Mary Reed: Four for a Boy

June 540 A.D.

Sweet perfume wafted briefly from drifts of rose petals strewn on the marble floor of the Great Church as a procession paced majestically into the sacred building.

The lengthy contingent of court dignitaries and guards passed through a wide doorway constructed of wood the faithful believed to be from Noah’s Ark, and came to a halt in front of the Patriarch and a flock of lesser clergy waiting to greet them.

Following a few paces behind the emperor and empress, John glanced rapidly around. Hundreds of lamps filled the vast space with lambent illumination. His gaze skimmed over the huge church’s countless columns of green, pink, and white marble topped with lacy carvings and adorned with imperial monograms, the silver, gold, and glittering gems decorating the altar and sacred vessels, and the equally colorful ranks of courtiers dressed in their finest silks and embroidered robes.

It was difficult to believe that this soaring edifice had been completed less than a handful of years before, replacing the former Great Church destroyed by rioting mobs. This glorious, light-filled building seemed more a creation of angels than men.

From above came a faint fluttering of wings. A nesting bird disturbed by the commotion. Or perhaps, John thought wryly as a dove feather drifted down like a lazy snowflake, the Holy Spirit had decided to attend the ceremony.

John had organized the route from the palace and ensured that all participants were in their proper places. Now that the imperial couple and their entourage had entered the Great Church, his task was done for the present. As he took his place among the official observers, he noted the contingent of Ostrogoths standing a few paces from the altar. What did they think about this service of thanksgiving for the fall of Ravenna, a great triumph in Justinian’s war to regain Italy from their countrymen?

The Patriarch stepped forward to greet the procession with formal and flowery phrases. Emperor Justinian regarded him with a slight smirk while Empress Theodora maintained a neutral expression, her eyes dark as the black veins in the marble floor.

John glanced down at the petals. He no longer contemplated the political or religious significance of the ceremony. Nor was he recalling the lost glory of the empire Justinian sought to reclaim.

Instead, he remembered a woman.

Had it been fifteen years since he had tutored her? It seemed much longer than that. Then he had been an insignificant palace slave. Now he was commonly referred to as John the Eunuch, or more formally as Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian.

He shifted his feet slightly. Fragrance wafted upward like a wraith from the roses crushed beneath his boots.

Roses always reminded him of Lady Anna.

January 525 A.D.

The swaggering and elegant young thugs who styled themselves the Blues had terrorized Constantinople for months. They had driven their rivals, the Greens, from the streets. Now their target was the populace.

As John escorted Lady Anna along the Mese he kept watch for possible ambush. The well honed alertness of the mercenary he had been in another life had never deserted him. So far, however, the colonnaded thoroughfare that ran from the heart of Constantinople to its defensive walls had revealed no dangers.

The shops crowded along both sides of the wide street boasted only a handful of customers that morning. The purveyors of pottery and glass, cloths both fine and inexpensive, spices, olives, and cooking oils, peered out disconsolately from their emporiums. The smells of their wares were as enticing as ever, John thought. It was hard to say whether the sparse number of pedestrians was due to the civil unrest or the wintry weather.

Two ill dressed boys, breath steaming in the cold, raced recklessly across the Mese.

“Take care, Lady Anna,” John murmured. He stepped nimbly into the path of the urchins, deflecting their careening course away from his companion. The boys shouldered him insolently as they went by and ran into an alley. There they paused only long enough to taunt a beggar huddled in a doorway. The unfortunate man clutched closer to his chest the largesse of the state. To the usual loaf of bread the authorities had added a small lump of meat. It was another reason for those dependent on the emperor’s generosity to refrain from rioting against their benefactor.

Lady Anna noticed the ragged man crouched in his makeshift shelter and turned her head away. Her shoulders trembled beneath the thick yellow woolen cloak hanging from her angular form. Perhaps, John thought, it was nothing more than a reaction to the frigid wind. There was enough tragedy on public display every day in Constantinople to make even the kindest hearts weary of grieving.

Shouted curses pulled John’s attention from the beggar to a gang of workmen laboring to repair a broken column on a colonnade just down the street. The chill lying on the still air served to amplify sounds even as it suppressed the familiar marshy tang of the sea, a smell now overlaid with the sharply acrid scent of smoke from a thousand braziers heating the city’s shops and dwellings.

Cold seeped through the leather soles of John’s boots. “To the Great Church, lady?” he inquired quietly of his companion.

Lady Anna looked up at him, her plain, thinlipped face animated by a lively look of interest. Though she was unbecomingly tall for a woman, her lean escort was much taller.

“Yes, indeed. Everyone tells me the new installation there is a wonder, but I intend to judge for myself before the Patriarch is convinced that it should be removed as blasphemous. Or these rampaging mobs father keeps warning me about set the church on fire.” They had come to the Augustaion. Anna inclined her head toward a stolid, brick basilica across the nearly deserted square.

“As you order.” John glanced keenly around again.

Snow had floured the city overnight. Dark imprints left by booted human feet formed purposeful paths over the faint, meandering trails of foraging seagulls. A few of the large birds squawked noisily and took to the sky as John and Anna intruded on their search for food.

As the couple stepped briskly forward, John remembered crossing frozen fields in Bretania, tilting his head toward their bordering forest, heart racing, listening for the stealthy hiss of steel drawn from scabbards. There was danger in Constantinople too, but of a different sort. The enemies here were alien to John. Not military men. Not Persians or Picts, but fashionably dressed young men, racing fans, more familiar with chariot tactics on the Hippodrome track than battlefield formations. The blades they wielded were as sharp as any Persian weapon, and the factions were ready to defend the honor of their favorite racing teams with all the ferocity of warriors defending a border.

Or to turn their ferocity on the innocent.

Suddenly one of the few other figures visible, a man shrouded in a black cloak, changed direction and walked purposefully toward them.

John’s hand fastened on the hilt of his blade, but as the man drew nearer realized he was not a Blue. His gold-trimmed, heavily embroidered cloak was certainly ostentatious enough to please any member of that faction, but he did not sport voluminous sleeves or their Hunnic hairstyle, shaved in front and long in the back.

The man was short but solidly built with a smooth, square jaw and close-cropped black hair. He was also, it turned out, known to Anna.

“Trenico!” she said. “What a surprise! You’ve been to see the notorious statue, I wager!”

The man stopped an arm’s length from John. He contrived to look through him in an insultingly obvious fashion and gave Lady Anna a stiff bow.