Tom Harper - The mosaic of shadows

‘Luck.’ Anna snorted, not at all like a lady. ‘If you are trusting to luck, Demetrios, then you are a bigger fool even than I thought.’ She pulled her fingers through her hair, and seemed to relent a little. ‘Are you really so desperate to keep him away from your daughters?’

Despite all the gravity of the moment, I laughed. ‘I would be grateful if you did not tell Helena. But I cannot force Thomas to do anything against his will, so I had better speak with him myself.’

Reluctantly, Anna acquiesced. She led me across the monastery courtyard to the kitchen door, where the sweet smell of baking bread mingled with smoke and the scent of onions. The aromas played on my stomach, for I had not yet eaten; they also reminded me of another cause for my visit.

‘Anna,’ I called, stopping her just before the door. ‘Before we speak to Thomas, I had almost forgotten: I wondered whether you would come for supper with me. And the girls,’ I added hastily, lest I seem too suggestive. ‘Perhaps on some evening in the next fortnight, before the fast of Great Lent constrains my hospitality.’

Anna turned and eyed me with suspicion. She wore a reddish-brown dalmatica today, its inexpert dying giving the effect of woodgrain, or mottled leaves. It was tied over her hips with the silken cord she always wore, and the breeze in the courtyard blew the skirt close against her thighs.

‘I accept your invitation,’ she told me. ‘But if you are merely trying to corrupt me into agreeing with your wicked plan, then you will fail.’

‘It’s neither for you to agree or otherwise. Thomas will decide.’

Thomas was in the kitchen, stirring a simmering pot of beans without enthusiasm, while a monk sat on the stairs and read at him from a dust-worn Bible. He scowled at the sight of Anna and slammed his book shut, locked the clasps and climbed the stairs out of the room.

‘It happens often,’ said Anna, without offence. ‘Some of them do not like having a woman within their walls, and all of them fear what might happen if they were found alone with her.’

‘Their misfortune.’

Thomas looked up from his cauldron as we approached. He gave a shy smile on seeing Anna, a broader smile on seeing that the monk had departed, and a nervous frown on seeing me. He let go of his ladle, and cursed fluently as it slid beneath the oozy surface of his broth. I doubted he had learned that expression from being lectured out of a Bible.

‘Demetrios has come.’ Anna spoke slowly. ‘He wants to ask you something.’

I pushed past a row of iron pots to stand beside her. ‘I have news of the monk.’ I paused to see if he had understood me. From the way his eyes stilled and his cheek twitched, I guessed he had. ‘We think he is in a big camp of barbar. . of your people, outside the walls of our city.’

Thomas glanced hesitantly at Anna, who added a few words in his natural tongue.

‘I want you to go there and find him.’

For a long time Thomas remained silent, while the pot beside him bubbled, and spat its liquid into the air. Some of it landed on his tunic but he did not seem to notice.

‘If I go, he kills me,’ he said at last.

I shook my head. ‘No. You find where he lives. Then you go to the house of my friend.’ My fervour hastened my words, and I had to concentrate to rein them in again. ‘He will protect you, and send us your news. Then we will come with many soldiers and catch the monk, and lock him in the dungeon.’

Again Anna spoke in the barbarian language. I kept my eyes on Thomas, hoping Anna did not take advantage of my ignorance to dissuade him. Thomas replied in kind, hunching his shoulders and gesticulating with his arms; I felt a growing anger that I was barred from their arguments.

‘I go.’

Coming at the end of a string of foreign sounds, I failed to realise that Thomas had reverted to Greek until he had repeated himself.

‘I go.’

‘You will go?’

He nodded, uncertainly.

‘Good. Very good.’

‘And when he returns, he will be free to go where he pleases, to return to Frankia or stay in Constantinople or settle in the empire, whichever.’ Anna stared at me with steel in her eyes. ‘You promise that.’

‘I promise.’ I would wonder how to persuade Krysaphios to honour that promise later, if the boy delivered the monk into our hands, and if he did not desert to his kinsmen.

If he lived long enough.

We stood by the Adrianople gate, shivering even in our cloaks. The rain which had relented on the previous day had returned with an implacable constancy in the night, beating on the tiles above my head so loudly that I could not use even the few hours I had for sleep. Two hours before dawn we had met at the gate — Anna, Thomas and I — the only light a beleaguered pitch torch in the shelter of the archway. Burning fragments dripped from it, hissing as they fell into the mud below. It was not a propitious beginning to what was already a slender hope.

‘If they ask, tell them the truth of your story — how you came here, the fate which befell your parents, and how you escaped to live in the slums of the city. Perhaps blame your misfortune on the Romans: curse us for not having provided more aid to your army, or more succour when you returned.’ I did not wait for Anna to translate my words, or worry if the boy had understood them. I had told him all this a dozen times the previous afternoon, and I spoke now more to quell my own nerves than to rehearse his duties.

‘You will have to go all the way around the Horn and come back down its other side. It will not be a pleasant journey, but we cannot risk the chance of them seeing you rowed across from here. Give me your cloak.’

Unwillingly, Thomas pulled the sodden cloak from his shoulders and handed it to me. Underneath, he wore only a thin tunic which had been purposely torn on stones and dragged through mud.

‘He’ll die of cold before he’s halfway to the silver lake,’ Anna muttered. I half expected that, even now, she would try to persuade him to abandon the plan.

‘He will look bedraggled, mud-splattered, and forlorn.’ I let concern shade my voice with anger. ‘As befits an urchin who has lived for weeks in the slums. He’s already too fat.’

I turned my attention back to Thomas. ‘Try and evoke pity with your story, and find a kind knight or soldier who will take you as his servant or groom. Then try and discover if the monk is in the camp, and where we can catch him. As soon as you know that, make for the house of Domenico the merchant. You remember where I showed you on the map?’

Thomas nodded, though perhaps only because I had stopped speaking.

A sentry ambled out of the guardhouse, his cloak pulled tight around his shoulders. The briefest glance at the pass I carried from Krysaphios satisfied him, and he started drawing back the bolts on the heavy door. I hoped that with the rain in his eyes he would be unable to see much of Thomas, for I did not want anyone to remember him leaving the city.

‘I do not like this course,’ Anna told me. There was sadness in her face. ‘But Thomas has agreed it, and you think it necessary, so I cannot argue.’

The last bolt came free, and the sentry pushed the door open. It took the full weight of his shoulder to force it. In the night beyond, I could see only driving rain and darkness.

‘Go, Thomas.’ I gave him a little push to hasten him forward. He stooped to hug Anna, who held him tight for a moment, then turned his back on me and stepped out into the night. Long before the gate was drawn shut, he had vanished.

I returned home to my bed, but my broken night had upset my soul and it would not permit sleep. I lay there for hours, sometimes rolling onto one side or another, sometimes trying to lie very still, but even with my eyes shut the visions of my mind continued unblinking. A grim daylight and the hustled noises of the street pricked at my senses, and even when I could forget my concerns for Thomas, and keep from revisiting the memories of his departure, I found no solace.