changes nothing.” I wish I could take her in my arms to comfort her. To smooth her ebony hair, to pat her back. I would hold her like a child, I would keep all harm from her. I have adored her ever since the first time I saw her venture into the opulent and hostile Imperial Palace: so small, so pale, so resolute. Of course I keep my arms straight at my sides.
“You sent the messenger?”
“He is on his way to Hieron as we speak, Despoina. Do not fear, Juliana and the baby will be kept safely under guard. Zeno will not bring them home till this is over.”
“You have been outside, haven’t you? How bad is it? Will it burn itself out?”
I tell her the truth. I cannot give her comfort, nor may I offer love. All I have to give her are words, but she knows she can rely on them. “I do not know. It is very bad.”
“Hagia Sophia is ruined, isn’t it?”
“Yes. The Senate Building also.” Well-chosen targets, I think but do not say. Both of them symbols of power: sacred and profane.
The Empress steps over to a window, pushing aside the velvet curtain. Together we stare out at the angry scarlet glow lighting up the stricken city. Over all a full moon presides, glowering redly through the windblown ash and smoke. I hear her draw in a breath. A bloody moon. The earth burns; the moon bleeds. A cosmic catastrophe.
How did it come to this? Where did it begin?
Chapter 1: Exit Acasius
Her very first memory was of a dancing bear. She loved going to the stable where the bears were kept to watch the training sessions, sitting quietly, entranced. The bear was taller than a man, taller than her father the bearkeeper; it seemed to loom almost up to the roof as it lumbered heavily to and fro, a dark, furred dancer, in a grotesque travesty of grace. The child did not think that, though. She thought that her father was a man of power, because he was the master of the bear. Clearly, the bear was very big, and very dangerous, but her father could make it do exactly what he wanted it to. So his power had to be even greater than the bear’s.
She sat on a bale of hay, dainty little feet dangling, and regarded her father gravely with huge, dark eyes. He concentrated with fierce intensity on the animal, gesturing boldly to keep it moving in time to the merry dance music his elderly one-legged assistant coaxed out of a fiddle.
“Hup!” he cried. “Hup, and two and three and four, this side, that side, hup!” She knew it was a black mountain bear from Illyria that had been trained by someone else before, and it was not easy to master an animal that you hadn’t trained yourself, her father said. But he had learned to work with bears when he was a child. That had been in another country. He used to visit his grandfather in a little mountain village, he told her, where there were Gypsies, and they had taught him their skills with wild animals.
She wrinkled her small nose. The place smelled powerfully: there was the rank scent of bear, her father sweating with effort and Ragu, his assistant, who always smelled sourly unwashed. Also, less pungent, the grassy smell of the bales of hay and the sawdust underfoot. A pity that such an interesting place did not smell sweeter, she thought. Yet she would come all the same, to bring her father his lunch and to watch him master the bears.
The assistant stopped playing and the bear stopped rocking, but still waved its heavy arms and whuffled through its nose.
“Well done, Bruno,” said the bearkeeper. “You are a good bear. You are the best dancer.” He leaned forward towards the bear, stretched his neck, placed his hands on either side of its head and raised his face so that he was intimately close to it. With great control he breathed right into its nostrils. So close, she thought, shivering with dread and delight. So close to such terrible teeth.
“Why does he do that?” she whispered to the assistant.
“Calms ’em,” said Ragu as he packed up his instrument. “And shows ’em who’s the boss.” His one good eye peered warily at the bearkeeper and the hulking animal. She knew that a lion in a hunting game had clawed his other eye out, right here in the Hippodrome; the same lion had chewed off half of his left leg. That was before the Emperor had banned hunting games altogether. The physicians that served the Hippodrome had managed to save his life, but, her father said, his nerve was gone.
“This breathing act that Acasius does gives me pains in the stomach,” said Ragu. “Man’s mad.”
“Do bears like dancing, Ragu?”
“Huh! No,” and he spat into the sawdust. “See, what the trainers do, they put a burning hot metal plate under the bear’s feet and they play a tune at the same time. The bear hops about to avoid the pain and cool its feet. After a while, when it hears the music, it starts to hop, pain or no pain. Then the trainer teaches it to keep time to the music.”
“Did my father do that to Bruno?”
“Nah. That was the trainer before him. Your father believes in other ways.”
Acasius patted the great bear and fed it honey-cake. “There! Now, off you go, into your cage, get along, get along, there’s a good bear.” The huge animal ambled away, rumbling softly to itself. The gate of its cage clanged shut.
“Come out and watch the next chariot race,” Acasius said to his daughter. “We can stand at the back where nobody will see you.”
She loved her father’s place of work under the vast Hippodrome, where the chariot races took place. Next to the Hippodrome there was the huge palace complex where the Emperor lived. Her father explained to her that the Imperial Palace was linked to the upper part of the Hippodrome by a corridor that led to a balcony, called the Kathisma, where the Emperor would sit surrounded by important visitors and by many men who served him, to watch the bears dancing, the tournaments and, above all, the chariot races.
“There is room,” said Acasius, “to seat one hundred thousand men.” The little girl looked at him, puzzled. “Enough seats for one out of every five people here in Constantinople to have a seat,” he explained.
She nodded solemnly. Five she understood. “We are five,” she said. “Father and Mother and Comito and baby Stasie, and me. Like my fingers.”
“Yes, dear.” He bent down and lifted her. She wrapped her legs around his sturdy body and he drew his cloak around them both. Respectable women were not allowed to view events at the Hippodrome, nor were monks and clerics, but he would smuggle his small daughter in to where they might watch, hidden, in a safe place. He strode out with her along vaulted passages fitfully lit with smoking torches and emerged into the sunlight at a vantage point below the Kathisma.
“We can watch from here. See, we’re right next to the area where the chariots are hitched up. We’re directly below where the Emperor sits. The start is over at the end, there.”
She peered through the fence at the support staff who laboured to hitch up the chariots for the next race. The unmistakable odour of stable, of horses and manure, thickened the air. Voices snapped orders, wheels crunched, horses whickered and whinnied. She could sense the heat, the tension and the power of the animals milling about: dangerous, surely – and so close! But she was safe. Her father held her safe. His arms were strong and the woollen cloak warm. He still smelled of sweat and bear, she thought. But he would stop off at the baths to wash before coming home for his dinner. Mother would not like him to come home smelling like this.
