and chests of carved wood lined three walls, and a worn wooden table stood in the center with brass scales and weights and a mortar and pestle. There were pieces of Egyptian paper and oiled silk in piles, and long-handled spoons of silver, bone, and ceramic set neatly beside glass vials.

  “From Nicea?” Shachar repeated curiously. “And you come to practice in Constantinople? Be careful, my friend. The rules are different here.”

  “I know,” she answered. “I use them”-she indicated the cupboards and drawers-“only when necessary to heal. I’ve learned all my saints’ days appropriate to every illness, and every season or day of the week.” She looked at him, searching his face for disbelief. She knew too much anatomy and far too much of Arabic and Jewish medicine to believe, as Christian doctors did, that disease was due solely to sin, or that penitence would cure it, but it was not something the wise said aloud.

  There was a flicker of understanding in Shachar’s eyes, but the dark, subtle amusement did not reach his lips. “I can sell you most of what you need,” he said. “What I do not have, perhaps Abd al-Qadir can supply.”

  “That would be excellent. Do you have Theban opium?”

  He pursed his lips. “That is one for Abd al-Qadir. Do you need it urgently?”

  “Yes. I have a patient I am treating and I have little left. Do you know a good surgeon if the stone does not pass naturally?”

  “I do,” he replied. “But give it time. It is not good to use the knife if it can be avoided.” He worked as he spoke, weighing, measuring, packing things up for her to take, everything carefully labeled.

  When he was finished, she took the parcel and paid him what he asked.

  He studied her face for a few moments before making his decision. “Now let us see if Abd al-Qadir can help you with the Theban opium. If not, I have some that is less good, but still perfectly adequate. Come.”

  Obediently she followed, looking forward to meeting the Arab physician and wondering if perhaps he was the surgeon Shachar would recommend for Basil. How would her very Greek patient accept that? Perhaps it would not be necessary.

  Five

  ZOE CHRYSAPHES STOOD AT THE WINDOW OF HER FAVORITE room and stared across the rooftops of the city to where the sunlight streamed onto the Golden Horn till the water was like molten metal. Her hands caressed the stones in front of her, still warm in the last glow of the day. Constantinople was spread out below her like a jeweled mosaic. The ancient magnificence of the Aqueduct of Valens was behind her, its arches sweeping in from the north like a Titan from the Roman past, an age when Constantinople was the eastern pillar of an empire that ruled the world. The Acropolis, far to the right, was far more Greek and therefore more comfortable to her, her language, her culture. Although its great days had been before she was born, the elderly woman still felt a pride in the thought of it.

  She could see the tops of the trees that hid the ruins of the Bukoleon Palace, where her father had taken her as a child. She tried to bring back those bright memories, but they were too far away and slipped out of her grasp.

  The radiance of the setting sun momentarily hid the squalor of the unmended walls, covering their scars with a veil of gold.

  But Zoe never forgot the pain of the enemy invasion, of ignorant and careless feet trampling what had once been beautiful. She looked at the city now and saw it as exquisite and defiled, but still throbbing with a passion to taste every last drop of life and drain it to the lees.

  The light was kind to her. She was past seventy, but the skin was smooth over her cheekbones. Her golden eyes were shadowed and hooded under her winged brows. Her mouth had always been too wide, but the curve of it was full. The luster of her hair was less than it had been and closer to brown than chestnut-there was only so much that herbs and dyes could do-but it was still beautiful.

  She stared a few moments longer at the glittering skyline of Galata as the torches were lit. The east was fading rapidly, and the harbor was masked in purple. The spires and domes were sharper against the enamel blue of the sky. In thought she communed with the heart of the city, that part of it that was more than palaces or shrines, more even than the Hagia Sophia or the light on the sea. The soul of Constantinople was alive, and that was what she had seen raped by the Latins when she was a small child.

  As the sun slid behind the low clouds and the air grew suddenly cold, she turned away at last. She stepped back into the room and its dazzling torchlight. She could smell the tar burning, see the faint shimmer of the flames in the draft. Between two of the finest tapestries in dark reds, purples, and umber, there was a gold crucifix more than a foot’s length from top to bottom. She walked over and stood in front of it, staring at the Christ in agony. It was exquisitely wrought: Every fold of His loincloth, the sinews of His limbs, His face hollowed by pain, all were perfect.

  Gently she reached up, eased it off its hook, and held it in her hands. She did not need to look at it, knowing as she did every line and shadow of the images on each of the four arms. Her fingers felt them now, going over them softly, like faces of those she loved; except that it was hate that moved Zoe, the envisioning over and over again of revenge: exquisite, slow, and complete.

  On the top, above the Christ, was the family emblem of the Vatatzes, who had ruled Byzantium in the past. It was green, with a double-headed eagle in gold, above each head a silver star. They had betrayed Constantinople when the crusaders had come, fleeing the invaded city and taking with them priceless icons, not to save them from the Latins, but to sell for money. They had run like cowards, thieving from the holy sanctuaries as they went, abandoning to fire and the sword what they could not carry.

  On the right arm was the emblem of the Doukas family, also rulers until more recently. Their arms were blue, with an imperial crown, a two-headed eagle with a silver sword in each claw; they were traitors as well, plunderers of those already robbed, homeless, and helpless. They would know in time what it was to starve.

  On the left arm was the emblem of the Kantakouzenos, an imperial family older still; their arms were red, with the double-headed eagle in gold. They had been greedy, blasphemous, without honor or shame. To the third and fourth generation, they would pay. Constantinople did not forgive the violation of her body or her soul.

  On the main trunk, against which hung the figure of Christ, was the emblem of the worst of them all, the Dandolo of Venice. Their coat of arms was just a simple lozenge horizontally halved, white above, red below. It was Doge Enrico Dandolo, over ninety years old and blind as a stone, who had stood in the prow of the leading ship of the Venetian fleet, impatient to inv
ade, despoil, and then burn the Queen of Cities. When no one else had had the courage to be the first ashore, he had leapt down onto the sand, sightless and alone, and charged forward. The Dandolo family would pay for that as long as the scorch marks of ruin scarred the stones of Constantinople.

  She heard a sound behind her, a clearing of the throat. It was Thomais, her black serving woman, with her close-cropped head and beautiful, fluid grace. “What is it?” Zoe asked without taking her eyes off the cross.

  “Miss Helena has come to see you, my lady,” Thomais replied. “Shall I ask her to wait?”

  Zoe carefully replaced the cross on the wall and stepped back to regard it. Over the years since her return from exile, she had put it back up there hundreds of times, always perfectly straight.

  “Walk slowly,” Zoe replied. “Fetch her a glass of wine, then bring her here.”

  Thomais disappeared to obey. Zoe wanted to keep Helena waiting. Her daughter should not simply walk in at a whim and expect Zoe to be available. Helena was Zoe’s only child, and she had molded her carefully, from the cradle; but no matter what she achieved, Helena would never outwit or outwill her mother.

  Several minutes later, Helena entered quietly, smoothly. Her eyes were angry. Her respect was in her words, not in the tone of her voice. As was obligatory, she still wore mourning for her murdered husband, and she looked with some resentment at Zoe’s amber-colored tunic, its flowing lines accentuated by the height that Zoe had and she did not.

  “Good evening, Mother,” she said stiffly. “I hope you are well?”

  “Very, thank you,” Zoe replied with a slight smile of amusement, not warmth. “You look pale, but then mourning is designed to do that. It is appropriate that a new widow should look as if she has been weeping, whether she has or not.”

  Helena ignored the remark. “Bishop Constantine came to see me.”

  “Naturally,” Zoe responded, sitting down with easy grace. “Considering Bessarion’s status, it is his duty. He would be remiss if he didn’t, and other people would notice. Did he say something interesting?”