Tom Harper: The mosaic of shadows

‘The arrow wasn’t fired from here,’ I said, to myself as much as to the captain who had thudded up behind me.

We mounted to the next level. Here woollen curtains hung from the ceiling, dividing the room into private spaces; I brushed through them, to the front of the building where more windows — shorter, now — again looked down onto the street. We were at some height, but still there was only a narrow gap between the edge of the arcade and the dome of Aelric’s helmet. I beckoned the captain to come and stand beside me.

‘Were you there when he was killed?’ I asked, naturally slowing my speech for the benefit of his foreign ears.

‘I was.’

‘And could you see — was he standing directly beside the Emperor’s horse?’

‘He was.’

‘And do you think,’ I persisted, ‘that an arrow could be fired from here and pass over something the height of a horse — and maybe its rider too — yet still strike a man standing in the horse’s shadow?’

The captain frowned as he stared out of the window. ‘Maybe not,’ he grunted. ‘But then I don’t know any arrow that would go through a coat of mail, whether a horse was in its path or otherwise. Ask the carver.’

‘I will,’ I said, more abruptly than was wise to this axe-bearing giant. ‘But first I want to examine the roof.’

‘The carver and his apprentices were on the steps outside when we found them,’ countered the captain. ‘None of them would have had time to get down from the roof so soon.’

‘Then maybe they weren’t responsible.’ I pushed through another curtain, into a back room where there stood a table and some stools, with a ladder leading to a trap door in the ceiling. Climbing swiftly, I shot back the bolt which held it fast and emerged, shivering, onto the roof. Broken only by low balustrades, it stretched to my left and right, joining together all the houses on this side of the Mesi in one elegant line. It would have been easy, I thought, for the assassin to escape down any of their stairs. Before me I could see Constantine the Great atop his column in the forum, only a little higher than I, and behind him the domes of Ayia Sophia, the church of holy wisdom. Wisdom, I thought, that I could well use.

Turning my eyes downwards, onto the street, I could see Aelric again, still standing impassive amid the thronging traffic. Though he seemed even smaller from this height, I could yet see much more of him than from below, even when others passed beside him. And likewise he me — he waved a salute as he noticed me peering down on him.

‘Yes,’ I murmured to myself. This was where you could have shot an arrow at the Emperor, and hit the ribs of a guardsman beyond by mistake. I knelt by the parapet which lined the edge of the roof. There were scratches in the stone, I saw with rising excitement — and there, just at the base of the wall where moss grew in the shaded cracks. .

‘Date stones?’ The Varangian captain had followed my eyes and caught what I had seen, a small scattering of date-palm seeds; now he tipped back his head and gave a great, bellowing laugh. It was not a comfortable sound.

‘Congratulations, Demetrios Askiates,’ he said, picking up one of the pips and tossing it in his free hand. ‘You’ve found a murderer who shoots like Ullr the huntsman, and has a taste for dried fruits. Miraculous!’

The captain stayed with me while I interviewed the carver and his family; I doubt it put them at their ease. The carver, a thin man with fine hands, trembled and stammered his way through a simple enough story: that he had been in his shop all morning, while the apprentices worked upstairs; that they had all three of them gone out to the arcade to watch the Emperor pass; and that they had been dumbfounded to be seized by the Varangians moments later — they had not even seen the soldier die, though they had noticed a commotion on the far side of the street. The carver chewed on his nails, twisting and tearing at them as he swore that he had locked the gate behind him, that nobody could have crept in while he was outside. His wife had been upstairs, he explained, and he had had thieves before, even on holy saints’ days curse them. Now, he said mournfully, he was forced to be ever vigilant. At that the Varangian captain snorted, which did nothing to soothe the carver.

The apprentices had little to add, though it took me the better half of an hour to establish so. They sat back sullenly on their stools and said nothing that was not prompted, regarding me for the most part with the inscrutable gaze of adolescence. Yes, they had been hard at work in the workshop before their master called them down to watch the procession — he was a fair man, they said, though demanding in his craft. He might have locked the door — they did not know, but he often did: he had a terror of thieves.

‘Was the door locked when you came in?’ I asked the captain, after I had dismissed the boys.

‘I wasn’t the first in. Aelric was.’

‘Can you ask him?’

The captain’s face, never reserved at the best of times, said plainly that he thought this a worthless task for an officer of the Emperor’s bodyguard, and I fancied he made even more noise than usual stamping down the stairs. I let it pass as the carver’s wife came into the room. She was younger than her husband, with a darker complexion and a fuller figure, though she dressed modestly and wore a scarf low over her face, casting her eyes in shadow. Her children were with her — two girls, very young, and a boy of about ten, none of whom would look at me. Behind them, I saw the dividing curtain twitch, and the carver’s two dusty feet protruding below the hem. Was he simply a jealous husband, I wondered, or were there secrets he did not want told?

I opened with an innocent enough question. ‘Are these all your children?’

‘Three of them,’ she said, so quietly that I strained to hear. ‘I have a son, apprenticed to another carver, a friend of my husband’s, and two married daughters.’

‘And you and your children were watching the parade from the window yesterday?’

She nodded silently.

‘Did you hear anyone else in the house at the time — someone mounting the stairs perhaps?’

She shook her head, then saw fit to add almost in a whisper, ‘No-one is allowed up here but the family. My husband is very strict on it.’

Between the ever-vigilant carver, the locked gate, and the family on the uppermost floor, Odysseus himself would have struggled to creep through this house.

‘And did you see — or hear — something that could have been an arrow loosed from near here?’ I pressed.

‘The procession caused much noise, much cheering and shouting.’ She frowned. ‘But perhaps there was a crack from above, just before the soldier fell across the road. As the Emperor was passing our window.’

‘A crack from above,’ I repeated. ‘Were you up on the roof at all yesterday morning? Hanging laundry or taking some air or. .’ I paused, hearing the distant sound of boots on the stairs. ‘Eating fruit?’

Another shake of the head. ‘We do not go onto the roof.’ It was as though Moses had commanded it thus on the stone tablets. ‘Urchins and vagabonds play there. Some of the other shopkeepers and craftsmen allow them up when they should not. We keep the roof-door bolted.’

The noise on the stairs reached a crescendo, and the Varangian captain came striding into the room, almost tearing the curtain from its hooks as he did so.

‘The gate was locked,’ he said abruptly; then, turning to face the cowering children and their mother: ‘Do you like dates?’

‘Whoever fired the arrow must have come up through one of the other buildings and along the roof,’ I told the captain. We were in the workshop, and I kicked up great clouds of bone shavings striding around the room in thought, while the Varangian leaned on the table and played with a small chisel that was like a toy in his hands.