Mary Reed: One for Sorrow

Thomas looked hesitant. “Should I wait here, Lord Chamberlain?”

“No one waits at Madam’s,” said Darius. He picked a mallet up from an ornate table and struck the brass gong behind him.

A girl with blonde hair piled high in the Greek fashion emerged from behind the curtains. She wore a short green tunic and was adorned in barbaric fashion with brass and green-stone necklaces and bracelets. Her cheeks and lips were painted and she carried a timbrel.

“Berta, we have a foreign visitor here, a guest of the Lord Chamberlain, who wishes an introduction to Roman culture.” As Darius spoke he relieved a fat newcomer of his dagger.

“Forgotten me already, Berta?” called the fat man as he passed, ducking between the curtains as the music grew louder.

Berta favored her admirer with the same studied lack of attention Empress Theodora might have given a whining cur seen from her carriage. The girl was, John guessed, all of fifteen. When she took Thomas’ hand the knight blushed but he also allowed himself to be led away.

John looked thoughtful. “The big fellow who just came in, wasn’t that the owner of the Inn of the Centaurs? I’m surprised he dares to stray so close to home.”

***

A thunderous bellow like the scream of the Great Bull when Mithra plunged his dagger into its neck reverberated around Madam Isis’ private quarters.

The horrific racket stopped when the plump Isis stepped back from a contraption set between two carved screens next to the window at the back of the room. A dozen gleaming bronze pipes of varied lengths rose from a polished wooden box on legs. There was a keyboard on the front of the box.

“It’s a portable organ,” Isis explained. “It’ll give me something to do now I’m retired, or at least semi-retired. I was playing it this morning to stop brooding over what happened last night.”

John realized the instrument was a miniature of the organs sometimes employed ceremonially at processions and in the Hippodrome. They were not permitted in churches. And no wonder.

Isis sat down beside John on a cushioned couch drawn up to a low table burdened with a jug of wine and filigree silver plates of fruit, nuts, and sweetmeats. “I do wish you would visit me more, John. But not under such circumstances.”

She was an Alexandrian with eyes as dark as her raven-colored hair. Belying her profession, she eschewed cosmetics. She invariably wore a lapis lazuli fertility amulet suspended from a thick gold necklace, which amused John. Fertility would be the last thing to cultivate in her line of business.

John declined the wine she proffered. Though usually abstemious Isis took a long drink, then occupied herself with a silver fruit knife, cutting a dried apple into neat segments. “Before you ask, I wasn’t able to learn anything about your friend Leukos. None of my guards or doorkeepers noticed such a man, and none of my girls tended to him either.”

“You must have been busy with the festivities. Would the girls have recalled him?”

“With that bald head? They would have giggled about it for days! They notice much smaller peculiarities than a shiny dome. Anything to relieve the tedium of the job.”

“So the closest Leukos got to your house was the alley where he was stabbed to death.”

Isis seemed to see the knife in her hand for the first time and set it down with a clink on the platter. She swallowed the apple segment she was chewing and almost choked.

“This murder has me so upset I can’t even eat,” she said, between coughs. “Wine….” Red, green, and blue fire blazed from elaborately worked rings as her chubby fingers rose through a shaft of dusty light falling across the room. Few but John would have noticed the thin gold marriage band worn in Egyptian fashion on the middle finger of the left hand. Isis had never revealed whether or not she was or had been married.

Isis took a gulp of wine. “That’s better. I would hate to be carried off by a piece of apple.”

“I appreciate your looking into this, even if there was nothing to learn.”

“Oh, but I only said no one had seen Leukos here. I did learn something. Not much, perhaps.” Her gaze met John’s.

He smiled. “I understand. Yes. What did you find out?”

“I remembered you asking whether the Inn of the Centaurs was nearby. I am guessing Leukos may have been on his way there.”

John said nothing.

“Anyway, last night there was a private affair at the palace put on by Theodora. Raising money for that pet project of hers, elevating streetwalkers to polite society. Ironic, isn’t it? There aren’t enough emperors around to elevate them all, like she was.” Isis sniggered quietly, recalling common rumors about the empress’ less than respectable past.

“And how do you know this?”

“Some of my girls attended. Berta’s been showing off this pendant she was given there. It’s got what they call a bloodstone, although actually it’s green. She dotes on green, you know. Anyway, she was boasting to the girls it was worth more than all the wealth in the city.”

Berta, John recalled, was the little blonde who had led Thomas away.

“I hired them out to dance. In a manner of speaking. And they also carried jugs of wine around,” Isis went on. “Supposed to be nymphs, you see. That was just Theodora’s unpleasant sense of humor, since for most of the ladies my girls served, they’d already served the husbands-and not just with wine.”

“And what is the connection with the Inn of the Centaurs?”

“There was a fortune teller there, some ghastly old man. A foreigner. Justinian will be furious if someone is foolish enough to mention it to him. Not quite the thing, is it, for barbarians to go about telling imperial fortunes? Mind you, it was quite all right in the old days when prophets did so for patriarchs.”

John recognized her description as the soothsayer. “He’s staying at the Inn of the Centaurs.”

Isis’ rosebud mouth formed a pout. “You already knew.”

“Not exactly. I know of the man but I didn’t know he was at the palace last night. Did Berta hear anything he said?”

“It was something about how the empress would shortly hold a great treasure in her hands. Well, even Berta could’ve predicted that! But then the powerful always hear the fortune they hope to hear, don’t they?”

“Yes, even barbarians want to keep their beards as they say, not to mention their heads.” John got off the couch.

“I’m sorry if you’ve had a wasted journey, John.”

“Not at all. At this point I know almost nothing about what went on last night. Anything I learn might turn out to be vital.”

Isis looked happier. “I always enjoy talking to you. Drop in when you don’t have to be here on business and we’ll talk about old times in Alexandria.”

Isis automatically included John in those bygone days, although they had not actually met in that teeming city.

“Certainly. But now I must continue about my business, and you yours.” He clicked a coin onto the table top. Friendship was friendship. Business was business.

As Keeper of the Plate, Leukos had performed his business in a more austere setting than Isis conducted hers. The palace’s administrative complex occupied a drab labyrinth of plaster-walled corridors and rooms decorated only with the occasional cross.

John had preferred meeting Leukos outside the keeper’s offices and now, as he made his way toward them, it was if he were walking back into his own past. He could hear his boots on the tiles. Footsteps in the halls of bureaucracy echo as hollowly as in a tomb.

The guards at the entrance stepped aside at John’s approach. Passing between them he entered a familiar open area scattered with desks and tables. The late afternoon sunlight slanting through barred windows striped the room with shadows as it had years ago. At the back the massive bronze door to the windowless storage vaults stood open. The air smelled of the vinegar that was mixed with clay to remove tarnish from silver. It completed the illusion that he had traveled back in time.